Erick Erickson, the forty-one-year-old right-wing radio host and political pundit whom The Atlantic described in 2015 as “the most powerful conservative in America,” has made a career of online provocation. He became the editor-in-chief of the influential conservative blog RedState in 2006, a position he held for nearly a decade. In a 2008 blog post, he dubbed Michelle Obama a “Marxist harpy.” In a 2009 tweet, he called the retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter “a goat fucking child molester.” Later that year, Erickson argued that President Obama won the Nobel Prize because of an “affirmative action quota.” The 2014 Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Texas, Wendy Davis, was, in due time, “Abortion Barbie.”
Last August, when Donald Trump said that Fox News’s Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” Erickson decided that the comment was “a bridge too far.” He disinvited Trump from the influential RedState Gathering, a forum for conservative power brokers. Liberal commentators called out Erickson for hypocrisy, pointing to sexist comments of his own. Trump’s followers, meanwhile, singled out Erickson with attacks that have yet to cease: Twitter trolling, public condemnation, death threats.
“The worst came when a guy told my radio call-screener that he was going down to Macon to kill my family while I was on the radio,” Erickson told me recently, at an Atlanta coffee shop, where his khakis and polo shirt stood out among the tattoos and skinny jeans. The screener told the caller that she wasn’t to going to put him on the air. “And he said, ‘Fine. I just want you to let him know that, when he gets home, his family will be dead.’ This was in March. Homeland Security actually got involved. This guy claimed to be a Muslim offended that I was insulting the Prophet Muhammad. But he was a Trump supporter.”
Not long after the threats to his family began, Erickson and his wife, Christy, both received frightening health news: he had blood clots, and she had a tumor in her lung. At The Resurgent, the site he started after he left RedState, at the end of 2015, he has written emotionally about what followed the diagnoses. Amid the accumulating medical bills and fears for his children’s future, he has looked for a bright side. “I was in the hospital for a week last April, without a computer for most of the time, which proved that I could live without it,” he said. “And, with my career more on the radio now anyway, I don’t feel compelled to be on the Internet all hours of the day and night anymore. Frankly, it’s not worth my time to get on Twitter and see all the people who wish I were dead. I can’t do that and fight insurance companies over my wife’s medicine.”
Some have wondered, understandably, if Erickson is softening. “I’ve always been perceived as the conservative rabble-rouser who’s just saying stuff,” he told me. “And I have said some things I regret. I shouldn’t have said the thing about Michelle Obama—she wasn’t running for President. It was a ridiculous comment.” He has also apologized for the Souter tweet. “The Wendy Davis one, though? She had a profile in Vogue talking about her Barbie looks. And I knew the polling in Texas showed that if you defined her abortion position, she’s not gonna win. So I’m actually rather proud of ‘Abortion Barbie.’ It’s a perfect definition of what she stood for.” What about when he told Megyn Kelly that women should subordinate themselves to men? “I was being dumb. I didn’t fully believe it, and I was trying to highlight a point with absurdity and ended up writing a piece more seriously than I should have. She ate me for lunch that day. We still laugh about it. A day later, I made cinnamon rolls for my kids and sent her a picture.”
Erickson makes those cinnamon rolls on most Tuesday mornings these days, while his wife is sleeping, at their home, in Macon. He gets up before six so that he can get breakfast ready for their two children, who are seven and eleven, and then take them to their Christian private school, where classmates have told them that their father is evil for opposing Trump. In March, Erickson wrote that even his children “loathe the crazy cat lady vibe his campaign and so many of his supporters give off.” Many, it pains him to see, are fellow-Christians: he wrote in September that he weeps for “the shallow faith of a church more wrapped up in its Americaness than its Godliness.” After dropping his kids off, Erickson drives an hour and a half north, to Atlanta, where he hosts a conservative radio program, “Atlanta’s Evening News with Erik Erickson.” A year and a half ago, he began attending a seminary class in the city. “I’ve been taking the systematic theologies recently,” he said. “But I really should have saved the eschatology class for this semester. Studying the end times would be richly rewarding this year!”

The seminary course is teaching Erickson, among others things, “how to always have a voice in the back of my head saying, ‘You probably want to pause before tweeting or writing that.’ ” I asked him to elaborate. “It has really put me in conflict with my political positions and how I say things.” He brought up immigration. “I find it harder and harder to reconcile taking eleven million people and throwing them out of the country, when some of them are grandparents who’ve been here for two generations. Does the party of family want to break up families? At one point, in the last few years, I was all in favor of rounding them up. But not anymore. My friends have started calling me ‘squishy’ on the issue.” He continued, “I find myself deviating more and more.”
During the Ferguson protests, he wrote a passionate blog post about the militarization of police departments and the racial disparities in policing. “The police bungled their handling of the matter, became very defensive, and behaved more like a paramilitary unit than a police force,” he wrote, adding, “The odds of a young white man being shot by the police in similar circumstances to Michael Brown are not as high as those of a young black man. But we should not need to have a young white man shot and killed for the rest of the nation to pay attention to the issue.”
Erickson was a CNN political analyst from 2010 to 2013, and he has close liberal friends from his time there, among them the acting Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Donna Brazile (“She’s an extension of family for me”), and the CNN commentator Van Jones (“I love him”). “You have to respect him,” Jones told me. He continued, “When you’re a young firebrand coming out of an insurgent movement, you will make all kinds of mistakes. The question is, Do you learn from them? And do you continue seeking wisdom while staying true to your fundamental principles? I think Erick is a fine example of that.”
Erickson’s mea culpas have their limit, however. “I’ve made jokes about feminists that I find hilarious, and I’m not taking those back,” he told me. “But do I consider myself a sexist and a misogynist? My wife is taller than me, owns more guns than me, and taught me about football. And I have a daughter who loves me, who I’m taking to see Adele this weekend. So no.”
Erickson admits that his stoking of anger and distrust has helped enable Trump’s rise—and thus Hillary Clinton’s likely victory. He’s no fan of Clinton, of course. “If somebody put a gun to my head and said pick Clinton or Trump, I’d have to pick the bullet,” he told me. “The day after the election, I’m just gonna go hide in the mountains and hit golf balls and drink beer for three or four days by myself.” Not exactly the itinerary of Moses, Jesus, or Paul, but a retreat, nonetheless.
This weekend, the day after that Adele concert, Erickson will take his children—one dressed as a cartoon character, the other as a “Halo Master Chief”—trick-or-treating. “Then I’ll sit on the front porch, drink bourbon, and pass out candy,” he said. Would he dress up, too? “I never do costumes. I did think about getting a Trump wig this year but decided against it. I’d rather just be myself.”