Erick Erickson HR 1 10-17-25

Three, two, one, zero, all engine running. Lift-off, we have a lifetown. the nation delighted to have you with me the phone number is eight seven seven nine seven three seven four to five Should you wish to join me, I am reminded today if you see me jump, duck, and scream, there are people climbing the building doing window washing, scared the mess out of me when it happened last year. Don't forget, text Eric, E, R-I-C-K to 33777. Should you want to get the show notes, the live stream, the podcast, so much more. The president of the United States has returned home. He's giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to his friend Charlie Kirk this afternoon at the White House at 4 p.m. He wanted to get back for that. They have peace in the Middle East. The hard part begins now. Here is a problem. It's a constitutional issue, and I wrote about this this morning. You know, I mentioned on October 7th, I just put up a tweet, and it just had 280 Israeli flags. It's the anniversary, the two-year anniversary of what happened on October 7th. There were no words. I just put up the Israeli flag. The world is turning against Israel. There's a lot of anti-Semitism in the world. And I just, I wanted them to know. I wanted my Jewish fridge to know. I'm with them.

But the Constitution makes the president almost a king when it comes to foreign affairs. And that's the thing you have to understand. Almost a king, because the president in foreign affairs can do a great deal without having to worry about Congress. When our founders drafted the Constitution, there's a great class from Hillsdale College I talk about. They talk about how George Washington was obviously the ideal. George Washington was the image of the ideal of... what the president should be. And they wanted George Washington to be king and he declined. And they framed our Constitution such that the president in foreign affairs reigns supreme with very little oversight from Congress, except if there's a treaty and it takes two-thirds of the Senate to bind us to the treaty because the treaty becomes the power of the Constitution. The treaty becomes very much like the Constitution. Everybody is bound to the treaty. All of the states, that's why the Senate, which represents the states, to agree by two-thirds vote to approve a treaty because all of the states, which are semi-sovereign entities, are then bound to the treaty. But short of a treaty, the president of the United States is allowed a great deal of control in his foreign affairs. So in second terms, as the president becomes a lame duck, and he has to deal with the Congress that's already thinking about the next guy, and most of Congress is thinking about they're going to be the next president. They all get up in the morning to look in the mirror and call themselves, Mr. President. Presidents tend to spend more time abroad. They tend to spend more time dealing with foreign policy. They tend to spend a lot more time focusing on the things that they can control. The president got Hamas. to release the hostages but cannot get Chuck Schumer to end his hostage standoff. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries refused to release their hostages, the American people, from this government shutdown. When they were in charge, they demanded clean continuing resolutions or else it was the Republican's fault for shutting down the government. And now that they're in the minority, they want the credit for shutting down the government, but they don't want the blame. They want the credit to show they're standing up to Donald Trump, but they don't want the blame for actually voting to shut. down the government. And the president is somewhat powerless to get them to do the right thing and open the government. The president is somewhat powerless to get them to do much anything. And that's okay. The power of the American people to persuade them will happen as the polling shifts. The hard part, though, for the president now in the Middle East begins. Donald John Trump, President of the United States, has been able to bring all the players of the Middle East together, and now he's got to get about to the next phases of the plan. And Hamas shows no interest in the next phases of the plan. If you got the show notes today, you can get them by texting Eric to 33777.

The New York Times headline now comes the hard part for the Gaza ceasefire plan. Hamas released hostages and agrees to abide by a ceasefire, but persuading it to lay down its arms is another matter. During the talks leading up to the ceasefire and Gaza provisions for who would run the enclave on the day after the war was over were among the most complicated and vexing, so much so that they were eventually severed from the ceasefire talks and put off until a second phase of negotiations. That phase had at least an air of auspiciousness on Monday evening and Sharmer al-Shake Egypt, where Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattel-C. of Egypt gathered dozens of leaders to try to build on the momentum created by the truce. the exchange of 20 living Israeli hostages and the bodies of others for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. Phase two has started. Mr. Trump said he predicted tremendous success. It's peace in the Middle East, he said. Everyone said it's not possible to do, and it's going to happen. Yet Monday's kickoff and Sharmael shake aside, its unclear even when phase two talks will formally begin and where they will be held. And both Israeli and Palestinian analysts said it was easier to imagine things going sideways than to imagine Mr. Trump's plan being fully realized. The main issue isn't resolved. Hamas's weapons. The Israelis are demanding Hamas disarm, which is not a simple administrative measure. Hamas was founded on the basis of bearing arms. Hamas is being asked to dismantle its ideology, and it is. By the way, Philip tells me the show notes haven't gone out yet. If you want to subscribe to today's copy, text data, D-A-T-A to 33-777. You can get a discount, get the paid subscription. You can get today's show notes with all these links in it, including the story from the New York Times, which you can get and see for yourself. It's actually a very good story. You know, when it comes to foreign stories like this, international affairs, a lot of our domestic media is seeing in the New York Times. They do a pretty good job of... covering the essence of it. And there is a concern here with this, and there is a lot to be concerned about that Hamas, like the Nazis, they can't give up who they are. For the Nazis to give up who they are, it would have been to denazify, and that's actually what happened to Germany after World War II. The denazification of Germany. Hamas will not be eliminated. Hamas does not want to go away. Hamas believes that it is the rightful ruler of Gaza. They got elected in 2006 or so, I think it was, and they've never left. They shut down elections thereafter and killed anyone who wanted elections. They're not going to go quietly. They're not going to go easily.

The president has gotten other Arab nations to recognize Hamas is expendable. And Hamas is expendable. Hamas is, well, in need of going away. Hamas... are bad people. Derivative of the Muslim Brotherhood, derivative actually descendants of Arab Nazism. And I don't actually say that lightly, and I don't say that just to throw around the word Nazi as the left does accusing anyone they disagree with of Nazism. The Muslim Brotherhood actually was an ideological heir to German Nazism. Many of the Muslim Brotherhood trained in Germany under Hitler's regime and went back to the Middle East. And then Hamas is a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is derived from the Muslim Brotherhood with Nazi ideology, like actual real German Nazi ideology. part of it, shifted to be amalgamated into Islam. Nazism itself was paganism that had quasi-Christian overtones, but was actually deeply, deeply Germanic pagan. pulled in a lot of Germanic mythology, the Valkyries and the like, and the derived from Norris mythology, Hitler wove all those themes together into this cult. The Muslim Brotherhood has kind of done the same with Islam, and Nazism, blending them together. And of course, in Islam, you don't have far to go to get to hatred of the Jews. They've been at war for 4,000 years. This is going to be a very difficult thing for Donald Trump. It may actually be easier for the president to deal with the Democrats than to deal with Hamas now without its hostages. All they have left are their arms. All they have left are their weapons. All they have left is their desire to kill the Jews. And still he's going to proceed. It actually is very remarkable to me that the president was able to get the hostages home. And to his credit, and I do have to give Joe Biden credit, unlike Barack Obama. Joe Biden yesterday sent out a tweet and praised Donald Trump for what he had done. That's commendable of Joe Biden. Like the guy or not, he was willing to give Donald Trump the credit. He didn't caveat it. He gave Donald Trump the credit, and so did Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton, you will recall, said if Donald Trump get the hostages home, she'd nominating herself for the Nobel Prize. To see Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton both commend Donald Trump actually speaks to the significance of what he did. But the hard part begins, and he's under no delusions. He's surrounded by very smart people the president is.

Getting to the next phase, getting the people of Gaza to want to rebuild from the rubble into something new, it's going to be very hard. But that the president has been able to command the Arab nations and get them together on this actually suggests he may be able to get something done. We should yet again giving the benefit of the doubt. Have something to say? Hello. 1-877-9-7-eering. That's 1-877-97-9-73-7-425. He's got the courage to tell you the truth, even when it isn't popular. You're listening to the Eric Erickson Show. Hello, my friends. It is Eric Erickson here across the United States. The phone number is 877-9737-975, should you wish to be on the program. I want to talk to you for just a minute. This is not about politics. It's somewhat personal, but I think it might be an encouragement to some of you who are struggling. Today is my 25th wedding anniversary. 25 years ago today, my wife said I do. In fact, my wife, and I didn't tell her she had to do this. There was no pressure at all. In fact, if anything, I suggest to her she could do something else. But my wife said love, honor, and obey. Those were her wedding vow. She said she would love, honor, and obey me. There were gasps. literal gasps from two of the women I worked with who were lawyers, both of them very distinctly feminist. When my wife said, obey, you could hear the, and I have been obeying my wife ever since, just for the record, 25 years ago. We got married in October, obviously, October 14th of 2000. It's great because I always know how many years we've been married today is 2025, been married 25 years. A few weeks after we got married, we went to Banff in Canada. We stayed at the Banff Springs Hotel, the nice castle up there. I would love to take my family up there at some point. And we were there when my bar exam results came in, and I had to get our neighbor, who was a doctor at the time, to go over and check our mailbox and see if I got my bar passage, which I did. I found out on my honeymoon. I'd pass the bar exam. He was kind enough to the primitive cell phones of the day, text me. We then, a few weeks later, watched as the November 2000 election happened. You know, historically, red states were the state of the Challenger Party, blue states, or the incumbent party, whoever held the White House was the blue state.

So in 1980, it was a Reagan bloodbath, and in 1984, it was a Reagan swimming pool. Those are the euphemisms of the day. The Associated Press back in the 1960s was in charge of doing the color coding, and they designated the incumbent party as the blue party, the Challenger Party is the Red Party. The 2000 election where George W. Bush won with 537 or 539 votes in Florida. It was such an iconic election. We hadn't seen a presidential election where the Challenger won the Electoral College and Lost Popular Vote since the 1800s. It was so iconic that red states stuck as a euphemism for the Republican Party, blue states and blue for the Democrats. We've been talking about that now for 25 years because of that election. Beforehand, those colors were meaningless, incumbent blue, Challenger Red. Shortly thereafter, in January, January 20th of 2001, I sat in a hospital waiting room watching the inauguration of George W. Bush while my wife was in surgery having a double mastectomy, she had a horrible history of breast cancer in her family. Horrible history of breast cancer. All the women on her mom's side of the family, she lost her mom to breast cancer. She lost her aunt to lung cancer. She also had breast cancer. Her grandmother had breast cancer. Her grandmother had breast cancer. Just horrible history of breast cancer. So she had a prophylactic double mastectomy. She did not have breast cancer, but knew she was going to get it. She had a mastectomy, double mastectomy. I watched George W. Bush. I was reading the David McCullough biography of John Adams and watching the presidential inauguration in the hospital while she had her surgery, which went fine, but they were not able to do the reconstruction at the time due to tissue damage. And so we would drive back and forth every week while I was a lawyer. I would leave my law practice every week. We would drive to Atlanta. I would drive her as she recovered. And she had expanders in her chest, and they would stick a needle through her skin every week, add a little more fluid to slowly build up her chest cavity for reconstruction surgery, tearing the scarring. It would make her nauseous every time. And eventually had the reconstructive surgery. And in 2005, we had our first child. And all the problems that come about with pregnancy, my wife had to have a series of reconstructive surgeries over time from her mastectomy, which no one told us to even expect. We were completely caught off guard with it. She had her last, I think, in 2009 after the birth of our second child. A year after Evelyn was born in Christmas of 2006, My wife, they had found some spots in her lungs. They did a lung biopsy. And the week before Christmas in 2006, if you're a long-time listener, you know what happened. My wife was given six months to live. I had to be the one to tell her she was going to die. I had to wake her up as she was in recovery from the lung biopsy. A painful procedure, by the way.

I had to be the one to look at my wife in the eye and tell her she was going to die. She had six months to live. She didn't believe me. Then I had to go get our kid out of daycare. It was raining. I had to go get my kid at a daycare, get her home, wait for family to come relieve me. So I could get back to the hospital and hold my wife's hand and begin those hard conversations you never actually ever want to have of what would life look like for my child and me. How would my wife be buried? Where would we place her body? Where should I move with my kid? What should I do with my career? You never want to have those conversations. I had to have those conversations. My wife said she thought I was a catapult. I was running redstate.com at the time. And she said, you throw good people and ideas into the arena, and that's what you need to keep doing. Move wherever you want to move. Just make sure the kid knows I love her. 24 hours later, turns out she was misdiagnosed. We had to have all those conversations, all the conversations you never want to have to have. And she was misdiagnosed. She was just fine. Had a rare condition in her lungs and it was benign. And you know what? Here's the irony. Ten years later, in 2016, in the spring, I was given 24 hours to live, my lungs filling up with blood clots. You know, it's one of the very few times I remember Rush Limbaugh calling me, was in the hospital, barely able to breathe. He found out what had happened and called me in the hospital, and I found the air to have a conversation with Rush on the phone, one of the very few times he ever called me on the phone, wanted to hear my voice, make sure I was alive. This was, by then I was on radio. We'd been friends for a long time. The day that I was rushed into a cardiac ICU unit, given 24 hours to live, call your family. My wife was told they thought she had a rare form of cancer, which she did. I lived. My wife was given a death sentence. She has a rare lung cancer. It's genetic. There's no cure. Stage four, all four lobes of her lungs. And she began treatment in 2016. In October of 2016, they found a genetic marker in her cancer. They knew there was a pill they had developed. It had just come on the market called Tigriso, and they put her on it. She was given two years to live in 2016. My wife's mom died when my wife was in first grade. Her dad remarried, and in fact, the first year after we got married, my mother's day present to my wife and my mother-in-law, my wife not yet with kid, but to my mother-in-law was I did the adoption of my wife to my mother-in-law, and my mother-in-law has now adopted Christy as her daughter. My wife's birth mother is buried down in South Georgia and died when Christy was in first grade. The weight of being told that she would not live to see her own child, her own daughter, walk across the graduation stage, did a number on my wife, I got to tell you. Two years to live and fight. That was nine years ago. Today we'll go out to dinner to celebrate not just 25 years of marriage, but nine years of life, seven years past the death sentence she was given.

You know, life's not easy, but God is good. And had it gone the opposite way, God would still be good, life would just suck. Life is not fair. It's never expected to be fair. And I've got to tell you, you know, I'm pretty open about my faith. And the question that I get more than any other, particularly from people who don't actually mean well, and I try to answer them anyway, there's some really awful people on the Internet and occasionally listeners. How can you worship a God who gave your wife lung cancer? I get that question asked so many times and usually phrased in the most hateful way possible. How can I worship a God who gave my wife lung cancer? He didn't. How could I not worship him? He's the only thing that keeps me sane most days. We live in a fallen world. Disease is not something God gives you disease is a product of sin. I think the Christian worldview is the only worldview that makes sense and synthesizes everything in the world into a rational whole, a rational sum of its parts. We live in a fallen world. Sin fosters disease. But... The God of the universe loves us so much. He came as a baby in a manger, lived a perfect life, and was tortured and crucified and died, but conquered death so that we can too. We don't get a reprieve from this fallen world, and neither did he. But he walks through it with us, and he knows what we're going through, because he's been through awful stuff in this world, too. He knows our pain because he was tortured and crucified, nailed to a cross. Twenty-five years ago, my wife said I do. She did not know that I would become a talk show host. You know that one of the weird things that happens in life is people come up to my wife and ask her questions. Why did your husband say X, Y, Z? Why did Eric do this? And there have been some awful things I've done over the years. And I never get those questions. Neither hostily nor gently. I don't get them. She gets them all sometimes hostily, sometimes gently, but she gets them. She never expected that. She doesn't even listen to the show. The secret to our marriage, she one time told a woman in church who was outraged that Christy didn't listen to me. She says, I got to sleep with him. She doesn't listen. Probably a good thing. I can go home at night and we don't have to talk about politics. She doesn't pay attention to politics. She doesn't particularly care for any of them. But she loves the Lord. Boy, she's gotten into, what, Jackie Hill Perry, and, um, She has really gotten into de-group now, deep theological studies that a group of women do on Monday nights. She's also got her Harley. My wife never pulls the can. I pull the cancer card more than my wife. I pull the cancer card to get us out of stuff. We don't want to go to. My wife's like suck it up and go. I'm like, you got cancer. Throw down the cancer card. Nope, I'll do it for her. She does not pull the cancer card except one time.

Had to buy her a Harley Davidson. She's got a fat boy. That was the only thing she's wanted when she got cancer was a motorcycle. We have two wonderful kids. Our oldest is 20 and in college here in Middle Georgia at Friedrich Merz University where I went, my alma mater, comes home all the time. Our youngest is an 11th grade, wants to be an architect and wants to go off to Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, because they love Jesus in architecture. And they have a 10 to 1 female to male ratio in the architecture department he's discovered. And I'm living life with my wife, who I did not expect to have this long. I started out as a lawyer. I got involved in politics. I got elected to political office. I then went from the internet to television and then television to radio and through it all, she has been there with me. 25 years ago, she said, I will love on her and obey you. I have been obeying that woman ever since and don't want it to change. It's been a remarkable 25 years. And again, I tell you, God would be good. even if my wife was not here. But it sure makes it easier to get through life having her here. She's a rock star.

Honest. Putting your trust in me to tell you what's going on. Transparent. I need you to know this from the bottom of my heart. Giving you the information without the noise. My job isn't to tell you what you want to hear. It's to tell you the tree. It's the Eric Erickson Show. Since the 1800s Hillsdale College has been advancing education across America free. And they can do it for you as well at Eric for Hillsdale.com. You can subscribe to their podcast network where you get incredible insights on a regular basis from Dr. Larry Arne, other great faculty and guests with Hillsdale College. It's always insightful. And no cost to you. Likewise, you can go to Eric for Hillsdale.com and you can sign up for Primus. I've been getting it since law school. Comes to my mailbox. I've never paid a penny for it. It is show prep from my mind. And for you, it will be as well. And then you can also get great courses from Hillsdale. College that you can do at your own pace. Learn more about the Constitution. I went to law school. I studied con law and I learned more from Dr. Larry Arden in Hillsdale College than I thought I knew. It was fantastic. Eric for Hillsdale.com. Subscribe to the podcast network with your favorite podcast app. Get Imprimus and get the free courses. All available to you. Eric for Hillsdale.com at Hillsdale College. It's the start of a new year, new you, new time, new technology. You keeping up with the times? My goodness, vision computers wants to help you, your company, your home, your kids keep up with technology. Now listen, college applications are dropping. Kids are getting admitted. Your kid's going to need technology. Vision computers can help you. Your business headed into this year got new technology. You need new graphics cards. You need new computers. Vision computers can build them. Laptops, desktops, they'll take care of you. Not only that, they'll service your computers. a phone number that you can call. If you have any question about how your computer operates, something doesn't work, you think, or you need to figure out something, they can help you faster than a Google search. All you need to do is go to visioncom, visioncomputers.com, or call them 404 compute anywhere nationwide, call Vision Computers at 404 compute. Tell them I sent you. You'll save even more money. Do business with visioncomcom. Call them at 404 compute. You'll never lose sleep over your computer again.

Get the podcast, live stream, email, and social media links by texting Eric to 33777. Now. Hello there. Welcome. It is Eric Herrickson here. The president has got some trade deals that he's got to deal with with China now. The markets, you know, they were in turmoil at the end of last week, and then things settled down yesterday because it sounded like perhaps we had misunderstood the Chinese. That seems to be the case. The Dow, I'm looking at it right now as I'm talking up. 353 points. You can't really pay attention to the ebbs and flows on a daily basis. However, Trump's trade representative was on TV this morning, Jameson Greer. said the president could still slap 100% tariffs on China November 1st or sooner, depending on Beijing's next move. Now, here's the interesting topic. And I want to spend a little bit, I want to spend a little bit more about this later in the show. So just stick around. The Chinese economy, we are figuring out, is not as good as a lot of people said it was and expected to be. What's going on here? You got to remember, the Chinese lie. The Chinese government data serves as propaganda. In this country, we have private companies that can trade and share data publicly to give a sense of the economy, and we have the government. probing companies for their data and making it public. That's not happening during the shutdown, but the private of the public tend to correspond pretty good. So there's a double audit on both sides. In the Chinese system, they had that. And Xi Jinping has banned private companies, the financial sector and banks, from releasing public economic data. So the only way to get the data from China about what's happening is from the government, and we know the government is... fabricating the data, manipulating the numbers. And when you actually look at what's happening on the ground in China, what you see is a lot of capital flight. That is, a lot of people are moving money out of China. A lot of people who have the means to leave China are leaving China going abroad. The billionaire class, the Jack Maas of the world, they get disappeared by China and sent to re-education camps.

Now, what's happening right here in this country is you've got Jerome Powell, who is on stage right now talking, saying that the Fed is nearing the point where it's going to stop reducing the size of its bond holdings, and that monetary tightening policy could in soon. He's not talking about rates. We expect another rate cut. There is turmoil within the economy. And... I kind of think that we have the opportunity right now to really take on the Chinese. That's why the 100% tariff from Donald Trump is so meaningful. I think Trump realizes the Chinese economy is not nearly as good as the Chinese claim. And all indications on the ground in China are that it's a weak economy. So next move is China's. We'll see. Right now, I need to tell you about banks in this country, particularly Old Glory Bank. They're my bank, and they can be your bank as well. So I've got a checking account with them, and I have a savings account with them. They do car loans. I may need to check with them on car loans for Gunner's Car. Oldglorybank.com slash Eric is where you can go. They have a great online app and bill pay system. They are incredibly responsive to business needs. If you're a business, they have great options for you. And they try to actually get you a representative who's going to be your representative. and not just fly-by-night person who is actually going to take the time to learn your company, learn your interests, learn your needs as a business so that you have someone who gets it. I can't speak highly enough of my, I enjoy using them as my bank. I can even deposit cash with a QR code at 88,000 retail locations around the country. You go to old glorybank.com slash Eric. Oldglorybank.com slash ERIC. Get a check account. Get a savings account. They do mortgages, car loans, CEDs. They're a fully functioning, fully service bank. They even do business loans and business accounts. Member FDIC, equal housing lender, terms and conditions apply.