Feb. 3, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:53
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| The timeless scream of a dying regime. | ||
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot of 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. | ||
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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War Room, here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| But listening and reading through some of the details of the story and looking at the history of it, it turns out this happens from time to time. | ||
| from time to time. | ||
| There are balloons floating around looking down on the United States, sometimes from China specifically. | ||
| And also that it was within range of being shot down, but the Defense Department made a decision not to do that. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit how often this happens and where the balloon may be now? | ||
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So we know of at least two other times this has happened in the past, and it's not just during the Biden administrations, it's happened during past administrations as well. | |
| The difference about this one that has caused officials more concern is that the balloon, in past cases, these aerial surveillance assets will Come near the U.S. or maybe go into the U.S. for a short time and then they leave again. | ||
| This one has been, it flew, as you can see from that map there, from the Aleutians down through Canada into Montana. | ||
| And it's been hovering in the United States now for several days. | ||
| That's what has U.S. officials more concerned about it. | ||
| And then, you know, you mentioned it was in Montana. | ||
| That's not too far from Malmstrom Air Force Base, which is where the U.S. has intercontinental ballistic missiles. | ||
| It's one of the U.S.'s strategic ballistic missile sites in the United States. | ||
| Now, as far as we know, it was never closer than about 200 miles. | ||
| The balloon is still flying over the continental U.S. and officials are not telling us where it is at this point. | ||
| So that's one of the things. | ||
| Now, you mentioned also the potential for it to be shot down. | ||
| This raised a level of concern that on Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who was traveling in Manila at the time, convened a meeting with his senior defense leaders. | ||
| That included Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, the head of NORTHCOM NORAD, General Glenn Van Herc. | ||
| Austin called them all together for a meeting. | ||
| It was the middle of the night in the Philippines, and they talked about the potential track for this thing, where it was coming from, where it was going, the potential intelligence collection capabilities, which they believed to be somewhat minimal. | ||
| They don't think that this can collect very much. | ||
| And they even brought in some aircraft, including AWACS, their surveillance aircraft, and F-22 fighter jets. | ||
| with the potential to bring this thing down. | ||
| They scrambled these aircraft to both look at it and the potential to shoot it down. | ||
| Now, ultimately, they decided that given the fact that it didn't have a ton of collection capability and they looked at the potential for taking it down and the debris field that that would create on the ground, They made a recommendation to President Biden not to shoot it down, but to continue to monitor and track it, and that's where they landed. | ||
| President Biden agreed with that decision, and according to a senior defense official who I spoke with yesterday, they're literally monitoring this on a minute-by-minute basis, and they are maintaining both the ability and the decision-making space to take it down if need be. | ||
| It's Friday, 3 February, the year of our Lord, 2023 in Beijing. | ||
| They are belly laughing. | ||
| They're mocking us right here. | ||
| The headline in today's Financial Times of London, right? | ||
| We always go to The Economist and the Financial Times for the real news. | ||
| Blinking to meet Xi during landmark China visit in sign of thawing relations. | ||
| That didn't age very well, did it? | ||
| We've asked Congressman Matt Gaetz, who's one of the smartest people I know on national security and armed services, to join us here. | ||
| We've got a lot to go through today. | ||
| Congressman Gaetz, give us your assessment of this situation over the skies of the great state of Montana. | ||
| This is the consequence of a totally predictable foreign policy, right? | ||
| They see Blinken and Biden as paint-by-numbers strategists, not even strategists. | ||
| This would have never happened under President Trump because... | ||
| You like the unpredictability of Trump. | ||
| Of course, because they would not have known what would have been the consequences. | ||
| An additional 1,500 torpedoes might have showed up in Japan the next day. | ||
| If they did this, you know. | ||
| Or you shoot down some over mainland China, not over Montana. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. I think that that really gave Trump an ability to reign over an era of peace in the world. | ||
| And now we see the negative consequences. | ||
| This is obviously a result or direct, I think, reaction to the basing decision in the Philippines, which is very important. | ||
| You have to also think that China may be trying to bait the United States into Disputes over appropriate rights in the air because we would say, look, we shoot this thing down. | ||
| It was over our airspace. | ||
| Then does that give some sort of pretext for China to take some action? | ||
| For the geosynchronized satellites we have maybe over that part of the world? | ||
| Well, not just that, but there are sorties that are being flown very frequently by our allies, by our service members in the South China Sea over areas that China is claiming their jurisdiction. | ||
| And so if you create this sort of jurisdictional pretext, you could see things escalate there very quickly. | ||
| Is what you're saying that this is more political information warfare, that part of unrestricted warfare they do, versus actually the national security? | ||
| If we knew that this balloon was getting information from our sensitive ICBM sites and transmitting it back to China and we did not shoot it down, that would be the dumbest in a series of dumb decisions from the Secretary of Defense and from this president that we have possibly seen. | ||
| There is also a possibility that this balloon has very little value militarily to China and it is there as a signal. | ||
| And maybe they're hoping that we go capture it and then you know what? | ||
| They would be able to observe what our capture technology is. | ||
| Something that would be very helpful to them as they were making a move on Taiwan or planning to make a move on Taiwan. | ||
| What if they're trying to see in this type of a circumstance what type of munitions we would use? | ||
| Would we go surface to air? | ||
| Would we go air to air? What type of squadron would we have activated for this type of a mission? | ||
| Then they get to observe all of that in the event of a Taiwan invasion. | ||
| So if this thing is just some dumb balloon floating over there, then I think we have a different series of options than if it is actually transmitting information back. | ||
| And trust me, we know whether or not that balloon is transmitting SIGINT back to Beijing. | ||
| And if it is, It should have been shot down long ago, but if it isn't, let's not just have the impulse that because it's over sensitive areas and it's a Chinese balloon that every option would advance our strategic goals. | ||
| I think that the reaction here should be more torpedoes in theater. | ||
| We know from all the war games that we have observed commercially and otherwise that torpedoes in theater is actually what changes a lot of the deterrence calculus. | ||
| I mean, torpedoes, when you're talking about a fast attack, submarines, Navy destroyers, up with torpedoes in the East China Sea, in the South China Sea. | ||
| And in the Taiwan, I mean, available for the states of Taiwan. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, straight to Taiwan. Let me go back for a second. | ||
| What you just laid out is a highly sophisticated, you know, we're going to move three, it's four dimension chests, right? | ||
| In that part of the world. | ||
| In, quite frankly, because the Chinese Communist Party with One Belt, One Road and clearly underwriting the KGB in Russia, with Russia and Turkey and Iran and Pakistan and our former allies in Saudi Arabia that are working with them to get off the US dollar. | ||
| And of North Korea, that group that they have now in some of the stands to consolidate the Eurasian landmass, right, and now throw in Brazil. | ||
| Is that subtlety lost in that part of the world where maybe it's not bad to do smash-mouth? | ||
| You come over our territory, you get shot down, we have the balloon and we hold it up and say, We're back and we're going to be on offense. | ||
| We're not going to be on our back foot in the straits of Taiwan. | ||
| Particularly, this foreshadows a naval and air blockade. | ||
| Not an amphibious assault, a naval and air blockade at Taiwan. | ||
| You're on the trigger and on offense. | ||
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How would you shoot it down? I think you've got a couple of opportunities. | |
| Number one, jets. | ||
| Number two, maybe surfaced air. | ||
| I realize it's pretty high with 150,000, but I think you have to go after it. | ||
| But then they're forcing you into a choice that you're then making, and then they're observing that decision calculus. | ||
| There's no doubt about that. | ||
| One thing I try to do in conflict and in strategy is to be in the fights that I pick, not the fight that my adversary picks. | ||
| And so if you're doing that and you're engaging in this sort of, let's assume just hypothetically, we don't know this, that it's a dumb balloon, that it's not- Let's assume it's a dumb balloon. | ||
| But you say there is signal value back to wave around their dumb balloon as sort of a- To show India right now, the big concern is, given how we've botched this Ukraine situation, And with munitions, people are not taking us seriously about, when the general talks about three years for war, they're not taking us seriously in the South China Sea, in the Straits of Taiwan. | ||
| That's why the Philippines was such a brave, bold move. | ||
| It shows you how desperate the Philippines, who have been kind of an anti-American government for so many years, is now scared about this. | ||
| But those people need to see leadership, and they need to see leadership not at the negotiating table. | ||
| They need to see leadership as shooting something down. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, but the way, I think, to show... | ||
| That message to India, to anyone else, is to go increase our actual basing in theater and our actual capabilities. | ||
| Instead of playing a signal game back and forth with Beijing, perhaps it would be a stronger response to say, all right, well, it's not going to be four new bases. | ||
| It's going to be 12 new bases. | ||
| I think I would agree with you. | ||
| If it wasn't for... | ||
| Because they've had this for a while. | ||
| If you'd done this over the Aleutians, if you'd done it over Alaska, but now with three days... | ||
| Over the ICBM of Northern Montana, and I think everybody should understand, just like every town's a border town and every city's a border city, you're in this fight on nuclear weapons, everything. | ||
| I mean, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, boom. | ||
| And you guys will be incinerated 60 seconds before D.C. in a thermonuclear war. | ||
| So that's why everybody is in this fight. | ||
| I think the thing that they're in our face is how many days they've put it over the Air Force Base in Montana. | ||
| Well, our own military is not entirely proficient in every circumstance in balloon world. | ||
| In 2015, our own army tried to test balloon technology, and it ripped through the state of Pennsylvania, leaving a number of people without power. | ||
| So these balloons don't always go where you want them to, and you may have had a circumstance where this thing was supposed to have kind of a symbolic glancing pass by, and circumstances change. | ||
| Let's go back over to the powers that be. | ||
| You're obviously one of the leaders of the America First movement. | ||
| You're a leader, obviously, in the Trump movement, but particularly in national security, which is your specialty. | ||
| We're gonna have Congressman Matt Rosendale on the Saturday show to go through his thoughts. | ||
| What is the takeaway? Rosendale's probably shooting at it right now. | ||
| No, he's got that pump action. | ||
| They're ready to go. | ||
| I don't know why the governor hasn't launched an Air National Guard. | ||
| What is the sense on the Hill right now of the smartest brains we have on our side of the football of how this should be handled? | ||
| I was in a meeting yesterday with Mike Gallagher who's going to be chairing our special committee directed at competition with China. | ||
| The select committee. And he believes that we right now are in the window where China could make a move on Taiwan at any moment. | ||
| That we are in that kill window right now. | ||
| And that we have to be enhancing our focus on cyber, on electronic warfare, on various air defense systems. | ||
| And we also have to look at how China might bring others into a conflict like that, Japan, the Philippines. | ||
| I want to refer back because although I think Gallagher is not quite as anti-CCP as maybe the war room, but I have a lot of respect for him. | ||
| That is totally different and that's why it was so great you coming in today of the headline the Financial Times. | ||
| They talk about Blinken going to the kowtow after he's been beat up in Alaska. | ||
| Sullivan was beat up and humiliated in Rome. | ||
| We're going back for a third helping of this and there's talking about thawing relations. | ||
| So how can two very smart young men Like Mike Gallagher, former Marine Corps officer, and one of our top thinkers on America First, say, hey, we could be in the window of kinetic war. | ||
| They're already engaged in unrestricted warfare. | ||
| That is a chasm right there. | ||
| Walk us through that chasm. | ||
| We've got about a minute, and obviously you're here for the first hour. | ||
| Walk me through that chasm. I mean, we are assessing the number of sorties that China is flying over Taiwan. | ||
| We are assessing the kinetic capabilities rise. | ||
| And, you know, there is this thought with Blinken and Biden that integrated deterrence will somehow prevail on Xi to not make this move. | ||
| Integrated deterrence being defined as? | ||
| We sort of think of it as woke deterrence. | ||
| It's like, well, we can't necessarily deter them with all of our air, land, sea capabilities, but we're deterring them with our economic prowess or our sense of social justice that everyone in the world just wants to be a part of. | ||
| Are they serious about that? Absolutely. | ||
| So that's how there is, I think, a real divergence in assessing the circumstance that we are in. | ||
| Gallagher and I think that we could be literally in the kill zone. | ||
| Okay, so you think real quickly, the 2025, General Millahan, his 2025 is the outside window of this. | ||
| You think right now we're edging up to the kill zone, beginning of potential, a kinetic war? | ||
| Absolutely, and that's why we have to catch the signal, not the noise. | ||
| And I'm not entirely sure that this balloon floating around isn't noise. | ||
| What we're doing to enhance our basing, our stockpiles, that's the real signal. | ||
| Okay, Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of the leaders of the America First movement, is with us for the first hour. | ||
| we're going to turn after a short commercial break. | ||
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Babb. | |
| Okay, CPAC is coming up. | ||
| CPAC.org slash worm. | ||
| First time ever. They're giving 47 bucks off the general mission ticket. | ||
| That gets you into the studio. | ||
| We're going to do the same studio we did at Turning Point, the same studio we did at CPAC Dallas. | ||
| Remember, one of our co-hosts At Turning Point was Congressman Matt Gaetz. | ||
| So we look forward to seeing you at CPAC. When everybody show up March 1st through 4th, we're going to have tons of War Room activities. | ||
| This is going to be like a War Room festival. | ||
| So just like we did at Turning Point, just like we did at CPAC Dallas, we want everybody to turn out. | ||
| CPAC.org slash War Room, $47. | ||
| Wasn't that where, I mean, all the initial news was made about the Speaker's race? | ||
| 100%. If I recall... | ||
| You laid out a pretty good strategy. | ||
| Actually, Gates, that was a called shot from, I think, July of 2022, the entire thing, and one day we'll be able to tell that story. | ||
| Matt Gates actually nailed the exact number that the majority is going to be. | ||
| This is in July. Right here in this building. | ||
| The number, he actually said and talked about TikTok and how they were actually going to, we weren't going to get to the 35 or 40 seats. | ||
| They'd be close races, but we'd lose, right? | ||
| How it was going to be the Republican establishment that did that, the entire thing, and then the entire strategy. | ||
| And this is one of the things when you were on Hannity that night. | ||
| When Sean said, hey, Matt, I have no problem after dumping on you for four days. | ||
| I have no problem with what you're doing. | ||
| This is the Friday night before the big event, the throwdown. | ||
| I have no... But all I want you to do is do it behind closed doors. | ||
| They don't realize what you and that team have been doing behind closed doors. | ||
| And I think it's for the... I think... | ||
| And Russ' vote came on here. | ||
| And Russ was, you got to remove... | ||
| McCarthy's head of the cartel. | ||
| You know, the Gates strategy is right. | ||
| And Russ came on here and says, I think you see the potential for a guy to be a great Speaker of the House on this path, right? | ||
| And so I think it was a net positive. | ||
| Yeah, my hope is that we front loaded the pain. | ||
| That by doing this out in the open, by doing it for the first week, we basically front-loaded the pain, and now there's a sense of how we have to proceed forward. | ||
| And I think we've seen the best version of Kevin McCarthy. | ||
| I think Kevin McCarthy now is on the balls of his feet, leaning forward into this fight, and I'm real proud to work with him. | ||
| Mitch McConnell is giving him a lot of headroom on the debt ceiling we'll get to in a second. | ||
| But I want to go back because people, I think, don't appreciate the fact of how on national security, how well you've thought this through. | ||
| So this morning on CNN in Morning Mika, we could play this. | ||
| They're in total panic mode. | ||
| So last week we had you had to get battle tanks. | ||
| As you know, tanks are just not another weapons platform. | ||
| It's another type of warfare. And then we were told the tanks because we were going to give up Bakhmut and we're going to pivot and go liberate Crimea right before we liberate eastern Ukraine. | ||
| Then we had to have the 16th fight. | ||
| In fact, Lockheed was nice enough to tell the Financial Times, hey, we're going to start a production run right now. | ||
| You don't even need a purchase order because we know you guys are going to get them. | ||
| Man, if they could have figured out a way to get the F-16s to the Afghans, they totally would have. | ||
| 100%. So then all of a sudden, the defense minister comes out. | ||
| When Biden says no in the F-16s, the defense minister, now we have 500,000 Russian troops on the border, and they're going to get a winter offensive, and Kyiv's going to fall, and the whole thing's over unless there's a massive buildup. | ||
| And the sub-headline is CNN this morning. | ||
| I think if Denver put it up, it would be appreciated. | ||
| The sub-headline is that we need a new massive program immediately. | ||
| So I want you to pull back the camera from an America First perspective and compare and contrast what's happening in Ukraine to the vital national security interests of the defense of Taiwan, sir. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's not comparable. | ||
| We do not have an interest in continuing to spend money in Ukraine. | ||
| And when we look at what's going on in Southeast Asia, it literally could dictate the future of the world and a major power node of Information and warfare and supply chain. | ||
| And so it's just a very – I mean, here's the simplest way I could put it. | ||
| Go look at anything in your house and tell me how many things say that they're made in Russia or Ukraine. | ||
| And then go look at everything in your house and see how much that's made in China or Taiwan. | ||
| Okay, that statement right there. | ||
| This is the most declarative statement I've heard from anybody that's an elected official up there. | ||
| Do people up there understand? | ||
| Boris Johnson was just here for three days, and he's now going back. | ||
| He's telling me he's in shock about how there's a thinking that maybe Ukraine's not in the vital national security interest of the United States. | ||
| He's sitting there. You've got to give them everything you need, including F-35s. | ||
| Is that thinking that you just laid out, is that starting to permeate? | ||
| Into the thinking of our side of the football. | ||
| Well, I mean, make no mistake. | ||
| In Congress, there is broad bipartisan support to send almost anything that shoots to Ukraine. | ||
| When we began our opposition to U.S. involvement in this war, there were three of us. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massey, and Matt Gaetz. | ||
| And, you know, as this has gone forward, there are now Just under 70 Republicans who vote against these continued US advancements into this conflict zone. | ||
| And I think that under the War Powers Act, the Biden administration should actually have to come to Congress and explain what the endgame is here. | ||
| Because what you just described is grisly and deadly and catastrophic and would be Just a horrible thing to have happen in the world today. | ||
| The carnage would be catastrophic. | ||
| So I'm for peace. | ||
| I don't believe that continuing to send M1 Abrams tanks or to even contemplate F16s advances the cause of peace. | ||
| I think that will make this conflict longer and bloodier. | ||
| And I do think Cravenly, that there probably are some defense contractors that need there to be a war going on somewhere that the U.S. is sending arms to. | ||
| And whether it's arms that ultimately end up in the hands of the Taliban or the Azov Battalion or the Ukrainians or sold on the black market to Lord knows who, they need to continue to book that new business. | ||
| And I don't think that should drive the foreign policy decisions that we make. | ||
| I think our nation's interests should drive that. | ||
| Being in World War III with a nuclear power is not in our interest. | ||
| I can't even believe I have to say that out loud. | ||
| But the people who watch this show should know that there is no geography in America where this war is more popular than in the 202 area code here in Washington, D.C. This is what I don't think people appreciate. | ||
| You come from one of the most patriotic congressional districts in the nation, right? | ||
| Pensacola Naval Air Station, the Navy base there. | ||
| And you win overwhelmingly, and you win with taking no defense contractor PAC money, right? | ||
| I take no PAC money from anybody. | ||
| Anybody, but you specifically, I mean, the defense contractors, a guy like you would normally be top of the list, right, when you come from those type of areas. | ||
| What doesn't the Republican Party get about that, that we're going down a path? | ||
| If you try to liberate Ukraine, you're going to have tactical nuclear weapons. | ||
| What's the probability that the Ukrainian army with F-16s and American tanks could liberate Crimea, sir? | ||
| Well, I mean, I'm not going to get into that level of intelligence and review, but We can't break the news here. | ||
| The notion that it is in our interest to go and decide what guy in a tracksuit gets to run Crimea is laughable. | ||
| It is absurd. | ||
| And the fact that we would risk World War III over this is so irresponsible. | ||
| I mean, we have to make serious decisions. | ||
| And to go, you know, putz around in Ukraine over the Donbas region or Crimea and to have that be the possibility that we literally melt the globe with nuclear fallout? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| And like Putin is... | ||
| A very dangerous person with the ability to wreak far more havoc on the world. | ||
| And I do not want to see that happen. | ||
| And I think we have to be very serious about this. | ||
| And I worry we are sleepwalking into this war and we're sleepwalking the American people into it. | ||
| And I believe that we ought to have a war powers resolution before the Congress and the Biden administration ought to explain the end. | ||
| I want to get to the war powers, but I want you to talk about the mentality in this city. | ||
| Why is it in the imperial capital? | ||
| They want to wrap themselves in the flag. | ||
| It's just the Ukrainian flag. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Well, I sense that... | ||
| These are not dumb people. | ||
| They're not dumb people. | ||
| They fashion themselves as great world leaders. | ||
| And there is this kind of narrative appeal to, oh, if we block the Russians, we seem tough and we're this strident force to the world. | ||
| But the reality is far different if what we're contributing to is deadlier war and war that extends for a longer period of time. | ||
| That's what really diminishes America's value. | ||
| Do we think that our involvement in the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War, for as long as it was, for as costly as it was, and for as bloody as it was, made us more of a symbol of hope and truth in the Arab world? | ||
| Does anyone really think that now? | ||
| Quite possibly, we could see a similar outcome in Europe and Ukraine if we're deemed as Meddling and extending the carnage. | ||
| As a tutorial, because one of the things we do here is try to give people the nomenclature and the concepts and the structure of process. | ||
| What is the War Powers? | ||
| What's the War Powers Act? | ||
| It's quite controversial about the constitutionality. | ||
| What's the War Powers Act and then why is it important in this country? | ||
| We have two minutes and you're clearly here after the break too, but just walk people through what we're talking about when we talk about War Powers. | ||
| Declaring war in the Constitution is vested in Article I with the United States Congress. | ||
| And because for generations in politics, congressmen and women don't want to take those tough votes. | ||
| They don't want to be on record for or against involvement in this. | ||
| And so they have ceded that power to the executive branches. | ||
| And this has happened under Republican and Democrat Congresses, Republican and Democrat Presidents. | ||
| And then you see, like you saw with Obama in Syria, where 40 advisors turns into us being a referee in a Syrian civil war. | ||
| You see in... | ||
| East Africa, where we continue to get kind of drug into these very regional disputes over things. | ||
| And in Ukraine right now, these M1 Abrams tanks, they come with them, very sophisticated supply chain requirements and very sophisticated logistics kits. | ||
| And that has to have a human operation component. | ||
| We have advisors in Ukraine right now. | ||
| And because we And because that is an area of hostility, the Congress can force a vote on whether or not to recall those people to our country and to diminish our involvement in this war. | ||
| Very seriously reviewing a legislation that would call the administration to account on that, to bring them before the Congress and say, what is the plan here? | ||
| Where are we going with this? | ||
| Is it howitzers to M1 Abrams to F-16s to F-35s? | ||
| What are we going to go? Give nuclear weapons to Ukraine next to have a deterrent structure against Russia? | ||
| It's crazy. Is it to defend Kyiv or is it actually to go liberate Crimea? | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. We're going to be back. | ||
| We've got the weaponization of government. | ||
| We've got all the strategy on the investigative committees, the debt ceiling, all of it. | ||
| Congressman Matt Gaetz joins us for the entire first hour here in the war. | ||
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We'll be back in a moment. We will fight till they're all gone. | |
| We rejoice when there's no war. | ||
| Let's take down the CCP. Here's your host, Stephen K. Van. | ||
| Thank you. By the way, CPAC, we need a huge showing at CPAC. There's going to be so much going on. | ||
| I think most of the presidential candidates will be the President. | ||
| Trump's going to give, I think, the big speech on Saturday to kind of wrap things up. | ||
| I think Nikki Haley's coming. I think other invites out there are going to be announcing. | ||
| Gates is going to be co-hosting War Room, breaking that news right now from CPAC one day. | ||
| I'm kind of concerned about giving you too much co-host time because it's like, I feel like Wally Pipp to your Lou Gehrig. | ||
| The one thing that went super viral was the Santos interview. | ||
| Gates was not shy about telling me. | ||
| Well, it is a co-host diminution to go from Natalie Winters to me. | ||
| It's pretty impressive. | ||
| Just real quickly, Tom Massey's got the exclusive interview up in Breitbart talking about what he's thinking of doing, this war powers thing. | ||
| Whatever venue you guys decide, we have to have Biden come forward and put forward the plan. | ||
| We just can't continue to do this. | ||
| It's so immature. | ||
| Tanks now because tanks have a new type of warfare. | ||
| Liberate Crimea, defend Kiev, F-16s, F-35s. | ||
| Well, you know you're going to hear... | ||
| The State of the Union, but the Union is going to be Ukraine's Union, not ours. | ||
| How are you guys going to respond to that? | ||
| Oh, I mean, you saw how I responded when Zelensky showed up. | ||
| I thought that was quite powerful. Why did you sit when the Churchill of the 21st century is there? | ||
| I agreed with Zelensky. | ||
| I was happy to stand and applaud, but I was not going to stand and applaud when he continued to assert that Ukraine's future and fate was directly tied to the future and fate of the United States. | ||
| I do not have that low of a view of the United States to say that, like, where Ukraine goes, we go. | ||
| And it seemed like everyone else was ready to adopt that paradigm, and Ms. | ||
| Boebert and Mr. Burchett and myself were not. | ||
| If we're tough enough just on audits alone, No more weapons. | ||
| Look, you think it's a coincidence that right as Republicans take over the Armed Services Committee and prepare for audits that he starts firing the people who are engaged in this corrupt conduct? | ||
| Hold it. First off, the Interior Minister that everything reports up to mysteriously dies in a helicopter accident. | ||
| Then he fires the ten guys closest to him because now he has zero tolerance. | ||
| Zero tolerance. That's just a normal course of events. | ||
| That seemed to be a reaction more to what was happening politically in our country than what was happening Politically in Eurasia. | ||
| I want to go to, we got the debt ceiling and then I got all the committees. | ||
| Let's go to the debt ceiling because I think McCarthy has really stood up here. | ||
| Coming out of the White House the other day, I thought he was terrific about laying out the case about how important this is, etc. | ||
| And then he came out yesterday after the thing saying, oh, they got a relationship, they're talking. | ||
| He walks out in front of the sticks in the Capitol and says, hey, I told him, no clean debt ceiling, right? | ||
| They're going to be spending cuts kind of in your face, which is about... | ||
| It totally cut the narrative of MFC and CNN, which is you got to come together. | ||
| It's going to be the end of the country. I think Speaker McCarthy did a good job in that meeting. | ||
| Let's acknowledge some facts, though. | ||
| Republicans voted to raise the debt limit without preconditions during the Trump administration. | ||
| I did not. I have never voted to raise the debt limit because I think when you max out your credit card, it's a pretty good time to start looking at your spending habits. | ||
| And we never seem to do that. | ||
| And so we have to refocus there. | ||
| And let's also remember, in most circumstances, when Republicans pick a fight over the debt limit, the Republicans lose. | ||
| So let's examine why. | ||
| The debt limit fight for Republicans... | ||
| In 2011, you don't think the Budget Control Act was at least a good start? | ||
| It wasn't great, but a good start. | ||
| We kind of threw it out the window eventually because of Afghanistan and Iraq. | ||
| We had the side pocket, $100 billion you had to keep feeding the war machine. | ||
| Wasn't the concept of the Budget Control Act the first time... | ||
| Cut cap and balance, you know, had... | ||
| Some positive downward pressure, but it wasn't enduring. | ||
| And so I think that when you're just looking at a negotiation over top lines, that is actually never enduring. | ||
| Let me make that as a premise argument. | ||
| I believe you have to force policy changes. | ||
| Those become more enduring. | ||
| Yes. Because it's not about waste and fraud and abuse. | ||
| You've got to have fundamental. | ||
| It's absurd. There's about half a trillion dollars in clawbacks that we should do and in distributions of funds to states that we should not make because we're repealing the COVID emergency. | ||
| That should be a baseline. | ||
| But I just don't understand why we're a country that pays people who could go to work not to. | ||
| How big a deal is that? | ||
| Does that come away with the emergency measures coming off, or is it deeper? | ||
| Considerably deeper. And by the way, it pays you on both sides of the ledger. | ||
| If you impose work requirements on all means-tested entitlement programs for working-age people, not for the disabled, not for seniors, but for working-age people, it's a trillion dollars in savings during the 10-year budget window. | ||
|
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This is in Medicaid and in food stamps. | |
| It's discretionary spending. | ||
| The biggest chunks are from the Obamacare-Medicaid expansion to able-bodied adults. | ||
| So Social Security and Medicare are off the table, but you're saying you're taking Medicaid and other aspects of discretionary spending. | ||
| If it was Matt Gaetz, I think that we do need reforms to Social Security and Medicare. | ||
| I understand politically enough people said that's off the table. | ||
| That's not going to happen now. | ||
| By the way, Medicaid should not be a sacred cow. | ||
| Big time. But it hasn't been. | ||
| You notice people don't talk about Medicaid. | ||
| It's always about Social Security. | ||
| Right. So with Medicaid, I think there's a lot of meat on the bone for savings. | ||
| In SNAP, you can get over $400 billion in savings just by having work requirements. | ||
| And then there's a lot of money to save if we just stopped giving tax credits to illegal aliens. | ||
| How about that as something that could unite 222 Republicans? | ||
| If we pick those vectors and focus on them, not only do you save money, but you actually drive growth on the other end because you have higher labor participation and you're able to get better business confidence. | ||
| Well, people go back to work. | ||
| Yeah. We become a more productive society. | ||
| The restaurants and the small business guys actually can get some employees, right? | ||
| Well, and the essence of the Trump boom was that it drove the productive sectors of the economy. | ||
| It wasn't just numbers moving on a spreadsheet in Wall Street. | ||
| People that worked with their hands... | ||
| That wore their name on their shirt actually did better as a consequence. | ||
| And if you drive labor participation, you drive business confidence, investment confidence. | ||
| At the same time, you're cutting federal spending, which has been a big driver of inflation. | ||
| That would be a bankable win. | ||
| Look, it's not all I would do. | ||
| It's not all I would want, but that is ground we could defend. | ||
| And Joe Biden says that he will negotiate about nothing. | ||
| So let's make Joe Biden negotiate on behalf of The 32-year-old living on the couch who could go to work, who isn't, and you're paying for their health care, their transportation, their cell phone, their broadband. | ||
| Let's get that person up and working and see how to unlock the potential of this country. | ||
| To get away from the rhetoric of the left, which is, oh, you already paid for it, all this nonsense you hear. | ||
| And also even on the right, dude, it's not focused. | ||
| The two things you're talking about, if you want to get real about avoiding a fiscal and financial crisis, is it's got to be policy and commitments. | ||
| You can't say waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| It's got to be policy and commitments. And it can't just be top lines. | ||
| My critique. The critique of cut cap and balance is when you explain it to the American people, we've now reached such a magnitude of the numbers that it almost becomes incomprehensible on just rolling back to certain levels of spending. | ||
| What you have to say is there is a policy choice we have made, a social choice we've made in this country to pay people to not work who could otherwise work, and we have to eliminate that. | ||
| We have to reverse that choice. | ||
| And I think that gets buy-in. | ||
| And you know what? We should be able to get some Democrats on that. | ||
| I don't know if you can in 2023 because this is a Democrat Party that can't, you know, that a hundred of them can't even vote against socialism this week when that matter was on the floor. | ||
| But- You're saying, Spanberg, you want to talk about swing districts where that's tough to defend. | ||
| Bill Clinton did deals like this with Newt Gingrich. | ||
| And then you're not juxtaposing Joe Biden against extreme MAGA Republicans, which is probably us. | ||
| Instead, you're juxtaposing Joe Biden against Bill Clinton. | ||
| Why not use that strategic option? | ||
| Very powerful. We have $31.5 trillion face amount at Treasury. | ||
| We also have $9.5 trillion over the Federal Reserve nobody talks about. | ||
| Mercatus is a great study. | ||
| Normally because of the game with zero interest rates, they've been kicking in about $50 billion to $100 billion every year to get the deficit down. | ||
| Now with the inverted yield curve, there's a trillion dollar loss sitting over there. | ||
| Isn't this the time for the Masseys to have their back that somehow, because the Federal Reserve is the funding mechanism of the administrative state, don't we have to put that on the table? | ||
| Remember, and Mercatus brings this up, without any congressional authorization whatsoever, They've gotten $9.5 trillion in their balance sheet, including a trillion dollars they just threw out there during COVID with no authorization. | ||
| And now we're sitting on a trillion dollar loss that's also going to now include, with the interest rates we have to pay, over a trillion dollars in interest. | ||
| Isn't it time to bring that part of the equation into this and say we've got to have a frank discussion about the money printing situation? | ||
| Well, I mean, let me tell you what probably few other Republicans would say, and Massey would be among those who would agree with me. | ||
| There's no amount of downward pressure you can put on authorized and appropriate government spending through Congress that will solve this inflation problem in the absence of reform to Fed policy. | ||
| No way to do it. | ||
| And so if you do not work on that Fed policy as well, there's only so far we can take economic recovery through the United States Congress. | ||
| And that's a really scary thing to say in a republic, that the elected representatives of the people aren't able to turn the levers on this economy the way this thing gets juiced and ran back. | ||
| By the way, the way things happen is you've got to get it out there and you move the Overton window. | ||
| Isn't now the time for the Masseys of the world, the Matt Gaetz of the world, Since you're doing such a great job on really explaining what America First is and what is in our vital national security interests and what is not, because you've got to make tough decisions. | ||
| You don't have easy decisions. The same thing, this is a massive teaching moment. | ||
| This debt limit fight is the fight we want because you have an opportunity to make it a teaching moment for the American people about how the system works and how they pay for everything that screws them. | ||
| It is a complicated argument and it is a difficult argument to make during a shutdown, right? | ||
| Explaining the way that Fed policy juices inflation is a tough split screen with people who are going to a veteran cemetery and it's Do you believe right now the cash comes in? | ||
| There won't be a default unless they choose a default because plenty of cash is coming in. | ||
| That's why they have to show us a model. | ||
| Do you feel comfortable making any of these decisions, putting it forward, where the Treasury Department has not given us exactly what the financial plan is? | ||
| We don't really have a model. | ||
| Russ Vogt does things. Other people do things. | ||
| But that's like in COVID where the University of Washington or Hong Kong or Southampton were taking their numbers. | ||
| But Fauci never has to come out and actually give his numbers. | ||
| No, I mean, look, I mean, We all know they're shooting from the hip, right? | ||
| Tell the American people that. | ||
| You talk about Treasury, a $6 trillion a year government. | ||
| Are they shooting from the hip, or do you think they really have a handle on just the cash flows? | ||
| Receipts in, cash out. | ||
| I think it's Panic mode with the way the American people are starting to get concerned about those drivers. | ||
| And that's why you saw in the last announcement, not a smaller rate hike than expected, but then the forecast that like this is not over, right? | ||
| It was almost like in the last announcement, the beatings will continue until morale improves. | ||
| Right. Where you have whether war powers or some sort of activity on Ukraine to bring this to the front with Taiwan. | ||
| Where do we see progress? | ||
| We've got about a minute. On the whole thing of the death ceiling, what you just talked about, about policy changes, when and where do we expect to see that come forward? | ||
| Well, look, we have work to do to create a center of gravity within the Republican conference. | ||
| That can unite 222 voices around a single vision. | ||
| And if we are unable to do that, the Democrats will have a single voice. | ||
| Which is clean debt limit. | ||
| Easy to explain. I think tough to defend in the medium and long term, but easy to explain in the short term. | ||
| And so we have to explain that when you max out your credit card, it's a pretty good time to evaluate your spending choices. | ||
| There are People that we are spending money on and we are not helping them by spending that money on them. | ||
| And I think that if we did not do that and we explained it to people, it's familiar. | ||
| People see it in their neighborhoods and their families and their churches. | ||
| Get them off the couch. Yes, we've got to get the Zoomers off the couch. | ||
| Zoomers off the couch. Brilliant. | ||
| Okay, short commercial break. | ||
| We come back. We got one more block and you walk us through the investigations, the weaponization, all of it. | ||
| Congressman Matt Gaetz joins us here in the war room for an entire hour. | ||
| Dead Ceiling, War Powers Act, shooting down, or in his case, not shooting down, a Chinese spy balloon. | ||
| We were walking through various hypotheticals. | ||
| Hypotheticals, I understand it. I understand it. | ||
| The grand strategic view, pretty impressive. | ||
| Not a lot of people in Congress can do that. | ||
| Short commercial break. And he wins with huge margins in a super pro-military district. | ||
| Takes no PAC money and particularly no defense contractor money. | ||
| Always beating swords into plowshares. | ||
| That's Matt Gaetz, America First. | ||
| Short commercial break. Back in a second. | ||
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| Okay, welcome back. We got Congressman Matt Gaetz. | ||
| Okay, all these investigations, there's a lot going on. | ||
| Number one, is anybody kind of coordinating all of it? | ||
| It looks like you've made a strategic decision to start the morning after the day after the State of the Union, and particularly weaponization of government, which I know is one of your things you're most focused on. | ||
| Yeah, I think that there are certain behaviors that we see common to the enterprise of government that are really troubling to a lot of people. | ||
| I mean, let me just give you a few examples. | ||
| List building. I mean, I don't even know, as a congressman, how many different types of lists exist that present derogatory information about our fellow Americans. | ||
| How people get on these lists, what due process exists, how being on a list like the no-fly list even accidentally can impact- You're saying government, not some list made up by Twitter or Facebook. | ||
| Oh, no. We're talking about this select subcommittee is focused on the weaponization of government against our people. | ||
| Yes. And you look at the unconstitutional list that the ATF has developed, right? | ||
| So I think that is something that I'm very interested in that I think would firmly be within the jurisdiction. | ||
| You're not a fan of the ATF? No. | ||
| You think it would be franchised as like a Chuck E. Cheese? | ||
| I made comments on the floor that alcohol, tobacco and firearms should be a Florida convenience store chain, not a government agency. | ||
| I would abolish the ATF and certainly given the way that they've abused rulemaking authority. | ||
| Surveillance is another vector that I think you'll really see. | ||
| You would be surprised. | ||
| Will people be shocked by these? | ||
| It is shocking to me each and every day to learn some of this stuff. | ||
| People probably won't be shocked at the national security states work to surveil people because we've exposed a lot of that. | ||
| But even government entities like the post office have digital surveillance teams that assess people's political conduct. | ||
| And when we asked them why they did that, the answer was, well, if there was a political protest somewhere, it might disrupt the delivery of the mail. | ||
| And so under that ludicrous pretext, you're literally being spied on from everybody from the highest level spy hunters on the planet Earth to the post office. | ||
| And so that's an important vector as well. | ||
| And then just the way the regulatory state It gets turned on people and you've got armed IRS agents. | ||
| You've got armed agents at the Department of Education even. | ||
| And you wonder why that is necessary. | ||
| It's like the future of this socialist, tyrannical state that they're going to teach you critical race theory at the end of an Uzi? | ||
| Let's hope not. The arming of government agencies is quite literally the weaponization of these agencies. | ||
| And why we have so many armed IRS agents and armed agents across the enterprise of government is also something I expect a subcommittee. | ||
| I call for this in the stage of CPAC in 17 when I was the president and senior advisor. | ||
| Deconstruct the administrative state. | ||
| It starts with this weaponization. | ||
| They're just not going to sit there with Jordan and you and Stefanik and these other hammers up there. | ||
| They're just not going to sit there and go, oh, this is lovely. | ||
| We got called. We're going to... What is the fight actually to get to the real information, expose it to the American people? | ||
| So the big flaw in the Trey Gowdy strategy was don't take any depositions until you get all the documents. | ||
| And in a traditional litigation context, that would be the preferred path. | ||
| We're on the shot clock right now. | ||
| We have to assume we have two years to do this work and have a deliverable in this Congress. | ||
| And so while our work may go beyond that, we have to have a time calibration that is precise. | ||
| And so we have already started taking depositions. | ||
| I was taking a deposition last week. | ||
| I want people to understand that. | ||
| Let me lay out the strategy. Yeah, I was in a deposition taking one of a former senior FBI official last week. | ||
| And while it can be very hard to get current officials, you often face less resistance when you get someone who has rolled out of their You know, FBI, DOJ, ATF, NSA job, and now they're working in the private sector because people with a big job in the private sector for a Fortune 100 company or a tech company, they don't want to see their name in the news as having defied a subpoena. | ||
| And so just historically, we've gotten greater participation. | ||
| from people who are no longer in the direct employ of the government, and a lot of them have a lot to say about their experiences there. | ||
| We would encourage whistleblower. | ||
| I mean, some of the best whistleblowers we've had, they call our congressional office and say, look, I'm out of service with the government. | ||
| I've seen some things there that I was unable to change in the direct chain of command, but I want to see them changed now. | ||
| And I want to tell you what things happened that weren't in accordance with the law or our regulatory policies. | ||
| And as those folks come forward, we're here to investigate their claims to ensure that we can corroborate with documents, with other witnesses, with evidence. | ||
| And then we want to tell the American people the story and then have legislative I think that one of the consequences of the select subcommittee could be bills to sunset some of these agencies, to eliminate some of these authorities, to de-weaponize, and then you know what? | ||
| That becomes the big fight on the upcoming appropriations bills, and because of the work we did at the beginning of January, it's not going to be the fight on an omnibus. | ||
| Each of these agencies is going to have to stand up and they're going to have to defend their budgets and we're going to have the evidence from the weaponization subcommittee to use to try to limit the harm to our people. | ||
| That's the convergence of all these strategies. | ||
| That's brilliant. By the way, this will be the hill they die on. | ||
| This committee. They will fight this tooth and nail. | ||
| This will be an epic fight. | ||
| They've already put some of their most talented members on the subcommittee as well. | ||
| Dan Goldman is a killer. | ||
| Smart guy. Worked against that guy in impeachment. | ||
| He's very capable. He's very bright. | ||
| And he'll be there leading the defense of the administrative state, it seems. | ||
| This is going to be a big one. How do people get to... | ||
| Oh, we've got about a minute. All your content, you've got an amazing podcast, all your writings, everything. | ||
| Firebrand is the podcast. | ||
| It's everywhere on the internet. | ||
| We're about to go over two million on my personal Twitter account, at Matt Gaetz, also on Getter, at RepMattGaetz. | ||
| Everybody on Twitter ought to be all over you because it's breaking news. | ||
| We've actually, if you, this is very impressive this morning. | ||
| A lot of good news here. Thank you so much for doing this and thank you for the fight that's going on. | ||
| You went next level in those five days. | ||
| Those were five days. | ||
| That changed the direction of this country. | ||
| That's going to be remembered in history. | ||
| When people go back and write the history... | ||
| It wasn't a destination. It's part of the process, and we've got to keep our shoulder to the wheel. | ||
| Trust the process, as long as you keep grinding. | ||
| There's a lot going on behind the scenes. Thank you. | ||
| Honored to have you on here. Okay, 90-second break. | ||
| I'm going to take a short break. 90-second break. | ||
| We've got Miranda Devine of the New York Post. | ||
| I think she's got a few things to say about Abby Lowell and his shot across everybody's bow. | ||
| Turns out it was in response to a lawsuit that Hunter got dropped on Hunter. | ||
| The laptop from hell. | ||
| We got Steve Cortez. | ||
| We're going to have Michael Patrick Leahy. | ||
| Who else? Joe Allen. | ||
| Darren Beattie on the U.S. dollar. | ||
| All of it next. 90 seconds. |
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