Erick Erickson Show 3-19-26 HR 3

I want to begin this hour in all seriousness with a movie recommendation. Any of you who are inclined to go to that thing we call a theater that we all used to go to and now not many of us go to, there is a movie that comes out today. It'll be there this weekend called Project Hail Mary. You should go see Project Hail Mary. You should go see it. It is, I think, a very notable swing back from the cynicism that we have seen in theaters in the last number of years and the nihilism we have seen in a lot of movies into just a real positive, upbeat, try-hard, feel-good movie. I it is instead of being doom and gloom it's very upbeat I got a I just I got to say that if you go see Project Hill Mary I don't think you'll be disappointed. I think you'll enjoy it. There's a Martin Shaw has a book Liturgies of the Wild. Let me read you this quote. No more jabbing our pinned in our wound and calling it art. In myth, any voyage into the underworld involves you bringing back beauty. If there's no beauty, no gift, then you've actually not reemerged, no matter how much you claim that you have. Art is supposed to be beautiful. Art should make you feel good. You know, all right, I'm going off on an unplanned tangent here. I'll get to your phone calls here in a bit. Unplanned tangent. Let me read you this quote from Martin Shaw. The book is Liturgies of the Wild. No more jabbing our pinned in our wound and calling it art. In myth, any voyage into the underworld involves you bringing back beauty. If there's no beauty, no gift, then you've actually not reemerged, no matter how much you claim that you have. Art is supposed to elevate. In our postmodern society, Someone will tape a banana on the wall and the art critics will fawn over it to show how much more sophisticated they are than you rubes. There's that famous story of the janitor of a museum who saw dirt on the floor and cleaned it up and it was actually supposed to be an art project. No, it was dirt on the floor. I know people who have moved... to Catholicism and Greek Orthodox religion because they want to feel part of something. They want to feel elevated. They want to feel a connection to the divine. And I don't mean to be insulting, and this is going to rub people the wrong way when I say it, but that's very selfish. It's about you.

You decide to become Greek Orthodox or you decide to leave your strip mall non-denominational church to join the Catholic Church because you need to feel you've touched the divine. I understand the awe and the reverence. I do. I go into Catholic cathedrals and I'm mesmerized. St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York even, the National Cathedral in D.C. run by the post-Christian Episcopalians. Gorgeous, gorgeous. It makes you feel small. It makes the divine feel real and overwhelming, and I get it. But also, you're not converting because of theology. You're converting because of feeling, and that is a level of selfishness that you need to feel somehow special. You need to feel somehow connected. You want to connect to God? Go on a mission trip to the slums in India where Mother Teresa used to work. Go into the hellholes of the planet. There you'll be close to God. You just going in because you want the liturgies and the incense and the stained glass, that's actually, that's putting you first, not God first. But we have this sense now in this day and age, and we see it in a lot of movie and a lot of cinema, that if you come out of the movie and you feel good, well, maybe the movie was a failure. We need to feel bad when you come out of the movie. There needs to be a not a clear black and white. There needs to not be a protagonist and an antagonist. Everything needs to be real muddied. It needs to be real nihilistic. It needs to be all the good people turn out to be the corrupt bad people and all the bad people wind up on top. And that's where a lot of Hollywood has been. I mean, Game of Thrones is the epitome of this. And Game of Thrones was a very well done series until the end of it when they all got burned out, we're ready to leave, and they got past George R. Martin's writings. But it was very realistic. All of the great people, the people you root for, they wound up being the ones who got killed. All the bad people tended to succeed until the end. And then things kind of reversed themselves in the end. He wrote, I think I read somewhere in part in response to the Lord of the Rings and there was that golden compass deal that was kind of in response to the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia where that guy was an atheist and he wanted atheism to come out on top. He didn't like the mythology of... of the church, and he didn't like the woven in theology of the Lord of the Rings or of the Chronicles of Narnia. And guess what? The Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings, they've come out on top, both in film and in books. They're widespread. They're beloved. Golden Cup is not so much. George R. Martin can't even finish his book. All of that then gets me back to Project Hail Mary. It is...

Intentionally or not, a response to the current nihilism and degradation of culture. It is a movie to make you feel good, where the good guys who have the stictuitativeness come out on top. It is a science fiction movie. I think the guy who wrote The Martian that starred Matt Damon in the theater. By the way, the movie is much better than the book there. And I have not read the book. I know the movie. And this movie. Project Hail Mary is a good movie to go see. And I think if you go see it and you're willing to embrace a science fiction story, you'll enjoy it because the good guys come out on top, the stick-to-tuitiveness and the hard work is rewarded, and you leave the theater feeling good as opposed to feeling bad, like so many movies. So much of art these days wants to make you feel bad and wants to be a social commentary. I have a buddy of mine, Nathan, who's one of the coolest people I know who got into writing comic books and let him down a path towards writing comics for Marvel and doing some of his own and how stuff that's been very, very good. He's had some film deals out there that I hope finally pan out and turn some of his intellectual property into great movies. And he... had this theory that he argued, I think, in college, that the further art has gotten away from the divine, the more art has become degraded and degrades us. We've gone from people without the Industrial Revolution being able to make a sky-high cathedral with beautiful stained glass like Notre Dame, that when you go in it, you feel like you're in the presence of God. to putting a toilet seat on the wall and saying this is art. Art has become a cudgel of the elite. You put the toilet seat on the wall, and the elite will remark to you about what great art it is, and if you don't appreciate it, you are clearly not of the elite. And I'm sorry, but that's not art. If I were to today call myself Charles III of England, all of you would either say, Erickson, you're doing a bit or you've lost your mind. All of you would be willing to recognize you would use your level of discernment and say you're not the king of England. But if I were to put poop in my hand and smear it across the wall and tell you it's art, some godless rich person might pay me a million dollars for it for the pleasure of hanging it in his house. And when you and I laugh and say, no, no, that was actually poop smeared on the wall, who are we to tell the sophisticated elite otherwise? Think of how valuable Hunter Biden's artwork became. The elite used bad art to judge you. It is one of their shibbolths. You show them art, it's not good, but they pay a lot of money for it. It becomes good because they're willing to put value on it, even though it's ridiculous. A banana taped to the wall, a toilet seat, dirt on the floor, a crucifix in a jar of urine.

None of that is really art. It doesn't edify. It doesn't lift you up. It doesn't make you feel good. It makes the elite feel elite. And that's the point for them for art is it generates the feeling of superiority. And in movies these days, a lot of the top movies, a lot of the award-winning movies are movies you and I don't want to see. It's that the elite saw them. And they were bad movies. They told terrible stories. They made the bad people, the heroes. You don't leave feeling good. You don't feel edified. It doesn't glorify God. It does none of those things. And so by you refusing to go appreciate the art and the elite goes and appreciates the art. then they have separated themselves from society in a way that makes them feel good and superior to you. And art went from connecting us to the divine to connecting the elite to their sense of superiority. And if it was inaccessible to you, it was never accessible to them, but they could pretend that it was and therefore point... out that you were the unsophisticated person because you did not embrace it. Think of that Oscar for the movie, the best picture where it was essentially the woman slept with the fish. She got it on with the fish creature. It was a bizarre movie. Or think about what was it, American Beauty, the Kevin Spacey movie. That movie was beloved. My wife and I watched it. It got so many great critical reviews. It was a trash movie. It was a bad movie. It was not a good movie. And today, people look back on it and are willing to say it's a bad movie. It never was a good movie. But it was a movie that made it was the closeted gay guy was good. The gay couple was fine. The suburban married white couple were bad. The guy in the military was a monster. It subverted the dominant. paradigms to use the phraseology. It made you feel good for the bad guys and bad for the good guys. And it was sophisticated and elite. And you left thinking, that did not make me feel good. Therefore, you felt superior because you enjoyed feeling bad. And that's where so much a postmodern art is gone. And a lot of people decided to stop going to movies. It wasn't just the streaming services and it wasn't just COVID. It was that a lot of the major movies sucked. Think about all of the movies about villains that Disney has done that repackets the villains of just misunderstood, misanthropic heroes, the anti-heroes. And now where are we headed? We're headed towards this, where we're going to get an Avengers movie where they bring back most of the original cast instead of the dregs of society they had filled them up with that no one knows. We'll get the Dune 3. And right now we've got Project Hail Mary, which is just designed to be a feel good movie that you, middle class America, can go watch and root for the hero. And at the end of the day, it's a good, feel good story. It is a swing back in the right direction. I hope it's a sign of movies to come that, hey, you know what? It turns out people actually want to go to the movies and feel good about themselves and the world around them instead of hating everything and coming out of the movie, depressed.

You're not going to come out of the movie theater to press with Project Hail Mary. You shouldn't come out of a church feeling miserable and beaten down. You should come out with a connection to the divine, whether it's the stained glass or the sermon. You shouldn't come out of an art museum wondering how the hell was that even considered art. And I don't think you should come out of a movie thinking, man, I hate my country now, which is what so many movies have tried to do. The left is twisted art. into a separator of the elite from everyone else. And I think Project Hail Mary is a good way to rebalance it. I didn't mean to do an entire 10, 15 minutes here on art and stuff. But, man, I've had so many conversations with my kids lately on it. My son is just fascinated by how modern art sucks so bad. And perfect tie-in to mention, go see this movie this weekend. Truth seems hazy. Eric will clear the way. It's the Eric Erickson show. Get Eric's daily show prep email. Text data to 33777, and you'll be in the know. Welcome back. It is Eric Erickson here to the phones we go. Barbara, going to go to you next. Welcome to the show. How are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm great. What's going on? Well... I heard you covering the story that happened in Seminole County, Florida, and it hits really close to home. I graduated from that high school. I won't tell you how many years ago. And all three of my children attended that high school and graduated from there. And what I wanted to just really underscore because... It's great that you tell where this happened, and for those who know they know, and for those who are not familiar, it's just another place. But this county, Seminole County, is one of the most sought-after counties in the state of Florida for people to live. It's more on the affluent side. It has the best-rated schools of which Lake Brantley is one of them in the country. And people want their kids to go to school in the school district. So for something like this to occur there is so out of the norm. And I used to work with the Seminole County Sheriff's Department. And I can tell you this is not something that we normally see in our county or certainly not. in that school. There's always trouble. There's trouble everywhere. But to this magnitude, and I think what this just really underscores for everyone is the damage that social media and the internet is having on the young minds in the world. When I went to school there, the worst thing that any of us did on that property is if you were spotted in the smoking section, smoking a cigarette, or God forbid a joint.

You were like a troublemaker. Now look where we're at. Now look where we're at. This is just gone from zero to a zillion in what seems like 60 seconds. It has. And Barbara, I got to tell you so much of it. I got to let you go there, but I thank you for calling in. The internet is just in parents giving their kids unfettered access to the internet. One of the girls' fathers said that she would be able to come home and not stay in jail because he had locked down the internet in their house. Oh, yeah, you should have done that before. Should have done it before. If you need to learn how to lock the internet down in your house, you can call Vision Computers.com. They can tell you how to do it. They'll have to use AI, tell you how to improve your business with AI and the efficiency. They can be your IT provider. They can build you computers. If you get a computer from them, the IT comes with it, and they will keep you online and help you. If you're a parent, you need help. getting a computer, but also being able to monitor and regulate your kids' usage. They can help you with that stuff, too. They're very hands-on with this stuff. They know what they're doing. We have a Vision Computers PC in our house. Call them at 404 Computer, Vision Computers.com. Seriously, call Vision Computers today, 404 compute or VisionComputers.com. If you're a business and you can't afford an in-house IT guy, Vision can be your IT, and your employees that are having to talk to AI chat bots, like some companies, they get a special number. they call 15 seconds a human being answers the phone and helps them so your employee stay productive check them out today their customer service sets them apart 404 compute or visioncomputers.com. Yeah, Eric, you were talking about Trump needing to finish this job. And if he doesn't, the 35,000 people who were killed recently is going to be nothing. Because if these people get back in control, trace phone calls, watch videos on YouTube, the retaliation against the people who assisted Massag, their families. I saw a video of a guy with a real loud stereo blasting the sound of a drone. to scare off the guys at the checkpoint. And they'll be able to trace where that video can. They'll be able to go on YouTube and trace all these videos. And the retaliation against the citizens is going to be unbelievable. I completely agree. And for Trump, there's a guy who builds skyscrapers and golf courses, it would be the equivalent of large building and not putting the windows in or building a golf course and having no greens. So, let's finish this job. Listen, that's so well said. The slaughter of the Iranian people by the regime, you all need to remember this. I am not making this up. You must remember this. You may not want to be in this fight in Iran right now. But we're there. You should hope it succeeds.

and encourage the president to do what must be done to finish off this regime. In Iran, the overwhelming majority of the people there oppose the regime. It's about a 10 to 1 ratio of those who oppose the regime to those who support it. You're talking maybe 2 million people out of tens of million who support the regime. But those 1 to 2 million people who support the regime are the well-fed and the well-paid and the well-armed and the well-protected. And if we walk away from the Iranian people now who are calling in positions on their own government on who to target, who to blow up, who to kill, there will be held to pay for those people. When people went into the streets demanding democracy a month ago, government just opened fire on them and those who survived the bullet wounds who went to the hospital if they were helped the doctors and nurses who helped them were murdered or brutally assaulted beaten and raped we are there now you should want this effort to succeed it is okay to say i did not want to do this It is okay to say, I wish we hadn't gone, and I think it's a bad idea. But we're there now. You should want it to succeed, given what will happen if it doesn't. That is one of the flummoxing things to me to see. the people who just, they're ready to just throw in the towel and come home. You've got a tiger by the tail. You haven't defanged it or declawed it. You haven't killed it. It will consume you if you let go now. And it will consume a lot more than us. Let's talk about the op. I'm not a fan of everybody saying everything is an op these days, but it's hard not to see this. Joe Kent. was being investigated by the FBI for sharing classified information before he quit. The president of the United States wanted him fired. Tulsi Gabbard declined to fire him. He quit in spectacular fashion and immediately went to Tucker Carlson's podcast. On Tucker Carlson's podcast, Joe Kent said that the Iranians were not developing nuclear weapons. What was the source of that? He said the Iranians said they weren't developing nuclear weapons. They had a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Within a minute... of Jo Kitt saying, you can believe the Iranians weren't developing nuclear weapons because they had a fatwa. He talks about how they were within six months of getting nuclear weapons. Joe Kinn in the conversation with Tucker Carlson said it was Israel that bombed a natural gas facility in Qatar. It was not. It was Iran. Iran took responsibility for it. Qatar pointed the finger at Iran.

Joe Kent said it was Israel that did it. And before the interview was finished, Russia today and other Russian-backed news services and Iranian sympathetic news services were running the clip that Israel had bombed a natural gas facility in Qatar. You can very clearly see the operation that is unfolding here and the meltdown from people. People have speculated. Maybe it's the Qataris who are funding Tucker Carlson. Maybe he's getting money from somewhere. I don't know. But when you see how invested the Russians are, it makes you wonder if the Russians are involved. A Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugan, who is one of Vladimir Putin's guys, is recirculating the Joe Kent Tucker Carlson interview. And anyone who questions Joe Kent, points out he might ride a short bus. He's not a bright guy. They are vociferously attacked. How dare you question this patriot he fought in the military? I'm sorry, you can fight in the military in the United States and still be an idiot. You can fight in the United States military and then turn around and hate the United States. Hello, John Kerry.

And then they would hate the United States and blame the United States for all the world's ills and demand that we accommodate the Soviet Union and demand that we give up our nukes and demand that we get out of countries around the world. And we're seeing the exact same playbook, but the people tend to be people who position themselves near Donald Trump. In the movie The Dark Night, Michael King's character, he plays Alfred, says some men just want to watch the world burn. If you know anything about Steve Bannon and his statements he's made over time, Steve Bannon wants to watch the world burn because his ego is so large. He has decided he could rebuild it in his own image and he has ties to members of the Chinese Communist Party into the Russians. Contrary to what a lot of people think, Andrew Breitbart was not exactly a fan of his. Talk to all the people who worked with Andrew Breitbart. Had Andrew Breitbart lived, we would probably not have heard much of Steve Bannon because he would have disappeared from the scene. But Andrew Breitbart sadly fell over dead. And Steve Bannon rushed in to pick up the pieces and rebuild Brightbart.com in his image. ingratiated himself with and built ties with Jeffrey Epstein and a lot of other unsavory characters and he's a nihilist. He wants to watch the world burn thinking he can rebuild it in his image. And you have all these people in his orbit and the orbit of the Russians. They're all getting money from somewhere. I have no idea where they're all making money. But their cloud is also being amplified by a bunch of spam bots on social media. You watch the Joe Kidd interview with Tucker Carlson, and it was remarkable how many hundreds and hundreds of random accounts were pushing out clips rapidly. Clips to make Israel look bad, clips to make the United States look bad. There's an operation going on here to brainwash people, and it's not working. And here's why it's not working. These people who want you to hate your country, these people who want you to reject a strong national defense, these people who want you to reject an American-led world order, made the fatal mistake that the same people on the left made, and that is to confuse Twitter for real life. And they thought if they can dupe and persuade people on Twitter that they would win the argument. But only about 10% of Americans are regularly on Twitter, and most of those people aren't engaged in political Twitter. Only about 20% of Americans even have a Twitter account. But they decided that if they got on Twitter... They could seed conspiracy theories about the United States and undermine the integrity of the United States and tear us apart, piece by piece, get you to hate your neighbors, and most Americans aren't there to hate. Most Americans are not even there. Most Americans are outliving their lives. So they're not there for the Joe Kent conspiracy theories. They're not there for the Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens's anti-Semitism. They're not there for Megyn Kelly's rants. They're not there for Steve Bannon.

Those in their orbit have gotten very angry now. They are realizing they're failing. They thought they had an isolationist president who would separate the United States from the rest of the world so China and Russia could grab it. They have built their entire philosophy on ending the American-led world order, and the president has collapsed Venezuela. It's collapsing Cuba, is collapsing Iran, and we're seeing a resurgent Western American-supported leadership structure emerge in South America, in Chile, in Argentina, in Ecuador, in other countries. We're seeing the Chinese pushed out of Panama, and these people are furious about it. And they're attacking you. They're attacking Mark Levin. They're attacking bin Josh Shapiro. They're attacking me. They're attacking all of these people who are supporting an American-led world because at the end of the day, they do not want America to lead the world because they want China and Russia to be dominant. They want us suppressed. That suggests where some of the money for this operation may be coming from. Not from Qatar, not from Iran, but from China and Russia. It is an operation. And you got a strong sense of that operation during the Jo Kidd interview last night by these trolling accounts, many of them from third world countries or from Russia, cutting up clips of Joe Kent telling lies and pushing them out to distort what's going on. And they just completely forgot that most Americans aren't there to even see it. And most Americans at the end of the day understand how profoundly good this country is. And they are invested in telling you how bad this country is. And Americans refuse to be indoctrinated by the hate outside of the far left and now the far right. Most Americans actually regularly touch grass and live in the real world and don't have time for the nonsense. that the people in the Steve Bannon, Russia, China, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Joe Kent, Orbiter, preaching. And I would just remind you, it probably was not a good thing for all of these people to get emotionally invested in the idea of a grand conspiracy led by Jeffrey Epstein. And then to have it turn out that one of his advisors was Steve Bannon. You're at the intersection of politics, news, culture, and current events. It's the Eric Erickson Show. Hello, welcome. It's Eric Erickson. Glad to have you with me. Now, this is important. The wife of the mayor of New York has been exposed for using the F-word slur for gays. the inward slur for black people calling for the eradication of Israel and a host of other pretty disturbing accusations about her. All of these things having shown up on her social media feed. One, it is remarkable that Andrew Cuomo's team never found this stuff. Two.

It is remarkable that the New York media refuses to ask the mayor about this stuff. Three. Before you say it is irrelevant to anything, I would remind you that the exact same press corps that will not ask the mayor of New York about his wife's anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism is the same press corps that tried to discredit Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court because his wife put George Washington's flag on a flagpole. We're going to hold Samuel Alito to what his wife did. We should hold Mayor Zohran Mamdani to his wife. But of course, we'll work that way because he's a Democrat and an anti-Semite. Now, I got to tell you about Old Glory Bank. They are my bank and they could be your bank. They could be your kids bank. They are the fastest growing bank of the country or one of the fastest growing banks of the country. You should not have to worry about your bank account being turned off because you were a conservative, and yet in many cases during the Biden administration, you had to have that worry, which is why I started using Old Glory Bank. If you were a conservative business, you had to worry about being targeted and pressured by your bank to change your business practices. If you wanted to buy a gun with your debit card, you in some cases couldn't do that because progressives said you couldn't, and so the banks complied. Old Glory Bank has stood up for your... freedom and they will stand up for your freedom. Your kid, they need a custodial account. They can do that. You want CDs or mortgage. They do that. Your business, you want business checking, you do that. Your veteran first responder, you can do that. Old glorybank.com slash Eric. Old glory bank.com slash Eric, member FDIC, Equal housing lender, terms and conditions apply.