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How We Can Rebuild Our Democracy | The American Crisis Speech
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Apr 18, 2025
Last week, I was honored to be a part of "The American Crisis: Building an Opposition in Oklahoma" event alongside Beto O'Rourke. I spoke to the crowd about the current state of American politics and focused on what we all can do to fight back and challenge this Trump administration. Subscribe for more and follow me here: Substack: https://steveschmidt.substack.com/subscribe Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thewarningses.bsky.social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SteveSchmidtSES/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thewarningses Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewarningses/ X: https://x.com/SteveSchmidtSES
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So I want to introduce first, Steve Schmidt
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Steve is a counselor for world leaders, CEOs, and political movements. Steve has for more than two decades played an influential role in American politics
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He's helped navigate some of the most high-state corporate, athletic, political crises, and
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business strategy challenges of our times. He's the founder of The Warning, a digital media company that comprises a daily newsletter on Substack, a podcast, and video ysis on his YouTube channel
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Yay! I think we're live streaming. No, we're not live streaming. That's good
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There reaches more than 10 million people a month. Through The Warning, he helps his audience to understand the gathering dangers bearing down on the United States and its people
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It speaks truth to power, practices straight talk, and explains what's happening in our turbulent era
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It stands up to powerful bullies, angry mobs, and the corruption that led to the rise of American extremism
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and the Trump era without fear or favor. It mixes history with our present circumstances and offers a guide toward what will happen next and beyond
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Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Schmidt. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be with you. Let's do something together to start this evening of defiance and opposition by joining in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States
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We usually rush through these words. Let's not do that tonight. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands
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one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We are here because we share something in common
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What we share is something that I imagine many of us have experienced in these last few weeks
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A moist eye problem. A rapid heart-beating problem
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A deep pain and sadness about the vandalisms being done
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About the desecrations that are occurring. And there are many people tonight all over the country who are worried, who are frightened, who are scared
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And Beto and I are just two ordinary guys. We came here to tell you something
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Do not be afraid. You are an American. You are Americans. And you are a free people. And there will be no king in America
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Providence has his reasons why this contestation should come now on the eve of the 250th anniversary
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of the independence of the United States cannot be enacted. We must recommit ourselves to the cause of our independence, to the idea of liberty grounded in human dignity
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We are an exceptional nation not because of the minerals in our ground
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We are a rich nation not because of our oil and our hedge funds and our Bitcoin and our billionaires
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We are rich and powerful because of the incandescence of the American idea and the ideal
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deal. The most important words ever put down in the history of mankind by the mind of man
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on paper is the notion that all men and all women are created equal, endowed by a creator
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with inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
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Donald Trump and his administration with their arrogance, their entitlements, their viciousness
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and their extremism, have embraced the philosophy of taking. We have government officials screaming at us through our TV screens
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We have government spokespeople lying to the American people. We have a president who evaporated $10 trillion of wealth
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manipulated the markets and made his cronies rich beyond measure this week
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while he crushed the retirement savings of the ordinary American while he crushed the dreams of the small business person I have a message for him
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Anytime the fascists gather in an attack as an aggressor, they have a first mover advantage
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because we are not aggressive people here gathered tonight. We are free people who want to take our kids to swimming lessons and to baseball games
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And we don't want to be in a civil war, but a civil war has been declared on us
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not by half the country, but by a couple hundred people who have gained power in Washington
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Now, there's a conventional wisdom, and it says that Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana
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and all these states, well, next election, and the one after that, and the next 50 after
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that, they're all decided. Oklahoma is an American state filled with Americans in the United States of America
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And the idea that you're fated to live with your awful representatives like Senator Mark
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Wayne Mullen is up for re-elections is not that. It is your job to leave here tonight and to gather people together
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Each one of you gets five more. Each of those five gets five more
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There are no safe seats for anybody in this next American election
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because what the politicians in Washington are going to see is a revolt by the American people
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against their officious high-handed arrogance and power. And they will be defeated
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We stand on sacred ground here tonight. We stand at a place that is no different than in Auschwitz
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We stand on a site of atrocity, a site of evil. And that evil is real and it's enduring
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Did you know that the killing at Auschwitz was delayed? Got off to a late start because the SS couldn't get the building permit
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Couldn't pass the fire code for the prisoners' barracks. So SS said we need to build a prison in Poland for 100,000 people here in the middle of the woods
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German bureaucrat looked at the plans and said you have no wastewater plan
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Where's the wastewater going? SF said, dump it in the river. German bureaucrat said nine
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Five million Germans downstream. SF came back a second time. Nine. Third time
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approved. I was at Auschwitz with the man who took Elon Musk around
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Elon Musk is a Nazi, ladies and gentlemen. You know how I know that
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The Hitler salute, the national media told me I didn't see. The man who took Elon Musk around Auschwitz
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took me around Auschwitz, and he pulls out the permit and he says, did you see those buildings
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You know what those are? Suits treatment plant. He says they built them to last
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Because they stand today in Auschwitz. And that camp opened with a stamp from a water bureaucrat
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So when we think about bureaucracy and Doge and all of these people, understand this
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that the man who interrogated Adolf Eichmann for 275 hours, an Israeli police captain who was a German Jew
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was asked 20 years after the event if he had any takeaways from the experience
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And he said, yes, I do. I walked away from the experience with a faith in democracy
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because there are Adolf Eichmann's all around us. They are latent and harmless in a democracy, but they turn deadly in an instant in a dictatorship
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In an instant. And this is an administration filled with little Eichmanns, have no doubt about that
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Have no doubt about it. These people are dangerous. The crisis is real
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They are domestic enemies with their hands on the throat of our liberty
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I want to share two quick stories and we'll get ready for Beto and we'll get into the questions
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As we stand here I want to talk about two great Americans the greatest leader of black Americans and Americans in the 19th century Frederick Douglass I want to talk about Martin Luther King What happened here is within still remarkably this lifespan of living human beings
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There are two survivors who endured, of 108 and 109 years old
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And when they are gone, my white friends, we have as much moral obligation to bear witness
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to what happened here as there is an obligation to bear witness to what happened in Europe
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and Germany. The erasure of our history, the erasure of Medgar Evers' grave from the Pentagon website
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we will not stand for it. You will not erase our stories. And so Beto and I were
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on the phone the other day with a friend of ours, Bishop William Barber, a great
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American patriot and a true moral voice in America. And he told us a story that
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It left me breathless. I'm going to do my best to share it
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Frederick Douglass was a devout man. And the abolition movement had a terrible setback in the year of 1857 with the Dred Scott decision
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And Frederick Douglass fell into a deep depression. and when we're low
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and we're down how many of you went to the protest on Saturday? Were you out there
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Did that lift you up? Did that lift you up knowing you're not alone
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So Frederick Douglass had doubt and Martin Luther King had doubt and Winston Churchill
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had doubt and Franklin Roosevelt had doubt, George Washington had doubt had doubt
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at the edge of the abyss. So Harriet Tubman sees her friend
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and she says, Frederick is God. Dead. And Frederick Douglass realizes instantly
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that he has been guilty of idolatry. He has put his faith in the Supreme Court
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He put his faith in men and he recognizes that he has to speak right away
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But of course, there's no sub-stack in Twitter, so he has to prepare his remarks
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And he decries this evil decision in the first half of the speech
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But in the second half, he raises the prospect that we have to grapple with tonight about the meaning of Trump, about the meaning of Dred Scott
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What if, Frederick Douglass wondered, if this decision of evil was a necessitous link in unforeseen events not yet occurred that would topple the whole rotten evil enterprise
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And it was toppled within eight years' time. Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, in a clear reading of the speech, watching
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it, no person could deny that Martin Luther King understood that his death was at hand
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that speech has three parts to it. And that speech, as a matter of architecture
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is the story of America. And Martin Luther King starts out and says
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if God came and said, Martin, I'll take you anywhere. You ought to go at all time in history
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And Martin Luther King said, I would want to go see God's people delivered from Pharaoh
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But I keep on moving. He said he wanted to go to see
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Plato and Aristotle and Greece and move on to Rome and then on to Philadelphia
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But Martin Luther King said there is no other time that he would rather be
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No other place that he'd rather be them right now in that place, in that moment, because if he had stayed in those other places
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he wouldn't have been in Selma. He wouldn't have been in Montgomery
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And he wouldn't have been in Memphis with the sanitation workers that night
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And then Martin Luther King was 39 years old. He's a young man, from my perspective of 54
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You'll think about Martin Luther King as a 39 year old man
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Martin Luther King was 39 years old when he was struck down. He didn't make it to 40
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And he said longevity has a purpose. He was a man. He wanted to grow old
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Watch his kids grow up. But he said declaratively, but none of that matters now
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None of that matters. Because I have been to the mountaintop Now like all prophets he left a peace out
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Left a mystery. He did not leave us a date of arrival on the mountaintop
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He gave us a task to complete, a moral obligation to fulfill, a burden to finish
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And that burden that Martin Luther King, an American prophet, lays out is a continuity of vision that John Winthrop first has
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And this is why we're here tonight. To build again the city upon a hill
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a city of justice, and a land of opportunity and prosperity, where each person is treated with dignity and respect
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and seen as a distinct, divine human being made in the image of God
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Democracy keeps us safe because it keeps the jackboot off our throat, and we will not submit to the jackboot coming down on ours or our children's. Never
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Thomas Paine, in the year that we became the country, castigated a merchant who had a meeting
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like this rose with his daughter holding her hand and he said I do not want this revolution
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I do not want this trouble. I have a daughter. And Thomas Paine looked at that man with contempt
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and he said you're an ungenerous parent because if there must be trouble
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let it be on our time, not our children's. And that is why we are here tonight
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My friends, I want you to know something. The outcome of this fight is not in doubt
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I'll say this again, the outcome of this fight has never been in doubt
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What is in doubt is the price of the catastrophe that has come to America
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and it will be terrible and there will be hard days and there will be suffering
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and there will be death and this chapter will be written about
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and it will be studied how it happened, why it happened but what will be remembered
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is that a generation of Americans from all 50 states in a season of corruption
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took their country back. And we will. On the 50th anniversary of the independence of the United States
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there were two men, both founders, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, close friends and became bitter rivals
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And then the country was shocked, the remaining shocked 200 years later that these two founding fathers died reconciled as friends within hours of one another on July 4th, 2026
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It was not a mere coincidence. I don't believe that then. And I don't believe that it's a coincidence that we will fight for our country in the year 2026
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And by the time we get to July 4th, 2026, it will be clear that a great tsunami is building that will sweep away this corruption and begin to end this rancid MAGA era
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Thank you very much. Don't give up the fight. Stay engaged. Do not get down
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We will win. You are Americans. You are a courageous people. Be not afraid
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Thank you
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