This is the warning.
There is some terrible news that is unfolding in Utah, and that is that the MAGA activist, the founder of the youth organization Turning Point USA, has been shot. Charlie Kirk has been shot in Utah. Let me say that this is a terrible crime. It is an act of reprehensible violence, and it should be condemned unequivocally and directly by every American, but especially by all of those who stand opposed to the descending curtain of fascism in America.
This act of violence stands the shooter on the side of what we must be against, against the depravity, against the violence, against the evil that the Trump regime has manifested, and that Charlie Kirk, misguidedly, in my view, supported and endorsed.
But in this country we believe unequivocally and without exception in the freedom of speech and conscience and thought.
And this act of violence directed by a democratic activist will be used by the demagogues of the MAGA movement, the propagandists to justify the use of force in the imposition of control by government authority against the citizen.
Because at the.
Core of the mag ideology is a victim and grievance industry that has told people for a generation that they are victims and that they are hunted. And today the evidence of that was laid down with bloody, perfect cloudy. And so a political leader of an opposition that I disdain and detest has been done down while trying to persuade people that he was right. And the act of evil perpetrated against him is an act of evil that was perpetrated against America and against our highest ideals in
furtherance of an evil. Violence. Violence begets violence. And we look at a democracy that's two hundred and fifty years old, atendants of the United States, and we think about Donald Trump inciting violence at the Capitol on January sixth, and we know that hundreds of police officers were assaulted, but the violence was dismissed. The violent criminals were pardoned and said loose and now they will be ready for their war.
We know that a week ago, upon the celebration of the destruction of a speedboat off of Venezuela, the eleven human beings aboard, when it was pointed out to JD. Vance that he lacked the authority the legality to word a lethal strike. There, he responded with, I don't give a shit the erosion that we have seen taken place in the talk about killing and death and the escalation and rhetoric.
There is no.
Voice that has ever been in the history of the United States has done more to court violence in the twentieth and twenty first century between US as a people than Donald Trump and the MAGA movement constantly divided, calling out to the American people that were each other's enemies.
And the answer to this hatred is etched in granite at the memorial of doctor Martin Luther King in Washington and in Atlanta, and in the permanence of the record that makes clear the defeating hate requires the application of love and the love of country and the ideas and ideals that we hold dear about freedom, about liberty, the rule of law, or the answer to the great crisis at hand, the solution to the American crisis at hand, and the only moral method of opposition and resistance to it.
And the man who shot Charlie Kirk tried to assassinate today his country, tried to assassinate the rule of law, tried to assassinate a human being because he didn't like his politics, and he thought, in all of his sickness.
In all of his arrogance, that he had.
The fucking right to be the judge and the jury and the executioner. And let every single one of us make clear our contempt and our disassociation in our demand that when we stand together, we do it with nonviolence as patriots. This is madness and sanity. Earlier today, I shared a story about a Life magazine that I've written about, and it's from November of nineteen thirty eight. And on the cover of that magazine is a toddler and there's
a cupcake with two candles. And I've always made the point then and now the media believes the news is about the media. The evidence, of course that upon the second anniversary of Life magazine, with all that was going on in the world, the thing that was on the
cover was the second anniversary of Life magazine. But inside the cover were the first images of the events that we remember as the Krystal Knock, the Night of the Broken Glass, which followed the assassination of a Nazi official in Paris and the act of collective revenge punishment spilled out all over the Jews and those pictures are in that Life magazine, and you turn the story and accompanying those pictures for publication, where the first publicity photos of
the occasion of Hermann Goring's nieces christening, and you see Hitler and you see Gouring together in the church with the children surrounding them, and you see a ad in the next pages for Coca Cola telling the American people to relax and to take it easy during the hours
and the days ahead. This terrible crime will be the foundation the basis to say that there is a cure for the disease that we just witnessed, that there is a type of justice that can be restored of, and that justice is to give to Donald Trump and for Donald Trump to use the power of the state to avenge this terrible crime against who the criminal and the assassin,
or against all of Donald Trump's uponts. And so we will hear now from the people who change the Department of Defense to the Department of War, those people who talk about lethality and violence and fetishize it and have divided the American people and told the proud boys to stand back and stand ready, and have said that the country has been invaded and that we are at war. Well,
they have their Reichstock fire now. And that's what this will become, the justification for the expansion of state power to suppress political dissent name of punishing the side of a political proposition from which this murderous scumbag came. And it is important to understand that we must deplore the violence. We must pray for Charlie Kirk, we must pray for our country, but we cannot submit to the abuses of power that will be asserted on the basis of this
terrible crime. Our children are not safe in their schools. We live in a country that glorifies this in sanity from billboards and with a gun shop on every corner, and the rhetoric the cold civil war that Donald Trump has stoked for many years a decade is flashing red, lashing hot on the periphery, turning violence. Violence is a cancer on a democracy. No democratic nation debates issues with a rifle. Fascism rose in the nineteen thirties not because
it was strong, but because democracy was weak. And in this country we are to descend into extremists left wing violence versus right wing violence. I have bad news for every left of center person who believes in democracy in America, in the United States. In that fight, the dominant faction is the fascisade, and it will win.
It will prevail.
The ideas that we must stand for require us to have the bravery to embrace nonviolence and the wisdom to reject hatred. If you know, people cannot see the humanity of Charlie Kirk, young father, those people are the worst of the worst, just like the worst of the worst that so many of us in opposition to this are so fiercely against, and so terrible day, an awful moment, an act of political terror, on the eve of September eleventh, twenty four years, on.
The eve to the day of a day that will live.
In infamy, as a fascist curtain descends on our country. It's massed agents in the military, is threatened to be deployed into the streets. Man who picked up the rifle, the sick individual, it's responsible for his actions, his crimes, and he is an enemy of the United States. He is a he is a domestic enemy of the of the Constitution of the United States. And he stole something from all of us today that he had no right
to take from any of us. But we must also consider causations, and we must remember that just days ago, an American president pictured himself as the Robert Duval character from Apocalypse Now ready to wage war on an American city. And there are unbalanced and sick people out there. When the president of the United States declares that his enemy is the American people, the sickness manifests itself, and the violence that is coming and the violence that has already happened,
should cause the deepest of reflection. And for those of you out there say fuck Charlie Kirk and all the sick of fants, what I say to you is Ken Goldsmith is no Ken.
You're the worst of the worst. The people who.
Are cheering for the assassins, for the violence, just as responsible as MAGA for taking your country from you. And what I want you to understand tonight is something that Robert Kennedy said a long time ago. Well, we need in America is not more hate, but we need more love. And let everybody be resolved. And no matter what, we reject the idea that the government has the right to avenge this evil by attacking the American people.
And I'm Steve Schmidt, this is the warning. I invite you to join this community, where I promise to be honest, blunt and direct about what is happening in this country. America is in crisis. Follow and subscribe to this channel and on substack. Thank you,