Feb. 26, 2022 - Bannon's War Room
48:51
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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So, | |
| so | ||
| it's a pristet Lobanovsky Now we're going to sit in front of us. | ||
| F**k, we're in the epicenter. | ||
| F**k, just f**k, just f**k, guys. | ||
| We are in the epicenter. Pizdez, just pizdez, just pizdez. | ||
| Guys. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| What the f**k is this? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| There is a car, there is a car. | ||
| There is another car. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| What the f**k? | ||
| You're so proud today. | ||
| Mr. President! | ||
| Are you worried about President Zelensky? | ||
| David Kalinsky! | ||
| Are you worried for President Zelensky? | ||
| Yeah, I'm worried. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't see. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| We're live, it's Saturday, the 26th of February, the year of our Lord, 2020. | ||
| We're in the War Room. | ||
| For our podcast audience, which is now approximately 150 million podcast downloads and people that watch us on podcast, which is enormous, our live audience dwarfs that every day. | ||
| The live audience, for the podcast audience at John Furtick's Radio, That cold open is just a small taste of the agony of Ukraine and the agony in Kiev and the agony of the Ukraine people. | ||
| A small taste. | ||
| And by the way, 90% of the video we can't show you because it's too bloody and too horrific. | ||
| But the punchline there is with all this going on, with all this carnage going on, Joe Biden This is a guy, the poll came out yesterday from NPR, PBS, Marist, which ain't The War Room, and ain't Trafalgar, and ain't Richard Beres, okay? | ||
| These are center-left pollsters. | ||
| That 67%, two-thirds, of independent voters think he's a failure. | ||
| 56% of all Americans I think he's a failure. | ||
| The worst numbers ever recorded for a president, okay? | ||
| Which he's not. | ||
| And I don't care what the left says. | ||
| This is an illegitimate regime. | ||
| Elections have consequences. | ||
| Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences. | ||
| And we're in, like I said, this thing's rolling now. | ||
| For everything that's going on, for all the false promises, for all the false hopes from Brussels, and Davos, and the City of London, and Washington D.C., and Hillary Clinton, and all of these, you know, the Atlantic Council, MSNBC, David Ignatian, all of the false hopes and promises you gave those Ukrainians who are now paying for it, to have the gall | ||
| To leave the White House to go up to Delaware to spend the weekend in Delaware when you should be in the Situation Room 24 hours a day? | ||
| You're, you're, you're, you're, and we're going to get to, we got Matt, Matthew Tierman in Berlin. | ||
| We have Ben Harnwell in Rome. | ||
| We're honored to have Rebecca Koffler. | ||
| She's taking time away from her busy schedule. | ||
| She's got to get to New York, but she's here with us today in studio for the first hour. | ||
| So we've got three experts. | ||
| With this feckless, hapless, limp-wristed sanctions, which are nothing, and any guy on Wall Street can tell you they're nothing. | ||
| And these people, and block by block, and they're going them on. | ||
| MSNBC, yeah, you know, these people are heroes. | ||
| Give them more hand grenades. | ||
| These are civilians. | ||
| Some of them don't know what end of the gun to shoot. | ||
| And they're cheering them on to go into the streets. | ||
| Yes, to blow yourself up and blow a bridge up. | ||
| For what? | ||
| For what? | ||
| This shows you the moral cowardice and bankruptcy of the global elites. | ||
| Nothing's better than to see it right there in Kiev. | ||
| Right there in Kiev. | ||
| This is a disgrace, and to have him leave the White House is a disgrace. | ||
| Politically, it's smarter for us to keep him around and not have him resign, but I gotta tell you, there should be a movement now to force this guy out, to force him to resign. | ||
| This is a disgrace. | ||
| No leader of this country has ever done what this guy's done, has ever given false promises. | ||
| Don't take it from me, this is not Steve Bannon, this is Zelensky. | ||
| Zelensky's sitting there in the middle of the night saying, where are you? | ||
| You committed, you promised, where are you? | ||
| And you got Barry McCaffrey over there, throwing the 173rd air drop from Colorado Springs. | ||
| It's all performative. | ||
| It's all, it's all optics. | ||
| But what is not optics and what's not performative is the blood in the streets in Kiev. | ||
| And it's all on their hands. | ||
| Yeah, I got it. | ||
| I got Koffler here. | ||
| I got Putin's, I said this from day one, he's a KGB criminal thug. | ||
| I got that part of it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But the world is supposed to be organized that you don't have KGB thugs that can steamroll you while you're cheering on people you're not going to help. | ||
| The people of Kiev have to understand that Calvary is not going to arrive. | ||
| That Calvary is going to sit in New York City in their studios or in Delaware at his weekend home. | ||
| So that Jill can put the bib on him and feed him the smashed peas. | ||
| Not in front of everybody, right? | ||
| They can do it in their basement. | ||
| I want to bring in Rebecca. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| We'll get to you in a second. | ||
| She's an expert. | ||
| She's of Russian descent, an American citizen, a former DIA intelligence officer. | ||
| We're going to get to her book, Putin's Playbook. | ||
| I got to go to Berlin. | ||
| We'll start in Berlin. | ||
| I'm going to go to Rome. | ||
| Berlin. | ||
| Matthew Tierman. | ||
| Is this a disgrace? | ||
| Can you believe the guy? | ||
| And where's the media? | ||
| I don't want to say it was Trump. | ||
| Forget that. | ||
| Where's the media? | ||
| You heard the thing. | ||
| Hey, what about Zelensky? | ||
| What about President Zelensky? | ||
| What about the guy taking incoming? | ||
| Tierman, Berlin, give us your assessment. | ||
| First, does Biden even know who Zelensky is? | ||
| I mean, he is. | ||
| Look, in his peak over the last 30 years as, you know, the senator of the great state of Delaware, he was always verging on vegetable status, but now he's a comatose vegetable. | ||
| I mean, he's turning to mush. | ||
| You know, power abhors a vacuum. | ||
| Why is Putin doing this now? | ||
| Timing. | ||
| There's absolutely no leadership in the West. | ||
| Boris Johnson's partying in 10 Downing Street. | ||
| Jen Stoltenberg has a billion dollar building that can't withstand a missile attack. | ||
| Putin is behaving rationally. | ||
| He's told us for two to three decades what he wants and who he is. | ||
| The fall of the Soviet Union and the USSR was the greatest tragedy to befall the contemporary geopolitical scene. | ||
| This is his view. | ||
| He screams it from the rooftops. | ||
| He says it to his people all the time. | ||
| He tried to invade Georgia in 2008, let Kuchinsky, was able to wake up the world and push him back. | ||
| In 2014, under Obama, when Obama was removing sanctions on the evil communist Castro regime, that perfect allegorical photo of him and Raul Castro holding up their hand and his limp wrist, and Raul looks like a strong man and Barack Obama looks like he wants to go back out to play golf and shoot 120. | ||
| This is exactly what you could expect in timing. | ||
| Trump is gone. | ||
| It's starting to filter out that Trump had told both Xi and Putin, you guys go and you start invading your neighbors and you're going to have big problems. | ||
| I will go to Moscow and Beijing and rain holy hell upon you. | ||
| Well, they didn't know if it was a bluff or not, and that's the beauty of bluffing. | ||
| But Matthew, hold on, hang on a second. | ||
| I'm going to get Rebecca Kaufman in a second. | ||
| But Matthew, hang on, hang on. | ||
| You're being too harsh. | ||
| Last night, the Brandenburg Gates had the color of the Ukrainian flag. | ||
| The Eiffel Tower had it. | ||
| 10 Downing Street had it. | ||
| I look all over, the Empire State Building had it. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Aren't they staying unified? | ||
| And I hear on MSNBC from General McCaffrey about how NATO's coming together and that diplomacy is so amazing and Biden's done so much. | ||
| All the colors of the Ukrainian flag are everywhere, from the Eiffel Tower to the Coliseum in Rome to the Brandenburg Gate to 10 Downing Street. | ||
| Right? | ||
| To the castles in Germany. | ||
| To the Empire State Building. | ||
| Aren't we standing united with the Ukrainian people? | ||
| Aren't we there? | ||
| Matthew Tierman, why do you mock that, sir? | ||
| This reminds me of when Boko Haram was razing villages in Africa, like My Lai in Vietnam, and kidnapping 90 young girls. | ||
| So Michelle Obama went to, I forget which room, the Eisenhower room in the White House, and held up a sign, Bring Back Our Girls, You're saying it's all performative. | ||
| Rebecca Kohler, you've done the book, Putin's playbook. | ||
| Is Matthew Tierman right? | ||
| Has Putin told us from day one who he is and what he is? | ||
| you know, Putin's not going to take seriously. | ||
| He was busy amassing troops on four different fronts. | ||
| Zelensky is out there fighting, he's literally picked up arms. | ||
| You're saying it's all performative. | ||
| Rebecca Kohler, you've done the book, Putin's playbook. | ||
| Is Matthew Tierman right? | ||
| Has Putin told us from day one who he is and what he is? | ||
| Is this part of his long-term plan? | ||
| He absolutely did, Steve. | ||
| And Joe Biden has failed to understand his opponent. | ||
| You know, Putin never made it a secret, and yet the Washington establishment apparatus has missed every single signpost, as what we call in the intelligence community, INW, Indications and Warnings, for 20 years, what Putin was going to do. | ||
| The Obama National Security Team, which is pretty much running right now the business under Joe Biden, they are complete failures. | ||
| Tierman and Rebecca, I want Matthew, you first. | ||
| We've got a couple of minutes here. | ||
| I notice now they're saying on MSNBC, McCaffrey and all these guys, from Putin's speech the other night, but if you read it, it's so logical from their perspective. | ||
| It's like an adult having an adult talk to a thing. | ||
| They're saying, we think he's crazy. | ||
| We think he's lost rationality. | ||
| We think he's crazy. | ||
| Tierman, they're totally performative and they fail to grasp the realities of geopolitics And Russia's thinking about itself as a country, a people, a culture, and an empire. | ||
| Matthew Tierman. | ||
| Let's go back to the 19th century great Russian novel starting with Lermontov going through Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and into the early 20th century and Gogol. | ||
| The Russian soul is what the Russian soul is. | ||
| And Russia believes that their place in the global dynamic is at the top. | ||
| China believes the same thing. | ||
| And maybe one day, if they should succeed in the next 20 years, they'll be battling each other. | ||
| But in the meantime, they're finding each other because they have a shared worldview. | ||
| They have been built out of communistic governance structures, which are autocratic, top-down. | ||
| And the Russian people, they enjoyed the perks of Westernization. | ||
| They enjoy the iPhones. | ||
| They enjoy the Western culture. | ||
| They enjoy the free travel in and out of Europe. | ||
| But with that at risk, we'll see how much they can tolerate At the same time, you've got the Russian oligarchs who we want to sanction. | ||
| This will be the first time since North Korea that we're sanctioning a global leader. | ||
| He has said that as a tantamount to cutting off all ties, which is probably appropriate at this point, because what kind of ties should we have directly with a guy who's now moving toward the NATO peripheral border? | ||
| If he takes Ukraine, I don't think he will, but if he does, NATO's next, the Baltics are next, the Balkans are next, Romania's right there across the sea, which is a NATO member and paying their fair share. | ||
| So Putin, I think, is actually losing a little bit domestically. | ||
| You've got huge protests. | ||
| Now he's said publicly that the media in Russia is not allowed to call it a war for fear of Protesters will be met with, you know, the usual harsh internal outcomes that happen in Russia when there are protesters, which will be arrests. | ||
| You look at the countries that are supporting Russia right now. | ||
| China, Venezuela, North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Algeria, Lebanon, Belarus and Syria. | ||
| Are these our allies? | ||
| Are these the kind of people that we can engage in real diplomacy with? | ||
| Again, these are people who tell you who they are, and we need to act with resolution, not boots on the ground, but resolve. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hang on. | |
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to get back. | ||
| We've got Rebecca Kohler, we've got Ben Harnwell, Matthew Tierman. | ||
| We're going to go to the convoys. | ||
| The question is, does America have a dog in the fight in the Ukraine? | ||
| All next in the war. | ||
|
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Okay, we have the annual betting sale at MyPillow.com. | |
| We cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room, pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
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| Got a lot more things we're going to talk about at MyPillow.com. | ||
| The great armor-piercing shell that is Mike Lindell. | ||
| Okay, let's go to Rome and Ben Harnwell. | ||
| Ben, are there protests there today? | ||
| Tell me what is going on. | ||
| You're down at your favorite spot, and I hear there's a big crowd there. | ||
| There is, Steve. | ||
| These protesters rather thoughtlessly occupied my normal standing position. | ||
| So when I approached them, I saw the red flags, before I saw the hammer and sickle on them, I said, what are you guys protesting about? | ||
| Because I saw the sign saying, peace in Ukraine. | ||
| I thought, is that anti-NATO there? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| And they said, yeah, we're protesting against the Ukrainian bombardment of the Russians in the Donbass. | ||
| This is a communist protest. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
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Very interesting. | |
| We'll come back to you, Ben, in a second. | ||
| I want to bring in Rebecca Koffler. | ||
| Rebecca, you wrote this book, Putin's Playbook, Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America. | ||
| Now, the theory that, like Matthew Terman says, when somebody tells you who they are, Believe them, right? | ||
| So who is Putin? | ||
| How does this tie into what Terman said is the Russian soul? | ||
| Because you're of Russian descent, right? | ||
| You're born in, what, Kazakhstan of Russian lineage? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So you're Russian, came over here, you're now an American citizen, worked as a DIA officer, a lot of the books redacted. | ||
| Redacted, I mean, when it went through the security screening of, I guess, CIA and DIA, they took certain parts of the book out, and you can see that, and there's quite a bit of the book that's blacked out. | ||
| So, what's your theory of the case? | ||
| Tell us, is Tierman right? | ||
| Is this about the Russian soul, and that Russia actually thinks that, in their heart, they should be at the top of the heap? | ||
| Absolutely correct. | ||
| Just like Americans believe that Americans are exceptional, the Russian national identity is just wrapped up in the idea of exceptionalism, the great power, what the Russians called derzhava, right? | ||
| The Russians felt humiliated after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fact that nobody was listening to them anymore. | ||
| The United States ignored pretty much Russia. | ||
| Believe him and I can't tell you said my book is redacted. | ||
| dividend was coming, but Putin always wanted to reconstitute the supranational alliance similar to USSR. | ||
| And so, like you said, Steve, when your opponent tells you something, believe him. | ||
| And I can't tell you, you said my book is redacted. | ||
| Of course it's redacted. | ||
| Because just like right now, you know, Joe Biden was not paying attention to what Putin was saying, right? | ||
| He kept engaging with the Russians in negotiations, even though Putin was gradually assembling a most formidable battle-ready force. | ||
| All but encircling Ukraine? | ||
| President Biden continued to negotiate with them when there was nothing to negotiate. | ||
| Well, but by the same token, when I kept waving the flag, warning when I was a DIA officer, here's what the Russians were planning to do, here's Putin's plan, The Obama administration officials in the Pentagon kept telling us, don't worry. | ||
| Why are you talking to us about a war with Russia? | ||
| We're not going to war with Russia. | ||
| We want to reset. | ||
| And we're like, well, you're not planning to go to war, but they sure believe that they will. | ||
| And in fact, it's the Russian intelligence assessment that a war between the U.S. | ||
| and Russia is inevitable. | ||
| Listen again. | ||
| This is what they have concluded through their threat forecasting process, which is very elaborate. | ||
| It's 50 years out. | ||
| Yes, perhaps not today, not tomorrow, the day after, but they believe in the next 10, 20, 50 years, there will be a shooting war between us And the Russians. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because our foreign policies, national interests are on a collision course with the Russians. | ||
| We're fighting over the same territory. | ||
| What's happening right now in Ukraine is not about Ukraine at all. | ||
| It's about who is going to call the shots in Eurasia. | ||
| Is it Washington? | ||
| Or is it Moscow? | ||
| Or is it Beijing? | ||
| So the Russians want to make sure that it's them. | ||
| This is what I'll bring to you in a second, and Harnwell, you hang there and roam with us. | ||
| It is an economy that is smaller than New York State. | ||
| It's in a demographic death spiral. | ||
| Here's what you have. | ||
| You have a bunch of KGB guys, a bunch of tough hombres that run it, and they're armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. | ||
| And I think, quite frankly, second tier, the combined arms of the Russian military does not match the combined arms of the United States military. | ||
| However, I know you'd be fighting on their home turf. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party is an existential threat in the senior part in anything Russia does. | ||
| They're the existential threat to the United States, economically, financially, culturally, cyber warfare, economic warfare, even kinetic warfare now in the South China Sea. | ||
| All of this, and why do we have a dog in the fight? | ||
| In the Ukraine. | ||
| The Ukraine is a historic part of the Russian Empire. | ||
| Am I not correct in that? | ||
| So why did Davos, why did NATO, why did EU, why did George Bush commit to Georgia and to Ukraine, even part of NATO, why did the West fall into this trap of trying to get in Russia's face on their home territory, ma'am? | ||
| Just like you said, Steve, it's a fetish, right? | ||
| They believe that the international world order is the mantra, right? | ||
| But the Russians and the Chinese, they absolutely don't care. | ||
| You're saying the post-war international rules-based order, which is what they say. | ||
| They have ignored that. | ||
| Putin always was planning to ignore that, and we weren't listening to them. | ||
| Right now we're in a situation, the reason why Biden promised to Putin that even in the event of a small incursion there will be no punishment is this, is because we have no plan. | ||
| Putin for 20 years has been developing the playbook which I described, which includes not only a military option, but it includes a whole series of non-kinetic options, cyber warfare, space warfare. | ||
| something called active measures, which is election interference, assassinations, intimidations, classic espionage. | ||
| And so he was actually gaming this out. | ||
| He's a long-term planner, okay? | ||
| And unfortunately, we are always behind the curve. | ||
| We're in the reactive mode because we didn't believe Putin when he was telling us the Russians declared in their 2010 military doctrine that the U.S. | ||
| and NATO was Russia's security threat number one. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they view NATO as an offensive military alliance. | ||
| And they don't believe when Washington and the Davos crowd tell them, oh, we're simply, you know, defensive and we want to democratize Ukraine. | ||
| They don't believe it. | ||
| Putin is a real politic. | ||
| He believes it's all about control. | ||
| And he wants to make sure that he's the one that controls His perceived sphere of influence and not Washington. | ||
| That's the pure cold-blooded rationale. | ||
| Matthew Tierman, your assessment and analysis, sir. | ||
| The decadent West that is overly self-indulgent, focusing on a woke military with transgender flags replacing American flags has been steadily, since the Cold War ended, And Fukuyama hubristically wrote the book, The End of History, We Basically Won, and we saw how fallacious that was in the last 20 years of Middle Eastern engagement. | ||
| But they've been engaging the, one of my favorite quotes, Ayn Rand said, you can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. | ||
| And that's where we are. | ||
| We now have consequences. | ||
| We're now pushing up against the NATO border. | ||
| He is retrenching and Soviet revanchism is in full effect. | ||
| He is certainly, as he gets his Crimean land bridge and starts building his sort of peripheral Soviet sphere back up in his near abroad, he will make more place for Georgia. | ||
| Armenian Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan is on the Caspian Sea across from Iran, highly strategic. | ||
| He is going to continue doing this unless we show the world we actually take action. | ||
| I'm not saying boots on the ground. | ||
| We do not want that. | ||
| Americans have no appetite for it, nor should they. | ||
| This is not our neighborhood, as you have pointed out, but there are grave consequences to going full Neville Chamberlain, 1930s UK, and allowing a strongman to invade his neighbors without taking any action. | ||
| We've got tools. | ||
| We can sanction the hell out of them. | ||
| We can also send Zelensky ammo. | ||
| He's got troops. | ||
| He's got people. | ||
| Ukraine's got 48 million people, probably more realistically it's closer to 40, and the official date is wrong because there's been such an out-migration in the last 10 years. | ||
| And all the, hang on, and all the, you're drinking your own Kool-Aid, and all the footage I've seen, I have not seen, and I'm sure it's out there so I'm not denigrating it, but I want to see some footage of actually what I would consider a military unit of Ukraine. | ||
| I've seen civilians, I've seen a couple of guys in camis running around putting grenades on bridges. | ||
| I haven't seen anything I would consider a military combined arms with maybe some armor and some troops and maybe some close air support. | ||
| You know, I hear we got the go. | ||
| There's a reason for that coming up. | ||
| OK. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Well, the heavy armaments, the heavy armaments. | ||
| Uh, is what he went after first, 48 to 72 hours ago. | ||
| He took out a lot of that capacity and that's why the chattering class was saying he was going to roll right over. | ||
| And I said on this show two days ago and yesterday, it wasn't going to be that easy. | ||
| The Ukrainians have the same sort of fighting spirit that the Poles did in the Warsaw Uprising that the Russians do. | ||
| And when they defend their homeland, you get, you know, 15 million Ukrainian able-bodied men and you give them an AK and some flash grenades. | ||
| They're not going away lightly into the night. | ||
| They're not... Zelensky, the president, is taking up arms. | ||
| The guy's an actor. | ||
| He's Ukrainian Reagan. | ||
| He's strong morally, and he's going out there putting his money where it's... I'd actually say he's... I think he's a stand-up comic or he's a comedic actor. | ||
| I'm not sure he's Reagan. | ||
| He's an actor. | ||
| But he's very brave, don't get me wrong. | ||
| He's standing there, he's showing a lot of courage. | ||
| God, you don't have to scratch you deep and the slob comes out, Tierman. | ||
|
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Okay, we're gonna take a short commercial break. | |
| Got the whole posse here next in the War Room. | ||
| Pandemic with Stephen K Banham. | ||
| The epidemic is a demon and we cannot let this demon hide. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K Banham. | ||
| Okay, welcome back to The Worm. | ||
| I want to go, we got, we're kind of juggling today because we've got some guests that got a punch. | ||
| Other people are going to stay in. | ||
| I want to go to John Sparopoulos, the great filmmaker, out there with the People's Convoy. | ||
| It's day four, sir. | ||
| Are you through New Mexico? | ||
| Did you stay in New Mexico or Texas last night, John? | ||
|
unidentified
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Stayed in Texas at 80 miles from where the truckers were. | |
| It's nearest decent hotel. | ||
| And so we're out here on Route 40. | ||
| They're coming down the road in about a half an hour or so. | ||
| Uh, they were just pulling up. | ||
| Wendy Strachmahoney, my colleague on this from Uncovered DC, has been live streaming this morning. | ||
| She's in a truck tab right now, and they're on the way east, and they're going to be coming by here, and as soon as we see the trucks, we're joining in. | ||
| They have a lot of excitement on the road. | ||
| I talked to the co-organizer, Mike Landis, last night. | ||
| He said he's been surprised. | ||
| He was hoping for a nice turnout on the bridges, but he can't believe how much it's been. | ||
| He said in the last two nights ago when they pulled into a remote area they were wondering what they were going to do for food because they have some with them and they thought they'd get in the back of the trucks and get the food out and he said when they pulled in three bonfires were going the locals were cooking all kinds of food and they were they were they were getting fed hot food and local cuisine so they've been welcomed everywhere they've gone. | ||
| Today we go to Elk City, Oklahoma. | ||
|
unidentified
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Today we go to Elk City, Oklahoma. | |
| Hey, let's get, I want the logistics up and the rally points and everything like that, the overpasses so people can meet them. | ||
| Where are they going to stop tonight, John? | ||
|
unidentified
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We did? | |
| Okay, fine. | ||
| If he came back out, let me know. | ||
| Let's go to Rome, and we're going to go from Amarillo, Texas on I-40 now to Rome, to the heart of Rome, Ben Harnwell. | ||
| Ben, you've thought this through. | ||
| The capitals in Berlin, and in Paris, and in Rome, and in London, they all got the Ukrainian flag on all their national monuments. | ||
| Are they taking any actions while the Ukrainian people suffer under this onslaught and die in the streets? | ||
| Not professional soldiers, brave individuals who are quite patriotic and want to defend their homeland are dying by the dozens every hour. | ||
| What's happening in the great capitals of Europe that are the beating heart of the European Union and NATO, sir? | ||
| Nothing is happening, Steve. | ||
| Basically, the various European capitals ...announced a series of sanctions a couple of days ago, which they have been honing over the last 48 hours. | ||
| But there's no real great movement. | ||
| And I'm going to sort of try and expose a thesis now as to why that is. | ||
| But I want to say here that my basic analysis of this situation, to answer your direct question, is this. | ||
| As Russian bombs rain down on Ukraine, EU capitals are reduced to the pathetic spectacle of performative virtue signalling. | ||
| Now, I was listening to, for example, Axios' morning news bulletin. | ||
| I listened to the FTs, the economists, just to get a sense of what the globalists are saying. | ||
| And their analysis is, pretty much as you were saying a short while ago, Steve, is that Putin is crazy. | ||
| Well, you know, I don't quite believe so. | ||
| I don't believe you outfoxed the EU, the NATO, the US, everyone, by being crazy. | ||
| I actually think he's been so many steps ahead and he's been working on his present dominant position for ten years at least. | ||
| And it basically goes like this, the thesis. | ||
| It's made up of four points. | ||
| So the first point is this. | ||
| I'm going to start at where we are now and then work back. | ||
| And that's why I think he's probably the shrewdest political player apart from President Donald Trump on the world stage right now. | ||
| So it's the first point of this four-part thesis. | ||
| Putin calculated he could get away with invading Ukraine, and he calculated that correctly, believing that enough important EU member states were too dependent on Russian gas to employ the sanctions nuclear option, which is expulsion from SWIFT. | ||
| And indeed, Berlin and Rome have vetoed that, as suggested by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. | ||
|
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One of the reasons is... Hang on. | |
| I want to ask our guest because we're going to lose her. | ||
| Koffler. | ||
| Is his first point correct? | ||
| What Hunter Wood just said? | ||
| The fact that he knew all along? | ||
| Yeah, he's been planning this for a long time. | ||
| Oh, absolutely! | ||
| And in fact, let's talk about the sanctions. | ||
| The sanctions policy is absolutely ludicrous, okay? | ||
| And if Biden was hoping that it's going to change Putin's behavior and his mindset, it wasn't going to do that. | ||
| It hasn't done it since 2014. | ||
| Let's look at the economics of it. | ||
| Russia has the GDP one $1.48 trillion, right? | ||
| It's only 3.11% of the global GDP. | ||
| What are you gonna sanction, right? | ||
| And besides, Putin has been sanction-proofing his economy since 2014. | ||
| He has beefed up his international reserves to an all-time high of $630 billion. | ||
| He has been pursuing a de-dollarization strategy, right, to ensure that the Russian sovereign wealth fund zeroed out the dollar, okay? | ||
| The $40 billion that we had is zeroed out in favor of the Chinese yuan, of the euro, and of the gold. | ||
| He has been pursuing an import substitution strategy. | ||
| So like he said, he has been at it for several years, right? | ||
| Most notably, 20 years. | ||
| And we haven't. | ||
| We don't have a plan. | ||
| The reason he's cocky today, he knows we don't have a plan. | ||
| Every single war game that I participated in, between red and blue, I was in the red team. | ||
| Blue lost. | ||
| This is why you see... Every war game. | ||
| Every single war game. | ||
| Every war game. | ||
| The blue team, which is the good guys, us, lost. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Yes, Steve. | ||
| This is why, because you see the Antony Blinkens, the Jen Psaki's and the Jake Sullivan's, they keep talking about diplomacy and all this stuff. | ||
| They don't understand. | ||
| Here's what Putin said about diplomacy. | ||
| He said, Politeness and weapons can achieve so much more than politeness alone. | ||
| He views diplomacy as politeness and so with Jen Psaki and her extreme arrogance is irritating because they really have failed to understand the judo practitioner who always wants to keep his opponent off balance. | ||
| That's who Putin is. | ||
| He's a KGB officer, okay? | ||
| He can't be appealed to with rationale how, you know, diplomatic, we're gonna like do this and sing all kumbaya. | ||
| That's not how he thinks. | ||
| It's just ridiculous. | ||
| Ted Harwell, we'll go back to you. | ||
| Continuing on your thesis, here's what I find interesting. | ||
| Axios, everybody, FT, last night on MSNBC, he's crazy. | ||
| He sounds crazy when he talks. | ||
| He's crazy and he's within blocks of taking over the capital of Kiev, while these guys are having coffee and tea in France and having high tea in London, and Joe Biden is in Delaware. | ||
| He's not even in the Situation Room. | ||
| The Democrats gotta understand, you're gonna go down to single-digit approval. | ||
| He's abandoned his post. | ||
| He abandoned his post as Commander-in-Chief. | ||
| Look, he's illegitimate to start with. | ||
| His regime is totally illegitimate. | ||
| Trump won, we know that. | ||
| But now, at least on a temporary basis, it's his post. | ||
| And he abandoned his post. | ||
| Everything you gotta see to juxtapose what's going on is Zelensky sitting there, you know, with the Kalashnikovs and the AK-47s sitting there trying to rally guys to defend it. | ||
| Yes, Steve. | ||
| I mean, that is the strange situation that we're in. | ||
| Where are you? You promised me, you said support. Where's NATO? Where are the arms? Where are the hard sanctions? Where's bringing down Russia? And he's flying off to go to Delaware. | ||
| Ben Harnwell. | ||
| Yes, Steve, I mean, that is the strange situation that we're in. I'm going to go continue with this argument. Excuse me, that the comrades behind me have started playing their anthem. | ||
| I hope you can hear me clearly. | ||
| So, I'm going to come to your favourite European capital. | ||
| It's always great having The International playing in the background as Ben Harnwell reads out his theory of the case. | ||
| Go ahead, sir. | ||
| So, it's actually all we're saying. | ||
| I don't know if you can hear the music, how clearly it's coming across. | ||
| It's all we are saying is give peace a chance, which immediately brings back So, we're going to go forward to Eurostats. | ||
| By the way, the late, great PJ O'Rourke said, all we are saying is give war a chance. | ||
| So, Hungary and Latvia have, and these statistics are from Eurostat, which is the European Union's official statistics agency. | ||
| Hungary and Latvia get 100% of their domestic gas consumption via Russia. | ||
| Okay, Finland, 67.1%. | ||
| Now, Germany, 57%. | ||
| Italy, 40.3%. | ||
| France, 20%. | ||
| And the UK, 4%. | ||
| Germany 57%, Italy 40.3%, France 20% and the UK 4%. | ||
| That is the illustration of what I was just saying, how Putin has been playing the long game and leaving the European capitals, the significant European economies in a position dependent, absolutely totally dependent on imports of gas from Russia. | ||
| Okay, hold it. So hang on a second, stop. Are you saying that this performative virtue signaling that they don't, in real politic, they don't have a choice? They can give all the happy talk and... | ||
| They don't have a choice. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Rebecca Kohler, is that true? | ||
| Yes, yes, absolutely. | ||
| He's been playing such a long game. | ||
| He has factored everything in economics, our dependency, the West's dependency on the energy, and also what he has figured out is that we are so dependent on technology for every aspect of our warfighting and for every aspect of our civilian life. | ||
| That he developed a cyber warfare capability and a space warfare capability. | ||
| Remember DHS and FBI just warned Americans that we should be bracing ourselves for Putin's cyber attack? | ||
| Well what are we supposed to do with that information? | ||
| Where was the government? | ||
| Where was the Pentagon? | ||
| I mean they made such stupid decisions that at some point The US government was running Kaspersky antivirus software on its networks. | ||
| Kaspersky is owned by a KGB officer who does work for Russian intelligence services. | ||
| How stupid is that? | ||
| You can't make this stuff up. | ||
| And that software was running on our networks until former President Trump gave an order to kick him out. | ||
| In fact, Trump was the only person who actually pursued sensible policy towards Russia. | ||
| He did three things that struck at the heart of Russia's asymmetric strategy or new generation warfare strategy. | ||
| Here's what Trump did. | ||
| He has established the Space Force, right? | ||
| The Russians actually established their Space Force in 2001. | ||
| So we were vacillating for 17 years until Trump came and did that. | ||
| And that countered Russian space warfare strategy and their belief that they can really exploit our vulnerabilities. | ||
| That's one. | ||
| What's the second thing? | ||
| He authorized cyber offensive operations against adversaries like Russia. | ||
| And the third thing that he did is he authorized the development of a low yield nuclear warhead Why? | ||
| It's because Trump understood that Putin has a very unique nuclear doctrine where he was planning to use, and is still planning to use, if it comes to that, tactical nuclear weapons to de-escalate conflict, right? | ||
| So Trump's development of low-yield You're saying they have a doctrine of using tactical nukes to de-escalate. | ||
|
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Give me 30 seconds of that before we go to break. | |
| Heck yeah! | ||
| If they perceive that we are about to intervene, even in a conventional manner on behalf of Ukraine or anyone else, and they would lose a conflict, then they would pop a low-yield tactical nuke To signal to us that they would ratchet it all the way up to make us to stand down. | ||
| And Trump's doctrine countered that, okay? | ||
| If we have our own low-yield capability, then Putin would be afraid. | ||
| Very smart. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| We got Rebecca Koffler for one more segment. | ||
| We got Ben Harnwell in Rome with the Red Guard, Red Brigade. | ||
| And we've got Matthew Tierman in Berlin. | ||
| We're gonna go back to the convoys. | ||
| All of it, strap in. | ||
|
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You're in the war room. | |
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| Ken, first to you, bring us up to speed. | ||
| What is being presented to the President? | ||
| We should caution, we don't know that he's signed off on any of this, but what is so interesting is that this would be, in advance of any attacks against us, it would be offense, or defense if you will, defense of Ukraine, which was hit again with cyber attacks this morning. | ||
| That's exactly right, Andrea, and that's what's so significant here. | ||
| American officials and others briefed on the matter tell Courtney, QB, and me that these options include things like shutting off the internet in parts or all of Russia, disrupting trains and railroads that are resupplying Russian troops in Ukraine, everything from making the trains not function to making them fall off the tracks, as one person Put it. | ||
| These options are designed to disrupt, but not destroy, we are told. | ||
| So they would fall short of an act of war. | ||
| They would be carried out by a variety of agencies, including U.S. | ||
| Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the CIA would be involved. | ||
| They're designed to be deniable, to be secret, and the fact that we're reporting on them sort of underscores the complexity of all this. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| This is the madness. | ||
| This is when you don't have a plan and you're grassy for it. | ||
| Rebecca Koffler, you were at DAA as an officer. | ||
| You're the author of the book, Putin's Playbook. | ||
| It's from Regnery. | ||
| Go to Amazon and get it. | ||
| You must read this. | ||
| What they're talking about is active wars. | ||
| We have three types of war. | ||
| Cyber and information war, economic war, and kinetic. | ||
| Are what they're talking about acts of war in your mind? | ||
| The most important thing, Steve, is that Putin is going to perceive it as an act of war. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Russia has the world's most formidable cyber arsenal that rivals the U.S. | ||
| We are peer-to-peer with the Russians in terms of cyber. | ||
| They're superior in programming power, speed of attack, stealthiness, right? | ||
| And they have a preemptive doctrine. | ||
| If they hear this conversation, they can decide – they meaning the Kremlin – and the one person who is in charge of the entire Russian cyber doctrine is Putin. | ||
| He may authorize a preemptive strike. | ||
| This is why our DHS and FBI were warning about that. | ||
| So clearly, there's no plan- But a preemptive strike against, in cyber, is an act of war against the United States, is it not? | ||
| It depends on how you do it. | ||
| Because cyber is a very flexible thing. | ||
| You can do a reversible attack, a reversible type attack, right? | ||
| Just like a cyber intrusion, ransomware like we had, the Russians did. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| There's all type of modalities and methodologies to do it. | ||
| But doing that to take down our power grid or mess with our financial system, that just by definition is an act of war. | ||
| You don't need a tank to shoot up a ballistic shell anymore to be an act of war. That's an act of war in the modern warfare, in modern post-industrial society. That is an act of war. Just like if we did it to knock down their trains or take down their internet, that is an act of war. | ||
| Is it not? It is an act of war and in fact the Russians perceive cyber on par with nuclear because by conducting a cyber Pearl Harbor type attack you can pretty much plunge the entire society society into darkness. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| If that's what we're talking about in both countries, the United States and Russia have such capabilities. | ||
| So, we're talking about serious business right now, and we are at such a critical moment, one wrong move, and we are in a shooting war with Russia, because things in cyber escalate like wildfire into the military domain, and before you know it, we will be at war with Russia and risking a nuclear escalation, because the Russians have prepared to fight a limited nuclear war. | ||
| They've trained Putin routinely, does nuclear exercises, and we haven't. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| When was the last time either President Obama or President Biden presided over a nuclear simulation exercise? | ||
| Never. | ||
| The Russians do it routinely. | ||
| This is why Putin is cocky. | ||
| He knows not only we're dependent on their energy, we're dependent on technology, and he wants to exploit us. | ||
| Real quickly, I'm going to get you a couple of minutes, you've got to head up, and people are going to be seeing you on other TV shows over the weekend on Newsmax, Fox and others. | ||
| We've got Harnwell, we'll go back to him in Rome in a moment, but I've got to ask you, as smart as the guys in Brussels are in the EU and Davos and everything like this, why did they push this forward to get Ukraine, all this pushing of Ukraine to join the EU, to potentially be part of NATO, what were they missing when they did that, when they instigated this whole effort back in 2014? | ||
| Well, first, it makes them feel good, right? | ||
| Isn't it nice, you know, to say we're going to democratize Ukraine, human rights, RTP, responsibility to protect? | ||
| But in reality, it's pure incompetence. | ||
| They didn't know who they're dealing with, right? | ||
| If they knew, Who Putin was and let me say this all this talk how Putin is crazy and a madman as Delusional that simply minimizes the threat. | ||
| It's the same people who kept crowing that Russia is a gas station Masquerade masquerading as a country its GDP is the size of Italy, okay? | ||
| It's like just minimizing the threat Obama was laughing at Romney when Romney was clearly telling him Russia Romney clearly was listening to his intelligence briefings, right? | ||
| So Obama laughed it off. | ||
| And so it's just purely, it's negligence. | ||
| You know, Biden as the Commander-in-Chief, he has failed us because now we are risking a potential cyber war with Russia. | ||
| He has failed Ukraine. | ||
| He has failed the American people. | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| The book is Putin's playbook out from Regnery. | ||
| You can get it on Amazon. | ||
| How do people get 30 seconds? | ||
| How do people get your writings? | ||
| How do they find it? | ||
| What's your social media? | ||
| I'm on Twitter at Rebecca, R-E-B-E-K-A-H 0132. | ||
| I have a website, RebeccaKofler.com. | ||
| Just Google me. | ||
| I write for the Wall Street Journal, for Fox News, for the New York Post, Washington Times, you name it. | ||
| Just Google my name and you'll see my writings. | ||
| We hope that we'll get all that up on the platforms in the chat room. | ||
| So I hope this is the first of many appearances here. | ||
| Extraordinary. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to come back. | ||
| We'll be with the Convoys. | ||
| We've got Dr. Malone, Dennis Sepak. | ||
| We've got in Berlin, Matthew Tierman. | ||
| In Rome, the one, the only, Ben Harnwell. | ||
| All of it in the second hour of the War Room. |
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