Will you come along for my journey?

PLUS: The search for balance can never lead to erasure of reality

This is a photo of a road in North Dakota, taken at the dawn of a new day headed East into the day break.

Last summer, I drove more than 4,500 miles with my son from California through Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alberta, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota,
Michigan, Ontario and Quebec to our final destination: New Hampshire. We travelled on backroads and two-lane highways, avoiding interstates. We rolled down roads that cut through mountain ranges and twisted through forests, crossed rivers and climbed steep hills.

Along the drive, I thought often about roads. Who made them? Why there? Who used them? I think about all of the hardships involved in blasting through mountains and building the endless ribbons of highway that connect a thousand communities together into a nation, like the sky holds the stars.

How did it all happen? Our story, that is. Our American story.

Soon, we will celebrate an epic anniversary together. The United States of America will reach the 250th anniversary of its independence, which was an earth-shattering event. It marks a rupture in history when a new epoch began in the fire of a revolution that declared, “All men are created equal and endowed by a creator with inalienable rights which include the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” After five long years of war, privation and death, the American Revolution was won at Yorktown when a white flag appeared above the British lines.

The Marquis de Lafayette declared:

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.

He also predicted the new world would be the salvation of the old. What he predicted came to pass.

I have been writing here at The Warning for 19 months now, and the community we are building continues to grow. Each day, I do my best to engage with you about the dangers of the world that are swirling all about us. Are the lessons of humanity’s greatest crisis gone?

The road is an important metaphor because it requires that, in order to know where you are going, you know where you began. The road does not preclude aimless wandering, or being profoundly lost. It simply marks a waypoint on a journey that is connected forever to the necessities and durability of those who built it for those who use and maintain it, and for those who will journey down it next.

One of the most gratifying aspects of writing on Substack is having the opportunity to introduce many of you to some great writing and speeches, particularly from within the Substack writing community. One of those writers is veteran journalist, author, thinker and observer,

Claire Berlinski

, who writes the indispensable

The Cosmopolitan Globalist

. I highly recommend it. It is superb.

Recently Ms.Berlinski wrote a genius essay across two parts entitled “Responsible Retreat:”

Responsible Retreat, Part I

Responsible Retreat, Part II

I urge you to read it and think about it, while becoming a subscriber to a newsletter that will leave you better informed and more curious about the world and how it became what it is. It is important for you, and for our children, to know. The second that no one knows or can remember, we will be at the precipice of disaster. The winds are stirring in a manner that is delivering a whiff of what seems to smell like amnesia in the air.

Curiously, what Claire Berlinski brilliantly writes about has gone from something universally accepted to rarely discussed, and perhaps even, less known.

How did America become the most powerful nation in the world, and why must it remain so? What will happen in the vacuum? What were the lessons of past sacrifice and the hard-earned wisdom from such cost?

Why do our leaders rarely talk about it? Why don’t they talk about the necessity of our alliances and the dangers gathering in the world? Why don’t they talk about our shared values of liberty, while rebuking the growing autocratic menace?

Claire Berlinski offers a lesson about the world as it is, and what is coming next by explaining the road that led to this moment. Ignorance is no friend in a moment when the truth and lies seem indistinguishable for some of the nation’s most powerful news executives and political leaders.

Fascism has come to America, and it could take power. Donald Trump is promising to impose retribution and vengeance on Americans who oppose him. He has promised to attack dissent, create mass deportation camps, and imprison his opponents. He has dehumanized minorities as vermin and subhuman, while spreading a hideous lie about the results of a legitimate election that is the equivalent of pouring a corrosive acid on the foundations of the American way of life.

The “America First” movement of this era is rooted in the “America First” movement of an earlier time. Both causes are filled with useful idiots who are bound by a shared admiration for foreign dictators, whether they be Putin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Orban or Pinochet. Both are toxic weeds growing from the poisoned soil that sprouts nationalism, which is the enemy of patriotism.

Last summer, I did my best to take you along on my journey across North America. Here are some of those essays:

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Teddy Roosevelt on the character of the American people

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Freedom and liberty are a moral proposition

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The fever will break

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This Friday, I am going to do my best to take you along on a different journey that can offer some perspective around this moment.

Sometimes it helps to see America clearly by looking back at it from far away.

I will take you to Poland over Easter Weekend. I will visit the beautiful cities of Warsaw, Lublin and Krakow over the following week, and will bear witness for you at the Nazi death camps of Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. I will visit the sites of the Jewish ghettos, and raise a glass with Belarusian and Russian dissidents in Warsaw, who have lost their country, but not their fire for freedom. I will show you the generosity of the Polish people towards the people of Ukraine who deserve American support, and are receiving it at a moment of grave danger.

I will write about this moment by looking backwards down the road, and ahead towards where it may be leading. I will tell the stories of the 20th century so that it may help you understand the dangers ahead in the 21st. My hope is that I will remind you of staggering sacrifices, an enduring responsibility, a fragile reality and a tenuous future that can be peaceful only if we are strong, prepared and vigilant.

I will take you with me to Prague and Lidice, as well as Terezín. I will write about sacrifice from the crypt of the Church of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, while remembering the travesty of what happened in 1938 to Czechoslovakia.

I will write about the fruits of appeasement and their terrible cost. I will do my best to share the details of a story that should be remembered again, so that our children can live in peace.

Next, I will take you to Bratislava with me to check out a conference of democracy activists who are at the front lines of defending our shared values across the continent that was saved by America. The fight between freedom and its alternatives is enduring.

When I leave for Europe, there will be 221 days until America decides its destiny, and 210 days will remain when I return.

It is my deepest hope to inspire and inform you, as opposed to agitate and scare you. However, I do not apologize for worrying you as you must be worried because a virus has been set loose with malicious intent. The virus seeks to refute a noble premise with a great lie.

Democracy is the only just system of government that has ever existed because it is the only system that places the dignity of the human being above the power of the state. Democracy keeps us safe.

When a strongman says, “Give me power and just a little bit of your liberties so that I may solve all of your problems,” then the danger is at the door. The siren songs of grievance and resentment always have a chorus ready to join the hymn. It’s a lazy philosophy of loserdom, replacing the dignity of individualism with the conformities of obedience and the surrender of personal sovereignty and intellectual agency for the price of acceptance in a community of malice in a time of loneliness. It will always be as sad as it is malignant.

There is something essential to remember. I have been saying this for many years now: fascism did not thrive in the 1930s because it was strong or right, but rather, because democracy was corrupt and weak.

American democracy is weak and corrupt today. It is why there is a dangerous fascist movement that is on the cusp of controlling the White House.

They exalt a dangerous demagogue who should be believed when he makes threats. When power and threats combine, there is always misery and death. I will remind you of that in this journey, as well as taking you into beautiful, vibrant cities with great people, food and drink.

I hope you’ll come along for the journey.

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VIDEO COMMENTARY: The search for balance can never lead to erasure of reality

This morning, I joined Scripps News to explain why Ronna McDaniel's hiring at NBC is damaging to the brand, and how news organizations should approach "fair and balanced" coverage of the 2024 election in an age of lying and misinformation:

Note: If you would prefer to read the transcript, instead of playing the video right on this page/email, click on “Watch on YouTube” on the video screen below. At this point, you should be on the YouTube page or YouTube app. Scroll down past “Description” (section where it describes the content of the video) to “Transcript,” and then click on “Show transcript.” If you’re still having difficulty, visit youtube.com, and just search for “Steve Schmidt The Warning.” You’ll be brought to my YouTube channel. All of my videos are there, and you will see the "Transcript" option after each video description.

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