Schweizer: “Political violence will get worse” until we deal with cancerous rhetoric

The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer

Government Accountability Institute

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Politics

4.9 • 627 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2026

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The shots that rang through the ballroom at the Washington Hilton last week bounced off the same walls as when President Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed 45 years ago. But the reaction to the two events says how much our culture has degraded. In 1981, the Academy Awards were postponed for 24 hours. When emcee Johnny Carson opened the broadcast by wishing Reagan well in his recovery, there was thunderous applause from the Hollywood audience. All those years later, two days before the attempt, liberal talk show host Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the First Lady having the “glow of an expectant widow,” which he later defended as a joke aimed at her age difference to the president. Some prominent Democratic influencers on Bluesky began peddling a theory that the whole incident was somehow “staged.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Research that resonates.
0:05.0	He's the president of the Government Accountability Institute, Peter Switzer.
0:09.0	Peter Schweitzer. Peter Schweitzer. Peter Schweitzer has spent many years, in fact, probably done a more comprehensive job than anyone's ever done, chronicling the corruption by the powerful in Washington.
0:26.1	Be very prescient, Eric Eggers. Join me right now is Government Accountability Institute Research Director, Eric Eggers. We're going to take information that we've learned, that people like
0:30.6	Peter Schweitzer have uncovered, and we're going to try to go further. Great investigative reporting,
0:36.1	Peter. You're the only one doing it. Thank God.
0:38.5	Eric Eggers from the Government Accountability Institute and co-hosts of that great podcast,
0:43.5	The Drilled Down with Peter Schweitzer. This is The Drill Down with Peter Schweitzer.
0:49.6	Hi, it's Peter Schweitzer and welcome to the drill dad. Well, political violence and something called
0:53.8	righteous crime is on the rise. What's causing it? Who's fueling it? We're going to unpack that today on the Drilldown with the co-host of this program. Eric Eggers. Eric, how are you? I'm excellent. I'm very excited. My inner social deviant is like tickled at the idea of the concept of righteous crime. You have to
1:13.1	explain to me what that is, but I'm here for it. Yeah, yeah. Well, two big news stories this week.
1:17.1	We're going to unpack. The first, of course, is yet another assassination attempt on Donald Trump
1:22.0	that just took place. And of course, the investigation and now the indictment of the Southern
1:27.8	Poverty Law Center, the accusation being that they poured millions of dollars into
1:32.6	violent racist groups to basically encourage them in their activity so they could fundraise
1:39.6	off of it. And these two events, we're going to argue, are connected in a very, very fundamental way,
1:46.1	and I'm going to get to righteous crime in just a minute. But tell me a little bit about what you
1:52.1	think they might have in common. I mean, they seem like they're totally different, but they're fused
1:56.9	together in a very real way. Well, I think what we're seeing, unfortunately, is a rise in a
2:02.9	trend that's been, I think, largely ignored. So I think it's good that we get a chance to talk
2:06.8	about it today of one political ideology, one political kind of identity that the left, quite frankly,
2:14.8	is increasingly linked to violence or kind of hateful rhetoric. Also,
	...

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