Defiance is the cure

PLUS: Join me and the Save America Movement crew -- Congressman Denver Riggleman and Ken Harbaugh -- live from Copenhagen TODAY at 1 pm ET

I want The Warning community to know that I read your comments, and I think deeply about some of them.

Here is one of them:

Honestly Steve, while your words do get me riled up, they offer no solution other than “American’s must do something”. You are an insider - what must/can we do? Call and email our weak Democrat leaders to please do more? Find out a day late about the next loosely organized “march” by this or that group that is as badly organized as the Democratic party? As Michelle Obama said “Do Something!” Its exhilarating to hear your and her words, but a big let down when I slump back into my chair and feel demoralized by the fact that there seems to be so little that we can actually do.

I guess I’ll wait to vote in November. Then we can get angry anew when Trump and the GOP declare martial law because someone threw a sandwich at an ICE agent, or declares the election as invalid if it does occur, or watch as their FBI simply grab all the ballots so that the “Justice” department can give us the “official” count.

When I read that comment I hear despair and hopelessness.

I get it.

I understand the feeling of loss and pain as we watch our country spiral into chaos.

It is sickening, utterly enraging and even physically painful. The sense of loss can feel unbearable, but the pain must be confronted and met head on.

Defiance is the cure.

We must not submit to despair or fear.

DO NOT BE AFRAID.

I want to be very precise and intentional about the words that I use in the next couple of sentences.

Donald Trump is evil.

MAGA is a vessel of evil.

Donald Trump is surrounded by evil.

Evil is real. What is happening to America and our fellow Americans is a sin beyond measure that desecrates the sacrifice, valor, courage and love that made the United States the most exceptional nation in world history.

The foundations of our civilization are being ravaged by a new version of fascism that is as deadly, dangerous and immoral as its predecessor.

Six years ago this week was the 75th liberation of Auschwitz. The occasion was marked by the presence of 200 survivors mostly in their 90s.

Jonathan Freedland, writing for The Guardian, opened his story about the commemoration with these words:

Humanity will soon be without first-hand witnesses of the depths to which it can sink. Survivors at the memorial knew that.

Freedland continued:

They came to bear witness one last time. Exactly 75 years after the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, those who had seen humanity’s descent into hell returned to speak of it while they still could – and with a new, double urgency. They testified like people running out of time, aware that their own mortality is pressing in on them – and alarmed that the world needs to hear their message now more than ever.

The ceremony was filled with dignitaries, but they did not speak that day.

Present were the crowned and uncrowned heads of Europe, kings and princes, presidents and prime ministers. And yet in this ceremony the dignitaries stayed seated, compelled to listen rather than to speak, as the floor was handed to men and women in their 90s, who spoke in the manner of people handing a scribbled note through the window of a departing train – with an urgency that bordered on desperation.

Batsheva Dagan, age 95, asked an angry question:

Where was everybody? Where was the world, who could see everything and yet did nothing to save all those thousands?

I urge you to linger on these next few paragraphs from Freedland:

But it was Marian Turski, 93, who spoke for so many of his fellow survivors when he issued what amounted to a final warning to a human race that will soon lack first-hand testimony of the depths to which humankind can sink.

He explained that “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky” but was the destination reached after a thousand smaller steps, each one stripping a single minority of its dignity and humanity.

After the Shoah, Turski said,

“The 11th commandment is: thou shalt not be indifferent.”

Turski added:

“Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against… Democracy hinges on the rights of minorities being protected.”

So what can you do?

The first thing is simple.

Open your eyes and trust them. Close your ears to the lies and find the truth.

Here is a truth.

This is a quote from Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf:

He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard; but, after all, that’s how it is.

This is one from Stephen Miller, who said this to Jake Tapper on CNN on January 5, 2026:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.

They are the same.

This is a map of the American concentration camps being built, shared by Jenn Budd:

Understand that what Franklin Roosevelt said in his acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic Party convention to a cohort of Americans remembered as “the greatest generation” applies to us too:

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

More than anything else, the test at hand for the American people is a moral one.

The issues at hand are about right and wrong, not left and right.

The battle between the light and the darkness is eternal, and there are no permanent victories. The battle is ceaseless. Even in the brightest light of long peaceful seasons of progress and justice the darkness is always bearing down and moving forward even though it is rarely seen before it arrives in full.

After a long languid season of progress and peace the ground has quaked, and the furies have woken.

Too many have forgotten the war before the world was saved by America. They cannot remember what has faded to mist — or never knew about in the first place.

Let us be honest. Trump has thrown the whole world out of balance. He has disrupted the peace of the world, while demanding that he receive peace prizes at the point of a gun.

The lines between decency and indecency have become blurred in America. We have lost sight of the difference between toughness and cruelty, between patriotism and jingoism, even between sanity and insanity.

We have lost sight of ourselves, and because we are a government of the people, by the people, for the people we have lost connection to the purpose of our nation.

Many of you ask, “What can I do?”

The answer is simple.

You must act.

Some will say, “What can one person do? I am not rich or famous, and I don’t have many followers.”

My response is, “You can change the world.”

Some will say, “But how?”

Here is where I fear I may frustrate you because I won’t answer the question directly. The fact is that ordinary people have done extraordinary things in America.

I prefer to answer the question within a framework around how to think about this vile era and this specific moment of danger.

I hope to fortify you with the resolve to properly face danger, and choose defiance with a reminder about some things we don’t talk about much anymore.

Words like love, honor, commitment, duty and obligation.

President John Adams put it this way in a letter to Abigail Adams in 1777:

Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

First, it goes without saying that these are dark, unnecessary and depressing days. But, these are not hopeless days — far from it.

I wish the storm had not come, but I would rather face it now than see a different Trump rise in this country at a later time.

Thomas Paine felt the same way:

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.

Let us put this insanity down, and make sure that it does not rise again in this country for several lifetimes.

Let us leave a record of warnings steeped in humility behind for our descendants that answers a question finally, and for all time.

There has long been a question that has hung in the American air about what happened in Europe in the 1930s: could it happen here?

Forevermore, the answer in America will be more than yes.

It will be “it happened,” and it will stand as a mark of shame in this country as indelibly as our most grievous sins.

Let us pray for the wisdom to face down what must be confronted, and the grace of restraint when it is defeated — which it will be.

I am grateful as an American to be able to take an American stand in a consequential hour.

I know with my full heart and soul that my purpose in life is to oppose this evil, and I will until the end.

When this MAGA madness ends in catastrophe, and Trump’s extremist cause is stamped out, when it is harder to find an American who admits to voting for Trump than finding gold in your front yard, when his henchmen are disgraced, his courtiers reviled, the giant technology syndicates broken up, democracy fortified and America renewed, the cause of opposition to this wretchedness will be held by the American people in the same esteem that every other movement has been that raised up liberty to crush tyranny in America.

There is a tyranny rising in America, a new serfdom, a callous and sinister techno fascism that is inhumane, cruel and threatening.

It is at once overbearing, officious, controlling and suffocating. The world’s richest men elected to do nothing, and convinced that their wealth is genius and their genius is the foundation of a new master race, have decided that America is theirs, and we are to be their serfs.

The moral high ground is an essential element in war and in politics, and MAGA will never, ever hold the high ground.

We The People do.

Among the greatest Americans in our long history was the man John McCain revered above all others: Admiral James Stockdale.

I want you to think about suffering for a moment.

Here is how the US Naval Academy introduced Stockdale when publishing a lecture he delivered on stoicism to an audience of United States Marine Corps officers:

Vice Admiral Stockdale served on active duty in the regular Navy for 37 years, most of those years as a fighter pilot aboard aircraft carriers. Shot down on his third combat tour over North Vietnam, he was the senior naval prisoner of war in Hanoi for seven and a half years, tortured 15 times, in solitary confinement for over four years, in leg irons for two.

When physical disability from combat wounds brought about Stockdale’s military retirement, he had the distinction of being the only three-star officer in the history of the U.S. Navy to wear both aviator wings and the Medal of Honor.

Included in his 26 other combat decorations are two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Distinguished Service Medals, four Silver Star medals, and two Purple Hearts.

As a civilian, Stockdale is a college president (The Citadel), a college teacher (a lecturer in the philosophy department of Stanford University), and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford for 15 years.

His writings all converge on the central theme of “how man can rise in dignity to prevail in the face of adversity.

Admiral James Stockdale would be tortured relentlessly, but he could not be broken.

When the North Vietnamese were going to film him in a propaganda parade, he used a contraband razor to slice his scalp open. When they cleaned him up and put a hat on his head, he used a wood stool to bash his head and face.

He broke his face and disfigured himself so that he could not be used to disgrace his country, the US Navy, and himself. When he slit his wrists, he broke the will of the North Vietnamese to keep torturing him and his fellow prisoners.

After he slit his wrists, the torture and mistreatment abated.

Stockdale wasn’t just a heroic individual, he was a heroic leader who forged cohesion, unity, trust, and courage from men in the most vulnerable and hopeless circumstances.

He set standards of conduct and enforced them by modeling the conduct. He understood the risk of moral injury and shame for Americans who inevitably broke during torture.

His orders were to resist for as long as humanely possible. He developed an acronym — BACK US — to guide the expectations of behavior that was tapped through the concrete walls as the American prisoners of war communicated in secret from their solitary confinement.

Stockdale understood the necessity of the American prisoners maintaining their dignity and honor as fundamental to their survival.

After the war he recounted his initial experiences upon being captured. His leg was broken, and he was severely injured.

His captors told him that the war was over, and that he had to think about himself first in order to survive. When the war ended Stockdale recounted his thinking in the moment:

From this eight-year experience, I distilled one all-purpose idea . . . It is a simple idea, an idea as old as the scriptures, an idea that is the epitome of high-mindedness, and idea that naturally and spontaneously comes to men under pressure . . . This idea is you are your brother’s keeper . . . That’s the flip side of “What’s in it for me?”

James Stockdale also said this:

I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.

This is the foundation of the “Stockdale Paradox,” which asserts:

You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. AND at the same time…You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

The Warning commentaries are built on this duality.

I am certain that terrible events lie ahead, and that an extremist movement that calls itself MAGA has done — and will continue to do — great damage to the country.

I believe the corporate media as an institution is as unfathomably corrupt as our political establishment and many corporations, where self-interest has eradicated the concepts of duty, responsibility, obligation and patriotism.

I believe that it is naive, bordering on delusional, to believe that the political media is adversarial towards the powerful people they cover, as opposed to deeply invested in a business model that has forged partnership through a thousand information transactions that have accrued billions in revenue, and forged an iron triangle of corrupt interests.

These special interests have crucified the common interests of the American people who hope for peace, prosperity and domestic tranquility.

I have no doubt whatsoever what side will ultimately prevail in the struggle to move America towards her destiny — as a place where freedom and liberty flourish for all people, and where the pursuit of happiness is at the core of our politics.

That journey will be long and uneven, but in the end, the United States will triumph against both its domestic enemies, selfish interests and apathetic citizens who have lost faith in politicians, and confused them with the character of their country and her people.

Remember, when you feel depressed and hopeless, it is within your power to control and change it.

This understanding is the key to changing America, and rescuing her from the cancer of MAGA, which is filled with the lowest collection of characters in American history.

Donald Trump is a rapist and a pedophile. He is a grotesquerie.

Their unworthiness is our burden, not our fate.

Every American must stand up in this moment of crisis, and ask themselves a question: what can I do for my country?

Americans have been gunned down and beaten for standing up and pushing back.

The more people MAGA guns down, beats, tortures and starves, the more Americans will rise up.

MAGA’s fate is already sealed, while all of ours remains unknown. There will be more death and more abuses, but there can be no backing up or down.

The die is cast.

What can you do?

Each American must decide.

Elie Wiesel understood the choice:

Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Don Lemon has made his choice:

I have spent my entire career covering the news. I will not stop now. I will not stop ever. Last night, the DOJ sent a team of federal agents to arrest me in the middle of the night for something that I have been doing for the last 30 years, and that is covering the news. The First Amendment of the Constitution protects me and countless other journalists who do what I do. I stand with all of them, and I will not be silenced. I look forward to my day in court.

My friends at The Save America Movement have made their choice.

MIllions of Americans have made their choice without instruction, guidance or advice.

Remember, my friends, the words of the poem — ‘Invictus’ — that James Stockdale and Nelson Mandela held close to their hearts.

Let it wash over you.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate.

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate.

I am the captain of my soul.

Donald Trump and MAGA have declared war on the US Constitution and the American people with masked agents and powerful guns, yet it remains true that they can’t kill us all, or lock up even five percent of us.

We control the high ground.

The dignity of non-violence and the power of love will prevail over violence and murder.

The battle lines have been drawn.

It is America or Trump. There is no neutral place to stand.

Now is a time for choosing.

I have made my choice.

We must all make our choice.

I will make an American stand.

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