June 24, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:52
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
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The people 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 lie? | ||
| 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. | |
| Hey, Peter K. Navarro in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| I can't tell you what an honor and pleasure it's going to be for this hour because we're having a very, very special guest. | ||
| It is Commander Jack Carr. | ||
| He's a former Navy SEAL who actually worked his way up through the ranks. | ||
| That's not often the way SEALs go, but he was a sniper Serving in both Iran, excuse me, Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| And then down the road also was involved in counterterrorism operations in the Philippines. | ||
| And what has attracted me to Commander Carr is simply I've been an avid fan of his books. | ||
| It started with The Terminalist. | ||
| He's written six books previously. | ||
| Bestsellers all, and he's really vaulted to the top of the military thriller authors, and he's just on fire. | ||
| But what was really interesting to me is this latest book, which I'll encourage you to go out and grab. | ||
| Get one for your friend, too. | ||
| Jack Carr, Only the Dead. | ||
| What really... | ||
| What intrigued the heck out of me is this is the first book which has very significant political and economic analysis in it overlaid upon just a very gripping story. | ||
| You see me a lot in the war room with Steve. | ||
| The left is trying to turn MAGA into a four-letter word. | ||
| I've been trying to explain to you what it stands for in endless wars, secure borders, strong manufacturing base, fair elections, things like that. | ||
| And my stuff is dry, and I picked up Only the Dead by it. | ||
| And lo and behold, this man, military hero, is also... | ||
| Arguably the best novelist in the genre of his time. | ||
| So right now, I want to welcome Commander Carr to Steve Bannon's War Room. | ||
| Sir, how are you today? Doing great. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| It's an honor to talk to you. Yeah, and I thought what I'd want to do is give most of the time to you. | ||
| So what I want to do is start off with a passage from your book. | ||
| It's chapter one. The conceit here is that the hero... | ||
| Of the book, and the books, all of the six books, The Terminalist, is a fellow named James Reese, not coincidentally a SEAL, although you go out of your way to say you're not him. | ||
| But I'm going to read something to you. | ||
| Reese is in solitary confinement, tucked away, falsely accused of assassinating the president. | ||
| They're really putting the screws to him, and he's lost his wife and daughter as a result of his activities. | ||
| And he says, had you been home, had you hung up the gun years earlier, they would still be alive. | ||
| It was an unwinnable war. | ||
| You knew that from the start. | ||
| You studied your history. | ||
| Those who sent you neglected to study theirs. | ||
| And then they failed you and those they sent to fight. | ||
| And we're talking about Afghanistan here, I believe. | ||
| For 20 years, they filled the coffer of their defense industry allies enjoying dinners and drinks with lobbyists, none of whom had the balls to step into the breach. | ||
| You knew it, you went anyway, and you didn't do it for God and country. | ||
| How much of that, Jack Carr, is your view of what happened in Afghanistan? | ||
| Unwinnable war, they failed you. | ||
| Yes, a lot of the things that my protagonist sees, more importantly feels, are things that I felt at some point along the line. | ||
| You don't have to have served in the military. | ||
| You don't have to have read a book on strategy. | ||
| You don't have to have read a book on tactics, geopolitics, anything to apply common sense to the situation in Afghanistan. | ||
| And come to the conclusion that there was a much better way to leave that country than the way that we did. | ||
| Especially if you have our quote unquote best and brightest studying this situation for these 20 years. | ||
| And then how they get out of there is the way that we all watched go down on national television, August 2021. | ||
| And then all of a sudden it just disappears. | ||
| There's no accountability on the other side of that. | ||
| Very different from George Marshall in World War II holding generals and admirals accountable for their actions and putting the right people in place who led us to victory in World War II. Very different than President Lincoln during the Civil War. | ||
| We lost that accountability really after World War II with the reorganization of our defense departments and intelligence apparatus. | ||
| We really lost that accountability that had been so important up to that point in time. | ||
| And Afghanistan really does highlight that. | ||
| And those passages that you just read Are certainly things that I feel and think about when I look at Afghanistan. | ||
| Because we didn't have to go back to Genghis Khan. | ||
| We didn't have to go back to Alexander the Great. | ||
| We had three British incandes in the 1800s, early 1900s. | ||
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And we had the Soviets, 79 to 89, that we could have looked at. | |
| And since Trump lied to our particular situation in Afghanistan. | ||
| Yet we neglected to do that. | ||
| So let me ask you this question, the two-parter. | ||
| Should we have gone in there to begin with? | ||
| Is there any reason why you, and whether or not we should have once we got there, what could we have done to actually have won that? | ||
| Or was it an unwinnable war from the outset? | ||
| So the reason I say it's an unwinnable war from the outset is because of the people we had in our leadership positions and the lessons that they drew from the Soviets. | ||
| What they drew from the Soviets was, oh, we cannot have a large-scale presence on the ground in Afghanistan. | ||
| That was their lesson. | ||
| So, when we had special operators on the ground in November and December of 2001 in the Tora Bora region, we had bin Laden essentially pinpointed. | ||
| And those special operators and a couple of CIA paramilitary outfits and some indigenous forces We asked for Marines. | ||
| We asked for Rangers. We asked for 10th Mountain Division people. | ||
| And I say we, I mean they. And those requests were denied for whatever reason, which allowed Bin Laden to escape, which led to this 20-year adventure or misadventure in Afghanistan. | ||
| So that's what I'm talking about when I say that it was unwinnable. | ||
| It was unwinnable with those people making those types of decisions. | ||
| At those levels. But if we took the right lessons from the Soviets in Afghanistan, if we'd studied our history, and we should have gone in there right away, but we should have just handled it differently, done the job, and then moved on out. | ||
| Moved on out. In and out. | ||
| Not in endless war. And there's a fascinating little passage on page 60. | ||
| Let me just read this. | ||
| The American poppy field eradication programs and their chemical herbicide spraying efforts had turned Had turned more of the populace against them. | ||
| Why were the Americans so intent on destroying a crop that produced something wanted and consumed in the West? | ||
| It only exacerbated the war. | ||
| Villages and families that owned the local warlords protection money for the opening crop now had to pay in other ways. | ||
| And what I love about what you do... | ||
| Commander Kars, you speak these truths from the perspectives of the various characters in the book. | ||
| This was an Afghan who had been a truck driver there, and he saw this firsthand. | ||
| This kind of level of detail, does the American people, do they understand this kind of thing? | ||
| Because I love seeing this as a matter of history in there. | ||
| It's something I didn't know. But can you just comment on how you came to include that kind of level of detail? | ||
| I've always been a student of warfare, a student of history, because a lot of it is a history of warfare. | ||
| So it's very natural for me to weave these things in. | ||
| My character is a student of warfare. | ||
| He's a student of his craft. | ||
| He wants to be a better leader and a better operator, as I did when I was in the SEAL teams. | ||
| Every day he wanted to be a better leader than you were the day before, a better operator than you were the day before. | ||
| And that meant understanding the battle space because that's going to allow you to make better tactical decisions under fire and then also allow you to lead in a way that establishes or continues to build on a foundation of trust that you have with those both below you and above you in the chain of command. | ||
| So you have to understand Not just how to place a breaching charge and kick in a door and go grab somebody out of their bed in the middle of the night and drag them back to a fob for questioning. | ||
| You have to understand the impact that's going to have on the battle space and then you have to articulate to those above and below you why you're doing what you're doing. | ||
| And then you have to be the best at placing that breaching charge on the door, getting in that house and go grabbing that person out of their compound and dragging them back. | ||
| So you have to be A student of all of these things. | ||
| I like to show perspectives of the United States through the eyes of the enemy. | ||
| Oftentimes we neglect to do that. | ||
| If you're any sort of student of history, you understand the importance of looking at things through the eyes of the enemy. | ||
| For some reason in the West, we have a very difficult time doing that. | ||
| I take the opportunity to do that in my novels. | ||
| In that case right there, that's the poppy eradication program that really just led to us having more enemies around in Afghanistan. | ||
| What I found interesting about your craft, your protagonist there talks about studying early as a young man. | ||
| His father was a great inspiration to him, who was in, I guess, the same profession serving this country in the military as well as later the CIA. Does that mirror your experience? | ||
| Was this something early on where you were both a bookworm and somebody who was also a patriot wanting to serve at the front lines? | ||
| Did you have some people in your life like that? | ||
| This is a question about your craft. | ||
| Yes, it's on both counts. | ||
| My grandfather was killed in World War II. He was a Corsair pilot, and for those watching or listening, that was the plane that had the wings that would fold up to I fit him on aircraft carriers and he was killed on an aircraft carrier at Bunker Hill near the end of the war in 1945, May of 1945 when two kamikazes hit us. | ||
| So I had pictures of him in his squadron, him with his plane. | ||
| Interesting. I had his wings. | ||
| I had the silk maps they would give aviators back then because if you had a paper map and you hit the water, it would disintegrate. | ||
| But a silk map just got wet and you could still use it on escape and evasion. | ||
| So I had all those things. | ||
| So it was just in my blood from a very early age. | ||
| And plus, there was a show on TV called Black Sheep Squadron starring Robert Conrad. | ||
| So that was a connection that happened to that generation because he never even met his father. | ||
| And I did not either. | ||
| So that was our connection to his father, to that generation, was watching that show. | ||
| So I always knew I was going to serve my country in uniform. | ||
| And then at the ripe old age of seven, I found out what SEALs were. | ||
| And my mom was a librarian, so we went down to the local library and started doing research. | ||
| On SEALs, on Special Operations, and a lot of it back then, although there wasn't much, was on Special Operations in Vietnam. | ||
| So I started reading everything I could possibly find. | ||
| That led me to thrillers, because a lot of the thrillers in novels in the 80s had protagonists with backgrounds in Vietnam as either a Navy SEAL, Army Special Forces, Marine Sniper, CIA. And this is when you're young. | ||
| You're like a teenager and stuff like that? | ||
| I'm not even a teenager yet. | ||
| Amazing. At 10 years old, that's when I became... | ||
| And that's when I started to transition from young adult fiction into the same things my parents were reading by sixth grade, 11 years old, certainly. | ||
| I'm reading books by David Murrell and Nelson DeMille and A.J. Quinnell and J.C. Pollock, Mark Olden, Tom Clancy, all the masters. | ||
| And what they were really doing, although I didn't look at it this way at the time, was they were giving me an early education in the art of storytelling. | ||
| So I'm learning a little something about my future profession and I'm also learning about the craft of telling stories. | ||
| And thanks for your referral for Charles McGarry, because I've started reading some of his stuff. | ||
| But we've got 60 seconds to the break. | ||
| Before we go there, Thomas M. Rice, you dedicate this book to him. | ||
| I noticed kind of the similarity between Reese and Rice. | ||
| Is there some kind of homage? | ||
| When you named James Reese to Thomas Rice, can you explain who he is and whether he fits in kind of more broadly or was that something else? | ||
| James Reese comes from two different personal touch points, I'll say that. | ||
| But Tom Rice was someone I met at Pearl Harbor for the 80th anniversary commemoration events. | ||
| My daughter and I went back there with the best of men in the school. | ||
| 62 veterans back there. | ||
| And then we went to to Normandy with that same group the next June. | ||
| So we got to spend time with Tom Rice both in Pearl Harbor and Normandy, walking the streets through the town which he jumped into on D-Day. | ||
| So I dedicated the book to him. | ||
| Heroes all. Here's the book, Jack Carr, Only the Dead. | ||
| After the break, we're going to move from Afghanistan to some passage about Ukraine, the war in Ukraine. | ||
| We're with Commander Jack Carr, author, Only the Dead, here in Steve Bannon's war room. | ||
| Peter Navarro, be right back. | ||
| Stay with us. Peter K. Navarro in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| And honor and pleasure. | ||
| We're with Commander Jack Carr, who wrote this amazing book, Only the Dead. | ||
| The reason why we're talking about fiction today in the war room, instead of the many nonfiction books that Steve talks about, is because as a fan of the Terminalist series, there's six of them, this last book, Only the Dead. | ||
| Is an absolute clinic from the grassroots of what MAGA, Make America Great Again, with the folks in deplorable land, I think really stand for. | ||
| I've been trying to explain it's the end endless wars, secure borders, strong manufacturing base, things like fair elections. | ||
| But I got to admit, Jack Carr does it a lot better and more exciting ways than I do. | ||
| So what we're doing here with the commander is I'm going to read a passage now. | ||
| We're going to go from the war in Afghanistan, where he served admirably, to chapter two of Only the Dead. | ||
| I'm going to read this and get a little reaction here. | ||
| And what this is, this is from the Russian perspective, and this is what I love about the book. | ||
| Jack, it comes at this problem through different lenses and kind of what they learned from us and what we haven't learned from them. | ||
| So here it is. The war in Ukraine was not going well from a tactical perspective. | ||
| From a strategic perspective, it had succeeded beyond their expectations. | ||
| The Americans were drawn in. | ||
| Funding the corrupt Ukrainian government at levels unheard of, even at the height of their follies in Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| Commander Carr, thoughts? | ||
| So just looking at where our money is going, and just like any big corporation, you have to show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. | ||
| And when you've had a solid run for 20 years, of evolving and you have these senior-level admirals and generals going in front of Congress and saying that they just need more troops, more money. | ||
| The Afghan military, the Iraqi military, they're getting there. | ||
| We're making progress. You can go back to any of those congressional testimonies and take the date off and they all sound exactly the same. | ||
| It's those guys getting up there with all those ribbons on their chest asking for more. | ||
| And once that comes to an end, like it did in August of 2021, it seems like we were in a bit of a hurry to find another way. | ||
| To fill those coffers. | ||
| And as everyone knows, or most people should know, when you add countries to NATO, that means that they need now NATO equipment. | ||
| And who makes a lot of that equipment? | ||
| Well, the defense industry here in the United States. | ||
| Or in Ukraine, who does that benefit? | ||
| Well, it certainly doesn't look like it benefits the Ukrainians when you see those photos coming back in, those videos coming back in. | ||
| Who does it benefit? Well, it certainly benefits the defense industry, no doubt about that. | ||
| So I just like to look at these problems through other people's lenses to see what conclusions I would come to if it was in their shoes. | ||
| So one of the themes that I've talked about before on The War Room is this idea of kind of you look at the chess board and you think of Vladimir Putin as a Russian where chess is kind of the national sport. | ||
| And as a chess master, it's like... | ||
| To me, what happened in the wake of the war, it's like it's actually benefited Russia. | ||
| And my question that I've always posed is, was Putin lucky or good? | ||
| And good in terms of strategy. | ||
| So let me read this to you as follows. | ||
| The U.S. sanctions had the opposite purported effect, regardless of what politicians in Washington, D.C. continue to say on cable news. | ||
| A little digression there. | ||
| You're not a fan of cable news, I can see. | ||
| Russia's central bank posted an account surplus In the first half of the year, more than $110 billion, the ruble was now the strongest it had been in close to a decade, and the nation was posting a massive trade surplus, billions of dollars higher than before the special operation to retake Ukraine began. | ||
| Russian exports now exceeded its imports, creating an inflow of domestic currency. | ||
| The exact opposite was happening in the United States. | ||
| Now... I've never seen that good of economic analysis on CNBC or Fox Business. | ||
| How does a Navy SEAL come up with that kind of sophistication and nail it? | ||
| How did you get to that? | ||
| I took a lot of research. | ||
| Two books ago, I went deep into the bioweapons research and bioweapons defense. | ||
| The one previous to this, I went deep on AI and quantum computing. | ||
| And this one was really the economics of warfare, in particular the war in Ukraine. | ||
| And I thought, well, if they're telegraphing this move, that they're going to go and retake Ukraine, and they're calling it this special operation, they're certainly going to think a couple moves ahead, as you said, these chess moves. | ||
| So if they do that, what will the U.S. do? | ||
| What will NATO do? Oh, sanctions! | ||
| That means they have to think a step ahead of that. | ||
| If the U.S. and NATO apply sanctions, To Russia in the wake of an invasion of Ukraine, what would that mean? | ||
| Oh, and how can we now counter that ahead of time? | ||
| And that's the future sales to China and to India as far as gas and oil goes. | ||
| So it was really just looking at the problem and learning. | ||
| I'm just a student. I study economics or anything like that, but now I am a student of economics because it was important to tell this story. | ||
| And so I went deep down the rabbit hole on these things to To build out the outline. | ||
| Who in economics talks about this? | ||
| Any folks you remember when you're in the research? | ||
| Because this is deep stuff. This is great insight. | ||
| I talked to a few different people in the financial world that specialize in gas and oil. | ||
| I just posed questions. | ||
| As a student, I tried to study it as much as I could that would allow me to then ask questions that would show that I had at least done the research before I stepped into the room with these people. | ||
| Same thing I did in the previous two books. | ||
| Just did as much as I possibly could on my own, got myself as educated as I possibly could on these things that allowed me then to do a deep dive with people who lived and breathed it and have for decades. | ||
| So I would ask them those questions and pose it in a way If this, then what? | ||
| And ask them to put themselves into Russian shoes looking at the situation. | ||
| And then I piece this puzzle together by doing that. | ||
| And let me double down on this because what we talk a lot about here on The War Room is how the corporate elitists and people are making all this money off the backs of the black, brown, and blue-collar Americans. | ||
| They're into the, we call it the managed decline of America as we move to a global thing. | ||
| So let me read this. | ||
| It was good that Americans placed no value on history had they learned nothing from the collapse of the Soviet Union. | ||
| They kept spending money they didn't have, big fame on the war room, throwing gasoline on the coals of inflation, ostensibly increasing the gap between rich and poor. | ||
| Intentionally, they couldn't seem to find a war they didn't like. | ||
| Politicians on both sides of the aisle, encouraged in no small part by the Defense India's lobbies, voted for massive spending bills in support of the corrupt regime in Ukraine. | ||
| We just saw that. Billions of dollars, as you write. | ||
| Fools. Here's what I love about this. | ||
| The corporate media knew a good thing when they saw it. | ||
| Even pundits who years earlier, who had been up in arms, I guess a pun there, against the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, now called to the United States to unconditionally support Ukraine. | ||
| Anyone who asked uncomfortable questions about that support, Was immediately labeled a Russian apologist or Russian agent who was doing Russia's bidding. | ||
| A blue and yellow flag became almost mandatory in America's social media profile platforms. | ||
| That's a lot of targets you're hitting there as a sniper, and you're hitting them like dead center. | ||
| Thoughts? I mean, it's like the war room MAGA, you know, it's the center of the MAGA Earth right there. | ||
| Thoughts? Well, it's just looking at our current situation and spending a little time with it rather than just shooting off a one-sentence tweet or retweeting something that I haven't researched. | ||
| And I just look at these things and apply a little common sense to them and then weave them into the story in a way that propels that story forward. | ||
| There's another chapter in there, Chapter 10. | ||
| I don't know if you remember that one. | ||
| That's the lobbyist sitting down with the congressman. | ||
| And in that case, they're talking about the pharmaceutical industry. | ||
| But it ties into how this congressman is funding his campaigns and hiding money offshore. | ||
| And I usually weave in a sentence or two of family members who are in some sort of a business that allows them to benefit financially from their relative's position as an elected representative. | ||
| Well, funny you mention that because, you know, I don't know if you saw if your folks, your agents gave you this, but I did an article for the Washington Times that basically took your work. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm looking at the article now. | ||
| Fictional congressman did Douglas Linden rails on the line to doublespeak the insider trading and family members of politicians caught red-handed taking millions from foreign governments hostile to the U.S. Who could that be, right? | ||
| Yet he cynically trades campaign contributions for legislative support of lawsuit immunity for big pharma vaccines. | ||
| So I get it. | ||
| And by the way, the terminal list... | ||
| Jack Carr's first book, which gripped me, the big theme of that was how Big Pharma had collaborated with portions of the defense military industrial complex and, wow, the Navy SEALs themselves as command to really do nefarious things. | ||
| But, yeah, you're... | ||
| You're over the target. | ||
| When we come back, we're going to break now, Jack, but when we come back, I'd like to kind of get your thoughts on whether you've been getting any flack from the usual Sussex out there, or are you able to shoot these bullets under the cover of fiction and not take any of the crap that Steve and I get here on The War. | ||
| So when we come back, we'll keep going through your excellent book. | ||
| I'm going to put this book up here for the... | ||
| War Room audience not on the podcast. | ||
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Jack Carr, Only the Dead. | |
| This is the, I don't know, I guess it's called The Lay Person's Guide to MAGA. We'll be right back with Commander Carr. | ||
| Stay with us. | ||
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We'll be right back. We will fight till they're all gone. | |
| We rejoice when there's no more. | ||
| Let's take down the CCP. Hey, Peter Cain of RN for Steve. | ||
| We're having what I think is one of the most important discussions about what MAGA stands for. | ||
| As you know, Joe Biden and the Democrats are trying to turn that into a four-letter word in advance of the 2024 election. | ||
| And I've been spending a lot of time trying to explain what MAGA stands for, end-to-endless war, secure borders, strong American manufacturing base. | ||
| Fair elections. | ||
| And I've been a fan of Jack Carr's novels going back to the terminal list. | ||
| And this latest one, Only the Dead, the sixth in the series, all of them have been bestsellers, really was an epiphany for me because, to me, it's the best presentation of MAGA principles I can find out there. | ||
| And it's far more engaging than any of the dry stuff I might do. | ||
| Talking off the air, I do have a confession, Jack, I gotta make. | ||
| I don't read your books. | ||
| I listen to them. | ||
| And you are blessed, sir, we talked about this off the air, with one of the great narrators, Out there in Audible Books Land, Ray Porter. | ||
| And you told me something I didn't know. | ||
| Apparently, the first book in your series, Terminal List, he won a major award. | ||
| So can you talk a little bit about that before I do some reading as a pale shadow of how Ray would do it, sir? | ||
| Well, I regret to inform you that if we didn't win, we were up for Audiobook of the Year. | ||
| So it's right up there with Stephen King. | ||
| I'm a few months into this new profession after leaving the military, and Ray and I were invited to go back to New York and put on the tuxes and go to the Audibles, which are the Academy Awards of the audiobook world. | ||
| So we got to hang out together, have some drinks, and Terminalist is right up there with Stephen King and Ruth Ware and all these authors who have household names. | ||
| So even though we didn't, we got to connect over some whiskey and have a great time, and we're dear friends. | ||
| To this day and he absolutely knocks it out of the park with his narration of these novels. | ||
| Yeah, his talent. | ||
| So I encourage you, if you're not a book reader, take a listen. | ||
| And to that end, what we've been doing, if you just jumped in, is I've been reading passages from only the dead and having Commander Carr reflect on them. | ||
| And one of the two themes I want to just introduce with a quick read here is the oligarchs here in America and also the people who benefit from this country but no longer love this country. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
| This is again from the Russian perspective. | ||
| They accuse us of consolidating power and wealth in the hands of an oligarchy when they have the very same system in the United States. | ||
| Politicians, defense, tech, Pharmaceuticals, they have their oligarchy too. | ||
| They just refuse to acknowledge it. | ||
| And then there are even large segments of their population who now take offense to the very word American. | ||
| They believe it overtly promotes an American exceptionalism that disenfranchises others in the Americas. | ||
| So, Commander Carr, look, you literally laid down, put your life at risk. | ||
| More times than you can count, I would suspect, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| How do you feel about folks now who just don't salute the flag, they don't love America, they just go on TikTok? | ||
| And then maybe talk a little bit about the oligarchs you think that might control this country, sir. | ||
| I try to remain hopeful, which is getting harder and harder to do, but I try to remain hopeful. | ||
| And someone talked to me about it recently, and they said you have to remain hopeful because then you can't manifest that going forward. | ||
| You can't manifest that future if you're not hopeful for it. | ||
| So I've been reflecting on that quite a bit. | ||
| But for me, it's such a strange thing to be in a country. | ||
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We won the lottery by being born here. | |
| No matter your circumstance, and regardless if you were born with a trust fund or not, no matter what circumstances, how dire they were or how great they looked from the outside looking in, we're all going to get knocked down along this path. | ||
| Doesn't matter how much money we have in the bank, what your family's last name is, doesn't matter. | ||
| We're all going to get knocked down. | ||
| We're all going to face this adversity. | ||
| But we were born in the United States, and that gives us these options and opportunities because people from the inception of this country up until today sacrificed everything so we could have these. | ||
| So one of the things that I like to reflect on, talk to the kids about, I try to weave into the novels, talk about on my social media, is our responsibility as citizens to not Just retweet something because someone else, an influencer, threw it out there with their end state wanting to get this reaction from us. | ||
| They want to manipulate us in some way. | ||
| It's recognizing that, hey, whatever this is, whether it was a news organization, whether it was a person, whether it's a company, whatever it is, they're trying to influence behaviors and now thoughts, even. | ||
| So if we recognize that, then what we owe those generations who came before us, who gave us all these amazing freedoms, And options and opportunities is to put the requisite time, energy and effort into studying the issue before getting upset and just retweeting something or just because it was the quote unquote other side, all of a sudden us taking the other side without putting that study into the problem. | ||
| We owe that. And it's not for us. | ||
| It's for our children and our grandchildren. | ||
| It's for future generations. | ||
| That's why we need to put that study in today. | ||
| So we walk into that voting booth or we make that decision to engage on one of the social media platforms or across the dinner table or whatever it might be at work, that we're doing it from a solid foundation of study and respect for those who came before us. | ||
| So that's something that I think about a lot and try to weave into the novels. | ||
| Does it alarm you to read about 2 million illegal aliens coming across the border a year now, which include... | ||
| Possible Islamic terrorists, recent reports of Chinese military-age folks coming in from Communist China. | ||
| I know you've commented on the book, I don't have the passage right here, but secure borders, I mean, how critical are they and how foolish is this country being, in your judgment, to allow this kind of infiltration? | ||
| It's the strategic level of the tactical locking your door at night, shutting your window at night, inviting people over to your house, who you know, family members, protecting those family members, who you are responsible for if you are the head of that household. | ||
| And we have the exact opposite thing going on at this geopolitical level for whatever reason in this country. | ||
| And people should look at that and ask those questions. | ||
| Why do we have this porous border? | ||
| Why are we unable as the United States of America The most powerful country in the world, why have we been unable to seal this border and have people come here through legal means? | ||
| Why can we not do that? | ||
| So it's one of those things that almost defies any sort of rational explanation. | ||
| Clearly you view it as a national security threat. | ||
| There's no question in your mind. | ||
| Yeah, there's absolutely no question about that. | ||
| I mean, wars from the beginning of time, before there were even borders, when there were just tribes, those were fought over this land and protecting those who you love, protecting your culture, protecting your family, protecting your extended family, protecting that tribe so you can continue to go forward back then, at the beginning of time, as a species. | ||
| And that's just on a larger level today. | ||
| It's one of the long list of things that we have neglected to take care of in this country. | ||
| We've got a few minutes before the break. | ||
| I want to hit one last theme that you just blew my mind over in this. | ||
| Going back to the days of the Twin Towers attack and what is clearly, in retrospect, stock market manipulation whereby the Islamic terrorists loaded up on oil futures and this, that, the other thing, and they made a bundle of money by attacking our homeland and killing Americans. | ||
| You have a very sophisticated take on how in advance of the invasion of Ukraine, the oligarchs in Russia, it goes oligarchs, senior politicians, | ||
| intelligence directors, military leaders, and other friends of the Russian president had all pre-positioned assets around the world a year before taking action in Ukraine, which is short for saying that they were playing the futures market. | ||
| Is that something that you think absolutely happened or are you thinking that probably happened? | ||
| Where do you come down on that, sir? | ||
| I would be shocked if that was not the case. | ||
| The facts that I could point to all led me to the conclusion that there's a very strong high probability that that is how things were set up in the advance of the invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| And I would be shocked if that was not the case. | ||
| And are you equally shocked that nobody on Capitol Hill or in the White House seems to be interested in investigating that kind of thing? | ||
| That is not a shock at all. | ||
| Why? Oh, because if you were to go down that route, then it means you have to ask very other uncomfortable questions about other people moving things around about the defense, about relationships between senior government officials and the government of Ukraine. | ||
| And it's not a place where those oligarchs, for lack of a better term, Would want us to go. | ||
| And I'm talking about the American oligarchy now. | ||
| They won't want us asking those questions. | ||
| They want us divided. And these tools like Twitter, like Instagram, like Facebook, like TikTok, these are tools. | ||
| And you can use a tool. You can use a hammer to build a house, or you can use it to remove someone from the earth. | ||
| And it all depends on whose hands it's in. | ||
| So these platforms are tools, and they're being used to divide right now. | ||
| And who does that division Who does that help? | ||
| Well, it helps politicians. | ||
| It helps the tech industry that wants you to take a certain action. | ||
| It certainly doesn't help us as the citizen who is trying to go out there and make a living and put food on the table for our families each and every night. | ||
| That's certainly who that division is not helping. | ||
| Oftentimes, I used to go back to the end of the Civil War for hope and think about how we came back together as a country after warring. | ||
| Then I think, well, what if we had TikTok and Twitter and Instagram Back then in the 1860s, would we have come back together or would that have been used by a tool, by different elements to keep us divided? | ||
|
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And I don't know the answer to that question. | |
| Look, the grand, I don't want to give the plot too much away, but a lot of it hinges on an alliance between Communist China and Russia seeking to gain a new multipolar world dominance. | ||
| Which do you see, quick answer to this, and we'll come back to it after the break, which do you see as the greater threat right now, Russia or China? | ||
| Certainly China. | ||
| You put Russia in the tactical area and China in the strategic element. | ||
| They're both strategic, but if you're looking at them as far as long-term threats, then China would have a job. | ||
| All right, Commander Carr, we're going to take a break now. | ||
| We're going to come back. We're going to do the finish. | ||
| It'll be a short segment, but what I want to do is look into the crystal ball and see what's next for Commander Carr, both in terms of the next book and what you're doing out there in the world to advance the cause. | ||
| I can't tell you enough how honored I am to have you here, sir. | ||
| Stay with us. Peter K. Navar in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| You are in Steve Bannon's MAGA War Room. | ||
| We'll be right back with Commander Jack Carr and Only the Dead, the bestseller. | ||
| Buy it today on Amazon. | ||
|
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C-C-B! | |
| Spread the word all through Hong Kong. | ||
| We will fight till they're all gone. | ||
| We rejoice when there's no more. | ||
| Let's take down the C-C-B! | ||
| They have all our lives to save. | ||
| CEO of FlagShirt.com A third generation, veteran owned small business. | ||
| I believe that the American way of life is for all of us. | ||
| I'm asking you today to visit FlagShirt.com. | ||
| Help keep the American dream alive. | ||
| Be a flag waver. | ||
| Carry a nation's heritage. | ||
| Use coupon code ACTION10 for 10% off site-wide and buy a flag shirt today. | ||
| Action, action, action. | ||
| Hey, Peter K. Navarro in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Honored to be with Commander Jack Carr, who's written a book called Only the Dead, which in my judgment is the best fiction to read if you really want to understand what the America Great Again movement is, MAGA. Before we get back to Commander Carr, I just want to put in a little plug. | ||
| For Mike Lindell at MyPillow.com Please go there. | ||
| Support Mike. I have his towels. | ||
| I have his pillows. I have his sheets. | ||
| Haven't tried the slippers yet, but you can. | ||
| And he really needs your support. | ||
| These are American jobs, and he's a good man. | ||
| You know that. And we need to have the war room behind him. | ||
| I also want to put in This is Only the Dead by Jack Carr. | ||
| I have the one thing I want to mention, my 99-cent book, The True Meaning of Trump's MAGA on Amazon. | ||
| After I wrote that, I read Jack's book, and I was thinking, you know what? | ||
| He does this stuff a whole lot better than I do, because This book, Only the Dead, is really a clinic on what MAGA means. | ||
| So at the end of this, we've got just about five minutes left here. | ||
| I want to just see, Jack, I know you mentioned something really exciting. | ||
| You've got a nonfiction book coming up. | ||
| Do you want to tell the audience a little bit about what you're working on now and whether there's a seventh James Reese book in progress yet? | ||
| There is. There's a seventh James Reese book in progress. | ||
| And as soon as we're over here, then I get right back at it. | ||
| But the first nonfiction work comes out in about a little less than a year and a half. | ||
| And it's a history of the 1983 Marine Beirut Barracks bombing. | ||
| It's an event that killed more Marines in a single day than they'd lost since Iwo Jima in World War II. And it's a fascinating story that reads like a thriller, but I'm doing it with an amazing historian, Pulitzer Prize finalist named James Scott, who writes primarily about World War II. And just trying to keep that history alive so we don't have to Relearn those lessons in blood going forward for future generations. | ||
| It was a very impactful event for me as a kid, being not quite ten years old at the time and seeing that Time Magazine cover, that Newsweek cover come across our dining room table and me knowing that I was on a path. | ||
| Into the SEAL teams already. | ||
| And that really that terrorist organizations were going to be my war of the future, be my enemy of the future. | ||
| So I was fascinated by it, have been since I was a little kid. | ||
| And this is my first foray into nonfiction. | ||
| So it'll be out in the fall of 2024. | ||
| Well, I'm sure Stephen K. Bannon will have a seat for you right here in the War Room when you come to the swamp on that book tour. | ||
| Now, I got a confession to make. | ||
| When I first drafted this op-ed that was in the Washington Times, in the lead paragraph, rather than focus on kind of this being a clinic, a better way to explain what MAGA means, I actually... | ||
| You're sitting down for this. | ||
| I actually suggested that you might be a really good dark horse vice presidential candidate. | ||
| And I thought of that simply because, look, it's like I look at kind of the Keebler elves who are in there. | ||
| In my judgment, Trump's the only guy who embraces MAGA principles of any of the Republicans in there. | ||
| And we're going to need somebody in that VP slot to do that. | ||
| And then I thought, well, maybe that's a little overreach. | ||
| How about Secretary of Defense or maybe even Secretary of State? | ||
| Because you're clearly a man of letters who could do that. | ||
| So I guess the question for you... | ||
| Joe Kent's one of our favorites here in the war room. | ||
| He ran unsuccessfully for Congress. | ||
| I don't know if you ever bumped into him in your travels fighting for this country, but have you ever thought of politics? | ||
| That is a much dirtier business, I think, than what I was accustomed to in Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| I prefer to be in that sniper position up in an elevated position. | ||
| I like the fighting side of it. | ||
| I like just having conversations and exploring different approaches of things and becoming a better citizen and becoming more knowledgeable about things. | ||
| Hopefully wiser about things so I can pass those lessons on. | ||
| It's that middle part, that politics part, that I don't think I'd be any good at. | ||
| I like the extremes, not that middle part. | ||
| My books are my therapy. | ||
|
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I guess that's the best way to say it. | |
| It's certainly a dirty business. | ||
| My thought was that if anybody who would read your books In Washington, probably wouldn't mess with you if you were in. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, this vice president thing would be kind of cool. | ||
| And we can do this tongue-in-cheek, but if you think about it, you never would have to raise any money so you wouldn't have to sell your soul to the devil. | ||
| And I'm speaking from somebody who spent four years in the White House who kind of learned what the levers of power can be like. | ||
| And You sure could do a lot of good there. | ||
| So the last question I have, we just got a minute left. | ||
| Your protagonist has a conversation with the president who gets assassinated. | ||
| But before that happens, the president says, yeah, there's a deep state. | ||
| So do you think there's a deep state and... | ||
| What president was that guy modeled after? | ||
| Who was he closest to? | ||
| Because he seemed to be an honorable man who wanted to get stuff done. | ||
| You got like 30 seconds for that. | ||
| I apologize for that. Right. | ||
| So I put him in the vein of a late 50s, early 60s JFK, just because I needed him to be different enough from my protagonist, James Reese, to allow them to have conversations and have a common ground to move the ball forward. | ||
| He writes a book. | ||
| He was in the military, as was JFK. If he was modeled on anybody, that would be more of the connection, but I draw that distinction between the two out in paragraphs in the previous novel. | ||
| For me, gosh, I just love writing these things. | ||
| My passion was serving my country in uniform, and now it's writing, and it's trying to make things better with each and every one. | ||
| All right. Well, look, Honor, you could spend some time on the War Room. | ||
| Nothing like the wars you fought, but it is pretty dirty here in D.C. Only the dead, Commander Jack Carr. | ||
| My vote for Novelist of the Year and Mega Man of the Year. | ||
| Commander Carr, thank you for being with us. | ||
| I salute you, sir. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. Take care. | ||
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Keep fighting for freedom. Take care. |
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