Nov. 17, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:27
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is what you're fighting for. | ||
| I mean, every day you're out there. | ||
| What they're doing is blowing people off. | ||
| If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians, get total control and total power. | ||
| Because this is just like in Arizona. | ||
| This is just like in Georgia. | ||
| It's another element that backs them into a corner and shows their lies and misrepresentations. | ||
| This is why this audience is going to have to get engaged. | ||
| As we've told you, this is the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | |
| War Room, Battleground. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Hey, Peter K. Navarro in for the Admiral. | ||
| Always a pleasure and an honor to be in the War Room. | ||
| It is the War Room. | ||
| It is your War Room, the posse. | ||
| You are the most potent political force here in America. | ||
| And my job is to try to give you as much information as I can So that you can act accordingly. | ||
| Great show today. | ||
| We're going to take the first half of the hour with a very special guest, Rogan O'Hanley, otherwise known to you as DC Drano. | ||
| He's going to come on in a few minutes and we're going to kind of take a look at the chessboard, otherwise known as the Deep Swamp in Washington, because there's some things going on that frankly have been very disappointing. | ||
| To the posse. | ||
| And then the second half of the hour, two very special friends are going to come on and do a debrief, a really deep debrief on the communist China meeting with our fearless leader, Joe Biden, in the clean for a day, San Francisco. | ||
| Kind of hilarious what they did there in a very dark way. | ||
| But the two guys, Brad Thayer, and then the guy I know most personally is Jim Finnell. | ||
| Jim, most famously, was the head of the PACOM command out in Hawaii, which had as its mission to deal with the Chinese Communist threat. | ||
| And he infamously got fired by his superiors for being too candid, let us say, about the danger that Communist China posed to the U.S. | ||
| Navy and the U.S. | ||
| military and to this country. | ||
| So, Brad Thayer, Jim Finnell, debrief in the second half of the hour. | ||
| What I want to do is just touch on a couple of topics before we get to Rogan. | ||
| The first thing, there's been a, let us call it a kerfuffle, In DC that erupted this week between the Trump campaign and a couple of so-called think tanks in Washington. | ||
| One is the Heritage Institute, which has been around forever. | ||
| The other is the America First Policy Institute, which was formed after Donald Trump left the White House in 2021. | ||
| And I wrote a piece about back in July of 2022, which basically looked at the American First Policy Institute. | ||
| First of all, it's misnamed. | ||
| It's got nothing to do with MAGA. | ||
| I looked at everybody in it. | ||
| There are some good people, but there's far too many never-Trumpers. | ||
| The person who heads it is a woman named Brooke Rollins. | ||
| She's a very nice person, a very earnest person, but she knows nothing about economic issues or trade issues. | ||
| She's strictly a social issue focus, and her vice chair, This Larry Kudlow, who I fought with literally on a daily basis when he was in the White House, made my life miserable when I was trying to implement tough policies on trade in China. | ||
| So you got like this one-two punch there, and then the fish rots from the head down, right? | ||
| Because you have all these people who are like the typical never-Trumpers who were in there. | ||
| And the beef that the Trump campaign came out with this week They just finally threw up their hands and say, hey, AFPI, you're using the Trump brand to raise money and that's taking money away from the Trump presidential campaign. | ||
| Oh, and by the way, please stop thinking you're grooming people for the new Trump administration. | ||
| Um, and good for Susie Wiles and LaSofita at the campaign for calling them out on that. | ||
| Um, and what I'm calling, AFPI out on today is simply this. | ||
| Brooke, just fold that organization up. | ||
| It may have served a purpose, maybe, over the last year or so, but you're not needed now. | ||
| Nobody in that thing is needed right now. | ||
| The Trump campaign has command of the policies and the messaging. | ||
| They don't need you. | ||
| And all you're doing is Taking money away from the Trump campaign that could be used to elect our next president and using it. | ||
| And I just hate, hate it. | ||
| When the swamp people do this, the swamp creatures, they just give it a bunch of money, too much money to people who don't need the money and paying too much rent and just wasting what it's just pure deep swamp stuff. | ||
| So Brooke. | ||
| Love you dearly, but it's time to fold that shop up right now because your efforts are not needed right now. | ||
| The Heritage Institute is a very different situation in a way. | ||
| Heritage has been around forever. | ||
| And going back to the 2016 campaign, Heritage was a strong opponent of Donald Trump, primarily because the stuff I was most involved with, which was The trade issues and the tariffs on China, and secondarily, securing our southern border. | ||
| And the problem, and this is a case where the fish rots from the core out, because the core problem with heritage is that it relies on Dark money from people like the Koch Network, all the globalists, rhinos who want to ship our jobs offshore. | ||
| And they're natural enemies of Trump, right? | ||
| So they went through this exercise. | ||
| They have a new CEO. | ||
| I like the direction he's trying to take the heritage, but let's be real here. | ||
| You can't have an organization which is funded primarily The one story I tell that kind of said it all to me is this. | ||
| They reached out to me, I don't know, it was over a year ago. | ||
| They were working on a policy book, which as it was presented to me, was designed to reflect what President Trump policies would be in a second term, or what they should be. | ||
| And they wanted me to do the trade chapter, I think for obvious reasons. | ||
| And I dutifully did my duty there. | ||
| I sent the thing in. | ||
| And the trade chapter reflected everything that President Trump stands for, you know, tough tariffs on China to offset their cheating, dealing with countries like Germany and Vietnam, which are robbing us blind in other ways. | ||
| And the funny part of the whole thing is, as this thing was getting ready to go to press and go through the editorials, they go, oh, and by the way, we had somebody write a rebuttal chapter to you. | ||
| And the title of that chapter is The Case for Free Trade. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I'm going, wait a minute. | |
| Wait a minute. | ||
| You're supposed to be doing a book that's reflective of the new Republican party led by Trump, who has never said the word fair trade except in vain. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| He never said the word free trade except in vain and has always supported fair trade. | ||
| That's Donald Trump. | ||
| Fair trade. | ||
| Donald Trump. | ||
| Fair trade. | ||
| Free trade is the globalist rhino mantra to send our jobs offshore, send our factories offshore. | ||
| Keep your wages down here. | ||
| And so, they said, okay, you're going to run that, do the chapter, you're going to call it the case for free trade. | ||
| Well, they'd call mine the case for fair trade. | ||
| It would be done. | ||
| So I just, I mean, it was like, you got to be kidding me. | ||
| And to me, that was the tell in the Heritage Con game there, because they're still grappling with their internal divisions. | ||
| And they're doing the same kind of thing that The AFPI, Brooke Rollins monstrosity, Kudlow thing is trying to do is like they're measuring drapes in the White House thinking that they're going to put their people in and control the policies of Donald Trump. | ||
| That's a fantasy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's a fantasy. | ||
| They tried that in 2016 during the transition and Trump just, just get out of here. | ||
| He's going to say the same thing again. | ||
| Um, so, It would be nice to have a think tank in Washington D.C. | ||
| that was a legitimate think tank reflective of MAGA policies, but it ain't Heritage, it ain't AFPI, it's certainly not the American Enterprise Institute, certainly not the Cato Institute, it's certainly not the Peterson Institute, all of which are putatively kind of Republican, but they're not, they're rhinos, okay? | ||
| So just, as this thing Unfolds just keep your eye open and if you want to call AFPI tell them you want to shut it down because they're not mega all right let's uh let's bring in uh in Rogan now and uh Rogan O'Hanley DC Drano is uh is his handle on twitter getter and uh truth social Rogan uh my brother | ||
| Would you prefer to be called DC Drano or Rogan, tell me? | ||
| You can call me either, whatever comes out doctor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright brother, let's go with Rogan because of my affection for the Irish. | |
| So here's the thing, let's start with Mike Johnson, the new speaker, and his decision this week to do something which basically kicked the can down the road. | ||
| For another 60 days, and frankly upset a lot of people in the posse. | ||
| Is he, okay, I'll give you some options here, multiple choice. | ||
| Is he just dumb and getting outwitted? | ||
| Is he kind of Kevin McCarthy with a southern brawl? | ||
| None of the above. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| I think he's none of the above thus far. | ||
| You know, I equate it to the first tee off in a golf match. | ||
| A lot of times you get a mulligan on that first one. | ||
| You may not be as warmed up. | ||
| And you know, I do give him a little bit of leniency for the fact that he was thrown into being Speaker of the House, which I think is one of the hardest jobs in America. | ||
| And he had only a few weeks to Completely transform how Washington spends its money. | ||
| We are let down by what he did. | ||
| Let's let's, you know, not blow any smoke here. | ||
| We are let down. | ||
| On the upside, no Ukraine funding, no Israel funding. | ||
| On the downside, no spending cuts. | ||
| And we put him in there and we stood in the breach with Matt Gaetz because we wanted Washington to be transformed. | ||
| The debt is out of control. | ||
| And you can rattle off these numbers better than me, but we have a $2 trillion deficit. | ||
| They can barely sell these treasury bonds without jacking up the rates. | ||
| Janet Yellen is over kowtowing to Xi Jinping, bending the knee, saying we need good economic relations with China because she wants them to actually buy these treasury bonds next time around. | ||
| And, you know, we're paying Upwards of over a trillion dollars in debt per year when we only have about 4.4 trillion in annual tax revenue. | ||
| So, you know, 25 percent, give or take, is going right to debt repayment. | ||
| So we need massive spending cuts and spending reform. | ||
| We need to rein DC in. | ||
| Mike Johnson did not get it done in his first month. | ||
| I'm a Mike Johnson guy. | ||
| I know Bannon. | ||
| I know some others. | ||
| They are. | ||
| But the honeymoon is over. | ||
| And we are going to be expecting, from now until that 60 days is up, major steps to transform how DC spends its money. | ||
| Otherwise, I have a feeling after that 60 days, if he doesn't come up with spending cuts, he's going to lose the majority of his support in the base. | ||
| Rogan, who's his inner circle? | ||
| And are they the kind of people that we'd like to have around him that will Well, I think right now there is a transition period, right? | ||
| So we have seen some positive steps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
any insight into that. I don't know how your process works. | |
| I want to talk a little bit about that in a bit. But what are you hearing, seeing? Is he like a lone wolf? Who's he listening to? | ||
| Well, I think right now there is a transition period, right? | ||
| So we have seen some positive steps. He fired a national counsel lawyer, National Security Counsel for Kevin McCarthy. | ||
| Brian Costello brought this up that actually shut down some of the Sequoia capital investigations, So he had all the information about it, and he coordinated with McCarthy to shut down Sequoia. | ||
| I know that another one of McCarthy's staffers in the Speaker office was recently fired, a female. | ||
| So, I mean, there is this transition period. | ||
| I do know that He has met with some of our Freedom Caucus congressional representatives and is listening to them on their ideas and their policies. | ||
| You know, he's kind of, he hasn't really thrown any sharp elbows in either direction yet. | ||
| He's just generally been the nice guys working and talking with everybody. | ||
| Everyone's kind of, you know, in a wait and see approach. | ||
| As for his, you know, internal staff, I saw an article about... Could that be the problem? | ||
| He's just too nice a guy for this job? | ||
| That could be. | ||
| You know, I do want to give him a little bit more time. | ||
| You know, I posted a video after he represented Trump during one of the impeachments, got the acquittal, and he was standing right outside Nancy Pelosi's plaque on her door, and he held up the newspaper and said, acquitted, and he looked and winked. | ||
| You know, to the camera. | ||
| I think he's got that dog in him, as we say. | ||
| But there's a lot of gears and controls and buttons to get a grasp on. | ||
| And, you know, 60 days. | ||
| And no Ukraine funding. | ||
| Hey, that's an improvement. | ||
| Every single bill that Kevin McCarthy passed had Ukraine funding. | ||
| So we do have that one improvement. | ||
| Right now, they're trying to tie in the Ukraine and Israel funding together. | ||
| I don't think that's... I hope that doesn't happen. | ||
| I'll be honest with you. | ||
| If I had to choose between no Ukraine funding and significant budget cutbacks, I'd choose budget cutbacks every time. | ||
| Because Ukraine funding, as large as it is, and as much as it's screwing American taxpayers, it's a rounding error compared to $2 trillion. | ||
| And so, that doesn't... | ||
| That doesn't appease me. | ||
| In terms of his inner staff, I mean, who's he listening to? | ||
| I've heard some things. | ||
| I can't disclose on the show, but I have heard there is going to be some good things coming down the road. | ||
| I think, I hope, that his plan is, hey, we didn't get everything we wanted. | ||
| We didn't get a lot of what we wanted on this CR. | ||
| But hopefully he's going to release the J6 tapes. | ||
| I know that that's in the works from what I'm hearing. | ||
| But, you know, believe it when I see it. | ||
| McCarthy sat on those, right? | ||
| McCarthy had them all. | ||
| When he gave them to Tucker and that was it. | ||
| Did he give all of them to Tucker? | ||
| Not to my knowledge, no. | ||
| I think they've been holding these back. | ||
| The thing is, it's good politics to release this stuff. | ||
| They think it's, oh, we don't want to talk about J6. | ||
| You know, the election. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's good politics to expose that this was a setup, to expose that it was Nancy Pelosi, to expose the election fraud. | ||
| But, you know, one of the biggest letdowns, and I saw Mike Cernovich talking about this, is, you know, we've fully funded this FBI so far and this DOJ that has gone after not only President Trump and the J6ers, but also pro-life protesters. | ||
| Soccer moms protesting at school board meetings. | ||
| I mean, there needs to be some serious hammering over this next 60 days. | ||
| So, you know, Mike Johnson, like I said, I like him, but this next 60 days is the gut check time. | ||
| And if he can come through and get us some wins, I think he'll have a lot more wind in his sails going into the rest of 2024. | ||
| And here's another positive. | ||
| He supported and endorses President Trump, right? | ||
| Kevin McCarthy, in the nine months he's been in, even though Trump kind of helped him behind the scenes, never said that. | ||
| So I do give him some credit. | ||
| He has kind of gone out there, and with his Christian, biblical worldview, but we want the spending cuts, we want the J6 tapes, and we want to hold this weaponized government accountable. | ||
| Well, you know, the three parts of this, these moving pieces, you got the budget piece, but you got Mike Gallagher, Running the Communist China investigation, that seems to be going nowhere fast. | ||
| And then you got judiciary not really doing a good job at all on the weaponization that you mentioned. | ||
| It's like, for me, it's like, look, it's all well and good to go after Hunter Biden and Joe Biden through judiciary. | ||
| But for me, the bigger issue Are the school board people, are the people like Steve, who the DOJ went after, like literally everybody, and I served within the White House, that I know of who was actually pro-Trump, has been subpoenaed or indicted or something. | ||
| But there's been just virtually no movement on any of that. | ||
| The Congress has left this whole issue of executive privilege, totally alone. | ||
| It seems like they totally ignore what's going on. | ||
| And by the way, the only reason why Trump is being investigated by Jack Smith is because Kevin McCarthy let that J6 committee get started to begin with and act illegally as a judiciary instead of a legislative branch. | ||
| So a lot of stuff going on. | ||
| Talk to me a little bit, you know, it's kind of fun. | ||
| It's like, um, you know, back in the day, uh, I always like to study, uh, how writers did their craft and stuff like that, you know, writing their, their, their, their op-eds or their books or whatever. | ||
| And you, you, you are kind of like the vanguard of this whole new media. | ||
| It's like the 250 word haiku on social media. | ||
| I was just kind of curious, maybe you could share with the viewers here and the listeners, what your process is. | ||
| What's a day in the life of Rogan look like? | ||
| What do you read? | ||
| What do you look at? | ||
| When do you start doing your stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you just maybe share a little bit of that? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| President Trump was joking at one of his rallies in West Palm a few weeks ago. | ||
| He gave me a shout out. | ||
| I was very appreciative. | ||
| He's appreciative of it. | ||
| He's like, these guys are brilliant. | ||
| I don't know what they do. | ||
| Do they do it from their couch? | ||
| Like what? | ||
| I don't know how they do this. | ||
| Um, you know, it, it, I basically just turned my kind of news addiction into a, you know, uh, a career of sorts. | ||
| I mean, what drove me to do this was seeing Marxism banging on the door when I was, uh, a Hollywood attorney in 2017 for years before that. | ||
| I said, I got to support President Trump. | ||
| I got to help this guy. | ||
| And I believe that memes are the most effective form of communication that exists, right? | ||
| It's a digital political cartoon. | ||
| But if you look at a meme that you saw 10 years ago, right, you would say, oh, I've seen this meme. | ||
| But if you showed me one of my own tweets from a week ago, I'd be like, yeah, I kind of remember that. | ||
| Maybe that was me. | ||
| You know, so that's the power of memes. | ||
| They call it meme warfare. | ||
| And, you know, I look and I try and see what isn't being said that needs to be said. | ||
| Or what is the one, two or three issues that the left is focusing on? | ||
| Or what things does President Trump or, you know, Matt Gaetz or somebody's America First Wars, what do they need help on? | ||
| And that's where I try and allocate eyeballs and attention And I try and give people talking points that I think are effective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I will say, I do believe... Where do you start with that? | |
| Like, what time do you get up in the morning? | ||
| What do you start doing? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Do you read the newspapers, the digitals, the websites, the drugs, this, that? | ||
| How do you get your information to sort out, to figure out what's important, what's not, what they're missing? | ||
| Walk me through that. | ||
| I mean, I get a lot from War Room, I'll tell you that. | ||
| I love, you know, I don't do a lot of news hits these days, only War Room, but I'm usually up around 6, 6.30, and I'm, you know, boom, right on my phone, getting all the information. | ||
| I do look at Drudge, obviously don't like him as much as I used to. | ||
| I love looking at CNN, MSNBC, Twitter. | ||
| I follow a bunch of leftists. | ||
| I mean, I want to see what they're angry about. | ||
| Or, you know, what they do, they block us out. | ||
| They either block us or jump off the platform or ignore us. | ||
| I love looking at what they're saying so that I can tackle it aggressively, so I can go, boom, right into it. | ||
| They're saying Trump said this. | ||
| No, it's boom, it's this, you know? | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, I listen, you know, to YouTube podcasts. | ||
| You get a lot of information. | ||
| You follow enough good people on social media, you get the daily news. | ||
| You know, when I watch Fox News, not that I do, but when it happens to come on, You're just reading, you're just hearing about tweets you saw five hours ago anyway. | ||
| So I think X and Truth. | ||
| Truth is amazing. | ||
| Getter, you know, you get the most up-to-date, current, no BS spin on those platforms. | ||
| And then I just provide my own angle. | ||
| I provide my own thoughts. | ||
| And, you know, I tell people, I try to throw punches with words. | ||
| That's just kind of my style. | ||
| We got about 60 seconds left, so this would be a great time to give all your social media handles and coordinates. | ||
| Yep, at DC Drano on everything, stands for Drain the DC Swamp. | ||
| And, you know, one point I did want to bring up from earlier, we were talking about, you know, some of the silver linings, what Mike Johnson has done. | ||
| Gallagher on the Chinese committee, he did send a letter requesting documents from Sequoia Capital, which was, that happened after McCarthy and And James Comer, too. | ||
| He finally sent out those Hunter Biden subpoenas. | ||
| So as tough as this CR pill has been to swallow, I do see some glimmers of hope. | ||
| And I'm hoping that in the next two or three months, Mike Johnson really steps up to the plate and impresses us. | ||
| And release those J6 tapes, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| All right, my brother. | ||
| You take care of yourself. | ||
| I'm following you. | ||
| I keep watching. | ||
| I love what you're doing, brother. | ||
| You keep throwing those jabs. | ||
| Thank you, doctor. | ||
| I got your back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, my brother. | |
| OK, in the next part of the show, we're going to bring in Brad Thayer and Jim Fennell to talk about Communist China. | ||
| They came, they saw, they conquered here in San Francisco. | ||
| And we're going to tell you what the real agenda was. | ||
| This is Peter K. Navarro, in for the Admiral Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Stay with me, be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stay with me, be right back. | |
| Hey, Peter Knavaro in for the Admiral Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| There's something very significant that happened in this country this week with our fearful leader in the White House, Joe Biden. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And this was his so-called summit with the dictator Xi Jinping. | ||
| Even Biden called him the dictator. | ||
| Well, good for Joe once. | ||
| We're going to break down what exactly happened with two of the very best analysts of Communist China that we have in the world, Brad Thayer and Jim Finnell. | ||
| And as I told you at the top of the hour, Jim's a very special person to me. | ||
| When we were in the White House, when I was in the White House, Jim was going through his trials and travails with PACOM. | ||
| He had been too tough on China for the Navy brass. | ||
| And they couldn't handle the truth of why he's now on Whorum. | ||
| But I actually tried to get him to be an ambassador out in Southeast Asia. | ||
| One thing led to another. | ||
| It didn't happen. | ||
| But he's just doing wonderful work. | ||
| So I want to welcome Bradley Thayer and Jim Finnell into the Whorum. | ||
| Gentlemen, how are you guys today? | ||
| Great, Peter. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Thanks for having us. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be great. | ||
| Let's start off with the 30,000 foot view with Brad. | ||
| You and I had a discussion offline about this whole notion of Biden coming in to save China at the worst possible time. | ||
| Tell me what the agenda, the real agenda, tell a posse what the real agenda was. | ||
| of that meeting and how did it go for the U.S.? | ||
| Well, Xi Jinping came to San Francisco to thank his base of support, which are the billionaires that were at the dinner in the evening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're talking about American businessmen, to be clear, right? | |
| American businessmen, right? | ||
| Silicon Valley, Wall Street types who make billions off of China. | ||
| Right, who are supporting Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| So Xi came to thank them, and their behavior was appalling, obviously giving them a standing ovation. | ||
| But in order to thank his base, he had to go through the Biden administration. | ||
| I think he used the Biden administration like a doormat. | ||
| Essentially showing up, and the Biden administration gave him everything he wanted on mil-to-mil, right? | ||
| Begging for mil-to-mil, and Jim will speak to this in just a moment, right? | ||
| On a fentanyl agreement, which is basically a pie crust. | ||
| Let me decode some of this. | ||
| Mil-to-mil, I believe, what you mean is better communications between the US military and the Chinese military out in the South China Sea and East China Sea, so nothing bad happens. | ||
| I think that's what you're talking about, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then on trade issues and to keep the investment flowing, Xi Jinping is in trouble. | ||
| He's facing an existential crisis because the regime is illegitimate, because you've had decades of tyranny. | ||
| So they're in dire economic strengths. | ||
| He needs investment and you need trade from the West, which is why he was there to thank his base. | ||
| He was there to thank the billionaires and ensure that they use their political influence and sustain the support for China. | ||
| Also to shore up Biden because he wants Biden or Gavin Newsom to come if Biden's not able to make it, he wants either Newsom or Biden in office in 25. | ||
| So it's a wonderful photo op for both of them, actually, at the meeting. | ||
| So he's shoring up Biden and Newsom and he's rewarding his base, thanking them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why is it a good photo op for Biden? | |
| It's a good photo op because he's meeting Xi Jinping, right? | ||
| And they're talking about how they're great friends and that's going to be, as you well know, Peter, going to be used in next year as the campaign heats up if Biden essentially stays. | ||
| So you think the American public actually think that's a good thing? | ||
| I think the American people see through it. | ||
| But there are a lot of different audiences to whom Biden is speaking. | ||
| And so it's going to be an effort to, he'll tout it as to be a feather in his cap. | ||
| But it was a disastrous meeting. | ||
| It was horrible for the United States. | ||
| For our national security interests, it was a disaster. | ||
| It should have never happened. | ||
| No, I mean, it would be. | ||
| There was a time where American presidents took American security seriously. | ||
| It's within living memory, actually. | ||
| And they would have never have gone through this type of humiliation, where really from beginning to end, an emperor, Xi Jinping, came to essentially see his supporters. | ||
| So it was a disaster. | ||
| At the same time, Peter, you saw the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission report that came out on the same day. | ||
| Right, which said, hey, the PLA is preparing for war. | ||
| Xi Jinping has told the PLA to prepare for war. | ||
| Secondly, he's prepared Chinese society for war and to prepare for hardships in the near term and lasting and significant hardships in the near term. | ||
| And also, thirdly, that Xi uses diplomacy to buy for time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| While the military prepares, while the squeeze on Taiwan, the Philippines, allies and partners, and on the U.S. | ||
| essentially intensifies. | ||
| So you have that surrealistic disconnect at one time. | ||
| Because what you've done is you've given me a beautiful segue to bring in Jim Finnella. | ||
| Jim, feel free to call up your chart from the control room if you want. | ||
| But Jim, You know better than anybody the seriousness of the Chinese military threat. | ||
| Handicap that for us now. | ||
| Tell the posse what exactly we're looking at here and how the Communist Chinese want to kill Americans. | ||
| Yeah, well, first of all, Peter, thanks for having us on. | ||
| In terms of this meeting, the big announcement for me was that they came out of this and Biden said, we have now this new arrangement, we're going to resume the military-to-military cooperation, as if that had not been happening for a year, because the Chinese are the ones that shut it down last August in 2022, when Nancy Pelosi went, as a speaker, went to Taiwan. | ||
| She was not even there 24 hours, And the Chinese made a big deal out of that, and they said, we're cutting off mil-to-mil communications. | ||
| And immediately, the administration went into this panic mode, and they started, you know, they sent Admiral Aquilino, the commander of Indo-Pacific Command on television, You know, to say, hey, I've been trying and they won't talk to us. | ||
| And everyone that went this year, Blinken and Yellen and others, Kerry, they all said we want to open up mil-to-mil relations. | ||
| And Secretary of Defense Austin made similar statements. | ||
| So there was this continuous effort to say, we have to resume these mil-to-mil relations. | ||
| But if you go back and you look over the last 25 years, we've had a number of mil-to-mil relations that were, you know, after Tiananmen Square in 1989. | ||
| We had the defense consultative talks that started in 1997. | ||
| We had the military maritime consultative agreement that was in 1998. | ||
| Then we had the defense policy coordination talks that started in 2005 and went on uninterrupted until that one-year break. | ||
| And then you had the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea, or CEWS, that was established in 2014. | ||
| So at the top levels of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, you had these major connections that had gone on for over 20 years, where our military was talking with their military. | ||
| Four-star generals, four-star admirals, speaking with their Chinese counterparts. | ||
| And it was also happening inside each of the services. | ||
| So the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, even the Coast Guard, down as far as you can get at the tactical level, maybe at the operational level, they were talking with Chinese counterparts throughout the year. | ||
| They've done this for 20 plus years. | ||
| So all of a sudden now we get this, you know, the world's on fire because there's a war in Ukraine and there's a war in Gaza, and now all of a sudden having mil-to-mil is the most important thing, yet nobody ever said, well, what happened in those 20 years of those talks? | ||
| Well, one thing that happened was that we gave away all of our Yeah. | ||
| uh... tactics techniques and procedures if you will we told them what was important for warfighting we told them that you need to have a not shunner officer cord that these things and they gave us nothing and so now we're in this position now where after the trump administration said hold on a minute uh... | ||
| we can have this secretary pompeo called it blind engagement i called it unconstrained and unaccountable engagement So we stopped that and you guys did that in the Trump years. | ||
| And everybody said, oh, you're right. | ||
| And there was this talk about a bipartisan consensus about China being a threat to the United States. | ||
| And the Department of Defense started taking China seriously. | ||
| So what I experienced in 2014, 2015, where you were not allowed to talk about China, you weren't allowed to provoke China, that changed after Trump administration came in and we turned the course of the ship of state, if you will. | ||
| Well, now that's been undone with this meeting. | ||
| And what President Biden is now, not only does he signal weakness to Xi Jinping, And the Chinese Communist Party and the Central Military Commission, but he also in a way puts doubt inside our Department of Defense about how strong and how hard can you be against China because you have the president now saying, hey, it's really important that we talk to each other. | ||
| So anybody inside the military today that doesn't want to talk to China or doesn't want to take them or wants to consider them a threat, they're now going to be kind of suppressed. | ||
| And that's going to make us less prepared and less ready for the conflict that China's actually been preparing for for many, many years. | ||
| And they're now in this what I call this decade of concern. | ||
| You can put up that chart, which essentially says the period from 2020 to 2030 is the most dangerous time Because China, unlike many people you hear will say, quote-unquote experts, will say, well, China takes a long view. | ||
| They don't want to rush any of this. | ||
| Well, actually, all the Chinese leaders since Mao Zedong have been saying to themselves and inside the Chinese literature and to their own people or to their own Communist Party, We have to be restored to be this great power in 2049. | ||
| We're going to be this comprehensive great power. | ||
| Well, you cannot become a comprehensive great power without having possession of everything that you say is yours. | ||
| They say Taiwan is theirs. | ||
| They say the South China Sea is theirs. | ||
| They say the Senkakus are theirs. | ||
| They have a bunch of areas on the border with India that they say is theirs. | ||
| They even have disputes with Russia and North Korea. | ||
| So they say this is all their territory and they're trying to get it through, you know, many means as possible. | ||
| They got basically the South China Sea when Obama was president. | ||
| They seized Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines. | ||
| They built seven islands in the Spratlys unopposed. | ||
| Well, they know now that they're probably Still going to press Taiwan, but if they cannot get Taiwan without force, then they're going to have to use military force. | ||
| And they can't use military force, you know, in 2040 and expect everybody to come to Beijing to have a big ceremony in 2049. | ||
| So they have this idea that, well, we used force in 1989 against our own people, and the world was shocked about that. | ||
| And they turned on us and they called us barbarians. | ||
| But then less than 20 years later, in 2008, They hosted the Olympics in 2008 and the whole world came and celebrated China. | ||
| So they know that in about a two year period, we'll forget everything. | ||
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And if you look at COVID, They gave us COVID. | |
| They killed millions. | ||
| And we're forgetting about it now. | ||
| So the bottom line is sometime between 2020 and 2030, and it may be earlier now because of the elections in Taiwan and other things that are going on in our domestic politics, that the PRC may end up using military force to take Taiwan. | ||
| And what we just signaled yesterday... Tell me, give me your quick view. | ||
| of how effective the Chinese military has become. | ||
| There was an interesting article in The Economist last week basically questioning the combat readiness of Communist China because they weren't battle hardened. | ||
| Tell me how formidable a foe you think they would be basically fighting in their own backyard against, say, the U.S. | ||
| Navy? | ||
| Yeah, they're incredibly capable. | ||
| So for 25 years, they've been building what they call a counter-intervention force, a force designed to keep the United States military out of the Western Pacific. | ||
| So the big threat from the US is Our aircraft carriers and our submarines and our bombers in Guam and that. | ||
| And we have a force that's always living in the Far East, but they expect us to be able to fight our way in and be able to defeat an invasion force. | ||
| Well, the counter-intervention strategy that the Chinese military developed over the last 25 years Was essentially building platforms, ships, submarines, aircraft, and shore-based rocket forces that are designed to sink and destroy an invasion or a count of the U.S. | ||
| Pacific Fleet and U.S. | ||
| Pacific Air Forces that would come in from Hawaii and Guam. | ||
| So they designed capabilities to destroy Guam so no bombers or aircraft could land in service there. | ||
| they've designed missile ballistic missiles to dissent aircraft carriers the df twenty one d the df twenty six they have all of their mainline surface combatants and their submarines have anti-ship cruise missiles that have longer range than the united states navy three hundred kilometers uh... supersonic uh... they've also now feel that hypersonic weapons and then they have as i said the shore based uh... rocket forces and work | ||
| what should we be doing that we're not doing both respect to safety of our military but also in defending helping taiwan defend itself What should we be doing? | ||
| What's on your checklist? | ||
| The first 10 things you'd like to see a new president do in 2025? | ||
| Well, the first thing I would do, chime in here if you want. | ||
| Yeah, let me just a couple seconds and I'll turn over to you, Brad. | ||
| The first thing I would do immediately was to start deploying U.S. | ||
| forces to Taiwan. | ||
| We need to be there on the ground and use our presence as a leverage to deter China. | ||
| Because they're going to have to go back to the drawing board and think about it. | ||
| Do we really want to invade if the United States has military forces there? | ||
| Because now we won't just be attacking Taiwan, we'll be attacking American forces. | ||
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Do you think Taiwan would welcome that? | |
| Well, at some point they're going to have to, because it's becoming increasingly clear to the Taiwan people that China is threatening them. | ||
| You know, from the 1950s until just three or four years ago, about a 60-year period, Chinese fighters never crossed the center line across the Taiwan Strait, except for four occasions in 60 years. | ||
| Now, in the last two years, they're crossing hundreds at a time in the last year. | ||
| Every day, there's fighters and other aircraft that are crossing that center line. | ||
| They're operating aircraft carriers on the east coast of Taiwan. | ||
| They're threatening Taiwan. | ||
| They're circling the noose, or you can say an anaconda. | ||
| They're squeezing Taiwan out. | ||
| Besides putting American troops in harm's way, which we've done quite enough of that Decades. | ||
| What else can we do? | ||
| Well, it's going to take time, but we need to start what they did in the 1940s, the Two Ocean Navy Act. | ||
| We need to build up the fleet. | ||
| We need to build up our air forces, which means there's going to have to be a battle royale on Capitol Hill about the budget. | ||
| And, you know, we're spending a lot of money on a lot of things that aren't really necessary to our national security. | ||
| But having a fleet and an air force that can essentially make sure that we cannot be pushed out of or destroyed out of the Western Pacific, And the Pacific writ large, threatening Hawaii, threatening our West Coast. | ||
| We need to have that. | ||
| And we don't have that. | ||
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OK, let's do this, because we've only got a minute or so left. | |
| I want to give Brad a word. | ||
| How can people get a hold of you? | ||
| What's your social media stuff? | ||
| I'm Bradley Thayer on Getter and Bradley Thayer on Truth and Brad Thayer on X. OK, take the 30 seconds, wrap it up for me, and then I gotta wrap the show up, Brad. | ||
| What's your top of your list? | ||
| Look, there's so much to do on the military front, and Jim's right, and the nuclear aspect, I would add to that as well, right? | ||
| As Admiral Richard said, their growth in the nuclear capabilities has been breathtaking. | ||
| We haven't matched that in terms of missile defenses as well, hypersonic defenses. | ||
| But look, go to the center of gravity, cut the head off the snake, Kill the CCP. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| Wage political warfare on them because they are an illegitimate regime. | ||
| They know they're illegitimate. | ||
| We need to treat them in that manner. | ||
| They are illegitimate. | ||
| That means no meetings with them. | ||
| Treat them the way we treated apartheid South Africa. | ||
| They were beyond the pale. | ||
| And work with the diaspora. | ||
| And people of goodwill around the world to undermine them within China and outside of it. | ||
| Don't give them the time of day. | ||
| Don't reward them. | ||
| Don't fund them, for Pete's sake, right? | ||
| The first rule of strategy is don't fund your enemies. | ||
| I'm going to have to say goodbye to you guys. | ||
| Two of my favorites. | ||
| I think the two very best analysts we have out there in partisan communist China. | ||
| You guys keep doing what you're doing, Jim. | ||
| We'll see you sometime across the pond. | ||
| And Brad, we'll see you in the swamp. | ||
| Take care, gentlemen. | ||
| Thanks, Peter. | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| All right, 30 seconds left. | ||
| Peter K. Navarro in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| You can follow me at my substack, peternavarro.substack.com, peternavarro.substack.com. | ||
| What I'm trying to do there on a daily basis is to provide the kind of information in real time. | ||
| You need to fight back against the swamp and to fight for getting Donald Trump in the White House. |
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