Feb. 5, 2022 - Bannon's War Room
48:51
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Olivia, I mean, this is the question to me. | ||
| I mean, it seemed untenable that the Pence stance, which was that we're gonna have to agree to disagree on whether I should have been hanged, which was functionally the stance that he was taking for the last year. | ||
| Like, he said, we'll never see Ida Ida on that day. | ||
| It's like the day that the mob was sent to chase you down and do harm to you. | ||
| The question is, like, This fight has to happen. | ||
| Whether it's going to happen or not, I don't know. | ||
| But it feels like it has to happen. | ||
| The question is whether Pence has a stomach for it now, or this is like his one entrance, and then he just recedes again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is a great question. | |
| And, you know, I'm wondering what happens tomorrow. | ||
| Will Pence reverse course? | ||
| Will he back down? | ||
| Will he go back to touting this is election integrity-based? | ||
| And, you know, by the fact of pushing the big lie in that sense, in order to fall back into the big races, of what they believe the base to be. But you know, I hope that this was a moment where he has decided now is the time where I'm going to make a break and whoever wants to come with me can come with me and maybe the Mitt Romneys of the world will continue to back him and he will follow mine supporting people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. | ||
| Pence, you're going to carry this thing eventually to your grave, okay? | ||
| Because it is a mark of shame, and you are a stone-cold coward. | ||
| A stone-cold coward. | ||
| Boris Epstein, what are your strongest words yet that, you're wrong, I wasn't authorized to do what I can do, and where the Republican Party is going is into dangerous, anti-democratic territory? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's good to be here with you. | |
| And, you know, this is just a culmination of something that's been happening for a number of years in the Republican Party. | ||
| Let's recall that during the President Obama's administration, Mitch McConnell said that he would be an obstructionist, that he would not work with Democrats, that he was going to be the Grim Reaper in which no legislation would pass. | ||
| Fast forward into when the Republicans had a unified government, having control of both the House, the Senate, and the White House. | ||
| What did they do? | ||
| They only took care of themselves with a tax legislation. | ||
| And now we see that they were unwilling to lose the grips of power at the demise of our democracy. | ||
| They are only concerned with power. | ||
| They are only concerned with controlling our government. | ||
| OK, we're live in the war room, Saturday, 5 February, the year of our Lord 2022. | ||
| We want to start off with a bang because wow, what a day yesterday we brought in and requested and here arrive the firebrand Matt Gates. | ||
| Let's put it all in perspective before we get to the the technical detail. | ||
| A lot of people don't realize that Matt is a terrific lawyer. | ||
| We're going to get into the constitutionality of the Electoral Count Act and everything there. | ||
| But walk us through yesterday with both the theatrics. | ||
| The optics and the meaning of both what happened at the RNC with your two favorite people, Cheney and Kinzinger. | ||
| And I might add, I still think, I still believe you're the only sitting congressman that has gone to Wyoming and showed up to actually support the opposition to Liz Cheney. | ||
| I'm told my anti-Liz Cheney rally was the largest rally in Wyoming political history that did not include a rodeo element. | ||
| The reason I know that's true, I actually was talking to folks last night in Wyoming about getting people on the show for next week, and they're still buzzing about you being out there. | ||
| My point is, you've been out there since the beginning. | ||
| You know Johnny come lately, you know River stay for this. | ||
| I want to walk through the RNC and all that, and I want to walk through the Mike Pence of it all. | ||
| So you were kind enough to carve out some Saturday to come over here, so let's do it. | ||
| Oh, Saturday in the War Room is the spot to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the inside baseball show. | |
| It's interesting that the national media so badly wants this to be the Mike Pence-Jerry Maguire moment. | ||
| You know, where he gets up and says, you know, who's coming with me? | ||
| And somewhat predictably, I don't even think Mike Pence could get the goldfish to go with him like Jerry Maguire was able to harvest for his own departure. | ||
| I don't really get what the base of the Mike Pence movement is. | ||
| You know, I'd heard that he had some pretty strong interest in going and being the president of Liberty University, and that probably would have been a better outcome for him. | ||
| He could have gone and been president of Protestant America and could have departed politics. | ||
| I think it's interesting that he chose the Federalist Society as the venue because for all of the immigration ambition that we sacrificed in the Trump era, you know, we wanted more wall money. | ||
| We wanted more internal enforcement of our immigration laws. | ||
| We wanted to codify these administrative rules in law so that remain in Mexico could never be changed. | ||
| And yet, Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans kept saying, we just gotta keep pushing through these Fed Soc judges. | ||
| That was the whole deal. | ||
| The Federalist Society judge pipeline through the establishment Republicans in the Senate was the prime directive. | ||
| And now you see Mike Pence going right back to that organization. | ||
| By the way, the organization that gave us Rod Rosenstein. | ||
| You know, the organization that recommended folks that I think let down our movement in a variety of ways. | ||
| And people should understand what's not shown there. | ||
| Pence got a standing ovation at the end, I believe, and a couple of big cheers during the thing from the Federalist Society. | ||
| Not just that he chose the venue, there was active support in that room. | ||
| A couple people walked out, but that was it. | ||
| Yeah, there are not a lot of places in the MAGA universe Where Mike Pence can go and not get booed off the stage. | ||
| I mean, if Mike Pence went and held a rally on the steps of the Wyoming Capitol in Cheyenne the way I did, he would not be getting a welcome reception from nearly a thousand people cheering. | ||
| He would face something far different. | ||
| And so he has to go to the cocoon of the establishment in the Federalist Society. | ||
| And when we take power again, we ought to remember that these Fed Soc folks are not the rock upon which we are going to build our church. | ||
| I recall. | ||
| I want to re-emphasize that for the Federalist Society. | ||
| That's called a warning shot, right? | ||
| More than a flare, that's a warning shot. | ||
| Shot across the bow. | ||
| Well, and I think that they have been exposed. | ||
| And that providing the venue for Pence to go and sort of grovel to the America First movement certainly exposes them further. | ||
| But I remember my last meeting with Mike Pence. | ||
| It was before January 6th. | ||
| It was in the White House. | ||
| We were there talking. | ||
| Not about insurrection and overthrowing the government, but about the substantive arguments that we believed would prevail in debate, much like Peter Navarro has laid out on this program, and also the substantive arguments that we thought would be persuasive to state legislatures who were looking for a signal to take more aggressive action to not maintain the fiction Of elections that were not run fairly. | ||
| And I knew then that he was not going to show a great deal of boldness before the Congress. | ||
| He came in and met with us. | ||
| Because he didn't understand the content of what had gone on and why the process for the certification of the electors had to go back to the states and the states like the Jake Corman in Arizona and Georgia and these other places wanted to go through and review the process? | ||
| It was more just the defeatism in his eyes and in his tone and it reminded me of like those George W. Bush years where there was just kind of an exasperation that we had to kind of surrender to the frame of the media or the powers that be and that we didn't have the ability to go and carve out our own destiny. | ||
| And I saw that in him at the time. | ||
| We put forward arguments and affidavits and evidence. | ||
| We showed him videos. | ||
| We were in the cabinet room meeting with Mike Pence in the days leading up to January 6th. | ||
| And I left quite disappointed that he was not motivated by our argument. | ||
| And the way people don't, a lot of people don't realize this, the way that it was Because we want it. | ||
| Remember, we're going to get 24 hours, 12 in each chamber, because it's two hours per state that's under question. | ||
| There have been 12 hours, 24 hours of actual debate to basically bring it to a vote and kick it back to it. | ||
| By the way, it would have made the Mueller testimony look like, you know, a tiny little blip, right? | ||
| I mean, what we understood during the Trump era is that we had to bring together the eyeballs of America to expose what was really going on. | ||
| You know, and I got trial by fire during the Russia hoax that, you know, you were never gonna win out there trying to joust with the media, you know, one interview here, one interview there. | ||
| You had to have the big moment, the big debate. | ||
| Critical mass. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And a place to adjudicate it. | ||
| And that would have been totally successful on January 6th. | ||
| And the way that you guys had carved out, this is how well thought it through, you actually were going to take, what state were you going to take? | ||
| Michigan. | ||
| Marjorie Teller Green and I had been assigned the state of Michigan to gather the affidavits, to review the evidence, to go over the legal pleadings. | ||
| We could show that while the media was out there saying, oh, you know, Trump can't win in any court time and again. | ||
| Courts refusing to exercise jurisdiction. | ||
| It was a total failure of Article 3 that we were not able to get substantive factual adjudications in court on these claims of voter fraud. | ||
| And, you know, you look at the state of Georgia now, Steve. | ||
| You got Brad Raffensperger and his political death rattle out there trying to launch investigations into Fulton County. | ||
| To save himself. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, like, Raffensperger's own statements after telling us in November of 2020 that this was the safest, most secure election in Georgia history, now he's saying no chain of custody on the Fulton County ballots when whistleblowers stepped forward and said, hey, these don't have the right markings on them. | ||
| These weren't brought to us in a way that we can ensure their validity. | ||
| Those people were fired. | ||
| Firing whistleblowers, hiding evidence, no chain of custody, new investigations, and they want to tell us that we have to sit back and accept this as some sort of legitimate result? | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| And we sought the platform to be able to put those arguments forward, and we sought the audience with Pence, and he met with us, but he just simply folded his hands and, you know, kind of nodded along. | ||
| And I thought, look, man, this is a guy who's not ready for the moment. | ||
| And by the way, that's why he's not going to be president. | ||
| He's still not ready for the moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a joke. | |
| He's gutless. | ||
| While you're on this topic, in Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth Court is the appeals court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. | ||
| It's the second highest court. | ||
| they're tightly fifty page and will put up again today in all the chat rooms and you will see it the fifty page opinion says we said from the beginning all two point six from the beginning that laws unconstitutional act seventy seven two point six million ballots are illegal or not is and right once again they've reinforced the content that you guys had well and where i think republicans miss the point in debating election integrity issues is that we think that these laws will have their own fiat | ||
| That if we just go past the right law and wave the flag on voter ID, that somehow we'll get clean, fair elections. | ||
| The reality is, personnel is policy. | ||
| It's the people who pull the levers on these elections who matter. | ||
| And that's why the Ron DeSantis strategy was the right one. | ||
| Florida was the laughingstock of the country on elections. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| We went and found the couple of elections officials who consistently had issues with chain of custody, who consistently violated our state constitution, And we fired them in the first 10 days of the DeSantis administration. | ||
| Where is that leadership around the country? | ||
| You cannot keep these same people in power expecting a different result. | ||
| We've got a couple minutes here, but I've got to get into this topic now that we're on it. | ||
| You met with Pence, and others met with Pence to walk him through what was going to happen, the evidence that was there, the whole structure of what the day is going to be. | ||
| Did he at any time ever mention to that group that the letter that he was going to drop. | ||
| Did he ever mention the draft? | ||
| Did he ever mention the legal thinking or put forward the arguments that he was coming to the conclusion were the correct arguments? | ||
| We were in the cabinet room, and we were going over the evidence, the facts, the law. | ||
| And President Trump sent us two things to continue our work. | ||
| The White House Swedish meatballs, which he was very much a fan of, and Mike Pence. | ||
| He sent Mike Pence in the room because President Trump wanted Pence to hear the actual evidence. | ||
| He wanted him to have a preview of the argument, of the substance. | ||
| And this was substantive work that we had done on the jurisprudence, on really just the total lack of confidence that we could have in the results and in the electors of some states. | ||
| My point is elected officials. | ||
| Who are going to step up and take 12 hours in the house and go through two hours of state like Michigan. | ||
| Put your professional careers on the line, your reputations on the line, the integrity on the line to walk through in detail exactly what he had. | ||
| He came in and he never mentioned at that time. | ||
| He was a defeated man when he walked in the room, was the sense I got, and that he was going to leave without the adoption. | ||
| There's a, yes, there's a, it's like when you're in a conflict and one guy's just a quitter. | ||
| What galls me, and this is what's gutless, is that he should have had the fortitude of character. | ||
| to at that time address with you, the president, other people, what that letter... | ||
| I've kept saying, how did he drop that bomb without running it by the White House counsel and other people? | ||
| Just to put forward his argument... | ||
| Well, because part of the resistance was in the vice president's office with people like Mark Short. | ||
| I mean, you know, Mark Short was a guy who worked in many ways on behalf of the Senate Republicans, who are his buddies, who he had worked with and worked for previously, and he comes in to work for Pence. | ||
| And there was an element of kind of the anti-Trump resistance in the Pence office. | ||
| And, you know, had Pence just told us then, in the days leading up, look, I am never going to do this, I honestly would have probably had more respect for him than dropping it that day. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| There probably wouldn't have been the violence. | ||
| If he was going to say, no matter what, I'm never going to do this. | ||
| I just don't have the stones. | ||
| And here's my legal argument. | ||
| People who said, hey, I disagree. | ||
| You're absolutely dead wrong. | ||
| Trump never said this. | ||
| But it would have made January 6 a fait accompli rather than a moment where we thought we were going to make an argument and then all hell broke loose. | ||
| 24 hours on a global stage. | ||
| Every time we get a place to adjudicate, whether it's in Pennsylvania in the courts or down in Georgia now, Out in Arizona. | ||
| Once we get a place to adjudicate something, good things happen. | ||
| A short commercial break. | ||
| Matt Gaetz is going to stay with us. | ||
| We may have to expand the next segment because we've got a lot more to go through. | ||
| Congressman Matt Gaetz, the Firebrands, in the War Room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll be back in a moment. | |
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
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| Are the Giza sheets softer than Mike Pence? | ||
| Is Mike Pence—go back to your Swedish meatballs. | ||
| What's softer? | ||
| What's softer? | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean Trump sent in Pence and the Swedish meatballs, and we were trying to figure out what was softer in the middle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Matt Gaetz, on fire. | ||
| By the way, the last segment broke some news. | ||
| Also probably got Matt Gaetz—no, just, okay, we'll move on. | ||
| Electoral Count Act. | ||
| Everything associated with this. | ||
| Because that's why his letter totally misrepresented everybody's position. | ||
| That's what upsets me so much is that he did not walk through the legal arguments with people at the time. | ||
| It was Cheney-esque. | ||
| Remember Cheney on that same day put out her statement supporting impeachment? | ||
| So you got Cheney and Pence almost in lockstep regarding the communication mechanisms and strategy of January 6th. | ||
| Whereas the Navarro, Gates, MTG, Jim Jordan strategy was to have a debate and present evidence. | ||
| Present evidence in a place that could be adjudicated right there. | ||
| Let's go to the electoral count. | ||
| Because right now I keep saying, oh, Trump's wrong. | ||
| Trump's in the wrong. | ||
| Everybody's wrong. | ||
| Because I laid this out in September. | ||
| 29th on with John Howman on the circus, and they did that spot where it related exactly what was going to happen, how it was going to kick to the house, and you're going to have eventually this state-by-state vote, Electoral County 1887. | ||
| Right now, they're up there. | ||
| The same group that gave us the increase in the debt ceiling, the same group that gave us infrastructure, the same group that sided with them On the American recovery plan that caused the systemic inflation, the same group of collaborators are now saying, we just want to make some tiny tweaks, just some tiny tweaks to clarify the VP's role so you actually can't reverse it to the states and take state legislatures out. | ||
| Matt Gaetz. | ||
| The road to perdition is paved with the votes of Republican senators, sadly, and there is pattern recognition here. | ||
| There's always a circumstance where the left takes the most extreme position to seize power. | ||
| And, you know, there's a part of that. | ||
| You've got to kind of tip your hat to them. | ||
| At least they know what they want and they're willing to fight for it. | ||
| You have to admire that in any of our fellow Americans. | ||
| So they go out with their elections bill that is going to institutionalize the fraud of the 2020 election and scale it to the moon and make it the forever path of American elections. | ||
| And instead of Our side saying, no, no, no, we need national voter ID laws. | ||
| We need to expose the corrupt elections officials who broke the law, who violated the Constitution, and we should put pressure on every Republican governor to can people who don't run clean elections in the model of Ron DeSantis. | ||
| But instead of doing that, we always try to, like, reach for whatever is the comfortable virtue signal. | ||
| For us. | ||
| And that's why you have some Republicans teaming up with Democrats to say, well, maybe we don't do the institutionalizing of fraud, maybe we don't do voter ID and securing a chain of custody, but we'll make this change to eliminate one of the protections that exist to stop certification of fraudulent electors. | ||
| And we see it play out all the time in this town, and it is indicative of a lack of vision. | ||
| Rather than negotiating with Democrats in Washington to change the Electoral Count Act, Republicans should be in Fulton County, Georgia. | ||
| Should be in Maricopa County, Arizona. | ||
| Should be in Nevada asking how many illegal aliens are voting in those elections. | ||
| We should be all over this country because what I hear increasingly is that our people view their vote as precious. | ||
| They value it and when they give it to you and you don't value it, they're less likely to give it to you again. | ||
| So I want to go back through this. | ||
| What are you recommending right now? | ||
| And how do we break up this, the Collins-Romney group hug they're having up there right now? | ||
| Because, one, this proves exactly what President Trump, the case Trump is making. | ||
| That sounds like the saddest group hug ever. | ||
| Isn't it bad? | ||
| So what is your advice right now for what this audience can do, what people can do to chop block this? | ||
| Because they start getting their hands into the Electoral Count Act. | ||
| You don't know where this thing's going to end up. | ||
| Well, I am not optimistic about the legislative path forward here because I do believe that they have the votes on this. | ||
| They've got all the Democrats and they've got the Republicans who are sitting around wringing their hands and wetting their beds and seeking some virtue signal. | ||
| I'm pretty good at counting votes. | ||
| And I think they're going to pass a change to the Electoral Count Act. | ||
| And so, our countermeasure to that has to be about personnel. | ||
| We have to take these people who live in anonymity in places like Fulton County, Georgia... And make them famous. | ||
| And we have to make them famous, and we have to make sure that they no longer are able to pollute and taint American democracy in future elections. | ||
| Mark Elias, right now, you know, every day we're fighting here on this redistricting fiasco that's out there. | ||
| We should be up 10 to 12 uh... trump or mega districts at the end of the redistricting right now it's a grumpy down to and is a dogfight all over it all over the world are not fighting florida now i thought that i could want to use a huge let's go through because this is a bond it's the sticks in our car the most work is the florida in the state of florida yet the plague of women vultures go out and get a constitutional amendment with like the old charlie christ court supreme court and that resulted in gains for democrats and losses for republicans in the last | ||
| Now, those people have become constitutionally senile, so they've gone off the bench. | ||
| DeSantis has replaced them with the DeSantis Court, and yet the state Senate in Florida is still clinging to a map that disadvantages Republicans. | ||
| If Ron DeSantis wrote about- But they started at almost 14, for 28 seats, right? | ||
| All of MAGA's moving, I mean the demographics, it should be 20 to 8, right? | ||
| New York State is 26, they're 23 to 3. | ||
| When Democrats control things, it's pure smash mouth. | ||
| One of the seats that could go away is Al Lawson's seat, and it should go away because it is a gerrymandered seat to connect black voters. | ||
| The issue is, so many white people have moved into the state of Florida, those seats are no longer constitutionally black access seats. | ||
| And so there's a high likelihood that that seat goes away and that Al Lawson is replaced by a Republican, not through gerrymandering, but by dissolving the gerrymandering that created that seat in the first place. | ||
| Another really important area of our state is in the Tampa area, where the communities of South Tampa are like the communities in St. | ||
| Petersburg. | ||
| And if those are connected across Tampa Bay, that creates a ruby red district in North Pinellas County that a great patriot, Ana Paulina Luna, will run for and win. | ||
| That's the old Charlie Crist seat. | ||
| Right now, so the state Senate in Florida has maps that would have a Democrat in St. | ||
| Petersburg and Al Lawson still serving in a gerrymandered seat in North Florida. | ||
| But if we took the DeSantis maps, We would be more rectangular in the creation of our districts, more constitutionally sound. | ||
| But there's just, with so many Republicans, there's a fear to do the bold necessary thing to put us in position to have that majority. | ||
| And, you know, a lot of folks are fighting over getting that majority. | ||
| You and I talk frequently about how to use that majority. | ||
| And what we've seen is, based on the conversations I've had behind this microphone, Kevin McCarthy has changed his tune. | ||
| He is now out there saying that the oversight-first strategy is his strategy. | ||
| So there are a few things we've got to do to make that happen. | ||
| We've got to discontinue the seniority-based system. | ||
| We've got to get the firebrands in the front. | ||
| You think McCarthy's come more our way? | ||
| Oh, I have no doubt, and I want to praise the GOP leader. | ||
| Let's give the devil his due. | ||
| What do you mean by this? | ||
| Yeah, in recent interviews, I think one was in Axios, Kevin McCarthy has said that he is going to construct the committee system to conduct oversight, not to engage in sort of virtue signal legislation. | ||
| Basically, your theory of government, which is we've got to drill down on everything this administration is doing, fairly and methodically. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| If it's not fair, it won't be effective. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It has to be fair, it has to be dogged, it has to be persistent, and it has to be universal. | ||
| We can't just pick one little thing to go look at. | ||
| All of these agencies are engaged in conduct that deserves thorough review, and what started behind this microphone, what was amplified by our colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene, what's been talked about by more and more conservative commentators, is now becoming the doctrine in the Republican leadership office. | ||
| That's the power of the Warren process. | ||
| Before we get to, because I want to talk about Cawthorn and what Mark Elias and these guys are trying to do there. | ||
| In Florida, what can this audience, where do we stand right now? | ||
| Because this is the key that picks the lock, what happens in Florida. | ||
| What can this audience do, where do we stand? | ||
| Because DeSantis, who's done everything else great, I don't know if he took his eye off the ball, the Senate got more aggressive on this. | ||
| DeSantis has been very aggressive. | ||
| In the past, Florida governors, they just sit back and wait for whatever maps emerge out of the legislative process. | ||
| DeSantis wrote a map, he laid it on the desk, and my fellow Floridians need to reach out to their legislators and tell them, pass the DeSantis map. | ||
| Don't go with some map that was written by the Plague of Women Vultures. | ||
| Don't go with some map that was written by some staffer somewhere. | ||
| Pass the DeSantis map. | ||
| And we will be in a stronger position. | ||
| Okay, we're going to get that all today. | ||
| And go to also Governor DeSantis, make sure you tell him you got his back on this. | ||
| Real quickly, Madison Cawthorn, right? | ||
| We're going to try to get Madison on here next week, hopefully. | ||
| Elias. | ||
| Elias is a smart, crafty, devious guy, right? | ||
| What are they doing down there with Madison? | ||
| Well, to save democracy, They are trying to remove Madison Cawthorn from the ballot. | ||
| So try to figure that out. | ||
| But we should not just laugh at this. | ||
| This is very serious because in North Carolina there's going to be an administrative review board that actually breaks probably 3-2 against us with the opportunity to force Madison Cawthorn to sit for a deposition before being able to run for office. | ||
| Jack Posobiec says it all the time, do you get The scene in the movie that you are in right now, where they're telling us to preserve democracy, the people of North Carolina shouldn't have the opportunity to vote for Madison Cawthorn. | ||
| What do we need to do to have that Congresswoman Cawthorn back? | ||
| This is going to be a very serious legal fight. | ||
| I would encourage folks to throw a few shekels Madison's way because I think that They've picked Madison for a reason. | ||
| Because if they can do it to him in North Carolina, they can take Trump off the ballot in North Carolina. | ||
| That's what this is all about. | ||
| It's ensuring that Trump can't run in North Carolina, and that we can't win again. | ||
| Madison is on the front line of this fight, and we should all have his back. | ||
| Real quickly, you agree the only way they could defeat Trump in 2024 is some sort of legal thing they come up with, right? | ||
| This is what their endgame is. | ||
| I don't think Donald Trump's ever lost a presidential election. | ||
| I don't think he's going to lose the next one. | ||
| I'm saying he's going to win his third term, but the only way they think about it is not the ballot box. | ||
| They can't get the votes to beat him. | ||
| Well, they know we're watching how they try to steal elections, so now they're trying these administrative games. | ||
| We're going to Canada. | ||
| I'm asking the congressman to stick around. | ||
| We're going to Canada to talk about truckers and freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
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Next. | |
| Okay, welcome back to The War Room. | ||
| Let's go to Canada up there for these truckers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love what's going on there. | |
| War Room, Pandemic, with Stephen K. Bannum. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room, Pandemic, here's your host Stephen K. Bannum. | ||
| Okay, welcome back to The War Room. Let's go to Canada up there for these truckers. | ||
| I love what's going on there. They've got Trudeau, they've got Castro's kid on the run here. | ||
| He's hiding out somewhere. | ||
| Let's go to David Freiheit, who has been an attorney, an analyst, a commentator, but he is really down into the deck plates of this. | ||
| David, update us. | ||
| I think you were in Montreal the other day, at Quebec City, and then you came back to Ottawa. | ||
| What's going on today? | ||
| I live in Montreal. | ||
| I drove down to Ottawa Monday, Wednesday, and yesterday for an overnight, just to see what's going on. | ||
| More of the same. | ||
| Wonderful, peaceful protests. | ||
| I think the most probably aggressive thing that I saw were fireworks going off in the street last night. | ||
| But it is more of the same. | ||
| It's the most peaceful, well-behaved protest you've ever seen. | ||
| They're honking their horns loud. | ||
| True. | ||
| They are parking their convoy, their big trucks, on Parliament Hill. | ||
| People are walking around, dancing. | ||
| They're handing out food, soup. | ||
| It is mayhem of sorts, but it's the most peaceful mayhem you could imagine. | ||
| And reading what's going on in the news, seeing GoFundMe, yesterday they froze the account and said we're going to issue refunds to those who ask, and if not, we'll donate whatever's left to a charity of the convoys choosing. | ||
| Today they reversed that and said we're just going to do automatic refunds to everyone because I think the prospect of a massive lawsuit was too high. | ||
| David, this is Congressman Matt Gaetz. | ||
| One question I had for you is, are you seeing MPs or other politicians go out and support these truckers and lend additional fuel to the movement? | ||
| So, a few conservatives have. | ||
| Pierre Poilievre, in particular, who's a member of the Conservative Party. | ||
| They do this, and then they go out and get lambasted by the liberal politicians, blue checkmarks media, who say, look at the intolerance that you're supporting. | ||
| Justin Trudeau put out a tweet the other day. | ||
| Everyone's echoing the same idiotic, untenable sentiment. | ||
| This convoy represents anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, transphobia. | ||
| I've met everyone from every walk of life, every race, ethnicity, religion in that crowd. | ||
| It's utter lies. | ||
| But they run with the lies, they bank on the fact that too many of their supporters are just ignorant, do not know what's going on, don't even want to step foot there to see for themselves, and will just be happy regurgitating the garbage that they spew out on Twitter. | ||
| But so some conservatives have. | ||
| And then the media says these conservatives are supporting white nationalism by supporting this convoy in which I saw a trucker who was born in Kuwait. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| I want to hear the Kuwait story. | ||
| I met a trucker born in Kuwait, fled Kuwait because of the totalitarian regime that he's lived in Canada for 30 years and he has now seen Canada turn into what he fled from in Kuwait. | ||
| I talked to a guy from Romania who said he fled communism and he sees it now in real time, same playbook, through and through. | ||
| A media that parrots fake news talking points on behalf of the politicians who fund them and they, lo and behold, they managed to sway and influence a large swath of the population Who are just too tired, too busy, or too apathetic to actually learn for themselves what is really going on here. | ||
| So David, give us a sense of who's got the momentum right now. | ||
| Is it the media pushback and the smearing of people improperly, or is it the singular focused message for freedom? | ||
| Are more people showing up? | ||
| Is the crowd dispersing? | ||
| Give us a sense of the trajectory of this thing. | ||
| So as things escalate in terms of public support, so they escalate in terms of ratcheting down the ability of the public to support. | ||
| So over the last week, the bridges between Ontario to the east and Quebec, where Ottawa is, were closed. | ||
| So people couldn't get from Gatineau, which is on the other side of the Ontario border, into Ontario with the convoys to support. | ||
| They've sectioned off the convoys by blocking off streets so that what is there on Parliament Hill doesn't look as monumental as it in fact is. | ||
| The more support there is from the people, the more the authorities ratchet down to try to curb that support. | ||
| We booked a hotel in downtown Ottawa. | ||
| Our reservation was cancelled, unbeknownst to us. | ||
| We show up at the hotel, the hotel gives me an excuse that I don't believe, but I'm not calling anyone a liar. | ||
| Says, you booked through Expedia, we cancelled all reservations through Expedia, and we have no more rooms. | ||
| We have no more rooms because staff are not able to come because the roads are closed, or they're not coming for various reasons. | ||
| And apparently the rumor is, and it was tweeted out by Ezra Levant from Rebel News, that the government has bought up all remaining hotel rooms to prevent people from coming down. | ||
| I'm driving down from Montreal. | ||
| I Google Maps to Parliament Hill. | ||
| It says directions unavailable. | ||
| I'm not joking. | ||
| I'm documenting this on my Twitter feed. | ||
| And then you have the GoFundMe. | ||
| Fees the 10 plus million dollars that they raised. | ||
| Second largest GoFundMe fundraiser in Canada history. | ||
| They seized it for a second time. | ||
| Then they put out a bullcrap email abuse, which I received by email saying, we're refunding all of your donations. | ||
| Because while this started off as a peaceful protest, the police have informed us of acts of violence and other security safety issues. | ||
| Bull. It's bull, plop, through and through. | ||
| I've been walking the streets now for three days, Monday, Wednesday, yesterday, going back today. | ||
| I asked the police officers, have you seen anything bad? Have you seen any acts of violence, vandalism? | ||
| One of them, they all said no. One of them said, yeah, someone spray-painted and vandalized the Senate building. | ||
| This is in a live stream last night as I'm live streaming. | ||
| I don't get the answer to the question that I thought I was going to get. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I walk over to the Senate building. | |
| Do you fear, you know, we saw a placed, you know, provoker there? | ||
| It appeared to be a false flag operation. | ||
| Are the people that are organizing this worried that there might be acts of violence that don't emerge from the people they're seeking freedom, but that are actually inspired by those who are trying to ratchet up the very draconian measures that you mentioned that the government was using to constrain this association activity? | ||
| So, interesting question. | ||
| First of all, I have no actual connection to the organizers of the convoy. | ||
| I'm here just as an independent individual trying to... Yeah, but in your reporting, are you concerned that they may seek justification with some sort of false flag act? | ||
| There have been two incidents which the media has run with. | ||
| There was one individual carrying a confederate flag, which is an odd thing to carry at a Canadian protest. | ||
| You know, the media snaps its shots of that individual, the blue check mark, retweet and retweet and say, look at this, a Confederate flag. | ||
| It was the only individual wearing a full face mask with sunglasses. | ||
| So you only saw a hole in his mouth. | ||
| It was like one of those bank robbery ski masks. | ||
| And he was told to leave by the crowd. | ||
| There was the other image that just by fluke, a photographer happened to be three feet from the guy of a swastika flag. | ||
| Those are the only two, what you might call, you know, instigators who are there, who I think do not belong with the protest. | ||
| It's so peaceful and so defined by peace, it would be out of place. | ||
| Has your footage or any footage start to pierce what CBC, Canadian broadcasting, these guys have almost a total lockdown on this. | ||
| The rest of the country has a very tenuous grip on what's happening. | ||
| Has it started to pierce the mainstream media at all? | ||
| Well, I don't know if it's pierced it. | ||
| All that I know is that the streams that I've been putting out, they're long streams between three and six and a half hours long, unedited live streams, have gotten close to a half a million views this week, if not more. | ||
| That's just my own YouTube channel. | ||
| I've invited everybody to cut, clip, and share. | ||
| The images are going, and people are seeing them. | ||
| And I can tell you from my own personal milieu, people are saying, holy crap, I just never understood or appreciated the degree to which I'm being lying. | ||
| So I think, CBC, the mainstream legacy media in Canada, has been losing its foothold for a while. | ||
| Nobody trusts them, nobody believes them, and those who do, I think, are unable to be convinced anyhow. | ||
| But I think the reality of the images are getting out there. | ||
| I won't say going viral, but people are seeing them. | ||
| And the more people that are out there, the more people that are getting it, the more people that are seeing it. | ||
| Yes, very much. | ||
| David, take us 30 days out from now. | ||
| How will we know whether or not this worked and whether this galvanized a lasting impact on Canadian policy and politics? | ||
| You know what, that's the good question also because even as we speak now, we see certain provinces in real time rolling back their measures. | ||
| Uh, the issue is that no government wants to be perceived as rolling them back in response to this. | ||
| So, if we see things roll back, they'll say it was a coincidence. | ||
| My personal prediction is that these politicians are going to get their political appointee medical experts to change the science and say, now it's time to undo these measures. | ||
| And then the politicians are going to be able to hide behind their political appointees and say, we're just following the science. | ||
| Not in response to the convoy, we're just following the science. | ||
| And I think that's how it's going to come to an end. | ||
| That's the clip you want to save. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's victory. | ||
| Let's bring in Mike Anderson. | ||
| Mike's one of the truckers actually down there. | ||
| Mike, give us your status report. | ||
| Where do you guys stand today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we're standing in the same place we were days ago. | |
| I haven't moved and I'm not moving until these mandates are ended. | ||
| I'm seeing the same thing and actually there's a huge flow of people that are walking by the truck right now heading down to Parliament Hill. | ||
| And they're here for the same thing. | ||
| They're here to get their freedoms back. | ||
| And it's a beautiful thing. | ||
| Like, even the people of Ottawa, I'm talking, said it's the cleanest protest they've ever seen. | ||
| Even Canada Day, our own Canada Day celebration is a little bit dirtier than this. | ||
| And I mean, that's just the day to celebrate our country. | ||
| And we want it back. | ||
| Where do you see it going from here? | ||
| You guys have been now parked, you got there almost like, what, it feels like a week ago. | ||
| What's the next step? | ||
| You're going to stay parked, the authorities can't get you towed out of there because no tow trucks, no truckers will show up. | ||
| So it's, you know, they're portraying this as a racist white nationalist siege. | ||
| What outcome are you looking for? | ||
| You're looking for Trudeau to basically bend or break here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Basically, we want him to acknowledge us and end the mandate. | |
| As soon as they end the mandate, we'll go home. | ||
| We'll go back to work. | ||
| But until then, we're staying put. | ||
| There's absolutely not one person in this movement who is of a violent nature. | ||
| We're all peace-loving Canadians. | ||
| We just want all the same thing. | ||
| We want freedom of choice. | ||
| We want our freedoms back. | ||
| They've just taken them from us. | ||
| Sure, it's very clear what the government is trying to do to you right now by shutting off the passageways that could lead to additional support, labeling this movement as something other than a freedom-loving movement, but maybe a violent movement, maybe a movement rooted in white nationalism. | ||
| Can you give us a sense of the resolve and the commitment? | ||
| Are you guys there until your demands are met? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah, we're here until they drop the mandates. | |
| We're dug in. | ||
| I'm quite happy to sit here because I'm visiting with a lot of nice, happy, smiling people, and it's great. | ||
| I'm actually parked on one of the main walking routes down to Parliament, and I'm getting smiles and waves, and people are happy to see us. | ||
| A lot of them are citizens of Ottawa, and they're saying, you know, with the horns, they're loud and all, But, you know, we're happy to have you. | ||
| Before this event, did you consider yourself a political person? | ||
| Are you a political activist? | ||
| Or did these mandates really inspire a lot of people to get involved too? | ||
| Otherwise, we're just happy to do their jobs and take care of themselves and their families. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wouldn't say I'm political by no means, but I did sit in this seat and I watched my country fall apart. | |
| And when something came along that I could contribute to, I was happy to join on with them and come and support them. | ||
| This is something that we needed as a country and that the world really needs. | ||
| And I'm in full support of all the other convoys going on around the world. | ||
| Mike, how do people follow you on social media? | ||
| Is there any way to follow you on Facebook, or how do people get to you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I do have a Facebook page. | |
| It's just under my own name, but I haven't been posting a whole lot there. | ||
| Being that I got a lot of time on my hands, I started actually posting on TikTok under the Pissed Off Trucker, and that has nothing to do with this at all. | ||
| That was my name on TikTok way before this even happened. | ||
| I'm just kind of using it to show people what's actually happening, because I'm getting calls from home from people that are watching the news, and they're checking to see if I'm okay, and I'm going, hey, it's happier. | ||
| People are happy and smiling. | ||
| I don't understand why they're smearing us so bad on the media. | ||
| Mike, thank you very much for joining us. | ||
| David, just hang on. | ||
| We'll do the break. | ||
| Mike, thank you very much. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Be back in a moment, the war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's take down the CCD! | |
| Okay, great. | ||
| Just decided to just kind of do it differently today. | ||
| Thank you, Denver. | ||
| MyPillow.com, promo code War Room, 50% off. | ||
| You got the bedding sale, you got the sale on everything to do with the Saskatchewan Screamer, or the Cyclone Bomb, whatever you want to call it, it's freezing. | ||
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| Of course, got a little inventory problem, got some overstocks, 50% off. | ||
| So go there today, support the armor-piercing show that is Mike Lindell. | ||
| I'm going to go back up to Ottawa. | ||
| David, when do you start? | ||
| Your live stream is going to start in 30 minutes again? | ||
| Yeah, I scheduled it to start at 11.15 and gonna run as long as the batteries last in this cold. | ||
| It's minus, it was minus 18 this morning, so maybe it'll warm up a few degrees during the day. | ||
| Are you, are you, you're a Canadian? | ||
| You're whining about the cold? | ||
| That's the first. | ||
| Dude, you're a tough guy. | ||
| I watch you all the time. | ||
| That is your day. | ||
| I just heard, are you whining? | ||
| You want a hug? | ||
| By the way, go to MyPillow.com. | ||
| Promo code Worm right now. | ||
| The battery packs that charge my phone while I stream, you know, continuously, they go dead in the cold. | ||
| But no, I'm not complaining. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Nice to get some sunlight. | ||
| Once again, how do people get to you? | ||
| Because you're very unique. | ||
| I love your stuff. | ||
| How do people get to you? | ||
| On YouTube, it's VivaFry, V-I-V-A-F-R-E-I. | ||
| On Twitter, it's TheVivaFry. | ||
| And Robert Barnes, another great lawyer, and I have a wonderful locals community, VivaBarnesLaw.Locals.com. | ||
| The live stream will be on YouTube and Rumble. | ||
| Simultaneously, Viva Fry. | ||
| David, thank you very much. | ||
| Appreciate you coming on today. | ||
| I want to make sure everybody watching is able to hook up to our Gitter account. | ||
| We've got a lot to go through and not much time. | ||
| I want to, RNC, why were these two not thrown, you know, Bossie puts the thing out there, throw them out of the conference, let's roll, they're not Republicans anymore, they're not part of your conference, and you get this kind of, I think, weak tea, you know, censure. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Well, I am typically not a big cheerleader for the Republican National Committee because I think that they aren't doing the work that you inspire the War Room Posse to do every day, and that is actually get out there and enhance your skill stack as an operative so that we can stop stolen elections in the future. | ||
| But yet, this last week, we actually saw more courage out of the RNC than we saw out of the Republican conference. | ||
| And that is an interesting moment to analyze. | ||
| The RNC has censured Kinzinger and Cheney. | ||
| I believe I have called for, for some months now, their removal from the Republican conference. | ||
| Why has that not happened? | ||
| You're just praising McCarthy's resolve here about the theory of governance, okay? | ||
| But this all falls to McCarthy, doesn't it? | ||
| I think that the leader could take a strong position to remove them. | ||
| His argument is, well, he doesn't want to send Democrats in droves to go vote for Liz Cheney in her upcoming jungle primary. | ||
| I think that... That's going to happen anyway. | ||
| Yeah, that ship has sort of sailed. | ||
| Liz Cheney acts like a Democrat, governs as someone hunting Republicans. | ||
| Also notice how she's running for president. | ||
| She's going to run in 2024 against Trump. | ||
| She's definitely going to primary Trump. | ||
| No, no, this sure is the turning of the year. | ||
| She's going to raise a ton of money. | ||
| I certainly hope she does, because seeing her on the debate stage with Trump will be quite something. | ||
| I don't think she'll ever get there, but she's going to run. | ||
| It's quite something to watch someone lose an election for Congress and then run for president. | ||
| I think she's actually going to punch up before then, but that's my theory. | ||
| OK, real quickly, does Tucker Carlson, what is going on with this thing? | ||
| Big moment this last week. | ||
| Behind closed doors, Congressman Jim Cooper gaslights the intelligence community to dig up dirt on Tucker Carlson because they don't like the fact that he is speaking against war in Ukraine. | ||
| Here's why this is important. | ||
| In the vast sea of headwinds that we face, whether it's big tech, big government, big media, the national security apparatus, we have these few nodes of communication, these outposts, whether it's the war room, Tucker's show, National Pulse, Revolver. | ||
| And we see a constant pattern of folks using the national security apparatus to shut down our effort to get our argument before the people. | ||
| In the Ukraine hoax, we saw all kind of information that targeted Sean Hannity, because Hannity was, you know, texting with Paul Manafort, and they acted like that was some great criminal conspiracy. | ||
| It was nothing, it was bupkis, but it was done to smear Sean Hannity while he was getting the truth out. | ||
| Now that Tucker Carlson is speaking against this war in Ukraine, He's been targeted. | ||
| He was also targeted by the NSA. | ||
| And not for nothing, Steve, but, you know, the War Room gets its fair share of attention from the national security apparatus as well. | ||
| And so does Matt Gaetz. | ||
| This shouldn't be lost on anybody. | ||
| That the buried lead of all this, that Cooper does this in the same week that the polling comes out, the analysis comes out from Nielsen and other shows, that Tucker's winning the demographic among young Democrats. | ||
| Tucker Carlson is being watched by as many young Democrats as the shows on MSNBC in the demographic, and that's why, one of the reasons they've got to take him down and blow him up. | ||
| And the fact that a member of Congress behind closed doors would ask this question then serves as a jumping-off point for them to go and engage in intelligence collection and say, well, there were members of Congress who had questions. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| If there's a member of Congress who thinks that Tucker Carlson is a Russian agent, let them make that appeal publicly. | ||
| And then let's go and have the debate in front of the American people. | ||
| But this behind-closed-doors effort to gaslight, target, smear, and destroy is straight out of the Atom Shift playbook, and we should call it out every time we see it. | ||
| Okay, for the great folks in the state legislature in Tennessee, this is the good work you did. | ||
| Jim Cooper retired this week after 29 years because of the 7-1 redistricting there, and that's having the war room head their back. | ||
| We're going to get into all this on Monday. | ||
| The whole first hour of the show is going to get into the details. | ||
| of 2022, but the nitty-gritty of how we're going to win this thing. | ||
| Well, and we are entering primary season, right? | ||
| March 1st, that's when it kicks off in Texas, rolls through August in New Hampshire, and when people want to know whether or not this is going to be a successful movement, a successful takeover, a successful oversight, it starts in primary season, and we're coming right up to it. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| We gotta win some of these primaries where the establishment's on one side, The fiery populists are on the other, and we need President Trump to have our back in that fight and to be backing the candidates that can go out there and ensure that his next term as president is an even more successful one. | ||
| Okay, real quickly, Firebrand, how do people get to you all over the place? | ||
| Firebrand's my podcast. | ||
| Firebrand's the book I wrote. | ||
| Folks can find me at Rep Matt Gaetz on both Twitter and Getter. | ||
| And this week's episode, coming up on Thursday, you're going to learn about a lot of these corrupt election officials. | ||
| We're going to make them famous with Marjorie Taylor Greene. | ||
| The podcast is going to be released on Thursday. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We'll get you back to tee that up and make sure everybody sees it. | ||
| By the way, personal changes? | ||
| Because the show is so well produced, right? | ||
| It's the best produced. | ||
| It's almost as well produced as Posobiec and Warren, but it's very well produced. | ||
| Well, I've got a wardrobe change. | ||
| I told them to give me their best Bannon. | ||
| I'm about three shirts short. | ||
| But I got the color concept right. | ||
| But the jacket alone is worth more than all my wardrobe combined. | ||
| You see, it's Armani, right? | ||
| It is not Armani. | ||
| I can't even spell Armani. | ||
| I think my wife bought it for me online. | ||
| Did I ever tell you you married up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have. | |
| Stay classy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Thank you very much for coming and taking time today. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| We broke some news here today, and I'm sure some heads are blowing up. | ||
| Matt Gaetz, the firebrand. | ||
| Matt, thank you very much. | ||
| Coming from Matt Gaetz. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to go to Beijing and find out about the meltdown. | ||
| The worst ratings in the history of the Olympics. | ||
| All Next. | ||
| Because of the war room. | ||
| All Next. | ||
| The war room posse, I should say. |
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