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April 11, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
46:40
WarRoom Battleground EP 745 'ARE TECHNO-OPTIMISM AND POPULISM INCOMPATIBLE?'
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s
steve bannon
30:45
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jake tapper
00:08
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Speaker Time Text
steve bannon
This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
Pray for our enemies.
unidentified
Because we're going medieval on these people.
steve bannon
I got a free shot on 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.
jake tapper
And where do people like that go to share the big line?
unidentified
Mega media.
jake tapper
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?
steve bannon
If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
unidentified
War Room.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance.
you you
steve bannon
It's Friday, 11 April, in the year of our Lord 2025.
Welcome for the second hour of our late afternoon, early edition of The War Room.
Remember, one of the big fights around has been President Trump and the tech bros.
Remember, you had the tech bros and the oligarchs versus the economic nationalists and the populists, the populist nationalist movement.
I think a lot of that got answered this week.
With President Trump's complete throwdown on Liberation Day, the follow-on from Liberation Day, but particularly really engaging for the first time against the Chinese Communist Party and head-on.
President Trump had confronted them back in 2019.
He actually, as you remember, offered them a deal that would integrate them into the world economy.
They essentially spit in his face.
This was in May of 19. And then next thing you know, you've got the pandemic and you have and you have Wuhan.
President Trump, this question has been was you going too much for the tech bros.
We know by having his FTC, his FCC, the antitrust people, they
have this incredible group of folks they have over at the Justice Department.
President Trump has got the greatest set of kind of antitrust, break up the oligarchs that ever had.
And you saw this past week with Josh Hawley, he's got support in the United States Senate.
Look, there was a conference held in the last couple of days.
Two things happened.
One, I went to a conference of kind of tech elites, but these are more on the entrepreneur side.
Also, I went over to the Justice Department.
We're going to break down all of this over the next couple of days so you can see it.
This conference was called Y Combinator for Little Tech Competition.
This panel was techno optimism and populism.
Are they incompatible?
And I make the case that they could be, uh, they can actually be very compatible if you have the right type of regulatory, uh,
It was a big bestseller.
Rohit Chopra is someone from the Biden administration.
He's actually one of the colleagues of Elizabeth Warren.
And he ran the bureau that President Trump is in the process of shutting down.
So he's the guy on the left, but he shares a lot of what we think about this thing, about these companies being too big, these oligarchs being too big.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to play a chunk of this conference with me giving as good as I get, and then I'm going to come back in in this first half hour block and kind of summarize.
So let's go ahead and cut right now to the tape itself.
unidentified
Thank you all for being here.
You ready to get going?
I'm coming right after you.
steve bannon
No, Josh.
Let's slow down.
unidentified
This is too fast.
steve bannon
I thought Bloomberg was supposed to move fast.
unidentified
We're moving fast.
You've already written articles in the last month quoting Rohit and Steve, so I feel like I'm up to speed, and I want to get you guys up to speed, too.
Looking ahead to this new Trump era, I wanted to start off by asking you both about an idea that was written up in The Atlantic yesterday that I think has big implications for what tech and antitrust policy might look like in the years ahead.
The article suggested that I'm quoting the article here.
Political suckerfish riding a whale.
My question for you, Steve, is this true?
Are you and the MAGA crowd beholden to big tech, or does Elon Musk's humiliation in Wisconsin last night begin to weaken his political standing and his influence on policy in the Trump presidency?
steve bannon
Are you assuming that someone spends $20 million and goes and wears a cheese head on a stage and bounces around and is humiliated?
Okay. The fusion, the whole fusion crap is pushed by the tech oligarchs.
You know why?
They fear populism.
They fear economic nationalism.
If we have, we're in a coalition, it is a coalition, but there's a much higher probability that we will have fusion with certain of the ideas of Rohit and particularly Lina Khan and others that have fought,
you know, monopolies, have fought oligarchs.
For years, and I think that's where the fusion is going to come.
One of the biggest scourges in our country are these oligarchs.
The lords of easy money on Wall Street, the corporatists, and particularly the apartheid state of Silicon Valley.
And it's a huge problem.
And yes, we're in a very uneasy coalition, but it is a coalition.
They were, some of them, quite central to our victory in November, and they were also central to our Let's say.
There was a huge defeat last night in the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.
unidentified
So my question then is if...
steve bannon
Do you agree with that?
unidentified
I think so.
I think if you look at the first Trump term, you know, at the Federal Trade Commission, for example, every single time you really saw the Republicans on the FTC speaking from a different hymn book than Trump.
They were pro-Chinese manufacturing.
They were pro-big tech.
They were pro-big pharma.
And then you saw others who were really trying to fight against a lot of that money.
And now we think Silicon Valley used to be lots and lots of little tech, and is it going to stay that way, or is it just going to be owned by these six dudes?
And Zuckerberg can wear whatever chains he wants.
But I think at the end of the day, if they control this whole system, there's big trouble for our country.
steve bannon
You're not going to bro out?
You're not going to start going to UFC fights?
No, the fusionism is pushed by...
We're in a coalition.
The fusionism, they want us to be subservient to their interests in techno-feudalism, and we're not going to do that.
The power we still have here, and the difference in the first term, we've now evolved this party.
To be truly a working class and middle class party.
And the Democrats have kind of lost that or lost focus on it.
They've become the credential class.
And we need to drive this point home.
That's why we're building a bigger coalition.
And I think if we do our job and somehow we can keep them together in an uneasy coalition, although I don't know if that's possible, we can build a, we can redefine politics like in 1932.
We're at that inflection point that it's upon us to do it.
And things like last night obviously are a big setback.
unidentified
Looking ahead at the policy landscape, though, if Elon and the six bros are representing big tech, who, if anyone, is standing up for little tech in the Trump administration?
steve bannon
I think you've got a lot of people.
I mean, I think we've got our new, one of our new FTC commissioners are here.
Mark's here.
You've got our viceroy.
Where's Mike Davis?
The fire breather Mike Davis is a fire breather for the unpopular side.
If you look in...
The Justice Department, right tomorrow I'm going to be over there at Justice with Omid and others, Gail Slater.
I mean, we have, look, I think Lena Kahn is one of the most important political figures in this country.
And I think if she had been listened to more by Democrats, they would have actually been more competitive against us in November of 2024.
But I think you have a lot of people that I would call neo-Brandeisians that actually see the danger.
Of concentration, of massive concentration of personal wealth and power to government power.
And look, let's be blunt.
That was all caused by the most progressive elements of the Democratic Party.
The bailouts on Wall Street in 2008, which were unacceptable, and the kind of Faustian bargain given to the big six dudes to essentially say, you're going to have monopolistic power.
But we'll make a deal with you.
You have to be at the cutting edge of that because we're a hegemon.
You have to have the commanding heights of technology.
TikTok shows you they've blown it on social media.
And quite frankly, DeepSeek, whether it's a Chinese psyop or if it's real, shows you that their method, right, which they do climate change overboard, all that overboard for this mass power of AI is wrong.
And now what do they want?
They want a bailout.
They want a $500 billion mercury program or Marshall Plan, however they call it, and they want us to turn the national labs over to them.
So these guys, they have an insatiable appetite for money and power.
And it's got to be stopped.
unidentified
And they want to hand over a playbook that is really Europe's playbook from the 40s about trying to have a click of corporate royalty that we're supposed to help the entire time.
And I thought, America built all of this because we made sure there was little companies challenging these big guys and running them out of business when they're doing something better.
So I think this is the jump ball right now.
We see it in a few different places, but if they hollow out and defund...
Some of these enforcers, they're not going to be able to go up against.
Let me ask you about that.
steve bannon
Are we taking this over?
Are you going to get some more into this?
unidentified
I want to spice this up a little bit, because you sound like you're half asleep.
You were recently on the receiving end of the Trump-Musk policy approach, and so I'm imagining your view of Trump's approach is a little less rosy when it comes to big tech than maybe Steve's is.
You told me at the time for a Bloomberg post I wrote, quote, Defunding the police at Watch over Wall Street and Big Tech will cost consumers billions of dollars.
What's the case you'd make to folks like Steve and Republicans on the right for why a robust enforcement regime is necessary?
Well, look, Steve mentioned the bailouts.
I think this, a lot of what our discourse is today, whether we know it or not, comes from the financial crisis and the big giveaways.
To those who are already powerful.
In what planet can you mismanage your business so badly and go on the other side and become bigger and more powerful?
That's exactly what happened in 2008.
So I really think, look, it is a jump ball in so many places.
When Musk and whoever took over the CFPB, one of the first people they fired We're the tech people, the ones who were doing the investigations of big tech companies creating currency.
They were the ones who were trying to make sure there was open tech so that small companies could challenge big banks.
So we're going to see a fight on both sides, I think, but I don't know how it's going to turn out if they keep getting rid.
Okay, so I want to dig in a little bit more on this idea of a struggle between big tech and little tech.
How it might play out in the Trump years.
And I want to provoke you both a bit by offering some historical context.
Richard Nixon.
Famously wanted his Justice Department to threaten investigations of the major TV networks in order to obtain friendlier coverage, perhaps a precursor to Trump's later threats against big tech.
On the Nixon tapes, we hear him saying a DOJ investigation, quote, gives us one hell of a club, a sort of Damocles, Nixon called it, to coerce favorable coverage.
Steve, is that Trump's real aim here, just a friendlier Facebook and a defanged Washington Post?
Or are there real populist instincts that might lean against the power of some of the big tech companies?
steve bannon
I think, look, it's obviously something that's being worked out through the Trump administration.
Like I said, we're a coalition.
There's definitely voices on big tech.
They have every lobbyist in this town, every law firm in this town.
It's a rigged system.
The system's totally rigged.
If you want to go up against big tech now...
I'm going to tell you how tough...
unidentified
But you talked to him personally about this.
steve bannon
Here's one of the things I think is important, is our going after the big law firms.
We're trying to go after the machinery that has this system set up to go after the big law firms.
I think we have to go after the big investment banks, the big hedge funds, the money center banks.
You have to go after all of them.
And basically play smash mouth, because they play smash mouth with you.
This system is run by money and power.
It's run by oligarchic centers in both Wall Street, the corporatists in Silicon Valley.
We're just not going to change it overnight.
And there is a struggle.
I mean, you have I would submit to you that.
And if you read the front two pages of the remedy section in the Google case and see where our Justice Department is coming at, it kind of stuns me of how antitrust the people we've put in.
I mean, people know I'm a bigger Mara Alina Khan.
I would love to have her back.
I think she'd be terrific.
But we're just a difference in degree, not so much in kind, of what we put in place today.
And I think you're going to see tough antitrust action taking place.
That's why I think Wall Street's not enamored.
They didn't see the big wave of M&A and M&A fees coming.
But it's always going to be a struggle.
It's who's going to be able to have muscle politically.
In Florida 6, we were down three points.
I think up to two weeks ago, when our show got involved, Breitbart got involved, we got our grassroots volunteers out.
You know, Scott Jennings on CNN makes a very important point about as we've reshaped this party to be more working class and middle class, we also are dependent upon low propensity voters.
Low propensity, low information.
They're not degreed or not done by low information.
They're just not interested in politics.
Right? These people basically come up for Trump.
We have to have a massive grassroots effort every time to get him out.
Scott's absolutely correct, and this is one of the reasons we won in Florida.
Six has got it out.
So the power, we have to, what do they call them, sucker fish?
Yeah. We have to deliver, you know, mass amounts of grassroots, right, who are basically entrepreneurs, right?
The little guy, the little shopkeepers, the...
The workers.
We have to deliver that, and we have to deliver it consistently.
But I think you're starting to see that we did win.
Shouldn't be lost.
We did win overwhelmingly the voter ID in Wisconsin last night.
Although we lost, I think, we got blown out.
unidentified
Since I've known you, you've been really outspoken.
You just mentioned it now about the power of money in politics.
And I'm interested in how that applies to tech and the antitrust policy.
Is there evidence you can point me to that Trump is serious?
About pursuing a crackdown he's talked about in the past.
Yes, I have.
And won't be bought off by inauguration checks from Zuckerberg and Bagos.
A Melania documentary.
steve bannon
We're in an imperial capital that the populist nationalist movement did not create.
Okay? This is an empire.
Exactly what the revolutionary generation and the founders of our nation warned us against, we evolved into.
If the revolutionary generation of framers came back to say they'd spit on the floor with how we've allowed this country to evolve.
And so our movement is relatively young in having political power.
But look at our Justice Department.
Look at some of the commissioners we're putting on there.
These people are almost as big of fire breathers as Rohit and Lena Kahn.
unidentified
Is the personnel the real focus?
steve bannon
Personnel's policy in this town, right?
Particularly working, go back and read, look at what we're doing at Google, both in the courts in Northern Virginia and in D.C. You should definitely want to read the summary that the folks wrote.
it's quite powerful and I think it shows you the beginning of a framework of what I would call a populist nationalist idea about antitrust and about taking on
unidentified
Let me ask you, people don't think of you as this necessarily, but you were actually, in a manner of speaking, a two-time Trump official, because you served in the Trump FTC, and you had a long and glorious, what was it, like seven-day run as director of CFPB?
Thirteen. Thirteen, oh, that's more than a Scaramucci.
So you look, but you, in all seriousness, You've had, it seems to me, a variety of experiences with Trump and his policy impulses when it comes to antitrust and other things.
I remember you were at FTC when they first went after Facebook.
You did some cracking down on companies that had abused the Made in America label, I remember, that Republicans were against.
But I believe Trump spoke out in favor of that.
So you've seen all sides of the man.
How serious do you think he is about pursuing an agenda that would really Police big tech and stand up for little tech companies, a lot of whom don't think they really have a voice.
Well, I'm not his therapist or psychoanalyst, but I guess I'd say this.
When you actually look at the people, the people that were put on the Federal Trade Commission in 2018, most of them were voting with big pharma, big tech,
those guys.
Over time, you saw some shifts.
We ended up voting out the Facebook complaint two Democrats, one Republican against two very pro-monopoly Republicans.
So we'll see how it plays out.
There are some warning signs.
I have no idea why they would fire.
The two federal trade commissioners.
Is that a positive moment when you fire the Democrats?
Well, it's also like, why fire them?
They're the ones who are also on board with going after some of this concentrated power, standing up for little companies, for little pharmacists, for little grocers, and the list goes on and on.
I don't know what that was about, but I think this is now the question.
Are we going to see a repeat of 2018, or is Steve going to be right?
That there's going to be some big change.
steve bannon
See, I think that's an evolution of our party.
I think we're getting more populist and more nationalist.
Look, in 16, we came out of nowhere to win.
We've had it in those four years at Interregnum, President Trump, and you see the relationships he built and who he's put in.
People should understand, I am banned on every platform.
I'm banned in perpetuity on Facebook, on YouTube.
Still? Yeah.
Twitter. Spotify.
The show is the number one or number two podcast in the country, essentially.
If you look at Pod Save America, we're generally in back of them.
I'm banned everywhere.
I was debanked after January, after President Trump went back to Mar-a-Lago.
All my banks fired me.
All my law firms fired me.
I had big-name law firms.
All fired me.
All my credit cards were canceled.
I went to federal prison.
I've seen the power of the state.
And you know what I say to them?
Go fuck yourself.
Right? Because you have to.
Otherwise they're out to crush you.
Don't think I'm any different than any of you guys.
You raise your head up against the apparatus and they're going to do the exact same thing to you.
This is why I think there's much more commonality.
The potential fusion I think we do have is much deeper behind the scenes and much deeper as we get back to actually what is populist, what is economic nationalism.
How do you defend the little guy?
How do you defend the entrepreneur?
How do we get back to our entrepreneurial roots as a country?
Right? And it's a struggle, and we're not going to agree on everything culturally.
We're not going to agree on everything politically.
But when I look at the battlefield, I feel pretty good.
I feel that there's a natural reaction to the Facebooks and to the Silicon Valley crowd and to the Wall Street crowd.
With what's happening in artificial intelligence, what's happening with this conflict, this economic war against the Chinese Communist Party, all of it, obviously technology plays a huge role in these oligarchs of the big five or six combined companies.
And this is one of the reasons about this whole Zuckerberg trial on Facebook that is so important.
And President Trump, I think, is taking a very firm stand and having our back.
I love that conference.
I really appreciate the folks inviting me, which I thought was pretty extraordinary, very controversial in them, but we had a terrific time.
The second part of that, and I think you'll see some of the audience response supporting our positions, we're going to play right as we get into the next hour.
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So make sure you get it and read it.
And every day we talk about this.
It's something you ought to get up to speed on.
One more thing.
We needed the ramparts.
You heard Mike Davis earlier in the day, the viceroy, say you've had just a massive impact on the judiciary at getting their attentions, particularly on the impeachment of Boesberg.
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Okay, we take a short commercial break.
We'll come back.
I'm going to set it up.
I want to get you into more of this conference that I spoke at.
I really want to thank the people over at Y Combinator.
It was done over at the Gallup headquarters.
Quite beautiful.
The old Masonic Hall that is very famous in Washington, D.C. President Grant used to frequent it a lot.
A lot of the reconstruction, they said, of the United States after the So we're going to leave you with Modern Day Holy War.
I'm going to be back in just a moment.
unidentified
We need changing.
So I suggest you take a look inside.
Cause I think you've changed already.
You went and lost your pride.
But I'm American made.
I got American power.
I got American faith.
In America's heart.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann.
steve bannon
Okay, that was obviously American Heart, not Modern Day Holy War.
American Heart from the great John Kahn.
Of course, Modern Day Holy War, some of our other album music, is from the incredible Lady No Grady.
That's Nicole No Grady.
I love that song, love John Kahn's song.
We always go out or try to go out with the right stuff.
Sometimes we do...
Billy Joe Shaver on those kind of days with Get The Behind Me Satan, which is always a good one on certain days.
Welcome back.
We're going to do a little more of the conference, and I'm going to come back and give you some of my closing thoughts.
One thing here is that President Trump, and this is what he's going after, Charlie Gasparino's story that we talked about this morning with Dave Brat, that he's now going to go after the Money Center banks.
Everything President Trump's trying to do, if you look at it, is to support the forgotten man and woman.
This is why, this was a conference of entrepreneurs, of kind of people getting, you know, friends and family round, angel rounds, initial venture capital, and what they wanted, what they're trying to promote, and that's why they're in Washington, D.C., is a sense of competition, how important it is to have the entrepreneurial spirit.
Well, listen, nothing has the entrepreneurial spirit more than, one, Donald Trump.
He is the ultimate entrepreneur of what he's done in the real estate area, media.
All of his endeavors.
But also, he supports entrepreneurs.
One of the most powerful driving focuses we have in the MAGA movement, in the Make America Healthy Again movement, if you think about it, you're against big tech, you're against big pharma, you're against these big, faceless, kind of heartless corporations that are just looking to do everything,
grind it out to the bottom line.
There can be nothing that MAGA is more opposed to.
And that's why I was very proud to speak at this conference.
I will tell you, in this conference, and I'm not saying it was a hostile environment, but it's an environment of folks that don't listen to War Room and really haven't had access to what we've been trying to promote over the last couple of years.
It was a very warm reception at the end.
They agreed with a lot that we had to say.
And because it really put forward President Trump's message that he's trying to stand up for the little guy.
He's trying to stand up for the forgotten man and woman.
And this is, if you see, everything that he's working on, every one of the Whether it's national security, of which he wants to stop the forever wars so that young men and women's lives are just not thrown away on these foreign battlefields, to everything to his economic nationalism,
which is really focused on the American citizen and making sure they have a better deal or the best deal, and that their tax dollars are not thrown out and just come back to hurt them and to hurt their economic well-being.
Everything President Trump does.
...is really in defense of the little guy, the forgotten man and woman.
That's why it was in his first inaugural address, the American Carnage address I had a little bit to do with, and very proud that President Trump allowed me to do that because you see his direction was standing up for the little guy.
Okay, we've got a few more clips of this to play from this conference.
Rohit Chopra is the other executive.
And Josh Green is the moderator from Bloomberg News, one of the biggest reporters over there on, like I told you, the terminal in Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Businessweek.
Very, very powerful in the financial conversation.
Let's go ahead and play the tape and I'll come back with some closing observations and commentary in a couple of minutes.
So I think there's a great future for populism, how we define it, and economic nationalism.
unidentified
Let's broaden the aperture a little bit beyond the U.S. Steve, you've been quite active in supporting populist right-wing causes, not just here, but across the globe and in Europe.
Trump has two supporting populist politicians.
In December, when he nominated Gail Slater, he said, quote, Big tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector.
I do agree with trying to stop these people anywhere we can because I think they've gotten too much power.
steve bannon
I would like to see instead of, you know, you have 75 electric vehicle companies, but you have one search company.
We should have 100 search companies.
We should have Facebook.
We should have 100 alternatives.
The only thing that holds me back about the Europeans is that there's no more corrupt system than the EU and what they do.
It's still the minarchists.
It's still the aristocracy that most of our families many generations ago came away from.
This is why I so detest the established order in Europe.
And I'm a big supporter of these right-wing...
Populist nationalists, which each one's different, right?
And each one's got its own characteristics, as it should, in these countries.
But we have a long fight over there.
Look, it shouldn't be lost to anybody.
They try to put Trump in prison for 300 years.
Bolsonaro's on trial for his life.
They're going to find him guilty in the show trial.
They'll put him in a prison.
He's going to be assassinated.
Or they're going to attempt to assassinate him.
And Le Pen, he's up by 20 points in the poll.
And they're putting Le Pen now has a four-year prison sentence.
I don't think we should outsource anything to Europe.
unidentified
But, I will say this, when they've been doing all their committees after their laws, the people who are actually going and using that process to challenge Big gatekeepers from squelching them out are a lot of little American companies because they want access to that market too.
So I don't know, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our own work here.
We should not allow Facebook's Libra currency scheme to come back again.
We should not have these new types of dollars that big tech companies control and can wall everyone out of.
We should be passing laws and doing work here in Washington and every single state and there are so many issues where I think there's a lot of agreement.
Child and teen privacy and exploitation of them.
Counterfeit goods and labeling.
I mean, the list goes on and on, and the big tech companies have fought every single step of the way, and we should fight against that.
It's Liberation Day.
I'm sure you all have heard.
I'd love to get a preview from Steve, but what I really want to ask you about is, can the U.S. and Europe effectively regulate tech companies at the same time that they're waging a trade war?
Or will Trump wind up inadvertently helping big tech in an effort to jam the EU?
steve bannon
I think they're kind of two separate things.
I think today, and I think in the Rose Garden at 4 o'clock we're going to find out, I'm not so sure a decision's been made.
I mean, I'm for reciprocity, and I realize there's some legal issues with that because I want to expose to the world how we've been taken advantage of by the political class in the United States, the globalists on Wall Street.
With these trade relationships with people that we pay for their defense that have hosed us for decade after decade after decade and that all rolls down to the little guy.
So I'm for reciprocity and tough reciprocity.
I don't think that may happen.
I think there may be some tiered of 20% of some tiered system which will be fine and they'll use the emergency measures to implement that but I think we have to think about And focus on bringing high-value-added manufacturing jobs back here to the United States and not assembly jobs.
You know, the guys at Ford bitch and moan all the time, well, we manufacture all this and we're going to lose a billion dollars.
No, you don't.
You assemble.
We need to bring high-value-added manufacturing jobs back here to the United States of America.
People say, well, we're manufacturing more than ever and there's 400,000 unpaid.
No, we assemble.
We need to manufacture here.
We need to rebuild the greatness of our industrial base and we can do it.
At the same time, we have to break up tech and give more access to capital entrepreneurs.
We can do all that.
The Republicans, when I first got into the politics here with Andrew Breitbart 12, 14 years ago, this kind of Austrian school of economics and all this, it was like they thought it was a natural property.
They thought this was like the second law of thermodynamics.
It's not.
It's all human agency.
We've proven this in this populist movement and getting people engaged and involved, the little guy.
Who's engaged and evolved now in politics.
So we can do this, and we can build a system that's closer to the American plan that Alexander Hamilton and the great founders of our country set up in the 19th century that we can recreate here and become an economic superpower.
A true economic superpower based upon people, not that, what, in the last six months, the top 1% have accreted another $4.5 trillion of wealth to themselves, more than gone to the bottom 50%.
We have a capitalist system, or a quote-unquote capitalist system, with no capitalist.
And that's what we have to change.
And we can change.
All of this can be done.
Don't think we have to take down the system.
And to do that, you have to be relentless.
You have to be prepared to be banned, to be debanked, to be shut out, and to go to prison.
If you're not prepared to do that, you're not prepared to take on the system and win.
unidentified
We're getting back to the question of Europe.
Is Trump willing to let the EU crack down on American companies like Google, like Apple, or will he dig in his heels and want to retaliate?
steve bannon
I don't think it's going to be retaliation against that.
I think it's going to be retaliation against manufacturing and the German car companies and all that.
unidentified
You don't think that bleeds over into tech policy?
steve bannon
To a degree, but I don't think we need to drive it.
unidentified
The big ticket item is on China.
Right now, you have a lot of the largest tech giants saying, you need to listen to us and favor us to compete with China.
I think if anyone gets distracted by that argument, we are in trouble.
steve bannon
Here's the horrible thing of that argument.
Their failure in being given the Faustian Pact Of allowing them to become oligarchs.
They failed in social media.
Clearly they're not as good.
And they failed in AI.
They won a bailout, at least $500 billion, and the national ads will be turned over to them.
They also put the gun to your head and say, hey, you can't regulate us now because you need national champions because the Chinese Communist Party has a fleet around Taiwan.
That's a struggle we're going to have to go through.
And we cannot agree to that.
We can't agree to a bailout.
We can't agree to turning the national labs over to them, the weapons labs for AI.
And we certainly can't genuflect, as you're so rightly pointing out, about the issue with the Chinese Communist Party.
unidentified
Rohit, Democrats have been despondent by the results of the November election.
With the exception of last night's victory in Wisconsin, it's been a pretty rough ride.
A number of folks I talk to do see glimmers of hope on the antitrust front with the nomination of Gail Slater, other folks we've talked about.
What are your thoughts?
You've talked a lot about this idea of a populist cross-party alliance.
What are your thoughts on that?
How realistic do you think it is as you look ahead at the landscape over the next couple of years?
As somebody who's worked under Trump, who's clashed with Elon, Who thinks a lot about the policy issues at the heart of all this.
Are you hopeful?
Are you despondent?
How should people think about this?
I mean, look, I'm happy that some of them are using the policy ideas developed by Lina Khan and others who really came and started and lit a match on all of this.
And if that is leading others to change, good.
I just want to go back to I still think it comes down to There is maybe going to be agreement on certain places,
but right now...
Those big oligarchs and big corporate royalty are still calling the shots in Washington.
Do you disagree with that?
steve bannon
No, they own this city.
If you try to go after them legally, you can't get a law firm because they hire the law firms.
They have all the lobbyists.
They have tremendous power in Capitol Hill.
That's why our movement is in its very early stages.
And with President Trump at the top of the ticket, we can win national elections, as it proved last night since we have low-propensity voters.
We built those low-propensity voters.
I'm the first to admit, we have a tough time otherwise, and we have to build an apparatus that can do that.
But it's going to come from, I think it was only one in the Senate, Josh Hawley, I think is the only person that voted, only Republican.
So we have a ton of work to do.
I'm not sure so many of the elected officials in the House or the Senate are populist economic nationalists.
We're still run in a neoliberal, neocon mentality.
But I think, I believe, and you look at Stoller, you look at yourself, neocon, I believe, since I would posit the Democratic Party and the official apparatus of it abandoned you guys, who had some great ideas, great ideas that we as populist nationalists are getting a whole team to hopefully implement at least some of them,
that there's much more.
That fusion to me is more important than the fusion with the big tech bros.
But we have to deal with...
Political reality as we have it right now.
But our party is only going to become more working class and more middle class.
And I think that'll tend to the fusion.
unidentified
Our time is ticking down.
But Trump also got rid of populists like Rohit.
So Rohit, Steve's talked a lot about the positive idea of an alliance.
But just as a last question, what's the worst case scenario for you?
What do you stay up at night worrying about?
Note that we only have 90 seconds.
To me, I'm actually, I'm not crying and despondent.
All of us are working on how we figure out how to reclaim power and to actually make sure that this economy is working.
And I think that we'll see if anyone in this administration will do it.
I'm going to be watching on big mergers like Capital One Discover.
I'm going to be watching, like Steve is saying, the Google case, Facebook case.
There are some places where I'm going to be watching really closely to see.
But I really hope that the status quo is so broken and we need to move and turn the page.
steve bannon
Jake Sherman said yesterday, because I've been a huge proponent of this extension of the taxes.
That given where we are with cuts that have to be made or just not going to be made, given the financial situation of having to refinance all this debt and what the burden is putting on working class and middle class people, that I don't see any scenario that we can extend the tax cuts for the upper bracket.
It can't happen.
And Jake Sherman went around yesterday, and I love Jake Sherman.
I think he's fantastic.
He said he couldn't find one representative.
unidentified
They laughed at the idea.
steve bannon
Chip Roy came on War Room this morning and absolutely agreed with me and says behind the scenes there are a lot of people.
The litmus test for me early on, besides all the great work the guys at the Justice Department are doing on Google and other things like that and the FTC, is this tax situation.
If the wealthy are not prepared to help us get control of spending, particularly defense spending, And actually align defense spending with our hemispheric defense that President Trump has laid out.
The defense budget has to be cut.
And I say this as a guy that spent eight years as a naval officer.
My daughter went to West Point.
I'm not a dove.
The defense budget's out of control.
It has to be cut right before you touch anything else.
And we have to raise taxes.
We cannot extend the tax cuts for the wealthy.
Their taxes have to increase.
I'll bet you that room was...
80% combination of Democrat and Libertarian.
People that normally wouldn't agree with a lot of stuff we talk about on a lot of the ideas we talk about on the show, but there was a lot of support at the end of this.
I would say overwhelmingly in the room.
And that means people just need exposure to these ideas.
They need the exposure unfiltered, disintermediated from the mainstream media.
And that's what we hope to do.
That's why I'm doing more of these conferences to go into more on this type of media.
We're going to have a killer show.
Tomorrow we get to a lot of the finances of what's happening this week, particularly the talk about the capital markets revolt against President Trump.
I don't think anything can be farther from the truth, although we will get into it.
This reconciliation bill, I believe, needs to be broken down for people, and the Warren posse is going to break it down.
We're going to break it down together because you're going to be at the ramparts on the fight of this because nothing can be absolutely bigger.
Remember the 25 to 30 folks minimum that wanted to vote against it.
Basically said, OK, we'll start the process.
We trust in the president.
We actually trust in leadership that they're not going to try to screw us.
So we're going to have to see.
We're going to check all of that.
10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time tomorrow.
We will be live and I'll be here with a number of guests that will make it the Saturday show, the great show that we always have.
And my favorite show of the week reminds me I was delivering papers and cutting grasses.
When I was a small kid, Saturday was the work day with my dad and then getting the job done with my own little entrepreneurial side hustles.
Okay, Birch Gold, make sure I want everybody over the weekend, it's a study weekend to get up the learning curve.
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I mean, gold's not supposed to do that.
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Why is it moving like this?
This is what you need to talk to Philip Patrick and the team over at Birch Gold.
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Okay, we're going to leave you with the right stuff.
I love ending with a song because it gets you jacked up.
It's so beautiful.
Off a classic book by Tom Wolfe, an incredible movie by Philip Kaufman.
I think it's a classic.
Didn't get appreciated at the time, although we got nominated for seven Academy Awards.
The one they came away with, I think they came away with a couple, but Best Score, Best Music, and that was by Bill Conti.
That's what you're going out.
The right stuff.
We leave you with the right stuff.
We will see you back in the War Room tomorrow morning, Saturday at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
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