Feb. 28, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:34
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Where do we really stand with what President Trump inherited as you see the economic battlefield in front of us? | ||
| It feels like less a battlefield than a minefield, frankly, what President Trump has inherited. | ||
| I mean, it is difficult, Steve, to, I think, to get across to people just how bad the economy is because what the economy actually looks like today and what people's lived experiences is just simply not matching up with what the data say. | ||
| There's just too many problems, again, with the data. | ||
| Going back to what we were just talking about, right? | ||
| There are things wrong with the data themselves. | ||
| I think is why President Trump won such a great victory in November, right? | ||
| Where you had him winning the popular vote, every swing state, a huge electoral majority. | ||
| It's because the media was not successful in telling people, don't believe your lying eyes and don't believe your empty wallets. | ||
| Everything's fine. | ||
| So we are staring down the barrel of more inflation, courtesy of the Fed's interest rate cuts last year and relatively loose monetary policy. | ||
| Let's not forget that. | ||
| If we look at the monthly inflation reports, the annual inflation rate that comes in every month, that has gotten worse each month since the Fed started cutting interest rates. | ||
| So, clearly, we have more inflation coming down the pike that the president will have to deal with. | ||
| We have all of the messes internationally that the president is already dealing with, especially in places like the Ukraine. | ||
| We have a banking crisis, which still really hasn't gone away. | ||
| Emergency lending programs, but that is still very real. | ||
| We have a commercial real estate sector that is in absolute turmoil. | ||
| The housing market is a disaster. | ||
| We just got pending home sales numbers this morning that were down to a record low. | ||
| Pending home sales today are about 30% below where they were in 2001. | ||
| Not 2021, 2001. | ||
| So here we are essentially a quarter century later, and the housing market is 30% less activity today than it did back then. | ||
| That's a disaster, even before you factor in things like population growth, for example. | ||
| So again, what this president has been handed is an absolute dumpster fire, frankly, of an economy. | ||
| Things are terrible. | ||
| The deficit is exploding. | ||
| It's the worst start ever to a fiscal year in terms of that deficit. | ||
| Started in October, ran through January. | ||
| The worst four-month start ever to a fiscal year. | ||
| And at the same time, you have a Treasury Secretary in Scott Besson, who is a master of sovereign debt markets, and he's going to need, I think, I'm | ||
| sure, with all of the negative aspects of this economy that President Trump has. | ||
| And on top, the only one you missed, we had a record trade deficit in the month of December. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mega Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Thursday, 27 February in Year of the Lord, 2025, another historic day in Washington, D.C. I wanted to play that again to remind everyone of exactly where this stands and how bad this economy is and what President Trump's trying to do on spending, on investment, on all of the taxes to try to sort this mess out. | ||
| Right there, E.J. Antony, one of the smartest guys around, great economist. | ||
| Talking about sovereign debt, you know, we had Sir Keir earlier in the day, and I think England's, they've already had a sovereign debt crisis once. | ||
| That's what turfed out Liz Trust. | ||
| It also, I think, crushed Ricky Sunak, who never figured out how to turn the economy around. | ||
| It's getting worse, I think, now. | ||
| This is why this whole discussion... | ||
| Of the French coming over here and who's in a financial crisis. | ||
| They just lost, Macron's lost control of actually the government. | ||
| He's still the president, but he's lost control of their assembly, which most of the power lies, particularly on the finance part of it, economic part of it. | ||
| Germany just had an election. | ||
| Alternative for Deutschland, one of the reasons they're coming is that it's the mass immigration, but it's also what it's done to wages over there and how the economy is upside down. | ||
| Because they've de-industrialized. | ||
| Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal. | ||
| I think you've got six or seven countries in Europe right now that could have sovereign debt crises. | ||
| I've actually talked to Nigel. | ||
| I don't think you're going to wait the next four years to have an election. | ||
| I think that the IMF steps in, and I don't think we're too far away in England for the IMF actually potentially stepping in. | ||
| And once that happens, that triggers a number of things. | ||
| I think it could trigger an election, an earlier election, where Nigel Farage, having taken over the Tory party, which he's in the process of doing, will run and become the next prime minister. | ||
| This thing's a mess. | ||
| And then in the massive trade deficit, President Trump on Tuesday is 25% tariffs on Mexico, 25% tariffs on Canada. | ||
| Mexico is given a punch list of what they have to do, but they kind of run out of time. | ||
| Peter Navarro is actually, I think, I don't know if he's quoted, I think he actually went on TV and talked about the Five Eyes program of getting Canada out of there. | ||
| So there's so much happening geo-strategically, geo-economically, I want to get in one of the steadiest of the steady eddies, Captain Jim Fennell, to discuss all this. | ||
| And I want to talk about this, basically, this degeneracy, and it looks like the intelligence community. | ||
| I'll get to that in a second. | ||
| When Peter Navarro is talking about Five Eyes, explain to our audience, and Sir Keir was here today, Starmer, right? | ||
| And they're one of our oldest allies, and they're the linchpin of the Five Eyes program. | ||
| What is Five Eyes? | ||
| What does it do? | ||
| Why is it beneficial to the United States? | ||
| And why would Dr. Peter Navarro, who's the trade and manufacturing guy, actually bring that up in a TV interview about Canada, who I would argue, punching much above their weight, has been one of our steadiest allies in the history of this country, sir? | ||
| Well, Steve, the Five Eyes program is an intelligence-sharing agreement. | ||
| Many times it's mischaracterized as an alliance. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party tries to characterize it that way frequently. | ||
| It is an intelligence-sharing agreement that goes back decades, and it's between the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. | ||
| And we share classified information across many different areas, but primarily in space-based signals intelligence arena. | ||
| That's the primary area, not just signals intelligence, it's also in it. | ||
| That's a sharing agreement. | ||
| The agreement is based upon our shared interests, shared histories, shared collective outlooks, and that we have mutual security interests. | ||
| And so when Dr. Navarro talks about, hey, we may have to kick Canada out of the... | ||
| Of the Five Eyes, people should sit up and take notice. | ||
| We had similar discussions about New Zealand back 20, 30 years ago when the New Zealand government said they wouldn't allow U.S. nuclear ships, anything nuclear powered or nuclear weapon ships into New Zealand. | ||
| There was a lot of people in America that talked about kicking the Kiwis out. | ||
| We didn't do that. | ||
| Now we're talking about Canada and it's largely because of issues of trust with the Canadian government that's in leadership right now. | ||
| Now, Justin Trudeau's leadership and the fact that they had open borders and the fact that they are taking a kind of almost a hostile attitude towards the United States when it comes to our relationship and the fact that the Chinese have so much influence there, as we saw with the Huawei CEO case in the last couple of years. | ||
| So I don't think we're going to actually do that, but I think the issue is that serious for us that we're trying to get a signal across. | ||
| To Ottawa and to the Canadians that, hey, you need to wake up here. | ||
| We're not going to just allow you to put our national security interests at risk, and we're going to use every tool in the kit bag, if you will, to get reciprocity and to make sure that our interests and our national security is guaranteed. | ||
| Captain, there are many people, including guys on the right, the Tucker Carlson's and others, that are questioning a lot of this about the intelligence community today. | ||
| And as we work these efforts to break the deep state here in the United States, is the Five Eyes lead to kind of a formation of a deep state where these intelligence services become more powerful than the government? | ||
| The governments are democratically elected, quote unquote. | ||
| They moving out. | ||
| You have liberals one day and you have liberals in Australia today, but they're coming up for election shortly. | ||
| They may be tossed out. | ||
| Trudeau's a progressive. | ||
| He may be tossed out, so you're going to have conservatives or people closer to our part of the spectrum, although not populist nationalists. | ||
| But that you have this permanent bureaucracy, a permanent administration of intelligence, and particularly the most secret of all, the signal intelligence and the ability to work in unison. | ||
| And we see this from the Russia situation in the crossfire hurricane. | ||
| That that was done between direct contact of the intelligence services, MI6 and the CIA, MI6 and guys like Brennan, Hayden, all of them. | ||
| Is this five eyes, although an agreement for mutual protection, lead to something creating a monster that can't be controlled by any one government in any one nation, sir? | ||
| I don't think Five Eyes in itself is the problem. | ||
| The problem is the politicization of the intelligence community across these various governments. | ||
| And so to that extent, an arrangement like Five Eyes leads to that ability to do these things. | ||
| And so I think we have to have a really serious look at the new director of national intelligence and director of CIA. They have to come in and they have to come in with a hose and they have to sweep out what's going on inside the IC. I mean, the politicization of intelligence was anathema when I was in my 29 years in the service. | ||
| That was not allowed. | ||
| No one did that. | ||
| It was impossible that these things were being abused like this. | ||
| And you never – no one talked about politics by the time that I retired in January 2015. It was starting to lean that way during the Obama years in the last couple of years. | ||
| But it was something that was just not done. | ||
| And it was a huge, huge red line that people didn't cross. | ||
| And the people that were in leadership you trusted, the collection capability. | ||
| These were saying we were not spying on Americans and we were not providing that information. | ||
| And in the last 10 years, it appears that it is really gone out of control. | ||
| And so this cannot be allowed to continue. | ||
| And this current event that happened here this last couple of days with the public announcements about the illegal chat rooms at the National Security Agency on Intel Link, which is a it's basically an intelligence sharing community chat room. | ||
| But it's called Intel Link and it's on behind the door. | ||
| It's at the TSSEI level. | ||
| It's supposed to be for the discussion of very serious classified information. | ||
| I had Intel Link when I was in the Navy and we shared information about what was going on in current operations or current collection issues about our adversaries. | ||
| And now we find out from this release from Chris Ruffo and the City Journal that this information is now delving into some really weird stuff that would never have been allowed or even conceived of. | ||
| And what I'm really concerned of is that this, what we've just discovered, is the tip of an iceberg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the cancer has gone so much farther than anybody could have imagined. | |
| Before I get back into that, because that's one of the reasons I want to have you on today, but when you talk about politicization, you left in 2015, you were in naval intelligence, although you were in the Pacific Command. | ||
| Did you ever work on joint intelligence that you would actually see the politicization? | ||
| Because some people say 2015, wow, it was already embedded at that time, because that's when they're starting to cook up. | ||
| It was in early 16 that they started a crossfire hurricane. | ||
| So it had to be going there. | ||
| Was that because you were siloed in the Navy? | ||
| You didn't see it? | ||
| Or you really can make the case it really wasn't that bad then? | ||
| I was in, well, just throughout my whole career, I was in a Joint Intelligence Center Pacific early in my career, the Intelligence Center Pacific back in the late 80s, which is the first Joint Intelligence Center in the Pacific Command. | ||
| And then throughout my tours at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., where I was part of a... | ||
| The groups that follow China amongst all the major IC partners. | ||
| So I was linked up with every person at the highest levels of intelligence regarding what was going on with China, from the CIA to DIA to every individual intelligence agency. | ||
| And there was plenty of sharing there. | ||
| In my time in the Pacific Fleet, in my last assignment as the Director of Intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, I was directly involved with... | ||
| operations and activities that involve the joint world, the IC back in DC, what was going on out in the forest, the embassies. | ||
| Inside the IC, intelligence community, even though it's not its own organization, the various representatives of the IC are linked up and share a lot of information on a daily, minute-by-minute basis. | ||
| At each one of my command opportunities with Pacific Fleet, with 7th Fleet, with CTF 70 on board the Kitty Hawk, where we had watch floors that were connected to the national intelligence community at the highest levels, directly back to, you know, the Fort Me, the National Security Agency and other agencies. | ||
| So I'm confident to say that that was not existing like that by the time I retired. | ||
| And what's happened over the last 10 years has really been a dramatic transformation. | ||
| And this idea that, and I think the Rufo report that came out today, it said it started about 10 years ago. | ||
| Employee resource groups were meeting to talk about... | ||
| Pride and other things, and they would meet here and there almost like a potluck, a culture, food and speech. | ||
| Then it started to get more and more. | ||
| Instead of just one day a month, it was one week a month, and then it was a whole month. | ||
| You could be hired as a mathematician, a staff officer, or a systems engineer, but you would spend your time going to these events and having meetings all day about your individual peer group. | ||
| They got themselves into positions to help craft policy, started pushing the idea that if you want to get promoted, you have to participate in these events. | ||
| And then everything became pride. | ||
| You would go to a training session and it would be about privilege and how to be a better ally. | ||
| And then someone would give a class on how to talk gender neutral to people. | ||
| You always had analysts that didn't want to report what they were supposed to be doing because they were going to have to report on somebody's dead name. | ||
| They were having this crisis of conscience about reporting on the adversary's actual name because they thought it would deadname them and they didn't want to go disrespect that person. | ||
| This was like a cult that was hell-bent on pushing gender ideology. | ||
| That's insane what I read there and that that's happening. | ||
| And we cannot allow that to go on. | ||
| You have a job when you're in the service, when you're in the IC, and you swear an oath to the Constitution to defend this nation. | ||
| And if your job is to report out signals intelligence or imagery intelligence or electronic intelligence or whatever it is, if you're a collector, you cannot allow your personal beliefs to come in and influence your responsibility. | ||
| And that appears to what has happened by the revelation of these chat logs. | ||
| And so I'm very concerned that the system is out of control, running out of control. | ||
| And what I'm even more concerned about is in the last two days, I'm talking with my colleagues. | ||
| In the community, and a lot of people are very upset that this has come out, and they're more concerned that the chat logs were released to a reporter than they are about the actual content of what's happening. | ||
| And sure, we need to make sure that how this was revealed was done through appropriate procedures, but that's not the real problem. | ||
| So shooting the messenger because he revealed corruption and cancer inside the system is not more important. | ||
| The fact of what's actually going on and that we had, clearly these weren't just low-level analysts doing this on their own. | ||
| There were supervisors up and down the chain that somehow Approved of what was going on. | ||
| Approved for these days off. | ||
| Approved for people not coming to work but could be in these chat rooms to talk about these things instead of doing what they were supposed to do, which is to tell and report on what our adversaries are doing so that policymakers and decision makers in the field and back in D.C. could make decisions on how to defend this nation. | ||
| I want to make sure because we've talked about the depravity. | ||
| And degeneracy of what was in these chat rooms. | ||
| We've had a number of people on that have, in fact, when Terry Schilling came on, it was almost uncomfortable for the audience when they read what was being talked about. | ||
| But you're saying that Rufo now and yourself are actually asserting that there was almost a cult that took over either part of or is trying to take over the intelligence community and make sure that everything was seen through the prism of LGBTQ, sir? | ||
| Well, I think the latter part, yeah, I think there's an ideological worldview that these folks had. | ||
| To call it a cult like some religious cult, I don't know if it was that organized. | ||
| Maybe it was. | ||
| I don't know that much about it. | ||
| But from what I've seen, it's very clear that people that had an opposing worldview to the traditional view that, hey, we're Americans and we serve as Americans inside the military, inside the IC, and we don't take our personal Religious views, sexual views, any of that stuff, and let it influence our mission and our job, that changed. | ||
| Something changed in the last decade where people were now saying, that's my most important aspect of what I do, and it influenced their ability to actually function in their job. | ||
| And the fact that it was allowed to go on and that, you know, if nobody saw it, I find that hard to believe, but let's just say, if those people that were in supervisory positions... | ||
| Didn't know about this, then what does that say about our system of not knowing what their personnel are doing? | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| If they did know about it and they promoted it, then you have to ask yourself, why were they promoting that? | ||
| What was the reason? | ||
| And that is, to me, the evidence to the politicization of the IC, that we allowed people to put this in and divide us and create these little cliques. | ||
| Then we gave these cliques space to... | ||
| Communicate to each other. | ||
| And then the cliques took over. | ||
| And then they took over policy. | ||
| And they then started addressing promotions and control the system. | ||
| And anybody that didn't conform or comply with that, they were the bad ones. | ||
| They were the racists. | ||
| They were the homophobes. | ||
| They were whatever labels they put on them. | ||
| So we went – we flipped the system upside down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How is it – you're totally dialed out. | |
| I know you're in a bunch of groups. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Yeah, I was just going to say, while all this is churning, the PRC is on the agenda. | ||
| The PRC is on the march. | ||
| The PRC is... | ||
| Becoming more and more aggressive. | ||
| They're expanding their operations, their threats around Taiwan, their threats to Australia, right, that we're seeing this week with their task force down there operating off of Sydney and towards Tasmania. | ||
| We see them operating drones around Japan this week. | ||
| All kinds of activities that are very clearly worrisome that the Indo-PACOM commander, you know, a couple of weeks ago put out a warning and said, hey, I see the Chinese rehearsing for an invasion, not exercising, rehearsing. | ||
| We just had the Secretary of the Navy's hearing today. | ||
| Bipartisan was like, we're very concerned about where the Chinese Navy is and where we are. | ||
| And so we have clear, present danger threats to our nation. | ||
| And we rely upon, as a nation, an intelligence community that is on the job and is watching the threat. | ||
| And if we have to worry about a cancer inside of our IC... There's only one solution. | ||
| You have to cut the cancer out. | ||
| To cut the cancer out, I mean, you're dialed in at the highest levels, even though you're retired, of people, particularly people that are supportive of the intelligence community in the great war against the CCP. How could those people, how could the people you know, they're more concerned about the actual turning over of this, I guess, intelligence chat room? | ||
| The actual thing itself versus what it shows about this kind of cult or this group that essentially had an opposing worldview and everything had to be through that prism. | ||
| How could people at the senior levels be more concerned about the turning over and the process of turning it over versus what the content was, sir? | ||
| Well, a lot of these people are my former shipmates and friends, and I've been shocked in the last two days about the reaction. | ||
| And on one hand, they have a point, which is to say, if you take something out of a TSSCI system, JWICS or Intel Link, these systems that most people don't know, if you take something out of them and you release them like Snowden did to a reporter or something, and you're an employee that does that after you've signed disclosure agreements that you would not do that on a penalty. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| So we have to make sure that this was done the right way. | ||
| However, if the person that did this felt that there was no other alternative and that if they went through the appropriate whistleblower protocols that they would be terminated, then we have to ask ourselves, why did they feel that uncomfortable that they couldn't go through the system? | ||
| And I don't know any of those answers. | ||
| I'm not making a judgment of how it happened or anything. | ||
| I don't think we know yet, and I think that the Director of National Intelligence and her team are investigating that. | ||
| So I think my point is, is that my colleagues quickly assumed that the problem was, well, we had an illegal whistle-person releasing information that wasn't formally designated as a whistleblower. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| That's troublesome to me because it demonstrates an attitude of, you know, we will not... | ||
| We condemn bad activity for political reasons. | ||
| Oh, if we condemn this, that means we must be for Trump, and therefore we don't want to be for Trump, so we're not going to say that. | ||
| So let's twist this around and blame the messenger. | ||
| And this is called politicization. | ||
| It's pure and simple, and we have to stop it. | ||
| There's no room for it. | ||
| I'll give you an example. | ||
| When I was a lieutenant on a watch floor in Hawaii— Captain Fennell, hang on one second. | ||
| I'm going to hold you to the break. | ||
| I'm going to get to that. | ||
| I want that example. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Roger Kimball is also going to join us, one of the top public intellectuals of the MAGA movement. | ||
| You heard the three, four-minute analysis by EJ and Tony on the morning edition of War Room. | ||
| I think it's the single best summary of where we are as an economy. | ||
| If you hear that, it ought to send chills down your spine. | ||
| Now more than ever, I think you need to have the information of why gold has been a hedge against times of financial turbulence and economic turbulence for, I don't know, 5,000 years? | ||
| Even in the age of artificial intelligence and digitization of Wall Street? | ||
| Birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| The end of the dollar empire. | ||
| The sixth free installment. | ||
| You can get all five. | ||
| the sixth free installment modern monetary theory the idea that broke the world another radical idea came out of France this one was embraced in the world's capitals particularly Washington D.C. and on Wall Street with the lords of easy money or you can take your phone out Bannon at 989898 that's B-A-N-N-O-N at 989898 get the free brochure investing in gold in the era of Trump the ultimate guide All free. | ||
| From Birch Gold, they want to make sure you understand what's happening in the world. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Captain for now, Roger Kimball next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, Patriot Mobile and patriotmobile.com slash Bannon. | ||
| You get a free month of service. | ||
| This is excellent service from a company that supports your values. | ||
| Remember, Glenn Suri and the team. | ||
| Also, if we can get it up, tomorrow in Tarrant County. | ||
| I think out in the grapevine. | ||
| I will be there with Jack Posobiec, Amanda Milius, and others to kind of have an evening of MAGA. I'll be giving a keynote address. | ||
| They're sold out for the main event, but they're adding seats for general admission. | ||
| We're going to meet and greet and all that. | ||
| I want everybody to do that. | ||
| PatriotMobile.com. | ||
| One of the things we can do is also you can... | ||
| Call the number 972, what is it? | ||
| Patriot Mobile. | ||
| 972-PATRIOT, P-A-T-R-I-O-T, to talk about the free month of service and what it means to be on the Patriot Mobile as a carrier. | ||
| They kind of lay on top of the backbone of all the major carriers, so you get great service. | ||
| It's the War Room's favorite cell phone service. | ||
| Plus, Glenn Suri and the team are fantastic, and what they've done in the state of Texas is unbelievable. | ||
| Tej, I know you find interesting when you see all these meetings with world heads, you know, Sir Karl-Kurr Starmer today, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom coming in, President Trump trying to stop the kinetic part of the Third World War and bring peace. | ||
| I think Trump's going to get nominated. | ||
| I mean a real nomination. | ||
| Anybody can get nominated, but a real nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize for what he's doing. | ||
| I know as a warrior that spent a better part of your professional life in various bad neighborhoods in the Middle East, you've got to really appreciate that, don't you, sir? | ||
| That you've got a guy like Trump that's finally there and people respect so they can stand down. | ||
| We can start to beat our swords into plowshares. | ||
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Maybe we can actually start winning these. | ||
| He's going to end these wars, but the wars under the other presidents, we weren't allowed to win because they didn't want the wars to end. | ||
| Because the wars are just for profit and money. | ||
| So that's incredible that Trump is going to stop the wars. | ||
| And then if there is a war under Trump, I guarantee he will actually allow us to win it. | ||
| And the war now is on the southern border. | ||
| And we're going to win that. | ||
| And we'll see about these cartels. | ||
| But winning, winning, winning all the way around. | ||
| Every day is like Christmas under Trump. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| But yeah, let's wrap these wars up in the Middle East and Israel. | ||
| Stop what's going on in Ukraine and Russia. | ||
| I think we need to build relations with Russia. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Do you spend how many tours as a SEAL and then how many contractor tours, sir, over there? | ||
| Four tours as a SEAL and then about 13, 14 as a contractor or something like that. | ||
| So 18 tours altogether in the Middle East are those environs. | ||
| Yeah, in the war zones, yep. | ||
| Talk to me about, is that the attitude of a lot of the enlisted men? | ||
| That you weren't allowed to win? | ||
| Your one hand at least tied behind your back and this was all, there was some reason that that was and you guys come to the conclusion is the forever wars, sir? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, when we're in it, especially in the early 2000s, even up to like 2010, 2012, I didn't personally realize that. | ||
| I didn't understand the politics and all that stuff. | ||
| I think Benghazi woke me up, and then I started opening up my mind to be able to understand this stuff. | ||
| But I was actually, this morning, I was talking to another enlisted SEAL that I used to work with, and he's been in and out of the combat zones forever. | ||
| He said the same thing. | ||
| He's like, dude, he's like, I feel like we went over there for nothing. | ||
| He's like, all our friends got killed for nothing. | ||
| We weren't allowed to win. | ||
| And I think that's, especially now, that's the consensus. | ||
| You know, when we're in it, we don't understand it. | ||
| We're just like, yeah, let's go. | ||
| Let's go kill these guys. | ||
| Let's go fight. | ||
| Let's go fight for America. | ||
| Let's get payback for 9-11. | ||
| But this day and age, I think with all this stuff coming out, especially now with all this stuff with Dojin, it's... | ||
| It's hard not to see the writing on the wall. | ||
| These wars are literally just moneymakers, and they're just revenue machines. | ||
| That's why, look, we just wrapped up Afghanistan with this terrible pullout where we left like losers, and then immediately they sparked up Ukraine, and that's just for money. | ||
| They're all money-making operations because we've offshored all our industrial to China. | ||
| Everywhere else. | ||
| It's definitely the consensus among my friends and my old teammates is that these wars were forever wars and that we're not allowed to win them. | ||
| I mean, look, the last time we're actually able to do an unconditional surrender was Germany, World War II. Vietnam, I think that's when the military-industrial complex figured out that this is a big money-making operation. | ||
| We just keep the wars going, just keep them going, keep them going, and then USAID and State Department is over there undermining us. | ||
| They're actually working with the enemy, funding them through these NGOs, and then the military and the CIA are on the other side, and it's crazy the way it happens. | ||
| Talk to me. | ||
| You came back and you decided to do something else, radically different. | ||
| You wanted to start a coffee company, and now it's one of the premier coffee companies. | ||
| Every time I give Warpath to somebody, I say it's the champagne and coffee. | ||
| You don't need cream. | ||
| You don't need sugar. | ||
| And virtually every person, one or two not, but virtually every person, we serve it in the war room nonstop. | ||
| And when we're on the road, love it. | ||
| So talk to me about the coffee. | ||
| I want to make sure every War Room person, we've got 7,000 now five-star reviews. | ||
| I want to make sure the hundreds of thousands and millions that listen to this show or watch it every week get the opportunity. | ||
| So tell us about it, and where do they go? | ||
| Yeah, well, when I was in the still teams, I got accustomed to having the best gear and working around top-notch guys. | ||
| I tried to carry that over to the civilian world, and with the coffee, I didn't want to just have any random coffee that tastes like crap that you have to put milk and sugar in. | ||
| I had an amazing cup of coffee in the Middle East several years ago, and I was trying to replicate that, and that's what we've done. | ||
| I actually created this coffee that we use premium beans, and we roast it on a perforated drum. | ||
| The way it tastes, it's smooth, even the dark roast. | ||
| So it's not bitter, it's not acidic, and you can drink it black. | ||
| That was the goal. | ||
| And even the espresso that we've launched, you can drink the espresso black. | ||
| You don't need to put milk and sugar in the espresso because it's premium and it's healthier to drink it that way. | ||
| Drinking it black is the way to drink it. | ||
| The milk and sugar is just literally there to cover up the taste of burnt coffee. | ||
| And most, probably 9 out of 10 roasters, they burn their coffee. | ||
| Some do it intentionally because they use cheap beans from all over the place to mask the taste and some don't know what they're doing. | ||
| But burnt coffee needs milk and sugar. | ||
| Properly roasted coffee, you can drink it black. | ||
| So the website is warpath.coffee and we're running 20% off for the War Room Posse. | ||
| It's promo code WARROOM and the website is warpath.coffee. | ||
| And like you said, Steve, we've got 7,000 five-star reviews and it's growing. | ||
| And no matter how much we roast, it just sells out and sells out. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's just growing. | ||
| People love the product. | ||
| We're not marketing a junk product or crappy product. | ||
| We're marketing a premium product. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm so proud of this because I'm a coffee aficionado. | ||
| And it's just been so – the time and care you did for do the dark roast is amazing. | ||
| But everybody knows just they absolutely love it. | ||
| One more time, where do they go right now to read the reviews and see the great product offering you got, sir? | ||
| Yeah, warpath.coffee is the website. | ||
| And then use promo code WARROOM, and that's for the War Room Posse, promo code WARROOM, and you'll get 20% off your order. | ||
| And then we have free shipping on $70 and over. | ||
| Promo code WARROOM, WARPATH.COFFEE, and try it. | ||
| And we're constantly dropping new blends. | ||
| Actually, we just dropped these Trump mugs. | ||
| Victory 47 for Trump. | ||
| Put in a promo code WARROOM and we get a 20% discount. | ||
| Brother, thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| For the insights into the forever wars. | ||
| President Trump tries to wrap them up. | ||
| Of everything President Trump's doing, the verticals, we had Ube Shandahar, who is Rick Grinnell's right hand on the Kennedy Center, in the show last night, on the show in studio with us. | ||
| I spent a lot of time with Ambassador Grinnell, talked to him about the Kennedy Center at CPAC. Spent a lot of time with Grinnell, particularly the night that we had the international dinner, which he was the focus speaker, hosted by the War Room. | ||
| Roger Kimball joined us. | ||
| Roger, why is, of everything President Trump's doing, why is this one of the most important things, to take active charge? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think that the Kennedy Center has been taken over by the left. | |
| It's become a playpen for the left. | ||
| The president himself mentioned the presence of drag shows for divas or some such last summer. | ||
| That's not really what counts as Edifying American culture. | ||
| It seems to me that this great country has been done a lot about culture. | ||
| And unfortunately, the academic left has taken over the heights of culture and has perverted it. | ||
| And of course, the Kennedy senator is a very distinguished But how did that happen? | ||
| Correct me wrong, before the war and even in the 1950s, the conservative, and it seemed like the conservative movement and people that were, I was a kid growing up, one, it seemed like it was apolitical, but two, it seemed like the conservatives had as much involvement, particularly high culture, particularly theater, music, opera. | ||
| Art, all of it. | ||
| When did we surrender? | ||
| Did we consciously surrender it? | ||
| Was it taken? | ||
| I mean, how did we end in this situation to get these progressives that run the deal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, if I could indulge in a brief moment of self-advertisement, a lot of the story is told in my book, The Long March, how the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s I don't talk about the Kennedy Center, as I recall, but I do talk about the way in which our culture writ large was taken over by the passions of this. | ||
| I hesitate to use the word utopian because some people think of the word utopian as a good thing, but utopian can mean both the good place and no place. | ||
| And for the kind of passions that stood behind the utopian movements of, for example, the French Revolution or the Communist Revolution or the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, utopianism was a very bad thing. | ||
| That's how it happened. | ||
| And, you know, you see this everywhere. | ||
| You see this in our universities. | ||
| You see it in our schools, primary schools. | ||
| You see it in our cultural institutions like museums, symphony orchestras, and so on, where the toxin of what we now call DEI, it used to be called affirmative action. | ||
| It's the same kind of thing. | ||
| It undercuts and undermines a commitment to merit, to the idea that some things are nobler than others, some things are deeper than others, some things are better than others. | ||
| And the attack on merit, on quality, on excellence has been remorseless. | ||
| And just to shift gears a teeny bit, I think you and I were corresponding about A government, a quasi-government entity, or at least a government-funded entity called the National Endowment for Democracy. | ||
| I want to pivot to this, but I want to use the pivot is that one of the groups or institutions on the right, the National Review, used to be at the forefront of defending the culture and high culture. | ||
| And now... | ||
| And they kind of lost that fight, but now they've kind of flipped this article the other day. | ||
| In the National Review, which used to be the conservatives, I think, one of the biggest journalists before New Criterion and others that you started, at the forefront of these cultural wars, they came out the other day, America's enemies are rooting for the death of the National Endowment for Democracy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Probably this article is the most anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, anti-populist nationalist article I've seen in a long time. | ||
| Can you take – we've got about five minutes. | ||
| I want you to break this down. | ||
| It's so shocking that they've been at the forefront defending the culture, and now they're doing this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, it's not just National Review. | ||
| And I'm sure that whoever wrote this article, I doubt that it was really Peter Roskam, who's the chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy. | ||
| But it was a very disingenuous article of a piece with the article that was written for the Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago by William Galston, a left-wing progressive Democrat who worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and so on. | ||
| Attempting to defend the National Endowment for Democracy, which Remember, it was started by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, 83, I think. | ||
| It was supposed to project soft power of the United States and help promote democracy and freedom and so on. | ||
| It's not doing that anymore. | ||
| It's been totally inverted. | ||
| And this article was quite extraordinary. | ||
| He begins by saying things like, I was following Donald Trump's election. | ||
| I was pleased. | ||
| I was honored. | ||
| Now, that suggests to me that Trump had something to do with his appointment, which is completely untrue. | ||
| He says, oh, well, our enemies abroad, China and Russia and so on, they applaud the fact that funding has been cut off for this agency. | ||
| But it's not just people abroad. | ||
| It's also, he says, the people who People here at home who question the value of Americans supporting those who seek freedom, which is completely disingenuous. | ||
| He also says that he insinuates that the NED is somehow advancing. | ||
| President Trump's America First agenda, which is completely wrong. | ||
| The National Endowment for Democracy on their board are people like Victoria Nuland, her husband Bob Kagan is part of that, Michael McFaul at the Hoover Institution, Anne Applebaum, and it goes on and on and on. | ||
| This is the war party, the forever war party. | ||
| And while the National Endowment for Democracy Did some good in the 1980s when the enemy was the Soviet Union. | ||
| It has been completely inverted, like so many things in our culture, and it's now been weaponized against us, against ordinary Americans. | ||
| It's part of the global censorship network that J.D. Vance talked about in his splendid speech in Munich. | ||
| They give thousands of grants every year. | ||
| And you can't tell what they've given the money to. | ||
| We'll say things like, Russia and its neighbors for democracy development. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Where is this money actually going? | ||
| We know some of the things they've... | ||
| We had Tej Gill on here, who's a warrior front line. | ||
| I saw what he and his list of guys say, forever wars, and we lost all of them. | ||
| Most people think that's a guy just screaming over his lunchbox. | ||
| Do you think what you've seen... | ||
| The National Endowment for Democracies and all this, that there's something there and that actually some of the institutions in the United States funded by taxpayers to actually bring peace was in the back of this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's completely right. | |
| We're not allowed to win wars anymore. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| But it's also the financial interest in keeping something like the war in Ukraine going. | ||
| They're huge. | ||
| It's gigantic. | ||
| They do not want President Trump to make peace there. | ||
| What Trump is about, he's not pro-Putin. | ||
| That is a complete misnomer. | ||
| And he's not pro-Zelensky. | ||
| He's pro-peace. | ||
| A million people or more have died in that war. | ||
| What President Trump wants to do is bring that to an end. | ||
| And that can be brought to an end. | ||
| By negotiation. | ||
| This is something that people have been talking about at least since 2014, when this first start—I mean, it has a prehistory, of course, but it really got going in its current incarnation, you might say, in 2014. And the people who want to keep it going are, in many instances, the same people who are profiting. | ||
| Roger, we've got to bounce. | ||
| Where do people get your writings, New Criterion, all the journals and magazines you're back of, and particularly to your writings like The Long March? | ||
| Where do they go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's a book. | |
| You just go to Amazon. | ||
| You can get that, The Long March. | ||
| I write a column for American Greatness. | ||
| I write a column for... | ||
| The Spectator World. | ||
| I write often for the London Telegraph, the New Criterion, and other places. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you have social media? | ||
| What's your social media? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| It's just my name, Roger Kimball. | ||
| That's at X. There it is. | ||
| At X. We'll be happy when Roger Kimball is chairman or vice chairman of the Kennedy Center. | ||
| That's what we're working on. | ||
| You're a man of his stature and intellect. | ||
| Brother, thank you so much. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Steve, great. | |
| Thanks. | ||
| The Right Stuff will take us out off of Tom Wolfe's masterpiece and another masterpiece by Philip Kaufman, the director. | ||
| Incredible film, incredible music. | ||
| The music won the Academy Award. | ||
| I guess the Academy Awards this weekend is going to be Sunday. | ||
| I'll make sure I miss that because I can't watch these films today because they're not really classics. | ||
| Back at 10 a.m. | ||
| tomorrow morning, Eastern Standard Time. | ||
| We'll be on the road with The War Room. |
Export Selection