It is September seventeenth. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning, and I am thrilled today to be joined by Aaron Parness of the Parness perspective. I think that one of the things we can all appreciate in this moment is that as this fascist curtain is descending on America, that correspondingly is the destruction of the media that for fifty years time the American people respected, the American people trusted, and the American media appreciated that when it celebrated itself,
that it delivered the goods. The newsrooms were filled supposedly with people who would not bend, would not bow, would not capitulate. During my career, I've run at the highest levels a couple presidential campaigns. I've been in every newsroom you can think of. I've argued, cajoled, and debated with
every editor at every news organization. The truth of the matter is I had a lot of respect for those people until I didn't, And on any given day it's hard for me to contain my contempt for their cowardice and their capitulance. And I think it's really important to appreciate the exchange yesterday that took place between Donald Trump and Jonathan carl of ABC News when Donald Trump looks at him dead in the eye and he says, well, your network engaged in hate speech against me, and they
paid me tens of millions of dollars. And anybody who thinks that Donald Trump doesn't hold the high ground in that debate, that Donald Trump isn't scoring points in that should pull their head out of their ass. These networks made corrupt bargains with the devil, and the result of it is the American people in a time of crisis, can't tell what's real, can't tell what's not, can't tell what's up, can't tell what's down, can't tell what's left from right and right from left because of the failure
of corporate media. But the First Amendment did not create NBC News Right and NBC News and it's collapse as a vessel of integrity or CBS or ABC does not eradicate the First Amendment. What the First Amendment creates is the ability for people in this country to say what they will, to believe what they want, and for the press to report what's happening. And so one of the people that does that and does it better than anybody else out there. A one man news network who you
can trust, you can believe in, is Aaron Parnis. Is somebody that I watch, that I pay attention to. He is a go to news source and you can trust him. Aaron, welcome, Thanks you for having me. Super excited to be here and listen. I agree with a lot of what you said.
I really think that the news media, the industry as we know it, is really not just dying but really changing. I think that the First Amendment is under attack in ways we've never seen before. And I mean the truth is so important in this day and agent. Right now, I don't know who to trust either in a lot of ways. So it's a very scary time.
There's a lot of stuff to talk about. How do you sort through what's happening in say this is one two three four today?
Yeah, I mean I think so, I mean it's not even one two three four. I end up posting many are from twenty to thirty times a day most days. It really is a lot. I think for me, where I go directly, as I go directly to the primary source. In this day and age, there's so much information out there that when media reports on say something that Donald Trump says, it's often skewed in certain ways, whether it's
the right to the left. I mean, there's so much bias out there, And so I go directly to the source. I go directly to the person who makes the statement, the bill that's introduced, and that's where I go to get all my information to then figure out, Okay, well let's see how we can report this to make sure it's factual, accurate. And and folks know because right now, what I've seen, at least is that the so called mainstream, the Times, the Posts, all these great organizations that people
rely on for many years, well they're scared. They're scared in the reporting right. The way they frame stories isn't fully accurate anymore. Even if the details are there, the framing isn't isn't isn't right. And so I go directly to the source. Every single time.
I'm watching CNN last week and John Berman, the anchor, is on a with a Democratic congressman. And the congressman I don't recall his name, but he was a former prosecutor. He's very measured. Do you know his name?
Dateman from California's forty seventh.
Okay, And I don't think the congressman was necessarily there to talk about the Epstein case. I think he got lassoed and dragged across the street. But what John Berman says, right, it's incredible. He goes, well, there's no reason to be suspicious that that Donald Trump did anything untoured with with Jeffrey Epstein. And you know, if i'm if, I'm if I'm sitting there right and you say, well, there's no reason right to say that Donald Trump has been implicated
criminally in this, right. I mean, that's a true statement, you know, so far as I know. But any reason that he should be suspicious, you know, for example, the birthday card that he denies. Right there there you go. But like when you see something like that, and you you see like the terror in a in a John Berman's eyes going out of his way to try to explicate Donald Donald Trump. Yeah, well, well how do you process that?
It's concerning. So I was an attorney before I even did this work. And as an attorney, whether you're on whether you're on the defense side or the plaintiff's prosecution spense, doesn't really matter. You're always taught never to start at the conclusion and then work your way back. You're taught to start with the evidence and go piece by piece
and work your way to a conclusion. When prosecutors are investigating in crime, they're not supposed to start with a suspect and then try to piece evidence in to make that suspect guilty. It's wherever the evidence leads them. And what the media is doing right now is what they shouldn't be is what lawyers shouldn't do, when what media shouldn't do is they're starting with this theory Donald Trump is not implicated, and they're kind of forcing everything into
that theory. Why because they're scared of what Trump's response is to them. What they should be doing is saying, well, listen, you're right, Donald Trump is not implicated criminally, he never has, but he may never will be. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that he is somewhat connected to Epstein. Right, he has the birthday book letter. Potentially he has his name in the files. Bloomberg's reported that the FBI has been instructed to redact his name from
a number of files. He was at Marra a Lago with Epstein. He himself acknowledges a personal relationship with Epstein. There is smoke, we should be asking questions to see whether that smoke leads to fire. We shouldn't just put out that fire because we may be scared of what the President is going to do.
Now. So that builds to what cash Battel says yesterday, And what cash Battel says yesterday is that there's no evidence whatsoever did Jeffrey Epstein trafficked any of these young girls to other men. And we know that's not true, right.
I mean, for based on what the survivors have said, that's not true. Right. The survivors themselves have said that there is more than just Jeffrey Epstein involved in this, and so we know that not to be true. But I mean, ultimately it's a bit of a confusing situation. And that did Jeffrey Epstein himself traffic women to other high net worth powerful individuals? I don't know, did other
high net worth powerful individuals conceal what Epstein was doing? No, what Epstein was doing worked in this kind of scheme, yes, And so the wording that they're using is so it's so I mean legal ease in a way, like they know what they're they're doing to try to like weasel them their way out of it. That's what Cash Footel is doing.
In my opinion, Why is Cash fatal trying to expocate Jeffrey Epstein from trafficking these girls to other women?
I don't know, I don't know. I mean, truthfully, here's the thing, Like, at this point, Epstein is not on trial, right like, he's not he's he's dead. There's no prejudice in Pash Fatel just coming out and saying the truth here And ultimately that's why I think that the files just need to be released at this point. Let the public decide what Jeffrey Epstein did or didn't do. And if you're worried. And here's the thing, it's actually funny.
One of the biggest worries that the Department of Justice has been saying for a long time for why they haven't released the files is because they say it'll implicate other people who have never been criminally charged. But now Cash Battella is saying that there aren't other people, and so that undercuts their original argument of why they weren't
releasing the files in the first place. So I did there are other people that could potentially be criminally charged because there's some type of connection and therefore we shouldn't release the files so that we can continue investigating them and potentially prosecute them. Or there aren't these other people and therefore they're not releasing the files because they just don't want egg on their face. In terms of Trump being in them, I don't know.
How do you process that contradiction as you're as you're doing that, how do you how do you hear it? Right? So, as as you're going along in your in your day, you're an attorney, you're a journalist, you're you're you're posting twenty times a day, does that immediately send a flare up for you that that is a that's just a major contradiction. Is that just par for the course? Does
that register to you? Is just well, that's one of the you know, one hundred different contradictions that have happened today because you know they lie all the time. How does that How does that trigger for you? Yeah?
I mean I think it's more the latter than is the former. But I will say with one caveat in this, in the Epsteine situation, I have spoken to so many of the victims several of the victims already. I've interviewed many of them, and every time I speak to them, their stories line up. I mean, these are these are They're not making this up. And it's not one story that's different from another. Every single story is almost the same.
It's the same pattern of behavior, and it's the same kind of influence and control of wealthy and powerful people connected to Epstein. And so this kind of lie from the administration is very different from their other lies because there is this nefarious aspect of it that they're trying to conceal or at least push down the stories of these survivors. And these survivors deserve to know the truth.
They deserve to know everything that happened regarding Epstein, Maxwell and anyone else connected to them, and it really seems like this administration doesn't want that ever to happen.
There was a Air Force test pilot named John Boyd, and amongst the things that John Boyd did in his careers, he was assigned after the Korean War to assess air combat decision making because casualties were deemed high, to see if there was a decision making matrix that could be applied to make the American pilots faster. And what John Boyd came up with is something called the DA loop
and stands for observe, orient decide Act. You think about it as a circle and the notion is and this has expanded to business schools and really the DA loop can apply to any competitive situation. And there is no exceptions to the oodle loop. You have the fastest oodle loop, you win, right, you can you can get through something where you observe, orient to it, decide what it is in an act. And it's something I've talked a lot about over my political career and campaigns. We want to
have a fast oodle loop. And I view you as someone who is a very fast oodle loop in terms of your journalism, being able to look at something, orient to it, decide what it is, and act. And so I want to I want to talk about this last week in the in the United in the United States, and one of the things is that I try to
put things into a historical perspective. And you don't ever want to loosely say that you know with a superlative that this moment is the worst right, or it is the greatest crisis, or the most dangerous rhetoric like right now today because because it's usually not, today's an important day in the history of this country. September seventeenth, it's one of the bloodiest days in American history. Today is
the Battle of Antietam anniversary. For those who are Civil War fetishists and would like to see a second American Civil War, look at some of the pictures from the battlefield of Antietam. But what happened in America in this in this last week. And I don't mean about the assassination, I mean in the reaction to the assassination by the leaders of the of the American government. What did you say?
Yeah? And I've actually told this to a lot of people. I really felt as though this past week is and has been a real turning point in the past decade of politics of just American society in ways that we've never seen before. I don't think it was ever this bad when Trump was almost assassinated last year. That wasn't that didn't feel like what this past week really felt like. And to me, it all boils down to a root cause that's been evident in our politics for a very
long time. It's the political politicization of non political tragedies. And I say non political, not in the sense that Kirk wasn't political. He was political, and the shooting likely had something to do with politics. But a non political tragedy is gun violence. A non political tragedy is an aircraft crash, terrorists, terrorism attack, things like that, where in this day and age, we immediately weaponize and it's not just on the right. Both parties do this, immediately weaponize
non political events and try to politicize them. Right when a plane crashes in Washington, d C. The first thing the right did was blame DEI. When Charlie Kirk is shot, before we even knew what the motive was, whether it was a political attack or not, the right was saying that it was the left fault. The left was saying that it was a far right guy immediately, and that is a problem because we don't know right and we still, I mean truthfully, to this day, we still don't know
why Charlie Kirk was shot, the motive behind it. The evidence that was released from the Utah County Attorney's Office yesterday really didn't give us a ton more that we hadn't already known. And so we got into a point in American society, where I think that the politicization of these tragedies has become so bad that I don't know how we recover from it. And I in this past week, really it was really different in a lot of ways and ways that I've never felt before.
I have a very specific reaction to this, and I think one of the things that I've tried to say is that no man, no woman can be held responsible after their existence ends for how living people react to their death. And so for me, you know, Charlie Kirk in his thirty one years is one of the great tragedies of this is that when you get a little older and you have perspective, I think from midlife looking back, you know, thirty one years of age, Charlie Kirk had a lot of road in front of him to come
to different perspectives in life. And from my perspective, maybe he would have grown up from some of the things he did, he believed and he said. But whatever my thought about that, it is all etched in granite now and there is no next day for Charlie Kirk. And that's a terrible tragedy and one that I lament. There
is the act of violence. I was on a podcast and a friend emailed the clip, and I thought when I was opening it that I was going to see him say something offensive, uh not be murdered, And I deplore that and have with every fiber of my being. But in the response in the aftermath, what I saw was the attempt by MAGA to turn Charlie Kirk into
horse Vessel, the first martyr of the cause. I saw highly choreographed videography and photography of an open casket and fundraising pitches, which I think is sick, but that's my opinion. But what I also saw was and I don't think this has ever happened in the United States, and I want you to level set this for me from a
journalism perspective. If I understood the government position, it was that if you don't love Trump enough, if you dissent, then you're a co conspirator in the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the government's coming after you with everything that it has. Vice President said that Stephen Miller said that in one of Donald Trump's closest confidants, Laura Lumer, called for mass murder, mass executions for those who de sent against Donald Trump.
Is there any exaggeration in my assessment of that, in your in your view of how of how I orient towards that, because that's what I heard.
Yeah, I mean that's what I That's what I heard too. Truth be told. But what I I will say, with the one caveat, I do think there's some exaggeration because I think that what Trump and co. Are doing in the aftermath of Kirk shooting is they have to do this publicly for their base, to consolidate MAGA, to consolidate Republicans around one kind of idea. They have to go out and say this was the left. They have to go out and say.
Let me, let me chat, let me chat, let me challenge because I think you're doing political analysis now. I mean, they don't have to do anything, sure, right, they could have de escalated the situation. I mean, the greatest political speech extemporaneously in American history was delivered by Robert Kennedy, and it came in Indianapolis after the assassination of Martin Luther King. You said to give a political speech all black crowd, delivered from the back of a pickup truck.
Told the crowd that Martin Luther King had been murdered and talked about we need more love in America, talked about one of the things, talked about his brother's assassination, said, a white man killed my brother. So I so the political motive of it. But they don't have to do that. But they are doing it.
They are doing it, and they're doing it because that's all they know. In a way, they're doing it to consolidate this movement behind them. I mean, I will say it's interesting that they they're doing it. And then at the same time, the Deputy Attorney General Blanche he can't name which left leading organizations are actually going after. Right, if they were ready to go after all these organizations and these left leading personalities, presumably they would have at
least one name. Donald Trump was asked about even Antifa, whether or not he'd labeled them a domestic terrorist organization, and he kind of punted on the issue and said, I kind of want to, but I don't know. It wasn't it's your answer. And it really seems like a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of action, which is me kind of emblematic of what the Trump presidency is. Over the past nine months, he has actually hasn't done a ton as president. He hasn't been able to outside
of his executive orders, which are not law. Right, he can sign as many executive orders as he wants, but they're not law. He's passed one piece of real legislation, and the bypart is not The bypart is in the budget bill earlier this year, the big beautiful bill.
That's it.
Outside of that, he hasn't done a ton. It's a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of action. And I see the same thing happening here, honestly.
So I think that this is a really fair point. But I'll be honest, it scares the shit out of me. And here's why. Right, if we were on the edge of a lake and there was thin ice on that lake in the winter, I would not step out on the ice anywhere on the lake. Right. What you're saying is and no disrespect on you're like, there is thin ice on the lake, right, But you can walk out on the lake here, right. The thing ice is out
there somewhere, right. And is the question of he means it or he doesn't mean it, And he's saying it because he's producing a television show. But for me, you just raise something that I think is the greatest journalism failure of the last ten years. Do you do you think this is a fair statement what I'm about to say. There's not a single interview that I'm aware of that would close the gap between what we're talking about here,
right between what he says and his intentions. There's not a single interview that anyone has done in ten years time that probes Donald Trump at a deep philosophical level. Agree, not one, not one right, not one that would say, well, but if you if you could hang one of your political opponents, would you would you like to r Do
you believe in that? And this is important in this country because you know, when George Washington rode into New York City at the end of the American Revolution, one of his first stops was out the loyalist presses who defamed him constantly and his wife, which pissed him off. And you know what he did. He posted guards outside the presses so the patriots wouldn't burn them down, because he understood the importance of the free media to a free society. Yeah, it is appalling. I'm with you, do
you think just looking ahead? And I know we got to wrap it up here in the next couple of minutes. What's going to happen at this memorial service? What are you picking up from MAGA, What is the plan for this, and what is the message that you anticipate that the country will hear, because it's it's not going to be a unifying one.
Do they have it's this weekend, right.
It's the twentieth.
Yeah, it's not going to be a unifying one. Actually, in a lot of ways, I think that any action from this administration or anything like they're they're waiting until after the memorial to do anything, kind of like you know how they mourn political leaders in other countries. They wait for this big state funeral and then they go after whatever they have their response afterwards, And I feel like that's what's happening here. I'm actually worried about the
rhetoric that's going to come from this funeral. I think truth be told. I don't think any media company should be covering the funeral because I don't think that they didn't cover the funeral of like other leaders who passed away. Whether I don't remember the coverage about Melissa Portman's funeral, but I can tell you it was nothing close to this.
Not only are they gonna, well, I was gonna. I mean we have an NFL Sunday, I guess the twenty. I mean, they'll cover it like it's a presidential funeral. Do you think do you think that maga. Do you think that maga white House officials or threatening networks or have any information that you best cover this or there'll be consequences.
I don't think explicitly, but I think him suing The New York Times this week is in a very implicit threat to any major major media organization. His lawsuits are the threats. I think that if none of them cover it, I think, though, I think they'll get a truth social posts and potentially a lawsuit for sure.
Why aren't you afraid?
I am afraid. Of course I'm afraid. I'd be lying to you effects that I wasn't afraid. But to me, the truth and fighting for the truth is more important than one fear. And so it's just and I know that with all the hate and vitriol and silencing coming from the White House on the other side right now, there's a whole host of folks opposite to the White House who are ready to fight back if they try to make an example out of me or any of us.
What are you afraid they would do? Do you?
I think for me, my biggest fear, honestly from as a lawyers is a lawsuit. I mean you can bankrupt someone immediately by suing, so that that's a big fear. I mean I've gotten threats to my home and in my mailbox and in my dms. Most are not actionable, but obviously there's a fear that, like you're walking down the street and it's like you could be next in a way, right, like someone could come and just beat you up. I'm not saying someone's going to drive down
the street and try to shoot you. That not necessarily fearful of that. It's more of like you don't know, It's more fear of the unknow of like what could happen out there, because no one thought that Charlie Kirk would ever be assassinated, Like no one could have imagined that to have happened, and so there's so much unknown of what could happen, and that rate there is scary.
You're brave guy, keep up the good keep up the good work, and uh if for everybody out on with us today. I really encourage you to subscribe to Aaron. It is a great, great, great platform to get a handle on what's happening factually with no BS, no spend, no side integrity matters a great deal when it's being lit up everywhere into flames, and so Aaron Partner, it's a real pleasure to have you with us today.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hope to be back soon.
Continue these absolutely take care, Aaron Partner said, everybody, 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.