Good afternoon, everybody. Steve Schmidt here with the warning and I'm thrilled today to be joined by my friend George Conway, candidate for Congress twelfth District of New York.
George, welcome, Thank you for having me, Steve.
As we come to the end of January, I want to I want to tell you what I would say if I was heading over to negotiate with the White House the Democratic position. I would walk in the room wherever they do the meeting over at the over in the Roosevelt Room, and I would say, uh, uh, well, fellas, Susie,
you don't you don't have the fucking votes. You don't have the votes, right, I got you by the balls here right, and Susie you two and uh and and what I and what I would say is well, we will shut down the government for two hundred and ninety five days and will ask the American people to stand with us. It will ask the American people for power to end this. But we will not permit these massed agents. We will not permit the blatant violations of the Fourth Amendment.
These people will be leashed and the American people's abuse will cease, and we will not yield on this point. You don't have the votes, we control the money. And that is the Democratic position now, Chuck Schumer and Hakim Jeffers right or in this position right now, And they have been equivocal, to say the least about what it is that they're prepared to do with saying, well, affordability is the issue, and no doubt everybody in America knows
two things. Everything's more expensive and Trump is responsible. So the Democrats don't really have to talk much about something that people already blamed Trump for and don't particularly think they have any credibility on. What they could reestablish their credibility on is drawing a red line, holding that line and insisting that they will, in front of the American people, use every bit of their capital to protect American citizens from abuses by as by a mass gestopa. One do
you think they will assert leverage? Two do you think that they understand where the basic Democratic party is and how imperiled their leadership will be if they do not hold that line? And three talk about talk about the implications right of yielding yet again, because now there is no other place to interrupt Trump's power until November of twenty twenty six through congressional elections that hopefully you come to power with in the next Congress as a member.
Look, I think it's absolutely imperative that nobody vote to fund ICE anymore because it is basically an organization of brown shirts. It's the essay revisited and after the murder of Renee Good, I think it would be just absolutely immoral to vote for funding ICE period, full stop. And you know, I hope that people on the Democratic Party. I think many people in Democratic Party are already there, many elected officials are already there. I think that's where
the American people are landing. And I don't And even if it's even if there's some political risks of a position, I don't know how. It's just it's just a moral obligation to say no. And and so I absolutely agree with you that that this the line has to be drawn here, and it has to be drawn now.
I can. I can go back to comments I've made over the last twelve years talking about militarized cops against it. I've written about the local cop who's dressed like a sealed Team six member in small town America. Not in the last year, but five six years ago. All of the sales of surplus military equipment to small town police departments has always always been a disaster. And I've thought about Homeland Security from the very beginning as a as a bad thing. And so I I think that ICE
must be abolished. Now what that what that means is do we need immigration enforcement? Of course we do. Never whatever it's going to be called, though, we're going to have an agency that's not called the US Border Patrol, it's going to be gone. Everybody can go visit Bavino's long ss code in the Holocaust Museum or the Tolerance Museum. That's where you go see a Border Patrol uniform. It will never be worn again. The agency won't exist. It won't exist because of Tom Homan and and Greg Bavino
and and all of the thugs. There'll be a new name and a new uniform, and new ethics and and new standards and and all of these things. But you know, one of the one of the foremost disasters of the Bush presidency was the creation of the Homeland Security Department. And in the Homeland Security Department is the monster created by John McCain. I read a criticism of McCain and you know, it's spot on, which is he wasn't a person that ever really cared about second or third order
consequences of of things that he supported. And and I don't mean that in a in a disrespectful way, but in a but in a precise way. And the Homeland Security Agency has become a threat to the liberty of Americans. It's the foremost bureaucratic monstrosity that's ever been created in
the history of the of the country. And so so, starting with the Coastguard goes back to the Defense Department, the Secret Service, goes back to the Treasury Department, that maybe we have a airport security agency that that all of this consolid day of power, uh in something called Helmeland security, it needs to be busted up and it and in busting up that concentration of power, uh then is to me a gateway to busting up other concentrations
of power. And so how do you think about that, George is you know, I I was a you know, during my Republican years, I was a moderate Republican. I was a fifty yard line guide. Culturally, I'm a I'm a New Jersey. I'm a New Jersey moderate, right, A Christy Whitman, Republican. I am a I'm a capitalist. I uh, I'm not. I'm not inclined on the natural to load up business with regulations. I think regulations imposed costs on consumers.
But when you when you look at big ad, big banks, big tech, how, how does a how does a per who came from a intellectually serious conservative position on things think about busting up power right to to unshackle Americans, ordinary Americans from that from the threats they're facing, because I think they're all linked together.
How I totally and I said, I think it actually it's a strand of conservatism to decentralized power. I mean, one of the reasons why you know, we have talked so much about small government in the eighties and nineties, right way back in the a galaxy far away unit in a long time, long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, is because of the fear that if you agglomerated too much power in various arms of the government, some bad person could take it over and
do bad things to everyone. Here we fucking are yep. And in terms of the private market, you know, my inclination is like yours that generally I don't think that government managing markets or controlling markets, for example, setting prices gets you very far. At the same time, I believe in the central values of for example, the antitrust laws
to promote competition so that we don't have monopolies. And I think now, you know, we have to rethink some of that nineteenth century wisdom that was codified in the Sherman and Clayton as to apply it to The most stunning example to me now is the is the growth of media conglomerates that basically are becoming tools of the state because of the fear that they have. You know, they have so much invested in not making the powerful state happy that they you know, conform their editorial policies,
and they can't. They become propagandists for the government, for a corrupt government ce G CBS. So I absolutely think that, you know, that's something that's something that we have to rethink, and I think there has to be it's part going to be part of kind of a reconstruction that has to occur after we you know, if, if, if, and when we get rid of Trump. You know that we were going to talk about things like I mentioned before
about the justice department. But we also have to talk about, you know, the structure of the media, you know, and and and and various departments of the government, like you mentioned, Homeland Security has been a disaster from the get go, and it was ripe for this kind of abuse that we're seeing today. So yeah, no, we have to we have to take long standing justice and apply them in different ways that we haven't thought about before, because we are in a different century, and we are not. This
isn't nineteen eighty when I became a Republican. It's twenty.
Yeah, a long time ago in nineteen eighty.
A lot different to me now than it did then. And I think one of the problems is a lot of people of various political persuasions basically think their minds were set in stone about what's right and what's wrong ideologically based upon conditions that no longer exist.
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