Feb. 15, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:42
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| and prevention will cut one-tenth of its workforce. | ||
| 1,300 workers are being forced out at that critical agency. | ||
| And as many as 2,000 employees at the Department of Energy were let go, including hundreds from its National Nuclear Security Administration. | ||
| Take that in. | ||
| According to the New York Times, the Internal Revenue Service is preparing to lay off thousands of employees as soon as next week, reversing the Biden administration's efforts to beef up that agency. | ||
| What could go wrong with... | ||
| Dramatically cutting the IRS workforce in the middle of tax season. | ||
| Just remember, the Trump administration put tax cheats ahead of your needs if you have problems with your refund. | ||
| Firings are already underway also at the Department of Education, Housing and Urban Development, and even at the agency ordering them, the Office of Personnel Management. | ||
| That genius squad has now reportedly been sent into the IRS. So now that group is in there with your tax information. | ||
| While tonight we get word that at the IRS, just ahead of tax filing season, they are about to fire thousands, maybe 9,000 people who actually work there to handle your taxes. | ||
| The combination of the smash and grab by the supposedly high-tech team and the mass firing of people who actually do know what they're doing means So you hear a lot about these probationary employees today. | ||
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These are folks who are in their first or second year on the job, and they can't just be summarily terminated like this on a mass scale. | |
| There are rules that govern federal employees and their rights in the workplace, and you're not supposed to remove them unless they're poor performers or they engage in misconduct. | ||
| So we filed another action just today, Joy, through one of the administrative bodies that enforces these rules, the Office of Special Counsel. | ||
| AMG who put out a statement about these probationary firings. | ||
| These firings are not about poor performance. | ||
| There's no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants. | ||
| They are about power. | ||
| They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism. | ||
| What they want is a chokehold, and they have a chokehold. | ||
| collar on the mayor of the city of new york and that is why i'm really thinking about what happens next and there are two things one the governor of new york has the ability to remove the mayor and if you've got a mayor who's this compromised who's who as you said you've now seen on tv the the quo from the quid um he is no longer he is so conflicted | ||
| he is no longer representing the people of new york city um and that is something where there is a democratically you know elected person with the power to take action here so that essentially the mayor of the city of new york is not donald trump who no one voted for for that position um the second is the judge | ||
| in this case can have a hearing and can hear from emil bovi um and can find out whether his version that he put in Is the correct one or whether it's Danielle Sassoon. | ||
| And just to be clear, he has a lot of discretion on the following. | ||
| He doesn't have a lot of discretion in terms of whether the case goes forward or not. | ||
| But he could actually appoint a special prosecutor if he thinks that Emil Bove is lying to him. | ||
| That can be prosecuted by an independent prosecutor and a separate judge. | ||
| In that same district, in the Southern District of New York, has done that exact thing in another case. | ||
| So there is precedent for having that kind of remedy here. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
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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. | ||
| 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 line? | ||
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Mega Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| It's Saturday, 15 February, Year of the Lord 2025. | ||
| So we are, I don't know what, 30 days away from Ides of March. | ||
| And by the Ides of March, much of this will be clear because two things are converging. | ||
| One is the ripping apart of the administrative state. | ||
| And I understand it may not, you know, for people defending these corrupt institutions and for people defending this. | ||
| It may look a little chaotic and messy, but I think there's actually a quite strong internal logic to it. | ||
| But eventually it has to merge into kind of process. | ||
| And what I mean by this, what we've talked about from the very beginning, is that the DOGE effort, and DOGE, even though it's the U.S. Digital Service, the apparatus that took over, it's still part of OMB. And OMB is the managerial effort of the entire government. | ||
| It then has to flow into... | ||
| An appropriations process to actually have these cuts take effect over and above, I guess, what they're finding on some of this waste fraud and abuse, which I assume you can shut down right away and is being shut down right away. | ||
| The merging in and getting in of real cuts and major cuts. | ||
| Now, updated news overnight. | ||
| Huge report how Elon Musk's team is crossing the Potomac and going to... | ||
| Go to the Pentagon. | ||
| I think they've actually had an early team over there. | ||
| The reason that's important is that we have two processes here. | ||
| We have one is the, and get ready, you're going to get a continuing resolution on the 14th because the work on the appropriation side was not done. | ||
| The Senate has not addressed any of these bills. | ||
| The House has seven or eight of them. | ||
| Like Moskowitz said when he talked about it the other day, they have seven single-subject appropriations bill, which is about 80% of the budget, but I don't think any work's been done in the Senate. | ||
| And remember, you have to reconcile that. | ||
| You have to have a conference to get both people on board. | ||
| It's one bill. | ||
| Bottom line, it hasn't been done. | ||
| So get ready for a CR around the first week of March. | ||
| To get to the 14th, I think right after the president. | ||
| The president may drop it. | ||
| The date to put in your calendar is 4 March, which is his discussion, joint session of Congress. | ||
| Essentially the State of the Union. | ||
| The State of the Union in the first year is not State of the Union. | ||
| It's called, you know, it's a joint session. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Called differently. | ||
| Where the president goes up and addresses Congress. | ||
| From the 4th of March to the 14th will be a firefight. | ||
| Just will be. | ||
| I want to give this audience a heads up. | ||
| We're not going to be happy about everything. | ||
| We've got to face reality here of what we can do and where we can put maximum leverage. | ||
| The end game we want to get to is dramatic reductions in federal spending. | ||
| Number one. | ||
| To get control over these deficits that continue to mount and Go on the face amount of the national debt, of which we then have to pay interest and principal. | ||
| Since we're never going to get the principal paid down, you're just going to continue to pay interest. | ||
| It is now a fact, as we have said now for a couple years, that embedded in this refinancing of at least a third of that every year is where you're embedding inflation. | ||
| And I realize people are joyous of what's happening every day we're moving forward, and I want to play that chaos at the top because I think, and I keep saying this legally, as we press the case, both in deconstructing the administrative state and pressing the case of what we're doing to essentially cut massive costs out of the federal budget, we are, I believe, winning and going to win at the federal court level. | ||
| Last night you've got this chaos over, but I think it's controlled chaos over this situation with Adams, which is now going to free up a sanctuary city. | ||
| And this is important for the deportation, the mass deportation of the 10 million people. | ||
| And you've had resignations at Maine Justice and at Southern District of New York, so be it. | ||
| Emil Bovee doesn't give two Fs and neither does Pam Bonney. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Just keep it pressed down. | ||
| I think, and I think it continues to show, we are going to win at the federal level. | ||
| You may get slowed down at the first line of judges, but at the appellate level, you know, on the expedited hearings at the appellate level and then at the Supreme Court, I believe you're going to win. | ||
| And one of the big things to put in your notebook, right, is impoundment. | ||
| Impoundment. | ||
| Write that down. | ||
| Take number two pencil and write that down. | ||
| That number is going... | ||
| That concept. | ||
| That construct. | ||
| Back to the unified theory of the executive. | ||
| Ideas have consequences. | ||
| These are big ideas. | ||
| They're going to have big consequences. | ||
| And they're going to be big fights. | ||
| Just is. | ||
| Because I believe what you're going to see is the only... | ||
| I think the way that... | ||
| If I think this through, I think the way that you get Doge into this year, which is what we're currently fighting, that's the CR. And in next year, which is a little bit of where the reconciliations process come, where you get Doge in, and Doge is two things, just to add to complexity here. | ||
| It is one, the waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| Every day you see them, they're sending a strike team in here and a strike team in here and a strike team in there and a strike team in there. | ||
| These young, you know, kind of Nader, Ralph Nader type guys going in with their computers and getting into the data and seeing where they're either old systems that were paying stuff or all that. | ||
| What does it add up to? | ||
| I don't know right now. | ||
| I keep asking that question. | ||
| I hope it's a significant number and this is just not optics, but... | ||
| It will get funneled into the process, and the process it's going to get funneled into is whatever comes out on the 14th, whether it's a whole year's CR, which you're going to hate, and I'm going to hate, just get ready to be hating on some stuff, because you ain't going to like it. | ||
| I'm not going to like it. | ||
| But we kind of are where we are. | ||
| In this very convoluted, because here's the thing. | ||
| Why are we where we are? | ||
| Because we still have a political class that does not want to face reality. | ||
| You have to be, you've got to fix bayonets, we've got to put the bayonet in the back, and we've got to drive them to face reality. | ||
| Because other than that, there's no penalty for them to continue to spend money and print fiat currency and just kick the can down the road and add more and more and more. | ||
| Now the inflation, now that people are waking up to the fact... | ||
| That this is how inflation is caused. | ||
| Inflation is caused by this massive federal spending. | ||
| And this is what turf Biden out of office. | ||
| And when the wake-up call comes that, hey, we have to be serious about this. | ||
| So Doge gets funneled into the process in this fiscal year. | ||
| When I say this fiscal year, I mean what's happening now between now and September 30th. | ||
| Then when you talk about the reconciliations, all that, that's fiscal year 26 and beyond. | ||
| The one thing also to keep clear is when they talk about all these huge cuts and everything they're doing, $4 trillion, it's all still fantasy. | ||
| It's emancipatory fantasy because it's over 10 years. | ||
| I'm not interested in 10 years. | ||
| I'm interested in this year between now and September 30th. | ||
| I'm interested in next year. | ||
| Once we get those done, I'm interested in the year after that and the year after that. | ||
| This is a restructuring. | ||
| This is a turnaround. | ||
| The predicate of that is an energy policy that drives down energy costs and sets the predicate for lower energy costs across the board. | ||
| And so for the signal, not the noise, President Trump is moving on that, and Dave Walsh is here to talk about that. | ||
| In addition, you have to get your arms around the Pentagon budget. | ||
| They're over in Ukraine right now, and the bottom line in Ukraine, and this is why the firestorm, we're telling Europe, hey, guess what? | ||
| You've got to stand up for the first time, really, since World War II. I would actually argue World War I. They haven't stood on their own since World War I. This is why we had World War II. They have to stand up, and they're going to put some money in the game. | ||
| The elites over there have gotten a free ride. | ||
| And as we reorient here to the hemispheric defense of President Trump, that leads to a potential massive realignment of our defense budget, which we've got to get to. | ||
| Because, you know, you've got to get to Medicaid, you've got to get to the discretionary spending, you've got to do that, you've got to get into the defense budget, you just have to. | ||
| And Medicaid, once again, because this is not about race, it's not about ethnicity, this is about economic distress. | ||
| We have 18 million men of working age, not in the workforce. | ||
| We have a crisis among men in this country. | ||
| We have 18 million not in the workforce. | ||
| This is why Medicaid is about economic distress. | ||
| Economic distress. | ||
| Do we want Medicaid? | ||
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No. | |
| Do you want Medicaid? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do the people take it and want it? | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| But because we gutted this country and sent all the jobs off, and since the last five years, let me connect another dot. | ||
| No net job creation in five years for native-born people. | ||
| Regardless of your race or ethnicity. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Essentially all the job growth in five years to foreign-born citizens. | ||
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Okay. | |
| We're going to take today, we're going to make this all perfectly clear. | ||
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Short break. | |
| President Trump wisely understood that under the Biden administration, there was a war against American energy, and today that war officially has ended. | ||
| President Trump on day one declared a national energy emergency. | ||
| And this is a real emergency because under the Biden administration restricted the production of oil and gas. | ||
| Production's still coming, but when you stop holding leases, when you take 625 million acres of land out of ocean land, out of production possibilities through an executive order, you're really restricting the balance sheet of America. | ||
| But today, as President Trump said, this is unleashed. | ||
| The National Energy Dominance Council will be made up. | ||
| All the folks that are standing beside me here, other cabinet leaders, and many more represent. | ||
| President Trump's wise decision that we need a whole-of-government approach to unwind. | ||
| The Biden administration had a whole-of-government approach that had the war against U.S. energy. | ||
| Now we need to turn that around 180 degrees and unleash that potential. | ||
| We've got to unleash it from the Gulf of America all the way up to Alaska. | ||
| We have amazing resources in this country, and we haven't been getting a return on them. | ||
| Many of these are under public lands. | ||
| The interior has 500 million acres of surface, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, critical minerals, and offshore, close to 2 billion acres. | ||
| And that balance sheet is the biggest balance sheet in the world, and it's been completely underutilized. | ||
| Everybody knows we have $36 trillion in debt as a country, but no one knows. | ||
| How many hundreds of trillions of dollars of assets we have. | ||
| And President Trump is asking us to go get a return on that investment for the American people. | ||
| With that, we're going to have prosperity at home with lower prices. | ||
| And we're also going to have peace abroad, because the wars that we've been engaged in, our allies have been fighting over the past few years, have been funded by the oil sales of our adversaries. | ||
| So we have an opportunity, and we also are in an AI arms race with China. | ||
| The only way we win that is with more electricity. | ||
| And we also have an energy emergency in terms of electricity. | ||
| Too much intermittent, unreliable, not enough baseload. | ||
| We've been shutting down the baseload that we have. | ||
| President Trump is going to reverse that and it's going to allow us to win the AI arms race which is the most important thing that we have to do relative to our future so with that I want to say again thank you to President Trump and I want to thank my fellow members of the Energy Council Okay Anyway, um... | ||
| You talk about policy and Project 2025 and working in ideas and ideas have consequences. | ||
| We owe this. | ||
| This is a number of people coming together. | ||
| But I gotta give a hat tip to the War Room Posse and to the great Dave Walsh. | ||
| What you just heard right there from Governor Burgum is chapter and verse of what we've talked about for the last four years in this show, including the energy dominance, full-spectrum energy dominance. | ||
| Also, put in your notebook, one of the most important people in the cabinet, very low-key and not a huge public profile, is Burgum, a very serious guy. | ||
| A very serious guy, and he keeps his hand on the pulse of corporate America, and I think he's the lynchpin, along with the Lutnik over at Commerce, to the corporate America, to the president. | ||
| And I think he does it in kind of a common-sense way. | ||
| Dave Walsh, because here's the thing. | ||
| While we're flooding the zone and overwhelming the radical Democrats, the apparatus, the administrative state, the deep state, all of it, You also have to be putting into place your plan. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Part of it's here. | ||
| Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| As we've talked about, right? | ||
| On ending the war on one side and the deportations. | ||
| That ties in New York City with what's happening in Munich today. | ||
| But the driving force to take away the existential threat, which is our financial crisis and the economic crisis. | ||
| What is the gospel of Dave Walsh? | ||
| It's got to be, the foundation has to be energy. | ||
| And it has to be, what's that great mantra? | ||
| You've got Dave Walsh, constant baseload, not the Green New Deal, not wind and solar and all these fantasies. | ||
| Time to stop fantasy and get back to it. | ||
| President Trump signed it right there, the National Energy Dominance Council. | ||
| Dave Walsh, thoughts. | ||
| How big a deal is this, brother? | ||
| Steve, this is Christmas Day for us. | ||
| This is the president doing exactly what we voted for and on this show advocated for for about three years. | ||
| Appreciate the recognition, but this is a tremendous day. | ||
| He's gone after, with the foundation of the All-of-Government Energy Council, to unleash energy dominance. | ||
| A full All-of-Government focus, not on net zero decarb, but on all-in energy abundance. | ||
| And low cost, which is essentially necessary for manufacturing anything, and for ratepayers to begin to enjoy less inflation and hopefully a reduction in the cost of energy, which is crippling the economy. | ||
| So he's got, Bergen pointed out, the need for baseload, less intermittent electricity, fantastic. | ||
| The formation of the council, of course, fantastic. | ||
| The reinvigoration of the continental pipeline. | ||
| That would support natural gas deliveries, badly needed natural gas deliveries to New York and New England, who are in the top seven states in the country of the top ten states in energy costs, electricity costs, all of New England and New York. | ||
| Solve that issue. | ||
| Get natural gas desperately needed to New Englanders, New Yorkers. | ||
| And then even mentioning the necessity of clean coal. | ||
| If we're going to have AI, server centers, and oh, by the way, the rest of industry, aluminum, steelmaking, which you mentioned. | ||
| You've got to have abundant energy, baseload energy of all sources. | ||
| One of the most immediate sources of that is reinvigorating clean coal, such as China is doing, he said, a plant a month. | ||
| It's really, they've got 400 under permit in construction, Germany reopening coal plants, and of course Japan, the big, big coal binge between 2015 and 2019. Putting 13 gigawatts more coal online in Japan. | ||
| So we need to be doing the same thing here. | ||
| We need to get back to baseload, constant duty energy. | ||
| This EO and this formation of the all-of-government approach through the Energy Council does exactly that. | ||
| It's a great day for the country. | ||
| It's a great day. | ||
| I want to make sure people understand the bid and the ask here. | ||
| Under Biden, and you saw this in Germany, they had a whole of government on net carbon zero. | ||
| A whole government on net carbon zero. | ||
| That is essentially an energy plan that de-industrializes you. | ||
| You're seeing this in Germany right now, as Dave Walsh has warned us. | ||
| Ours is a whole government of full-spectrum energy dominance. | ||
| The gap in there is massive. | ||
| The gap in there means your children and grandchildren, yourselves, but your grandchildren and children and grandchildren have a shot. | ||
| We have a shot. | ||
| Because we were going down the same path. | ||
| Of the Greta Thunberg insanity that you see in Germany right now. | ||
| And you see the social upheaval in Germany. | ||
| One of the key parts of that is their de-industrialization at the same time kind of surrendering and sending the jobs to China. | ||
| Does that sound familiar? | ||
| This is why this is so massive. | ||
| Am I correct there? | ||
| That's the spread. | ||
| The spread is you had these maniacs in Washington who were self-dealing too. | ||
| And this gets back to when I talk about impoundment. | ||
| This is Trump grabbing the $300 billion that has not been spent on the Green News scam. | ||
| And he's saying, hey, guess what? | ||
| I'm going to repurpose this. | ||
| The bid here is between these maniacs that were doing net carbon zero. | ||
| Which means you're de-industrializing your society versus full-spectrum energy dominance. | ||
| Now, to be brutally frank, the progressive Democrats in the apartheid state of Silicon Valley got the joke and said, oh yeah, we just figured out that AI needs like 10x power. | ||
| So they're now our allies, and they ain't allies because they're good guys. | ||
| They were the driving force at one time in net carbon zero and all the venture capital money they were putting and how they talked it up and how they suppressed voices like Dave Walsh in this show not to talk about full-spectrum energy dominance. | ||
| They flipped. | ||
| Because the reality of artificial intelligence, particularly the brute force way we do it, you need massive new energy sources. | ||
| Dave Walsh, your thoughts, observations, and comments, sir. | ||
| Well, the stupidity, the sheer stupidity economic disaster of the last five years has been the investment of 91% of the capital spent on new power generation in this country the last five years has been on intermittent renewables that operate on average about 24 or 25% of the time and don't operate 75% of the time at about $100 billion a year in total spending on capital, where normally we spend about $65 billion a year. | ||
| So we've spent about 56% more money. | ||
| On equipment that's basically churning away from baseload, full-time energy devices, coal, gas, and nuclear, over the last five years, and spending about $42 billion a year going forward in incentivizing more of that, incentivizing more energy devices by the Biden administration, solar and wind and battery storage, that cost from 6 to 11 times more for ratepayers. | ||
| So that's not going to be off the table. | ||
| That'll be off the table, and instead... | ||
| And also through the tariff program, which goes after soft issues such as China, you can't import any United States or German-Japan-made gas turbines, steam turbines, generators, or even renewable equipment into China. | ||
| You just can't do it. | ||
| So on a soft basis, as he goes through reciprocity of actions, not just tariff percentages, they will be unable, hopefully, to import any further solar panels, thin-film PV, inverters, and batteries into this country. | ||
| For energy supply, which cost American ratepayers 6 to 11 times more money than conventional gas-fired power generation or coal-fired power generation. | ||
| That'll be brought to its knees. | ||
| So this has been a false economy and one very ruinous. | ||
| So the last five years, we've added only 3.5% or 0.6% per year growth to our electricity supply, where now we're needing 3 to 5% per year growth in electricity. | ||
| As we grow industry, AI data centers are just part of that. | ||
| Aluminum smelting, steelmaking, all of that. | ||
| Petrochemicals, chemicals, plastics, all need enormous electricity on a constant duty, not part-time basis. | ||
| Fink and the company recognized this, and they began talking about this nine months ago. | ||
| So the president's moving strongly to re-electrify the country and re-energize the country on a cost-effective basis. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| And basically essential to build the economy. | ||
| Essential is the predicate. | ||
| You have to lay that foundational element. | ||
| Dave Walsh, where do people get you, sir, on social media? | ||
| Find me at DaveWalshEnergy on GetterX and TrueSocial. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Great day. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
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|
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| Okay, cpac.org slash war room. | ||
| You get a $75 ticket. | ||
| We are absolutely packed wall-to-wall. | ||
| We've got a force multiplier academy. | ||
| I want everybody there to fire up the football, kind of get organized about the next phase. | ||
| The next phase is going to be quite intense, leading down to essentially the Ides of March and then driving these reconciliation bills, the tax cuts. | ||
| The foundational element of President Trump, remember, it's an energy policy, and it's a... | ||
| It's a supply-side tax cut. | ||
| Supply-side tax cut. | ||
| And on top of that, big cuts in federal spending, smart cuts in federal spending, taking out the doge, waste, fraud, and abuse, and then you get into programmatically where you're going to have to cut. | ||
| I'm going to have Captain Fennell up here in a moment. | ||
| We're going to talk geostrategically why this reorientation to the hemispheric defense is quite brilliant. | ||
| We'll have massive, massive implications to the defense budget. | ||
| And what I want to make sure people are not doing is just blindly going down the path of doing what we've done before. | ||
| Because President Trump is saying, we ain't doing that. | ||
| The whole thing in Europe, and, you know, Lindsey Graham's over there. | ||
| All my people over there tell me Lindsey Graham's running around, hugging on Zelensky, and he's the greatest partner ever had. | ||
| And it just, we're not doing this anymore. | ||
| We're not going to do it. | ||
| We're not doing it. | ||
| The European elites are going to have to step up and talk to their people. | ||
| If you've got a primal fear of Russia, then President Trump told you the number, 5%. | ||
| You're not going to do it because we've been bailing you out for over 100 years, and that day is over. | ||
| Over. | ||
| The American people are going to take care of themselves. | ||
| You're an ally, and we'll be an ally. | ||
| We're not breaking the alliance, but we're not underwriting. | ||
| It's the difference between being an ally and being an underwriter. | ||
| We've underwritten it. | ||
| That's why NATO in Western Europe is a protectorate of the United States. | ||
| That's why the Middle East and the Gulf Emirates and all these kings and potentates and even Israel, ally Israel, we underwrite all that. | ||
| And they and probably the UAE are two best allies over there that punch way above their weight. | ||
| But the whole thing's a mess. | ||
| And no, we're not getting dragged into another, we're not getting dragged into a land war in Persia, we're not going to get dragged into airstrikes in Persia, we're just not going to do that. | ||
| Not going to do it. | ||
| There are other ways and smarter ways to do that, and I say that as a young man that spent no time in the North Arabian Sea in the Persian Gulf looking at Persia, and it's like the moon. | ||
| No need for us to be doing this. | ||
| You've got to be smart about it. | ||
| That's why this geostrategic and the three island chains and India being the key and Diego Garcia being a key, there's a smart way to get through this with a third less cost. | ||
| And you start using unrestricted warfare, you start using your capital base, you start using your technology, withholding it from people. | ||
| And we can get there and not put ourselves in bankruptcy because now one of the biggest national security threats is this frickin' spending that's out of control and these gutless people up here that don't want to go back and tell anybody. | ||
| American people will be very understanding if you explain it to them and they don't think they're getting screwed. | ||
| And this whole Medicaid situation is going to be a big deal because this is about economic distress. | ||
| This is about gutting. | ||
| This is about 18 million or 20 million men in this country of working age who are not in the workforce because there's not jobs there. | ||
| We gutted all the good jobs. | ||
| You got young men now not going to college because they don't see the benefit of it. | ||
| Not that college is everything, but they're not going for a whole host of reasons. | ||
| We got to get them re-engaged into the workforce. | ||
| Then you do that, you're not going to need Medicaid. | ||
| The elites have done this and gutted our country and now want the people to deal with it. | ||
| Now want the taxpayer to deal with it. | ||
| It can be unwound. | ||
| It can be unwound smartly. | ||
| But you have to be tough and you're going to have to take a lot of incoming. | ||
| And we are going to take a lot of incoming. | ||
| Trust me on this. | ||
| Particularly say, oh, all Bannon wants to do is soak the wealthy, soak the rich. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| But hey, no offense. | ||
| Be brutally frank. | ||
| They benefited from all the bailouts. | ||
| They've benefited. | ||
| We've socialized the risk and given them unlimited upside. | ||
| Those numbers are not even questioned. | ||
| Cannot be questioned. | ||
| This is how you've had this great concentration of wealth, and we're going to give them another benefit, another tip? | ||
| Not going to happen. | ||
| Can't happen. | ||
| Because you can see the underlying numbers. | ||
| And don't think our approval ratings are that so far over the top that if the current trending in economics continue, and this is driven by this massive federal spending, things can change in a diamond. | ||
| We have to address it now. | ||
| And the two underlying things he's doing are quite smart. | ||
| This energy policy is a predicate. | ||
| A supply-side tax cut smartly as a predicate, and also a geostrategic alignment so we don't have a defense budget that's killing us and crippling us like I think it is now. | ||
| Although a big part of it's a work program, an industrial policy. | ||
| Ben Harnwell, let's talk about Ukraine first. | ||
| This Ukraine thing, please, we cannot get sucked into this. | ||
| President Trump, they're trying to suck you into it. | ||
| You know, Ben? | ||
| Okay, we've got a technical problem with Harnwell. | ||
| I'll do this then on that. | ||
| We don't need Ben. | ||
| I can take this. | ||
| I mean, I'd love to have him, but if he's got technical problems, okay. | ||
| You see over there, President Trump couldn't be clearer. | ||
| He's having a direct conversation with Putin. | ||
| And he's got Witkoff. | ||
| He's got Witkoff in, went to Moscow, and that's where they're having a discussion. | ||
| Now they're saying, Zelensky has to be at the table. | ||
| Zelensky has to be at the table, and then you guys start paying for it. | ||
| Don't talk about American security guarantee. | ||
| And Zelensky comes back, no American troops. | ||
| And they're saying, oh, Pete Heggs is a rookie. | ||
| No, let's get it up on the table first. | ||
| Here's what the framework is. | ||
| We're out. | ||
| We're tired of it. | ||
| We're tired of shoveling money over there. | ||
| And quite frankly, I don't give a damn about the rare earths. | ||
| Keep it. | ||
| Just walk away. | ||
| If you get sucked in, you're going to be sucked in year after year after year. | ||
| It's opportunity cost. | ||
| We've got bigger fish to fry. | ||
| The EU wants them in there, and NATO wants them in there. | ||
| Then have the Germans, have the French, have the Italians, have all these deadbeats, Macron and Georgia Maloney, and have whoever's going to run Germany, and throw in the Brits. | ||
| Boris Johnson is a big talker, and then put some money up. | ||
| And put some money for your defense. | ||
| Let's see a couple, three combat divisions. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| We're out. | ||
| And we've got to be adamant about this. | ||
| And Lindsey Graham is over there cheerleading, skipping around. | ||
| Oh, Zelensky's great. | ||
| Keep skipping around, bro. | ||
| We're out. | ||
| What don't you understand? | ||
| We're out. | ||
| Zelensky doesn't get to see the table. | ||
| We don't give a damn what Zelensky has to say. | ||
| We've seen what he's done to his people. | ||
| Last time I looked, there were a million dead or wounded, and the place looks like Dresden. | ||
| Great job. | ||
| Great job. | ||
| For what? | ||
| For what end? | ||
| Here, President Trump is reorienting. | ||
| He's saying, hey, kind of pox on all your houses. | ||
| We got bigger fish to fry. | ||
| Plus, he's talking about getting Putin and Xi in a room and sitting down and talking about hammering swords into plowshares. | ||
| And hey, we're not going to walk in naively and think these guys are going to have a kumbaya moment. | ||
| We always got to be prepared, always have to be prepared because these are not good people. | ||
| They're just not. | ||
| Their people are good. | ||
| I mean, if you look at World War II, the war on the Eurasian landmass, the Chinese people were our ally. | ||
| The Indian army was our ally. | ||
| The non-commissioned officers, the guys that stood at Irrawaddy and fought the Japanese and didn't let them come and take India, they're on our side, the Indian people and the Russian people. | ||
| Now, their leaders in the next, I don't know, 50 or 60 or 70, 80 years were not pro-American at all. | ||
| They were anti-American. | ||
| Doesn't mean the people weren't and didn't bleed on the battlefield on battles we need to have won. | ||
| For now, now we have a total reorientation, and this is Alfred Thayer Mahan. | ||
| President Trump, who's read Morrison, understands the victory, the naval victory in World War II, is saying, hey, I think I got it. | ||
| From Panama Canal to Greenland, the Arctic's going to be in play, and we got the three island chains in the Pacific. | ||
| You've got a desert. | ||
| The Pacific Ocean is as big as the Eurasian landmass. | ||
| And it's essentially an ocean desert, vast. | ||
| It's like crossing the Sahara. | ||
| We've got that. | ||
| You do that, America's hermetically sealed. | ||
| Captain Fennell, the floor is yours. | ||
| Well, Steve, I agree with what you're saying. | ||
| There's this recognition that... | ||
| You know, land wars and, you know, we always say you don't want to find a land war in Asia. | ||
| Well, you don't really want to fight a land war in the Middle East and in Europe forever either. | ||
| And President Trump's been very clear this focused on, as you call it, the hemispheric defense, focusing and talking about, hey, we have to have control of the Panama Canal. | ||
| Not our own physical control of it, but the ability to make sure that our forces and our goods and services and our naval forces can transit through there is important. | ||
| He talks about Greenland for a lot of reasons, but he was very clear about mentioning Russian and Chinese ships transiting through the GUIK gap. | ||
| And so he's talking in naval terms. | ||
| And then three days ago in Munich, you had Pete Egseth. | ||
| I know he's gotten some bad publicity for some things he said about Ukraine, but the most important thing he said from my perspective was this. | ||
| He said, we also face a pure competitor with the Chinese communists with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. | ||
| The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific. | ||
| Recognizing the reality of scarcity and making the resource tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail. | ||
| Deterrence cannot fail for all of our sakes. | ||
| And that's really what we've neglected for the last 40 years, is deterring the PRC. And as you said, our great ocean areas of the Pacific, from the West Coast to Japan, it takes an aircraft carrier 14 days or so to go across. | ||
| From San Diego to Yakuska. | ||
| That's a large area. | ||
| People cannot comprehend how big that area is. | ||
| But we have neglected that area and we have kind of, there's people even calling to pull back the four deployed naval forces. | ||
| And what I see is the Trump administration and the people that are talking and making these plans. | ||
| This hemispheric defense, it's based upon returning America to be a naval power. | ||
| And what we need is to define what is the purpose of our Navy for our nation. | ||
| And it has always been, as you mentioned, Mahan, it is about command of the seas. | ||
| And we have always had command of the seas. | ||
| And we need to have command of the seas today, and we do not have it in the region of the Far East, given what the PRC has done in their naval modernization program for the last 25, 30 years. | ||
| And so we need to restore our naval power. | ||
| That's not an occupation force. | ||
| That's not sending soldiers into foreign countries. | ||
| That's having the ability to command the seas where we need to at the time that we need to. | ||
| And what that does is maintain the peace and security of the region, which is what the Navy, this U.S. 7th Fleet, largely did from the end of World War II up until this last 10, 15 years as the Chinese Navy developed. | ||
| So we walked away from our responsibility. | ||
| To deter the PRC, to deter the Chinese communists, because they have plans to do a lot of mischief. | ||
| And if we're not there, if we're not there in strength, and we're not working with our allies, I was glad to see Prime Minister Modi and President Trump specifically talk about defense as a key element of our relationship, and that's good. | ||
| It was under the first Trump administration that we revitalized the Quad. | ||
| Japan, Australia, United States, and India. | ||
| And it's going to get re-energized again, which is going to put pressure and deter China from their activities. | ||
| But we have serious problems. | ||
| And you mentioned the Defense Department. | ||
| You know, why are we spending all this extra money for the, you know, the Ford-class carrier that has problems with this electromagnetic launch system? | ||
| All we're getting is an extra 40 sorties in a day. | ||
| To have that technological capability at what cost? | ||
| Billions of dollars. | ||
| We paid for the Zumwalt Cruiser, you know, billions of dollars for Zumwalt's. | ||
| We only produced three of them. | ||
| And then we found out after we produced them that firing a single round of this ammunition that would go into these advanced guns would cost over a million dollars a round. | ||
| It was unsustainable. | ||
| We've had problems with the littoral combat. | ||
| All these problems in our Navy that... | ||
| It's atrocious. | ||
| And all the admirals that I work for, some of them are friends, good people, but it's unbelievable that we allowed this to happen. | ||
| The people that were supposed to be guarding our naval sea lanes went to sleep and turned the Department of Defense over to the Army. | ||
| And if you talk about... | ||
| Captain, hang on for one second. | ||
| We're just taking a short break. | ||
|
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Hang on. | |
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | |
| you . | ||
| Captain Fennell, you're going to be writing a lot about this. | ||
| Yes, we've been asleep on the Navy because this is the thing with CENCOM. This is about the pivot to Asia. | ||
| The pivot to Asia is really a pivot. | ||
| In pivoting Asia, President Trump's come up with a new hemispheric defense, which is brilliant. | ||
| Monroe Doctrine 2.0 or 5.0. | ||
| Fortress America. | ||
| Quite brilliant. | ||
| Captain Fennell said about you leave San Diego with a carrier battle group 14 days later. | ||
| People do not understand because maps don't really show it correctly. | ||
| The Pacific is a massive ocean desert. | ||
| Massive. | ||
| That is protection for the United States of America. | ||
| And President Trump thinks this through. | ||
| Although, obviously... | ||
| With our partners in India, the Indo-Pacific is obviously vastly important. | ||
| The Seventh Fleet. | ||
| And this is why the British have got to keep Diego Garcia. | ||
| We can't be giving that back to the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| More absurdity. | ||
| But whole CEMCOM was this land war in the Middle East. | ||
| And we're not doing it. | ||
| We're not going to do that again. | ||
| The mistakes there are just horrific. | ||
| And it cannot happen again. | ||
| This is why there are certain people trying to suck you into a land war in Persia. | ||
| They're not going to happen. | ||
| Last thing you need. | ||
| Been doing that since, what, the early 90s? | ||
| Actually, you could throw Beirut in there, maybe the early 80s. | ||
| Captain Fennell, where can people go to get your writings? | ||
| Because now more than ever, particularly as we reorient the Pentagon to a new strategic, the post-war international rules-based order is over. | ||
| Because America's not going to underwrite it anymore. | ||
| That's the squealing you hear in Munich. | ||
| They want America, they want you. | ||
| They want the suckers that are American taxpayers. | ||
| And the parents that send their kids to go do this to underwrite it all. | ||
| It's not going to happen anymore. | ||
| We're out. | ||
| We're out. | ||
| It's America first. | ||
| We're looking for allies. | ||
| We're not looking for protectorates. | ||
| Europe's been a vassal state, and they've dined off the American taxpayer, and they've dined off the sons and daughters of MAGA for 80 years. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Not going to happen anymore. | ||
| I don't care how much they squeal. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Provence or Tuscany or the west end of London or in Berlin and Paris. | ||
| There's plenty of money in Europe. | ||
| Big money. | ||
| Let the Norwegian fund, you know, the sovereign wealth fund is like a train and a half dollars off a North Sea oil and the Norwegians are good investors, right? | ||
| They'll squeeze you. | ||
| Captain Fennell, where do people go to get you, sir? | ||
| I write for American Greatness occasionally. | ||
| And I would just say, you know, When I joined the Navy in 1986, we had 600 ships, about 600 ships. | ||
| And over the last 40 years, we now have less than 300 ships. | ||
| And we're not able to provide for that hemispheric defense with a force that's like this. | ||
| We just had an aircraft carrier have a collision just off the coast of Egypt at the entrance of the Suez Canal on Wednesday. | ||
| The USS Harry Truman collided with a bulk carrier. | ||
| And put some damage onto our aircraft carrier. | ||
| Don't know how extensive it is, but we don't even have the capability to do forward repairs, because we only have two repair ships in the U.S. Navy, and there's only two, and they're out in the Pacific right now, but we don't have the ability to sustain ourselves in those kind of operations that are necessary for our hemispheric defense. | ||
| We've got a lot of problems in the Navy and the Department of Defense. | ||
| To show you what a kid. | ||
| What a kid Captain Fennell is, and I revere Captain Fennell as a man that put everything on the line. | ||
| Moral courage and brilliance. | ||
| Unbelievable to put his whole career on the line. | ||
| Captain Fennell, I was there a decade earlier. | ||
| Captain Fennell was still in short pants, as we say. | ||
| 76 to 84, or 85, or 83, 83 or 84. Captain Fennell coming in in 86. You saw it. | ||
| When I joined the Navy, it was the 295 ships, the Carter debacle. | ||
| President Ronald Reagan came in and said we're going to build a 600-ship Navy, and hey, we came pretty damn close, did we not, Captain Fennell? | ||
| And that's when we ruled the waves. | ||
| It was a different deal then, and we've shrunk ever since then. | ||
| This is why Trump gets it. | ||
| Hey, Panama Canal, Greenland, let's get a base up there, let's block the Russian Navy. | ||
| Up in the Arctic, in Archangel Murmansk. | ||
| We can see all the fast attacks and boomers coming by and trail them. | ||
| And Europe should get the joke, when he announced that, they should understand, hey, the Russian army's your problem. | ||
| You deal with it. | ||
| We'll be there as an ally, but hey, you deal with it. | ||
| And that means drafting some young men, getting some equipment, building an army. | ||
| Building an army. | ||
| And you see what happened to Zelensky. | ||
| A million dead and wounded. | ||
| Ukrainians, according to President Trump. | ||
| And the place looks like Dresden in 1945. Captain, we've got to bounce. | ||
| Look forward to having you back on here to go through this. | ||
| Trump's making, I mean, this is the thing, the signal and the noise. | ||
| There's so much going on, and it's breaking them. | ||
| But there are deep, deep, deep moves being made by President Trump. | ||
| He's thought a lot in the years in the wilderness. | ||
| He did what Churchill did. | ||
| He read, he thought, he studied, he looked, he observed, he compared that with what he did the first time. | ||
| This is why you have a totally different deal this time. | ||
| And also the people, the America First priorities, the Heritage, the Center for Renewing America, thinking through national security policy, thinking through economic policy. | ||
| The National Energy Dominance Council didn't come out of nowhere. | ||
| The strategy in Greenland, he just didn't materialize. | ||
| He's not dreaming this stuff up. | ||
| It's not coming off the top of his head. | ||
| This is a lot of thinking, a lot of smart people thinking it through. | ||
| And they understand, the deep state and the administration understand it. | ||
| What do you think they're over there, my folks over there in Munich, when JD and the team and Hex and those guys left? | ||
| It's a feeding frenzy over there right now. | ||
| Lindsey Graham's people stirring it up. | ||
| They're stirring it up. | ||
| Oh, America hasn't left. | ||
| Don't pay any attention to them. | ||
| This is what happens. | ||
| The Praetorian Guard of the deep state, they're permanent. | ||
| They say, don't worry about these guys. | ||
| Trump is a thing. | ||
| Look, they brought Poso. | ||
| How serious can they be? | ||
| They brought Posobiec. | ||
| Helbrahim Kassam's over there. | ||
| How serious can they be? | ||
| These guys are all just floating through. | ||
| JD's talking about First Amendment speech. | ||
| These people, they're just drifting through. | ||
| We're permanent. | ||
| That's what Lindsey's saying. | ||
| We're permanent. | ||
| Deal with us. | ||
| Deal with us. | ||
| Come to CPAC. We want you there. | ||
| We're going to have a partner's discussion over four days. | ||
| CPAC.org slash worm. | ||
| 76 bucks. | ||
| Also on the 28th of February of the following week, I just got to run a show. | ||
| It's going to be amazing. | ||
| Poso and a whole band of pirates are going to be down there. | ||
| Tarrant County. | ||
| Brought to you by Patriot Mobile. | ||
| PatriotMobile.com. | ||
| Go check it out today. | ||
| This is a company that supports your values. | ||
|
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Those values would be Judeo-Christian values. | |
| Check it out. | ||
| Glenn Story and the team. | ||
| Just absolutely amazing. | ||
| Can't wait to see folks spend a whole hour or so beforehand. | ||
| Usually longer. | ||
| Like 90 minutes. | ||
| Meeting and greeting. | ||
| Getting to know y'all. | ||
| Get a selfie. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| Excited. | ||
| Second hour on fire, on fire, on fire here in the war room. | ||
| We're going to leave you with the right stuff. |
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