Oct. 7, 2022 - Bannon's War Room
48:01
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| That's what you're fighting for. | ||
| I mean, every day you're out there. | ||
| What they're doing is blowing people off. | ||
| If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians, get total control and total power. | ||
| Because this is just like in Arizona. | ||
| This is just like in Georgia. | ||
| It's another element that backs them into a corner and shows their lies and misrepresentations. | ||
| This is why this audience is going to have to get engaged. | ||
| As we've told you, this is the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | |
| War Room, Battleground. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| For years, I wore the uniform of the United States Army. | ||
|
unidentified
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One of the biggest challenges, besides deployment, was serving in Alpha Company. | |
| There's a lot of pressure on these soldiers, you know. | ||
| There were suicides there, and that's when Doug came in, and he instilled discipline. | ||
| He took it very seriously. | ||
| He did not want any of his soldiers to be hurt. | ||
| We did different things with the soldiers, working with the soldiers. | ||
| Good projects, things like better training, stuff to keep their mind going. | ||
| With a leader like that, things started to happen. | ||
| I don't remember any more suicides. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was really important to Doug to connect personally with his soldiers. | |
| He did it by bringing up confidence, by bringing up standards. | ||
| We'd be on a run, and soldier's trying to get tired. | ||
| He'd run all the way around it, trying to motivate soldiers. | ||
| And I kept looking back, and he'd be back. | ||
| There was this soldier who was falling out. | ||
|
unidentified
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But he'd sit there and go, you can do this, you can do this. | |
| And next thing you know, he's bringing them back to the flock. | ||
|
unidentified
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I guess I admire most Doug's tenacity. | |
| And so it's important for me that I bring everyone along with me and give everyone a hope and opportunity. | ||
| I want every Pennsylvanian to know that I will have their back. | ||
| All right, Jack Posobiec in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Steve Bannon on assignment. | ||
| He's actually winging out to, I believe, New Mexico with Mike Lindell right now. | ||
| So I am in, and we've got coming in hot right now from the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. | ||
| It's none other than Senator Doug Mastriano. | ||
| You just saw his ad right there, this incredible ad that's going up on television across Pennsylvania. | ||
| Senator Mastriano, how are you today? | ||
| Thanks for having me on, Jack, and what a great event we had this past weekend with you down in the southeast of the state. | ||
| Well, I thank you. | ||
| I appreciate going up there. | ||
| It's always great to be able to be home, and I think that really we have to understand that Pennsylvania is truly the keystone when we're looking at our country. | ||
| We're looking at where we are in 2022, 2024. | ||
| You know, interestingly enough, there was something you mentioned even before we get into | ||
| The news of the day there was something you mentioned on or in that speech that I really stuck with me and it was this idea of every day now we're hearing about pipelines we're hearing about geopolitics we're hearing about energy and we're talking about Nord Stream and Ukraine and Russia and the Saudis and OPEC and everything else but what you said is how come we're not talking about Pennsylvania we're not talking about the Marcellus Shale find that God provided for the people of Pennsylvania and the people of America | ||
| Right under our feet. | ||
| And you actually had this idea about potentially bringing a pipeline for the LNG from Marcellus, the Marcellus find all the way out in the West, through to Philadelphia and then building an LNG terminal, maybe even getting the old ConocoPhillips refinery back going again, and all of the jobs that would come through for Pennsylvania. | ||
| And I said, why isn't anybody else talking about this? | ||
| Can you walk us through that idea? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And you're absolutely right. | ||
| You know, God has blessed us with incredible natural gas with coal and very high-grade oil in the center and western part of our state. | ||
| And could you imagine if we had built two pipelines, like the C1 going up to Erie, that will take a bit more time because there's not an infrastructure in place. | ||
| But one to the southeast in Philly, with access to the Atlantic Ocean via the Delaware River, it'll bring millions of dollars throughout the state, especially Philly, that we have a terminal there that could solve a lot of the world's woes, that we could help Germany get off of Russian oil and gas. | ||
| Something, by the way, Ronald Reagan warned them against in the 80s when the first pipeline was built by the Soviets across East Germany. | ||
| And we can help our allies in the Baltic nations get off of it. | ||
| We can bring money to Pennsylvania and help bring order and stability to the world. | ||
| And we're sitting on it. | ||
| It's interesting to me that Joe Biden has no problem Begging the Saudi king for help. | ||
| And the Saudi king, in effect, gave our president a middle finger and said, no, we're going to slash oil production. | ||
| And much of the answers to our woes and the nation's woes are right here underneath our feet in Pennsylvania. | ||
| So on day one, we're going to shoot for being number one in energy in the nation. | ||
| As a governor, I have control of what goes on within the state, you know, by and large, as far as state land. | ||
| So we're going to open up state lands. | ||
| We're going to roll back regulations, get us out of this regional greenhouse gas initiative. | ||
| Yeah, I think it would be amazing. | ||
| just kind of turn the lights on, drive down energy costs in Pennsylvania and be open for business. | ||
| Yeah, I think it would be amazing. | ||
| You know, I had that line this weekend. | ||
| I said, you know, we need all the different regions of Pennsylvania to unite, to save our state from the Biden regime, whether you're, so I was saying, whether you're from Sheets, Pennsylvania, or Rutters, Pennsylvania, Turkey Hill, or Wawa, Pennsylvania. | ||
| I mean, but but now combine that with what you're saying there. | ||
| Imagine if you go to buy your gas, whether you're at Wawa or Sheetz or whatever, and you're actually you're actually filling your car up with Pennsylvania gas that we got in Pennsylvania. | ||
| We refined in Pennsylvania. | ||
| And now we're selling in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Imagine what that would do for our economy. | ||
| Not only imagine the amount of jobs for primary, secondary and tertiary industries that would come up through that. | ||
| And I think you're right, by the way, the idea of being able to build pipelines up to Erie, then throughout the entire Northeast. | ||
| I mean, we would become a net energy exporter. | ||
| And that would be amazing. | ||
| And just for people who know out there, our liquefied natural gas industry has the capability now to confer, to refine that LNG to car gas. | ||
| All we need is a plant built in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Could you imagine? | ||
| I mean, we could become self-sufficient in Pennsylvania as far as energy and become an exporter to New England and overseas as well. | ||
| I mean, it's not that hard. | ||
| And so I have a plan. | ||
| It's called the Pennsylvania Energy Independence Act. | ||
| And the goal is, in the first one or two years of my administration here, just to open up everything here so we can start exporting. | ||
| Jobs will come here. | ||
| Opportunities will come here. | ||
| Your kids and grandkids will want to stay in Pennsylvania. | ||
| It'll drive down taxes. | ||
| It'll bring revenue into Harrisburg. | ||
| Our roads are terrible. | ||
| Our infrastructure is falling apart. | ||
| This will bring us money to actually fix our roads and bridges and actually be like a modernized state for a change. | ||
| Well, you look, and I've been to all 67 counties. | ||
| You've also just finished up holding rallies in all 67 counties. | ||
| But when you get up to some areas of North Central, when you get to the Northwest, you see these roads, and they're in a sorry state of disrepair. | ||
| And our governors and our administrations from Rendell on forward, they have not been upkeeping our roads in Pennsylvania. | ||
| But I wanted to shift gears a little bit over to Wilkes-Barre, because there was a statement that I saw that Your campaign had put out earlier today about the lockdown that's going on at the Veterans Administration in Wilkes-Barre. | ||
| Can you break us through what's going on down there? | ||
| Yeah, our veterans have been on the wrong end of the whole deal here since COVID. | ||
| We watched Governor Wolf with his draconian policy shutting down things, followed by what happened in veterans hospitals across the state. | ||
| We saw a plague of deaths in the Southeast Veterans Home, not too far from where we rallied this past weekend with you. | ||
| And then up in Wilkes-Barre, they're still treating the veterans home like it's in the midst of 2020. | ||
| Family members can't visit. | ||
| Very heavy-handed draconian rules on masks and what have you. | ||
| And that completely needs to end. | ||
| Family members must have access to their loved ones. | ||
| This is just so typical of Democrat draconian policies. | ||
| It needs to end. | ||
| And to happen to veterans that you and I served with, potentially, is just unconscionable to me. | ||
| That's absolutely horrific. | ||
| Senator, I want to be respectful of your time. | ||
| I know you've got a lot going on. | ||
| There in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Tell us where can people go? | ||
| We've got only got about 30 plus days left. | ||
| Where can people go to sign up to volunteer for your campaign? | ||
| Mastriano's Army. | ||
| What's the website? | ||
| And then how can people, because I get this question all the time. | ||
| They say, what can we do? | ||
| This, this is the war room. | ||
| So we're here to talk about action, action, action. | ||
| What actions should people be taking with really this last month sprint to the election? | ||
| If you live within Pennsylvania or within driving distance, you know, go to DougForGov.com and sign up to be a volunteer. | ||
| Actually, anywhere in the nation. | ||
| You can make phone calls for us, for instance. | ||
| We're making millions of phone calls. | ||
| So go to DougForGov.com. | ||
| If you're able to pitch into our campaign to keep our ads running until Election Day, just a month away from tomorrow, then go to DougForGov.com and donate. | ||
| The people on the war room have been very generous. | ||
| We're asking for continued support, you know, until we cross that line. | ||
| We have a people's movement. | ||
| Jack, when we were together, we had a meet-and-greet first off over in your home county, at Chester County. | ||
| It was supposed to be a meet-and-greet of maybe a couple hundred people. | ||
| It turned into a rally. | ||
| It was packed in a fire hall. | ||
| And then we went up to Bucks County a couple hours later and had over a thousand people in the room. | ||
| That kind of movement is sustained, of course, by the generosity of people from across the nation. | ||
| Thank you very much, Senator Mastriano. | ||
| Good luck to you out on the trail. | ||
| I know you've got a lot going on. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| See you next time. | ||
| See you next time. | ||
| We'll be back up in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Don't worry, PA. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| Poso's coming home. | ||
| By the way, the Philadelphia Inquirer, they said, why would Doug Bastriano bring this MAGA guy into Pennsylvania, into the Southeast? | ||
| Why would he bring him there? | ||
| I mean, he needs to appeal to moderates. | ||
| He needs to appeal to the suburbanites. | ||
| I'm from Southeastern Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Inquirer. | ||
| Maybe do a little bit of research because it turns out places like Kimberton, guess what? | ||
| That's where I used to play football. | ||
| That's where I used to play baseball. | ||
| That's where I used to play Paintball, believe it or not. | ||
| Right going up there, down Route 23. | ||
| Okay, that is where I'm from. | ||
| So why would you bring somebody who's supporting you and endorsing you inside their own home area? | ||
| Gee, you think? | ||
| Absolutely ridiculous. | ||
| But speaking of absolutely ridiculous, I want to bring on now Pedro Gonzalez. | ||
| Because Pedro is always focused on things that are completely ridiculous. | ||
| And do we have Pedro? | ||
| We have Pedro? | ||
| We do have him. | ||
| Now, Now, Pedro, I want to play a clip very quickly, and it's a clip that's basically based off of this comment that our president, Joe Biden, made last night, saying that we're at the brink of Armageddon, talking about nuclear war, we're in the midst of a nuclear crisis. | ||
| Somehow, we went from two years ago, with a world that was completely at peace, ISIS was barely even talked about anymore, and now Just two years later, we're on the brink of nuclear war. | ||
| Let's play this clip very quickly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President! | |
| Will you talk to us about Putin, sir? | ||
| You think Armageddon is coming, sir? | ||
| Pedro, are we at the brink of Armageddon? | ||
| And if so, why? | ||
| I think that we're definitely... I've said this before, and I'm going to continue saying it again until it's too late, but it feels like we're sleepwalking into something like Armageddon, which really is just another way of saying a nuclear exchange, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the thing on everyone's mind. | ||
| You've got these comments from Zelensky calling for a preemptive strike against Russia to Decapitate its nuclear capabilities. | ||
| And then you've got, after that, you've got Zelensky's team doing damage control, basically saying, no, no, no, we're not talking about a nuclear exchange. | ||
| But I mean, it's very obvious that any kind of preemptive strike led by the U.S.-led NATO on Russia with the express purpose of preventing Russia from being able to defend itself with nuclear weapons would obviously touch off that kind of an exchange. | ||
| So, I mean, it does feel like that, but obviously the thing that you can't get away from is the fact that I know that we've been told that all of this is Russia's fault, but it's actually the Biden administration, it's Washington, D.C., that is pushing us toward this kind of an escalation, while at the same time blaming everyone else but themselves and their allies. | ||
| So, I mean, yeah, we are in a place that we haven't been Since I think like the Cuban Missile Crisis, I mean, that's that's Biden alluded to that also. | ||
| But again, it's the United States government. | ||
| Like, I think I would put as much blame on them as I would anybody else at this point. | ||
| I know, again, we've heard told that we can't say that, but it's the truth. | ||
| Well, we've heard and I think what's what's the most sober, you know, really proposal that I've heard. | ||
| Um, you know, certainly Elon Musk put up a proposal for peace that was immediately shot down. | ||
| But you also saw President Trump. | ||
| And this was something that had always been part of Trump's appeal to middle Americans, to the working class. | ||
| He was, he was saying, look, by the way, today, I don't know if people know this. | ||
| Today is the 21 year anniversary of the United States invasion of Afghanistan and our declaration of war against the Taliban. | ||
| So here we are 21 years later. | ||
| Thousands of Americans dead, Taliban still in control of Afghanistan, flush with money and materiel that we provided them when we left there. | ||
| President Trump said, why don't we just go to these people and make deals with them, figure out what they want, get them to back down? | ||
| Because you're not going to take out or you're never going to remove Russia from the map. | ||
| You're never going to remove North Korea, never going to remove China writ large. | ||
| Is there a way that we can work at least peacefully No, it's entirely escalatory. | ||
| I mean, this is, again, this is the bizarre thing, right? | ||
| That's what he's called for as well. | ||
| I don't hear any of these politicians, though, that are currently in power talking about peace. | ||
| No, it's entirely escalatory. | ||
| I mean, this is, again, this is the bizarre thing, right? | ||
| It's actually the other side that seems to want a kind of resolution to this that does not escalate any further, that does not go beyond existing boundaries. | ||
| And it's the so-called good guys that are actually saying, no, we won't take anything short of complete regime change in Russia or the complete destruction of Russia. | ||
| Basically just the liquidation of Russia as it exists today. | ||
| That is what the supposed good guys are saying right now. | ||
| I mean, it is really insane. | ||
| And I think it's important to take other events into context, right? | ||
| In the background, of course, you have the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. | ||
| There is, again, this kind of elephant in the room where everyone seems to think that it was either the Biden administration or one of its allies. | ||
| Or the Ukrainians, or the Poles, or somebody else. | ||
| But the bottom line is, is that it was the West, it seems like, that was behind the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. | ||
| And you had that fantastic exchange, I think it was on MSNBC, with that prominent economist Jeffrey Sachs, who said, you know, the quiet part out loud, and immediately the host tried to shut him down. | ||
| Because you're not supposed to say that, right? | ||
| The good guys don't do things like that. | ||
| The good guys don't blow up civilian infrastructure. | ||
| And then, just the other day, There is this really interesting report in the New York Times where U.S. | ||
| officials are blaming Ukraine for the assassination of Darya Dugin in Russia, the murder of a non-combatant in a foreign country, because they were critical of the war effort. | ||
| And I think that's really interesting because, again, it shows that either the U.S. | ||
| government is trying to distance itself from Ukraine, which flew off the reservation in this case, or, you know, wants to basically throw somebody else under the bus. | ||
| I don't know, but the point is, Is that the what Biden is saying needs to be understood in the context of all of these provocations that are coming from the West that is not taking anything short of complete regime change in Russia as acceptable? | ||
| Pedro, how much of this is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy? | ||
| Because there were two or three generations, depending on the account in this country, That were socially conditioned to believe that nuclear war would happen at some point in their lifetimes. | ||
| Remember, we had the bunkers, we had the, you know, the ridiculous hiding under the desk drills, which I remember even as a student in the 90s, prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, that very, I guess it would have been 1990. | ||
| I definitely did at least one desk drill. | ||
| I remember the bunkers in the basement. | ||
| You know, we had this nuclear, I probably didn't actually protect you from nuclear fallout. | ||
| Oh, I think about it. | ||
| Yeah, put a book over your head. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| But this idea that we did that to children and for so many people like Joe Biden and others, they lived their entire life. | ||
| So is this kind of self-fulfilling in a way? | ||
| Kind of, but in some ways it's worse. | ||
| And I'll come back to the kind of part, but I think in the way that it's worse is that we have people that are openly saying, well, it's worth it. | ||
| A nuclear exchange with Russia would be worth it to save democracy. | ||
| Or it wouldn't be that bad, really. | ||
| I mean, that people like us are kind of just exaggerating about the realities of nuclear warfare. | ||
| I mean, that is what you're hearing from people, from the Atlanticists, that either it's worth the risk or it wouldn't be that bad in the long run, which is insane, which makes it worse because we don't have the kind of fear that is, you know, necessary to avoid that kind of thing. | ||
| But self-fulfilling? | ||
| We're not naive, people like you and I, Jack. | ||
| War is inevitable, right? | ||
| But there are things you can do to mitigate the chances of war and certainly reduce the cost of war, right? | ||
| And it doesn't seem to me that we did any of those things. | ||
| And that one of the reasons Trump was so despised is, like you said, he ran on normalizing relations with Russia to just try to avoid exactly this kind of outcome. | ||
| And Trump was not alone. | ||
| He was actually saying the same thing that George Kennan had said in the past, the famous anti-communist theorist. | ||
| Saying the same things that Henry Kissinger had said, the same things that Alexander Solzhenitsyn had said. | ||
| All these other luminaries have been saying the same thing for the longest time, that if the West does not change tack, it will result in an escalation and a conflict with Russia. | ||
| No one listened. | ||
| Sorry, people did listen. | ||
| They were just shouted down and called Russian stooges. | ||
| And then, you know, this just, all of this that we're dealing with right now, it just happened spontaneously. | ||
| No one saw it coming. | ||
| Well, there's that, there's that great, um, you know, I don't know if it's an apocryphal quote or not, but when they say World War III will be fought with nuclear weapons and then World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. | ||
| And, uh, if you want to understand, by the way, a little bit about nuclear war, go watch, and I've gone back and watched this, the film, the American TV film, The Day After on ABC. | ||
| This was a miniseries that aired in 1983. | ||
| And actually showed the effects of what nuclear war, nuclear exchange would have on the Midwest. | ||
| Set in Kansas, believe it or not, and set in, in the Midwest. | ||
| It has to do, there was a launch site there. | ||
| The Russians were trying to hit it. | ||
| Absolute devastation. | ||
| This was a film that when it came out, people were watching it. | ||
| They were terrified. | ||
| They were calling up ABC to tell them to turn it off, to tell them to stop playing it. | ||
| They show what happens to children. | ||
| They show what happens to families. | ||
| I mean, it's, it's Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | ||
| On a scale that we can't even comprehend. | ||
| And so for anyone to be so callously insane, as to suggest that we this could be survivable for us. | ||
| And this is a private military officer that apparently some of this needs to be said again, because this is a situation where there are secondary consequences. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| You have to think beyond step one, the United States, Russia, China, North Korea, perhaps have something called second Second launch capability. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Second strike capability. | ||
| That idea, that's your nuclear submarines. | ||
| So a nuclear missile submarine, if Washington D.C. | ||
| is taken out, let's say Moscow takes out D.C., right? | ||
| While D.C. | ||
| is gone, what do you do? | ||
| Does the country lose? | ||
| No. | ||
| Because you always have your ballistic missile submarines, your boomers, out on patrol, whether it's out of Bremerton, Washington, or Kings Bay, Georgia. | ||
| They exist to protect Washington DC on a regular base every single day of the week from nuclear strike because they provide second strike capability. | ||
| Here's the issue with that. | ||
| The Russians have that too. | ||
| The Chinese have that too. | ||
| So if you think that you're just going to take them out on the first try, are you sure you're going to get all their submarines? | ||
| Do you know where they all are? | ||
| Are you positive? | ||
| And this is what gets you into mutually assured destruction. | ||
| But it's incredible to me that everyone who lived through that era seems to have forgotten these very important lessons. | ||
| No, no, that's totally right. | ||
| And I think that what we've seen in this conflict is that as a conventional force, Russia is not that effective, or it certainly can't really threaten the United States, I don't think, in conventional terms. | ||
| And I think Russia understands that, which is why they've invested so much in their nuclear arsenal. | ||
| That is where a lot of Russian R&D and money has gone into, is into developing nuclear capabilities that rival the United States, or even superior to the United States, perhaps. | ||
| There are certainly more tactical nuclear warheads in Russia's hands than in any other country in Europe. | ||
| So they already have that advantage, right? | ||
| In other words, Russia understands that if push comes to shove, we can't go toe-to-toe with NATO, so we have to resort to nukes. | ||
| But like you said, we're being very cavalier about this. | ||
| Let's see if Russia is actually going to pull the trigger. | ||
| Maybe we shouldn't actually see if Russia is willing to go that far, but everything that the West Uh, is doing, you know, so-called liberal democracies are doing is putting Russia in a position where that might actually be the thing that has to resort to. | ||
| Uh, because again, the consensus right now is that nothing short of regime change is acceptable. | ||
| Well, so here's, and, and, and this is the, the issue when it comes to Russian military doctrine. | ||
| So the United States military doctrine, when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons, it's whether we're, whether we've been struck first, obviously, Or if we believe a strike is imminent, right? | ||
| So with Russia, it's not that. | ||
| Russia has stated in their doctrine that they will use nuclear weapons to include tactical nukes. | ||
| Tactical nukes, by the way, it's a low yield. | ||
| So we're not talking about your megatons. | ||
| We're talking about maybe half a kilo. | ||
| We're talking about these smaller weapons that have the ability to wipe out, say, maybe one block of a city. | ||
| Uh, one strategic unit somewhere on the battlefield and just completely devastate them. | ||
| So what, what Russia's doctrine is, is that if they are facing the collapse of the state, then they will use nuclear weapons. | ||
| This is written into their doctrine. | ||
| It's been in there for decades. | ||
| Well, of course, Russia is going to define their state as their regime. | ||
| They're going to define that as, as Putin and his, uh, his courtiers and his advisors, the regime that's in place now. | ||
| So if they feel that their regime is threatened, the direct power over Russia, they will use nuclear weapons. | ||
| That's not what's in the best interest of anybody. | ||
| And so, Pedro, let's shift gears here a little bit and say, what's the so what here? | ||
| What is the interest of this to whether you call it the global American empire, whether you call it NATO, whether you call it the West? | ||
| Why are we pushing so hard to continue the escalation? | ||
| What is the, what is the game? | ||
| So I think that countries like Russia that are kind of, they act as like blind spots in the globalist American empire, which is to say that there are places that are just kind of beyond the reach of the regime, right? | ||
| There are places that are unreconstructed. | ||
| And that's not to say that Russia has like a superior model of governance than the United States or Germany or France or whatever, but it's just a system that is beyond the control, right? | ||
| And I think that just that poses a kind of existential threat to Western elites because it shows that it's possible to evade that kind of domination. | ||
| And it might give people in other countries ideas like it seems to have. | ||
| I think that the election that you saw in Italy is somehow connected to all this, although the new prime minister, Maloney, Actually is very aligned with US foreign policy. | ||
| The policies that she ran on, I mean, there were a complete rejection of everything that defines Western liberal democracies. | ||
| You're talking about a platform that puts Italian nationalism ahead of all other interests, that puts the interests of the real Italian people and their actual country over the interests of everything else. | ||
| I mean, that's why you had this kind of hysterical reaction to the election in Italy, right? | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| And I think that Russia, again, is the same thing. | ||
| It might not be a model. | ||
| Obviously, as Americans, we don't want to emulate Russia, but just the fact that it exists and it refuses to be dominated incenses Western elites, because it might give other people in other countries ideas that we don't have to live like this. | ||
| I think that's the ideological aspect of this. | ||
| Perhaps you don't have to live at the beck and call of the elites who want you to be mindless consumers. | ||
| Pedro, we're coming up on our one minute. | ||
| Let people know your coordinates, where they can find what you're working on, and then get more information about all your latest. | ||
| I can't give out my home address, but my social media handle everywhere is Emeriticus, E-M-E-R-I-T-I-C-U-S, and you can follow me on substack at contra.substack.com, and I've got a column at chroniclesmagazine.org. | ||
| All right, Pedro Gonzalez, thank you so much for joining us today. | ||
| We are going to come back here. | ||
| On War Room Battleground with the great Darren Beattie. | ||
| He's going to walk us through all things Elon Musk. | ||
| Because as we've seen in the texts, Elon is reading Revolver News. | ||
| So we need to know what's up with that. | ||
| and maybe Darren can give us some insight. | ||
|
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This is Jack Posobiec. | |
| I am the host of Human Events Daily. | ||
| Filling in, Stephen K. Bannon is on assignment for us, but we've been having a discussion with Senator Mastriano about what's going on on the ground in Pennsylvania. | ||
| We had Pedro Gonzalez on talking about the question of, are we at the brink of Armageddon? | ||
| As President Biden tells us. | ||
| But perhaps there is someone who could help stave off Armageddon for a little bit. | ||
| And is that man, the unlikeliest of all potential candidates, Mr. Elon Musk? | ||
| Not sure, but it's an interesting question. | ||
| And so there's someone that we all know who got inside Elon Musk's head, wrote an article, which was actually read by Elon Musk and leaked text messages that came out in his lawsuit with Twitter. | ||
| And that was none other than Darren Beatty of Revolver News. | ||
| So I wanted to bring on Darren To get his take on all things Elon. | ||
| And to start off, Darren, when you first wrote that article about Elon purchasing Twitter, did you have any inside knowledge, inside baseball, that this was coming? | ||
| Or was that just you sort of reading the tea leaves? | ||
| Just intuition. | ||
| Just kind of something floating around. | ||
| And the timing was really auspicious. | ||
| The timing was exactly right and exactly aligned to the Uh, publicity of his initial intention to get Twitter. | ||
| Then of course we did just a real analysis, a real breakdown, battle of this, uh, the fight of the century, it was called. | ||
| Um, and an article just goes in pretty, pretty, uh, good detail on what to expect from the regime in terms of backlash to Elon's, uh, attempt to get Twitter. | ||
| Cause initially, you know, I don't have such a good theory of mind For Elon, unfortunately, despite the fact that he's a Revolver reader, so he's probably just a little bit less informed than your average War Room viewer who has been reading Revolver for a long time. | ||
| Elon's sort of catching up, so I'm glad to see that, but I didn't have a great theory of mind. | ||
| We'll have to get him here in the posse. | ||
| He'll be in the live chat. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| You know, it seemed to me, frankly, that in a lot of domains, he's a little bit naive and that might surprise people. | ||
| Of course, he's tremendously successful. | ||
| He's tremendously talented and focused and everything. | ||
| But the mechanism of his success was really kind of swimming with the current of the regime and using that to construct a narrative behind his products and companies. | ||
| So, for instance, Tesla really rode the sort of Environmentalism angle that's totally in line with, you know, a lot of the dominant ideology. | ||
| You have to have very friendly relationship with the government for them to effectively outsource NASA to you, which is essentially what SpaceX is doing more competently than NASA. | ||
| So, so much of what he's doing, and not just him, but anyone operating at a certain level within tech, You basically have to be friends with the government because of what big tech is at that level. | ||
| What big tech is, is essentially an instrument that can be used by the United States government for national security purposes. | ||
| And when we get to Twitter, It's crucially so, because Twitter, as the global public square, imagine the national security advantage of being able to control what narratives take off and what narratives get crushed on the global public square. | ||
| Not only to facilitating efforts for some kind of proxy rebel group overseas whose narratives and cause you want to amplify, and there are many such Conflicts around the globe in which the United States is involved, but more crucially, and I would say darkly, it is a huge advantage on a domestic level. | ||
| And as we all seen, the big theme of the past several years has been the reorientation of the national security state domestically. | ||
| Trump was their national security threat. | ||
| They zapped him from Twitter, just like they would some authoritarian leader overseas that they wanted to suppress. | ||
| And so All of this was built into the meaning of what Twitter was, and it wasn't clear to me initially that Elon Musk understood the storm that he was inviting by stepping into this ice. | ||
| You recently referred to it as the pain box from the novel Dune, where they conduct this trial to see who can withstand their hand in the pain box the longest. | ||
| And it's tough, you know, you've been in it, I've been in it. | ||
| And you know, for someone, it's just to operate at the highest level in the United States. | ||
| It's like in China, if you're not friendly with the Communist Party, you get Jack Maude. | ||
| And if you're not obsequious to the dominant ideologies and narratives of the regime, you can get Elon Musk. | ||
| Now, there's a big question mark up here, because You know, I've been celebrating Elon when it looks like he was moving in the right direction. | ||
| And I've been critical and even insulting toward him when it looks like he was moving in the wrong direction. | ||
| It seemed to me initially that Elon was thinking, okay, I'm going to do this. | ||
| And then he just got a little inkling of the type of reaction that you get when you challenge the system with that, you know, at that high stakes level. | ||
| And he was like, okay, maybe this is not for me. | ||
| Tail between the legs, head down. | ||
| Maybe he's just content being a multi-billionaire, but with no power, effectively, I call it glorified IT support for the regime. | ||
| Maybe he's comfortable in that IT support role, he's happy with his billions, and he doesn't want to make a greater mark on history. | ||
| But recent events show that maybe he's reassessed his position. | ||
| The scoop that Steve Bannon had On the show here a couple of days ago, I think it was yesterday actually, was that according to his sources, and Steve does have good sources with Elon, I can confirm that, he says that Twitter at one point went to Elon and offered to drop the price. | ||
| So of course Elon makes this huge push this week to say, I will buy Twitter outright at the full price. | ||
| Let's drop the case. | ||
| Let's move forward. | ||
| Steve says that the backstory there is that Twitter went to Elon and said, We'll drop the price, but no Trump, no right wing, and you have to keep the management. | ||
| Elon turns around and says, no, I want the whole thing. | ||
| And I think everybody knows there's going to be mass layoffs when he purchases the thing. | ||
| And he's already said again, then we get this concurrent with the text messages coming out that he says, not only do we want to bring Trump back, we want to permanently Excuse me. | ||
| Restore everyone who was permanently banned. | ||
| So a blanket amnesty for bans. | ||
| And then, worst of all, he's reading Revolver. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No, and these are very encouraging signs. | ||
| And, you know, it's important not to prematurely celebrate here because there are a number of remaining open questions. | ||
| One is the open question of, Is Musk actually going to go through with this? | ||
| Is this going to be a successful purchase? | ||
| Number two, to what extent would Elon be able to restore a free speech environment on Twitter, bring back banned accounts? | ||
| It all sounds nice in theory, but again, can he withstand the pain box of, oh, I just brought back this banned account, and then there's just A cacophony of saying, oh, how dare you bring back this person who said this, this, this, this, this. | ||
| Do you support racism, sexism, antisemitism, misogyny, transphobia, and the whole thing? | ||
| Can he withstand that pain box? | ||
| And thirdly, assuming that he's in battle mode and really wants to go for the glory option rather than the glorified IT support for the regime option, Can he deal with what the regime throws at him? | ||
| Because the regime has a lot of tools at its disposal. | ||
| And Elon, despite his considerable wealth, his really overwhelming wealth, there's only so much you can do in terms of translating that to power at this level. | ||
| So can he survive what the regime is prepared to throw at him if indeed he's on the battle footing and he's committed to restoring free speech on the global public square? | ||
| I was just going to add that as Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, that for a prince to remain a prince, should he commit atrocities, commit them all at once and then no more. | ||
| So if he were to do all this and be successful, do all of it at once. | ||
| That would be my recommendation. | ||
| Do all of it at once so that it's too fast for them to respond to any one person at a time. | ||
| And by that, I mean James O'Keefe. | ||
| I mean Alex Jones. | ||
| I mean, of course, Steve Bannon, the war room platform, Donald Trump, whoever it may be, bring them all back at once. | ||
| And then there's no way for you to stop this. | ||
| And I've also heard that the one of the things they're looking at potentially is a rumble based regulation policy. | ||
| So you're essentially regulations would be along the lines of if it's explicit hate against a you know, any one ethnic group, then we will | ||
| Target that or obviously specific calls for violence and criminal activity and these such things but for the vast majority of the rest of it that they are going to completely disempower the of your favorite tribe on Twitter the misinformation and disinformation experts and completely remove Twitter from the business of determining what is true and what is false in reality Well, I mean, if that's so, that's an existential threat to the regime. | ||
| I mean, the regime that we live in, that I call the globalist American empire, is utterly dependent on censorship. | ||
| It's utterly dependent on controlling a narrative because it's utterly dependent on manifest lies. | ||
| And as much power as the regime has, I don't think the regime is weak, but as much power as it has, I simply don't think it's sustainable for more than six months in a censorship-free environment on big tech and on the internet. | ||
| That's how dependent it is on lies. | ||
| And for that reason, it's an existential fight. | ||
| And so in a weird way, like hearkening back to the geopolitical analysis about Russia, like Russia's stake in its own territories, its own sort of region, That's existential. | ||
| That region is not existential to us the way that it is to Russia. | ||
| So at least in that critical sense, Russia has an advantage in conflict. | ||
| And it's kind of the same way with respect to the regime. | ||
| Free speech is an existential threat to the regime. | ||
| Whereas for Elon Musk, it's just kind of something really amazing that he might be able to do. | ||
| And so the calculus there really kind of Militates in favor of the regime going all out, pulling out all the stops it needs to to prevent this from happening. | ||
| You saw an interesting confluence of events as well this week with Elon because it seemed as though the news about him moving forward with Twitter happened concurrently with this peace plan that he broached on Twitter, this idea of | ||
| A potential mediated conflict resolution between Ukraine and Russia put up a Twitter poll on it, which was immediately brigaded by a series of artificial amplification and bots. | ||
| And he was absolutely mocked, scorned and ridiculed by many members of the establishment. | ||
| Certainly the Ukrainian government came after him, including the president. | ||
| And we're also hearing May not be related, but we're also hearing that there's some outages of the Starlink system on the battlefield in Ukraine at the moment. | ||
| Do you think that, and again, we're sort of playing remote psychiatrist here, but do you think that in Elon's mind that any of this might be linked? | ||
| Well I'm sure like it is a theoretical matter it is Link and again he's starting to understand what the stakes are but it also underscores what he's up against like the Starlink is a perfect example of Starlink is basically an instrument of United States foreign policy. | ||
| There's United States supported protest movements like Uh, for instance, what's going on in Iran and, you know, he's expected to do that, but what happens if he uses Starlink to the advantage or just at least to create a level playing field with groups that aren't supported by the United States. | ||
| And the fact that it's down in Ukraine for now, um, who knows what, you know, what's behind that. | ||
| It's probably an innocent explanation. | ||
| Um, I would imagine, but it underscores this role as. | ||
| IT support for the regime. | ||
| They're saying, hey, hey, IT guy, our Starlink system is down over the place where the US government has, you know, interests in helping this particular group out what's going on. | ||
| And so it really shows like how much of the legend of Elon Musk, how much of this creation of Elon Musk and all his success is really inextricably intertwined with being on good terms with the government and the regime. | ||
| And so is it even possible for him to step outside of that box? | ||
| And if so, how much? | ||
| And if so, does he have the stuff that it takes to really survive outside of that protective bubble that you get When your whole existence is contingent on cooperative relationship with the regime. | ||
| Those are the big questions that remain and a lot is wrapped up in the balance of that. | ||
| Because as I've said, the question of free speech is existential. | ||
| If we have free speech on the internet, on a platform as meaningful as Twitter, the regime simply cannot survive. | ||
| Well, I think that's what you're seeing as well now too, because Elon Musk, not only does he have These businesses, not only does he have this leverage in terms, keep in mind, right? | ||
| You know, this is sort of that, that, you know, that old saying about, you know, if the, if the mafia owes you a thousand dollars, you have a problem with your mafia owes you a hundred million dollars. | ||
| They have a problem. | ||
| And then if, if Elon Musk is their only ability to service satellites, the international space system, Um, it seems as though space, I mean, if there's some competitors, there's, there's Bezos has his, um, his, uh, flights up there as well. | ||
| If Elon Musk is providing these cars that we're putting this. | ||
| Is he, but he also has his, the sort of the people that listened to him, this, uh, this vast middle. | ||
| So there's, there's a certain group of people in this country that they're more in tuned with say the Joe Rogans, the Dave Portnoy noise. | ||
| And you and I spoke about this, uh, before an interview, we're talking about sort of the man cave. | ||
| You know, type lifestyle and that's, but they do have, you know, a keen understanding of, you know, they might listen to Alex Friedman or they might listen to, uh, uh, the Huberman lab or Elon Musk and to say, well, that's not political. | ||
| Those are just normal guys. | ||
| And so there's a huge amount of people in this country that have Elon's ear. | ||
| So if you've got groups like the war room, if you've got the, the sort of centrist podcast, um, you know, listeners, whatever the best term for it is. And then all of those sides joining together to say, we don't need to do these things. Even, this is why, by the way, to your point, even Elon Musk putting up a Twitter poll saying, should we continue this war or not, is an existential threat to the regime. It's not because of | ||
| the question being asked, it's because of who's asking it and how many people are listening. | ||
| Yeah, that's absolutely true. He has a tremendous amount of clout. There's a reason that I've described him previously as one of the handful of live players on the planet. He's a live player, therefore what he does is incredible. | ||
| Incredibly meaningful. | ||
| And that's why in my own, you know, little way, I try to do my best to encourage him when he's moving in the right direction and to criticize him sometimes really harshly when he's moving in the wrong direction, because he's one of the very, very few people whose actions actually matter and who can make a true difference as to the configuration on the chessboard right now between the regime and the American | ||
| Citizens who deserve a lot more than what the regime is offering them. | ||
| So it's a difficult road. | ||
| I mean, all of these things that make someone respectable, that go into the image of someone like Musk, that have contributed to the influence that he has over these centrist types. | ||
| Again, it's a question of how much of that is contingent on the more or less Friendly position that he enjoyed with respect to the regime and how well that's right and you And you've already started to see some of the attacks. | ||
| Um, the of course the the former workers the the female employees with stories that suddenly start coming you saw this with trump as well when he Came off the the bench so to say and stepped onto the the playing field this you saw that you've seen it with With everything they do with steve bannon to try to stop him to try to lock him up Perp walk him in front of the in front of the crowds to show people that you cannot listen to this man. | ||
| This man is dangerous. | ||
| But at the same time, you know, when you cut off someone's tongue, it shows the world that you're afraid of what they have to say. | ||
| And so people can say, I think I really do think that there are people who can see this for what it is. | ||
| And so those types of attacks aren't effective. | ||
| But what they will also do, we've got about two minutes left. | ||
| I've said this from the start. | ||
| They will go for Tesla. | ||
| They will go for SpaceX. | ||
| They will go for Starlink. | ||
| They will move to quasi-nationalization of these types of things if they have to. | ||
| They will find other people to take control of them. | ||
| They'll move him out of positions of power. | ||
| Certainly, they'll go after his stock positions because the vast majority of his wealth is tied into his stock. | ||
| And so it's actually quite vulnerable. | ||
| So there's a lot of potential pain points. | ||
| And of course, you brought them up in your piece going into Elon about this. | ||
| But we've got about a minute left. | ||
| What's on the other side though? | ||
| What if he's successful? | ||
| What if, dare we ask the question, he's actually successful in restoring freedom of speech? | ||
| Well, if he pulls it off, and I've said this, and it would be, I would say, I will go out on a limb and say it, if he actually pulls it off, which is a tremendous if, it's a huge if, it will be more significant than The 2016 presidential victory of Trump, which I think is enormously significant. | ||
| This will be more significant than that. | ||
| Because it's a precondition for future political victories. | ||
| It's a precondition for everything. | ||
| That's why the speech on the internet is so essential. | ||
| And the regime is smart enough that literally the day after Trump won in 2016, the entire C-suite of Google basically came together and said, we can't have this free internet thing anymore. | ||
| Precisely right there. | ||
| Coming up on the end of the show, Darren Beaty, revolver.news is the site. | ||
| Darren, thank you for your insights and for your service to your country and to people around the world that actually want to do something like the people of this audience who don't just want to sit back and be passive and go silently into the night. | ||
| They want to fight back. | ||
| My name is Jack Posobiec. | ||
| I'm the host of Human Events Daily. | ||
| Make sure to follow us every single day. |
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