Aug. 9, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:55
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Do you think that the imprisonment of Steve Bannon was politically motivated? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. President, Mr. President. | |
| Because other people have done far bigger things than Steve Bannon. | ||
| Sure, it's politically motivated. | ||
| I think it's a horrible thing they did. | ||
| Look, they've weaponized government against me. | ||
| Look at the Florida case. | ||
| It was a totally weaponized case. | ||
| All of these cases. | ||
| By the way, the New York cases are totally controlled Out of the Department of Justice. | ||
| They sent their top person. | ||
| To the various places. | ||
| They went to the AG's office, got that one going. | ||
| Then he went to the DA's office, got that one going. | ||
| Ran through it. | ||
| No, no, this is all politics and it's a disgrace. | ||
| Never happened in this country. | ||
| It's very common that it happens, but not in our country. | ||
| It happens in banana republics and third world countries. | ||
| And that's what we're becoming. | ||
| We have no borders. | ||
| We have bad voting regulations. | ||
| Anytime you have mail-in ballots, you're going to have problems. | ||
| France learned that lesson. | ||
| You know, France had all mail-in voting, and they went back to paper ballots, voter identification, voter ID. | ||
| They went back to a normal system, one-day voting. | ||
| They don't want to be around, you know, voting for 64 days. | ||
| Look, the election, I keep talking about November 5th, but the election really starts on September 6th. | ||
| That's when it starts, because it's early voting. | ||
| We should have one-day voting, we should have paper ballots, we should have voter ID, and we should have proof of citizenship. | ||
| Please. | ||
| 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 free shot all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
|
unidentified
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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 line? | ||
|
unidentified
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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. Bannon. | |
| Welcome to The War Room. | ||
| It's Natalie G. Winters hosting, filling in for Stephen K. Bannon today, Thursday, August 8th, in the Year of Our Lord 2024, coming at you live from California. | ||
| I know, pray for me, but I'm honored to be doing a special edition of War Room today. | ||
| You guys know I've been doing my Lincoln Fellowship with the Claremont Institute. | ||
| Steve was so happy that I was doing that, so I'm honored to be able to be juggling that while concurrently hosting the show. | ||
| We've been holding it down Nicely so far, but today I am joined by two of the leading voices within the sort of Claremont orbit, and I kind of wanted to do a special show today where we focus, I think, on what President Trump was talking about in that opening clip, the weaponization of government. | ||
| Specifically, I think, when it comes to the administration, or frankly, lack thereof. | ||
| of elections. And we're going to focus on that with Brian Kennedy and Michael Anton, | ||
| but also the other side of the coin, which is the weaponization of government in terms of trying to | ||
| make a potential Trump victory what is, I think, fair to say a Pyrrhic victory in the sense that | ||
| you see the administrative state already sort of, you know, holding on to power, not wanting to, | ||
| as Steve always says, hand over the keys to the castle, the keys to the kingdom, just because | ||
| we win come November. | ||
| So, Brian Kennedy, I'm honored to have you on. | ||
| Former president of the Claremont Institute, senior fellow board member, you always have great words in the American mind. | ||
| Basically anywhere you write, anytime you're on War Room, I know the posse loves you. | ||
| And I want you to introduce our next guest. | ||
| It's been a while, Michael, since you've been here on the War Room, but we're always happy to have you on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you, Natalie. | ||
| You're doing a great job, let me just say, as a co-host. | ||
| I talk to people all over the country and they are thrilled any time you are on. | ||
| The Claremont Institute's been around for 45 years now and it has been talking about the principles of the American founding. | ||
| And saying the things about the country that really matter to Americans, if they're going to save this country. | ||
| And one of our leading intellectuals is Michael Anton, and Michael's part of the faculty. | ||
| You'll be listening to Natalie in the coming days. | ||
| And he's an old friend of mine. | ||
| He was a Publius Fellow of the Claremont Institute, I think in 1993. | ||
| But he's a very accomplished A political professional has worked for Governor Pete Wilson in California, George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, and then President Trump during the Trump administration on the National Security Council. | ||
| He's also an author of a book called The Stakes, which if you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend, but also maybe most famous for the Flight 93 essay. | ||
| Which he wrote in 2016, 2015, 2016, where he was laying out the case for President Trump in that most important election. | ||
| And it's a real privilege to have him join the show with us here today, Natalie. | ||
| And thank you, Michael, for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're welcome. | |
| Yeah, Pooley's fellow in 94, and the 1993 election was September 5th, 2016, about two months almost to the day before the election. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I want to get into all that, but Brian, I want to start with you. | ||
| You have a wonderful piece up, In the American Mind, The Diminishing Likelihood of a Fair Election, and you walk through what I think are the most pressing crises when it comes to what we're barreling towards with, you know, early voting beginning in, what, just under 40 days. | ||
| Can you kind of walk us through the broad outline of the piece? | ||
| Yeah, well, thank you, Natalie. | ||
| And I think President Trump suggested it when he was at that press conference, mail-in ballots. | ||
| And my concern is that we have not done in the country anything or near anything or not nearly enough to make sure that there is going to be a fair election and that the mail-in ballots are not going to be decisive. | ||
| And in this piece, you know, I'm Chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, China, something which I founded with Steve Bannon and Frank Gaffney. | ||
| In that, I focus on communist China and whether communist China can play a role in the 2024 election. | ||
| It's my own personal view that in 2020, COVID-19 was used to fundamentally alter our politics and push the entire nation toward mail-in ballots, and that in 2020, that was decisive in stealing the election. | ||
| My worry is that in 2024, the Communist Chinese, which is a nation state that spends annually here in the United States $16 billion on intelligence and influence operations, that they could use a fraction of that budget And in those seven swing states around the country produce, you know, in warehouses that they have throughout those swing states, they have printers, they have the paper that's being used. | ||
| They have access to the voter rolls. | ||
| They have access to the ballots themselves, which are PDFs, which you can download online. | ||
| And they're a nation state with an amazing intelligence service. | ||
| They could acquire the signatures through artificial intelligence of everyone that was voting. | ||
| And then you pick off a million people. | ||
| This is again, a worst case scenario, but they would take a million people who never vote, but who are on the voter rolls and produce a million perfect looking counterfeit ballots, insert them into the system and try to decide the election. | ||
| Now, I think the idea that they wouldn't do that, or that's completely off the table would be naive. | ||
| That certainly has to be something that's on the table. | ||
| Is that going to be something that can be stopped? | ||
| I don't think so, unfortunately. | ||
| We will do our best, but I don't see that we have enough lawyers or enough people on the ground making sure that cannot happen. | ||
| Which means that if President Trump is going to win, he is going to have to have such an overwhelming number of people vote for him, that in fact, it's going to be too big to rig. | ||
| I don't think today, just given the polls, it is yet too big to rig. | ||
| So a lot of work's going to be needed to be done by the Trump campaign if they're going to get to that point. | ||
| We've not secured these elections is my fundamental point. | ||
| And we're at a war with a nation state in communist China that would certainly like to have someone like Kamala Harris and what looks like their man in Minnesota, Tim Walz, as the next president and vice president. | ||
| Well, I think it raises the sort of perennial question of the Biden regime, right? | ||
| Is it intentional or is it incompetent when it comes to the failures to secure these elections? | ||
| When you look, whether it's DHS, CISA, FBI, the DOJ, they're more concerned with censoring Americans. | ||
| And that brings me to you, Michael. | ||
| You know, Brian, you make the point in the piece, right? | ||
| Of course, you've got China declaring a people's war in 2019, unrestricted warfare. | ||
| For decades, and if you look at Chinese military strategy, you know, I'm always inclined to go back to the three warfares doctrine. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Lawfare, psychological warfare, public opinion warfare. | ||
| I mean, you could make the same case that the United States, I mean, I would say CISA most poignantly, is using similar tactics against the American people. | ||
| So on the sort of domestic side of election interference at best, outright election rigging At worst, what do you think is the kind of state of affairs when it comes to the threat posed domestically by how our elections are being run here by the administrative state, by these rogue agencies? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the old saying goes that in Washington or in politics generally, if ever you have to choose between, you know, deliberate malfeasance and incompetence, incompetence is always the right answer. | |
| This is one of the great exceptions, it seems to me. | ||
| I think it's entirely deliberate what they're doing. | ||
| And it's genius in a way. | ||
| First of all, we don't know, and I think that's by design, none of this stuff ever really gets investigated so that you have a firm conclusion. | ||
| So what they do is they pursue policies across the board of laxity. | ||
| Let's just make sure that we make it as easy as possible for anybody to vote, same-day registration, no ID required, you know, non-citizen voting, you name it, across the board. | ||
| You know, ballot harvesting, let's let people go to nursing homes and just walk the halls with ballots and so on. | ||
| All of these things have become impossible to verify. | ||
| Then there doesn't have to be, in a way, a central committee dictating this or running it. | ||
| Once it's known that this is a lax process, you can count on precinct captains and local party figures to just do what they're naturally going to do. | ||
| You get the outcome you want and the other side howls, you use your state, you know, the incumbents in office that you, you know, if the Democrat is a Secretary of State or if the Secretary of State is a Democrat, the State Attorney General is a Democrat and so on down the line, you make sure that they block any serious investigation and or conduct cursory, desultory, fast investigation and say, we found no fraud here. | ||
| This is all crazy conspiracy talk. | ||
| You close the books on the thing. | ||
| You say, well, you know, This person's taking office anyway. | ||
| It's all moot now. | ||
| We can't get this sorted out in five weeks. | ||
| You move on and you, you know, lather, rinse, repeat, as the saying goes. | ||
| So the laxity is absolutely deliberate. | ||
| The one thing that I'm more skeptical of, or at least I just, I lack information, is whether there is, and I doubt it, whether there is ever, you know, a conference table where they all get together and say, okay, this is how we're going to steal the following election. | ||
| I think what they do is they just go, let's just make the law as loose as possible. | ||
| Let's make fraud as easy as possible. | ||
| And then let's just sit back, We'll sort of crowdsource it, let other people do it. | ||
| We don't even have to tell them to do it. | ||
| They don't have to tell us they're doing it. | ||
| We'll just let it happen. | ||
| And when it comes time to do anything about it, we'll make sure that we stop any effort to look into it | ||
| or to prevent it the next time. | ||
| Well, I think what you referenced sitting around war gaming, stealing an election. | ||
| I'm inclined to bring up the Transition Integrity Project, which I know you're uniquely familiar with because their co-founder Nils Gilman, I think, advocated, what was it, for your execution, I think, for daring to support Trump. | ||
| Your thoughts on sort of, you know, the Transition Integrity Project. | ||
| They've sort of rebranded, but I think something that, you know, Claremont has felt uniquely that the pressure campaign, and you guys were | ||
| talking yesterday at an event, they had a wonderful State of the Union panel, I'm sure the War | ||
| Impostor would have loved to be there, but John Eastman was detailing how part of the | ||
| strategy is to intimidate lawyers so much so that there's no one on our side who can | ||
| bring cases to challenge what they're doing. | ||
| Can you walk us through the lawfare side of things, Michael? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well on the transition integrity project, that's more sinister than what I just described. | |
| So if you go back to the 2000 effort that they put together, and I don't even know what they changed their name to, but it's the same group of people. | ||
| And then they leaked a bunch of stories about it. | ||
| What they were planning for was a way to use their control of NGOs, the media foundations, and even state power if necessary, and even the military if necessary, to prevent Donald Trump from Serving a second term, even if on election night he had 270 plus electoral votes and so on. | ||
| They were planning to basically say, we're going to call a legitimate election illegitimate. | ||
| Now, whether they believe that in their hearts or not, I suppose is an open question. | ||
| It's probably a mix. | ||
| Some really did believe that there's no possibility Trump could win. | ||
| Therefore, if he won, it would have to be fraud. | ||
| Therefore, we would be justified in blocking it. | ||
| And I think others believe that, well, he might, you know, limp in with just over 270 because there's that MAGA group out there who are insane and they'll vote for him no matter what. | ||
| But if that were to happen, it would be such a dangerous outcome for our country that we would be morally justified in blocking him taking office. | ||
| Now, that was a group of people getting together in a conference room, quite literally, and plotting what they were going to do. | ||
| So, but less about the election itself and more about the and Michael we've had we have to jump to break but I | ||
| will come back to this because as you guys know we deliver the signal not the noise here | ||
| in the war room this is going to be an hour of straight signal no noise you can also always find | ||
| the signal and not noise at birchgold.com slash bannon to get the latest installment of the end of | ||
| the dollar empire and while you're out you can always go check out public square.com to | ||
| support companies that don't hate you that won't cancel you if you dare to uh watch this show or even | ||
| question the results of the 2020 or forthcoming 2024 election we will be right back after | ||
|
unidentified
|
this short break here's your host stephen k bannon | |
| Welcome back to the War Room. | ||
| We're still coming at you live from the Claremont Institute in California. | ||
| We got Brian Kennedy and Michael Anton with us, walking through all things 2024 election, pre-game, post-game, election day. | ||
| Who knows what they're going to try to pull. | ||
| They're already pushing, what is it, DDoS attacks and cybersecurity attacks. | ||
| But hey, the FBI and CISA have said, don't worry, it's not going to affect election outcomes. | ||
| Don't quite know if I believe them, but I digress. | ||
| But Michael, to pick up where you left off, and I think to stress something to the audience that they know very well, but the urgency and how now is not the time for complacency. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, one of the things I said, you referenced the event we did last night, and I said to the audience, you know, I think we all, everybody who supports the president had a period of several weeks of just basically elation from his great performance at the debate through that magnificent unprecedented response to the assassination attempt and through what was just a terrific convention almost from beginning to end. | |
| And, you know, during that period, I think we all some of us started to feel, hey, this is in the bag or close to it. | ||
| You know, nobody I don't think anybody feels like that now. | ||
| You know, we're all a little bit nervous. | ||
| The Democrats pulled off a reasonably seamless transition from one candidate to the next. | ||
| in an anti or undemocratic way to be sure, but that hardly matters. | ||
| What matters to them is that they did it. | ||
| I think they've made a bad choice for vice president that I hope the Trump campaign | ||
| seizes on. This guy's record is just abysmal. | ||
| His philosophical positions are terrible and his record is terrible in Minnesota. | ||
| So that's something that, you know, plays in our favor if we play it right. | ||
| But I think even if in a couple of weeks, you know, the Harris honeymoon starts to fade, the polling, which by all accounts I've seen, you know, she's doing much better than Biden. | ||
| Some of these polls are probably fake, but they're showing her with big leads over the president nationally and maybe even over him in six of the seven swing states, whatever. | ||
| That could go away in a couple of weeks. | ||
| And what I really caution everyone about, and I'm going to be on guard against in myself, is Let's not get back to that feeling of elation or inevitability, or we have it in the bag. | ||
| I think we need to believe in our own hearts that we are underdogs, that we're five-point underdogs right up until Election Day, and act like that. | ||
| Don't coast. | ||
| Don't get complacent. | ||
| Don't start to take anything for granted. | ||
| Don't measure the drapes, all of the metaphors you want, right? | ||
| Just, like, believe in your heart that you're down. | ||
| It's the fourth quarter. | ||
| There's enough time to win it, but only if you just Play your heart out on every single play and you might scratch out a one-point victory. | ||
| I think we gotta look at this like that. | ||
| And I will say, shameless plug for the War Room Posse, since I've been here, whether | ||
| it's the professors, the fellows, just the donors to the institute that I've met, the | ||
| number one thing they all say when they meet me is how engaged and wonderful you guys are, | ||
| how you guys truly are saving this country through the work that you do, whether it's | ||
| the precinct committee of men, your work on the RNC, your work just knocking doors. | ||
| So truly, your efforts are really appreciated, and they're seen and heard around the world, | ||
| frankly. | ||
| So I just wanted to share that with you guys. | ||
| I get all the things, but you guys do the real legwork. | ||
| The real foot soldiers. | ||
| But Brian, you and I were sort of talking about this a few days ago. | ||
| When it comes to the actual steps that we can take, we don't want to be complacent. | ||
| We want to go and do stuff, whether it's knocking doors. | ||
| We're up against such a machine. | ||
| We can't out-knock what is systemic fraud. | ||
| What are some of the ideas that you guys have sort of cobbled together to push back against | ||
| this? | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Yeah, well, we've been going around the country, many of the War Room regulars, myself and Frank Gatney and Karen Segaman and John Mills and Trevor Loudon, Who I know you had on yesterday. | ||
| We've been going around the country talking to all sorts of Americans on this World War Three, the early years tour that that Steve had thought up several months ago. | ||
| So we've had a chance to meet folks all over the country. | ||
| And I can tell you that there will be zero complacency around the country because nearly everyone we speak to is really worried about this election and really worried about the ability of the election to be stolen. | ||
| And one of the things that I'm seeing emerge is the idea that we should have a whistleblower program around the country where cash bounties are offered To people to inform on those people who might be trying to steal the election, because I think Michael is is right in one way. | ||
| There may not be a central table, everyone sitting around, but there are many tables in many parts of these states around the country where election fraud occurs. | ||
| And it's they don't need to all be working together. | ||
| If enough of them are working on it, or if a nation state like Communist China is working on it, you need a lot of eyes on the system. | ||
| And the only way that's going to happen is if we actually have a whistleblower program and people are capable of informing when they see fraud. | ||
| My concern is that, you know, Michael said that, you know, it was a bad choice picking Tim Walz as the vice president. | ||
| It seems to me that she did that, Kamala Harris, out of a certain confidence she could get away with picking the most radical possible vice presidential candidate she could. | ||
| She could have picked Josh Shapiro. | ||
| She knew she'd alienate the Muslims that she thinks she needs in the pro-Palestinian movement. | ||
| So she didn't go there. | ||
| And she may not even like Josh Shapiro that much, her being someone who has more of a pro-Palestinian worldview. | ||
| She didn't pick Mark Kelly, the astronaut. | ||
| I think in part because that represents an older America that she really wasn't interested in representing. | ||
| She picks the most radical communist she could find, who has been to Beijing 30 times over the last 30 years, at minimum. | ||
| Now, I think she did that because she had a certain confidence that it didn't matter who her vice president was, because this system that is in place today, whether it's people actively engaged in voter theft, or actively, you know, capable of stealing the election because of lax laws, | ||
| she has a lot of confidence, and you can see that confidence, | ||
| and that should be a real signal to our side that they're really going to have to work, | ||
| you know, and run through the tape, as it were, the Olympics are going on, | ||
| run through the tape if President Trump is actually going to win this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm gonna be more optimistic than Brian, which is not often, but I actually don't think, | |
| And I could be wrong. | ||
| I'm not, you know, I freely admit, I don't think she picked Tim Walz for the reason you said. | ||
| I think it was a sign of weakness that she picked Tim Walz. | ||
| I think everything I've heard reported and you know, the whispers that I'm hearing from people who know Washington say she really wanted Shapiro. | ||
| And was told in no uncertain terms by various wings of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, that that was a bad idea, that you'd lose Michigan if you did that. | ||
| I think what we saw of those pro-Hamas protests all over America in big cities, in college campuses, Democratic citadels, that wing of the party put pressure on her not to do it. | ||
| I doubt it's a coincidence that the announcement was scheduled for Philadelphia and then she brings a guy from St. | ||
| Paul, Minnesota. | ||
| To introduce him to the world. | ||
| I think that with the plan all along, she had to change her mind at the last minute. | ||
| I'm also hearing that a couple of very senior, plausible Democrats who would have helped the campaign didn't want to be on the ticket. | ||
| For whatever reason. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| It could be because they're not sure she's going to win. | ||
| It could be because they don't like her. | ||
| It could be anything. | ||
| I'm sort of mystified as to why she didn't pick Mark Kelly. | ||
| There's some story out there that he's got a problem with the labor movement who blocked him. | ||
| It didn't sound all that convincing to me. I mean, Minnesota came close for Trump in | ||
| 2016. It wasn't close in 2020. | ||
| It's not really expected to be close in 2024. So, Waltz doesn't get you anything there. Whereas, | ||
| Kelly would have maybe helped you in Arizona, which is a swing state and which, until the switch | ||
| drew, President Trump was well ahead in. And, you know, they don't also, they don't seem to me to | ||
| have a good grasp of Waltz's record, both his record as governor and his personal record. | ||
| He's being hammered over the stolen valor charges that appear to have some serious validity to them. | ||
| I don't get the sense that the campaign had fully vetted him and were prepared for this. | ||
| There's probably a lot more in his background that they're not fully prepared for. | ||
| So I'm still reasonably confident that it was a bad choice. | ||
| It was one that they felt maneuvered or pressured into and one that they made at the last minute. | ||
| And Brian, can you just walk the audience through? | ||
| I'm sure there are people who've gone to a lot of your live events and they're probably watching, but you know, Warren Posse is proud to be behind the You know, much, I think, a source of anger, a large source of anger for MSNBC, which is the precinct committeeman project. | ||
| But when you talk to those people, do they feel like they are having the ability to transform, you know, the party from within, election poll watchers? | ||
| Do they feel like they have a meaningful sense of sway over what is going on? | ||
| Or do they feel sort of like to bring up Pennsylvania when they were, you know, locked out of those Philadelphia counting rooms watching the election be stolen? | ||
| I guess they were in the room, but they couldn't really do anything about it. | ||
| You know, I think more the latter. | ||
| And it varies, you know, state by state. | ||
| But we were just in Arizona on the weekend. | ||
| And a lot of those folks thought that the party was not really serious. | ||
| And that hadn't been serious, wasn't going to be serious. | ||
| And that if a difference was going to be made, it was going to be made by them and the war room posse. | ||
| That the combination of those two things was the thing that was going to be decisive. | ||
| But that the party still hadn't got its act together and that, you know, it's hard to change institutions. | ||
| We know that it'd be it'd be very difficult to believe that, you know, within four years, I know it sounds like a long time. | ||
| But that you could actually transform an institution like the Republican Party, get enough people in it to actually make a difference. | ||
| Now that having been said, there are thousands of committeemen around the country, precinct captains and what have you. | ||
| They're going to make a difference. | ||
| I have no doubt about that. | ||
| And them, along with the War Room Posse, is going to be decisive. | ||
| So, however pessimistic I may ever sound, and, you know, Michael and I talk regularly, you know, maybe not daily, but regularly, and we always try to, you know, compete with one another on who could be the most pessimistic. | ||
| And if everyone is pessimistic, we have to switch over, and one of us has to be the optimist. | ||
| You know, look, right now, I believe, forgive me, God's on our side. | ||
| And he has demonstrated that with President Trump and we just have to work and we have to be able to deserve victory. | ||
| As I told the audience in Arizona, we have to deserve victory, which means we have to work very hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If we do that, that can be decisive. | |
| We've got a jump to break. | ||
| I will say for my time at Claremont, my number one takeaway is that it is a competition of who can out black pill the next. | ||
| But I guess that's realism because, you know, we're all about action, action, action here in the war room. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance. | |
| Welcome back to The War Room, still live from California, Newport Beach, at the Claremont | ||
| Institute Lincoln Fellowship. | ||
| We're joined by two of their brightest and leading voices, Michael Anton and Brian Kennedy. | ||
| If you guys want to check out what Claremont's about, you can always go to Claremont.org. | ||
| They also have their affiliated publication, The American Mind, and I was talking to a lot of Claremont people and they were saying they would love to see more members of the War Room posse in their fellowships. | ||
| They have a sheriff's fellowship that they thought would be Particularly well-suited for this audience. | ||
| If you go to the website, you can check out. | ||
| See how to apply. | ||
| I've had the privilege of being taught by people like Michael Anton, John Eastman, Theo Wold, who we have on the show a ton, Brian Kennedy. | ||
| It's truly amazing, so I encourage all of you guys to check it out. | ||
| You can see Charlie Kirk. | ||
| He was also a Lincoln Fellow, so I encourage you to go there. | ||
| Check out Claremont.org. | ||
| And like I said, The American Mind. | ||
| Maybe while you're at it, Birchgold.com slash Bannon for the latest installment of The End. | ||
| of the dollar empire, but we're sort of halfway through the show. So I wanted to bifurcate | ||
| and pivot more so to what a potential Trump administration would look like. And you know, | ||
| the show Steve Bannon's kind of life crusade has been for deconstructing the administrative | ||
| state. | ||
| And I know you guys share that concern setting up, you know, recently sort of an administrative | ||
| state project within Claremont run by Theo, who's on war room a lot. But Michael, you | ||
| served in the National Security Council. Thank you. I don't know how you made it out alive. | ||
| You had a front row seat to probably one of the most corrupt little outcrops of the White | ||
| House. But just walk us through where you think Trump stands in terms of, you know, | ||
| the lessons that were learned from the first administration on the issue of personnel and | ||
| subversion, just going into it. What do you, what your analysis is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
OK, I've listened to the president talk about, you know, he's been, you know, look, let's just say Donald Trump is not a guy who likes to dwell on past mistakes. | |
| But so therefore, when he does say I got something wrong, it's very serious and you need to take it seriously. | ||
| And he has said the personnel decisions, the operation, all of that in the first term, Was bad or had a lot of problems and I've learned a number of lessons from that. | ||
| I'm going to get it right the next time. | ||
| I think he's completely serious. | ||
| He because he's the president and he's at the top of the chain and it really every cabinet decision is down to him. | ||
| He's going to focus on that. | ||
| And I just hope that the people around him don't also lose sight of the staff. | ||
| The reason why the National Security Council staff is important. | ||
| First of all, it was created by law in 1947. | ||
| You could, I suppose, scale it down and try to get rid of it. | ||
| You can't entirely get rid of it without repealing the law. | ||
| I still think that would be a mistake. | ||
| I think the National Security Council staff, which was an obstructionist entity within the White House for much of his first term, could be reformed and become one of his greatest assets in a second time if it's approached the right way. | ||
| First of all, it's the operation that handles foreign policy that's literally the physically closest to the president. | ||
| It's part of the executive office of the president. | ||
| It's part of his personal staff. | ||
| It exists on the campus, the so-called 18 acres of the White House, you know, with its senior leadership in the West Wing and the rest of it in the executive office building across West Exec. | ||
| You know, they're not often across the river in Arlington or Langley or in D.C. | ||
| across town in Foggy Bottom. | ||
| These people are right there. | ||
| They work directly for him in his personal chain of command. | ||
| It's also, it's the central node of everything that goes on in the intelligence, military, special operations, diplomatic, you name it. | ||
| Anything that happens in the national security foreign policy space is all coming through that system. | ||
| The policies are being examined in that system. | ||
| They're being debated. | ||
| They're being refined, rejected, promoted. | ||
| It's it really is the middle of the web. | ||
| If you can get control of that you can have a tremendous impact. | ||
| I think it's in a way it's the lowest hanging fruit. | ||
| Nobody on the NSC staff has to be confirmed by the Senate. | ||
| Every single appointment is completely at the president's discretion. | ||
| What has happened Over decades, and it's become accepted as normal that we need to kind of think through or think past, is that the NSC staff ends up being dominated by about roughly 80 to 85 percent career professionals who are detailed in from their home agency for a year, two years, and then they go back with a little layer of late leadership at the top that are appointed by the president. | ||
| I think that number, that 85% number, needs to go way down, which will require some reforms | ||
| that I've outlined in an article in the past and that I could explain if you want, | ||
| but it's within the realm of possibility. | ||
| And the president and his chief of staff and his vice president and really the senior people | ||
| that are the most close to him need to think of the NSC not as, I think in the first term, they started to, | ||
| they didn't know what it was or what to do with it, and then because they had all these | ||
| basically obstructionist detailees in there who gave them a hard time, | ||
| They didn't think about getting rid of it, but they just started to think about bypassing it. | ||
| Let's just, you know, go around it, ignore it. | ||
| They need to think about it as a potential asset, as potentially the president's greatest asset in the conduct of his foreign policy. | ||
| As I think we all know, I mean, I know it from up close because I work for him on these questions. | ||
| He likes to conduct diplomacy personally. | ||
| He likes to make calls. | ||
| He likes to do trips. | ||
| He likes to take meetings. | ||
| He needs his staff to help him do that. | ||
| And if he had a loyal, competent staff that is there for the right reason, that reports to him, that either he hired or people he trusts hired that know what the agenda is and believe in it and want to serve him, the NSC staff could go from being either a liability or a big rock that you just try to get around into an actual engine that helps him conduct foreign policy. | ||
| And that's what it needs to be in a second term. | ||
| I think with the advent of all the discussion of, you know, deconstructing the administrative state, the narrative that you hear, whether it's, you know, being vamped on MSNBC is, you know, oh, we're politicizing civil servants, right? | ||
| To which you say, they politicize themselves and they've been doing this for decades. | ||
| I'm curious, Michael, from your perspective. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say that whole question is already politicized. | |
| When that accusation betrays a fundamental misunderstanding, right? | ||
| You're politicizing the civil service as if it's possible to conduct politics apolitically, right? | ||
| This is why we have elections. | ||
| We have elections because people say, you know, remember Donald Trump in 2016, everybody thought he can't possibly win Republican primaries running against the Iraq war because, you know, everybody Well, he did, because people wanted a different direction. | ||
| And then you get in there and you find that the permanent government doesn't want a different direction, right? | ||
| Politics means I elect you because I like what you're going to do and I voted against that guy because I don't like what he's going to do. | ||
| What these leftists who support the administrative state say is, oh, you elected somebody who doesn't like what the experts do? | ||
| Well, we're just going to ignore that and the experts are going to keep doing it. | ||
| The politics should be politicized, right? | ||
| Elections should change the direction of the government. | ||
| Presidential appointments, who he chooses for jobs, should have an effect on policy. | ||
| What they want is it for not to have an effect. | ||
| They want the same people always running everything in the same way. | ||
| And whoever gets elected and whoever gets appointed, maybe they get to sit in the fancy car and get the big office, but they shouldn't be able to do anything. | ||
| And what I'm saying is that's a completely wrong way to look at it. | ||
| And a second Trump term needs to attack this problem pretty directly. | ||
| And from your perspective, when you see what is it that, you know, three or 4,000 political appointees versus the, you know, 50 or thousand or so career appointees in terms of actually reforming the system from within, do you think, and I'm aware they're not mutually exclusive, but do you think that focusing on quality appointments of those 4,000 people is of more or less significance than finding a way to | ||
| rework that kind of existing steady state of 50,000 people, | ||
| the Vindmans of the world. | ||
| Like, where would you focus time and energy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unfortunately, you've got to do both at the same time. | |
| There's no either or here, right? | ||
| I think that every single, so it's roughly 3,000 schedules see full-time and another 1,000 on boards and commissions, which aren't as important, but they're less important than the 3,000, right? | ||
| Perfection is going to be impossible, but the goal should be get somebody in every one of those 3,000 jobs. | ||
| Who's good at it, committed to the agenda, knows what they're doing, is energetic, right? | ||
| We want to be 100%. | ||
| We're not going to get 100%, but it's got to be as close to that as possible, as fast as possible. | ||
| Fill those jobs up with managers who know how the system works, how to move the levers, and who completely believe in what the president's doing and are enthusiastic about implementing it. | ||
| At the same time, some of those people, the people who run, you know, the admin, or let's say deputy secretary is responsible for administration, people who run purely administrative parts of the government, should be tasked with exactly the kind of reform agenda that you're saying. | ||
| Like, these people over here are going to manage, you know, the East Asia desk and keep an eye on what's going in the South China Sea, etc. | ||
| Your specific job, Mr. Administrator or Madam Administrator, is Reforming this terrible system that blocks reform and blocks change, blocks the implementation of the will of the people. | ||
| Those efforts just have to be double tracked. | ||
| There's no picking, there's no prioritizing, right? | ||
| The priority will be who's doing what, but you've got to have people in both camps doing both at the same time or this will never work. | ||
| And Brian, from your perspective, again, I think you're more, you do more events with the War Room Posse than I do. | ||
| I don't know how that got, we need to renegotiate our contracts, because I love meeting the War Room Posse. | ||
| But in terms of making sure that that core group of 4,000 people are true, solid, you know, to their core MAGA types, You know, how do you think we thoroughly vet people and get people who are committed to Trump's agenda and aren't just going to end up being MSNBC contributors, you know, three months after they depart the administration? | ||
| Yeah, no, I think that's important. | ||
| First of all, I agree with everything Michael said. | ||
| I would only add to it that we have to do that quickly. | ||
| That, you know, a lot of folks say, well, you know, you just can't dismantle Washington overnight. | ||
| And I would say it may not be overnight, but it's going to be very quickly. | ||
| Do the painful things quickly. | ||
| When it comes to the actual personnel, you know, I am more of the view like William F. Buckley, Jr., who said he'd rather be governed by the first 300 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University. | ||
| I think the first administration of President Trump, there may have been too much of a focus, not by President Trump, but by those people doing the hiring, that you had to have certain credentials. | ||
| And there was a trade-off made between credentials and whether you actually believed in what President Trump did. | ||
| In the second administration, we want competent people, but we shouldn't worry about whether they're coming from Harvard or Yale or Princeton. | ||
| We should actually care if they're competent. | ||
| Do they have real world experience? | ||
| Do they believe what President Trump believes? | ||
| Which is not complicated. | ||
| The America First agenda has been articulated by Michael, by President Trump, most especially, and by many other people. | ||
| It shouldn't be that hard to find those people. | ||
| We just can't get hung up on whether they've worked previously for the State Department for 10 years, and so therefore we get to hire them again. | ||
| This is part of the problem in Washington. | ||
| It's not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people anymore. | ||
| It's a government by experts who no longer love the country, who no longer believe in the country, and who no longer are willing to put the the interest and the authority of what the president stands | ||
| for and what he commands into actual policy implementation. They have, as Michael | ||
| was suggesting, they have their view, and they're going to push their view, and they dare you to | ||
| fire them. Well, I think in a second Trump administration, he's not going to be too hung up on | ||
| firing people who are not willing to carry out an America First policy agenda. It is what the | ||
| American people want, and it's what they need, and it's about the only thing that's going to | ||
| stand between us and American collapse. | ||
| And Michael, just give me a minute real quick. | ||
| When you were at the NSC, when you would look to your left and to your right, I mean, what percentage of people did you feel like were actually on your team, on our team? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, some of you absolutely knew they were hired by the president. | |
| They were, you know, in the NSC terminology, they were direct hires. | ||
| And you work with them for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, you figure out very quickly these people are completely with you. | ||
| I will be fair, maybe some of the audience will think, you know, he's being a rhino here. | ||
| There are a lot of people in the government who really are basically nonpartisan career civil servants who just want to do a job and who won't I think those people can be found. | ||
| I also think, though, that we didn't do much of a very good job of vetting them and trying to bring them over as detailees in the first administration. | ||
| In fact, we were, you know, we would get blocked at the NSC. | ||
| We would say, well, we've identified some people that we want from this department or that department, and we would allow the secretaries to say no to the White House and not send them. | ||
| That's basically, you're allowing a cabinet secretary to say no to the president. | ||
| I just don't think that should be allowed in a second term. | ||
| The National Security Advisor says, I've identified Jane Smith as a Korea expert, and I want her over here, and we've vetted her, and we think she's good, even though she's not going to be a direct hire. | ||
| The Secretary shouldn't be- Michael, we've got to jump to break. | ||
| We've got one segment left. | ||
| We're going to distill how we secure the 2024 election in eight minutes. | ||
| We'll do it right after this break. | ||
| Government gangsters are the group of individuals, career bureaucrats, who have been installed by what we call the deep state into every agency and department in the United States government. | ||
| Had Donald Trump not won in 2016, he would not have exposed the flank of the deep state and their weapon of choice, the two-tier system of justice. | ||
| From Russiagate, to Hunter Biden's laptop, to Joe Biden's classified documents case, to January 6th, to the 51 Intel letter, and everything in between. | ||
| We would never have learned that. | ||
| These people are dangerous and vindictive, learning from their mistakes and perfecting ways to hide their corruption. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation. | |
| war room dot film you can You can buy and rent War Room Films first production | ||
| government gangsters. | ||
| Maybe we should have put a trigger warning on that for Michael, for all the people who | ||
| used to probably work with at the NSC. | ||
| But Michael, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| I know the audience really respects and is appreciative of your insights. | ||
| I want to give you guys each like two minutes each, just your sort of concluding thoughts on why the time to not rest, the time to get involved, engaged is now and how they can do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Definitely the time to rest is not now. | |
| I mean, you could just see the polling changes. | ||
| I think Kamala is actually not in tune with the American people. | ||
| I think she's a beatable candidate, but it's not, it should not be surprising that when a party that was demoralized about a hacked or non-sentient candidate, | ||
| when they finally get out from under that rain cloud, they're gonna be energized, they're gonna be fired up, | ||
| they're gonna be feeling confident, and we're gonna be on our back foot a little bit. | ||
| But to beat that energy and that confidence, we gotta get back to, | ||
| we gotta do something kind of contradictory. | ||
| Get back to the really high spirits and the great feeling that we had in that period I talked about around the time of the convention, and yet not let that great feeling and those high spirits make us rest. | ||
| We've got to make it and do the opposite. | ||
| Drive us. | ||
| We haven't won this yet. | ||
| We're behind in the fourth quarter. | ||
| There's enough time left. | ||
| We can score some points. | ||
| We can win it. | ||
| But only if you just drive, drive, drive. | ||
| Michael, if people want to... You're not on social media, I don't think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You strike me as a bit of a Luddite with your Skype difficulties. | |
| I'm too intemperate a person to be on social media. | ||
| If I were on Twitter, I'd just get in trouble all the time. | ||
| I'd get the Claremont Institute in trouble all the time. | ||
| I don't want to do that. | ||
| Good trouble. | ||
| But if people want to get the books, read the essays, where are you writing? | ||
| Where can people go to do all that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the books are all out. | |
| You can get them on any book website. | ||
| When I write, I write a lot for the Claremont Review, for American Mind, for others. | ||
| I'm working on a really big book right now that's going to take me a while, so you may not see, you know, the volume of essays that you used to from me, but when it's all over, I should have a doorstop out there for people if they want to read it, to read. | ||
| I'm sure they will. | ||
| Michael, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Of course. | ||
| And Brian, Kennedy, your closing thoughts? | ||
| Yeah, I agree with Michael. | ||
| We have to keep on fighting here. | ||
| I would also say that a lot of Americans today are disoriented. | ||
| They look out and they think, Kamala Harris, how can she be popular? | ||
| How can Kamala Harris be ahead in the polls? | ||
| I think there's a lot of gaslighting going on. | ||
| And I think these pollsters in the presentation of these polls, there's a lot of games being played in all this. | ||
| And so don't believe it that there's really one main poll and that's November 5th and people have to be geared toward that day. | ||
| I think you look at these rallies that the Democrats are having, you know, there's a lot of Democrats who are pretty deranged when it comes to President Trump. | ||
| I don't know that they like Kamala Harris that much, but you know, these are the same people who were for lockdowns and for wearing masks and for actually behaving in the kind of craziness we've seen over the past four years. | ||
| So we ought not be surprised that there are a lot of crazy people on the left with a lot of pent up interest in going to rallies. | ||
| I still believe the American people are good and determined, and they want freedom. | ||
| There's only one candidate today that represents that, and that's Donald Trump. | ||
| And I say that just as a private citizen. | ||
| If they rally to that cause, the cause of human freedom, America will be free. | ||
| And if we don't do that, and if we sit on our Well, thank you. | ||
| And thank you for joining us. | ||
| We're not and so now this is the most important time in my life for engaging in politics | ||
|
unidentified
|
So, thank you Natalie and thank you for all you do as well Well, thank you. And thank you for joining us if people | |
| want to follow you read the writings Where can they go to keep up to date? | ||
| Well, there's Claremont org. There's a present danger China org, which is the | ||
| committee on the present danger China's website and My me on X is Brian T. Kennedy one on X. So, thank you very | ||
| much A must-follow, Brian. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you for joining us. | ||
| And War Room Posse, you guys know, next man up is the mantra here in the War Room. | ||
| I hope you can see through just the brilliant leaders that we have at Claremont that we do have many men who are willing to step into the breach and go to Claremont.org. | ||
| They accept donations if you want to help support their work. | ||
| Like I said, the programs that they're doing here are truly amazing. | ||
| And I'm sitting in a room every day with dozens of other young people like myself who are equally committed to saving this country. | ||
| So I hope you guys find a lot Of hope and strength and solace in that because you should because every person in that room is as committed as I am and I'm sure as you are too. | ||
| You can also go to patreonmobile.com slash Bannon, get 15% off, use a company that doesn't hate you for watching this show and being pro-America, another company that certainly doesn't hate you, I think probably loves you for watching this show is of course my pillow, Mike Lindell. | ||
| Got about a minute and a half. | ||
| I hear you have some breaking news and some promo codes. | ||
| Well, everybody, we always have good breaking news, but you can check that at LyndalePlan.com, everybody, if you want to know everything that's going around this country involving our election platforms. | ||
| And we also need your help there. | ||
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unidentified
|
Let me guess. | |
| It's a win, win, win. | ||
| Mike Lindell, we've got to balance insurance. | ||
| Win, win, win. | ||
| I've learned that by now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a good, catchy slogan, but like I say, I think you sell yourself short. | |
| There are a lot more wins. | ||
| Warren Posse, thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you for hanging with me today. | ||
| I hope you guys found that show a little different than what we usually do in the war room, but helpful, insightful, and hopefully motivating. | ||
| Action, action, action until tomorrow. |
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