Feb. 7, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:56
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I'm also creating the White House Faith Office, led by Pastor Paula White, who is so amazing. | |
| To confront such weaponization and religious persecution, today I'm signing an executive order to make our Attorney General, who's a great person, she's going to be a great Attorney General, Pam Bondi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The head of a task force, brand new, to eradicate anti-Christian bias. | |
| About time, right? | ||
| Anti-Christian bias. | ||
| It's a concept that actually Jesus talks about in the Sermon on the Mount. | ||
| I'm only bringing this up. | ||
| It's not preaching. | ||
| This is just reporting on if you're going to the prayer breakfast and you're saying Democrats are godless heathen and you don't even understand. | ||
| That Jesus is one of the first things that we learn in Matthew on the Sermon on the Mount is that you pray for your enemies. | ||
| You pray for those who want to persecute you. | ||
| Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy. | ||
| When you're asked to forgive, you're asked to forgive 70 times 7. That's like the perfect number. | ||
| Jesus' ministry. | ||
| And so I just remember when Nancy Pelosi talked about praying for Donald Trump, he said, oh, nobody believes that. | ||
| How could you ever do that? | ||
| He's also a man who has said that he's never had to ask God for forgiveness either. | ||
| So, again... | ||
| What one does at the prayer conference when prayer breakfast, when one is president of the United States, obviously is up to them. | ||
| I would say, though, just a recommendation, if you're trying to bring the country together, you can pass on the whole Democrats are godless Marxists because, yeah, maybe the most intense of the base believe it, but it's kind of hard to spread that message at the same time you're destroying. | ||
| PEPFAR. At the same time, you're destroying all these other aid efforts that were actually inspired by religious organizations and presidents' belief in Jesus Christ and the need that we needed to help the poorest among us. | ||
| And so, interesting time to be delivering that message. | ||
| Let's hope. | ||
| Again, a page is turned. | ||
| Hope springs eternal. | ||
| Let us hope. | ||
| That the two sides can figure out how to get along. | ||
| And that starts by one side not calling the other side godless heathens. | ||
| Just a suggestion. | ||
| Just a suggestion. | ||
| That may not be the best way forward. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mega 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. | ||
| It's Friday, 7 February in the year of our Lord 2025. | ||
| So obviously it's a day of thunder here in the war room at the White House in the Trump second term. | ||
| We'll get to all of it, economics, DOGE, deconstruction of the administrative state, all of it. | ||
| But the last 48 hours have been quite important as far as driving the demons out of the federal government and stalling the righteous. | ||
| I want to start with Lance Wallnau, a guy I've known Lance for years. | ||
| I can say this as probably one of the nicest guys I've ever met, low-key, just a gentleman. | ||
| Actually may be more controversial than Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| I can say that. | ||
| Lance, you've got a show here on Real America's Voice on Sunday. | ||
| You've always been a big part of this network. | ||
| The executive order. | ||
| So Pam Bondi's executive order, she's working on a task force to make sure anti-Christianity, going after Christians in the federal government. | ||
| She's leading a task force of major department heads. | ||
| She'll head it up as attorney general. | ||
| Then today, there's a whole other initiative on faith. | ||
| One of the evangelical leaders will be there. | ||
| Put it in perspective. | ||
| You are identified, I think, in the mainstream media, and I think rightly, as one of the co-founders or leaders of what we refer to as the Christian nationalist movement. | ||
| So what is Christian nationalism? | ||
| Why is it kind of a rising movement? | ||
| And what's your perspective on what President Trump has done in the last 48 hours, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good question. | |
| Well, the first thing is, a Christian nationalist is nothing more than a nationalist. | ||
| That's a common sense American who wants their country to have boundaries and protect their culture and not be assimilated. | ||
| By the Borg or by Davos or by communism, every country that's intelligent and healthy doesn't want to be assimilated. | ||
| So we're nationalists. | ||
| And we're Christians. | ||
| We believe that there is a God who is the ultimate value system. | ||
| If you don't have that, you have some goofy system that mutilates children and calls it a transgender ideology. | ||
| So it's really nationalist Christians. | ||
| But the left gave us white Christian nationalists because... ...are Jewish, but... | ||
| So here I am, the leader of the movement. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But the thing about this person... | ||
| Yeah, can we should reboot... | ||
| Lance, Lance, hang for... | ||
| Lance, we're gonna reboot you. | ||
| You froze on your end. | ||
| I want to make sure this is clear because it's quite important. | ||
| Let's go and reboot Lance. | ||
| This will be one they'll play on MSNBC forever, so I want to make sure they get it right. | ||
| We're going to reboot Lance. | ||
| Well, now, two things happening. | ||
| Actually, three. | ||
| There's so much happening in the days of thunder, you've got to make sure every night we kind of go through it. | ||
| Number one, President Trump, there was this executive order yesterday setting up a task force, Pam Bondi, over at the Justice Department. | ||
| And she's already fired off the football at the Justice Department. | ||
| I mean, Pam went over there after she was confirmed and then sworn in, went over to Maine Justice. | ||
| She's on fire already, as you know. | ||
| A number of people on an interim basis like Emil Bovee, others very close to the president, are there and are already in place, and they're driving down the thing. | ||
| I think the first thing she's going to do, and we'll talk about it a little later, is work through some of these issues on sanctuary cities and with getting folks out. | ||
| So that task force on making sure there's no anti-Christian bias and no bias about individual Christians is quite powerful. | ||
| Is a devout Christian. | ||
| And she's going to lead that effort because, as you know, it's gotten out of control in the federal government. | ||
| And today they're going to announce a faith office. | ||
| Paula White, the evangelical preacher, is going to be there with President Trump. | ||
| We will cover that on Real America's Voice. | ||
| There'll be a signing of that and a big announcement of that. | ||
| Also, the Japanese prime minister's in town. | ||
| There's going to be a joint press conference. | ||
| I think there'll be a press avail also. | ||
| We will cover the press availability, I think, from the Oval Office of President Trump, because, you know, President Trump, he calls audibles all the time. | ||
| He's going to have a bilateral with the Japanese foreign minister. | ||
| He's then going to have, I think, a press avail, and the Oval will go live there. | ||
| Brian Glenn is over at the White House. | ||
| They're then going to have a formal press conference like he had with Bebe. | ||
| You know, those press conferences, the formal ones get to be, you know, even wilder. | ||
| Then the press avails. | ||
| So we'll also cover that. | ||
| That's going to be from the East Room. | ||
| The President's leaving early, heading to Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| We've got Jane Zirkle will be in the press pool there to make sure she gets a couple of questions in, if the President takes questions, which I assume he is. | ||
| You saw right there at the end, we wanted to play. | ||
| I wanted to play Morning Joe. | ||
| Morning Joe, because Morning Joe went to the Gospel of Matthew. | ||
| What do I say all the time when people come up to me saying, we're praying for you, and sent the cards into Danbury, which I asked you not to send, but obviously some got through. | ||
| The key is, I always say, pray for our enemies. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Pray for your enemies first. | ||
| And I disagree with Joe Scarborough. | ||
| The federal government had gotten demonic. | ||
| There are people in the government that hate Christians, that hate Christianity, have gone to thwart it. | ||
| And you can't look at USAID. USAID, of everything that Doge is doing right now, USAID may be the most profound. | ||
| That's come from years and years and years of the Eli Cranes and the MTGs and the Matt Gaetzes and people that came before them going after USAID. Who stopped them? | ||
| Not just the Democrats. | ||
| It was the establishment Republicans. | ||
| It was very, very difficult to even get at a committee with even review it. | ||
| Paul Ryan and these guys would not let people get into it, not let people review it. | ||
| Effort is done. | ||
| He's frozen the establishment Republicans in place. | ||
| So, a lot going on today. | ||
| I wanted Lance on here, because Lance, although he has a show here on Real America's Voice, is, and I think Lance is back up, let's see if it works, is one of the more controversial guys in the country. | ||
| And Tom Cotton... | ||
| Josh Hawley, Steve Bannon, there's many others that refer to themselves as Christian nationalists. | ||
| And it's Lance's definitions. | ||
| We're populist nationalists that also happen to be Christians, given all our failings. | ||
| So Lance, how do you take President Trump's, you know, they're there mocking him on Morning Joe that he's so imperfect and, you know, he's not really a Christian and he doesn't go to church and he doesn't pray. | ||
| Put it in perspective, are President Trump actually signing this task force to make sure we purge the anti-Christian? | ||
| Go ahead, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
President Trump is such a perfect instrument. | |
| I mean, God couldn't have a greater sense of humor than wrapping President Trump in the mantle of a reformer for Christianity, because the left doesn't know how to handle it. | ||
| If Mike Huckabee said, we're bringing prayer back into public school. | ||
| They'd have a meltdown. | ||
| If Ted Cruz says, we're going after all the anti-Christians, they'd say it's his religion. | ||
| But in our case, what we have is Donald Trump. | ||
| They can't accuse him of being a Christian religious zealot because nobody believes he's a religious guy. | ||
| He's perfect for this job. | ||
| And when he's talking about this persecution, there's real stuff going on. | ||
| It isn't in the news cycle. | ||
| Let me give you an example that I'm talking about, Steve. | ||
| Idaho National Guard is exposed today for... | ||
| Having no Christians in command as a policy. | ||
| Imagine that. | ||
| Major David Worley was removed from command for simply opposing drag shows in libraries. | ||
| His crime was that he believed the Bible. | ||
| The bombshell is General James Packwood created policy requiring religious belief screening for all Guard members. | ||
| So you're going to see this as ubiquitous within the government, a hostility, and it's political. | ||
| Because so many evangelicals and pro-life Catholics are voting conservative that this is their way of clawing them out of the system. | ||
| It's part of the DEI mischief of get the white evangelicals and Catholics out and move in other underrepresented people. | ||
| And Trump is rectifying that expeditiously. | ||
| It's not going to stop here. | ||
| He's got a big office there and a big opportunity. | ||
| But the other thing I want to say is, President Trump at a prayer breakfast is hilarious. | ||
| This guy, I would go to Vegas, I'd pay to watch him because it's a high-wire act. | ||
| He's in a different environment than a typical Trump thing. | ||
| And he navigates it. | ||
| I've watched him every year. | ||
| I remember the second year he did the prayer breakfast, he opens with telling people to pray for Arnold Schwarzenegger because his ratings were so low on The Apprentice. | ||
| My wife was horrified. | ||
| It was hilarious. | ||
| He has an unreligious side that makes Scarborough look like a Pharisee. | ||
| And that's the thing that is great about his Christianity. | ||
| Trump is authentic. | ||
| What you see is what you get. | ||
| With Scarborough and those guys, you're getting some kind of a sanitized, weird Russell Moore. | ||
| By the way, not every verse with Jesus is all about turning the other cheek. | ||
| He insulted his enemies left and right. | ||
| That's how come he was crucified. | ||
| That's my rant. | ||
| Lance, hang on for one second. | ||
| I want to come back. | ||
| I want to take a short commercial break. | ||
| I want to come back. | ||
| I want to ask you about what you hope to see come out of the task force. | ||
| Will you help assist Pam Bondi and also the new faith office? | ||
| What you hope for out there because you're obviously one of the more powerful voices in this movement. | ||
| I think people want to know what you think of both of them and how we can collectively help because they're both important. | ||
| And President Trump went out of his way to ascertain and to actually say they're important. | ||
| By doing it on two different days, one's the task force to make sure the government has no more anti-Christian bias and no more bias about individual Christians. | ||
| They're two different things, and both are very important, and the faith office being set up today. | ||
| Gold this morning, $2,902. | ||
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| Short commercial break. | ||
| Lance Walnut on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I've got Dave Brett. | |
| Back to Lance in a minute. | ||
| Dave, go through actually what President Trump has said and how important this is to him. | ||
| And I want to set this up for Lance to come in and make commentary. | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| Yeah, Lance was great on the nationalism. | ||
| And I just want to add for Morning Joe and Mika. | ||
| Hey, Joe, did God intend for there to be nations? | ||
| Just answer that. | ||
| It's a yes or no question. | ||
| Or is this whole thing a mistake? | ||
| I know the globalists don't like nations. | ||
| So let's hear from President Trump. | ||
| His most recent comments, his heart changed after the assassination attempt. | ||
| Here's President Donald Trump the last couple days at the National Prayer Breakfast. | ||
| Quote, these are all quotes, from the earliest days of our republic, faith in God has always been the ultimate source of the strength that beats in the heart of our nation. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| We have to bring religion back. | ||
| We have to bring it back much stronger. | ||
| There's Trump. | ||
| It's one of the biggest problems that we've had over the last fairly long period of time, which I would define as post-World War II. It's been a downhill decline. | ||
| We have to bring it back. | ||
| Deep in the soul of every patriot is the knowledge that God has a special plan, glorious mission for America. | ||
| And that plan is going to happen. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| Quote, it's his, God's hand that guides us every single step of the way. | ||
| Just steps away from here in the Hall of Columns is the statue of John Winthrop, who famously proclaimed America would stand as a city upon a hill, a light to all nations with the eyes of all people upon us, which is clearly true. | ||
| Continuing, today, almost 400 years after that famous sermon, we see that with the Lord's help, the city stands taller and shines brighter than ever before, at least it will soon. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| So you never know, but God did that. | ||
| He's talking about his assassination. | ||
| I mean, it had to be, referencing God saved him. | ||
| It had to be that way, but it changed something in me. | ||
| I feel. | ||
| I feel even stronger. | ||
| I believed in God, but I feel much more strongly about it. | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| You can just hear him saying it, right? | ||
| It's real, like Walnut was saying. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| We have to make religion a much more important factor now. | ||
| We have to make it an important factor. | ||
| And if we do that, it's going to be, our job is just going to be much easier. | ||
| It unifies people. | ||
| It brings people together. | ||
| Democrats are going to be able to have lunch again, dinner with Republicans. | ||
| So let's bring back religion. | ||
| Let's bring God back into our lives. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Okay, Joe, there you go. | ||
| There's Brother Trump going at it. | ||
| Yesterday. | ||
| Do you forgive 70 times 7, Joe, or not really? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Hang on for a second, Dave Brett. | ||
| So Lance, given the cathartic moment that President Trump had about the assassination, and you can tell how deeply he believes this is a moment divine providence saved him for this further work. | ||
| How is that work manifested in the task force? | ||
| How's it manifest in the faith office? | ||
| And what would be the role for people like yourselves that are, I think, much more upfront about we've got to get back? | ||
| To the belief in the Judeo-Christian West, and we've particularly got to get back to the belief of Christianity, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, here it is, Steve. | |
| And so this is the reason why they don't like me, because I'm very specific about what we've got to do. | ||
| America is the land of revivals, the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening. | ||
| We're even talking now that we believe we're in a Third Great Awakening. | ||
| We've never had a Reformation. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| Steve Bannon, we are now having a reformation. | ||
| Europe has had reformations. | ||
| Germany's had them. | ||
| England has had them. | ||
| But never the United States. | ||
| Reformation is different than simply a religious renaissance. | ||
| It's the recapturing of institutions. | ||
| Oh, this is what makes the left go crazy when I say these things. | ||
| It's the recapturing of education, of media, of business, of government. | ||
| And it's recapturing them with the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization. | ||
| And the moment that you bring those Those powers to bear and you start being accepted to be a Christian. | ||
| Look at the press conference that she's wearing a cross like Mike Lindell now. | ||
| And I'm looking up at her and I'm saying, my God, it's cool, it's okay to be a Christian again. | ||
| Because Christians could only be in business for themselves. | ||
| Ask Dave Brat. | ||
| We're a big enterprise people. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because you can't work for a corporation the moment you're outed at the Christmas party because you're a holy roller, you kind of get pushed to the side. | ||
| And there's no Christian presence in academia. | ||
| Oh, boy! | ||
| I want to see us expand this to why it is that professors are being deprived of opportunities to get on campuses to talk to students because they're evangelical or because of their strong pro-life history on social media. | ||
| Now, it's much bigger. | ||
| What we're doing now, we've got a foothold with Paula White. | ||
| But the expansion of that has got to be the underrepresented Christian population, which is over half the United States, in all sectors of what we call the high places of culture or the mountaintops of culture. | ||
| That's my thought. | ||
| We're a big believer here, and we say all the time about seize the institution. | ||
| You have to seize the institutions. | ||
| How would you propose to use both these, the task force and the new faith office, to seize the institutions of the federal government? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are three arteries that make this happen. | |
| Legislation. | ||
| Litigation. | ||
| And the shaping of public opinion. | ||
| Thank God for you, Steve Bannon, because people like you, as long as we can shape the public opinion, the secret sauce is you've got to work with the awakening that's happening and move with it in such a way that you litigate and you legislate, but never get too far ahead of public persuasion. | ||
| That's why Lincoln had to wait for the perfect timing for the Emancipation Proclamation. | ||
| He couldn't do it prematurely. | ||
| He needed a victory at Antietam. | ||
| So what we have to do is we preachers have got to stop being weak and wimpy. | ||
| Take a page from Donald Trump. | ||
| Have an opinion. | ||
| People go to church to get a perspective. | ||
| Have one. | ||
| And if we'll lead, if the churches will begin to resonate as the conscience of culture rather than as the statesmen trying to market Jesus, we will see an unprecedented movement of the Spirit of God at a grassroots level. | ||
| Awakening is grassroots. | ||
| Reformation is institutional. | ||
| Legislation, litigation, and the shaping of public opinion. | ||
| And while Paula White has to be careful what she says in public, I believe I might have learned that from her. | ||
| The second one. | ||
| Legislation, we see working on that, obviously shaping public opinion. | ||
| We would call it information warfare, but we're there. | ||
| On litigation. | ||
| Give me your top one or two things you think we have to litigate now in order to clean out the underbrush. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, right now you've got a case in front of the Supreme Court, Steve, which is going to be decided in April. | |
| A very critical one. | ||
| It has to do with whether Catholics have the right to charter schools. | ||
| And we need to really bang the pots and pans on this. | ||
| Because public sentiment has a tendency to shape a little bit that Washington area, which for some reason we send in conservatives and over time they degrade and erode. | ||
| So we have to be very strong on this. | ||
| If Christians can have access to their tax dollars to be able to have their own competing schools, we're going to see a whole upgrade in what takes place. | ||
| We've got to take the government control of education away from the unions on the left. | ||
| That's a huge battle. | ||
| That's a Supreme Court-level battle, but it's a public persuasion battle as well. | ||
| And it's probably going to end up having states have to do some legislation in order to work with this. | ||
| Lance, you've got the show here on Real America Voice on Sunday. | ||
| Where do people go to get all your content? | ||
| You're putting stuff up all the time. | ||
| You're doing podcasts. | ||
| Where do they go to get everything? | ||
| Because I think this is a... | ||
| A topic we need to drill down on. | ||
| I think we need every week to make sure we drill down in more depth about what Christian nationalism is and where it's headed because the left clearly fears this and they're trying to smear everybody associated with it. | ||
| So where do folks go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, thank you. | |
| I'm glad that you see that because they recognize this is the ideological power. | ||
| LanceWallnow.com forward slash podcast. | ||
| We try to keep up with you and Dave Brat every day. | ||
| And, you know, I'm on the X account. | ||
| And you guys like you have so dominated Getter. | ||
| I'm trying to exist over there. | ||
| But maybe you could shout me a hello because I'm trying to build. | ||
| You took it over. | ||
| You made it hard for me to exist over there anyway. | ||
| That's where we're at. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| We want to... | ||
| I tell you how much they fear the concept of Christian nationalism and dominionism is that Lance Wallnau is one of the finest gentlemen I know. | ||
| And if you just read left-wing media, you think literally you're a horned devil. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty amazing. | ||
| So Lance, we want to make sure we get you plenty of exposure and provide a platform for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, my dear brother. | |
| Continue doing what you do, which is agitate the devil every day. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| That's easy. | ||
| Thank you, Lance Walnut. | ||
| So, Brat, Christian nationalism. | ||
| Lance's definition of that is that we're populist nationalists, and, you know, the Josh Hawleys and the Tom Cottons and the Steve Bannons of the world, so you're nationalists and you have deep belief in the Christian faith. | ||
| Your thoughts, sir? | ||
| You know, I agree with Lance. | ||
| That was a great setup. | ||
| I would broaden it even further. | ||
| The Judeo-Christian West is basically the synthesis of the Greek reason and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. | ||
| And so the nation has always been a part of that. | ||
| The idea of being a Christian nationalist is just redundant, right? | ||
| It's the history of the West. | ||
| And he brought up the Reformation and Westphalia. | ||
| You bring up Westphalia, the beginning of the nation-state. | ||
| A true Reformation is always grassroots. | ||
| And that's what's happening, thanks to thought leaders. | ||
| It's just like the budget. | ||
| The elites don't want to move on it, but if the base wants to move on it, it's going to move. | ||
| And religion right now, there is an awakening happening. | ||
| The young folks are getting really involved. | ||
| The people sense now that there's a new sense of liberation. | ||
| The First Amendment, what we've done wrong, what Lance was getting at, if you spend any money on anything... | ||
| The federal government says, hey, we're spending money on this. | ||
| Religion cannot be involved. | ||
| That's the basic principle we have to fight back against. | ||
| And so nationalism, it's the history of the West. | ||
| It's what we have. | ||
| We've been losing it in the last 40 years. | ||
| We need to take it back, and I think that's what's going on right now. | ||
| Dave, just hang on for one second. | ||
| I've got some things I want to talk about on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Billy Joe Shaver, get thee behind me, Satan. | |
| Takes us out. | ||
| We're going to be back in the warm in just a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen Stephen K. Band. | |
| Gold above 2,900. | ||
| Make sure you go to Birch Gold. | ||
| Citicorp, as you know, one of the Rockefellers banks, one of the biggest money center banks in the world, or Citigroup, I guess it's called now, put out a report that they see gold going to 3,000. | ||
| Just read it. | ||
| We're not here to tape at the price of gold or to target. | ||
| We give you the capital markets geopolitics macro. | ||
| But gold has been a hedge. | ||
| For 5,000 years. | ||
| There's a reason for that. | ||
| Times of turbulence, and I'm going to go through some turbulence in a second. | ||
| Everybody's going to take their number two pencil out here, and you're going to remember who explained it to you. | ||
| As gospel truth. | ||
| Because we're in the fog of, in the days of thunder, there's thunder, there's cannon fire, there's gun, you know, one of the things in the Civil War, you got gun smoke all around, kind of hard to see through the gun smoke. | ||
| Here in the war room, we have to be clear. | ||
| We have to be clear on the objective. | ||
| 12 o'clock high. | ||
| Keep the flying fortresses in formation. | ||
| Never peel off, even if you've got to help a friend save himself, because the only thing that matters is the payload you drop over industrial Germany in the Ruhr Valley. | ||
| The more you take down the industrial capacity of the Germans, the shorter this war will be. | ||
| Quite mathematically, to a mathematical certitude, work through. | ||
| And many, many, many brave young men gave their lives for that. | ||
| They were expendable. | ||
| They just were the first way. | ||
| He tells them that. | ||
| Gregory Peck tells them in that magnificent movie. | ||
| But one of the reasons that movie is so magnificent is Gregory Peck in the entire time has absolute, total, and complete focus on the objective and what the objective is. | ||
| And it's not that we're losing focus. | ||
| Other people, because days of thunder are rapid, things are happening, you've got all these verticals, you've got scale, you have depth, and you have urgency. | ||
| But in that, you also have to say, okay, you know, we're moving down this path, and we're going to get to that in a second. | ||
| But Brett, the reason these are important, and I want you to relate to your time as congressman, you come up and you dedicated your life. | ||
| To your religion. | ||
| You had other things you were doing. | ||
| You went to, you know, theology school, dedicate your life to your religion. | ||
| When you went to Capitol Hill, were you surprised about how almost like a second-class citizen Christians are given? | ||
| Because it shocked me at coming to the Imperial Capitol, how you almost had to keep your Catholicism or your Christianity. | ||
| Kind of in your back pocket. | ||
| Anybody that would actually be out there was considered a kook, a nut, and was immediately marginalized by the system. | ||
| No matter how talented, no matter how smart, no matter what amazing things they had to say about government or technology or geopolitics, if you were a professed Christian and professed it or a traditional Catholic, you were immediately in the secular... | ||
| And I call it kind of demonic power, money and power of the imperial capital. | ||
| You were identified as a kook and somebody that couldn't be counted on in a tough time. | ||
| Your thoughts as coming up as a young congressman, what did you see? | ||
| Yeah, first, you just remind me, J.D. Vance is lobbing a couple bombs over Germany the last few days, too. | ||
| So I just want to give him a shout-out for raising the issue. | ||
| But yeah, when I came... | ||
| It was a very interesting dance up there. | ||
| Everybody smiles to your face. | ||
| Most everyone is religious and a Christian at some level. | ||
| Except when it comes to the Ten Commandments, like don't lie, and then broader issues of Christian integrity, telling the truth, doing the right thing. | ||
| Everyone up there is hiding under their desk, and now you're seeing it, right? | ||
| This USAID thing and the corruption that's spilling out from that in every direction is just giving us... | ||
| Just example after example after example of what we should have been doing in the first place, right? | ||
| We've had a border invasion. | ||
| We have 14 wars, hotspots going on, four wars that are on the verge of kinetic. | ||
| Not a word from anyone. | ||
| It's people say they're Christian, but no one called each other on the carpet, right? | ||
| And in the good book, there's all sorts of counsel within the church and St. Paul and all that of holding your brothers accountable to the truth. | ||
| There's none of that. | ||
| So there's no backbone. | ||
| There's no focus. | ||
| In the words of John Wick, there was no focus, there was no commitment, and there was no sheer will. | ||
| That you're exerting right here today. | ||
| And so that's a short memo. | ||
| Do you anticipate the task force under Pam Bondi to root out anti-Christian bias and bias against individual Christians and the faith office set up now with Paula White and under Paula White? | ||
| Do you think that those will start to accomplish our task and purpose? | ||
| I think they'll start, but it needs to be embedded in our institutions within a year to make a difference, just like the budget needs to go into law. | ||
| The Supreme Court, you know, Catholics, Christians, Jewish, should be, I don't know if they can read anymore, the First Amendment says there shall be no law prohibiting the free expression of religion. | ||
| No establishment, no national establishment of religion. | ||
| I don't see that anywhere. | ||
| Can they read? | ||
| There shall be no law prohibiting the free expression of religion. | ||
| We need to fight that one up and down everywhere. | ||
| As I was saying, if you pay $20,000 to go to public school... | ||
| Your kid cannot mention religion during the eight or nine hours of their formative years of education, where the Judeo-Christian West is responsible for literacy, reason, the Enlightenment, science, etc. | ||
| Einstein. | ||
| I could go on and on on that little rift. | ||
| So it's just incredible. | ||
| And the reason for this is because Christians have become passive. | ||
| I read Samuel yesterday, right? | ||
| Saul killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands, and God took Saul out of commission because he wouldn't execute the wrath of God. | ||
| He wouldn't do the hard stuff. | ||
| It's easy to do the nice stuff, like Joe and Mika, and they just reference the gospel. | ||
| They're not systematic across all the public policy issues they cover in the morning. | ||
| Is this Christian, Mika? | ||
| Do you think we could do better along God's will there, Mika? | ||
| You'll never hear that. | ||
| You'll just hear when the time is needed at a prayer breakfast, they'll give you the token few words of pompous, pious Pharisees, like Lance said. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And that's why our culture's in trouble right now. | ||
| Okay, and we're talking about USAID. So I want to put up Thomas Massey's. | ||
| Thomas Massey. | ||
| Massey went to MIT, and we fight with Massey a lot. | ||
| But he's one of the smartest guys around. | ||
| Do we have the tweet? | ||
| Can we put the tweet up? | ||
| Denver? | ||
| Not that. | ||
| That's not the tweet. | ||
| This is a tweet from Tom Massey. | ||
| He says, I'm concerned that the House and Senate will fully fund USAID in March, just like we did in December. | ||
| Of which Massey says he voted no. | ||
| Remember, the only Republican to vote no. | ||
| The argument from Republican leadership was that they need Democrat votes to pass an omnibus or a one-year CR bill to avoid a government shutdown. | ||
| And Johnson's running around, and they're up at the White House yesterday for a five-hour meeting. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Five-hour meeting. | ||
| And nobody comes out and says something just structurally. | ||
| We have to take it and drive a stake in it. | ||
| At midnight on the 14th of March in the year of our Lord, 2025, and I don't know, that's 35 days away or X amount of days away, the government runs out of money. | ||
| So the government will have to shut down. | ||
| President Trump's government runs out of money and will have to shut down. | ||
| Let me repeat this. | ||
| President Donald John Trump's government will shut down. | ||
| We have been kicking the can down the road on these CRs, which this audience hates. | ||
| One happened while I was in prison. | ||
| But they've happened before. | ||
| And always the excuse, well, we've got to get the individual appropriations bill. | ||
| The Senate had that. | ||
| It's the main excuses. | ||
| Always excuses. | ||
| Well, in December, right before Christmas, with only Thomas Massey standing in the... | ||
| We kicked the can down the road, and we were for 90 days to get to March 14th to give the team, President Trump's team, and the House and the Senate to work through so that we could get... | ||
| A budget from President Trump in his first term, his first year of his second term. | ||
| The reconciliations, and I've said this over and over and over again, the reconciliations are, and we think there ought to be two, but they are kind of side pockets right now. | ||
| We have a central mission we have to do. | ||
| And Elon Musk and these guys can run around all they want. | ||
| They can go into Treasury and try to get the checkbook. | ||
| They're over at the Social Security. | ||
| I think they may be at the Education Department. | ||
| They're at the National Oceanographic, which is all fine. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| The USAID identified, by the way, identified because of 10 years of hard work of the Eli Cranes and the Matt Gaethes and the MTGs and many, many other people have been up there. | ||
| But understand, and first off, they will not go across the Potomac, which they have to do, to get to the Pentagon. | ||
| To start to see where cuts are going to come from and where waste, fraud, and abuse is. | ||
| It just has to happen. | ||
| You're not an adult in Washington, D.C. and trying to take on the people that run the imperial capital if you're not prepared to do that. | ||
| So let me go back. | ||
| On the 14th, and Collins, who's the head of appropriations over in the Senate, she's a savvy old bird. | ||
| She raised up the flagpole, a one-year CR. You don't see any work being done by anybody else, no appropriations bills. | ||
| They're going to come to you and say, we need a one-year CR. And a one-year CR is just an omnibus. | ||
| It's just an omnibus. | ||
| And we are going to kick the can down. | ||
| All of the spending, all of the spending that's being done at USAID is going to be in that bill. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| Legally, now, you may on the margin, they may cut a couple of subscriptions and better management, but USAID is going to be in that CR. As right now. | ||
| Because that funds the government. | ||
| And President Trump's going to be in a terrible dilemma. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Because you can't, you want more cuts, you actually want real cuts? | ||
| That you shut down your own government? | ||
| In addition, and make sure you write this number down, the Congressional Budget Office agrees with the war room. | ||
| That this budget that we are currently working on, that as we move down the path, unless something radically changes, if people listen to this show, in other words, and radically changes, we're going to approve a one-year extension to September 30th, a continued resolution, and that's going to have in it a $2 trillion deficit. | ||
| A $2 trillion. | ||
| The math here is irrefutable. | ||
| It's irrefutable, and that's why nobody wants to talk about it. | ||
| So I just want to make sure that we're all singing from the same hymnal. | ||
| That because of the inaction of Johnson in the Senate, and even people that are around President Trump, at least initially, we're in a situation where in President Trump's first year, the budget and the spending is going to kind of be a Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi deal. | ||
| Of around $6.5 trillion, the revenues will be the revenues, and we'll have about a $2 trillion. | ||
| I think it'll be high on $2 trillion, but right now, CBO says $1.9 trillion. | ||
| We say $2 trillion. | ||
| I think it'll actually be higher on that deficit that'll go on top of the debt. | ||
| We'll have to refinance it. | ||
| Scott Besson will have to refinance it, and we're not going to get down. | ||
| The price of eggs are not going to come down. | ||
| This is not a supply chain problem. | ||
| This is embedded deeply in the way that we finance the deficits we run. | ||
| And the financing and how we finance the deficits. | ||
| This is just clear in all the things you're running around on. | ||
| One big, beautiful reconciliation or two bills, and I've said it had to be two bills forever because it has to be two. | ||
| You've got to get money, you're talking about for the border and for energy and all that. | ||
| And right now, my understanding, in the two reconciliations, in the first reconciliation, there'd be an increase of $300 billion of additional spending. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| If you find $300 billion of cuts, and they say they're going to guarantee it, and I don't want to hear 10-year cuts. | ||
| We can't play games. | ||
| We have to address the fact of what are the real cuts, real cuts of federal spending in this year, and real cuts in federal spending next year. | ||
| Not three years, not four years, and certainly not 10 years. | ||
| We have to have an adult conversation, and we have to act as fiduciaries. | ||
| And Thomas Massey... | ||
| Is 1 million percent right? | ||
| That's exactly where we're headed. | ||
| On the 14th of March, in the year of our Lord, 2025. And with that, I'm not so... | ||
| The Citicorp 3000 for gold? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That may be conservative. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Short break. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | ||
| So, Brad, okay, folks, I got more to drill down on this. | ||
| And some more math to give you, which you're going to want to take down. | ||
| Because I'm giving you the gospel truth. | ||
| We're going Old Testament here this morning, because somebody's got to talk about this. | ||
| We've got to get out of fantasy land. | ||
| As an investment banker, particularly doing a lot of turnarounds and restructuring, you go into these companies, you've got the management, and they're all confused, and things are happening, and the balance sheet's all upside down, they've got negative cash flow, they're going out of business. | ||
| And you will sit there, and you'll hear a lot of fantasy land. | ||
| You'll hear a lot of fantasy land. | ||
| I got EBITDA and EBITDA and I said, hey EBITDA is an opinion. | ||
| Cash is a fact. | ||
| So don't give me EBITDA. I just saw EBITDA on Twitter the other day. | ||
| The new EBITDA forecast. | ||
| EBITDA is whatever you want it to be. | ||
| EBITDA is an opinion. | ||
| EBITDA is, you know, the earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and anything else. | ||
| They throw it all in there. | ||
| It's supposed to be a proxy for cash flow when you do deals. | ||
| It never is. | ||
| It's got no accounting provisions. | ||
| They throw everything there, and that's what I would say. | ||
| EBITDA is an opinion. | ||
| Cash is a fact. | ||
| I say, give me Mr. Balance Sheet at the beginning and Mr. Balance Sheet at the end, and let's see what happened to the cash account, because that's cash. | ||
| That's meaningful. | ||
| Everything else is happy talk. | ||
| And once you understand that, then you can get back in. | ||
| And right now, it's nothing about happy talk. | ||
| They're running around and they're having meetings and they're, you know, Johnson's thinking great thoughts and they're thinking great thoughts. | ||
| It's all fantasy. | ||
| Just tell me, just on the 14th, if we're going to do it, let's just do it. | ||
| Let's just take Biden's number and let's just do it. | ||
| You're going to have the same spending in USAID. Now, maybe you cut some subscription to Politico and some other things. | ||
| You might do that. | ||
| That's a managerial action you can do. | ||
| And President Trump may step in and say the Impoundment Act. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I support that. | ||
| But that's not the thing itself. | ||
| That's instrumentality you're using to kind of get control of it. | ||
| But hey, the process you have itself, and you had plenty of time. | ||
| We didn't pick March 14th as a random date. | ||
| It was 90 days or 100 days. | ||
| Nobody did any work. | ||
| Johnson and these guys didn't have to spend their time on the reconciliations and all this because the lobbyists wanted him to do that. | ||
| They spend their time with it. | ||
| The lobbyists tell them, spend your time on this. | ||
| Spend your time on this. | ||
| That's what they end up doing. | ||
| And Doge, I think, is doing some great stuff. | ||
| Some amazing stuff. | ||
| And this USAID is fantastic, but it misses the point. | ||
| The point is, just tell me directionally, what are we going to cut in this year? | ||
| Because right now, we're going to spend it all. | ||
| You're going to have a one-year. | ||
| They're going to come up with a one-year CR. Or maybe they come up with a 30-day CR, they'll lead to a one-year CR. Why are they doing this? | ||
| Because there's no political will to cut federal spending. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| And they want to put a bunch of goodies in there and tax cuts. | ||
| Now, the president put out an eight-point tax plan yesterday that I thought was heroic. | ||
| Number one, he has no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, but no tax on Social Security. | ||
| Caroline Levin put it out there. | ||
| The president put it out there. | ||
| That is a real number. | ||
| That is a big number. | ||
| So when we talk about putting in, we have six and a half of spending and four and a half of revenue, all sources, so we got $2 trillion gap, right? | ||
| Got to finance that. | ||
| Well, the 4.5, if you do that, the 4.5 is, I don't know, let's say $4 trillion. | ||
| It's $500 billion of tax cuts to the people. | ||
| To middle-class and working-class people, and I'm one billion percent in back of that. | ||
| And he takes away the subsidies for the billionaire sports teams, and he takes away carried interest, which I love, and it's got to happen. | ||
| That's not a huge amount of money, but it's meaningful, and the optics of it are brilliant. | ||
| But you then have a gap. | ||
| You have a bigger gap than you have before. | ||
| And I understand that the tax cuts and all that, it's a pro-growth supply side, and I'm a big believer in Scott Besson. | ||
| Scott Besson said this is the last shot. | ||
| He and Kudlow, last shot we have supply side tax, and I agree with that. | ||
| 1,000%. | ||
| But that takes up time to kick in. | ||
| In 2017, when we got the tax cut done in the late fall of 2017, it didn't really kick into 2019. It takes a while for that to kick in. | ||
| So in the interim, you have bigger deficits. | ||
| Unless you cut spending. | ||
| And the way you start with spending, you don't start with Medicaid. | ||
| And you can't touch Medicare or anything. | ||
| It may be some waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| Maybe $100 billion or more. | ||
| That's got to be stopped. | ||
| But until you cut the discretionary spending and get to the social programs, you have to go across the Potomac to the Pentagon. | ||
| That's just the physics of modern political life. | ||
| And not just that, we don't need to spend 3.4% of GDP on defense. | ||
| We don't. | ||
| You don't have to do it. | ||
| They're going to give you a million-one reasons why you have to do it, but you don't have to do it. | ||
| You don't have to do it. | ||
| You can do it for hundreds of billions of dollars less. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You heard it. | ||
| You have to be smarter about what you're doing. | ||
| You have to have your task and purpose or your objective, but you don't need it. | ||
| However, when they talk about Medicaid and Medicare and the social programs, yes. | ||
| Waste fraud and abuse, duplication, look at USAID. An abomination. | ||
| But you ain't seen nothing yet to go to the Pentagon. | ||
| Those guys are the mac daddies of this. | ||
| Those are the Mac Daddies. | ||
| They haven't been able to do an audit, I don't know, in 30 or 40 years. | ||
| You spent trillions and trillions of trillions. | ||
| People don't even know where the stuff is. | ||
| You spent $7 trillion in Iraq and $2 trillion in Afghanistan. | ||
| Do you think we have any sense of where that went? | ||
| The tax cut on Social Security is a... | ||
| If you look at the $4 trillion from the 2017 cut, and let me be frank, my idea... | ||
| On raising taxes on the wealthy in the upper bracket was the smart thing to do in 2017, and it's a smarter thing to do in 2025. The tax cut for Social Security has to happen. | ||
| President Trump said it's going to happen. | ||
| He put it on the list yesterday. | ||
| It was heroic. | ||
| President Trump is in your corner. | ||
| Very few politicians would ever do that. | ||
| Very few politicians would ever sign a task force to root out the anti-Christian bias in this federal government against the religion of Christianity, the culture of Christianity, and individual Christians. | ||
| And nobody's ever stood up and said, we need to stop taxing Social Security. | ||
| That the folks that have helped built this country and put it on their shoulders, by the time they get to take Social Security, they need a break. | ||
| They've done enough. | ||
| They have done enough. | ||
| They've worked enough. | ||
| They've sacrificed enough. | ||
| They went through it all and, hey, delivered us this great country. | ||
| We don't need to tax them anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In order to do that, it's either got to be made up in two places. | |
| We either have to cut the spending, the out-of-control spending, or you have to look for additional tax revenues. | ||
| I'm a huge believer in the external revenue service and using this as a golden market to get through the golden door. | ||
|
unidentified
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But if that's not enough, you've got to look around again. | |
| And where are you going to end up in the same place in 2017? | ||
| The upper bracket. | ||
| That $1 trillion sitting there, that $4 trillion, has to go to Social Security. |
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