April 11, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:33
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| To turn January 6th into a success story of authoritarianism here in the U.S. | ||
| He writes this, quote, Bannon believed the MAGA movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalized by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years. | ||
| Republicans were the ones standing in the way of Bannon's plans. | ||
| Quote, the first guys that we got to take down is a Republican Party, he said. | ||
| We haven't done that yet. | ||
| We're getting there. | ||
| Trump's our instrument. | ||
| We're getting there. | ||
| We're back. | ||
| The author, Isaac Arnstorf. | ||
| Congrats. | ||
| Pub day is tomorrow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| We were joking about being eclipsed by the eclipse. | ||
| You won't be. | ||
| You're in the clear now. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| Tell me about, I mean, their successes are clear. | ||
| I mean, there is no Republican Party. | ||
| It's Trumpism. | ||
| And Joe Biden is running against Trumpism. | ||
| Joe Biden's running against a MAGA movement that isn't maybe as big as it was in 16, but it is certainly more virulent. | ||
| And tell me if that is a means to an end or the end. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What it has is it has an institutional home now, which is the Republican Party itself. | |
| And this is really something that changed in the aftermath of January 6th. | ||
| Because the story that developed in the movement, and Bannon had a huge role in this, was that the reason Trump failed, the reason that he couldn't stay in office on January 6th, was because of a few uncooperative Republicans. | ||
| And there's actually a lot of truth in that, right? | ||
| If you think about the Republicans who stood up to him and prevented him from overturning the election, it was Republicans. | ||
| And so the idea was that the movement needed to take over the party, and they needed to do it from the ground up. | ||
| From the precincts, to the counties, to the districts, to the states. | ||
| And then they could purge the party of anyone who wouldn't be there next time when everything was on the line. | ||
| And that's what we have now, is the movement being channeled into this structure, into this apparatus, the party organization itself, that has made it so much more effective, actually, in that time when Trump has been out of power. | ||
| We are witnessing an alliance of Christian nationalists, anti-feminists, and fascists working together to make sure they maintain control over us all. | ||
| This is Steve Bannon's vision. | ||
| A Christian, nationalist America run by white, heterosexual, so-called Christian men. | ||
| Because I'm a Christian. | ||
| That ain't Christianity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, keep in mind, Bannon himself grew up in a Catholic military school where he learned about history as a clash of civilizations between the Christian West and the Muslim world. | |
| A huge part of his rise back when it was Breitbart and the alt-right. | ||
| And also a big part of Trump's rise was this fear of Islamic extremist terrorism, and in Christianity he was core to that. | ||
| But fundamentally, the MAGA movement, as Bannon conceives it, is nationalist, and Christian nationalism is a strand of that. | ||
| It's not the only form of it. | ||
| But certainly, I mean, when I visited him in his office doing some reporting for my book, he's surrounded by books, and one of them out there on the table was called The case for Christian nationals. | ||
| Right, and of course Camp of the Saints and all of that sort of other stuff too. | ||
| I mean, I didn't even realize that Mark Burnett, I am this week old in realizing Mark Burnett is an evangelical Christian. | ||
| His wife was on a TV show where she, you know, was sort of playing into that as well. | ||
| So is the idea that what they think they're going to do, as he keeps saying, deconstruct the administrative state, essentially break the government at the federal and state level, and put their people in charge, and then voila, it doesn't matter what women think or what minorities think, they will be ruled by this small group of men. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bannon's idea is that if you redefine the two-party system as a populist, right-of-center, nationalist party, called the Republicans, versus what he would call a globalist, elitist, liberal party, then he thinks that is the recipe for the Republican Party to rule for 50 or 100 years. | |
| What is it like to cover, not just two parties that see the world differently, but one that doesn't attach itself to provable facts? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we as reporters always have to be clear and honest about what is observably empirically true and what isn't. | |
| That's a huge part of our job. | ||
| But it's also part of our job to be respectful of where people are coming from and to be fair. | ||
| And this was also a huge part of the project of this book, was spending a lot of time with people who really did Where do you draw that line between respecting people that believe things that aren't true and wanting to tell them that 60 courts found that there was no fraud? | ||
| How do you do that personally? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think when I started out, I was more afraid of, like, getting into that argument with people, and I would think, I'm really just here to listen and try to understand. | |
| And what I learned over time was actually to be less afraid of having that out, because, like, they know. | ||
| Like, they've heard of it. | ||
| Like, I'm not here, like, breaking it to them that, like, people think they're conspiracy theorists, or, like, on MSNBC, people say mean things about them. | ||
| They've heard it, they're aware. | ||
| On Fox sometimes too, right? | ||
| Prepared and vitalized. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, exactly. | |
| And so actually, there was something that was actually kind of freeing about that. | ||
| It's like, no, we can actually level with each other. | ||
| Bannon believes in a country, you know, what the stolen election myth is really about, fundamentally, is a starting premise that the country is conservative. | ||
| And it's about who the country belongs to. | ||
| And that's why it's not really about the machines or the mules and all that stuff can kind of change or go away or get disproven. | ||
| But what really matters is this idea about who America is for. | ||
| White people. | ||
| Well, in the view of some members of the movement. | ||
| White Christians, I should say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think we have to be realistic about the gains that the polls are showing that Trump is making with voters of color. | |
| And that's something that this campaign is extremely excited about, diversifying that coalition. | ||
| Not that they're going to ever win a majority, but if they can make a few inches gain. | ||
| A few Candace Owens here and there that go along with the idea of white conservatives. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If they can either suppress or even convert a few voters of color in those key states with large cities, that can make a difference in a close election. | |
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| You're not going to get 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've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Babb. | |
| It's Thursday, 11 April, in the Year of Our Lord 2024. | ||
| Welcome to the world. | ||
| We've got a lot to go through today. | ||
| Victoria Sparks is going to join us. | ||
| Congressman Sparks is going to join us here in a moment at the bottom of the hour to talk about Ukraine. | ||
| She's from Ukraine. | ||
| We've got, obviously, the FISA in that open. | ||
| You heard Islamic terrorism, the deconstruction of the administrative state. | ||
| They all come together. | ||
| In this warrantless FISA fight. | ||
| We'll get more to that day. | ||
| Brad's going to join us about the Federal Reserve. | ||
| Amazing video, I think, from O'Keefe's team that just really strips the face off of what Powell's doing. | ||
| Joel Pollack's going to join us from Jerusalem today with an update on everything that's happening in the Hamas war. | ||
| I want to start, I want to read a quote. | ||
| Probably, I think one of the most important speeches Donald Trump ever gave, President Trump gave, was at the CPAC. | ||
| in March of 21, but there's another one he gave at CPAC that I happened to attend. | ||
| I want to quote this, we will not back down, we will not bend, we will not quit, we will not yield, we will press forward with vigor, we will push onward, and we will finish what we started. | ||
| I want to introduce now the author of what I think is an extraordinary book, Finish What We Started. | ||
| Isaac Arnsdorf joins us from the War Room. | ||
| Isaac, thank you so much for coming on the show. | ||
| First off, I can't make more of a stronger recommendation for this audience to buy this book because this book is your story. | ||
| This book is told from many different perspectives of Dan Schultz and Steve Stern and John Fredericks and people that fought the precinct strategy and people that fight today, etc. | ||
| But it's really your story. | ||
| And that's what I've got to ask you, Isaac. | ||
| Most of these political books that come out, particularly about President Trump, are about the inner workings of the court, who said what about whom, who's putting the knife in whom. | ||
| It's so detailed Did you spend two or three years on the road out there in the hinterlands, in Maga territory, interviewing people? | ||
| I mean, how did you actually compile this book? | ||
| Because it's extraordinary. | ||
| And you say at the beginning, hey, every word in this is a quote from somebody I interviewed either on tape recording or took notes. | ||
| There's no made up quotes here. | ||
| There's no summations. | ||
| There's nobody hiding behind, which most of these books have, behind anonymous quotes. | ||
| You lay it all out there. | ||
| In particular, you lay it all out there for working-class men and women who are really the stars of this book, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Well, that's exactly what I wanted to do with this book because I was doing all that reporting in my day job, and some of the most interesting and insightful stuff that I was learning was never going to be headline news. | ||
| It was just never going to be the kind of thing that you would read in the newspaper or that you would read in, like you said, the typical political books that are all about, you know, Washington operatives and politicians. | ||
| And I wanted to try to capture what we as Americans were living through in this period. And, you know, in the period when the reporting started, early to mid-2021, it was also a period where Trump was not as prominent as he is today. And I think that's a really important thing to remember. | ||
| And we didn't know, it wasn't clear at that time at all that he was going to come back and be the Republican nominee again. | ||
| I mean, he was kind of in hibernation at Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| And so actually it was you, Steve, and you, this audience, and the community that was forming in the MAGA movement without Trump's direct leadership at that time that ended up setting the direction. | ||
| The book ends in kind of a culmination, and I keep telling the folks here that, hey, in the last hundred days or last couple of months, because we've moved forward a little bit, you've taken out a Speaker of the House for the first time in American history, you've now completely purged all the senior leadership of the Republican Party, the RNC, the National Committee, including the Chairman, and you've effectively removed Mitch McConnell, who's had a grip on the Senate for 20 or 30 years. | ||
| You've done all that, and this is the culmination of the book. | ||
| How does that, this is what I'm saying, how do newspapers or how do people who are supposed to be smart not get that? | ||
| And you went out for two or three years because you can only understand the culmination of what's happened over the last couple of months if, quite frankly, you read this book. | ||
| And the reason is that this book contains Eyewitness accounts at the moment it happened, whether it's Cary Lake in Arizona or the, you know, the precinct strategy in Kansas or wherever. | ||
| How do news editors miss that this stuff with McCarthy just doesn't come out? | ||
| It's not like a thunderstorm that comes out of nowhere. | ||
| There's a deep basis for this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, you know, there are lots of other things. | |
| You know, I didn't always know when I started reporting the book that what stories that started, how they were going to end, and that was part of what made it exciting. | ||
| But, you know, that's the advantage of reporting a story over this long a period of time is you can kind of see those stories developing, you know, and whereas on the day, in the moment, we do the best job that we can, but things become a little bit clearer in the longer view. | ||
| You know, and since since you mentioned McCarthy and McConnell and McDaniel, I think it's also fair to mention, you know, some of the other party leaders who, who get elected at the end of the book, are no longer and no longer in their positions. | ||
| I'm thinking about Jeff DeWitt in Arizona, and Christina Caramo in Michigan. | ||
| So I don't know if there's a curse in the book or what, or maybe it's just a reflection of how this, how this instability in the party is, is continuing to be a moving target. | ||
| No, but this is the power of the book. | ||
| We're going to go to break, and Isaac's going to stick with us, and hopefully we'll get him back on here. | ||
| I want people to get the book and read the book, and then we'll get Isaac back on, hopefully in a week or two. | ||
| But it's Finish What We Started, MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy. | ||
| I might argue about that. | ||
| No, but you see, here's the thing. | ||
| The Karamo situation, the DeWitt situation, and many more are in your reporting because it is evident that the precinct strategy, this grassroots movement, the engagement of MAGA, and actually the political process to take over the Republican Party really doesn't have the Chamber of Commerce on the side. | ||
| It doesn't have the donors on the side. | ||
| There's obviously going to be a clash in taking over an apparatus. | ||
| Then phase two has got to be like, okay, well, how do we fund this apparatus? | ||
| And if they cut you off of money, It's going to be another war. | ||
| That's one of the powers of it. | ||
| That's one of the powers of the book. | ||
| I want to get into particularly, I keep saying all the time, hey, you're not going to be embraced. | ||
| You're not going to be patted on the head. | ||
| You actually have first person eyewitness accounts of what that looks like, of what it means. | ||
| And it actually shows that maybe these people aren't the villains that we make them out to be. | ||
| Maybe that maybe they're actually closer to being MAGA than we think. | ||
| And we can convert those. | ||
| We'll get into all of it. | ||
| Isaac Arnsdorf, The book is Finish What We Started. | ||
| That quote is taken from President Trump's magnificent speech at CPAC in March of 23, where he really laid out his plan for returning to the White House. | ||
| This is when actually he had already announced he was a candidate. | ||
| Finish What We Started. | ||
| Go right now. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| You're the star of this book. | ||
| You are the star. | ||
| The MAGA movement. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Back in the war with Isaac Arnsdorf in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We rejoice when there is no more. | |
| Let's take down the CCB! | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Babb. | ||
| you you The book is Finish What We Started. | ||
| You're the star of this book. | ||
| You're not going to love all of it, right? | ||
| It's got some sharp edges to it, but hey, you're big boys and girls, but you definitely should get this book and read it and think about it. | ||
| And particularly think about the journey we've taken over the last couple of years. | ||
| The defeats we've had, the victories we've had, and quite frankly, the long road and tough struggle we have ahead of us. | ||
| And by the way, Isaac was the guy, we did that cold open, he's the guy getting beat up by Joanne Reed and And our own Nicole Wallace. | ||
| One of the reasons we do so much MSNBC is that they have the Nicole Wallace's, the Tim Miller's, the Charlie Sykes, either former members of the Republican Party or the never Trump wing of the Republican Party, maybe even still, though I think Tim's totally punched out, that do the analysis that we actually share with you on a daily basis. | ||
| The book is finished while we started. | ||
| Tim, I mean, Isaac, I want to go to Particularly when people show up for the precinct strategy, and we keep saying they're not welcome by the Republican Party that controls it. | ||
| You have some really amazing examples of people you've interviewed. | ||
| What is the mindset, as you've reported in the book, of people that have been in charge of the precincts, or in charge of that hierarchy going up, all the way to the state party level, that opposes MAGA? | ||
| And what do they think of MAGA, particularly when we first show up? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there's a mix. | |
| I mean, some people are excited to see fresh faces and think that the party needs to grow and needs fresh energy. | ||
| But sometimes the friction comes from, you know, not that inexperience. | ||
| And particularly when MAGA newcomers come in very confident about their experience and their understanding of how elections work, you know, versus the, you know, I'm thinking of one woman in particular in the book, who's going to coffee, meeting all these new recruits who are telling her about all the theft. And this woman is thinking, you know, I've been a Republican my whole life, I've voted in every primary and every general in my whole life, I go door | ||
| to door, you know, I am all in the nitty gritty of the machinery and, and who are these people who are just joining the party now, and are telling me how it really works, and that there's all this going on that I just never saw. | ||
| Bye! | ||
| Those are people I'm talking about. | ||
| I've got a new perspective on that, in that those look like people we can actually convert to MAGA and to the MAGA philosophy, because their philosophy is still that kind of neoliberal, neocon, although they've been the foot soldiers. | ||
| I'm not sure they totally understand what the foot soldiers are. | ||
| The other question I've got on here, just about the book itself, is how did you How did any publisher pick this book up? | ||
| This is probably, at the beginning, the most unsexy... Well, it just is. | ||
| I don't know how, because we have War Room Books, and I see all pitches going everywhere. | ||
| This is probably the most unsexy pitch ever, particularly when you don't know the outcome. | ||
| You don't know that eventually these people will be part of, that Trump will be resurgent, Trump will come back, Trump will be the nominee, Trump will be leading in polls to be President of the United States, and not just that, his followers took out McCarthy, took out That's all in the future. | ||
| When you actually make the book, make the pitch to the book, I can't imagine why anybody would say, would give you any money to go do this, because they say, this is a bizarro land. | ||
| You're dealing with the biggest wingnuts in the country, and who cares what they think, because they have no power, particularly in 2021, when effectively we were scattered to the winds by the powers that be in the Republican Party, not even the opposition, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, and I did hear a lot of no's for that reason, and the credit goes to my editor and publisher for seeing the potential there and believing in it from the start. | |
| And the case that I made then, which is really the same case that I'm making now, is this is the real story of You know, if you're not just living in the Washington bubble, this is the real story about what we as Americans and collectively as America have gone through in the past four years. | ||
| And it's been such a tumultuous and transformative time. | ||
| And in order to understand that, you need to spend time with the real people on the ground who you know, in ways that aren't immediately predictable or expected to them either, are kind of, you know, playing a massive game of pool, and we are still seeing how the balls shake out. | ||
| You talk about Jeff DeWitt in the Arizona party, in the mission party, I think they're two great examples. | ||
| Throughout this book, the folks you're dealing with and the folks coming into Dan Schultz's precinct strategy and Steve Stearns as the head marketing guy and the cheerleader are average, everyday Americans. | ||
| And most of them don't have a lot of resources, particularly to put to political campaigns. | ||
| So it's an under-resourced. | ||
| I realize I may not be objective in this, but I try to be as objective as possible in looking at it. | ||
| When I read your book, on the evidence that you have presented, not anything outside the book, but what's presented on the pages of this book, it looks to me like Edmund Burke would be so proud. | ||
| This looks like the greatest experiment in true populist democracy. | ||
| And yet the title is the MAGA movement's ground war to end democracy. | ||
| I would actually say it's the MAGA movement's ground war to actually begin democracy because these are people that are not the donor class. | ||
| They're not the class of people, a lot of them that go to college, right? | ||
| The credential class is what they call it. | ||
| This is truly working class and middle class America. | ||
| Why is the title to end democracy instead of that you've written a book That shows you actually an experiment in democracy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because it's important to understand that democracy often doesn't end at the end of a rifle, but at the hands of its elected leaders. | |
| And everyone recognizes that Trump could legitimately win a free and fair election in November and return to power, but it's a question of what he would do with that power. | ||
| And based on what he has said publicly and what his advisors have said in our reporting, or the people who would go into staff his administration, they're very serious about things like making plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on inauguration day to put down protests. | ||
| Those are not, you know, what democracy means. | ||
| It's actually very simple. | ||
| It's that we decide things based on elections, not based on violence. | ||
| And Trump has never said he'll accept the outcome of an election going back to 2016, and he's never disavowed violence. | ||
| And we saw the consequences of that on January 6th. | ||
| Did you, in your reporting and going throughout the country and talking to the people that are now at the precinct level and going forward on this, did you ever hear any inkling of that? | ||
| First of all, obviously I don't agree with that. | ||
| I don't want to get in an argument. | ||
| We don't have time to get in an argument about that. | ||
| We'll do that another day. | ||
| But in his base, and the people are actually not just talking or sitting there watching talk radio or listening to talk radio or watching shows like this. | ||
| The people that are actually engaged are putting in the work. | ||
| Because I didn't see it in the book, but is there empirical evidence out there that these people have any more motivation than to take over the Republican Party and to go forward and back politicians that want to deconstruct the administrative state? | ||
| And the perfect example is this FISA fight we're having. | ||
| We have a perfect example in FISA in Ukraine, which we're going to have guests on from Congress here in a minute. | ||
| Is that what your reporting showed? | ||
| What did your reporting show about the actual engaged base of the MAGA movement? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're absolutely right that they're using the democratic machinery to accomplish this political objective. | |
| But I do hear a lot of that frustration and, you know, Dan Schultz himself, a lot of the people quoted, I'm thinking about chapter 12 at the Georgia GOP convention, there is this ominous tone of, you know, like this is what we're trying to redeem what we see as a stolen election and if that works, If that fails, then what else is left for us to do? | ||
| And that is a concerning message. | ||
| Yes, but I think, look, there's nobody, I don't think there's anybody watching this show, no one producing this show, myself, that is not a true believer that 2020 was stolen, and we could take you through chapter and verse, although now's not the time to do that. | ||
| We'll do that at a later time. | ||
| What do you think, what impact do you think this book is going to have? | ||
| Because it's getting a broad reading by, let's say, people that are not friendly to this movement, are not big fans of the war room, think Dan Schultz is a nutjob, hate Trump. | ||
| It's getting a wide reading. | ||
| What do you think is going to be the outcome of what this book accomplishes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I also hope it gets a wide reading in this audience also, and for whoever picks it up, that they just come at it with an open mind and give me a chance, give the people in the book a chance, give a chance to the people who maybe think a little bit differently than them. | |
| and if we all spend just a little bit more time listening with some empathy and trying to understand where people are coming from, even if we don't agree, then that actually is how democracy has to work. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because I'm more convinced than ever after reading this book that we are two-thirds of the country and that the MAGA movement represents a political movement inspired and led by President Trump that's going to reform American politics. | ||
| In fact, I'm announcing next week at our Gladiator School on the 18th in In Las Vegas. | ||
| We're going to go through this book. | ||
| So I want everybody to go out and get it. | ||
| I'm going to go through it. | ||
| We're going to take lessons learned from this book. | ||
| Because our movement's not perfect. | ||
| We've had victories. | ||
| We've had defeats. | ||
| We've got to learn from our defeats and double down on our victories. | ||
| Isaac, where do people, between now and the time you come back, where do people get the book? | ||
| Where do they find out more about you? | ||
| Where do they get your writings? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I write for the Washington Post. | |
| You can find us at WashingtonPost.com, and please subscribe. | ||
| It's very cheap. | ||
| The book is also not too expensive, and you can get it anywhere at your local bookstore, independent, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, doesn't matter. | ||
| Isaac, everybody's not going to love everything in this book. | ||
| Obviously some of the stuff already in the interview, I'm sure our audience's heads are blown up, but I want to thank you for at least spending Three years of your life, showing the respect to this audience to go out and find the story, because the story, in this book, the story builds to a big climax, and it's pretty impressive. | ||
| It's what this audience has accomplished, what these people have. | ||
| Isaac Arnstorf, thank you very much. | ||
| Look forward to having you back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, and thank you to them for letting me in as well. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Finish What We Started by Isaac Arnstorf. | ||
| We're going to talk about this next Thursday in Vegas at the Gladiator School. | ||
| Get your copy. | ||
| Get it now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, oh, oh, it's true. | |
| Monday, Monday morning. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bowne. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| you The book, Finish What We Started, make sure you get it next week. | ||
| We're going to walk through this because this book talks about the victories and defeats. | ||
| It talks about where we got things accomplished and where we did it. | ||
| You'll find out about what the thinking is of the Republican establishment at the foot soldier level when you first show up You know, why you're not warmly embraced, sometimes why they try to force you out, it's all in here. | ||
| I'm actually going to discuss it. | ||
| We're going to break it down because there's a lot of lessons we can learn from this and move forward. | ||
| Remember, this movement only increases every day. | ||
| Remember, Joy Ann Reid says, we're just a bunch of white, patriarchal, Christian nationalists. | ||
| And Isaac disagrees with her because our movement every day is bringing in African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians to our movement. | ||
| That's what this movement, I say it's two thirds of the country. | ||
| You just get a few things sorted. | ||
| This is going to have, oh, this is going to be a 1932 type of realignment. | ||
| And how did it start? | ||
| It started with you. | ||
| This book is about you. | ||
| And you're not going to love everything in it. | ||
| Hey, the guy works at the Washington Post. | ||
| You're just not going to love everything in it. | ||
| But I know you can push forward past that. | ||
| But go give it a try. | ||
| We're going to talk about it in depth next week as a precinct strategy and what we need to do to continue momentum going forward, not just to take over the Republican Party, to finalize it. | ||
| But most important, with our eye on the target, what we need to do in November of this year to make sure we secure the election that President Trump's going to win. | ||
| Okay, Victoria, Congressman Victoria Sparks joins us. | ||
| I got a quick call open. | ||
| Let's play that. | ||
| I'll bring her in. | ||
| Let's turn to Ukraine, an issue that's important to you and your fellow Republican chairman Michael McCaul, who runs the Foreign Affairs Committee. | ||
| Congressman McCaul made a comment this week about what he says sounds like Russian propaganda from some conservative media. | ||
| And why it's so difficult to explain to Republican voters why supporting Ukraine is important. | ||
| He told Julia Yaffe, quote, I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it's infected a good chunk of my party's base. | ||
| He singled out primetime shows on conservative channels. | ||
| Do you agree with him and how big is this problem? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, it is absolutely true. | |
| We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor. | ||
| I mean, there are members of Congress today who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which of course it is not. | ||
| Vladimir Putin having made it very clear, both publicly and to his own population, that his view is that this is a conflict of a much broader claim of Russia to Eastern Europe, including claiming all of Ukraine's territory as Russia's. | ||
| To the extent that this propaganda takes hold, it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle, which is what it is. | ||
| President Xi of China, Vladimir Putin himself, have identified it as such. | ||
| We need to stand up for democracy. | ||
| We need to make certain that we know that authoritarian regimes never stop when they start an aggression. | ||
| Ukraine needs our help and assistance now, and this is a very critical time for the U.S. | ||
| Congress to step up and provide that aid. | ||
| You see, of course, Republican chairmen saying, idiot Republicans on the House floor are repeating Russian disinformation along those lines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, you saw Marjorie Taylor Greene just openly lie. | |
| She openly lie about priests being persecuted in Ukraine. | ||
| She took Actually, a reality that's happening in Russia. | ||
| Let me have it. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Congressman Victoria Spartz joins us from Indiana 5. | ||
| Congressman, you actually are from Ukraine. | ||
| Is this true? | ||
| Is Russian disinformation? | ||
| Are Republicans that oppose any more funding to Ukraine, of which we've opposed it from the very first start of the war because we correctly said that Ukraine's going to end up like Dresden in 1945 with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women and children dead. | ||
| Is this all Russian disinformation, ma'am? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Stephen. | |
| I think we have a little problem with our camera today, so maybe I should blame for Russian disinformation, too. | ||
| But unfortunately, everything's been blamed for, unfortunately, to mismanagement of the whole situation, which was started under Obama. | ||
| And unfortunately, you know, we've been so weak in it, you know, in our policies. | ||
| We've been so terrible what was happening right now around the world and have so many wars. | ||
| And I'll be honest with you, when two years ago, I said, as a congresswoman, American congresswoman, I said, I want to have oversight of our money, and we need to have a strategy. | ||
| We took down Soviet Union, which I grew up in, you know, by economic policy, by energy policies, not by weapons. | ||
| And you need to be very smart what we're doing. | ||
| We cannot have never-ending wars. | ||
| I was dragged through mud, like I am pro-Kremlin, pro-Putin asset. | ||
| I couldn't believe that, how much, you know, they were trying to drag me and lie. | ||
| So I think this is unfortunate that what's happening. | ||
| And unfortunately, some of my Republicans are drinking the Kool-Aid. | ||
| But I was listening to your previous interview and this recent one, and both Mark Turner and your other guests are wrong about we are not a democracy. | ||
| We're a constitutional republic for a reason. | ||
| And if American people don't wake up, and I think more than wake up to defend our constitutional republic, we're going to lose it. | ||
| And we are in the process of losing it right now. | ||
| And it's sad for me to see. | ||
| So we have to win in November. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| We have to be smart and never underestimate our enemy, because the other side has been very aggressive and been on the move. | ||
| And the Republicans, a lot of Reiner Republicans, are weak. | ||
| You, at one time, were going to drop out of Congress, but you've now determined you're going to stay because you think there's unfinished work to do. | ||
| As part of that unfinished work, I mean, you're probably the best person to help explain to us exactly kind of what is going on, because it seems to me this has been a great tragedy for the Ukrainian people. | ||
| Why are they pressing forward? | ||
| Why is the Deep State and the RINOs and the Democrats, why is it so important for them to get this $80 billion? | ||
| for Ukraine when the mothers and fathers in Ukraine are fighting right now about this 500,000 call up of 500,000 young men and women of which the parents are fighting. | ||
| So can you explain that to us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, listen, unfortunately, a lot of foreign wars became, you know, slush funds for a lot of other agenda. | |
| A lot of people don't realize, I've actually put an amendment in the DAA to say, I want to know countries and companies that got the money. | ||
| You know, a billion dollars of Ukrainian aid went to Houthis in Iran that are, you know, Yemen, the Iranian-backed Houthis, billion dollars of Ukrainian aid for do what? | ||
| Now they're shooting at our ships. | ||
| How is that, you know, related to Ukraine or dealing with that war? | ||
| So unfortunately, all of this big slush fund and blank checks become an agenda where the government can spend money all over the world with no accountability. | ||
| And on top of it, giving to corrupt organizations like UN. | ||
| And a lot of Republicans are drinking the Kool-Aid. | ||
| I had an amendment to defund unauthorized UN programs. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| They defeated it. | ||
| I had to fight to get it on the floor. | ||
| They defeated it. | ||
| Republicans with Democrats defeated that amendment. | ||
| And that is unfortunate what's really happening. | ||
| And I'll be honest with you. | ||
| You know, we really have a terrible strategy, no peace through strengths, and President Trump, he'll never get the credit, but he was the toughest and the strongest to deter further aggression by Putin, to put better pressure on, you know, on Europe, to have better policies on energy, to put pressure on Ukraine, don't give up resources to China, which is expanding all over the world, to stabilize the Middle East and have Abraham Accords, | ||
| We didn't have wars, and adversaries were not moving. | ||
| And I think that is something that he was very strong. | ||
| That's why peace through strength work, but you need to have tough leader. | ||
| We have weak leaders, abandoned our lives in Afghanistan, and now have wars everywhere. | ||
| And unfortunately, no matter how much Congress can do, if you don't have the right people in the White House, it's very, very difficult to succeed. | ||
| And my colleagues really need to start thinking. | ||
| Two years ago, I was the only person, the first congressperson, and I got attacked. | ||
| How could she, Ukrainian-born, question what is happening there? | ||
| I understand what is happening there. | ||
| But I'll tell you, this is a big issue. | ||
| We'll have to have good leaders. | ||
| But another issue, additional to the border, and that's something that I know enough to be dangerous about weapons. | ||
| But I actually claim expertise about our fiscal situation. | ||
| I'm a CPA. | ||
| And if we don't fix our debt and health care, this is going to be a calamity that our country is going to be facing. | ||
| And we destroy, we will destroy middle class with taxes and low income people and fixed income people with inflation. | ||
| And that is a huge national security crisis that no one wants to deal with because it's tough. | ||
| You know, the swamp is very deep and very rich and getting very wealthy on our money. | ||
| Okay, we have the financial crisis we talk about here every day. | ||
| You have the border invasion that you've been at the forefront of explaining to the American people and fighting for. | ||
| Right now, Johnson's speakership hangs by the thread. | ||
| The leadership of actually the whole conference hangs by a thread. | ||
| You have this FISA fight and then you have Ukraine. | ||
| What would be, given that you understand this probably better than anybody, what is your recommendation to Speaker Johnson of how he goes forward with the Ukraine situation and the southern border, ma'am? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think right now the situation is right now we at least need to be able, you know, we cannot let Russia and China in advance and throw in our face and embarrass our country. | |
| But we cannot win this war with people in charge of Biden. | ||
| You just can't. | ||
| It's impossible because he has no policy, no strategy, and we cannot be wasting money. | ||
| I think we need to have a loan. | ||
| I think, you know, what President Trump mentioned, I completely agree. | ||
| actually pushed to have a law two years ago that passed unanimously in the Senate, you know, and it was only a few people that objected it. | ||
| You know, and it's a better oversight that way. | ||
| You know, Biden never invoked that. | ||
| So we need to know that Ukrainian government owes money. | ||
| We need to provide some lethal aid that they can hold the ground. | ||
| And then hopefully we'll have better leaders to figure out what to do with that situation. | ||
| I just don't think it's going to happen under Biden. | ||
| Under Biden, the only thing that's going to happen, he's going to let Russia to take over first when they did it under Obama and move even further because they know that he's weak. | ||
| So Russia knows that they can do whatever they want, unfortunately. | ||
| You know, so I think have it on the loan and then also force some border security, like remain in Mexico policy. | ||
| We need to force it because this is if we don't, I am a legal immigrant, you know, and I, we are a country of immigrants, but we are not a mob ruling lawlessness. | ||
| We are going to have, it's a serious situation, national security situation, and now cartels and China through fentanyl controlling our country, killing Americans. | ||
| I mean, we have Americans dying, more than in wars. | ||
| And right now China is selling over 90% of fentanyl through cartels. | ||
| I mean, we have to secure that border, and I think then hopefully we'll have better people, you know, next year to be able to actually do some policies and resolve this situation, which is very difficult now, too. | ||
| Let me make sure our audience understands it. | ||
| Because I don't... I think there's so many mechanisms with the loan that doesn't work. | ||
| But let's say for the purposes of discussion, a loan does work. | ||
| Is your point that you want to kind of get the money to them for arms or whatever? | ||
| To freeze in place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Only arms. | ||
| To freeze in place. | ||
| Only lethal aid to freeze in place right now so that when President Trump comes in, he has then some leverage of the cut the deal that he wants to cut? | ||
| Is that the point? | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| I'll be honest with you. | ||
| That is the only way to able to be able right now. | ||
| In this situation, there is nothing else. | ||
| This president is losing. | ||
| He lost on, you know, he neglected to completely abandon our borders. | ||
| People don't understand Biden and Obama. | ||
| Let's put an anti-Crimea in Eastern Ukraine and they did nothing. | ||
| They give blankets. | ||
| Trump, the first person who actually gave Ukraine weapons. | ||
| You know, Putin doesn't care about their grandiose statements. | ||
| He will move as much as he can. | ||
| And now he's in cohorts with China and Iran. | ||
| They're moving around the world. | ||
| And I think that is a big problem we have. | ||
| But I think to hold the ground and give an ability for President Trump to have some leverage and have a discussion, and I think he will take him seriously. | ||
| I don't think Putin is taking Biden seriously. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised if Biden and with his Hunter stuff is really compromised. | ||
| If you can hang on, we just got a short commercial break. | ||
| I want to just hold you for a minute or two afterwards. | ||
| we're going to do because we shouldn't have such a major insanity wars around the whole world. | ||
| The world is on fire. | ||
| It can destabilize. | ||
| We can have serious situation. | ||
| But I think that needs to happen in the short term. | ||
| And I think that is the only thing that this administration should really be able to do. | ||
| If you can hang on, we just got a short commercial break. | ||
| I want to just hold you for a minute or two afterwards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Congressman Victoria Sparks. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here. | |
| Welcome back, Congressman Victoria Sparks. | ||
| First off, you dropped a bombshell there. | ||
| I just want to give you a second to develop that. | ||
| You said you believe that Biden may actually be compromised, since obviously this Ukraine situation with the oligarchs over there in Zelensky, the reason of the whole thing, the sun is so radioactive. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, listen, let's think about it. | |
| You know, you have son at that time, a vice president of the country. | ||
| And let's remember, you know, Biden was in charge of China and Ukraine on all of this policy. | ||
| He was the top contact. | ||
| He goes to corrupt country, working to corrupt oligarchs in all of these countries and including Burisma, in which case this corrupt oligarch used to work, you know, at the Former president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, that is right now hiding in Russia. | ||
| He was, he's like a top guy on energy. | ||
| And then soon as he goes there, you know, they are going to investigations, you know, they get pressure to stop investigation. | ||
| He is pressuring to fire prosecutor. | ||
| But people don't even realize a lot of these people that Hunter was working on, they were Russia connected. | ||
| Some of them were Ukrainian, some were, you know, Russians. | ||
| He actually had from some Russian oligarchs. | ||
| He was getting money too directly. | ||
| So that is very interesting for me to see how then, you know, president now of our country having his son and his family getting so much money from, you know, oligarchs around China and Russia. | ||
| And all of these businesses are very interconnected. | ||
| He was on the top. | ||
| You know, oil and gas business, and known the guy that he was actually corrupt. | ||
| UK open investigation, which they stopped under pressure, you know, because the Ukrainian prosecutor didn't provide them information. | ||
| And that is coincided exactly when Hunter showed up in Ukraine. | ||
| So, this is a very serious national security issue, and how much information these countries can potentially have. | ||
| Look at the Durham report, and really, no one unfortunately got even punished for that, where our FBI did nothing about Hillary, corrupt as it can be. | ||
| And you have Jake Sullivan. | ||
| pretty much fabricated a case against Trump, tried to use, you know, by agents, actually some of them paid by Russian oligarchs, you know, to fabricate the case about some Russian collusion, you know, which was known that it was all fake and fraudulent, but all of these people was mingling, like Jake Sullivan, with all of these agencies and oligarchs tried to create this Still does here. | ||
| And what is Jake Sullivan is doing right now? | ||
| He's the main guy under Biden who's running national security. | ||
| And what did Jake Sullivan do? | ||
| He stopped all of the aid, most of it, to go faster into Ukraine. | ||
| He was the guy who always, the one that wants us to have Iranian deals, the ones who stops anything when we deal with China, and he's the guy who stopped. | ||
| All of this aid, because you cannot, you know, wars need to be won not as long as it takes, but as fast as you can. | ||
| And he slow-walked the aid to make this war, and now in a very serious situation, the same person who was mingling to take President Trump down, you know, with the Hillary fight in 2015, now he's running National Security Agency. | ||
| It made a lot of bad policy, whether it's Afghanistan, Ukraine. | ||
| So I do not know what is going on there, but I wouldn't be surprised. | ||
| And I think that's why this investigation is so important. | ||
| And we need to get to the bottom of it, because this is a serious issue to have president of the country like that. | ||
| I know we talked about Johnson's speakership hanging by a thread. | ||
| It just announced with Jake Sherman, he's told him he's going to try to bring FISA back up probably tomorrow for a vote, probably today for a vote tomorrow. | ||
| Your thoughts, ma'am? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, listen, this is what this is FISA loophole is used. | |
| To intimidate Americans by police state, and that is a very dangerous, because a lot of people don't realize what's really the FBI was doing, or NSA. | ||
| No one is watching them, but they're all watching us. | ||
| That's why they come in, you know, after January 6th, people, because if you've just been in Washington, D.C., you might be a domestic terrorist, and then they create cases against you. | ||
| But what they do, what is the most dangerous thing, you know, it's not just even Warren's situation, it's really an issue that I've been trying to, Convince my Republicans we need to do something about it where NSA goes collect data upstream in the backbone and they scoop a lot of data and they know that they're scooping data of Americans. | ||
| They're supposed to do this minimization procedures. | ||
| They will not retain that data. | ||
| The challenge is no one ever checks if they do it or not. | ||
| So no one ever audits that. | ||
| And we know in 2016 they violated, we know Snowden whistleblowing case, what they violated, but no one is watching them. | ||
| So generally they have an ability to get whatever data they want. | ||
| And we know they've done it before. | ||
| And that's why we have to have some auditing. | ||
| What are they really collecting and retaining? | ||
| Not just saying, oh, we're doing it, we're great, because we know they're not. | ||
| Our agencies, FBI and NSA, need to know that Congress is watching them, not they're just watching us, because otherwise American people have no ability to watch them. | ||
| And this is how police state was created under KGB and Stalin? | ||
| And that, you know, I think someone under Stalin said, give me a person, I'll give you a crime. | ||
| I make a crime, something like that. | ||
| And that's what they do. | ||
| And they making up stuff to suppress and intimidate low Biden people. | ||
| They're just mad about this government that failed us so badly. | ||
| I mean, we truly have right now government that is tyrannical. | ||
| And it's sad for me to see, so I hope people will be strong on that, but we have to rein in on this police state. | ||
| And FISA is a big loophole that allows them to do that. | ||
| That's why it's a very significant fight. | ||
| I will see what Speaker Johnson does. | ||
| I've been very upset. | ||
| That we didn't like judiciary bill to be actually the main bill, because the intelligence committee is really very bad with our police state. | ||
| Unfortunately, a lot of people are there. | ||
| But I also think there is another major issue in that bill that no one is watching and checking what they collected, and they have enormous ability to collect information. | ||
| And that is going to be downfall of our republic if we allow police state to expand and really intimidate Americans. | ||
| Congressman, how do people get to your social media and your website? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's at rapsparts, you know, sparts.house.gov, or it's at rapsparts, my, you know, Twitter account, or X account now. | |
| And, you know, we'll try to communicate, and I try to say things how they are. | ||
| Some of the things are complicated. | ||
| Government wants to make it complicated, that we don't understand what doing. | ||
| But actually, it's all about, do you protect constitutional rights, or you are infringing and being tyrannical? | ||
| And if we're not willing to stand up for Fourth Amendment right, You know, we are really not worthwhile to be here. | ||
| Congressman, thank you for coming on. | ||
| Look forward to following you closely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. |
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