Feb. 1, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:51
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| You're just not going to get a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
| MAGA media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room, here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| You think there is any lack of will in the United States to save the country? | ||
| I don't think there is any lack of will. | ||
| Do you sense that? You were just up on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Yeah, so I just talked to Lindsey Graham, I talked to Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Speaker McCarthy, loads of others. | ||
| You know, I find there's a massive amount of bipartisan support. | ||
| And look, I want to pay tribute to the Biden administration, what they did, what Joe did, what Joe Biden did. | ||
| Okay, I've already heard enough. | ||
| It's Wednesday, 1 February, year of October, 2023. | ||
| That's Boris Johnson with Bret Baier last night. | ||
| We are honored to have in studio Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. | ||
| Senator Vance, thank you so much. | ||
| As you know, this audience, I would say, is big fans of yours, big supporters. | ||
| And here's what's interesting. | ||
| You've got Boris Johnson there, and he's talking about, I'm on Capitol Hill. | ||
| I've seen nothing but massive support from the U.S. Senate, particularly picked out Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham as massive support. | ||
| On the same day, and this came up last night I think online, but this morning, one of the most important pieces, I'm quite frankly kind of shocked that G. Joe and the guys at the Wall Street Journal, Trump's best foreign policy not starting any wars. | ||
| Now, there's two-fold here. | ||
| The headline today is you're endorsing, I guess, President Trump out of the box, and you lay out this case, but there's a lot here I want to cover. | ||
| So let's get you're endorsing President Trump. | ||
| That's right. Endorsing President Trump, obviously his support was very helpful to us in both the primary and the general election in Ohio. | ||
| But importantly, the case that I lay out here is it's really about policy. | ||
| In particular, you know, we often talk about Trump's domestic policy achievements, but the foreign policy is the most important part because that's where the blob is most corrupt. | ||
| That's where they're most wrong. And that's where they're most destructive. | ||
| I think the mainstream media tells me all the time that he was dangerous. | ||
| He's not statesmanlike, as you mentioned in your article. | ||
| He's uncouth. | ||
| MSNBC, CNN, Fareed Zakhar, they… It's pearl-clutching nonstop about his style, sir. | ||
| They're obsessed with his style at the very same time that his substance is actually the most cautious and the most careful foreign policy we've had in this country in a generation. | ||
| Just think about this. From my perspective, Steve, I graduated from high school in 2003 and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. | ||
| George W. Bush was president. | ||
| Since I've been an adult, you had two separate, two-term administrations, Bush and then Obama, start four separate wars, none of which were successful for this country. | ||
| Trump comes in and actually one starts to decouple from China, another great foreign policy achievement, But more importantly, he doesn't start any new conflicts, and he starts the process of diplomacy with these regimes that people said, you can't talk to these guys. | ||
| And Trump came along and said, well, why can't you talk to them? | ||
| It's sure as hell better than letting us completely stagnate our relationship with these regimes and potentially lead to further conflict down the road. | ||
| So I think what he accomplished there is actually the most important part of his presidency. | ||
| And by the way, it's why they hate him the most. | ||
| If you really go to this, This is why the D.C. establishment hates the guy because they make a lot of money from broken American foreign policy. | ||
| If we can fix it, we'll save a lot of American lives. | ||
| We'll also empty their pocketbooks. | ||
| By the way, to support that, last night, Fareed Zakhar is on with Wolf Blitzer after Jake Tapper does his interview with Netanyahu. | ||
| And they say about the Arab nations not really supporting the Palestinian state anymore because of the Abraham Accords. | ||
| And by the way, they did the entire segment and never mentioned Trump's name and never mentioned Abraham Accords. | ||
| So President Trump – and here's the thing I think is so important. | ||
| I want to reiterate this. | ||
| You have a very close personal relationship with President Trump. | ||
| He thinks very highly of you. | ||
| But your endorsement here is not just Trump the man. | ||
| That's part of it. And somebody can deliver a set piece. | ||
| But it's what Trump, America first, and his policies. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| I want to go back to something you said about, you know, we have all these people who are obsessed with Trump style, right? | ||
| Trump is careless. | ||
| He's reckless. He doesn't say the right things. | ||
| And yet all the people who for a generation supposedly say the right things have presided over one disaster after another. | ||
| Why is it that America is so good at training people who are very careful in what they say? | ||
| They stand up and they throw out slogans about freedom and democracy and all these other things. | ||
| And yet when it comes to actually supporting freedom and democracy here at home, when it comes to not getting us involved in disasters, they fail miserably. | ||
| That to me Is the biggest takeaway. | ||
| And it suggests there's something, Steve, broken about America's elites and how we train our elites. | ||
| Well, you went to, I mean, you're a working class kid, but you went to Yale. | ||
| You've seen it, but I want to make sure Denver has this up on screen. | ||
| We're going to put it in all the chat rooms. | ||
| We need this opinion piece, a real analysis by Senator Vance in the journal, read by everybody and pushed out. | ||
| You've got a quote in here. | ||
| Why is it the people in the United States, the US trains for leadership, are so careful with their words, yet so reckless with their actions? | ||
| What do you mean by that, sir? Well, what I mean by that is that we have an entire apparatus. | ||
| All of our elite universities, fellowships at the State Department, at the Pentagon, these things train America's smart young people for leadership. | ||
| And what I've seen is a lot of these guys, they are smart. | ||
| But they become reckless and they become boring and conventional. | ||
| And right now, boring, conventional, and reckless go all hand in hand in the American foreign policy establishment. | ||
| Nobody is asking, I mean, this is really about Ukraine because that's the major foreign policy crisis at the time. | ||
| Nobody is asking, what does this look like if we keep escalating? | ||
| Why is it Boris Johnson is on Fox News this morning talking about the importance of the Ukraine war when his own people can't afford food? | ||
| What the hell is the guy doing? | ||
| What are we talking about? And we had Dave Walsh on here yesterday. | ||
| The air pollution is back to Dickens era because they're burning wood and coal in stoves in London. | ||
| I want to continue on the notes. | ||
| By the way, your staff, your crack staff is here. | ||
| I don't think Boris Johnson's on your dance card today. | ||
| I doubt he is. | ||
| I doubt he is. You say, but here's, talk about these catastrophes. | ||
| I prefer, that would be Senator Vance, a different kind of statesmanship. | ||
| One that stands athwart the crowd, reminding leaders in both parties that the U.S. national interest must be pursued ruthlessly, but also carefully, with strong words, but great restraint. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Well, let's just compare and contrast Donald Trump with John Bolton, a person very well respected in the D.C. foreign policy establishment, who, as far as I can tell, his main foreign policy objective is to start a nuclear war with half the nations in the world. | ||
| This guy is respected, and Donald Trump is the reckless one? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| We've totally inverted and turned upside down basic wisdom and basic caution in our foreign policy. | ||
| Look, I don't even think of myself as a, quote, non-interventionist. | ||
| I'm a realist. I want to ruthlessly pursue America's interests, and this war in Ukraine is not in America's interest. | ||
| Let's bring this thing, slow it down, de-escalate it, and get back to an America first war. | ||
| I think also the power of this too is that you've been there. | ||
| You enlisted in the Marine Corps. | ||
| You were forward deployed into Iraq. | ||
| You've seen what goes on. | ||
| You see how decisions are made. | ||
| You see what happens to these countries. | ||
| You see when it's not thought through when you talk about people at Princeton and Harvard and Yale and Georgetown and all the cocktail parties. | ||
| Absolutely. Man, I bought it. | ||
| I remember when I was in Iraq, I read this book by Natan Sharansky called The Case for Democracy. | ||
| Very good book actually, but it lays out the case of how we're going to transform Baghdad into like Ohio, right? | ||
| Jeffersonian Democrats. Jeffersonian Democrats. | ||
| And I remember being in Iraq and thinking to myself, you know, doing security for the Iraqi poll workers and thinking, these people don't want Jeffersonian democracy. | ||
| Why the hell are we trying to force it down their throats? | ||
| And why are we spending America's best and brightest to do it? | ||
| It doesn't make any sense, but again, that's what passes. | ||
| That's what passes for statesmanship in 2023 in Washington, D.C., is throwing America's best and brightest at fake problems and problems we're never going to solve. | ||
| Let's talk about this Ukraine problem because now you've got battle tanks. | ||
| We never had a national debate about that. | ||
| Next thing you know, we're given battle tanks. | ||
| On the 80th anniversary of the German army surrendering at Stalingrad, you've got German tanks with iron crosses going to go across the border. | ||
| Now all of a sudden it's F-16s. | ||
| And you know this. When you give them tanks, that's not just a weapons platform. | ||
| It's a different type of war. They're talking about taking back Crimea. | ||
| The escalation here is incredible. | ||
| Is it time for the Senate? | ||
| Or a couple of people stand up and say, force Biden to come with a War Powers resolution and lay out the plan, lay out the objectives, lay out the strategy, what we're prepared to do, and then let's vote. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's exactly time to do that, and that's something I plan to work on over the next few months. | ||
| But think about this, Steve. If Ukraine is as important as the Biden administration and way too many Republicans say it is, then why isn't Europe stepping up and doing its job? | ||
| Why are we footing the majority of this bill even today? | ||
| The argument often made is that if Putin marches through Ukraine, then he won't stop until he reaches Berlin. | ||
| Well, number one, isn't that the problem of the Germans? | ||
| And number two, the Germans sure as hell aren't acting like they're worried about Vladimir Putin. | ||
| Why are we so worried about what he can do instead of worrying about our own national interests? | ||
| When you compare and contrast this to the defense of Taiwan right now and the concern of that, what is your sense of that? | ||
| It's night and day because Taiwan is such a critical part, frankly because of mistakes that you were warning about 30 years ago. | ||
| We offshored our entire computer chip supply chain to East Asia. | ||
| China's much more an important foe and Taiwan's a much more important part. | ||
| For us strategically. Another point here, Steve. | ||
| The Biden administration is telling us, they're sounding the alarm, that we are spinning down our munitions such that we're going to have to choose between arming the Ukrainians or arming our own troops. | ||
| What happens, God forbid, if the Chinese invade Taiwan? | ||
| Can we even invade Taiwan with our defense industrial capacity where it is right now? | ||
| I don't know the answer to that, but I don't like the fact that it's uncertain. | ||
| The Financial Times today says Brussels pressed to rein in promises fueling Ukraine's fast-track to EU hopes. | ||
| People are hearing you, right? | ||
| People are hearing you, and they know they've got to dial down the EU. You've got to stop being in Russia's face. | ||
| You've got to dial down the EU, and you have to dial down the NATO aspects. | ||
| The Europeans are being more cautious about this than the Americans are, and that should say a lot. | ||
| Why is that? Why is the Biden regime... | ||
| Why is Victoria Nuland... | ||
| Victoria Nuland is there yesterday. | ||
| She's there yesterday with Rand Paul, and they're talking about war crimes trials from Putin. | ||
| Well, Victoria Nuland, as far as I can tell, is the most bloodthirsty person in the entire Defense Department apparatus, so I think that we know the answer on her. | ||
| But look, why is Europe being more cautious about this? | ||
| Because they recognize the risks of escalation. | ||
| If this thing spills over, you're going to have untold death and destruction. | ||
| God forbid it could become a nuclear war. | ||
| Look at the inflation rate in Central and Eastern Europe. | ||
| Every single country in Central and Eastern Europe has sky-high inflation. | ||
| These people can't afford to eat, and we're talking about continuing to escalate this war. | ||
| It's complete insanity. | ||
| The reason you're such a fresh new, not just voice, but kind of angle of attack is the people in Ohio. | ||
| You connected with these folks. | ||
| What do the people in Ohio think about this entire situation? | ||
| The economy, what Biden's doing, and tie it to the national security aspects. | ||
| I hear mixed views from the people of Ohio. | ||
| Most people probably agree with my view. | ||
| They don't know why this is such a main focus. | ||
| Look, a lot of people have a lot of sympathy for the Ukrainians. | ||
| The country should not have been invaded, and a lot of people in Ohio feel that very personally. | ||
| You've got a big Ukrainian population in Ohio. | ||
| But I think even people who are sympathetic with the plight of the Ukrainians like I am, they don't think that this is America's main concern. | ||
| There's obviously the border dynamic to this, where we have a completely open American southern border, and yet we have a bipartisan consensus that a border 6,000 miles away is the most important thing for our country. | ||
| It's definitely a lot of us are looking around and saying, what the hell are we really focused on? | ||
| Shouldn't our American government do America's job? | ||
| How do people get to you? You endorsed President Trump today in 2024. | ||
| How do people get to you and find out more about you? | ||
| Well, they can go to our Senate office. | ||
| They can go to my personal website, JDVance.com. | ||
| Obviously, I'll keep on talking to you and your audience. | ||
| And look, just people got to stay in the fight here. | ||
| If we're going to win in 2024, it is going to take a grassroots army the likes of which we've never seen. | ||
| They're not going to let 2016 happen again. | ||
| It crept up on them. 2024 is going to take more energy, more passion. | ||
| People got to stay involved, keep their powder dry, but it's going to be a big fight. | ||
| But this is the reason that J.D. Vance is in the United States Senate, okay? | ||
| I'm telling you. You saw that from that speech you gave at Claremont back in 2021 before you even jumped in there. | ||
| This has got their attention, not just on Capitol Hill. | ||
| This has got their attention in capitals in Europe, which is exactly what we need. | ||
| Senator Vance, honored to have you on here. | ||
| Breaking news, the FBI has just raided, it looks like he just raided Biden's beach house. | ||
| We're going to get to all of that when we get back. | ||
| Short commercial break. I want to thank Senator Vance for being here. | ||
| Thanks, Steve. And we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| Steve Cortez, we're going to assess, give some overview about Senator J.D. Vance's endorsement of Donald J. Trump. | ||
| Talk about this new breaking news of the FBI at the beach house of Joe Biden. | ||
| short commercial break be back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, it's your boy, the CCP. And I'm your host, it's your boy, the CCP. | |
| Just watch and see, it's all started, everything's begun, and you are over. | ||
| Cause we're taking down the CCP! Spread the word all through Hong Kong, we will fight till they're all gone, we rejoice when they're no more, let's take down the CCP! | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Back. | ||
| You Okay, welcome back. There is breaking news. | ||
| There has been an FBI raid. | ||
| I guess since they were invited and they could process and throw out all the Hunter stuff beforehand, maybe it's not a raid. | ||
| Let me go to Steve Cortez. | ||
| Steve, I want to talk about J.D. You were absolutely essential in the primary, in the general, but in the primary, that very tough primary of helping J.D. get over the top, and this is everything you and I talked about. | ||
| Of accomplishing. | ||
| I mean, just incredible. But what's your assessment of this FBI, quote-unquote, raid onto Biden's beach house? | ||
| Right. For the war room posse, you understand we talked about this like the day after they announced first thing. | ||
| We said, hey, have they gone to the beach house? | ||
| Has the FBI gone? Have they gone to the University of Delaware? | ||
| Have they gone to Hunter's house? | ||
| Steve Cortez. | ||
| Well, you know, look, there's never one cockroach, right? | ||
| You turn the light on and you see one. | ||
| It's not the only one, right? And that's, I think, very relevant and true here. | ||
| And you're exactly correct, though, too, Steve. | ||
| It's not just his residences. | ||
| You know, I think it's his full set of papers, right, his full document file that needs to be at both University of Delaware as well as at Penn that needs to be investigated here. | ||
| So, you know, this is obviously an ongoing story, continues to be incorporated. | ||
| It's incredibly alarming. | ||
| And remember, you know, the corporate media keeps trying to gaslight the American people and say, oh, there are differences here, meaning that Biden's situation is not as bad as Trump's. | ||
| The inverse, of course, is true, because President Trump, as president of the United States, has the legal unitary power to declassify whatever he wants, whenever he wants. | ||
| None of that power rested certainly not in Senator Joe Biden nor in Vice President Joe Biden. | ||
| And yet we know these papers go all the way back to his senatorial days, up through his vice presidential days. | ||
| So, you know, once again, it's another troubling revelation, not surprising from somebody who really personifies permanent Washington. | ||
| Remember, Joe Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972. | ||
| Okay, we are now past a half-century mark. | ||
| of this man operating in the Washington sewer and doing so largely for his own benefit and the benefit of his family, which acted a lot more like a cartel than a legitimate family. | ||
| You, very early on, and for the audience, you know, J.D.'s a beloved character, but so are you. | ||
| And here's one of the things that Cortez is great about picking talent, but it's particularly about talent that stands for something. | ||
| And you saw this in J.D. Vance very early on and gave up so much of your time to do that. | ||
| When you see this Wall Street Journal piece, quite frankly, I'm shocked. | ||
| I am kind of shocked the Wall Street Journal published this. | ||
| Paul Gijo, because the Wall Street Journal op-ed section Is the thought center of the neocons, is it not? | ||
| Steve Cortez, give us your thought about this piece and tie it back to what you saw in J.D. and you went around Ohio with him nonstop barnstorming in that amazing three week run up to the primary. | ||
| Yeah, listen, thrilled to see J.D. Vance in the United States Senate. | ||
| And so far operating just as we all believed and hoped that he would, as a patriotic populist advocate, as a real America first fighter. | ||
| One of the things that I saw in him earliest, and thankfully the people of Ohio saw in him, is that he is willing to buck the establishment, even though he is extremely close to the establishment because of his life experiences, right? | ||
| Because he is this amazing Horatio Alger story, somebody who came from a troubled home, but found his way largely through the love of a devoted grandmother in the U.S. Marine Corps, found his way all the way to Yale Law School and then significant success in business, a lot of fame because of his book and the subsequent movie about his book, | ||
| Hillbilly Elegy. So he's somebody who was intimately aware and conversant with the establishment, yet rejected the precepts of the establishment and saw, I think largely because he had lived in some ways these two separate lives, saw the pain and the agony that was inflicted upon regular working class Americans by the ruling class for their own self-aggrandizement. | ||
| So I saw in him the perfect person in terms of both his character and life experiences, but then also in terms of the policy applications, the fact that he was willing to stand up and say, wait a minute, Is intervening Ukraine, is escalating this war really in American interest? | ||
| He was willing to say that way before it was popular. | ||
| Now, I think it is getting to be a much more accepted ideal in American life right now, and certainly at least on the political right. | ||
| But it was a very lonely position. | ||
| There were only a few people there. | ||
| Steve, you were one of them. J.D. Vance was one of them. | ||
| In those very early days, and of course both of you, as former officers of this country, people who have worn the uniform of the United States, risked your lives to defend our freedom, both of you had authority even beyond other political analysts when you said, wait a second, does this march toward escalation really serve the interests of the United States? | ||
| So that's really mainly what attracted me about him, other than his personal life story, his character, and I was I'm absolutely honored and thrilled to have played a supporting role in getting him elected. | ||
| And by the way, there are others like him, thankfully, in the U.S. Senate. | ||
| There's a crop of young patriotic populace who I think are starting to change that body, people like Katie Britt and Senator Schmidt from Missouri. | ||
| I hope there's going to be more added to those ranks. | ||
| I think Jim Banks will be one of those in the upcoming election, a new declared candidate who's been endorsed by both now President Trump as well as J.D. Vance. | ||
| So this movement continues to grow. | ||
| And a lot of us in the movement, in the America First movement, we understandably get very frustrated, particularly the Senate, when you see people like Lindsey Graham, these kinds of globalist corporatists, obviously Mitch McConnell. | ||
| The frustration is palpable at times and very understandable. | ||
| But let's also take solace and be encouraged by the fact that there are young patriotic populists who are already there, or I think on their way there in the election in 2024, and that our movement is still very young. | ||
| In the case of J.D. Vance, literally young, but also young as a political movement. | ||
| I want to go, people should know Cortez is not just a capital markets guy, but one of the most sophisticated people about narrative and political messaging. | ||
| It's the reason he was first brought on as a Trump surrogate into the Trump campaign back in 15 and 16 because of his understanding of this. | ||
| I want to go through, I want to stick to Ukraine, but Steve, you've got to help me out here. | ||
| All of a sudden, out of nowhere, these main battle tanks were everything. | ||
| And it kind of came like, boom, like a summer storm. | ||
| All of a sudden, Germany's committing tanks, America's committing tanks, which means a whole new... | ||
| And the war, all of a sudden, you start to hear, yeah, this is all for a major offensive. | ||
| They're going to totally pivot, major offensive, kind of maybe give up Bakhmut, the seizure. | ||
| Pivot in the spring, massive offensive maneuver warfare, combined arms. | ||
| To Crimea. And then they go, oh, by the way, we're going to need combat air patrol for that closer. | ||
| So we need F-16. So then F-16s became the thing. | ||
| This is just a couple of days ago. | ||
| And of course, my favorite headline, Lockheed announces, Lockheed announces they're starting production around F-16s even without a purchase order. | ||
| So everything's go. Then all of a sudden Biden, no, well, maybe no F-16s. | ||
| Then today you look at the Mac daddy and if Denver could put that up on Drudge, All of a sudden, out of nowhere, now you see, which we've been saying is going to happen, but now all of a sudden there's a story, oh, well, you know, the Russians are actually massing, I don't know, 700,000 new troops. | ||
| They're conscripting on the border, and they're going to roll in with a massive winter offensive. | ||
| Steve, what is going on? | ||
| They're spinning a new story every day. | ||
| Give us your assessment of the narrative of this, and what's the reality behind it? | ||
| Well, listen, it seems like they try to throw out whatever escalatory tactics they think will play. | ||
| They see if it sticks or not, right? | ||
| And I really believe it's that haphazard. | ||
| And that gets to the larger point here that you've certainly been making and that JD made on your show today of, give us the plan, okay? | ||
| Give us the plan. First, make the case to the American people why this battle, okay, this Black Sea battle, this ancient ethnic rivalry that has gone on from time in memoriam Make the case to us why this matters to us and why the American people have a vital national interest in what has been an often moving border of eastern Ukraine. | ||
| First, make that case. Then, secondly, make the case of, okay, if it does matter to us, what is the strategic plan? | ||
| What are going to be the tactics of the United States to achieve this supposedly massive goal, this supposedly massively consequential goal for the United States? | ||
| And then, thirdly, How are we going to pay for it? | ||
| That would be what a serious country would do. | ||
| It would be what a real administration would do. | ||
| We don't have that, unfortunately, in the White House right now. | ||
| None of that has been done. | ||
| Instead, we get ridiculous platitudes saying that we're fighting for democracy, or for the ideals of democracy, or that we're somehow fighting to prevent another World War II, even though the situation is in no sense analogous to World War II. Not to mention, if it were, Europe, to J.D. Vance's point, Europe should be far more alarmed than the United States, and that is not the case right now. | ||
| The United States has spent more, think about this, it's important for the audience to know, the United States has spent more than all of the European Union combined. | ||
| We have also spent more already in Ukraine than the entire Russian military budget. | ||
| Okay? Those are the stakes. | ||
| That kind of context is important. | ||
| We are the force of escalation here. | ||
| That is the reality on the ground. | ||
| But getting back to the plan, Joe Biden had the decency to go to the American people, and not just Biden, the Republicans as well, many of them every bit as pro-escalation as he is, people like Lindsey Graham, have the decency to make the case, not with platitudes, okay, with reality, with strategic reality, to make the case to the American people why this is important, how you propose that we pursue these supposedly massive goals, and then how are we going to pay for it? | ||
| Because, Steve, even if I were to grant, which I certainly don't, but even if I were to grant that this is massively important to the United States, How are we going to pay for it? | ||
| Our country is broke. | ||
| We are borrowing mountains of money that we are sending over to Ukraine, which only exacerbates the inflationary quagmire that we are currently suffering here in the United States. | ||
| The American people cannot afford the essentials of life, and yet we are borrowing mountains of money to send over to Ukraine to escalate a battle in which the United States has no discernible U.S. national security interest. | ||
| By the way, Steve, we're going to take a break. | ||
| We've got a chalk talk. We've got more on the economy, more on capital markets. | ||
| We're going to get to Biden's beach house being quote-unquote raided by the FBI. I guess since the FBI was invited, they cleaned it up, and the FBI has been invited over there. | ||
| So we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to come back to Steve Cortez in a moment. | ||
| A note about Jim Banks. | ||
| We had Jim Banks on, as you know, the day that he announced running for the Senate. | ||
| Banks is endorsed by President Trump. | ||
| Actually, the Senate, I think, Leadership Fund came in. | ||
| As soon as, wait for it, Mitch Daniels announced he's not going to run. | ||
| I take a tiny bit, this audience, a tiny bit of pride in that, of coming out strong, that Mitch Daniels was not accepted. | ||
| It was going to be a very tough He opted out even before. | ||
| He said, not the right job. He came to D.C., checked it out, listened to a couple of War Room clips, said, not the right job for me at this time. | ||
| I'll pass it this time. So J.D. Vance also endorsed. | ||
| Very important. Short commercial break. | ||
| We need more Hollies. | ||
| We need more Banks. | ||
| We need more J.D. Vance's. | ||
| Schmidt now looks like it's not going to be too shabby. | ||
| We'll check it all out. Steve Cortez next. | ||
| We're going to talk about the economy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe even throwing a chalk talk next in the war room Here's your host Stephen K back You you you Are you shocked at your latest utility bills? | |
| Well, if you are, you're hardly alone. | ||
| But for millions of Americans, it's an absolute crisis because they are literally having their power shut off. | ||
| Let's look at the numbers in a chalk talk. | ||
| From the Chicago Sun-Times data, last year, January through October, the most recent month we have, 1.5 million Americans had their power shutoff. | ||
| How does that compare in context? | ||
| Well, for electricity shutoffs, up 29 % over the prior year. | ||
| For natural gas, up 76 % over the prior year. | ||
| And this stunning number may get even worse soon because prices are spiking. | ||
| For example, in California right now, according to the utility SoCalGas, Typical winter heating bill has gone from $130 a month last year to $315 a month this year, a rise of 142%. | ||
| This reality is simply unaffordable for many, many Americans. | ||
| It's a consequence of Biden's war on American energy and the exorbitant borrowing and spending of the Washington Uniparty. | ||
| We're counting on the GOP House to hold the line. | ||
| Okay, today, two things. | ||
| Steve Cortez is going to be a meeting at the White House with Biden and Kevin McCarthy. | ||
| It kind of started all off, and there's also going to be... | ||
| The Federal Reserve this afternoon. | ||
| Give us your assessment, though, of just walk through. | ||
| And by the way, Dave Walsh is going to join us. | ||
| Our energy experts are going to join us in the six o'clock show tonight. | ||
| We're going to go into details on this energy situation. | ||
| But Steve, walk through where the economy is right now for working class and middle class Americans. | ||
| I reported out the other day 65 percent or 70 percent of Americans couldn't put together a thousand bucks. | ||
| If they had an emergency, a super emergency with the kids or something, they couldn't put their hands on $1,000 in cash. | ||
| 70 % of the American people, sir. | ||
| Right. You know, Steve, the reality is, and you would never know this from corporate media, but the reality is for working class people, we are in a very deep recession, if not a depression. | ||
| And that's not my opinion. | ||
| That may sound alarmist, but that's what the numbers reveal, like the numbers that I just showed during the chalk talk. | ||
| And by the way, I'm being very careful there because I always I always make sure that my data is correct. | ||
| The actual number is probably worse than that because only 30 states out of the 50 states actually report this data. | ||
| And again, we only have that data through October. | ||
| So the reality is probably closer to about 2 million households, not people, 2 million households in the United States had their power shut off last year. | ||
| And it's only going to get worse, Steve, because there was, of course, a moratorium on power shutoffs during the pandemic, and that saved a lot of people, but that is no longer the case. | ||
| So the reality on the ground for working class people right now, Steve, and we know this because of credit card debt, is that they are struggling simply to stay afloat. | ||
| And by the way, to further prove my point, and again, let's use some data and evidence to back this up, the Wall Street Journal actually just in a couple days ago published an article, the U.S. consumer is starting to freak out. | ||
| Not a term that you normally see from the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| But the Journal is exactly correct here. | ||
| And if we can go to slide number one, chart number one, as evidence of that, of the consumer freaking out, credit card balances up 15 % in the third quarter. | ||
| And according to the New York Fed, that is the largest increase in credit card balances in two decades. | ||
| And this is also key in the Wall Street Journal, a paper I don't often agree with. | ||
| They did very good reporting here. | ||
| They also said tens of millions of Americans, and this is a key point, are going to have to start resuming making payments on student loans later this year. | ||
| So, Steve, think about the fact that a lot of folks could get away with not paying the utility bills and still keep the power on, okay? | ||
| That has ended. Also, millions of Americans have not paid student loans now in almost three years, and they're going to have to start paying In addition to that, Steve, we know that the job market is deteriorating fast. | ||
| That is always the last indicator that we are going into a recession because employers, thankfully, are reticent to lay people off. | ||
| They make cuts other places first before they start laying people off. | ||
| And the Wall Street Journal, if we can pull up slide number two, chart two, also made this point in that article about the consumer freaking out. | ||
| And they cited the chief economist of Nationwide. | ||
| And she said, the last bastion of strength is the labor market, but I don't think it can withstand all these other forces. | ||
| So, Steve, here we see this confluence of factors, right? | ||
| What the Biden inflation has done to crush working class Americans, middle and lower income folks, are hardly making it right now, as revealed by the utility shutouts, the most basic bill in your life, right, that people simply can't pay. | ||
| At the same time, we have the Biden war on American energy, unfortunately, making these basics of life all the more unaffordable. | ||
| And the result, the net, net result, is that the U.S. consumer who had kept the U.S. economy going, who was more than two-thirds of the total U.S. economy, is spent. | ||
| That's the reality right now. | ||
| That is what we face in this country. | ||
| It puts tremendous onus, tremendous pressure on the House GOP to do the right thing. | ||
| The American people handed them a mandate, entrusted them, gave that gavel to Kevin McCarthy for an important reason, to stand up against Biden on a lot of issues, but I think perhaps principally this one, or maybe second only to the border, to restore the prosperity of the United States, because working class people are really hurting right now. | ||
| I want to tie this back to the two things today. | ||
| Then you've got McCarthy going over to the White House for the first meeting. | ||
| And remember, Biden's position is clean debt ceiling, no negotiations. | ||
| You just got to give it. | ||
| And then you've got the Federal Reserve should be, I think, this afternoon. | ||
| On McCarthy, we shouldn't be leading. | ||
| They want to put forward a plan of the cuts and, of course, Medicare and Social Security off the table. | ||
| We know that, as it should be. | ||
| But do you believe we shouldn't put forward anything right now? | ||
| Don't they owe us the financial model? | ||
| Steve, you follow this very closely, as I do. | ||
| We have no earthy idea, none. | ||
| Of where the Biden regime is, where the Biden administration is, anywhere financially. | ||
| We don't know what the cash flow is, we don't know really. | ||
| We got a letter that's got one day, one number, 5 June, right, where they say they run out of cash, which is a lie. | ||
| That's a total lie. Give us your thoughts on this and how important this is for working class people about your economic situation is not going to get better till we sort this situation out with the debt ceiling and with the Federal Reserve, sir. | ||
| Correct. So, you know, look, good math teachers will always say, show me your work, right? | ||
| I don't want to see just the final answer because you might have looked at your neighbor's paper and gotten the final answer and gotten it correct, okay? | ||
| So, show me your work, right? | ||
| Any good math teacher does that. | ||
| Well, McCarthy needs to be a math teacher and say, show us your work. | ||
| By the way, this is very analogous to what we were just talking about with Ukraine, okay? | ||
| Show us your work there. What's your plan? | ||
| Because, no, we don't trust you. | ||
| After two decades, okay, Washington war machine and the foreign policy establishment of America, we don't trust you to just make it up as you go along. | ||
| We don't trust you that an ad hoc plan is going to work out somehow for the American people. | ||
| We don't trust you in Ukraine and getting back to the economy. | ||
| We don't trust you here. Janet Yellen, you say that we can pay our bills through June. | ||
| Okay, show us that model. | ||
| Show us exactly the model. | ||
| Show us the prioritization of payments. | ||
| And Steve, I think you were the first person out there in the conservative world in media to promote this idea. | ||
| And it's critical. Show us how you are going to prioritize payments. | ||
| Because I think in all reality, we can actually go quite a bit. | ||
| And still take care of the fundamental obligations of the United States, meaning things like, in an order of priority, first thing, faith and credit of the United States, paying the interest on our debt. | ||
| Secondly, things like Medicare and Social Security, that those will be taken care of, okay? | ||
| We can do this, and we can go, in all likelihood, for quite a long time. | ||
| But show us your work, and then beyond that, if we If we agree to raise the debt ceiling, what is the economic model? | ||
| What is the economic model, Joe Biden and Janet Yellen, to get us back to a place of fiscal sanity? | ||
| Because, again, to connect the dots, my last two chalk talks have been about Americans can't pay their utilities, Americans can't pay their car bills, okay? | ||
| That's the reality. The repo man is back. | ||
| One of the few jobs that's going to be very much in demand is being a repo man right now. | ||
| Both of those realities, okay, your car payment, your utility bills, are directly connected to what is going on in Washington, D.C. The profligacy, the exorbitant borrowing and spending of Washington, D.C., Combined with the war on American energy has created an absolute inflation inferno in this country that has resulted in real wages crashing for 21 straight months, the worst streak in all of American history. | ||
| And given the streak of layoffs right now, Steve, given the fact that big business, particularly big tech, is starting to lay off people in mass, by the way, that 21-month streak of decline in real wages I don't see that reversing anytime soon, unfortunately. | ||
| I fear, you know, that in another nine months, I'm gonna be on this show saying we're now at 30 straight months of declining real wages. | ||
| But how do we arrest that trend? | ||
| How do we change that trajectory? | ||
| How do we get back to a place of fiscal sanity and get back to a place where working-class Americans can pay their bills? | ||
| And I don't mean the luxuries. I mean the basics of life. | ||
| Well, Kevin McCarthy has to stand his ground. | ||
| House of Representatives, Republican majority, they must stand their ground. | ||
| And you're exactly correct. The onus is not on the Republicans to come up with a plan. | ||
| I mean, of course, we should have a lot of ideas, but the onus is on the White House to say, okay, here's our model. | ||
| We're going to show our work as any good student would do. | ||
| We're going to show our work, why we're saying we can last through June. | ||
| And here's what we propose going forward to get back to a place of fiscal sanity. | ||
| So thank goodness we do have that leverage. | ||
| And look, I know a lot of folks Are very understandably not happy with last November's elections, that we thought we would do better. | ||
| And I certainly agree with that wholeheartedly. | ||
| However, let's also take solace that we did win the House, that we earned that victory and we have this seat at the table and we have this significant lever of power that we can use and that we must use in the coming weeks to restore prosperity. | ||
| You see, the narrative is pointing out, oh, you're going to cause an economic catastrophe. | ||
| It's already an economic catastrophe. | ||
| It's an economic catastrophe. | ||
| Just ask working-class people or middle-class people throughout the country. | ||
| It's a catastrophe. The only way you reverse this is full-spectrum energy dominance along with stop printing money. | ||
| Remember, this spending is really a tax. | ||
| John Tammi, this spending is really a tax on people. | ||
| Okay, and it's all there to replace the productive economy that's waiting to be unchained, right? | ||
| And that's why he continued to have this phony, you know, and this is why they got to stop the emergency use, because once you do that, all the games, all these excess payments are going to people, right? | ||
| This whole thing about the student debt, that's why they want to extend it. | ||
| That's why they want the emergency powers extended. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons we got to stop it, plus the fact there is no pandemic. | ||
| I want to go to the Fed. | ||
| Give us your thoughts today because everybody's, you know, Jim Cramer, everybody's around. | ||
| Although Michael Burry last night put out a one-word tweet that went mega viral, sell. | ||
| So tell us about the Fed today. | ||
| Your thoughts, Brother Cortez? | ||
| So look, I'm basically consensus here with most economists on Wall Street that the Fed will raise by a quarter basis point, meaning 0.25%. | ||
| But I guess I would be a little out of consensus in that I think the Fed will talk tougher. | ||
| I think rather than the actions today, actually the talk is going to be more important regarding the press conference from Powell. | ||
| And I think he's going to talk tough. Financial markets so far are sort of calling the Fed's bluff, saying, well, you've raised pretty aggressively, but we really don't think you're going to continue to. | ||
| And I think Powell has found religion. | ||
| I really do. And by the way, I'm not giving him undue credit, okay, because Powell was either a fool or a liar or some combination of the two throughout 2021, for example, when He joined Janet Yellen, and even into 2022, trying to tell the American people that inflation was, quote, transitory, when anybody with a brain knew that it was anything but transitory. | ||
| It was structural. So Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve as an institution, they have tremendous guilt here. | ||
| They have complicity for what they have created. | ||
| However, having said that, it really does seem like Jerome Powell has found religion. | ||
| In his public statements and because of his actions in raising rates aggressively, he seems keenly aware of the crisis that this country faces regarding inflation. | ||
| And so my guess is and my prognosis for today is that he's going to talk tougher than the markets expect. | ||
| And given that, I would join. | ||
| I'm not giving financial advice to anybody. | ||
| But on the whole, looking at the macro perspective, I would join Dr. | ||
| Michael Burry of the Big Short fame in saying, in general, Assets are priced pretty richly here if the Fed is going to stay aggressive, meaning that Wall Street perhaps is a bit more exuberant than the reality on the ground would suggest. | ||
| We're going to go to break. We're going to come back with Cortez. | ||
| We've got Darren B. Andrews talking about Nikki Haley in South Carolina. | ||
| Real quickly, Steve, we've only got about 20 seconds. | ||
| Boris Johnson's on Capitol Hill. | ||
| What are your thoughts? Boris Johnson, a great Prime Minister of England or maybe not so great? | ||
| He might be the worst prime minister in the history of the UK, and that's saying something for a country with centuries of prime ministers. | ||
| Steve Cortez, hold on for one moment, short commercial break. | ||
| We'll be back with Darren Beattie, Steve Cortez, next in the war room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're taking down the CCP Spread the word all through Hong Kong Getter has arrived. | |
| The new social media taking on big tech, protecting free speech, and canceling cancel culture. | ||
| Join the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| The platform for independent thought has arrived. | ||
| Superior technology. | ||
| No more selling your personal data. | ||
| No more censorship. | ||
| No more cancel culture. | ||
| Enough. Getter has arrived. | ||
| It's time to say what you want, the way you want. | ||
| Download now. He got defaulted in the open when he hit the line in the state. | ||
| He gets deported out of Australia. | ||
| Doesn't get any points at Wimbledon. | ||
| Can't play the open. | ||
| To be fair, he made choices that led the bat on some of those things. | ||
| I think he should have committed the play. | ||
| That's a debate, but he did make choices that led to that. | ||
| That's for God for the moment. | ||
| Okay. Steve Cortez is with us. | ||
| Cortez, a terrible day in American sports history because the man, Tom Brady, has retired officially, the greatest of all time, in the hardest position ever. | ||
| In all sports. And somebody, Ben Harnwell today said, oh, you left Formula One. | ||
| Don't give me Formula One. Being a national football quarterback is two orders of magnitude harder than anything else on Earth. | ||
| Okay? He retired. | ||
| But this is such a big story for so many reasons. | ||
| And I want to talk a little bit about Chris Fowler, who I love on football, but just went awful woke on this. | ||
| Talk to us about why this athlete, why this is so important, particularly given everything we're finding out now about the VACs. | ||
| Right. Listen, Chris Fowler is a corporatist shill, and unfortunately, in that regards, he very much fits the ESPN mold, because ESPN is all about woke narratives, and it's all about supporting their advertisers, including Big Pharma, rather than really covering sports. | ||
| Now, by the way, folks out there who aren't into tennis or aren't into sports, this story still matters to you because it's about COVID tyranny. | ||
| So Djokovic won for the 10th time the Australian Open. | ||
| It was a magnificent comeback for somebody who was literally expelled from that country last year for supposed to be an unsafe to the health of Australians, even though he is literally one of the most fit people on the entire planet. | ||
| But because he decided for very valid reasons to not get vaccinated, he was expelled from Australia last year. | ||
| But not only did he return and win this tournament, he has regained the number one ranking in the world, despite the fact that he obviously couldn't play in Australia last year. | ||
| He got no points, as John McEnroe, the tennis great, mentioned there. | ||
| He got no points for Wimbledon. | ||
| And then total shame on the United States. | ||
| He was not allowed to play in the United States Open last year. | ||
| And the United States Tennis Association, the United States government, the Biden administration, all of them should hang their heads in shame that we told the most talented and fit tennis player in the world that he was not allowed to come and play tennis in the United States because of the personal medical choices he had made. | ||
| But despite all of those obstacles, he regains the number one ranking. | ||
| And John McEnroe is celebrating that on ESPN. And Chris Fowler has to step in and defend the corporate interest, right, and try to step on this magnificent story and say, oh, well, this was because of the choices that he made. | ||
| No, it wasn't. It was because of COVID tyranny in Australia, COVID tyranny here in the United States, and big pharmas The pain that it inflicted upon Americans, many of them regular folks, by the way, who couldn't deal with it the way, thankfully, Djokovic is in his own stratosphere financially, right? Not worried about his finances. | ||
| A lot of regular working class Americans were who had to make the same kind of decisions as Djokovic did. | ||
| But I think it's very revealing to see that take. | ||
| And good for John McEnroe for standing up for Djokovic and shame on Fowler for playing corporate shill. | ||
| And you, Emerald Robinson, there are other heroes. | ||
| This is all going to come out over time. | ||
| Trust me, what went on here. | ||
| Outrageous. And now we're into the Pfizer documents. | ||
| Our book is number three, I think. | ||
| The collection of all the reports. | ||
| The one Naomi gave last night was probably the most explosive of all. | ||
| So this is all going to come out. New York Times article on all this. | ||
| I'm quoted in there saying the vax. | ||
| Its origination, what happened, all of it, the vax, is going to be at the center of the primary in 2024. | ||
| Trust me, we need answers on all this. | ||
| Fowler, I love him on football, but man, to make that comment right there is pure corporatist show. | ||
| Steve, I know you've got to bounce, and I've got Darren Beattie up. | ||
| Darren Beattie's got a new article on Nikki Haley. | ||
| I want your thoughts on it. | ||
| Four weeks before, five weeks before the 2018 midterm, which I was going around the country saying, hey, Pelosi's telling people if they take the House, they're going to impeach him. | ||
| People are going, what are you talking about? They're impeach Trump? | ||
| What do you mean? I said, that's what she's telling me. | ||
| That's why they're knocking on doors and ringing doorbells. | ||
| Nikki Haley resigned, steps down from the administration. | ||
| She could have done it the evening of the election. | ||
| She could have waited four weeks. | ||
| The reason she did that is she wanted to say, hey, I'm not with him. | ||
| I'm not with him. And I was giving a talk in London at Bloomberg. | ||
| They had a conference there of all these hedge fund guys, and I'm laying down fire-breathing populist nationalism. | ||
| And they told me that, and I said, hey, she is, to quote Milton, since I was in London, I was going to give a Paradise Lost analogy. | ||
| She's as ambitious as Lucifer. | ||
| Your thoughts on Nikki Haley from South Carolina, Steve Cortez. | ||
| Maybe more ambitious than Lucifer and even less principled. | ||
| That's what I would say about Nikki Haley. | ||
| And if you think it's hyperbole, just look at her past statements. | ||
| I call her the political weather vane, meaning whichever way she thinks the political winds are going, that's where she orients herself. | ||
| And by the way, I say thinks because she's usually wrong. | ||
| about where she thinks the political winds are going. | ||
| But look at her relationship just with Donald Trump, right? | ||
| Absolutely gushed over Donald Trump when he was popular, when things got tough after January 6th, and a lot of people showed who they truly were after January 6th in that aftermath. | ||
| Here's what she said about him. | ||
| Quote, we shouldn't have followed him. | ||
| We shouldn't have let that happen, and we can't let that happen again. | ||
| She then comes back to Donald Trump, gushing over Donald Trump, and promising that she will not run against him if he gets in the primary. | ||
| Well, he is very obviously in the primary, and now she is getting into the primary. | ||
| So she is a political weathervane. | ||
| She is a total committed globalist, somebody who served on the board of directors of Boeing. | ||
| She is unfortunately representative of the terrible politicians from the great state of South Carolina. | ||
| It's an absolute crime that the wonderful people of that red state, the wonderful salt-of-the-earth South Carolinians are represented by so many charlatans, unfortunately. | ||
| And we can get into that maybe at another segment. | ||
| But chief among them, their former governor, Nikki Haley. | ||
| In a sense, I'm almost glad that she's entering the primary because, fine, it will give us a chance to highlight the failures of the globalists, to highlight her own hypocrisy, her own duplicity, and yes, to your point, her unbridled ambition that is not bound in any sense in patriotism or principle, but only in the pursuit of power. | ||
| That's who Nikki Haley is. | ||
| We got the quote of the week. | ||
| It's more ambitious than Lucifer and less principled. | ||
| Steve Cortez, how did they get your content, brother? | ||
| Please find me on Twitter. | ||
| I'm at CortezSteveCortez with an S. Thank you very much. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Darren Beattie, Revolver. | ||
| He's got a thing or two to say about Nikki. | ||
| Also, we're going to start with a cold open on our favorite, Victoria Nuland, and what she thinks about Ukraine next in The War Room. |
Export Selection