Erick Erickson 5-8-26 HR 3

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome. It is Eric Erickson here across the United States. The phone number this open line Friday is 8779373425. Should you wish to be on the program, you can call in today. We're a little more flexible on the phones on Fridays. You can also text the word Eric to 33777 and get all the links you need to follow up on social media, the show notes and the like. If you're in Georgia, text Engage to 33777. And I will send you a list of all the state ballot positions you want to vote for. Remember the incumbent judges in Georgia. You want to vote for those if you're going to the polls and you should know in Georgia. The Republicans are still losing to the Democrats in early voting. They're starting to turn out. Republicans are the governor in Georgia's fired up his machine to try to save the Georgia Supreme Court. But the Georgia Supreme Court is in danger of being lost to a Barack Obama, Stacey Abrams, organized effort to steal it for the progressives because Republicans are not turning out early voting. They're too divided, and the Democrats are taking advantage of that divide. So Republicans show up, vote in the non-partisan. Even if you don't know who to vote for governor or Senate, show up, vote for the nonpartisan races, you've got to stay. after the stupid opinion questions from the Georgia GOP and vote in the nonpartisan racist incumbent Republicans. Vote for all the incumbent not Republicans judges. Vote for the incumbent judges on the Supreme Court Court appeals, all of them. Now, we got to talk about the billionaires. But before I shift so dramatically to a new topic, Irene from Stillwater, Oklahoma is on the phone. And I want to talk to her before I talk about the billionaires in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Irene, welcome to the show. I hope you're doing well out there. I am. Hopefully you are too. I want to start off by saying I have always been a Trump supporter. However, with this Iran thing going on, he's really let me down. I'm disappointed in him. I feel like he sold the Iranian people down the river. He's not back in the point he said he was going to do for them. He said basically he would clear a road so they could take to the streets and take their country back. And that hasn't happened. How do you feel about it? Yeah, look, I remember they said get ready, essentially hope. help is on the way sort of thing. And the Iranian people got really excited. And then they said, stay inside. We'll tell you when to come outside. They had the Shaw go out, record a video. They blast, they hacked the Iranian phone system. The Israelis did. Pushed out this message from the Shah that said, stay inside until we're ready for you to come outside. And they never did. They never went back and said, okay, take to the streets. Instead, people went outside. They got. Got gunned down. The Iranian regime is now murdering protesters in a rapid clip. They've escalated the executions of the young in Iran. We've got to do something. We've got to do something. We've got to help the Iranian people. We gave them hope. They are dying for that hope. It would be the right thing to do for us as well. We need to. We need to do something.

We started it. We didn't have to. We got to finish it now. Irene, yeah, it well said. Now, I want to talk about the billionaires. I want to play for you this clip. It has kind of gone viral. It is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I want you to listen to this. She is a democratic socialist. She's a communist. She doesn't, she's not, most of the American democratic socialists are actually communist. They're just not brave enough to admit it yet. Remember, I mean, there was a long time people said they supported gay marriage. They didn't support transgenderism. Then they got gay marriage. They're like, oh, yeah, we support transgenderism. The Democrats do the same thing. They're not socialist. They're not communist. And the moment you embrace their ideas, they're like, okay, we're communists. Kill all the bourgeois, kill the middle class. Round them up and put them in concentration camps, and the elite will rule everything. This is Alexandria Kosovo Cortez. Listen to this. There's a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right? You can't earn a billion dollars. That's right. You just can't earn that. That's exactly correct. You can get market power. You can... break rules, you can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they're worth. But you can't earn that, right? And so you have to create a myth that, since you didn't earn that, you have to create a myth of earning it. Question. Question.

Why can't J.K. Rowling be a billionaire? What did J.K. Rowling take from you, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? What did J.K. Rowling take from any of you? You can't earn a billion dollars. J.K. Rowling has earned a billion dollars. See, what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants you to think about is Elon Musk. She wants you to think about Elon Musk. She doesn't want you to think about Steven Spielberg. She wants you to think about Jeff Bezos. She doesn't want you to think about Taylor Swift. Notice she doesn't go into names because if she went into names, she would go into names like Elon Musk and maybe Bill Gates. She'd go into names like Donald Trump, but she wouldn't mention Oprah Winfrey or Jay-Z or Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian or Michael Jim Jordan or George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. She wouldn't mention either name. She wouldn't mention J.K. Rowling. What about Tiger Woods? Tiger Woods has a net worth of $1.3 billion. Let's play her clip again. Just think about this. Think about these names. We're going to read you names of celebrities. who have a net worth of over a billion dollars. I'm not going to read all the names. Some of them you will never have heard of. But let me just read you these names. Stephen Spielberg, Mark Cuban, George Lucas, Michael Jim Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, J. Z., Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Peter Jackson, Lord of the Ring movies, Mike Johnson, or Magic Johnson, Tyler Perry, Tiger Woods, Dick Wolf of Law and Order fame. J.K. Rowling, Bruce Springsteen. LeBron James, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Seinfeld, Roger Federer, Rania, Beyonce, Jimmy Buffett, Kylie Jenner, Kanye West. No, he's falling off now, it looks like. He used to be a billionaire. Boy, he's problematic, isn't he? Beyonce. Rihanna. Roger Federer. Jerry Seinfeld, Arnold Schwarzenegger, LeBron James, Bruce Springsteenstein, J.K. Rowling. Tiger Woods, Tyler Perry, Magic Johnson, Peter Jackson, Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jim Jordan, George Lucas, Mark Cuban, Steven Spielberg. All of those people have a net worth of over a billion dollars. There's a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned, right? You can't earn. A billion dollars. That's right. You just can't earn that. That's exactly correct. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they're worth. But you can't earn that, right? You can't earn that. So who did Taylor Swift pay that was less than they should have been paid? What laws did Steven Spielberg break? See, she doesn't want to answer those questions. She wants to say those things with a synchophantic host. That's right. That's right. Preach. That's right. That's right. Do you know why Jeff Bezos is a billionaire?

Jeff Bezos is a billionaire because in major cities in America today, you can get food and you can get toilet paper, you can get condoms, you can get music, you can get books, you can get them all delivered to your house by the end of the day if you put in the order in the morning. And in rural parts of America, you can get everything from Amazon the next day. The hipsters in Brooklyn love the same-day prophylactic delivery from Amazon.com through their pharmaceutical business. You can get Plan B too. They love it. In rural America, you can get toilet paper, you can get paper plates, you can get movies, you can get books, you can get trash bags, you can get garden supplies, deliver to you the next day without ever getting in your car and driving 45 minutes to the nearest city. Thanks to Amazon.com. You're damn right, Jeff Bezos should be a billionaire. He has convenienced all of our lives. There is a website that I can go to and get virtually anything under the sun, and it can be delivered to me within a day or two, thanks to Amazon. Yes, he should be a billionaire. They were all fine with Elon Musk being a billionaire when he was on their side. Why? Because he invented... a battery-powered electric car, and you can drive from Portland, Oregon to Key West Florida on a series of roads that have high-speed chargers built and programmed in, and by the way, they're going to take care of you. They're going to treat you well as an employee. You're going to get well paid as a Tesla employee, and you can drive your battery powered car from the northwest to the southeast on a series of roads with high-speed chargers. You've got to wait 30 minutes for them to charge up, unlike fossil fuel, but you're not... burning emissions, and they loved him when he was a Democrat, but now he's the richest man on the earth and he's a conservative, so it's bad. He didn't pay people what they should have been. Taylor Swift gave all her employees bonuses upwards of six figures after her last tour because it did so well. Who there got cheated? Tyler Perry. showed up at the Atlanta airport during the government shutdown and gave all the TSA workers $1,000. Had to do it in gift cards. The government would let him hand out cash. What laws did Tyler Perry break? According to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tyler Perry can't have earned a billion dollars. He had to steal it from someone. That is the vanglorious jealousies and immaturity of the socialist. They can't understand that the markets have value, and you give someone their wealth because they have come up with something valuable for you.

Young women across the planet are deeply entertained by Taylor Swift. They go to her concerts, and so many of them are so affected by her music, she's a billionaire. Because she gave them something they found valuable. Young kids are excited to read because of J.K. Rowling. They loved the movies and the games. They love the books, and she's a billionaire because of it. She didn't underpay anyone. If anything, she was a poor woman who worked with a pseudonym because people wouldn't know her and wouldn't want to buy her books if they knew it was her. She had been abused and was a single mom, and she worked at a coffee shop. writing her books and she's been rewarded to billionaire status. She didn't break the law. She didn't cut the rules. She didn't unfairly undercut other people's salaries. She provided entertainment and was rewarded by the marketplace. The entire premise of the Democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is jealousy. And in response to their jealousy, their solution is to deprive people of the opportunity to innovate in ways that reward them. You get rid of the opportunity for people to become billionaires. Some of those people will not innovate. But the surprising thing is that most of those innovators did it, not because they wanted to be billionaires, but because they had a great idea. Jeff Bezos was not working out of his house running Amazon.com as a bookstore in the early days online thinking one day I'm going to be a billionaire. No, he wanted to do it because he had a great idea. He filled the void he saw was able to be filled and he made money at it. And the reward is that he's a billionaire. punishing people for coming up with good ideas by putting a cap on their value artificially by technocrats. There's a reason all the people, the intellectuals in the world, love these planned communities and these artificial caps imposed by technocrats is because they think they're going to be the ones in charge of it. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to be in charge of setting your arm's-length transactions term. She wants to be in charge of setting your labor value. She wants to be in charge of setting how much money you're allowed to be. earn. She wants to control your life as opposed to allowing you in a free market to set a value in charge for it and if people want to pay you for it, they get to. She doesn't want you to do that. She doesn't believe in the individual rights of people from which we gain value. The old ideas that communism is premised on, they give a value to labor. It was actually in the mid-1800s. that a free market economist said, you know what, we're looking at the economy wrong. It's not a value of labor. It's a value of the good or service provided. See, we think that I've got a Yeti Tumblr from Pinehurst here. Buddy of mine got it for me.

You look at this, and the communist would say, and the old economists would say, well, there was a value to the labor and the materials, and the labor was worth this, and the materials were worth this, and therefore the price should be this. What the free market economists realized that the 1800s is no, there is a value to have a Yeti Tumblr from Pinehurst. Golf Mecca. And I can put a price on this based on how the affinity someone has for the good and they're going to buy it. And it'll take into account the labor and the materials and also the affinity for the good. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the communist, this is why communist societies are so dower. They have no affinity for goods, only for the value of labor. And they want to set it as a technocrat, not let you do it in a arm's-length transaction because they're jealous of other people's success. What Alexandria O'C. Cortez is saying is an attack on Taylor Swift. It's an attack on Tiger Woods. It's an attack on Steven Spielberg. It's an attack on J.K. Rowling. It's actually an attack on the value of your happiness. That's what she's doing. Follow Eric on X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble. Search EW. Erickson. Wow. The British Reform Party is on pace to win over 1,400 local elections in the UK. Having gone from 0 to 1,400 in 24 hours is wild. The last time a political party in Great Britain did that was in 1995 when Tony Blair's Labor Party won 1,800 seats and then took over a landslide in 1997 British government. By the way, there is some breaking news happening right now. Diana Hagan has resigned from the Utah Supreme Court. Justice Hagan resigned a short time ago, notifying Governor Cox of that resignation. Now, this is significant because the reason she's resigning is she did not recuse herself from the redistricting case in Utah. She was the swing vote, and there have since that vote been allegations that she was... in a relationship with the lawyer for the Democrats who argued their side. Yes, that's why she's apparently resigning. Very interesting. We'll see if that affects the redistricting case there. Now, let me tell you about Old Glory Bank. Oldglorybank.com. It is my bank. I got a no-fee check-in and a no-fee savings account with them, old glorybank. And I had somebody come up to me and says, what do you think about Old Glory Bank? I said, look, I've been able to deposit cash. They've got a great

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You too. All right. So I love the last segment you did about that brain surgeon, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But I would even expand on that and say that in no culture in history has there not been arms length transactions. The black markets always existed, especially in communist societies. And basically, I would even say that it's a human right to do armstrong transactions, which makes communism and socialism and opposite of a human right. Your thought? I agree with you. People have since, I mean, the dawn of man operated in large to arm's-length transactions. I mean, you as the hunter-gatherer going out and trading with others to get what you need in exchange for them as opposed to bullying, badgering, killing, and stealing people in society, and that's how society evolved over time was, arms-leaf transactions. And along come the communists in the late 1800s and decide. no, no, this is unfair that some people have been able to accumulate more than others. We, the elite, must level the playing field. And if you actually read Animal Farm, as you know at the end, it gets to a point where some are more equal than others. Alex Andrew Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a United States member of Congress. who lives a privileged existence, and she believes that she should be able to determine what is best for you and your family, not you. Remember, Democrats don't even like the idea of family, or at least the far left in the Democratic Party, doesn't like the idea of family. They don't like the idea of homeschools. They don't like the idea of school choice. It was really wild. Let me go back to that Stacey Abrams clip from earlier, too. We can move beyond Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Let me jump back to Stacey Abrams here. This is very important. Just listen to Stacey Abrams again. She's on EMS now talking about the redistricting issues. And what we have to understand is that there are no longer blue states and red states. There are authoritarian states. democracy states. There are states that do not believe in the right of the people to have a say who want to aggregate power and foment corruption. And there are states that want to guarantee that in this country we have free and fair elections. We have access to the remedies that democracy is supposed to deliver and that no matter what goes wrong in one part of the country, that the quality of your citizenship does not depend on your zip code and your geography. Now, you got that, let's redo this last little bit here. And on your zip code, that the quality of your citizenship does not depend on your zip code and your geography. The quality of your citizenship does not depend on your zip code and your geography, but Stacey Abrams and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are fine with the quality of your education being dependent on your zip code.

And frankly, that goes to the quality of your citizenship. Stacey Abrams is totally fine with your citizenship being bound to your zip code, as long as it benefits the Democratic Party. Same with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A poor black kid in Mississippi is more likely to be able to read and write in third grade than a poor black kid in California. And in California, the kids who go best and do best and get educated the best are the ones who are able to get into private schools. And it's just wild to me. that we have Democrats out there muttering about your zip code and the quality of your citizenship based on your zip code when they are willing to allow poor black kids in a lot of states to get horrible educations and bind them to public schools and not actually give them the opportunity to escape with school choice. It's really rich. Since the dawn of civilization, People have bartered and traded with each other for what they needed. You know, remember, it's one of the essential stories of the American founding. It was documented at the time by the governor of Massachusetts. When the pilgrims went to Massachusetts, they nearly starved their first winter because they did everything as a collective. Everyone was given a plot of land, and they were to grow their food on that plot of land and share it in the commune. And some grew more than others, and they nearly starved to death. And the second year, and I think it was 1621, 1620, 1621, they redid it. Everyone was given a plot of land. And on that plot of land, they were required to grow for their family. And anything they had left over, the excess could be traded with others in the community. They thrived. And those who didn't do well were able to trade with those who did well. And they thrived. They started as a commune and everything was communal and they nearly died. And they switched to private property. Here's your plot of land. You grow the food that your family needs and any in the excess you can trade with others whose crops didn't do as well. And they succeeded. The first Thanksgiving was Thanksgiving that they didn't die because they nearly did. The Indians had to help them out. And then they discovered private property. They embraced the idea of private property. You take care of your family. I'll take care of my family. And we can trade between families as need be. And it worked. It was a great success. The Puritan work ethic became a divine driving factor in the growth of American civilization. And now we treat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez treats the Protestant work ethic as a pejorative. The Protestant work ethic is what saved the pilgrims. And she wants to treat it pejoratively. She wants to treat the success of America as a pejorative. She hates the founding of this country.

You know, I didn't cut all the other crazy things. She says that essentially that black people brought democracy to this country. We didn't have a democracy in this country. We had apartheid until the 1960s. Listen, make no bones about it. Segregation erasing in the South was bad. But did the northern states, did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's New England and New York? Did they also have apartheid? Was it bad? Was it bad everywhere? They've tried to reinvent this country to find it as something bad and awful, and that's just not so. It's just not so. But they have to redefine, pervert, and demonize the founding of this country to try to undermine it. And unfortunately, they've gotten to help in a lot of public schools, which is why Stacey Abrams, who complains about the quality of citizenship based on zip code, is perfectly fine to have black kids in failing public schools so long as those failing public schools teach them to gender unicorn and to hate the country. The Democrats use public education as a tool of indoctrination, not education in this country. And they're fine with that. But they really hate it if a black kid escapes from the private school, gets homeschooled, and becomes a success and then makes a lot of money. Then that kid is bad because they have strayed from their race because they have to be bound to their race. They're not as an individual. There's no respect for the individual. It's all collectivism. That's where the Democratic Party is these days. David and Jacksonville, Florida are going to go to you next. Welcome, sir. How are you? I'll tell you what you just touched on my subject today because I was listening to ACO yesterday. And I was trying to think what it is I didn't like about it, and you couldn't earn a billion dollars is the first thing to hit me. You know what she didn't say? She didn't say that all these billionaires, all the ones that you have identified, to include Jeff Bezos, the big difference between them and what she was taught, every one of them, to include the pilgrims, risk their own capital. That's the big difference. They put their own money up. And just to give you an example. From 1997, when they went public, through 2003, what's that, about seven years, Amazon did not make a penny. And the reason they did was they kept pouring anything that they made back into the business to expand it and gain market share. That's the way it's done. He could have very easily lost that race, very easily. And then he got into the AWS, the cloud business. Again, risking a lot of capital. That's what they never tell you. They just say, this guy's a billion there because he robbed all the rich and he robbed all the poor and gave it to himself or whatever. And what they don't tell you is how much money these guys are on the hook for, what bank loans they have, and the probability of them going under is pretty substantial at any time. And that's why they're an entrepreneur. And they never say that. That is such a great point. Yeah, I mean, the amount of, like, Jeff Bezos for a very long time did not make money off of Amazon. He poured his heart as soul and his entire retirement into building Amazon. And he started in his garage. Yeah, in his garage. Or look at, I mean, look at all the, the billion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley, the starting garage is HP, Intel, Apple.

But it is in the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. We have this from Abraham Lincoln, four-scoring seven years ago. Our father's brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We are a creedal nation. It's more than that, but it is essential to understand that. And they reject the creed. They want to come here and have an American passport and reject the American creed. They don't want to assimilate. She wants to be a congresswoman who represents Somalians. Not a congresswoman who represents Americans. An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to be a congresswoman who uses her power to dictate how you relate to your family and your children and your neighborhood and your community and how you relate to your job and your intelligence and your inspiration to go out and create great things in this country. The intellectual elite. always favor the sort of central command and control planning. It's why they love communism because they think they're going to be the ones in charge of it. And then when they get in charge of it, they screw it all up for everybody else. Only the elite get taken care of. The poor remain poor, and they always find someone to blame. And that's what they do. And that's all ultimately, at the end of the day, premised on a contempt for this nation's founding ideals and jealousy of their neighbor. They never love their neighbor. They're always jealous of their neighbor. You're at the intersection of politics, news, culture, and current events. It's the Eric Erickson Show. I hope you guys have a great weekend. I got to play this clip from the president yesterday. Made a lot of reporters mad, but I think the question from the ABC reporter, she's got a history of rank hackery in the White House when it comes to Republicans. I just, I think the president was on the money here. Listen to this. Mr. President, you are here against the backdrop of the war in Iran. Why focus on all these projects right now? You know why? Because I want to keep our country beautiful and safe. Beautiful also. This place was a disgusting place. It was Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and we had a terrible, I don't know, you probably don't see dirt, but I do. And you walk down this pond. walk down they'll tell you better than anybody they had to take 11 or 12 truckloads of garbage out of that lake out of that water and sat there for years like that and that's not what our country's about our country's about beauty cleanliness safety great people not a filthy capital what is this status such a stupid question you asked you're we're fixing up the reflecting pond to the lincoln memorial the washington monument and you say

Why are you fixing it up? Because you can understand dirt maybe better than I can, but I don't allow it. This is one of the worst reporters. She's with ABC Facebook. He goes on for there. Listen, the idea that a president of the United States can't multitask is one of the dumbest things. Now, I realize we just got through Joe Biden, who, I mean, he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Donald Trump can do foreign policy and domestic policy. It comes with the territory, and he's been cleaning up Washington. This is our 250th anniversary. Have you ever been to Washington, D.C.? The reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial is one of the most disgusting things. It's covered in scum and filled with trash. The water is dark and black and filled with goose and duck poop. It's gross. I'm trying not to gag thinking about it. So he's going to make it, he's going to tint it blue, do a tile that makes the water blue. He's cleaning it up. He is re-landscaping, and it's going to look nice. And here's the thing that I predict is going to happen is we're going to get 10 years beyond Donald Trump's presidency. He's going to have done all these upgrades to Washington, D.C. He's going to have made it safe again. And people are going to think, oh, this is nice. And people will finally, a decade after he's gone, admit that it was actually worth having Donald Trump do the things, that all they can do is bellyache about. Now, the idea that he can't do two things at once as president, absolutely absurd, comes from liberal hacks in the media. Now, I want you to go to perfectly snug.com slash Eric, and I want you to get one of their perfectly snug mattress topers, so you can have a great night's sleep. The perfectly snug mattress topper is like an air conditioner for your bed. It can cool you down. It can warm you up if you need it. It has two zones, so your spouse can have one of you can be cold, one of you can be hot, however you need it. It pumps so much cool air through. You can watch your fitted sheet on top of it inflate, and it's quiet. It uses fans. You don't hear the fans. They circulate the air. It also has the wiring to be able to warm up. I love it. You can save $280 by going to perfectly snug.com slash Eric. Perfectly snub. Snug.com slash ERICK. You can save great. Oprah Winfrey has recommended this thing. I'm recommending this thing. I love it. It's comfortable. The warmth, the cool, whatever you need, you can adjust it with your phone. You can have it adjust automatically through the night. It's well thought out and it just works. If you're looking for these, there are multi-thousand-dollar systems. You don't need to pay that much. Perfectly snug is perfect. Perfectly snug.com slash Eric.