Dec. 26, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
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unidentified
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
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unidentified
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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? | ||
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unidentified
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MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
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unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance. | ||
| Well, welcome to the War Room on a very special Boxing Day special. | ||
| For those of you who have followed the War Room and indeed the old Breitbart News Daily radio show know that it's somewhat of a tradition in the War Room that Stephen K. Bannon hands over the reins to me for Boxing Day, for the Boxing Day special every year where we kind of do a round-up of the year's events. | ||
| We explain a little bit what Boxing Day is, because I know that it is particularly a British tradition, but we're trying to kind of make it a thing again here in the United States. | ||
| So welcome to the War Room on this Thursday, the 26th of December, the year of our Lord, 2024. I will do somewhat of an introduction for myself, for those of you, because I know this audience is growing every single day, every single week, every single month, and of course every single year. | ||
| But for those who don't know me or might have kind of seen me but don't really know where I fit into this whole operation, my name is Raheem Kassam. | ||
| I am, of course, British. | ||
| You can probably hear from my accent. | ||
| I used to work for Nigel Farage, the now Reform Party leader of I've worked for and with Stephen K. Bannon for far longer than I wish, quite frankly, and far longer than he wishes, I imagine, quite frankly. | ||
| I was the London editor of Breitbart.com for many years. | ||
| I'm now the editor-in-chief of The National Pulse.com. | ||
| Which I want to talk to you guys a little bit about over the course of this show as well, as well as all of the other fantastic new right-leaning, truthful media sites and operations that are out there at the moment. | ||
| You know, I guess my role now in this broader movement has been, I think the New York Times referred to me as the ombudsman of the MAGA movement for quite some time, or perhaps I think maybe I referred to myself as that and they quoted me. | ||
| But that is kind of where we sit. | ||
| That is what the National Pulse does. | ||
| We are very much the first to a lot of stories that you hear about, kind of two days, two weeks, sometimes two years down the line. | ||
| A couple of days ago on the show, Steve noted how I was in Ukraine in 2013 trying to ring the alarm bells and tell people, hey, you know, we face an existential crisis. | ||
| We face a hot war. | ||
| There's a color revolution going on here. | ||
| And... | ||
| You can see that across the board with so many things. | ||
| So I was one of the co-founders of The War Room with Steve Bannon, with Jason Miller, back when it was originally an audio-only show before Real America's Voice came along and picked it up and did such a great job in distributing it and producing this televisual experience that you have. | ||
| But yeah, Jason Miller, myself and Steve, we kind of went through all of the early impeachment detail. | ||
| We had members of Congress who would stop by and we operated it exactly like an actual political war room. | ||
| There were stacks of papers highlighted, which we were going through. | ||
| We had a team of great researchers at the time and we'd We'd be in that office, we'd be in that war room from about 7 o'clock in the morning through midnight most days throughout that impeachment process, going through, deep diving all of the information, all of the data, cross-referencing the links. | ||
| When they did that to President Donald Trump, they had just... | ||
| So much in terms of apparatus, staffing, money at their disposal, and the counter-narrative operation between the lawyers and kind of what we were doing externally with the war room was really a very, very tiny, tight-knit A group of people who just kind of came together and said, we believe this to be a complete and total lie. | ||
| We're going to go through these documents the same way that you guys are. | ||
| All the witness testimonies, those of you who followed along with impeachment, you will remember on a day-to-day basis just what an intensive labor process that was. | ||
| We'd never been through anything like that before. | ||
| It was a first for many of us going through that level of detail, that level of data, All these foreign names, all of the Ukrainian names, all of that would come up. | ||
| And honestly, not to take anything away from what the show does today, but that was kind of my favorite iteration of the show because we were just so heavily invested in the actual witness testimony and things. | ||
| That's where I live. | ||
| That's where the national pulse is. | ||
| That's what we do for a living. | ||
| We actually... | ||
| We get into the nitty gritty. | ||
| We get into the detail of things. | ||
| And it's my absolute favorite thing to do. | ||
| You can say the same about polling data. | ||
| We've been doing that for years upon years. | ||
| You can find me writing about this stuff back 10, 15 years ago maybe, about how the polling industry works, why you get certain levels of responses. | ||
| You know, when this Ann Seltzer thing came up in Iowa, it was so obviously, immediately obvious to anybody who understands how to go through numbers like that and to go through detail like that, that it was a complete fraud and it was another fraud, another hoax being perpetuated, not just on the American public, by the way. | ||
| Remember how much the rest of the world has invested in who the president of the United States was. | ||
| So it was another hoax perpetuated on On the world, on the global community, as they like to call it, in Washington, D.C., and at The Hague, and in Brussels, and in the City of London. | ||
| The global community was being hoaxed yet again, as we were back in 2020, as we were during COVID. And isn't it funny, you know, when war room impeachment not even had wrapped up But we had this pandemic coming down the pipeline. | ||
| And again, this show was at the cutting edge when that information was coming out of Wuhan. | ||
| You know, people are sick. | ||
| People are falling down in the street. | ||
| Nobody knows what this is. | ||
| We put the two and two together on the first, on the very first... | ||
| We had a bunch of others later on, amazing whistleblowers, doctors, some of them who are no longer even with us today, I'm afraid, but just shows how far this all goes back and how invested people were in the truth-telling process. | ||
| In all of that... | ||
| That you had, concurrently, you had to have a War Room impeachment and 2020 operation running parallel with a War Room pandemic operation. | ||
| That kind of doubled the scope, doubled the research level of everything that was coming out of these offices. | ||
| And of course, Real America's Voice was there with us all along the way, helping us with that, you know, to get the real information out. | ||
| There's a lab that we might want to look into. | ||
| Hey, that lab actually may have been funded by the US taxpayer. | ||
| Hey, they've got this deal with Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak. | ||
| You know, it was Natalie Winters who first made the connection between Dr. Fauci and Peter Daszak. | ||
| Back in the early days of war and pandemic, and of course everything you're seeing now today as a part of the investigations that are going to be taking place, as a part of what Kash Patel is going to be doing inside the FBI, all of that. | ||
| As a direct result, you can run the pattern right back down to that moment. | ||
| That's the tail of the tape and everything that came out of this war. | ||
| I'm delighted to be here with you all today and bring you a show that is... | ||
| I wouldn't say that it is the most intensive of shows in terms of the day-to-day news of the operation today, but it is an intensive show when we think about Where we go now over the next four years, how the next administration gets staffed up properly, accurately, with true believers, with people that are willing to put their shoulders to the wheel on getting the right things done. | ||
| Because really, ladies and gentlemen, I know this audience especially probably doesn't need me to say it, but... | ||
| You know, you have four years, you really only have about 18 months. | ||
| Well, you really only have about 12 to 16 months. | ||
| Really to hit the ground running, to get what needs to be done. | ||
| In day one and week one, by the way, probably the most important parts of all of this. | ||
| And we're here kind of acting as the ombudsman for all of that. | ||
| You know, calling, I think you say calling balls and strikes, right? | ||
| Making sure that the people who have let down President Trump over the last four years, I think of it as kind of the dark years, the wilderness years, the Mar-a-Lago years, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| But so many people, so many people, And you know, I say this not as a political talking point, but like we lost friendships, personal, long-term friendships over that primary, over the GOP primary, with all of these people who kind of toddled off into the DeSantis camp because there was a promise of a paycheck or a job or whatever it is. | ||
| And don't get me wrong, you know, Governor DeSantis has done a wonderful job governing in Florida. | ||
| I don't need to tell this audience that. | ||
| And I certainly don't need to tell the people who lived in Florida throughout the pandemic, especially that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then the fight that he's taken to the school boards on the transgenderism, on the on the books, these deviant books that they're trying to shove down a kid's throats. | ||
| But but what he did was he made a fundamental. | ||
| I know I'm jumping around here a lot, but that's that's kind of what I do. | ||
| So you've got to stick with me for the changes here, to quote back to the future. | ||
| DeSantis came along, and he kind of acted like—and his team around him acted like, okay, we need to find some way to marry the old GOP, bushy era— Cheney, what's his name? | ||
| Karl Rove with his little whiteboard and all that. | ||
| We need to marry them with the MAGA base and kind of what they ended up doing was trying to force it down the MAGA base's throats. | ||
| That this was the only way that they were going to win another election. | ||
| And they were telling us day in and day out, you're never going to win an election with Trump. | ||
| You're never going to get the Electoral College victory, let alone a popular vote victory, right? | ||
| And I kind of looked at it at the time and I was like, listen, you guys are entitled to your views. | ||
| You're nuts, but you're entitled to your views. | ||
| I mean, there wasn't a single person in that camp, by the way, who I think of as a savvy political operator. | ||
| And I tell them that to their faces and I've told them that to their faces. | ||
| Some of our old friends jumped ship and went over there. | ||
| So it's been a heck of a year. | ||
| It's been a heck of a last 18 months. | ||
| I know that so many of you out there know that as well. | ||
| I meet so many of you out there when I'm on the road. | ||
| I'm not just holed up on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. all the time, although I'm there far more than I wish I was, quite frankly. | ||
| But I've been there through the dark years, through the wilderness years. | ||
| There were only a handful of us. | ||
| Of these people that you see on television and in podcasts and on social media who actually showed up at Mar-a-Lago when President Trump announced he was running again, a lot of people hedged their bets. | ||
| A lot of people didn't show up that day. | ||
| And by the way, we kind of got mocked for it. | ||
| You know, Olivia Nuzzi R.I.P. to her career. | ||
| You know, Olivia Nuzi, who wanted to get jiggy with RFK, you know, over text message, she wrote this nasty piece saying like, hey, you got Raheem Kassam, Seb Gorka, and Bricksuit Man as the most recognizable faces at Mar-a-Lago during the announcement. | ||
| So perhaps it's not going all that well for President Trump. | ||
| I called her up and I said, hey, F you. | ||
| I'm sorry to speak in such unglamorous terms on Boxing Day, but I told her, you know, you are making fun of me for being one of the people who actually sees where this thing is going. | ||
| Mark my words. | ||
| Watch where it goes. | ||
| Now, who knows where she is right now after she got unceremoniously defenestrated by her bosses. | ||
| Over there at New Yorker. | ||
| But listen, some people get it and some people don't, right? | ||
| Some people understand the trajectory of history and some people don't. | ||
| And what you saw back then, what you saw during that primary campaign was again one of these things that we see all the time. | ||
| And we cannot allow it to happen in January. | ||
| We cannot allow these people, these never-Trumpers, these people who are ready to jump shit, to go over I'm sorry, you made your bed, now lie in it. | ||
| You made your choice. | ||
| You can figure that out for yourselves. | ||
| So over the course of this show, we're going to reflect on this last year. | ||
| I very much appreciate The beautiful music. | ||
| I'm afraid my words may not be so beautiful over the course of the next two hours, but hey, we're not taking a break this Christmas. | ||
| We're spending this time to get all our ducks in a row, to get all our plans in place and to make sure that like there was in 2016. | ||
| We went in there and you had all the staff go in there and you had three factions go in there. | ||
| You had the family faction, you had the RNC faction and then you had the MAGA faction, the Bannon faction. | ||
| And everybody's kind of at each other's throats and some people didn't get what they want and some people got rolled and whatever. | ||
| We're here to make sure that that doesn't happen again. | ||
| Everybody has to be on the same page and that page that Donald J. Trump won a mandate from the American, a historic mandate from the American people. | ||
| And he must be allowed to execute on that mandate without anybody standing in his way, without anybody leaking to the press, without anybody, any of these anonymous people or deep state holdovers. | ||
| It cannot be allowed to happen. | ||
| So we're going to have Will Upton on the show with us, my political editor, Jack Montgomery as well, my deputy editor, Chris Tomlinson at The National Pulse also. | ||
| We're going to walk you through all of these things. | ||
| Stick around, stay tuned, follow the National Pulse at the Nat Pulse on X. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Well, we've given Stephen K. Bannon the day off here. | ||
| Here is Boxing Day, the 26th of December, the year of our Lord, 2024. And we'll be getting into that and a lot of the 12 days of Christmas, which we tend to do every year at the National Pulse to remind people. | ||
| Of the importance and what it means, what the Yuletide period actually means and why each separate day kind of has something spiritual, associated religious, very Christian iconography associated with it and how we need to think about those days, how we need to think about those moments. | ||
| Jack Montgomery will be on with us later on to unpack all of that and he does just a magnificent job at it. | ||
| I want to say, while I have your attention, your undivided attention, there's nobody right now to come in over the top of me and say, hang on, hang on, hang on. | ||
| I want to say, while I have your undivided attention, you know, the last couple of weeks I've been on the road and that has been more and more of my life. | ||
| I always tell myself, I'm going to take a little step back, take it a little bit easier, maybe just kind of take a secondary role, maybe write another book. | ||
| There's so much to be written about the last 10 or 12 years as well. | ||
| I've been in so many of the rooms that you wouldn't even believe, by the way, hearing some of the conversations, meeting some of the characters. | ||
| And so I want to do all that for history's sake, really, to get that down on paper and on the record. | ||
| And then I get dragged into something else. | ||
| And, you know, whether it was the New York Young Republican gala, I mean, by the way, for those of you that don't know, gala season, as they call it, in the political world, in the nonprofit world, is so much fun, but absolutely Absolutely mind-boggling as well. | ||
| Every night, you're doing the same thing, and you're seeing a lot of the same faces, and you're going through the motions, doing all the networking. | ||
| What are you hearing? | ||
| What do you know? | ||
| What's the latest? | ||
| It's obviously a great opportunity for people to come together. | ||
| There's nothing better, by the way, than FaceTime, than actual face-to-face human interaction. | ||
| Too often... | ||
| We are talking down the line to each other like this, right? | ||
| Too often we are FaceTiming on our phones rather than in person or Zooming or Skyping or telephone calls or text messages or DMs or whatever it is, right? | ||
| And you can't really... | ||
| I don't think you can ever escape just how important it is to shake hands with somebody, to look them in the eye, to pat them on the shoulder, to be present in a moment with somebody. | ||
| And so these things are great for all of that, but man, are they exhausting. | ||
| And they happen all around the country. | ||
| So I started in D.C. We did a couple of things over there. | ||
| We went up to New York. | ||
| We did the gala there. | ||
| A thousand plus people at Cipriani in Manhattan. | ||
| The finest venue in New York City. | ||
| Planting the MAGA flag right there in Lower Manhattan. | ||
| And a huge shout out to Gavin Wax and Vish Burra and the whole team over there at that New York club. | ||
| They started with, they had... | ||
| 40 members when they took over the club like four years ago. | ||
| They just passed 1,600 paid-up members. | ||
| They're not just there to party, although they are very good at that. | ||
| I can testify to that firsthand. | ||
| And it takes a lot for Raheem Kassam to give people their partying dues, believe me. | ||
| I have a high bar, high tolerance. | ||
| But they're there. | ||
| They're door knocking. | ||
| They're canvassing. | ||
| They're doing the phone calls. | ||
| You know, they were instrumental in just how much the ground shifted for Donald Trump. | ||
| I mean, that Madison Square Garden rally that was just absolutely historic for multiple reasons, but was absolutely historic. | ||
| Would never have happened were it not for Gavin and the team, the Bronx rally, same thing, the trip to the bodegas, the endorsements from the Steamfitters Union, you know, all of these things that were part of a wider piece. | ||
| That piece being victory, right? | ||
| That piece being a victory so gigantic, so massive, so overwhelming, right? | ||
| That the democratic machine downed tools the day after the election. | ||
| They said, we don't know what to do with this. | ||
| We don't know how to handle this. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying they've gone away. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| And I think we cannot be, for a second, complacent about where they stand as an operation at right now. | ||
| Because they're going to get more radical. | ||
| They're going to get more extreme. | ||
| They're going to become more vengeful. | ||
| As a wounded animal being cornered. | ||
| And they will lash out and lash out. | ||
| And I think we're going to see it on January 6th in Washington, D.C. And I want everybody coming into town to be extremely careful and have their wits about them because I think there are going to be some fringe elements who are in the midst of taking over, by the way, in the midst of taking over the left wing in a massive way. | ||
| And you saw Cenk Uygur go over to AMFEST and kiss the ring, right? | ||
| And if you didn't see it, you should see it. | ||
| Because they understand. | ||
| They get now. | ||
| All of these people who for the last decade have told me, looked at me square in the eye and said, I don't know how you can do this populism stuff. | ||
| You know, and holding their nose while they say it. | ||
| You know, it's dirty, it's filthy, it's disgusting. | ||
| Why do you want to be around ordinary people? | ||
| And I always look back at them and say the same thing. | ||
| The ordinary people built this country. | ||
| The ordinary people built Western civilization. | ||
| And there's absolutely nothing ordinary about them. | ||
| They are in fact the extraordinary people. | ||
| It's the people who are the leeches on that effort. | ||
| And whether it is the security effort, For the people who served their country, served in the military, anything like that, or whether it's the people who physically get their... | ||
| You know, one of the things that I learned And I'll bring Will Upton into this conversation in a second. | ||
| One of the things that I learned, you know, having spent many years with Steve Bannon over the years, like up close and personal, understanding his mental framework, how it all works, because I think we all agree, ladies and gentlemen, he's kind of nuts, right? | ||
| In the best way, you can see the cogs moving, you don't know quite where they're going to go. | ||
| And you kind of just have to try your best to follow along. | ||
| It's the old Breitbart News Radio Show. | ||
| That was one of the things that really clued me up onto how you actually get to understand what's going on out there in the country. | ||
| I mean, you know, I can go to New York, and I can go to LA, and I can go to Phoenix, but, you know, the big cities will scarcely tell you anything real. | ||
| They might give you a vague sense, especially out in some of the suburbs, what's going on in people's day-to-day lives, you know, affordability, things like that. | ||
| And actually, you've got to get far deeper into it. | ||
| I know I don't have to tell you this. | ||
| But it was that radio show, and the reason it was that radio show was because it was a call-in show. | ||
| And so I think we were up at 6 to 9 a.m. | ||
| So you had to be in the studio at 5 a.m., which for those of you who know me, you know, it was difficult. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because sometimes I would come straight from the pub to the studio. | |
| And it's 6 o'clock in the morning, and the entire call boards are lit up. | ||
| Everybody wants to, hey. | ||
| And I remember them by name. | ||
| You know, Lou in Connecticut. | ||
| Vinny in New York. | ||
| You know, Vinny's no longer with us, I'm afraid. | ||
| You know, we stayed friends. | ||
| You know, he was a fantastic guy. | ||
| And his family, and his kid, absolutely fantastic people serving their country. | ||
| And you would hear from them every single day, what's going on in the country? | ||
| All these people would call in, and they were truck drivers, and they were homeschooling moms, and they were the farm owners. | ||
| And you get to grips with a level of information, a level of detail about the lived experiences of the so-called ordinary Americans. | ||
| What I think of as the extraordinary Americans, right? | ||
| People who actually roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty and leave a legacy for their kids and for their grandkids. | ||
| The generational struggle that they face. | ||
| Will Upton, let me bring you in here. | ||
| We've got a couple of minutes here in this block, but I want to carry over to the next one too. | ||
| I've developed Bannonitis, which is the involuntary ability to rant down a camera lens. | ||
| I call it Bannonitis, so you'll have to forgive me, but we've got another block on the back of this as well. | ||
| Will, we've had an extraordinary 18 months. | ||
| You and I have known each other actually for far longer than we've worked together. | ||
| I was so delighted when you came to me one day and you were like, hey, you know, I'm a free agent if you got anything going at the National Polls. | ||
| Because I was like, nobody knows that town. | ||
| Nobody knows MAGA, you know, at an institutional level better than Will Upton. | ||
| I think you show it every day on the site. | ||
| Let's get into the last year. | ||
| And if you have any thoughts on the things I just said, please feel free to weigh in. | ||
| But let's, you know, let's talk about the last 18 months to bring people from, you know, because it went so quickly. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It went so fast. | ||
| But in a lot of ways, it was probably some of the most painful stuff that we'll ever go through in our political lives. | ||
| Will? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that primary was woof and happy Boxing Day. | |
| No, I think you bring up a really good point. | ||
| You're talking about the Colin show. | ||
| This is something that I noticed during the primary and it carried over to the general election. | ||
| It started with the DeSantis campaign. | ||
| They completely missed sort of the primary electorate. | ||
| They focused sort of on your traditional, predominantly evangelical, predominantly upper middle class, sort of high income, modern education level to high education level evangelical voter. | ||
| But since 2016, Trump has sort of brought in A whole new demographic to the Republican Party, typically working class. | ||
| A large portion of them are Hispanic. | ||
| A smaller portion are black men. | ||
| A large portion are white males without a college education. | ||
| Trump is the only one who has ever really sort of offered these people anything on the policy front, whether it's immigration, whether it's trade, reshoring jobs. | ||
| This has been sort of the message that has propelled the MAGA movement, the America First movement, the sort of anti-foreign interventionism movement, has propelled all of this forward. | ||
| In the early days of the primary, I kind of sat there and looked at the DeSantis campaign, and they had their big Twitter rollout, and they were kind of messaging on sort of the, you know, Florida where woke goes to die, things like that. | ||
| And none of this really, I thought, resonated with what is now a large portion of the GOP electorate. | ||
| These people are actually registered Republicans now, especially after 2020. Hold that thought right there. | ||
| Hold that thought right there because we've got to go to a quick break. | ||
| But hold it right there. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| It was a failure to recognize the moment. | ||
| It was a failure to recognize the changing nature of the GOP base and what Donald Trump had actually brought to the equation here. | ||
| Without that, no electoral college vote, no popular vote. | ||
| We'll be right back with Will Upton here on the War Room Boxing Day special. | ||
| Don't go anywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
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We travel far and near. | |
| May God bless you and say. | ||
| War Room. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| Welcome back to this Boxing Day special. | ||
| You're in the War Room. | ||
| I'm Raheem Kassam, one of the original co-founders of this show, obviously under Stephen K. Bannon, alongside Jason Miller. | ||
| And we've all had kind of, I would say, kind of a busy year, quite frankly. | ||
| Although, you know, one of us did go on vacation in Danbury for a couple of months over the summer. | ||
| Came out with a, you know, wonderful tan, looking all svelte, you know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But Steve's got the day off today, so I'm in the driver's chair here leading you through this Boxing Day special. | ||
| I'm delighted to be with you, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| It's one of my, probably actually, I mean, so one of my, it is my favorite audience in the whole world because I meet so many of you every single time I'm out there at these events. | ||
| Obviously, we did AmpFest, AmpFest, sorry, last week. | ||
| With Charlie Cook and the extremely, I mean, just mind-blowing turning point operation that was there. | ||
| I think their staff, their volunteers that run that event, a lot of them just kids, right? | ||
| College kids volunteering their time, their spare time to make sure that event runs effectively. | ||
| I think they now number in the thousands actually, or at least a thousand people that they have there on the ground in Phoenix at that convention center. | ||
| It's just an incredible sight to behold because, look, I've run things all my life. | ||
| Will Upton, we'll bring Will back into this in a moment, and Will will tell you that I am a particularly hard taskmaster at times. | ||
| I don't deal very well with what I perceive to be lethargy or laziness or things like that. | ||
| Not to take any shots at Will directly, by the way, but it's just a blanket attitude that I have towards everything that I've ever run in my life. | ||
| And, you know, for Charlie to be running an operation like that and to have as many people working under him as he does, I mean, you've got to understand, I know lots of you run your own companies out there and know how hard it is. | ||
| You're getting into the numbers that he's dealing with. | ||
| 20,000 attendees, 1,000 plus people helping run the event. | ||
| You've got to deal with social security, secret service. | ||
| You've got to deal with the local police departments. | ||
| You've got to deal with all of these things. | ||
| And it's extraordinary. | ||
| So you make sure that you support those people, that you go to those events. | ||
| I love it because I get to meet so many of you and I have an almost broken wrist by the end of it from shaking so many hands and taking so many selfies. | ||
| But it keeps us going because we don't get that level of support, you know, when I walk down the street in Washington, D.C. You certainly don't get that level of behavior, people coming up to you in restaurants, in bars. | ||
| You know, I can't even begin to tell you how much it means to me when somebody says to you, oh, I read your work, I share it, you know, we're members. | ||
| Of The National Pulse. | ||
| That is, by the way, that is the music to my ears because we are 100% reader supported. | ||
| I don't want to have to put a paywall on it. | ||
| Although, you know, if people don't join up voluntarily, we're going to have to get there. | ||
| We have to underwrite this organization. | ||
| We have to keep it going. | ||
| We have to keep the real news out there and grow the organization, by the way. | ||
| And the website for those of you who want to join is simple. | ||
| It's thenationalpulse.com. | ||
| Forward slash war room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay? | |
| The NationalPulse.com forward slash war room. | ||
| It's two bucks a week, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Less, quite frankly. | ||
| I think it's $1.73 a week. | ||
| So I'm not asking you... | ||
| And by the way, we have a donate section. | ||
| If you want to donate money, it's bigger. | ||
| The NationalPulse.com forward slash donate. | ||
| And if you want to throw more... | ||
| That's great. | ||
| We love all those people. | ||
| I'm extremely grateful for it. | ||
| But our sustaining base of people, our thousands upon thousands of members, are what keeps us going day in and day out. | ||
| And I'm going to keep talking about it over the course of this episode because I will be frank with you. | ||
| We go into a year now where a lot of people take their foot off the accelerator. | ||
| They go, oh, well, we won the election, so we can just kind of... | ||
| Let Trump and the team now make America great again, right? | ||
| It doesn't really work like that. | ||
| You have to have your allies across different sectors running interference. | ||
| We have to have the Will Uptons doing the requisite fact checks on the false narratives that are being perpetuated out there. | ||
| We have to have in-depth reporting, real news reporting. | ||
| You saw it this week, this last couple of days when they released or leaked, I should say. | ||
| The Congressional Ethics Committee, ethics being the word, leaked in a deeply unethical manner. | ||
| They're reporting to Matt Gaetz to sully him up, to besmirch his name, to try and tell the world he should never come back to Washington, D.C. He's not allowed in these hallowed halls. | ||
| Forget the fact that we've been paying off, you know, sexual harassment accusers for the last several decades, at least, and using taxpayer money to do it, by the way, your money, ladies and gentlemen, to do it. | ||
| No, Matt Gaetz is the problem because he went to a couple of parties and maybe he had a sugar daddy relationship with a girl one day. | ||
| You know, by the way, a girl who was overage, you know, these lies that they tell about this underage girl. | ||
| And Matt's approach to this is always the same. | ||
| Bring it into a courtroom then. | ||
| If you have the evidence that this ever happened, show it to a court of law and let me defend myself against these allegations in a courtroom. | ||
| And guess what they never do? | ||
| That very thing. | ||
| I want to bring Will Upton back into the conversation here. | ||
| Will, that's obviously been one of the main themes of the last couple of days. | ||
| I interrupted you over the course of the break. | ||
| We were talking about the primary process. | ||
| Let's marry those two up. | ||
| How did we get here? | ||
| Let's talk about Kevin McCarthy. | ||
| Let's talk about Mike Johnson. | ||
| Let's talk about this budget crisis that we've got going on here. | ||
| Because it's crazy to me the way that the GOP establishment appears to have learned absolutely nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Kevin McCarthy was ousted for basically trying to marry a debt-limit deal to a CR with government funding. | ||
| This is something that he had promised he would not do when he was first elected speaker. | ||
| It was part of the conditions of him becoming speaker. | ||
| And Matt Gaetz rightfully held his feet to the fire on it. | ||
| And for the first time ever in United States history, a motion to vacate the speaker's chair actually passed through the house. | ||
| The last time it was used was in the 1910s against Speaker Cannon, who actually used it against himself in a power move to basically lay it on the table and be like, I'm the big guy in the room. | ||
| But yeah, and then you fast forward today, we find ourselves again in the same situation. | ||
| Now, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, they kind of put us in this budget scenario where we have to do this continuing resolution every December right before Christmas. | ||
| It used to happen at various points throughout the year when funding would kind of run out, but now it's set for December. | ||
| And the whole goal is to jam members right before Christmas and sort of ram through a big expensive CR and call it a day. | ||
| Now, thankfully, this time we had a lot of pushback from activists and just rank and file people at home and rank and file members of Congress that prevented a 1,500-page campaign. | ||
| Continued resolution. | ||
| A continued resolution should only be anywhere between four to nine pages, really. | ||
| It's just changing a date and saying we're extending government funding for three months. | ||
| But thankfully, there was kind of a groundswell of pushback against it, and we ended up with about a 116-page continued resolution. | ||
| It's only that long, really, because it had a bunch of disaster aid for the victims of the hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina, and then wildfires out west. | ||
| If it had not been for that, Mike Johnson probably would have ran through this 1,500-page bill in the dark of night, and very few members of Congress, if any, other than the men behind closed doors who wrote it, would have ever read the damn thing. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| Well, you know, the spotlight being on these people seems to change their, at least public statements and public behavior, just a smidgen, right? | ||
| Just enough to kind of, all they're really interested in is taking a little bit of heat off them. | ||
| But I keep telling people, you know, you can play whack-a-mole. | ||
| With this House Speaker as much as you want, but unless you get to the crux of the issue, right, the structural problems up on Capitol Hill, then you're going to be playing whack-a-mole for the rest of your life. | ||
| So let's talk about that a little bit here, because look, it comes down to this. | ||
| You know, a big major corporation can buy a member of the House or a member of the Senate. | ||
| And I keep telling people, hey, listen... | ||
| They didn't write their own pay rise into that 1,500-page legislation. | ||
| The lawyers, the lobbyists, the appropriators who wanted that bill passed wrote in a bribe in the form of a pay rise into that bill. | ||
| That's what it was. | ||
| So talk to me a little bit and talk to the audience who doesn't really understand how that bill... | ||
| Look, Mike Johnson ain't sitting there writing a 1,500-page bill, okay? | ||
| Who's writing that, and how do we make them famous? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so the people who write these bills, it's the Appropriations Committee. | |
| It's key members of the Senate and the House, usually committee chairs. | ||
| A good way to identify some of them is to see who kind of got bills that they had sponsored that really hadn't moved. | ||
| If they suddenly appear as a new title in this bill, that's a good bet that person had a hand in it. | ||
| There's a certain senator from Texas who I know a lot of people like, Ted Cruz. | ||
| He had The Take It Down Act, which is an anti-deepfake bill. | ||
| It is sort of languished in the Senate for the better part of years. | ||
| All of a sudden, I believe it was Title IX in the 1500-page CR. The whole bill is in there. | ||
| But mostly, it's written behind closed doors, so you don't know exactly who is in that room. | ||
| But it's going to be sort of leadership aides and then your appropriators and powerful committee chairs. | ||
| And this is the way Congress really runs. | ||
| We sit there and people want to criticize Mike Johnson and sort of point the finger at him. | ||
| And at the end of the day, he is the speaker and the buck does stop with him. | ||
| But in the House, the day-to-day, the stuff that we really don't like, often the real perpetrators... | ||
| Are these committee chairs? | ||
| Are the Appropriations Committee? | ||
| And are their staff and their sort of lobbyist buddies, their sort of paymasters at the end of the day? | ||
| That's who's really behind a lot of this stuff. | ||
| And I think that as we sort of move forward into this next Congress— It would behoove people, I think, to look into who's running appropriations now. | ||
| The former Kay Granger, of course, just showed up in an assisted living facility and hasn't taken a vote since July. | ||
| Thankfully, she stepped down from the committee last spring. | ||
| Tom Cole runs the committee now, a congressman from Oklahoma, but who some of these committee chairs are and See, Will, I mean, maybe I'm crazy. | ||
| I'm one of these guys who thinks if you're going to do all of this stuff now, right, doge and really turn everything on its head, let's talk about Manifest Destiny, right? | ||
| We're talking about Canada. | ||
| We're talking about Greenland. | ||
| We're talking about the Panama Canal. | ||
| If you're going to We're going to do all of these. | ||
| And even if you're going to talk about them, right? | ||
| If you're going to start introducing that kind of revolutionary thinking back into the American national psyche, then you've got to apply that same level of radical thinking to Capitol Hill, too. | ||
| I want to see an open source, bill-making process on the blockchain where people can see every single person. | ||
| Who is it on the committee staff who's added this line and why? | ||
| And what are their interests? | ||
| Who is it on the appropriation staff that added this line? | ||
| What are their names? | ||
| Who are these people? | ||
| You work for the government. | ||
| You're a public servant. | ||
| You're using taxpayer money. | ||
| And by the way, you want a hell of a lot more of it to spend on your pet projects. | ||
| Then I think we need to know who you are. | ||
| And that is my pledge over the course of the next year. | ||
| Because if we're not going to get the money directly out of this right now, day one, then at least we need to know who is on the receiving end of that lobbyist and lawyer, Cash. | ||
| We'll hang over. | ||
| Hangover on the break. | ||
| I want to bring you back for the last segment in this hour. | ||
| We've got Jack Montgomery in the next segment talking to us about the 12 days of Christmas. | ||
| Going to bring in Chris Tomlinson, another one of our great writers over at the National Post to talk about what's going on in Europe at the moment, because it is blowing up over there right now. | ||
| Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom. | ||
| We're going to go through all of it. | ||
| I hope you all had a very happy Christmas, but we are back. | ||
| With our shoulders to the wheel here at the War Room, I'm grateful for you joining us. | ||
| Make sure you're following us on social media, all the War Room pages, across all of it, the National Pulse on X. I'm at Raheem Kassam, R-A-H-E-E-M-K-A-S-S-A-M, across all the different platforms. | ||
| Coming in hard on the gram, as Boris would say. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| We'll be right back after this break. | ||
| Welcome back to this special Boxing Day edition of The War Room. | ||
| I'm Raheem Kassam, joined by our political editor at The National Pulse, Will Upton. | ||
| Will, we've got a brief segment here. | ||
| I know I've talked... | ||
| I told you I got bananitis. | ||
| It is basically where you cannot disconnect from the microphone here in front of you. | ||
| And this suddenly becomes your best friend for two hours. | ||
| And I want to throw it to you now. | ||
| Summarize over the last 18 months anything you want to reflect on from the last 18 months. | ||
| But where are we going? | ||
| And let's maybe talk a little bit about the transition process and how I wish they hadn't driven that wedge between Project 2025, that employee database. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Remember, Project 2025 was not the document that everybody held up and said, oh, you know, this is a crazy town, blah, blah, blah, and that Trump had to end up distancing himself from. | ||
| The original 2025 project was just a database of... | ||
| Pure MAGA staffers who had worked in the first admin, who were true loyalists. | ||
| You know, these people who put their shoulder to the wheel every single day, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, who didn't abandon Donald Trump after January 6th. | ||
| There were so many people out there who did. | ||
| And that was what that thing was originally for. | ||
| And then it all got muddied up. | ||
| You know, you could talk about heritage and all of this stuff. | ||
| But let's talk about that. | ||
| Because as I understand it to this day, the staffing process is coming along a little slowly, and there are some people that we need to be looking out for. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so they're just now getting landing teams up at a lot of these agencies. | |
| These are usually kind of experienced staffers who are around either in the first administration or prior presidential administrations who are sort of in charge of getting in there, sort of seeing where things stand, and then beginning to bring in sort of that permanent political staff that Trump will appoint. | ||
| With Project 2025, you're absolutely right. | ||
| Heritage every year puts out a mandate for leadership, and it's basically a big policy book. | ||
| It's not Project 2025, but the database was 2025, where it still seems like they're going to try to draw a lot of names from for people who appoint to a lot of these positions in the federal government. | ||
| But a lot of this sort of infighting there, I think, has slowed that process is absolutely correct. | ||
| But the transition is underway. | ||
| It is moving slowly. | ||
| The economic team that they've put together is absolutely fantastic. | ||
| You know, Scott Bassett over at Treasury, he's going to be the next Treasury Secretary. | ||
| Very incredible economic mind. | ||
| His number two, Michael Falkander, I worked with at the Treasury Department. | ||
| He'll be the DEBSEC. Michael is one of the most brilliant human beings I've ever seen in action. | ||
| Stephen Mirren was just named to the Council of Economic Advisors. | ||
| He'll be chairing that. | ||
| Stephen was kind of our in-house economist at Treasury. | ||
| He's really the only reason why I know anything about economics. | ||
| Whenever I ask questions, I just ask Stephen. | ||
| And I still do. | ||
| I still consult him quite a bit. | ||
| You've kind of got this team slowly getting into place here that is Really, the guys that were around the last time that were able to put together that robust and booming Trump economy. | ||
| On that front, I think that we've got the ducks in order and things are running pretty smoothly. | ||
| Elsewhere, we've seen some problems. | ||
| The State Department is always a concern. | ||
| It's a place where you really, I think, truly need People who are battle-hardened and battle-ready because your careers over there, your career federal employees, your career bureaucrats, your career diplomats, It is a viper's den. | ||
| These guys, some of them are almost more loyal to the countries or regions which they work with than they are to the United States. | ||
| And they are predominantly far left-leaning, and they hate the president-elect. | ||
| So I think there's a concern there that we're maybe going too soft. | ||
| And to go along, to get along at the State Department, which, again, I want to flag as a big concern. | ||
| And then, of course, we're going to see, you know, both within sort of the GOP establishment and among the Democrats, the big guns come out for people like Tulsi Gabbard and for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And we've already seen it with Pete Hengfeth at the Department of Defense. | ||
| But, you know, The delay in getting the landing teams down, I think, is concerning, but it does seem like, at least on the economic front, they've got things well underway. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| Well, I think I tend to agree with you on that. | ||
| The state stuff really worries me. | ||
| Some of the domestic stuff worries me as well, seeing certain people going into certain landing teams. | ||
| Now listen, some of the people have gone in and then maybe somebody like Raheem Kassam has dropped a tweet or two and suddenly they're not in anymore. | ||
| And that's okay. | ||
| You know, if we need to be the clearinghouse, if we need to be the ombudsman, I'm happy to be unpopular with the people I love being unpopular amongst. | ||
| You know, I'm not interested in being a good buddy to those people who have worked in, uh, Rhino Hill offices for all their lives or, uh, Ron and McDaniels RNC, quite frankly. | ||
| And you'll never, you'll never change my mind about those things. | ||
| I don't want to hang out with you. | ||
| I don't want to come to your little receptions where you drink, you know, bladdered wine, uh, Cross me off the list. | ||
| Delete my email address. | ||
| Delete my phone number. | ||
| I'm not that interested in it. | ||
| What I will say is this. | ||
| I don't think you can be too hard on that situation. | ||
| I think the tendency of President Trump to be a uniter, it's a good character trait. | ||
| It says lots of good things about him as a human being. | ||
| But in going back into Washington, D.C., I don't think you can be too hard and too vindictive, quite frankly, against the people who abandoned you, the people who talked BS about you for so many years. | ||
| That applies across the board. | ||
| Whoever you're hiring, in politics, in media, we should be building up new media organizations, not inviting the CNNs back in, not inviting the ABCs back in. | ||
| There's a lot to talk about with that as well, how the press operation works, all of that. | ||
| Will, we've got about a minute to go here. | ||
| Tell people where they can find you, how they can follow your work, and what a great boss I am. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can follow me on X, formerly Twitter. | |
| It's just at Wupton, W-U-P-T-O-N. You can read all my writing at The National Pulse. | ||
| That's thenationalpulse.com. | ||
| And he was a great boss. | ||
| I mean, we see I had a lot, so it makes things easy. | ||
| That's absolutely true. | ||
| You know, the real secret of it is that I actually just listen to the things that Will says and kind of connect the dots. | ||
| So he's the real mastermind behind the operation. | ||
| As with Jack, as with Chris, as with my whole team, by the way, Sandy, and all the guys who have such an amazing contribution to how the National Pulse operates. | ||
| Will, happy Boxing Day. | ||
| I hope you had a very happy Christmas. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving Day. | ||
| We'll talk after the show. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, stick around. | ||
| We've got a killer second hour here. | ||
| In the break, however, you can just go to thenationalpulse.com forward slash war room. | ||
| Sign up. | ||
| If you're already a member, by the way, go to thenationalpulse.com forward slash gift and give somebody else the gift of real news. |
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