My name is Mandy Hassan. I'm the host, editor and chief CEO of Zateo. I'm joined for this election

dialogue on sub-sab, finally, at 8.15. We are 15 minutes late to talk about the most important

topic in America. It tells you everything by the one-only Steve Schmidt from the warning on

sub-stack, former GOP strategist, White House strategist, never Trump. Steve, how are you feeling about this election?

It's 815.

We were supposed to start at 8.

Everything in life is stressful right now.

Everything is stressful.

We're a little bit behind, but thank you everybody out there for joining.

You know, when we talked about doing this, what we decided we were going to talk about was fascism.

Yeah.

And this threat, talk about it as a fascist threat, talk about the media that hasn't called this out for what it is.

Oh, yes.

So it was providential almost that the news today is John Kelly, the former Marine

four-star general, the White House chief of staff, comes out. There's audio recordings, and he makes

it clear. It's a man who knows history, knows something of the world, knows something of the wars of the 20th century. And he says,

the guy I worked for his chief of staff is an autocrat, is a fascist who doesn't believe in democracy.

It's a big deal. Yeah. It's a very big deal, but you might not believe it from the front pages

of the national newspapers today, because I believe it didn't really make the top headline on any front page in America, which tells you everything about nine years in our media is still very broken. It's the reason I went and set up my own media company. When I launched Zateo, Steve, people said, why are you doing your own media company? And I said two reasons. Number one, and it's probably one you disagree with me on, and we could have another conversation about this, is the genocide in Gaza. And number two is the

fascist threat here in America. People don't use the G word genocide. They don't use the F word

fascism. And in August 2020, Steve, I did my first ever show on MSNBC. I guest hosted for Chris

Hayes. And it was just after Portland and the

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