Eric Jenkins, Kansas Third District Congressional Candidate, In Studio | 9-8-26

0:00This is Ashley Akinetti from the Almost Hymnest Podcast. You ever notice you and your spouse keep saying, we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything. That was us until we did something fun and spontaneous. We went to resortpass.com. There are hundreds of hotel resorts, pools and spots and private beaches that you can enjoy. You can spend the day at a luxury resort, pool, spa, massage, without booking an overnight stay. And listen, I may have only been 15 minutes from home, but it felt like it was a whole different world. And I'm thinking, this is exactly what I needed. So just go to resortpass.com, choose your resort, choose your day, luxury, resort, day passes, start at just $1,500. Once you post your daycation, people are gonna ask where you are. Go to resortpass.com, slash almost famous, and use the promo code almost famous to get $20 off when you spend $100. That's code almost famous at resortpass.com slash almost famous.

1:00[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Many of you have asked on this show, hey, who's running against Sheree Stavis? Well, it's the person sitting across from me in studio. Eric Jenkins is here on KCMO Talk Radio. Eric, good morning. Welcome in. Thanks for being here. Good morning, Pete. Thanks for you, KCMO. Welcome here. Yeah, well, it's great to have you here. So first off, for people that do not know you, 34 years of military service, you were the Shawnee City Council president as well, from 2021 to 2023. What made you say to yourself, hey, it's time for me to get back in the game and run against Sheree Stavis. Well, I think it's the thing that's affecting a lot of Americans right now and Republicans, especially, is we're looking what's happening to our morals and values. It has been really devastating to a certain extent. And it doesn't seem to be getting any better. We keep lowering the bar on what's acceptable in our society.

2:02And we've lost the ability. We've lost so many things. And now with the DSA people out there trying to basically turn us into a communist country, that kind of gets my rancor up a bit. The hair on the back of the head stands up. You spend 34 years wearing that uniform and jumping at a lot of perfectly good airplanes in the middle of the night and that kind of thing. And you got a little vested skin in the game. Yeah, this kind of stuff is very disturbing to me. And it motivated me to say, yes, when I was asked about run, I said, hell, yes. Oh, yeah. What about Sheree's, David? It's her record, her tenure. What was it about the job that she's doing or not doing that also made you say, you know, I got to get in there and give this thing a shot. Well, I think you hit on it with saying the thing she's not doing. She hasn't really done much if you get right done to it. She's not really representing Johnson County and the five county area well at all. If you look at her legislation that she's been a sponsor to or actually proposed, there's nothing there. She's pretty much an empty suit, to be honest.

3:03And she flies below the radar. We don't see much of her. So I think we probably like the divator if we could get that opportunity to get her out. But I think the people in this district, when I talk to my fellow Republicans and some independents when I'm at their door or meeting them at a parade or a remand, the feeling about Teresa is pretty strong. They're very upset with her and they really would like to see a change. And I think it'd be a great opportunity to provide some change. Here I am. Well, here you are. So what do you, when you see the way that some of the other folks you ran against are lost. Personth Ready, Amanda Adkins, Kevin Yoder. What do you want to do differently? What have you learned from their losses that you can apply to your own campaign here to maybe pull off an upset? Well, I think serving the past four elections, those campaigns were run kind of in the traditional matter. A lot of ads on TV, mailers, all that standard approach to an election.

4:05We're doing something a little different. I guess we're kind of, you had to consider it's be like guerilla warfare a little bit. Having spent about 10 years and special forces, that kind of, that's going to lean in that direction anyway. And the idea is I'm really into people. And we're going to go direct to the people throughout depending about every function we can find. And just talking, just talking to people, tell them what we stand for, what we want to do. And we're getting a lot of feedback. And I'm implementing some of that feedback. I think there's some good ideas out there. So it's a combination of not just talking to people, it's a combination also of listening to people. And I think we're doing a good job of listening and trying to incorporate a lot of what we're hearing into what we're trying to do. Eric Jenkins here. You can find him Eric Jenkins for Kansas.com. He's now running against Sharice Davis, their congressional district. What's the best idea you've heard and all the meetings that you've gone to? Different events, different folks you've heard from? Well, one interesting idea was about Social Security because here we are, look at Social Security. Having some difficulties in 2032. And I had this one fella. He sent me a video and stuff about Social Security

5:09and how we used to have a ratio of six to one supporting it because basically it's a Ponzi scheme. The whole thing. And now we're getting to the point where just about down to two to one. Obviously that can't support the system. It's going to collapse under its own weight here very shortly. And to talk about a 22% reduction in benefits to people. He was saying, well, maybe we need to take a look at raising the cap on how far you or how much income you have before you get relieved of your burden on Social Security. It's 184,000 right now. And you're thinking maybe 500,000 would be more appropriate. That was a pretty interesting idea. And we've looked into it. I have made any decisions on it yet of course. Because there's 3, 435 people up there. It's not just me. So we can take a little bit of work, anything like that done. But another idea that's come up on the Social Security issue is this tariff money. A lot of tariff money coming in. It's kind of like a slush fund right now. Seems it's not really dedicated to any one purpose. Perhaps some of that could be dedicated to helping prop up our Social Security so we can take care of our folks out there. That's an interesting point.

6:09So for you, Eric, 34 years of service, you mentioned jumping out of airplanes. What did you do on behalf of this country? What roles did you serve? Well, I served a number of roles. It was active duty and reserve components. So started out regular army. Which those people that have some military experience know what regular army means. It's different. It's the core of the army. And was a military intelligence officer I got grabbed by the Pist-Special Forces Group and served with the Pist-Special Forces Group out of Fort Bragg for about three years. Then I got caught up in a post-war reduction in force. So I had to go find a regular job in the world. So I went to work for FEMA here in region seven, where I spent about 30 years of FEMA region seven doing pretty much everything they do. I did mitigation, did response and recovery operations. Actually, I did a couple. I was the lead federal official on a couple disasters. They were smaller ones, but they were nationally declared disasters. And wound up in the emergency preparedness side.

7:09Help field the national response plan and get all the station locals that everybody on a vertical alignment with communications and coordination. So it was pretty good. It was also gave me some good ideas strategically on how to look at things more strategically and instead of just tactically. I think they had to advantage that while I was in the military as well. They commanded a special forces A team, commanded a military police battalion, graduated the United States Army War College, which is the highest educational level you can go into military. It's kind of your general prep school for general officer. And that was very strategic as well. I didn't get my master's degree though. They're giving master's degrees for that now. You get a master's degree in international strategic studies or some names like that. But yeah, I had to get my master's degree the old fashioned way working through the system from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. But yeah, it was a great career. I feel I'm so blessed. I got to do so many things. And when I got a effective duty, I mean, when I retired from reserve for 30 years as a colonel, I was still working at FEMA.

8:10In five years after I retired, I got this message on my emails in Eric. We need colonels. Can you come back? And I said, wow, okay, that sounds kind of interesting. So I did. I came back and did four more years. Wow. I'd go to deployed to Iraq one time on actual deployment. Then I came to working for the Center for Army Lessons Learned out here at Fort Leavenworth, working with General Petraeus. And I would take these high powered teams into the box. And we debriefed the core commanders and the Army commander and the division commanders. What's working? What's not working? And I'd bring it back with brief General Petraeus and stuff would happen. Yeah. That guy could make things. He was a mover shaker, things would happen. And it was so satisfying to say, wow, I'm actually doing something that's meaningful and accomplishing something. So that four years was really exciting and good four years. Can't say that's a great place to live. Iraq and Afghanistan, they could wait. They were, I thought I was landing on a moonscape first I've been seeing in the Al-Alios Al-Saline Air Base there.

9:10But it was great, great experience. When I came back, I said, hey, you know, I'm tired of be on the planning commission. I was on the planning commission for 20 years in Shawnee. I said, I think I'm going for office instead. So I ran for mayor against Jeff Meyer. And I gave him a pretty good scare, but I didn't get him. I guess the same thing I'm doing now in name recognition. You gotta get that name recognition out there. And he was a third term incumbent. So he's kind of hard to knock him off. But after that, the next time, the next two years later, the council's seat opened up and I ran for council and served a couple terms on council. What were you most proud of during your time on the Shawnee City Council? Well, there's a couple things I'm really proud of. Shawnee didn't have a downtown. So on Friday evening, about five o'clock, they just rolled the sidewalks up and put them back in the building. Now you get on on a Friday night, there's things there. So I did a coordinated program. I worked very closely with the Chamber of Commerce there and Shawnee, really great team with the insumin' estate and Eric Ely. And I also worked with a commercial real estate agent.

10:12And then I had to work with my council and try to get this done because I'm not one of those guys that believes that you can't have a public-private partnership. I believe in public-private partnerships because they use them a great deal in FEMA. How do you think you put a city back together after it's destroyed? Yeah. It's a combo team that comes in there and tries to put it all together. So I was comfortable with the concept. We leveraged funds that we received because Shawnee gets some money from waste management because they got their facilities in our town. So it's kind of a nuisance type of things. We get some money. Gotcha. And I took some of that money and used it as seed money. We put the theater back in the operation that had been gone for years. We built a, we got a beclaims market in there. The district poor house came over from Waldo, Hanks Garage. And next thing you know, we got a bustling little downtown there and it was important that we kept our motif that we have for Shawnee. It's a smaller town image. It's a hometown feel and we try to keep that. So no, we didn't build city center like to gut LaNexa.

11:15We tried to stay within that framework of keeping a neat little town, it's our town kind of thing, place you call home. And I think we succeeded in that. There are a couple other really good things we did. We cut property taxes the last three years that I was there. We didn't just not take all the increase. We actually cut the middle levy three years in a row. That's great. We had a conservative council at that time and we were really doing some good things. And just stuff like, you know, you get upset. You go to these meetings where they're having a new building coming in and a new apartment complex or they're going to raise the taxes or whatever. And you go and what do you get two minutes or three minutes or whatever? I cut the policy past that allowed. If 10 of you would get together and go over to the city hall and sign a petition with the city clerk, you could call yourself a group and have 30 ministers on a cogent argument. And I think that was really valuable. Not only to those individuals that wanted to express their concerns in a real constructive way, but also it helped the council. We got to hear some actual input that you could consider in making the consideration.

12:16When you get those little bits and pieces like that, they don't add up too much. Yeah, that's a great point. Well, Eric, we're going to make sure we get you back on here. Eric Jenkins running for Congress against Sheree Stavitt. He's the Republican nominee. You can find them at Eric Jenkins for Kansas dot com. We appreciate you coming in Eric. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. You bet Eric Jenkins for Kansas dot com. How you find them? It's football season on polymarket trade. Your football predictions against other fans before and during the game. You can even combine multiple trades with polymarket combos from OCOWCFB new customers deposit $10. You get $50 instantly to start trading. 18 plus C polymarket's terms of service for more information about restrictions and eligibility. The polymarket app is an independent affiliate of polymarket US and not CFTC regulated trading always involves risk complete loss. Canter, the $50 offer is issued as not withdrawable trading credit for use on the platform offer exclusively available to first time depositors, not available in all jurisdictions. This is Ashley Akinetti from the almost famous podcast. You ever notice you and your spouse keep saying, we need to get away, but you never actually plan anything. That was us until we did something fun and spontaneous.

13:18We went to resort pass dot com. There are hundreds of hotel resorts, pools and spots and private beaches that you can enjoy. You can spend the day at a luxury resort, pool, spa, massage without booking an overnight stay. And listen, I may have only been like 15 minutes from home, but it felt like it was a whole different world. And I'm thinking this is exactly what I needed. So just go to resort pass dot com. Choose your resort. Choose your day. Luxury resort day passes start at just $1,000. Once you post your daycation, people are going to ask where you are. Go to resort pass dot com slash almost famous and use the promo code almost famous to get $20 off when you spend $100. That's code almost famous at resort pass dot com slash almost famous.