Feb. 18, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:48
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
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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've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
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MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | ||
| Tuesday, 18 February, Year of the Lord 2025, second hour of the morning show. | ||
| So... | ||
| What we're going to talk about here now is going to have major implications. | ||
| And this is one of the reasons I've been yelling and screaming for Doge to get what I call Cross the Potomac. | ||
| To get to the Pentagon. | ||
| And Doge is doing two things right now. | ||
| And we're trying to ascertain how it's coming out because we need this. | ||
| That's when Dave Brat's going to join us here in a minute. | ||
| Because How do I say this? | ||
| The cat's kind of out of the back. | ||
| You've seen the Hill newspaper starting Sunday morning and really coming from the Senate. | ||
| They're talking about the most important thing, as we've told you, is midnight on the 14th of March. | ||
| We have a problem. | ||
| We have an issue. | ||
| Issue number one, we've already hit the debt ceiling. | ||
| Janet Yellen told us that in the first couple of days of January. | ||
| It's kind of her love tap on the way out the door. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| It means we can't raise any more debt technically, but we're using emergency measures, and as you know, emergency measures can last a long time, could be years, because you can manage the cash flow coming in to pay off your interest and any obligations you have, and then all the way through Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, it all works out. | ||
| Now, there may be some contractors at the bottom of that waterfall that you have to stretch. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But hey, you got the Pentagon, you got the DHS, you got some people who have been contractors a long time. | ||
| And if they get stretched, you know, they get higher payments, etc. | ||
| So it's doable. | ||
| Number two, technically on midnight, midnight on the 14th of March is equivalent to midnight on 30 September. | ||
| It's the same fiscal year. | ||
| We have not approved a new budget. | ||
| We're working off of Joe Biden's numbers. | ||
| And right now, that process is the process that we're going to have to... | ||
| You know, somehow to pay any bills the next day, and I mean any bills, you're going to have to have a, wait for it, either a CR, or you're going to have to bundle together some of these appropriations bills. | ||
| Remember, this audience drove the single-subject appropriations bills in the House, and Andy Biggs tells us this, and Eli Crane tells us this. | ||
| I think they've completed seven or eight. | ||
| That are about 80% of the budget. | ||
| Now, the Senate hasn't exactly jumped in here and done, you know, their job totally. | ||
| So it's kind of all over the map. | ||
| But right now, and this is key, at midnight on the 14th, three things will happen. | ||
| If we kick down, and they're talking about, they're raising the flag right now for a year-long CR. Number one, it will be in President Trump's first year, you will have Joe Biden's budget and Joe Biden's numbers and Joe Biden's priorities. | ||
| Just embrace that. | ||
| Number two, the Congressional Budget Office tells us, and War Room did its own math, it's at least a $2 trillion deficit this fiscal year. | ||
| Number three, and here's the one that's as hard as those two are to embrace, the third one to me is the kill shot. | ||
| All of the work of Doge. | ||
| And here I'm not talking about their programmatic work of actually taking programs apart. | ||
| I'm talking about all this running around with audits and, you know, there's $7 trillion in treasury, you don't know where it's going, and all this, everything, all the dust you see kicked up, all the waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| You would actually technically be paying for that, all of it. | ||
| None of it would come out, and you would pay for all of it. | ||
| So all the doge work to date would be for naught until... | ||
| Next fiscal year. | ||
| And people already tell me, well, you know, in the appropriations process in July, you know, DOGE is going to make presentations, going to be part of it. | ||
| Not good enough. | ||
| So we have a mess. | ||
| Number one, to get that $2 trillion down, which we have to do because it's not sustainable. | ||
| The Congressional Budget Office came out and they did a 10-year forecast. | ||
| And we don't totally agree with everything you say, but directionally it's correct. | ||
| Debates about dynamic scoring and all these technical things can make it different. | ||
| But what they say is you basically have 1.8% growth. | ||
| In over 10 years, it's $2 trillion a year, right, given the current tax structure. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| In 10 years, it's $52 trillion. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| Interest is, you know, double what the Pentagon is at that time, time and a half. | ||
| Neil Ferguson actually has a chart at his new theory of the case, is that any nation that has an interest payment higher in defense will collapse. | ||
| It's different than the, this time it's different, which is about total debt to GDP. This is interest payments via defense. | ||
| We're checking it out, but it sounds, unfortunately, quite logical. | ||
| So what is President Trump doing? | ||
| Number one, and tie it back to Rubio's opening statement in his Senate confirmation, the post-war international rules-based order is over, and that is basically spread out to the United States around the Eurasian landmass, in NATO and Western Europe, around the Gulf Emirates and Israel and the Middle East, in the Malacca, in the South China Sea, down in Southeast Asia, and up with Korea and Japan. | ||
| That's the four hot nodes. | ||
| We have commercial relationships, we have trade deals, but all of it is underwritten by an American security guarantee in American troops or American naval and air forces. | ||
| Your sons and daughters of MAGA. Now, in every one of those trade deals, we're upside down. | ||
| Every one of those commercial relationships were upside down. | ||
| That's for the globalists who make their money doing that, where you get gutted. | ||
| That is what MAGA is saying, America first. | ||
| We're not doing it anymore. | ||
| President Trump's... | ||
| Geostrategic thinking is that, hey, what? | ||
| Hemispheric defense is the Monroe Doctrine 2.0. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| We're going to start by taking back the Panama Canal, cut off the Chinese, the People's Liberation Navy from teaming up with the Russians in the Caribbean, and we're going to go all the way to the Arctic. | ||
| The new great game of the 21st century, like Afghanistan was in the 19th, or Persia was in the 19th, between the Russian Empire and the British. | ||
| This is going to be the Arctic. | ||
| And in that regard, you have Greenland, maybe Canada. | ||
| You've already got Alaska. | ||
| But Greenland to the Panama Canal gives a forward deployment of American power, naval power. | ||
| You block the Russian submarines, the fast attacks and boomers coming out of Murmansk and out of Archangel, right there between Greenland and Iceland. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| The Russian Navy is our baby. | ||
| We got it. | ||
| The Russian Army, that sounds like a problem for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. | ||
| You deal with it. | ||
| This is why we need a peace accord. | ||
| This is why we need peace between these powers. | ||
| Now, President Trump, when he looks at geostrategically the hemisphere, also, you go to the three island chains in the Pacific, in the vast desert that is the Pacific Ocean. | ||
| In the United States... | ||
| It's pretty well protected. | ||
| You add an Iron Dome if it's even feasible, and you have a hermetically sealed hemisphere. | ||
| You get Bolsonaro down in Brazil, and you get Millet out of that crypto mess in Argentina. | ||
| Got some allies. | ||
| You run the Chinese Communist Party out of the Amazon. | ||
| We got it. | ||
| Now, when you look at that, there's a problem, and that problem is the southern border of the United States of America, and that is a failed state just south of us in Mexico. | ||
| The Mexican drug cartels are a kinetic force in that plan, and they must be eradicated. | ||
| To make the hemispheric defense work, you've got to take care of your problems inside that hemisphere. | ||
| Number one problem, Mexican drug cartels. | ||
| Todd Benzman. | ||
| Your reporting on this is amazing, because last night the Central Intelligence Agency, I guess it got leaked out, the CIA is now repurposing some assets, and they're looking to get involved with the Mexican drug cartels in some sort of kinetic activity, coupled with you've got the 10th Mountain, you've got the 7th Special Forces, you've got guys down training, pre-positioning. | ||
| What do we have on the war that's coming, folks, and it's going to be a kinetic war against the Mexican drug cartels, sir? | ||
| Well, the Washington Post is out with a very important story, and their reporting usually is good on CIA. And they're saying that the CIA is realigning from protecting Ukraine's borders in its war to protecting our borders down in Mexico. | ||
| Now, the CIA has always been down in Mexico doing intel operations in support of... | ||
| Mexican and U.S. law enforcement regarding the cartels. | ||
| But what it looks like here is a major treble-down where they're going to really be enhancing and increasing their ability to infiltrate the cartels, to provide intelligence against the cartels in a more dedicated, committed fashion, a wider, broader way to do counter-narcotics. | ||
| operations with the Mexicans and possibly even to do covert actions themselves infiltrating the operatives into the cartels. | ||
| So this all just fits in with a lot of other puzzle pieces that have been coming out in bits and dribs and drabs here and there about that all kind of point to the fact that the United States is resetting the table for something that is probably going to look like what we did with Colombia against the FARC all during the 90s and into the early 2000s where the Colombians went to war. | ||
| With FARC, which is a major cocaine smuggling organization and an insurgency against the Colombian government, leftists of course, it looks like they're going to require the Mexicans to drop the. | ||
| There are hugs, not bullets policy of the last six, seven years and make it a bullets, not hugs policy. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| We're going. | ||
| It looks like that's where... | ||
| Hit that again. | ||
| Number one, the Washington Post and David Ignatius is spokesman. | ||
| The Washington Post is literally the typist for what the CIA wants. | ||
| So it's more than just news media. | ||
| It's a marketing campaign. | ||
| When Langley tells them to type up, they type up. | ||
| So when it comes from the Post, this is holy writ. | ||
| Number one. | ||
| Number two, music to my ears. | ||
| Let's focus on the Ukraine border, not in the vital national interest of the United States, the eastern Russian-speaking border between those two Slavic entities, and now focus on our border. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| We've done this before, but now you're seeing special forces and, what, the 7th Special Forces Group. | ||
| You've got the 10th Mountain Division. | ||
| You've got CIA. You've got the air flights going over. | ||
| Something's happening. | ||
| Something's getting ready to happen. | ||
| And they've told the Mexicans, you're not going to hug this one out. | ||
| We want to see your best forces. | ||
| And we've got the least corrupt. | ||
| The federales are owned by the cartels. | ||
| So you went to basically one of the naval forces down there. | ||
| We call them Marines. | ||
| They call it Naval. | ||
| Those are going to be our partners down there when we drop the hammer blow to these folks, Todd Benzman? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| So the Green Berets sent a small contingent, at least initially, of trainers down into near the Bay of Campeche in the south to help the Mexican Navy of trainers down into near the Bay of Campeche in the south to help the Mexican which tells you that something is up, obviously, | ||
| And that particular force, the Mexican Marines, I mean the naval Marines, are probably the most insulated of all the Mexican military forces from corruption. | ||
| That tells you something that they selected them. | ||
| They're probably going to be the tip of the spear in whatever happens. | ||
| Well, they selected them. | ||
| Number one, these are the guys, hang on, these are the guys they brought up to the border to secure before 10,000 of them. | ||
| Todd, this is the one that's the least infiltrated by the cartels. | ||
| The cartels control the political process down there. | ||
| The cartels, they are a part of the political landscape. | ||
| Remember, they tell you it's lead or gold, right? | ||
| And people down there choose the gold, not the lead. | ||
| And this is the problem. | ||
| And the federales are up to this naval infantry. | ||
| Folks, bottom line, when Trump looks at hemispheric defense, he looks at the U.S. Navy, this is a very Alfred Thayer-Mahan strategy, right? | ||
| All the way from the First Island chain over the vast Pacific, Greenland, the gap up there from Archangel, the Panama Canal. | ||
| But he understands we got our backyard. | ||
| What we should have done, instead of being in Afghanistan and Ukraine and all this, finally you have somebody. | ||
| And they're pre-positioning for a fight. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And they're not going to be a law enforcement fight where the cartels actually outgun the cops. | ||
| You're bringing in some heavies. | ||
| They're going to pound, ground and pound these guys like they've never been hit before. | ||
| And we're going to see how tough the cartel is. | ||
| Cartel's tough against civilians. | ||
| They're very tough against the law enforcement that's outgunned by these guys, both on our side of the border, right? | ||
| Because these people are vicious on the other side of the border. | ||
| Hang over a second, Todd. | ||
| Todd Benzman is with us, the great author of Overrun, a book that changed the direction of the 24 campaign from his years of... | ||
| Putting himself in harm's way. | ||
| Of course, Ben Harnwell's in Roma. | ||
| Got Dave Brat. | ||
| We're going to talk some economics and capital markets. | ||
| Birch Gold. | ||
| Make sure you go check it out. | ||
| Take your phone. | ||
| Bannon, 989898. Ask for the free brochure. | ||
| How to invest in precious metals and gold in the age of Trump. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| Okay, breaking news. | ||
| The head of criminal division over at the D.C. under graves. | ||
| Now Ed Martin's taking control of our good buddy Ed Martin and a friend of the show. | ||
| Ed Martin is just a man on fire. | ||
| I think she's resigned. | ||
| So you're going to see a lot more of these Southern District of New York and D.C. as they clean the rat's nest out of there. | ||
| I'll try to track down Mike Davis. | ||
| I think Mike's going to join us tomorrow, in fact. | ||
| If he's feeling better, he's going to join us actually at the Force Multiplier, cpac.org. | ||
| The ticket's $76. | ||
| You get a free lunch tomorrow. | ||
| You get an extra day at CPAC because we're going to do a Force Multiplier Academy. | ||
| We are going to do the show live from there tomorrow. | ||
| Poso's going to do his 2 o'clock show there live. | ||
| We're going to have a ton of information and presenters. | ||
| To make sure that we take you next level, given the tremendous, great results you had in 24, the 22 midterm, 24 election, and now getting the confirmations approved. | ||
| Also, I'm going to go back to Ben. | ||
| Ben's been here in a moment. | ||
| Bridge Colby. | ||
| It's not been scheduled. | ||
| It's kind of a firestorm between, you know, the Tucker Carlson, the Charlie Kirk, kind of the guys on the new right. | ||
| Kurt Mills, about this guy, Bridge Colby. | ||
| You know, I do know Bridge. | ||
| I've read his book. | ||
| I've talked about his book at length, The Strategy of Denial. | ||
| And Bridge is not a... | ||
| You know, if you read Josh Rogan's book... | ||
| Chaos Under Heaven, which is Xi and Trump in the first term. | ||
| And he's got these definitions of groups. | ||
| He's got the accommodations, which is the Wall Street crowd. | ||
| You've got the realists, which is kind of the maddest crowd. | ||
| You've got the hardliners, kind of the Pompeo crowd. | ||
| And then he said you had a totally new group that had never been done in American history, and that was the Superhawks. | ||
| The Superhawks were Navarro, Miller, and Bannon. | ||
| And they don't believe in the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| They want to see the Chinese Communist Party taken down 100%. | ||
| That's why I'm the only civilian in American history to be fully sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party, as you guys know, one minute after high noon on the 20th of January 2021. Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, Peter Navarro, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Those three were still government officials. | ||
| I was not. | ||
| All of this revolves around the CCP and the threat to the CCP in the... | ||
| The criminals in Beijing. | ||
| We have two existential threats to us right now. | ||
| Our own making our debt in our financial situation and also an existential threat in the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| Bridge Colby is far from perfect. | ||
| But here's what I like about Bridge Colby. | ||
| I like this a lot about him. | ||
| Number one, he's one of the earliest voices of kind of what I call the establishment because he has an establishment guy. | ||
| His grandfather is William Colby. | ||
| You might have heard that name before. | ||
| By the way, to tie it back to Todd Benson, when Todd Benson, William Colby's grandfather, ran the CIA back in the days when it delivered some hammer blows before the church commission. | ||
| They talk about the CIA in Mexico. | ||
| A guy named either Lee Harvey Oswald or somebody pretending to be Lee Harvey Oswald actually went to the... | ||
| To visit, I think, the CIA, and the CIA reported on this in Mexico, I believe, Todd, it was September or early October of, wait for it, 1963. So the CIA has been very involved in Mexico for a long time and knows its way around there. | ||
| And now it's going to be utilized to action for our defense. | ||
| Bridge Colby is not a super hawk. | ||
| You can't be a Superhawk and be in a position he's going to go in. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| I keep telling my Superhawk colleagues, the Committee on the Present Danger, other guys, the Frank Gaffneys and our colleagues who hammer every day about the CCP, the Brian Kennedys. | ||
| It's just not realistic. | ||
| At that level, the Pentagon... | ||
| In this administration, you're going to get a let's take down the CCP. That is our responsibility to continue to drive that narrative to eventually it becomes accepted wisdom here in the imperial capital. | ||
| We're not there yet. | ||
| Bridge Colby is about the strategy of denial. | ||
| That's his book, To Deny Now. | ||
| It's very focused on East Asia, and he may not look at, as we look at the Chinese Communist Party, as having designs on all the Eurasian landmass. | ||
| He doesn't think, by our theory of the case, that they really are the controlling element of the mullahs in Persia or the KGB in Russia. | ||
| And that's why Saudi Arabia, the meeting yesterday, is so vitally important to break them off from their sphere of influence. | ||
| But Bridge Colby is one of the first guys to say, we've got to get out of Ukraine. | ||
| And, and this is sensitive, Bridge Colby agrees with, I think, not just Tucker and Kurt Mills, but Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| We can't get into a war with Persia. | ||
| We just can't. | ||
| Given the bad track record we've had over the last 30 years in the Middle East, it's been a disaster. | ||
| Right now, there has to be other means, and this is why the Saudi Arabia meeting is quite symbolic, to have it in Riyadh and to have Russia and the United States coming together. | ||
| There has to be other means than an air attack or a ground invasion. | ||
| Into Persia to stop what they're clearly trying to do. | ||
| And I say this as a young man that spent a couple of three days off the coast of Persia during the Iranian hostage crisis in the workup for that failed endeavor. | ||
| And I will tell you, you don't understand that part of the world until you've been there and you see it's like the landscape from the moon. | ||
| It's vast, it's barren, and it's not appropriate for America to go to war in Persia. | ||
| Just not. | ||
| And our allies, Israel... | ||
| There has to be another way. | ||
| And a guy like Bridge Colby, I think, can work. | ||
| And this is one of the reasons he's being blown up right now. | ||
| He's not perfect on China, but he's good enough for right now. | ||
| He's been pretty perfect on Ukraine, and I think he's pretty damn good on Persia. | ||
| And right now in that slot, which is an all-important slot, I'm a big supporter. | ||
| Let's get Bridge in there, and then we'll figure it out. | ||
| Because the other alternatives, I don't see any better right now, given the reality of where we are. | ||
| So Bridge Colby, and right now they haven't scheduled it, but this is something we'll be reporting on as we go forward. | ||
| Todd Bensman. | ||
| The other thing, before we go to the post, anything else on this? | ||
| Because you've been at the tip of the spear, and folks, we're connecting dots here. | ||
| You've got Hex has sent the military to the border. | ||
| They're sending training. | ||
| The 7th Special Forces and 10th Mountain are as tough as we got, right? | ||
| They're down there training people, quote-unquote. | ||
| You've got the CIA taking an ad out in the Washington Post saying, hey, guess what? | ||
| We're listening to... | ||
| We're listening to War Room. | ||
| We're listening to MAGA. We're listening to the election results. | ||
| We're out of Ukraine, and we want to help defend our country against the chemical warfare of the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| We're all in. | ||
| So that's a big development. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| Now, the deportations, Ben, you're the first guy to mention, and this gets back to the two bills and not the reconciliations. | ||
| Lindsey Graham's telling the president over the weekend. | ||
| This will tie to my breath thing. | ||
| He told the president on the weekend, say, hey, look, this continuing resolution is not going to have any more money for you than what we need to do. | ||
| We need to get this one bill done, and we need to get it done now. | ||
| We need $175 billion to secure the border and to basically deport—you want to deport 10 million people? | ||
| You need $175 billion, and you need it now. | ||
| Oh, by the way, let's throw in $125 billion on top of the 900? | ||
| $125 billion on military. | ||
| And they're going to say... | ||
| They say, Banner will shut you guys up. | ||
| They're going to say, this is all for hemispheric defense. | ||
| You want hemispheric defense? | ||
| You want the Panama Canal? | ||
| You want Greenland? | ||
| You want naval forces? | ||
| You want to drive out the cartels? | ||
| You want to have three island chains? | ||
| That's not in our budget because our budget still ties to the post-war international rules-based order. | ||
| Todd Bensman, how's deportations going? | ||
| Any closing thoughts on taking on the cartels, sir? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Before I get to the deportations, I just want to point out the Washington Post, which is now breaking the story, I guess, about the CIA troubling down in Mexico, also is carrying a story talking about how, wow, nobody's coming across, but Trump keeps putting troops down on the border, and what are they going to do? | ||
| They've got nothing to do. | ||
| They're twiddling their thumbs. | ||
| But what they're not realizing, that maybe they want to have... | ||
| 500 troops of the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Huachuca as a credible threat to the cartels when fireworks start up down there. | ||
| Because that's a light infantry division. | ||
| Yes, they'll probably have them scaling cliffs in Arizona, going after drug traffickers and whatnot. | ||
| But if the cartels decide to cross in and do something to our law enforcement, etc., they're going to be having to contend with these guys. | ||
| I just wanted to point out that there is a reason other than tracking drug traffickers and shutting down... | ||
| Illegal immigration for a group like that to be in Fort Huachuca, 500 of them with all their gear and ammo. | ||
| So regarding the deportations, I just wanted to point out like there is pearl clutching going on around the globe over the fact that we are cuffing and leg ironing immigrants on these flights. | ||
| Everybody's going crazy. | ||
| India is just absolutely beside itself with outrage over a couple of flights that came in and everybody was handcuffed, usually young men handcuffed when they come in there. | ||
| And the New York Post piece that I have out today is just pointing out that there's a damn good reason for that. | ||
| Just a few years ago... | ||
| When the Biden administration was trying to shut down the migrant camp under the Del Rio Bridge, they did air deportations on the Haitians and didn't restrain them. | ||
| And as a result, they tried to hijack flights midair. | ||
| They rioted on these planes. | ||
| They tore the stuffing out of every seat and attacked the pilots, attacked ICE agents, mutinied on buses, took over buses that were on their way to Laughlin Air Base. | ||
| For the deportation flights. | ||
| And they learn their lesson. | ||
| And I just point out that that is the problem. | ||
| You don't want to have a hijacking or a riot at 40,000 feet. | ||
| Hello? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, Todd, by the way, the cover of your book is from the International Bridge, that amazing picture. | ||
| This book, one of the most important books of the 21st century, because this book did more than any to show people the reality of what Biden had done at the border. | ||
| Overrun. | ||
| How Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border crisis in U.S. history. | ||
| Full stop by Todd Bensman. | ||
| Todd, social media, we've got 30 seconds. | ||
| How do people get to you, sir? | ||
| Yeah, BensmanTodd at X. I'm on, you know, Getter and Truth Social. | ||
| You can find me there. | ||
| That's my website. | ||
| ToddBenzman.com. | ||
| You can sign up for my free newsletter there. | ||
| Every time I write something, I'll push it out to you. | ||
| And I work for the Center for Immigration Studies, great organization. | ||
| They've sent me all over the world covering this mass migration event. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, hopefully for too long, you're going to work for the United States government in town hall. | |
| We hope. | ||
| We pray. | ||
| Love you, Brother Benzman. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Back to Rome. | ||
|
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Your host, Stephen K. Band. | |
| Okay, there's a tweet out from Lavrov, I think, on RT, so take it for what it's worth, that state TV in Russia, but saying how they've already agreed to ambassadors, ASAP, and to take apart any kind of diplomatic restraints on getting together. | ||
| Why is this important? | ||
| Look, we're not Rebecca Sonny Brooks Farms. | ||
| We understand the Russians are as tough as they get the leadership. | ||
| They're kind of a follow-on from the Bolsheviks. | ||
| And Stalin and these guys kind of ran the deal at Yalta and other places. | ||
| But it's a beginning of a directionally... | ||
| You've got Europe and Paris talking about their own defense. | ||
| The key takeaway is that we're not looking for protectorates. | ||
| We're not an empire. | ||
| We have a revolutionary... | ||
| Basis for this country. | ||
| We're anti-imperial. | ||
| And now it's time to start acting anti-imperial. | ||
| In Paris, what you're seeing is they're having a discussion and they're coming to the conclusion the smug elites in Europe is they can't afford and never could afford their own defense. | ||
| This is why we bailed them out in World War I. We then went back and bailed them out again in World War II. We then went back and bailed them out again in the Cold War. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| No thanks, total smugness of what the heartland of America did. | ||
| So now it's time for them to fend for themselves. | ||
| There's no more. | ||
| They're not a protectorate. | ||
| They're not a vassal state. | ||
| That's not what we're looking for. | ||
| They're going to come quickly to the conclusion they're not going to have health care. | ||
| They're not going to have six weeks of vacation in summer. | ||
| They're not going to have retirement at 50 on full pensions. | ||
| They're not going to have any of that if they've got to pay for their defense. | ||
| And they're going to have an awakening of the reality of being an ally. | ||
| Not being a vassal state. | ||
| At the same time, we pivot here to take care of business in this hemisphere. | ||
| Ben Harnwell, there's a lot of tough... | ||
| Look, the Russians are as tough as they get. | ||
| The guys that run that are just a notch down. | ||
| They're a little bit the junior varsity criminal sect that the guys in Beijing have perfected, right? | ||
| But we've got to deal with them, and it's going to be a tough negotiation, but it's a start. | ||
| Your thoughts, sir? | ||
| Steve, you mentioned that the United States isn't looking for protectorates. | ||
| I have to say, if you look at the Telegraph article from yesterday outlying the plan, the supposed plan, the US administration plan for Ukraine and the rare earths and the minerals, which you and I both posted. | ||
| Oh God, don't even go there. | ||
| Well, the point is, that is moving into territory, plain and simple. | ||
| That's in your face. | ||
| So there are different things circulating right now. | ||
| No, no, no, but that's... | ||
| Look, look, look, look. | ||
| The minerals, they're not worth it. | ||
| They're not worth it. | ||
| Just walk away. | ||
| We're going to be adamant. | ||
| Walk away. | ||
| There's no minerals. | ||
| Walk away. | ||
| That's a whole thing to get. | ||
| You're going to have there. | ||
| You're going to have to have protection. | ||
| Walk away. | ||
| If companies want to do it, God bless them. | ||
| Let them go over there and do it. | ||
| I'm sure that the mineral rights will be something. | ||
| That's a long-term play. | ||
| That's to suck you into that. | ||
| I understand President Trump's thinking. | ||
| He's tired of doing this in Iraq. | ||
| He's tired of doing it in Afghanistan. | ||
| He's tired of doing it where the American elite has. | ||
| And you end up costing $9 trillion dollars. | ||
| The net present value of 9 trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. | ||
| And we have nothing. | ||
| I understand the thought. | ||
| But in Ukraine, it's just cut it and let's get the hell out of there. | ||
| Let the German mining companies, let the French mining companies, the Italian mining companies, let them deal with it. | ||
| But no, that's not a play. | ||
| And look, Maloney, here's the key. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a trap. | |
| It's a trap. | ||
| Here's the thing, Ben. | ||
| I've got to bounce. | ||
| I've got to talk about our debt. | ||
| The finance minister... | ||
| Of the party that may actually win. | ||
| It won't be an alternative for Deutschland, but it may be the Christian Democrat right. | ||
| This guy's a pretty low-key guy. | ||
| I'm sure it's him. | ||
| He's the one saying, hey, sovereign debt crisis. | ||
| Sovereign debt crisis is... | ||
| And you know this. | ||
| The French government got turfed out because of this. | ||
| The British government got turfed out because of this. | ||
| The German government's kind of getting turfed out because of this. | ||
| In Italy, she's eventually going to get turfed out about this. | ||
| The bond market has taken out more governments than howitzers. | ||
| Just remember that. | ||
| It's one of the things we have to worry about here when you've got 36 trillion in debt and you're adding a trillion dollars every 100 days. | ||
| The global capital markets get a vote. | ||
| And what they're talking about is a sovereign debt crisis. | ||
| At the very moment they've got to sit there and start talking about the defense they've never paid for in their lives, it's a joke. | ||
| Ben, we'll get back on this tomorrow. | ||
| Thanks for standing up late last night to do the breaking news out of Riyadh and out of Paris. | ||
| We'll have much more of this in the evening show, but Ben, we'll let Ben have the night off. | ||
| Ben, you're putting up stuff 24-7. | ||
| Where do folks go? | ||
| Thanks, Steve. | ||
| Getter. | ||
| Getter under my profile at Harnwell. | ||
| I've got a great article at the top of my feed right now indicating, talking about this thing that Keir Starmer, the UK Prime Minister, was calling for in Paris yesterday, which was the U.S. Stopgap. | ||
| Basically, the US would be underwriting the UK on the security guarantees. | ||
| Very, very dangerous territory, and that's following through. | ||
| No, it is. | ||
| It's following through on the Biden regime's trickery in its dying days. | ||
| The Atlanticist, we're a Pacific power, and we're looking for hemispheric defense. | ||
| The Atlanticist? | ||
| Which I hate to say is kind of racist, but hey, I'll throw it out there. | ||
| The Atlantis' days are over. | ||
| We're finished. | ||
| We don't want to hear about it. | ||
| And all you got up here in Washington, they don't think the Pacific exists. | ||
| They don't care about the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| All they care about is their buddies in Northwest Europe and in places like Paris, places like Milan, places like the City of London and then Greater London. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| That day is over. | ||
| Ben Harnwell, thank you so much, brother. | ||
| Thanks, Steve. | ||
| Dave Bratt, now we bring it back here. | ||
| Wall Street Journal folks understand, big article today. | ||
| They've targeted our own former co-host, Peter Navarro, Dr. Peter Navarro in the White House. | ||
| They've targeted Navarro as he's the problem. | ||
| You know, Trump's got this kind of master plan, but Navarro's the problem, and particularly he's going to destroy the agriculture and manufacturing sector. | ||
| When the Murdochs come for you, they roll hard, baby. | ||
| And they're trying to Alinsky. | ||
| They're trying to Alinsky, our own Peter Navarro. | ||
| Dave Bratt, you got a whole series of charts and analysis you want to walk us through? | ||
| What do you got for us, brother? | ||
| Yeah, well, I love this show. | ||
| It's like cramming for an exam every time I come on because it's just exciting. | ||
| And hearing you connect the dots, they all just flow, right? | ||
| The war to the border invasions to the economy. | ||
| I think you mentioned the other day, Neil Ferguson, right? | ||
| A great Oxford historian who connects the dots, that when your interest payments get bigger than your defense sector, your economy's in decline. | ||
| And roughly, that's just true intuitively, right? | ||
| If you look at Western civilization, you need two things to be a successful empire or country or whatever, and that's a sound economy. | ||
| And a strong military. | ||
| If you're missing any one of those, you're in trouble. | ||
| Rome got in trouble precisely because they got over their skis, right? | ||
| Their spending on wars and defense overcame their ability to generate revenues. | ||
| And so at the beginning of your show, I love the autocratic breakthroughs, right? | ||
| This is great. | ||
| Autocratic breakthroughs. | ||
| And they're accusing Trump and our team of this. | ||
| The autocratic breakthrough we're doing is we're taking apart the autocracy, right? | ||
| We're going away from empire toward hemisphere. | ||
| Go back to Western Civ. | ||
| Name me an autocrat who doged himself, right? | ||
| Who voluntarily downsized his military, downsized his federal employees, downsized the workforce. | ||
| I don't think Rome did that. | ||
| I don't think Napoleon did that. | ||
| I don't think Lenin, Stalin, Hitler did that. | ||
| They were all the opposite. | ||
| And the left wants the big state. | ||
| Our team is getting it straight, so our interest payments on the debt are not bigger than defense. | ||
| And the other day on the show, by the way, interest payments over the next decade, the only thing bigger is Social Security. | ||
| Then the interest payments, then underneath that, Medicare non-defense discretionary, Medicaid defense discretionary, everything else is under interest payments. | ||
| I just want to make sure people know, Niall Ferguson is a tremendous historian. | ||
| But the Mac Daddy in this, a guy named Paul Kennedy, he wrote a book that was a must-read when I came out of the Pentagon and went to Harvard back in the mid-'80s. | ||
| It was towards the end of President Reagan's administration. | ||
| He wrote The Rise and the Fall of Great Powers. | ||
| If I can strongly recommend to this audience, you get a book. | ||
| It's in paperback. | ||
| He's a British naval historian that's absolutely brilliant. | ||
| He went through, essentially, I don't think he does any China. | ||
| He does the history of the West. | ||
| Empires and rising powers. | ||
| He always ties it back. | ||
| The fall part comes from this. | ||
| It comes from you've spent too much money on arms. | ||
| You've diverted too many swords. | ||
| It plowshares the swords. | ||
| And it's how you finance it. | ||
| He gets to the part of it. | ||
| It's not just the aggregate amount of what you're doing and the manpower you're killing. | ||
| Your own best guys. | ||
| But he gets into how you finance it. | ||
| The rise and the fall of great powers. | ||
| And baby, it is the United States today, and that's what these elites that run this nation have not got. | ||
| They have not learned the true lessons of history that have been out there to learn. | ||
| And this is what America First means. | ||
| Dave Brat, your thoughts? | ||
| Yeah, and so, you know, the conservatives are dumb, to quote our vice president, who I thought was funny the other day. | ||
| But the laughter is smart. | ||
| Now, I'm going to get to that in a little analysis here. | ||
| But the Wall Street Journal, they're just silly, and it's all about framing. | ||
| And our good friend Peter Navarro, yesterday, they say reciprocal trade, they're calling that maximalist tariffs. | ||
| Reciprocal trade, which means just fairness, right? | ||
| It's like Aristotelian fairness. | ||
| It's like the golden rule. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But hold it. | |
| Hey, Wall Street Journal, do you think the golden rule? | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| But they're not – hang on. | ||
| They're not silly. | ||
| It's actually very well thought to me. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| We're not talking about tariffs. | ||
| This is a new... | ||
| Trump has a new geostrategic concept. | ||
| You see it playing out in Saudi Arabia in the negotiation and here with the CIA and the military going down. | ||
| These are the actions of a new geostrategic realignment. | ||
| He also has a geoeconomic realignment. | ||
| It's not tariffs. | ||
| We're not talking about a 25% tariff on a Mexican avocado. | ||
| We're not talking about a part made under the hood in Canada that goes back and forth 20 times. | ||
| It's different than that. | ||
| He's talking about what we talk about here, that civic society has provided for the greatest market in mankind's history. | ||
| And Trump thinks like, hey, if you're going to get a skybox at a sporting event or if you're going to get a front row seat at a concert, you've got to pay a premium. | ||
| Get through the golden door. | ||
| It's got to be a premium. | ||
| And if you bring your manufacturing here and make it here, then guess what? | ||
| You don't probably have to pay the premium. | ||
| But it is to a degree. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal is smart to attack this because they're free traders, right? | ||
| This is the Economist, the Financial Times of London, really the papers and magazines that inspired the Wall Street Journal were built in the time of free trade. | ||
| These were ideological, almost religious fights. | ||
| Late 18th and 19th century in Britain when London was the centerpiece of the world. | ||
| And the fights here from the Corn Laws and everything ahead, this was British politics for 150, 200 years. | ||
| It's one of the reasons we had a revolution. | ||
| Remember, our revolutionary generation would have been on the ground floor of an empire when Clive and these guys are doing India, they're doing North America, and these guys said, hey, look, we see how a worthless... | ||
| This aristocracy has corrupted commons, has corrupted commons, taken it away from the little guy, and they give these monopolies to their buddies like the British East India Company. | ||
| And they saw this coming. | ||
| In British history, what's not done enough is the power of these monopolistic companies to basically drive international strategy and geostrategy in North America. | ||
| This is what the revolutionary generation is about. | ||
| This is what Alexander Hamilton got. | ||
| Now, he wanted to replicate a little bit. | ||
| But these guys understood it. | ||
| These were smart lawyers. | ||
| They were real estate speculators. | ||
| They were freebooters like Sam Adams and John Hancock. | ||
| They understood exactly what was going on. | ||
| And they said, hey, guess what? | ||
| We'd rather opt out, even to the point of being hungish traders, to have our own deal here. | ||
| Because we see what's happening with this worthless aristocracy in London. | ||
| We see how the corrupted commons will never be free. | ||
| We will never be free. | ||
| We will co-opt it. | ||
| And that is what we owe the revolutionary and the framers. | ||
| They had an ability to have a pretty damn good deal, and they risked it all for future generations, down to the current day. | ||
| And this is what this fight's about today. | ||
| We have almost the exact same fight, right? | ||
| And now we've allowed these oligarchs and the concentration. | ||
| Well, if a revolutionary generation walked into Washington, D.C. today, they'd walk that square, and they would spit. | ||
| They'd be so mad about what we've allowed to deteriorate. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return with Dave Brat, Professor Dave Brat, in the war room in just a moment. | ||
| Okay, Brat is going to be here this afternoon in studio to co-host Brat is going to be here this afternoon in studio to co-host both hours of | ||
| We're going to get to all of his brilliant analysis because I've been yelling and screaming into this microphone and taking away all his airtime. | ||
| We're also going to have updates on the resistance, you know, the Supreme Court, all the legal, the federal judges, everything they're trying to do on Doge. | ||
| Brett and I are actually going to take some time. | ||
| Besides his charts, we're actually going to take some time and walk through process. | ||
| We're going to walk through the CR that's coming, and we're going to talk about the two reconciliations, everything else President Trump and the economic team are trying to do. | ||
| So that's all five to seven. | ||
| Plus, we've got a special. | ||
| I didn't know this until last night in the middle of the night. | ||
| The manifesto the young woman wrote in Nashville, the Christian school. | ||
| It's not like a three-page book. | ||
| It's 900 pages. | ||
| Michael Patrick Leahy is doing an extraordinary job out there in Nashville. | ||
| He's going to be on. | ||
| We're going to get into this cult of this, I don't know, this transgender cult that's murdering people. | ||
| This stuff's over the top. | ||
| There's something wrong here. | ||
| It's happening all over the country. | ||
| We're going to have some of the experts on to break it all down at 6 o'clock, and Dave Brett's going to be with me besides economics. | ||
| More updates on geopolitics. | ||
| Dave Bratt, closing thoughts? | ||
| No charts, Dave. | ||
| You're going to save them for tonight. | ||
| There's the hook. | ||
| The Warren Posse is going to want to be here to see it all. | ||
| And Bratt's going to be with us all day tomorrow in CPAC. CPAC.org slash war room. | ||
| $76 a ticket all day. | ||
| You get a hot lunch. | ||
| You get to see us all. | ||
| Everybody will be there making presentations. | ||
| Bill McGinley is going to join us. | ||
| I think I'm going to try to get Scott Pressler in by video. | ||
| Brad's going to be there. | ||
| Grace Chung making a guest appearance. | ||
| You know what it does? | ||
| Get Grace out of L.A. So this is how big it is. | ||
| Dave Brad, closing thoughts. | ||
| Yeah, good. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal article didn't even make a trade argument, right? | ||
| They first mentioned Navarro's prison term, Hegseth, I mean, great economic analysis, right? | ||
| Wall Street Journal. | ||
| And then the buried lead comes out about two-thirds down the article, and they start talking about what they really want. | ||
| They want exemptions and carve-outs, etc. | ||
| And so that's where I'm saying they're off course compared to the left. | ||
| The left is brilliant. | ||
| Let me read you a few lines. | ||
| I'm going to skip all the charts, but I'll just read a few sentences. | ||
| People may not know this. | ||
| Economists don't know this. | ||
| Well, I remember something smart from my training. | ||
| But back in the days, they changed the definition of manufacturing and investment. | ||
| And this is going to shock you when you hear this. | ||
| The definition of manufacturing has evolved over time to include more than just physical transformation of materials. | ||
| It now also includes services, engineering, logistics, and technology. | ||
| Computers, big tech, etc., are now counted as manufacturing. | ||
| But it's more than that. | ||
| Capital investment is counted as manufacturing. | ||
| But here comes the bombshell. | ||
| Yes, this is all brought to you by artificial intelligence, by the way. | ||
| Green investment is part of U.S. manufacturing, and it's a key driver of job creation and a more sustainable economy. | ||
| How is the green investment part of U.S. manufacturing, you might ask? | ||
| The answer? | ||
| Tax credits. | ||
| The Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| IRA offers tax credits on clean energy, etc. | ||
| All this when I show you the charts, Brookings and all of our Fairweather friends are showing, don't worry about it. | ||
| Manufacturing is still going up. | ||
| It's just employment. | ||
| All the jobs numbers are going down. | ||
| Don't worry about those human beings. | ||
| Manufacturing is going up. | ||
| Jobs are going down. | ||
| Well, that's because manufacturing has been redefined by the left in the government statistics. | ||
| I'm going to get into that with you later today. | ||
| But if you don't understand that, they can lie with the statistics. | ||
| You can't lie with the human beings and the jobs, right? | ||
| Because they're easy to count. | ||
| Very hard to lie. | ||
| And I'm going to show you charts on that lie in five as well. | ||
| We'll break it all down. | ||
| Also talk about the deficit debt, all of it in the CR, all the games being played right now. | ||
| Because we can't have austerity. | ||
| For the people and tax cuts for the wealthy, it's not going to work. | ||
| It's just not going to work. | ||
| So we've got to figure this out collectively. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Dave Brad, social media. | ||
| We'll see you here at 5. Social media, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep, Brad, economic getter, and now on X. Whoa, on X. Still ban on X here. | |
| Thank you, Dave Brad. | ||
| See you at 5. Mike Lindell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You bet. | |
| It's a very special day for you, sir. | ||
| We're so glad to have you as a partner and as a friend and a colleague. | ||
| Why is this day important in the history of Mike Lindell? | ||
| Well, eight years ago today, February 18, 2017, is the day I gave my life to Jesus Christ. | ||
| And my book, which, by the way, you're all going to get when you go into CPAC-3 tomorrow and this week. | ||
| In my book, I tell the story of that. | ||
| It's in my book. | ||
| It's called One of the Odds from Crack Addict to CEO. I always use mathematics my whole life to prove that God exists. | ||
| I said, wow, what's the odds of that happening? | ||
| A one in a million? | ||
| Or a one in a billion? | ||
| Or when do you add them together and it becomes a miracle? | ||
| Well, I remember in 2017 being in the White House. | ||
| Here's this next crack addict. | ||
| And I go live with President Trump to the nation. | ||
| And all my friends at home are going, what is this crack addict doing on TV with the president? | ||
| Jesus is real because this would be impossible. | ||
| And so eight years ago today, when those things kept happening, I did a full surrender to Jesus Christ, and I forgave myself for a lot of things that happened way back in the day, and I was able to then go forth to something I couldn't do, and that was speaking in public. | ||
| Two months after that, I spoke at US Bank Stadium, 60,000 people, and led them in prayer. | ||
| That is something there's no way I could have ever done. | ||
| And so it's a very special day for me, and I want to bring it back to the war room with the... | ||
| With the crosses that we're going to keep on sale, it means so much to me, 30% off. | ||
| But also, we're going to go back in time with the pillow that God gave me the idea for, the MyPillow, the classics, for $14.88. | ||
| We're bringing that special back for just a couple days here, exclusive to the War Room Posse. | ||
| You guys, this is where it all started. | ||
| We've sold 84 million MyPillows. | ||
| Take advantage of this. | ||
| Free shipping on your entire order. | ||
| Promo code WARROOM. You guys go to the website. | ||
| Scroll down until you see our great leader Steve there. | ||
| Click on him. | ||
| And there you are. | ||
| There's the crosses. | ||
| 30% off for the War Room Posse today. | ||
| And the Classic Collection. | ||
| Get them all. | ||
| King Size 1988. But free shipping on your entire order. | ||
| And I'll see you all at CPAC. I'm leaving in a few hours. | ||
| We'll see you tomorrow, Mike. | ||
| In the Force Multiplier Academy. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Yeah, thanks. | ||
| Mike Lindell will be there. | ||
| We're going to have everybody. | ||
| Gathering of Eagles! | ||
| How's that sound? | ||
| Make sure you go to cpac.org slash war room. | ||
| 76 bucks is the ticket. | ||
| You get there. | ||
| Parties, brunches, lunch. | ||
| Don't want to say there's no such thing as a free lunch. | ||
| There is one in part of the War Room Posse. | ||
| Force Multiplier Academy tomorrow. | ||
| We're going to stream it. | ||
| We're going to do the show live there. | ||
| We're going to stream all day. | ||
| If you can't make it, get you on streaming and in the chat rooms. | ||
| I think it's very appropriate today. | ||
| We're going to leave you with the right stuff. | ||
| From a book, a classic by Tom Wolfe, a masterpiece of a film by Philip Kaufman, and magnificent music that won the Academy Award for Bill Conti. | ||
| The right stuff. | ||
| The courage, grit, and determination of the American people. | ||
| We'll see you back here. | ||
| Charlie Kirk is next. | ||
| Jack Posobiec after that. | ||
| We're back here live, 5 to 7. Dave Brattle be my wingman. |
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