April 3, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:54
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Not because Donald Trump has moved towards their version of Christianity. | ||
| Rather, American Christianity, evangelical Christianity, has moved towards Donald Trump as an increasingly authoritarian personality cult around the ex-president. | ||
| Writing in the New York Times, Michael Bender says, quote, even more than in his past campaigns, he is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity. | ||
| One history professor at a Pennsylvania evangelical university told Bender, the apparent effectiveness of such tactics has made Trump the nation's first major politician to successfully separate character from policy for religious voters. | ||
| But now, Trump is using his own brand of positive thinking and prosperity gospel to dupe his self-proclaimed Christian supporters into believing that he is the second coming of Jesus himself. | ||
| His own brand of the power of MAGA thinking, fusing his own perverse messianic message into his rallies, which alongside the passion of the MAGA faithful, gives them a Church of the Cult of Trump heir. | ||
| Including the rituals that would seem familiar to Christian believers. | ||
| Hands raised in the air as a sign of surrender and reverence to God. | ||
| Except that Trump rallies its reverence to Trump with a one-finger salute, a hallmark of QAnon followers, and a nod to that movement's slogan. | ||
| Even though they were told to stop, you still see them from time to time. | ||
| He's also taken to ending his speeches with a sermon of sorts, proclaiming that they are one movement and one family under God. | ||
| But now that he's running for president so that he can stay out of prison, he's really ratcheted up the church-like energy at his rallies. | ||
| As the New York Times notes, even more than in his past campaigns, he is framing his 2024 bid as a fight for Christianity, telling a convention of Christian broadcasters that just like in the battles of the past, We still need the hand of our Lord. | ||
| On his social media platform in recent months, Trump has shared a courtroom-style sketch of himself sitting next to Jesus and a video that repeatedly proclaims, God gave us Trump to lead the country. | ||
| And the reality is that his venomous snake oil is working. | ||
| As Trump has either directly or indirectly compared himself to Jesus, his followers have continued their descent into cult-like madness, parroting his persecution complex right back as if he is being punished for their sins. | ||
| Trump followers, evangelicals, will say, well, everybody's done this, everybody's done that, everybody sins, Joe Biden sinned, everybody... And yet, again, growing up in the Baptist Church, what we learned, and it's great, again, in this time after Easter, to be reminded of it, | ||
| That if you're a Christian, you believe that Christ died for your sins, and you need to ask for forgiveness. | ||
| And, you know, you see the bumper sticker across the South, Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven. | ||
| That is the central, core belief. | ||
| Of evangelical Christianity. | ||
| I can't speak for other parts of Christianity. | ||
| I think it's the same. | ||
| But for evangelicals, it's always been, ask for forgiveness. | ||
| That's always at the call. | ||
| After, you know, you go through 20 verses of Just As I Am. | ||
| Ask for forgiveness, it will be given. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Donald Trump Undercuts that in a way that no evangelical I ever grew up with would have been okay with. | ||
| But when Donald Trump says I've never done anything wrong, no reason to be forgiven, They still fall right in line and say, Oh, he's the second coming of Christ. | ||
| I mean, they, they idolize him and it's, it's really, it's twisted. | ||
| I still, again, growing up in the Baptist church after all these years, I just, I can't, I can't explain it. | ||
| I just can't, I can't explain it. | ||
| How they would kind of like, this is a great follow-up to what Jeffrey's Atlantic article talks about. | ||
| How do these people that I know, that I knew, that I grew up with, how do they embrace a guy like this who says, no, I've never asked for forgiveness because I don't need forgiveness from God. | ||
| I gotta say, as someone who sort of spends a fair amount of time kind of reading around the different circles of the American right, particularly on this, that even if Trump doesn't specifically say this, although he flirts with this iconography, this kind of iconography is extremely common, particularly in the hardest core group of his supporters. | ||
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Oh absolutely, and it's important to understand this when it comes to understanding why Trump, who is the subject of dozens of criminal charges, and someone who has led his party into repeated political failures over the last few election cycles, | |
| With that kind of record, why he is still the nominee for a third presidential cycle in a row, and positioned to potentially win the White House again. | ||
| In a closely divided country, each candidate needs to keep every vote inside their party. | ||
| They have to keep that column. | ||
| nice and tight on the Republican and Democratic side, if they're gonna have any chance of winning. | ||
| And then this, with Trump and Republicans, is a pretty clear advantage in April of 2024, heading toward November. | ||
| We're going to win the White House and we are going to save our country. | ||
| We're gonna save our country. | ||
| And what the hell was Biden thinking when he declared Easter Sunday to be Trans Visibility Day? | ||
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No! | |
| Such total disrespect to Christians. | ||
| And November 5th is going to be called something else. | ||
| You know it's going to be called Christian Visibility Day when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before. | ||
| Let's call it Christian Visibility Day, alright? | ||
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Bye. | |
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
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Because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot on 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 lie? | ||
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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. Bamm. | |
| It's Wednesday, 3 April in the year of our Lord. | ||
| Okay, you see that it's non-stop on MSNBC. | ||
| I mean non-stop. | ||
| And here's why it's non-stop. | ||
| They understand. | ||
| We'll talk about some polling. | ||
| We'll talk about the results yesterday from the primaries. | ||
| One of the most important was that the Zuckerberg situation got blown out. | ||
| Of course, nobody will talk about the actual numbers. | ||
| 55-45 in the state of Wisconsin. | ||
| Get rid of Zuckerberg. | ||
| Also, Charlie Kirk going on offense in Nebraska. | ||
| We'll have Charlie on later to talk about it. | ||
| But the polling, The Wall Street Journal out with a massive poll today of all the battleground states overnight. | ||
| And Trump, oh wait for it, leading in six of the seven battleground states. | ||
| The only battleground state they had that he's not leading, he's dead tied, I think 46 each, in Wisconsin. | ||
| And yesterday, Trump had a show of force, not just at the Green Bay rally, which was fantastic. | ||
| I want to thank Real America's Voice. | ||
| Our own Jane Zirkle for braving the snowstorm to kind of get through the inclement weather to get there. | ||
| But Michael Bender of the New York Times wrote that kind of definitive piece on all this about the religiosity of what they say that has infused the Trump movement. | ||
| He gave it up when he said at the end, it's about having your columns tight. | ||
| Remember, my theory of the case in this election, it's a base plus election. | ||
| I think a lot of time spent trying to convince people on the margin, and particularly suburban women, to come and vote for Trump is going to be a tough call and kind of a waste of resources when you have so many other opportunities out there. | ||
| Especially given the traditional and conservative nature of so many of the groups out there, like the African American families, Hispanic families, that's a, you add economic populism to that, you got a winner. | ||
| And it's not a hard sell, it's just, hey, here's the empirical evidence. | ||
| And they already know, and what President Trump said so powerfully last night, Under the illegitimate usurper reign in the White House, the blasphemy that goes on in the White House every second of every day. | ||
| They have Transgender Visibility Day on Resurrection Sunday and Easter Sunday and they ran, you know, Biden denied it. | ||
| I had no idea what you're talking about. | ||
| I don't know anything about it. | ||
| They're at general quarters to disprove that they allowed no religious symbolism on any of the Easter egg or the Easter celebrations they have over there in the afternoon. | ||
| President Trump came back hard. | ||
| Biden's running away from his transgender visibility. | ||
| President Trump came in last night and threw down and threw down hard. | ||
| He said, hey, how about this? | ||
| Suck on this. | ||
| No Transgender Visibility Day in the White House anymore, because on November 5th, we're having Christian, Christianity Visibility Day. | ||
| That's a shocker. | ||
| And MSNBC, which is really the counter-programming, that's the Uniparty, that is the apparatus, the Radical Democrats, a programming arm, Are all in on this, like nonstop, like I've never seen before on any one topic. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| Michael Bender gave it away because he said, look, in this election, you have the Biden coalition that is not coming together and it's not coming together for two, three primary reasons. | ||
| Number one, Bidenomics. | ||
| Axios reported last week. | ||
| They never mentioned it. | ||
| They don't want to talk about it. | ||
| They're telling the House guys, don't talk about it. | ||
| Don't use that term. | ||
| That term is toxic. | ||
| Why? | ||
| The lived experience of the American people. | ||
| So number one, the economics. | ||
| Number two, the invasion on the southern border, the illegal alien invasion, which is destroying particularly the Hispanic citizens community and African-Americans. | ||
| So that's the second part of the coalition. | ||
| Third, a part of that is the that economics combined with that is the The lack of support they have from young people. | ||
| In fact, as we reported yesterday, said yesterday, Josh Shapiro's a sneaky attempt in Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to sign people up on voter registration and to put it so that you could do motor voter, that kids get their license and immediately they're already, you know, they're already signed up to vote since you have to declare A party, and guess what, with young people, the Republicans outrun them, so now they're figuring out how they stop or slow down the issue. | ||
| And on top of that is everything with the Muslim American community with Biden's stance on the war. | ||
| And of course, the Jewish community with his stance on the war too, because he really doesn't support Israel, has been a detriment to Netanyahu, those people finishing what they need to finish. | ||
| Of course, the Arab American and Muslim American communities outraged by this, and they're not showing up. | ||
| They're not going to vote for Trump, but they're not showing up to vote for Biden. | ||
| So that coalition has four flat tires. | ||
| Plus you have Biden, who barely knows what he is, wandering around every day. | ||
| They're not taking the messes out. | ||
| They're not on top of things. | ||
| And so Bender said, and then in something like this is a base plus election, you have to have like your marching columns tight. | ||
| You have to have your marching columns tight. | ||
| This is what Ralph Reed's doing. | ||
| You know, the 30 million non-registered evangelical Christians, and there's a ton of traditional Catholics, particularly the Latin mass Catholics, that just are just punched out of the political process. | ||
| They're just not into it. | ||
| They don't feel it's correct or it's right to be involved. | ||
| Where people are making the case right now, it's certainly right to be involved. | ||
| And President Trump threw down as hard as he could throw down. | ||
| In that magnificent speech in Green Bay yesterday, he said, hey, how about this? | ||
| We'll have a visibility day. | ||
| We'll have a visibility day for Christians. | ||
| It'll be called November 5th. | ||
| And hey, we'll see what transpires. | ||
| Let's see how it goes. | ||
| Let's have an up or down vote on that. | ||
| This is why you have Morning Joe and Mika. | ||
| Mika's Amy Semple Brzezinski. | ||
| He's Billy Sunday. | ||
| He's quoting a gospel. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| He's quoting gospel verse and talking about his youth. | ||
| They understand they've gone too far. | ||
| They understand that they have We rejoice when there's no more! | ||
| destroy traditional America and the polling is horrible for them so now they're gonna try to put some makeup on and say Trump oh he's he thinks he's Jesus he's an authoritarian right he's a messianic leader but we got the good Christianity we have the Sermon on the Mount we're the good guys we're rubbing up on it and hugging it's all a lie they're demonic okay totally demonic short commercial break back in the warm in just a second | ||
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it has to figure out who they can persuade and who they must defeat at the ballot box at the ballot box So, I think there are persuadable people out there. | |
| I'm going to go and meet them all over the country. | ||
| I'm trying to book tour into a town meeting tour on faith and democracy. | ||
| And I'm going to talk to lots of people, and I want to bring them back to the story. | ||
| What did Jesus say? | ||
| What did He mean? | ||
| And you can't keep saying you're a believer. | ||
| Jesus says, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do the things I tell you? | ||
| So that's the question. | ||
| And I want to have a debate on faith. | ||
| Because I think faith could be a factor now, in these weeks and months ahead, and the fact that it's Easter makes it even more significant. | ||
| So I know the history of those people. | ||
| I come from that background, right? | ||
| But I had to find Jesus outside of my white church, white neighborhood, white school. | ||
| The whiteness is an idol. | ||
| And in the phrase white evangelical, the defining word there is not evangelical. | ||
| It's white. | ||
| And that has to change. | ||
| And I think we can change it. | ||
| And I think we can We can transform people, but also we can help people find the language. | ||
| I want this book to be a tool for people. | ||
| Find the text. | ||
| Find the language. | ||
| Find the ways to speak about this. | ||
| Because we're all influencers. | ||
| People talk to their family and their friends. | ||
| Everybody can do something. | ||
| This book is my two cents. | ||
| But I want others to offer their two cents. | ||
| And I believe in a God who increases the value of our two cents. | ||
| Okay, right there is Jim Wallace. | ||
| Let me make sure I walk through this. | ||
| He said something very smart with a lot of gobbledygook at the end. | ||
| He said something quite smart at the beginning about politics. | ||
| And I think he's a minister or he's the head of Sojourner, another left-wing social justice warrior, Christian front. | ||
| You have to know who you have to persuade and who you have to defeat. | ||
| I 1,000% agree with Brother Wallace on that and that's what I've always said in campaigns. | ||
| You must focus on What you what you can persuade and what you must defeat and this is my whole thing and look Florida yesterday was a big deal this abortion issue on the on the ballot is a big deal one is that the right-to-life movement is Not exactly. | ||
| Let's say we got to call it, we got to call balls and strikes as they are not exactly hitting on all cylinders. | ||
| Now there's some debate about it. | ||
| Are you messaging correctly? | ||
| Is the right policies, what you're doing, but Florida getting these on these ballots for these constitutional amendments have been, um, pretty, and I think you look at Kansas, you look at Ohio, I think Montana, a couple others, they're, they're trying to get this out in Arizona. | ||
| It's in, uh, now in Florida. | ||
| And I said yesterday, it's going to draw, they could spend $100 million. | ||
| They're talking about spending $100 million just on this proposition. | ||
| And that will bring, because they have no enthusiasm for Biden. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| All the numbers show that, all their internal numbers show that. | ||
| That's why they're in panic mode. | ||
| That's why they're having the things at Radio City to raise as much money as possible. | ||
| To hammer Trump, like on the trial that's going to come up, the law fair, is they will try to weaponize that about, you know, Trump is the patriarchy and just boom, carpet bomb that. | ||
| Day after day, you know, they cut stuff from the trial itself and put it up in the 32nd spot because they know the bookkeeping part of it, the commercial issues related to the bookkeeping part of it is irrelevant. | ||
| This is all why they're going to have Stormy Daniels testify, and they're going to have the Playmate Bunny, whoever she is, testify. | ||
| And they're talking about bringing Billy Bush back in there and have all that, because it's to hammer Trump. | ||
| And that's how they think they're going to win this thing, because they're in panic mode. | ||
| They're in absolute panic mode. | ||
| Jim Wallace, so he says, and by the way, he says the whiteness isn't honest. | ||
| He's the author of this book, The False White gospel. | ||
| Always gets back to your whiteness. | ||
| And here, the other big book they got it now is White Rural Rage. | ||
| Do you understand that the working class, the white working class in this country that's on the shoulders that have done so much, and quite frankly, the black working class, the Hispanic working class, so much in common because they're all being screwed. | ||
| by the globalists every second of every day. | ||
| But they're trying to divide you on race. | ||
| They're going back to the oldest playbook they've got. | ||
| I know it's redonkulous, but that's what they got. | ||
| They don't have anything else. | ||
| That's the toolbox. | ||
| The patriarchy and go back to racial politics. | ||
| I say bring it. | ||
| If that's what you got, let's bring it. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| I think Trump's on to something. | ||
| Hey, you want Visibility Day? | ||
| Well, here's what we'll do. | ||
| We'll give, we'll play Newsom's, you know, video and Whitmer's video and Hochul's video and Pritzker, all of them. | ||
| We'll play all that on transgender, on the radical transgender ideology, visibility. | ||
| We'll give it all the visibility you want. | ||
| We're into visibility. | ||
| We'll give you visibility. | ||
| But Trump says, hey, 5 November, we're going to have, that's going to be Christian Visibility Day. | ||
| And let's add it up. | ||
| We believe in democracy because we had the votes. | ||
| Remember, we believe in democracy, not anti-democracy. | ||
| We believe in democracy because we won in 2020 because we had more certifiable, legal, legitimate, chain-of-custody votes. | ||
| Yes, we did. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| Even with all the stealing, even with all the stealing, you stole it with, what, 72,000 votes? | ||
| That's what you did. | ||
| That's what you did after all that stealing. | ||
| And you're still cooking up different schemes every day, different schemes every day. | ||
| That's why the vote yesterday in Wisconsin said people are fed up with it. | ||
| I think it was 55-45. | ||
| You only see that number if you go to Citizens Free Press. | ||
| The great Cain puts that up in the headlines. | ||
| You go to the AP article. | ||
| It's not even mentioned. | ||
| It just says defeat it. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's called a blowout. | ||
| Because people are sick of these elections being stolen. | ||
| Even Democrats and Independents just sick of it. | ||
| They're tired of it. | ||
| One interesting thing on Brother Wallace here, and this is a—I'm going to give you a buried lead. | ||
| He's out there mumbo-jumbo. | ||
| By the way, I want that guy to go everywhere. | ||
| The more you get clowns like that out, the more people will say, hey, maybe I have to get involved in this. | ||
| Maybe I have to join this movement. | ||
| Maybe I have to register to vote. | ||
| Maybe I have to get to it. | ||
| Maybe I have to become a force multiplier. | ||
| You heard that term before? | ||
| Maybe it's become a force multiplier. | ||
| I want Jim Wallace everywhere. | ||
| Jim Wallace and the Sojourners, do you think they're going to convince anybody to support the radical left and the demons, all the demon policies they have? | ||
| Do you think they're going to do that? | ||
| Do you think people that are believers in the Christian faith are going to do that? | ||
| Maybe on the margins, a tiny amount. | ||
| But he's going to inspire people to really rethink and go, yeah, upon further review, I think I support Trump and the Trump movement and America First and MAGA, the deplorables. | ||
| I think that's me. | ||
| One thing I don't want to, I want to make sure that we, I keep talking about the Gospel of Mark and read the Gospel of Mark and they're not, and they never teach that in the seminaries. | ||
| Well, this is a, by the way, this is a bleeding heart, Jesus is a social warrior from start to finish. | ||
| Of course, it's the false white gospel because your whiteness is an idol. | ||
| Your whiteness is an idol. | ||
| So, and by the way, at the top to sell some books, rejecting Christian nationalism. | ||
| Rejecting Christian nationalism. | ||
| Rejecting it. | ||
| Not understanding it, debating it, rejecting it. | ||
| It's interesting, I go back here to see where he actually, he actually cites gospel verse, and guess what? | ||
| We have the gospel according to St. | ||
| John, right? | ||
| The one that's so, in the beginning was the logos, or in the beginning was the word, the one that's very deep, Philosophical, right? | ||
| Beautifully written. | ||
| Magnificently, the thinking is magnificent. | ||
| You have the Gospel of Luke, right? | ||
| You know, Gospel of Luke said to be St. | ||
| Paul's Gospel, right? | ||
| Or the Physician. | ||
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St. | |
| Luke, right there, St. | ||
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Luke. | |
| You got a number of citations. | ||
| I think you got 20 citations here. | ||
| On St. | ||
| John, 20 at least on St. | ||
| Luke, maybe more. | ||
| And of course we get to the Social Justice Warrior, the Sermon on the Mount, and St. | ||
| Matthew, the Gospel according to St. | ||
| Matthew. | ||
| Guy goes from a tax collector to writing the Social Justice Warrior Gospel. | ||
| Very powerful, beautiful, the Sermon on the Mount, all that, and Jim Wallace. | ||
| But I noticed I go, I said, well, man, I can't wait to see what he's got here at St. | ||
| Mark. | ||
| Oops. | ||
| Oops. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Not saying I told you so. | ||
| Would never sit there and go, hey, it's St. | ||
| Mark. | ||
| Here's the reason. | ||
| In St. | ||
| Mark, Jesus is not a social justice warrior. | ||
| Don't take my word for it. | ||
| Just read it. | ||
| Don't even read the analysis of it. | ||
| Just read it. | ||
| Take it from the beginning and read it. | ||
| It's quite short, and it's written like an action movie. | ||
| And then, and then, and then, the connective tissue is like, to the next scene, to the next scene, to the next scene. | ||
| Not a lot of parables, not a lot of, you know, the thinking in St. | ||
| John, the thinking in St. | ||
| Luke, this thinking in St. | ||
| Matthew, no sermon on the mount. | ||
| Christ does not pat you on the head in St. | ||
| Mark. | ||
| Christ is an exorcist in St. | ||
| Mark. | ||
| The very beginning. | ||
| It's Christ versus Satan. | ||
| Christ versus Satan. | ||
| And in the entire gospel, the Holy Spirit has a pretty big role in imbuing Christ. | ||
| with the Spirit from the very moment it opens. | ||
| No Bethlehem, no manger, no three wise men, none of the backstory. | ||
| Cut right to the chase. | ||
| We start at the Jordan River with the baptism of Christ and the Holy Spirit and we go right into the desert. | ||
| And then you have a confrontation the entire time with Satan and demons. | ||
| With Christ as the exorcist. | ||
| And he's not a happy camper in this gospel. | ||
| The reason he's not a happy camper, he's taking on Satan in the material world. | ||
| Don't take my thing. | ||
| Just read it. | ||
| Read it yourself. | ||
| You can read it in one sitting. | ||
| It's quite powerful. | ||
| The Jim Wallaces of the world, all the social justice warrior. | ||
| Jesus Christ is patting you on the head, telling you it's going to be okay. | ||
| Not in the gospel, Mark, and that's why they will never mention it. | ||
| So Jim Wallace, go out throughout the country. | ||
| We want you. | ||
| Go preach your gospel. | ||
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The false white gospel, I think you refer to it. | |
| Short break. | ||
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break back the warm in a moment here's your host steven k band. | |
| Bam. | ||
| Uh, bye. | ||
| Dave Brad's going to join me at the top there. | ||
| We're going to get to all the polling and we get to all that. | ||
| So we got a lot to go through. | ||
| Charlie Kirk, we're going on offense all over the place. | ||
| This vote to get rid of Zuckerbuck's in Wisconsin. | ||
| Spectacular. | ||
| Great job to the folks in Wisconsin that were running that deal on the Constitution. | ||
| That's the way to run things. | ||
| A close run thing. | ||
| It can't give you a big enough head tip. | ||
| You ought to teach the rest of the country how things are done. | ||
| Because Wisconsin is not a 55-45 state. | ||
| When we won it in 16, it was, what, 10,000 votes, right? | ||
| 10,200-something. | ||
| Close. | ||
| Tight. | ||
| Or 20,000. | ||
| Very close. | ||
| It's always close. | ||
| When they stole it, even with all their stealing, it was close. | ||
| It's tight. | ||
| Wisconsin, with those big universities, is going to be tight. | ||
| Gold, 2,300 this morning. | ||
| I am not here to give you personal financial advice. | ||
| The difference we do in this show is for a working class and middle class audience, we go out of our way to talk a lot about capital markets, a lot about macroeconomics, a lot about the economy, about how things work, and particularly how they work together to impact your life. | ||
| You know, what we talk about, the 10-year treasury, interest rates in the 10-year treasury. | ||
| We do that. | ||
| Because you can't be completely informed and really understand politics and particularly the tension points in politics and the forces against you until you understand money. | ||
| Until you understand money and you understand capital markets. | ||
| On gold, we've been with Birch Gold, partnered with Birch Gold for years and years and years. | ||
| We did the end of the dollar empire because we realized when Biden came to office what they were going to do was going to eventually destroy the US dollar as the prime reserve currency. | ||
| the prime reserve currency and that is that is a process that started that's what the de-dollarization Where'd you first hear that? | ||
| Oh, on The War Room. | ||
| So Gold's at $2,300. | ||
| We, in our partnership and our working with our sponsorship with Birch, they give you access to the top people. | ||
| So go to birchgold.com slash Bannon and talk to Philip Pasternak. | ||
| Philip's going to be with me on Saturday. | ||
| They're so busy during the week, it's very hard to break those guys off, as you can imagine. | ||
| Gold's at $2,300. | ||
| We're not saying it's going to go higher. | ||
| I'm not going to say it's staying there. | ||
| My point is that it was a lot lower when we first started. | ||
| And it's because of these converging forces, geopolitical, financial. | ||
| And one of the things is, hey, you know, Johnson's back next week. | ||
| We had MTG on last night. | ||
| Johnson's back next week. | ||
| And with the $2 trillion deficit this year and working on another budget, they can't even get concurrence to put out about the top line number for this current year that we got to get a budget by 30, appropriations by 30 September. | ||
| They're talking about another $60 billion for Ukraine. | ||
| I am not making this up. | ||
| This is the number one priority when he gets back. | ||
| So we're going to get to all that in a moment. | ||
| Very important about what we're going to go through. | ||
| And Darren Beatty is going to join me here momentarily. | ||
| I've got a cold open. | ||
| I want to introduce you to a fascinating individual. | ||
| Let's play it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, Brandy, first of all, tell us about the election disinformation campaign that Mackey is accused of orchestrating. | |
| What did he allegedly do? | ||
| So, yeah, Mackey is accused of having used Twitter to coordinate with other trolls in these private spaces, private group chats. | ||
| One was called War Room. | ||
| And he's accused of spreading disinformation, specifically that voters could cast their ballots via social media and text. | ||
| This one was specifically aimed at black and Latino voters. | ||
| You could tell because he used memes with black people and ones written in Spanish, allegedly. | ||
| No, basically, you know, what this guy did is what we're all really familiar with from the Russian internet agency, they created fake posts, they said that, you know, in these posts that certain celebs were on the Trump train, for instance, right? | ||
| Or they created big advertising campaigns for Hillary Clinton, where they were like, We're going to draft your daughters into the armed forces. | ||
| Or, you know, like we just said, the lies about when and where people can vote. | ||
| And just like the Russian campaign, we've been saying forever, there's a homegrown, alt-right disinformation campaign and it was aimed at electing Donald Trump. | ||
| And quickly, Brandi, we really haven't seen the federal government policing election interference on social media posts before, but what could this mean for the fight against misinformation moving forward, especially if he's convicted? | ||
| Well, Joe, we have. | ||
| It's just that it's not been aimed at us, right? | ||
| The people working for the Internet Research Agency in Russia faced federal charges. | ||
| It's just that now the DOJ is looking into our own backyard. | ||
| As for what it means, you know, there were several unnamed co-conspirators in there in the complaint, but they did include their Twitter IDs. | ||
| So we have sort of have an idea of who else was in this chat room. | ||
| And those people should be pretty afraid. | ||
| I think it also sends the message that these disinformation campaigns have real consequences. | ||
| Now, we were the winner of, I think, the Brookings Institute, the New York Times. | ||
| We were on a roll there. | ||
| I think it was 22. | ||
| In 22, I think we ran... I don't know if they gave awards out for 23. | ||
| I'm gonna have to get Natalie to check that out. | ||
| She was deemed misinformation. | ||
| But we as a site, or as a show, won every... We ran the tables in awards season for the year 22 that were handed out in early 23. | ||
| Doug Mackey... Doug, explain to our audience... | ||
| Exactly what's going on, because it's almost mind-boggling, right? | ||
| It's very hard to think that this could actually actually happen in the United States of America, and this is quite important given this gag order situation with President Trump, which gets into a lot of this area. | ||
| Walk me through exactly what you did, who you did it with, what crime were you charged with, and how were you found guilty, and what's your current state or status? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Steve. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Everybody has to go to memedefensefund.com. | ||
| I'm going to tell you exactly why. | ||
| So back in 2016, Steve, I'll take it from the top. | ||
| I posted these joke image macros from 4chan on Twitter. | ||
| And it's something that was so trivial that you just kind of forget about it. | ||
| Five years later, seven days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, I get a knock on the door. | ||
| And it's four FBI agents and a whole plethora of other law enforcement agents. | ||
| And they're telling me I'm under arrest. | ||
| And the first words out of my mouth were, for what? | ||
| I had no idea what was going on, especially because I was nowhere near January 6th or anything like that. | ||
| So they dragged me to the courthouse and I got to go through the COVID protocols and get arraigned. | ||
| via Zoom in front of a judge and they let me out on a signature bond. | ||
| I finally get the criminal complaint and they're charging me with a conspiracy against civil rights for posting these two memes. | ||
| They created this story that I was this mastermind orchestrator of this plot using these DM chats None of them I was even participating in at the time, and it's really unbelievable. | ||
| Everybody was posting these kind of jokes. | ||
| Hold on, hold on, hold on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hang on, hang on, hang on. | |
| In 16, which I stepped in to run at the last 100 days, I mean, all this was everywhere. | ||
| It was the Pepes and the, you know, people, the Cernoviches, or people putting stuff up All day long. | ||
| I gotta go back. | ||
| If Denver could help do this, please put up, I'd like the audience to see, and if you can, if you're on podcast or on radio, this is why you gotta get our newsletter, which we've made fantastic now with Kerry Dunovan and Grace and Mo and Jane and the entire team. | ||
| But just, I want to make sure people understand what you were arrested for by the FBI. | ||
| Put up those memes again. | ||
| Is that the sum total of what you, of the output you put up that they arrested you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Two memes, just throw away, copy paste off 4chan. | ||
| And of course, they say it's targeting certain voters. | ||
| Well, I mean, maybe you could say that if I designed the meme, but this was just a copy paste off 4chan. | ||
| These memes were going around everywhere, like you said. | ||
| And then they say, well, if you're in chat groups, and you retweet and you like things that you're a conspirator to deprive people of their civil rights. | ||
| Hold it. | ||
| And how did they make that argument? | ||
| I don't understand because they said... I'm totally confused even what you're charged with. | ||
| Because you put up these memes. | ||
| Why were you... Why are you depriving people of their civil rights? | ||
| Or their voting rights, I guess. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| How could they make that... How could they make... What jurisdiction was this in again? | ||
| Who was the U.S. | ||
| attorney? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that's an important thing. | |
| This was in the Eastern District of New York, and there's no connection to the Eastern District in this case. | ||
| I was sitting in Manhattan, which is the Southern District. | ||
| So venue is one of our big issues for appeal. | ||
| They argued that because the tweets went over the Internet line, over the bridge, the 59th Street Bridge or, you know, the George Washington Bridge or whatever, or under the water, that the Eastern District has jurisdiction. | ||
| So this was brought in this random jurisdiction. | ||
| Probably the Southern District didn't want to have anything to do with this kind of a case because it is so sketchy. | ||
| So what did they, and so, and when they argued this in court, what did they, what argument did they make that you should be found guilty of felonies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, exactly. | |
| So a conspiracy to injure, intimidate, threaten, or oppress voters. | ||
| ...in the process of using their civil rights. | ||
| And they brought up these DM groups, some of them I was a member of, some of them I wasn't even a member of, and said, here they are, they're creating the memes, all this stuff. | ||
| Now, here's the problem. | ||
| I wasn't even involved in these chats, because quite frankly, as I testified at trial, I was involved in dozens of DM groups, and people are just spamming it all day, 600 messages a day. | ||
| So I wasn't even reading these chats or have anything to do with it, but they said that I conspired with others to injure people in the exercise of their civil rights. | ||
| Do I have Darren Beattie up? | ||
| Beattie, you gotta help me out. | ||
| Darren, this is Kafka-esque, is it not? | ||
| I mean, this is the most bizarre thing I think I've ever heard. | ||
| Am I missing it? | ||
| I mean, I don't understand what the beef is. | ||
| Well, you know, I don't even think that Kafka captures it. | ||
| If Kafka could somehow be resurrected, he would use the adjective, this is Biden-esque, because we far surpass anything of the imagination of Kafka or any other kind of dystopian writers. | ||
| You know, again, it's kind of hard to believe people hear, oh, a guy got arrested for a meme. | ||
| Someone was charged and convicted of a felony for a meme. | ||
| Mocking Hillary Clinton, by the way. | ||
| I think that's an important component here. | ||
| But yeah, it's real, and they resurrected this- But hold it, but hang on, hang on. | ||
| As part of our campaign, I was brought in for one reason. | ||
| I had never been in a campaign office in my life. | ||
| I ran for student body president when I was in college. | ||
| I had nothing to do, I was a naval officer, I had nothing to do with politics. | ||
| I was born for the last 100 days, and the reason, as you remember at Breitbart, with Clinton Cash, we were specialists, and myself particularly, and Peter Schweitzer, in the Clinton Mafia. | ||
| I was born for one reason, to take the heat right to her. | ||
| Every day in a campaign, We brought the heavy artillery on Hillary Clinton as a complete, one of the main focuses of the decline of this country, of the decline of the elite in this country, and we ripped her face off. | ||
| And I'm proud of it. | ||
| That's why Merrick Garland is not the Supreme Court Justice. | ||
| I'm proud of it. | ||
| We did it every day. | ||
| Why didn't they come and arrest the Trump campaign? | ||
| It was putting forth President Trump's policies and programs, but hey, one of the big focuses is that just to expose Hillary Clinton to the evil demon that she is, right? | ||
| Which I wholeheartedly believe, and the American people agree, too. | ||
| That's why she's not at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, so beady. | ||
| What's even the crime? | ||
| It's called politics. | ||
| They were on Trump 24-7. | ||
| I'm still stunned about what's going on here. | ||
| And how's this guy even charged? | ||
| A number of things here. | ||
| As you well know, they have gone after the Trump campaign very vigorously. | ||
| And one would be hard-pressed to find a single person who is instrumental in Trump's victory who hasn't faced Pretty serious legal retaliation by the Biden DOJ. | ||
| So I think that is one kind of contextual element that conditions all of this. | ||
| I think in terms of the legal import, it's obviously important for the First Amendment. | ||
| It's obviously important for free speech. | ||
| More specifically, this is the regime, the Biden DOJ, Really trying to codify the disinformation scam that we've covered extensively at Revolver. | ||
| We've spoken about it. | ||
| They're trying to codify the disinformation scam. | ||
| into the legal framework and this is really a trial for that. | ||
| Hang on one second. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| You're seeing this, you know, Andrew was the ultimate first amendment guy, free speech guy, and was the most powerful warrior I think we ever had in that. | ||
| It's not my specialty. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| I follow it closely because I'm in media. | ||
| But it's not. | ||
| But I defer to people like Andrew Breitbart and I defer to people like Darren Beatty who kind of have that intellect to pull together. | ||
| But here's the on the 30 Front War. | ||
| This is going to get down to this. | ||
| We're going to have a huge blow up here in a couple of days, folks, over what's happening in New York. | ||
| And they're going to be there. | ||
| You know, the Trump guys are filing more and more motions. | ||
| It looks like the judge is digging in. | ||
| The media is all on the side of the of of of the judge. | ||
| Avinati from prison, actually, I don't know how he tweets from prison, but he was in prison, I think, and he tweeted pretty powerful, or Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen. | ||
| Michael Cohen's like a regular co-host on MSNBC. | ||
| If they're up there all the time, and this is him saying, if they're up there all the time, just hammering Trump nonstop on this massive network over at MSNBC, how can Trump not say things? | ||
| It's one of the weapons of an opposition party. | ||
| It's one of the most powerful weapons that got Trump into the White House. | ||
| It's basically free speech. | ||
| So, Darren, go back to this, because you see with the work you're doing and Michael Benz is doing, you're telling us that, hey, darker days are coming. | ||
| They're going to try to shut you down on all of this. | ||
| This is the whole thing of lawfare. | ||
| And what we're seeing here is another aspect of lawfare. | ||
| So take it from the top and walk me through it slowly. | ||
| Yes, it's a deeper form of lawfare because it seeks to establish a really dangerous precedent. | ||
| That's what I was mentioning before the break, is we've covered pretty extensively the emergence of this phrase, this term disinformation, this term of art borrowed from the psychological warfare offices of the CIA and other agencies, this term of art that's typically used in the context of information warfare with other nations. | ||
| Now of course everything's been repurposed domestically in order to silence Trump supporters, and so we have this term disinformation that's seemingly ubiquitous now. | ||
| It's always used in a kind of artificial context, in a fake context. | ||
| in a politically motivated context, and it's almost always used to shut up speech that the regime doesn't like and use it as a pretext to de-platform conservatives. | ||
| That was sort of the first wave of, if you say something wrong, if you say so-called disinformation, you're de-platformed from Twitter or Facebook or whatever. | ||
| They're moving into the second phase, a more, shall we say, severe form of de-platforming, and that's simply putting you in prison. | ||
| And in order to do that, they have to take the whole disinformation ideological architecture and codify it within a legal system. | ||
| And so they've picked this fairly obscure and old and frankly kind of obsolete statute, the Ku Klux Klan Act or Ku Klux Klan law. | ||
| It was basically set up in the aftermath of reconstruction to prevent People from intimidating African Americans at the polls. | ||
| So, you know, so they would be able to vote. | ||
| Of course, this is entirely different context of somebody sharing a funny meme online, but they're trying to say, well, disinformation is deception. | ||
| And that's basically just as good as intimidating. | ||
| It's the same type of deprivation of a right in this case, the right to vote. | ||
| And so if they get this precedent in the door. | ||
| A wide range of things, basically anything you can imagine that's considered to be disinformation by these corrupt ruling elites can not only get you banned from Facebook, it can now get you thrown in prison. | ||
| And this case of Doug Mackey is the test balloon. | ||
| So if they actually win here, if they prevail, I don't think they will. | ||
| But if they prevail in appeal, that's what the implication is for the entire country. | ||
| If you say something that Biden doesn't like, that Hillary doesn't like, that Amy Klobuchar doesn't like, you're not just going to be banned from Twitter anymore. | ||
| You're facing 10 years in prison. | ||
| Because that's what actually Doug was facing here—10 years. | ||
| That was the maximum. | ||
| They had to do it. | ||
| The Eastern District too is, wait for it, Brooklyn. | ||
| Hillary Clinton, Robbie Mook, and all the people that lost the election for her because they were too woke. | ||
| Remember, they looked down their nose in Wisconsin. | ||
| They never sent her to Michigan, never sent her to Wisconsin. | ||
| Trump, the very first week I was there. | ||
| They knew it and he was warning them. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, no. | ||
| Sullivan, Jake Sullivan sat there and said, hey, you're not going to Michigan, you're not going to Wisconsin. | ||
| And Robby Mook goes, we don't need that, we got a new coalition. | ||
| But that's where they do this trial. | ||
| Mackie, you were found guilty. | ||
| What was the penalty? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I was sentenced to seven months in a federal prison and a $15,000 fine back in October. | |
| And so where does this stand today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So after the sentencing hearing, interestingly enough, the judge denied our motion for bond without any arguments or briefs or anything. | |
| So we went to the circuit and we won a bond pending appeal. | ||
| Otherwise, I'd be sitting in a prison cell right now. | ||
| So on Friday, we have some very well-respected judges in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals will hear this case. | ||
| the oral arguments on Friday. All the briefs are in. We got brilliant briefs. We got amicus from the likes of Professor Eugene Volokh. So we're very optimistic about what's going to happen in the circuit and we look forward to the oral arguments on Friday. | ||
| Um, can you, hey Darren, can you and Doug just hang out? | ||
| I want to take you into the next hour. | ||
| I got some more I just want to drill down on. | ||
| As important as this is, this is what they're going to try. | ||
| This is lawfare, the next wave of lawfare. | ||
| Particularly as we start to add more elements to our movement. | ||
| As President Trump is bringing in a broader coalition. | ||
| This is going to be one of the ways they try to shut us down. | ||
| And it's vicious. | ||
| Look, we've been de-platformed everywhere. | ||
| And I don't whine about it. | ||
| I could care less because the show gets bigger every day. | ||
| But this is the de-banking and the de-platform. | ||
| And Beatty's right. | ||
| They're going to take this now to a darker place of actually putting you in prison. | ||
| Hey, Peter Navarro. | ||
| One of the best men in this country has done more for this country. | ||
| Did the China terrorists, went after China, secure the southern border when he came to President Trump about the tariffs on Mexico? | ||
| Peter Navarro is in prison right now. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| Peter Navarro, Dr. Peter Navarro. | ||
| Our own Dr. Peter Navarro is in prison, even as we speak. | ||
| Just absolutely incredible. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| One of the things is stop giving, you know, you get to vote every day. | ||
| What I mean by that? | ||
| With your dollars. | ||
| With who you give your commerce to. | ||
| Make sure PublicSquare.com. | ||
| Go check it out. | ||
| They have tens of thousands of companies with products and services and they support your values. | ||
| Now, they've got to be at the quality that you demand, but it's there. | ||
| Go check it out. | ||
| PublicSquare.com. | ||
| Do it today. | ||
| 90-second break. |
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