April 25, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:01
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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 try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
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Mega 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. Band. | ||
| It's Thursday, 24 April, in the year of our Lord, 2025. | ||
| Welcome back to the second hour of our late afternoon, early evening show. | ||
| Sean Davis joins me from Kansas City, Missouri, here for the Hillsdale's conference. | ||
| Very honored to be speaking tonight. | ||
| A tremendous group of speakers. | ||
| Throughout the day, tomorrow, Sean Davis is with us from the Federalist. | ||
| Chris Caldwell, who's going to speak tomorrow, is going to join us. | ||
| David Malpass, who is former head of the World Bank under President Trump, is going to be here. | ||
| David is an old friend, going to be here tomorrow morning. | ||
| So, Sean Davis, you're in the narrative wars over at the Federalist. | ||
| You've been doing this for a decade there. | ||
| You've worked with Tucker and the guys over at Daily Caller. | ||
| The narrative war we have today is the left understands that their shot here is through this radical neo-Marxist judiciary. | ||
| And there we just had at the beginning of the show, top of the show, we had the first hour, a federal judge just came in and reversed President Trump's thing on IDs for voters. | ||
| We also had a very interesting, the Daily Signal, Rob Bluey's site, they've got this poll and analysis, 75%. | ||
| Of the administrative state personnel working in Washington, D.C., that make over $75,000 a year. | ||
| So these are the people that would be up to the SES, mid-managers and above. | ||
| Seventy-five percent of those that voted for Harris, which is like 90 percent of them, have said that if it was a legal executive order or presidential memorandum, legal. | ||
| If they thought the policy was bad, they would not implement it. | ||
| This is what Trump's up against, the administrative state and particularly the federal judiciary. | ||
| How successful do you believe they've been so far? | ||
| Because to delay is to deny, sir. | ||
| I don't think the administrative state this time around has been all that successful. | ||
| There's been a lot of smoke. | ||
| There's not been a lot of fire. | ||
| I think Trump coming in, understanding the nature of the beast. | ||
| And kind of chopping it off at the head right out of the gate was really important. | ||
| The red wedding moment. | ||
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unidentified
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Yep. We gotta take him out. | |
| So what the left is left with now is they've got the media still, at least parts of it, and they've got the judiciary. | ||
| And while I think a lot of people assume, well, Trump has a whole term. | ||
| He's got four years. | ||
| We're only like 98 days into it right now. | ||
| We're good. | ||
| He has about a year and a half. | ||
| He has until the midterms in 2026. | ||
| That's what the Democrats and that's what the Marxists are pushing towards is they want to stymie him as much as possible and give themselves the option of taking over the House in the midterms, which I think they have a very good chance of doing. | ||
| Why do you say that? | ||
| The margins are super thin. | ||
| In history. | ||
| Yeah, number one, history. | ||
| Generally, they're not favorable to the party that's in power. | ||
| And then three... | ||
| If I were to ask you, what is the House doing? | ||
| What's the message? | ||
| No, nobody has any idea. | ||
| It's just utterly rudderless, kind of just, you know, waiting, treading water, hoping something happens. | ||
| So they're not giving people a great reason to vote for them. | ||
| So the left understands that if they can just drag everything out and delay as much as possible until November 2026 and they win the House, they think that's all they need. | ||
| Because once that happens, Trump's getting impeached again by a completely deranged... | ||
| And this is where we start the whole cycle over again. | ||
| Once they win, they'll raise a billion dollars. | ||
| It'll come down to a handful of seats in New York and California that could easily flip, right? | ||
| They've got ground troops, shock troops all over from these NGOs. | ||
| And as you said, even people are not citizens of this country. | ||
| And they flip a handful of seats, five or six seats. | ||
| Hakeem Jeffries is Speaker of the House. | ||
| Do you believe? | ||
| Not your readers, but do you believe a greater expansion of Republicans? | ||
| What we said at the time, look, November 5th was one of the most magnificent come from behind. | ||
| People celebrate. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| Then for the inauguration, people here, the tech bros and the cyber guys, it was all great. | ||
| We said at 100 days, given what Trump is looking to do, in 100 days... | ||
| The sunshine soldiers and summer patriots are going to be gone. | ||
| You're going to be in the trenches again at multiple fronts in warfare. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| We're here before 100 days. | ||
| Do you think the greater – because one of the problems we have is we've turned this into a working class and middle class party. | ||
| But we still have not solved that part of the equation as we saw in Wisconsin where if Trump's not physically on the ticket. | ||
| We still have a tough time getting those low information, low propensity voters to turn out. | ||
| Do you think we can do that understanding, and do you think you're seeing an expanded knowledge base of that in our ecosystem of new media as we try to promulgate this message out there? | ||
| Yeah, I think you hit on the number one long term problem for the right is that Trump is such a unique figure. | ||
| He's able to get people to come vote who wouldn't have ever wanted anything to do with the Republican Party. | ||
| He's not because he's a Republican. | ||
| It's not the R next to his name. | ||
| It's because people trust that he has their best interests out for him. | ||
| They trust, and it's fascinating, that the real estate investor from New York City, this big bombastic guy with the gold letters everywhere, is the best champion for the working class that we've seen on the right in 50 years. | ||
| And you can't just take the policies that he's pushing and somehow transfer that to another character. | ||
| As great as J.D. Vance is, you know, he has real blue-collar roots and he clearly has a heart for working-class people. | ||
| There's something there that the party has to capture and make its own permanently before people are going to trust it. | ||
| When you say make it their own permanently, let's go back to the comment you just made about the House because that's – look, the founders set it up that the House was supposed to be the one closest to the people and it would be hot and the Senate would be deliberative. | ||
| You would think – and with the fire breathers, you would think you would start seeing – A turnover of more populism and nationalism there. | ||
| You see it on somewhat, but it's not through the 218 people. | ||
| I mean, a lot of President Trump's policies, the populist and nationalist policies, would not get a majority. | ||
| The Hassett rule, if you get a majority of the conference, we're still not there. | ||
| How do you solve that part of the equation? | ||
| Yeah, and that's the nut we haven't cracked yet, and I think it has to do with just how entrenched incumbents have become. | ||
| Each new class that's come in... | ||
| Really since 2010, it kind of started with the Tea Party, is better on average for Republicans than the class it replaced. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, yes. | |
| But you still have – how many new people are we getting every two years? | ||
| Five or ten? | ||
| It's very small numbers. | ||
| In the Tea Party, we had such a small base, 153. | ||
| We won the 62 seats. | ||
| But now there were up to 215, 220, and there's very few real – Competitive seats to go after. | ||
| So if you're picking up, you're going to pick up a half a dozen, maybe eight. | ||
| And of those, if you pick up eight, five or six might be really good. | ||
| And so it's just a structural problem. | ||
| And so much of the fight that we're having isn't just with the left. | ||
| It's with our own entrenched establishment who, you know, they don't want a manufacturing base back in America. | ||
| They've convinced themselves that we need to be a service economy and making stuff is what other countries do. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| So you agree overall with President Trump's, the arc of his strategy, of all these commercial relationships, since we're paying for their defense, that we take a hard line, that you're either going to pay a premium to get into this market and or move your manufacturing here. | ||
| You believe in the actual underlying We built the China war machine. | ||
| It was with our money taken out of our pockets that resulted in our middle class and our manufacturing base being hollowed out that built the Chinese military, number one. | ||
| Number two, our money built the European welfare state because we decided we're going to take you all under our wing. | ||
| It wasn't enough that we helped you win the First World War and the Second World War. | ||
| We've done it three times. | ||
| Particularly for a nation of people that got kicked out of those countries, right? | ||
| It's madness. | ||
| We cannot be the world police and the World Bank forever. | ||
| And the chickens are coming home to roost on that. | ||
| We're starting to go bankrupt. | ||
| Our currency isn't as strong as what it was. | ||
| We're almost $40 trillion in debt. | ||
| And the debate that's happening in Congress now is, hey, we should increase spending by a trillion instead of like $1.2 trillion. | ||
| And they pat themselves on the back and call themselves fiscal conservatives. | ||
| It's madness. | ||
| So this is going to be part of my talk tonight. | ||
| That's what we try to preach here. | ||
| What is it about the mindset when we have – we're going off a fiscal cliff? | ||
| Like yesterday, I talked at this World Economic Conference, the summer of what it puts on. | ||
| It's all the globalist financiers. | ||
| And I said, when people criticize President Trump, the strategy of trying to bring jobs back, I said, tell me what the alternative, the plan A, your plan, is not sustainable. | ||
| We're $2 trillion in deficits every year. | ||
| We're $37 trillion, adding a trillion dollars about every 100, 150 days. | ||
| You've got to now refinance 10 to 12 trillion of that every year. | ||
| The math simply doesn't work out. | ||
| It's just, it's not sustainable. | ||
| And there's no, in their model... | ||
| And this is what gets me. | ||
| There's no urgency about cutting spending. | ||
| They have a $900 billion defense authorization, which is outrageous. | ||
| And in this reconciliation, the big beautiful bill, they're adding $150 billion of additional defense. | ||
| This is not the $170 for the border. | ||
| It's like they're living in detached reality. | ||
| When I talk to these people individually, they acknowledge it. | ||
| But as a group... | ||
| They sit there and they come back and they give these 10-year budgets. | ||
| They said, well, Steve, by law, it's got to be 10 years. | ||
| I go, I got that. | ||
| But I've done at Goldman and my own firm so many bankruptcies and restructurings. | ||
| We have this year and next year. | ||
| You've got to show me some cuts. | ||
| Otherwise, it's all fantasy. | ||
| But the city... | ||
| I guess because we're the prime reserve currency and the Fed can just buy – we can just create the bonds and buy them. | ||
| We've lulled to sleep and that's these converging crises that are coming and people got to understand. | ||
| This is not – there's no magic wand here. | ||
| Elon Musk, as many of my differences with him, I love the Doge effort. | ||
| But Doge, let's be honest. | ||
| We don't know really what it came up with the fraud and here's the thing. | ||
| Congress sat there and they thought he was going to be dois ex machina, that he was going to come and save them with a trillion dollars a year in fraud. | ||
| It didn't happen. | ||
| And the reason is they do not want to make tough decisions on facing our physical crisis. | ||
| And as supposedly limited government conservatives, you would think that they would want to address this. | ||
| They talk a good game. | ||
| I worked for Tom Coburn for many, many years and fought his spending battles with them. | ||
| And was just dumbfounded by – they would – these people would sit in a meeting with you and tell you, oh, it's totally unsustainable. | ||
| And no, no, I'm not going to vote for your amendment to cut spending 1 percent. | ||
| And this was back when the budget was $2.5 trillion and $2 trillion. | ||
| I think it's – And the deficits were $250 billion or $300 billion. | ||
| I mean it was nothing compared to today. | ||
| And now – OK. | ||
| So why – tell us – what is that mentality? | ||
| Why would they sit there and go, you're right, it's not sustainable? | ||
| The total budgets of the federal government are what our deficits are today. | ||
| Why would they then say they wouldn't do the amendment, just the 1% cut? | ||
| I think there's two reasons. | ||
| One, they just get in and they get kind of indoctrinated into the blob. | ||
| Well, this is my committee and this is what we do. | ||
| I've really looked at these programs and there's no fat to cut. | ||
| It's all muscle. | ||
| But then the other problem, which I think is much bigger, and I think it is an American problem. | ||
| As pioneering as we are and individualistic and entrepreneurial, we lack imagination for what actually happens with human history. | ||
| Ever since we started, we've been great. | ||
| And it happened really fast. | ||
| And so we assume, well, America's always been big and strong and great. | ||
| Therefore, we will always be big and strong and great. | ||
| And we've never had a currency crisis. | ||
| And we've never had riots for food. | ||
| We've never had massive bank runs. | ||
| Therefore, we will never have massive bank runs. | ||
| We've never had an inflation crisis. | ||
| Therefore, we'll never have one. | ||
| They're operating under this idea that it's all musical chairs, except the music's going to go on forever. | ||
| And it's totally wrong because the old joke is how does a company go bankrupt for slowly and then all at once? | ||
| Nations are no different. | ||
| Unbelievable. The Federalist, your social media, because you get a little heated. | ||
| On Twitter every now and again. | ||
|
unidentified
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A little? | |
| You get a little heated. | ||
| Where do they go for your Twitter account? | ||
| How do folks get over to The Federalist? | ||
| And how do people support you guys? | ||
| They can come find us at thefederalist.com or follow me on X at Sean, S-E-A-N-M-D-A-V. | ||
| They can support us by going to our website. | ||
| We have a donate button. | ||
| As I've said, we've got a hybrid profit, non-profit model. | ||
| So if you'd like, we can give you tax-deductible donations that support great journalists. | ||
| Or you can come and, you know, just throw a contribution to the company, buy a subscription to get ad-free and comments, but check us out. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Great honor. | ||
| Great honor. | ||
| The Federalist, Sean Davis. | ||
| Okay, can we bring Chris Caldwell in? | ||
| I want to go to the merch. | ||
| Can Denver get up the merch page of President Trump 2028? | ||
| Who was talking about that? | ||
| They were mocking me a week ago on Stephen A. Smith. | ||
| Chris, right over here. | ||
| Come on, brother. | ||
| There we are right there, Trump 2028. | ||
| We're sending swag to Stephen A. Smith, Chris Cuomo, a whole bunch of folks. | ||
| Bill Maher, people that mocked and ridiculed me over the last couple of years. | ||
| Hey, I'm just saying. | ||
| As I said, it's happening. | ||
| It begins. | ||
| Chris Caldwell, I am so honored to have you on here. | ||
| One of the first people... | ||
| To identify the issue of Islam, the West, and Europe and what happened. | ||
| That book you wrote, it was called The Coming Revolution. | ||
| It was back in... | ||
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unidentified
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It was called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. | |
| This is about 2010? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, a little before, 2008 or 2009. | |
| 2008 or 2009. | ||
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unidentified
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2009 to be precise. | |
| Yeah. What did you see at the time? | ||
| And has the arc of it gotten any better or has it gotten worse? | ||
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unidentified
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I think the arc of it has gotten better. | |
| It has gotten better. | ||
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unidentified
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I think it's gotten better. | |
| What was the problem back when you started running in 2007 to 2008? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I think the big underlying problem was the demographic problem, which is that the populations of the Middle East and North Africa were growing much faster than Europe. | |
| That is the part that I think has abated a little bit. | ||
| The outright population pressure from the Muslim world has... | ||
| Because their birth rates are declining or European birth rates coming up? | ||
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unidentified
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Their birth rates are declining. | |
| I mean, I think that the population of the West Bank, for instance, and I had this number when I wrote the book, but it had increased something like fivefold between 1967 and the first decade of this century. | ||
| So, I mean, you're talking about a real... | ||
| Powerful thing. | ||
| And I think there was a great... | ||
| A sociologist who just died a year or two ago, a German sociologist named Gunnar Heinsohn, who wrote a great book called Sons and World Power. | ||
| And he said, you know, like all the expansion of cultures, including the European cultures that settled the New World and things, had to do with families having eight or nine children. | ||
| And having three or four or five sons. | ||
| Yes. And you've got to figure out, since one's going to inherit everything, the other's going to do it in the ministry. | ||
| You've got two or three. | ||
| They used the Crusades for that for one point in time. | ||
| So you got it. | ||
| It's three, four, number of sons, three, four, and five, who usually have some attitude, right? | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, to begin with. | |
| Hold it. | ||
| I haven't heard, I mean, that's always been my theory. | ||
| A guy wrote a book about that? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, Gunnar Heinsohn. | |
| It's called Sons and World Power. | ||
| You rise to world power off of having a number of sons that have time on their hand? | ||
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unidentified
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Off of having surplus sons. | |
| Sons who, like, can't be employed. | ||
| We have a couple of three of those in the United States right now, don't we? | ||
| I mean, we have some young men that are just kind of drifting, right? | ||
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unidentified
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But not that many. | |
| Not that many per family. | ||
| Yes, very weak there. | ||
| So in the arc of it, you don't think... | ||
| The pressure, because you look at Sweden, you look at what's happening, you look at now the Rotherham cases are now coming up in England. | ||
| Our guy Raheem Ghassam focused, but a lot of this is coming back up to the surface. | ||
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unidentified
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I thought you were talking about the migration pressure. | |
| Is that because Orban stopped it? | ||
| How did that actually stop? | ||
| Was it Merkel leaving or was the Italians people getting more focused on it? | ||
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unidentified
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See, I think... | |
| I think the migration pressure has diminished for population reasons. | ||
| Because there's less population and there was no Syrian civil war. | ||
| They're not coming up by the millions. | ||
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unidentified
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But there is a sense in which the problem is greater than it was when I wrote the book. | |
| I was writing the book basically between 9-11 and in the five years or ten years after 9-11. | ||
| And at that time, you could say, well, Europe is really... | ||
| Before a choice, you know, of what kind of continent it wishes to be. | ||
| But that it made its choice. | ||
| And we're no longer in that Europe anymore. | ||
| It's not like Europe is going to go back to being, you know, the continent that it was before this mass invasion. | ||
| So certain things have been set. | ||
| You mean politically pressure came up. | ||
| They've made a choice to stop. | ||
| That open immigration of millions of people here to Germany. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, I think so. | |
| Was that pressure from the right to, say, get our sovereignty back from the Viktor Orbans and the Salvinis and the Le Pens who were not taking over governments but at least enough political pressure on the globalists to stop that? | ||
| How did that stop? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, those figures that you name are absolutely key. | |
| And they didn't show up in every... | ||
| I mean, Nigel Farage had a great populist role to play, but he was not as purely an anti-immigration figure as, for instance, Salvini was. | ||
| Salvini, I think, was probably the most successful anti-immigration politician of the last 20 years in Europe. | ||
| I think you're absolutely correct. | ||
| I was over there in 1821. | ||
| Why was Salvini ahead of the curve? | ||
| Because Italy's right there and was being invaded in those islands or in the boot? | ||
| Why Salvini? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, that's an interesting question. | |
| He himself is such an interesting guy because he had a great combination, a kind of Reagan-esque combination of being really populist, but also having grown up among businessmen in Milan. | ||
| So he was a very balanced politician. | ||
| I think it was mostly that... | ||
| He had a way of talking about the issue that made people really comfortable. | ||
| And I forget the name of his internet expert, but he had a guy who ran his website. | ||
| And the website, his webmaster said to him, you know what? | ||
| You're talking about how... | ||
| Our civilization is collapsing. | ||
| We're being invaded and stuff like that. | ||
| That's really dark. | ||
| And, you know, after a few days of that, people aren't going to want to go to your website anymore. | ||
| And he said, so every time you do two immigration swamped by, you know, alien forces things... | ||
| Do a feature on pasta. | ||
| Do something about tiramisu. | ||
| Do something about how pretty Italian women are. | ||
| And so Salvini's website was actually a fun, witty kind of place to go to. | ||
| And when he ran, he was a guy who took Facebook and it was live. | ||
| They were hanging out and doing fun things and the rallies were kind of Trump. | ||
| They were smaller than Trump's but the biggest thing that Europe had ever seen. | ||
| But they were fun. | ||
| They were gatherings. | ||
| He did that merger. | ||
| They tried to govern for a while. | ||
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unidentified
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I think it was, until the moment it collapsed, it was close to the most popular Italian government since the war. | |
| And the problem was... | ||
| The problem was that Salvini's right-wing populism wound up more popular. | ||
| I mean, in the vote, you had the five-star movement, the left populist, got about a third of the vote. | ||
| Salvini only got about a sixth of the vote. | ||
| But once they were governing, then the thing that people really loved was the Salvini immigration policy. | ||
| And he got up to like 45... | ||
| To the point where if they had an election the next day, he would have had a non-coalition government. | ||
| He would have been able to rule by himself. | ||
| The problem is he didn't have those votes in the parliament and he just lost track of that and he got booted out. | ||
| Why is it the elites? | ||
| It appeared that the elites in Europe at the time looked the other way, particularly the business elites. | ||
| I don't know for bigger consumer markets or whatever, this invasion. | ||
| They never really took a hard line against it. | ||
| Much like the business elites here in the United States. | ||
| What is it about corporatists? | ||
| What is it about capital markets, the city of London, Wall Street, Frankfurt, that has no problem with mass immigration? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I don't know that they have no problem with it, but they do benefit disproportionately from it. | |
| The best quantitative account of that that's been done is in the Harvard economist George Borjas' book. | ||
| Maybe you've talked about it on the show. | ||
| But he did a study in around 1995 where he looked at some of these claims that immigrants add a trillion dollars to the economy. | ||
| And they do. | ||
| But it all goes back to the immigrant countries. | ||
| Immigrants themselves who benefit from immigration. | ||
| Otherwise, it's a wash. | ||
| However, that zero difference in the country disguises a big immigration, disguises a big, let's say, income transfer from the people who compete with immigrants to the people who hire them. | ||
| Yes. You're going to speak tomorrow. | ||
| We've got about a minute here on this side, and we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| Make sure, by the way, Birch Gold, It's not the price of gold. | ||
| It's the process. | ||
| Why are the central banks buying more than ever? | ||
| Why is the dollar? | ||
| Why is the Chinese Communist Party's central theory of the case here is de-dollarize the world economy. | ||
| Make sure they break Bretton Woods. | ||
| Go to birchgold.com. | ||
| It's the sixth free installment of our series, The End of the Dollar Empire. | ||
| I've been doing this now for four years. | ||
| You've got the six. | ||
| It's modern monetary theory, the idea that broke the world. | ||
| We want to make sure we're big name and putting out concepts and ideas for you and see how they work out through reality, how they manifest themselves. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| Birchgold.com slash bandit. | ||
| You can talk to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| It is not the price of gold. | ||
| It is the process. | ||
| Of why gold is a hedge for, I don't know, 4,000 or 5,000 years of mankind's history. | ||
| Johnny Kahn's going to take us out. | ||
| We're going to have a short commercial break. | ||
| Brother Caldwell, Chris Caldwell on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
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They say that we need changing As if all the founding fathers seem to get it | |
| wrong But I say you | ||
| I still believe in The greatest innovator, liberator, cultivator, freedom knows So I suggest you take a look inside'Cause I think you've changed already You went and lost your pride War | ||
| Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| Welcome back here with Chris Caldwell. | ||
| No, we were just talking between the break. | ||
| Our audience is one of – we sell a ton of books here because our audience are book readers, which is kind of a lost art. | ||
| We started an imprint with Tony Lyons and the guys over at Skyhorse after – I don't know. | ||
| We sold – Kennedy's book sold I think over a million copies and War Room sold half of them. | ||
| So the Tony Fauci book. | ||
| But we started an imprint. | ||
| A couple of years ago, and I think we've published 10, 12 books, and we've had one book into the New York Times' top 10 bestseller list, Jack Posobiec's Unhuman, talking about the communist revolutions, different revolutions of the day. | ||
| So we're – your writing process, because your books are – Have big impact. | ||
| They're very serious, but they're spread apart. | ||
| You're not a guy that's cranking out a book every two years. | ||
|
unidentified
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I wish I were. | |
| Whenever I'm writing a book, I feel like this is really what I was born to do, but I have... | ||
| You get the juices get going? | ||
|
unidentified
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I love the process of writing a book. | |
| Talk to our audience about that. | ||
| What is the process of writing a book? | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| Books, and this is why we love them, they're so much different than reading on the internet or even newspapers today. | ||
| It's a lost art. | ||
| What is your process for researching, and then what is your process for writing? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I hate to say, you know, to be glib, I'd say it's, but the first 80% is procrastination, you know? | |
| And, you know, I do a lot of day-to-day journalism. | ||
| The Claremont Review that I work for is a quarterly. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Which means that I get to, you know, go really in-depth on a lot of subjects. | ||
| And so... | ||
| You know, at the end of a few years of procrastinating, there are actually a handful of things that I actually can talk reasonably, knowledgeably about. | ||
| And if they come together into a book, that's great. | ||
| And then just spend a lot of time thinking, and then outlining, and then a little more procrastinating, and then... | ||
| There's a blank page that can't concern you because you're prolific. | ||
| In all your day-to-day journalism and things like that, what is it about a book when you say procrastinate? | ||
| What's it about a book that makes you procrastinate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a really interesting thing. | |
| I think a certain perfectionism creeps back in. | ||
| Because you know the book's going to be there forever. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| And it's more definitive than a newspaper article or something else you're doing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, you know, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the novelist, said that he was totally unable to write novels until he took a job at a Colombian newspaper like El Espectador or something and started writing about murders and traffic accidents and things like that. | |
| And it took away his kind of like... | ||
| Fear. Reverence. | ||
| His undue reverence for the blank, you know, for the printed page. | ||
| That he got over that hurdle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| What was it that got your attention? | ||
| Your book was Age of Entitlement? | ||
| Yeah. What was it that got you interested in that topic to take a couple of years and research it and write it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I started off thinking about it as sort of like a demographic book. | |
| I was so interested in how the baby boom moved through society. | ||
| I mean, I think that the baby boom was a big enough generation that they not only got to vote for what they wanted. | ||
| If they were behind something voting-wise, it was going to happen. | ||
| But also the power of them as a force in the consumer market. | ||
| It meant that all the objects that everyone looks at their whole lives are whatever the baby boomer is. | ||
| You saw a lot of sex in the 60s and 70s. | ||
| You saw a lot of real estate in the 80s and 90s. | ||
| You're saying as they went through the phase of life, when people are young and have the testosterone and everything like that, that's when the sex was a big thing. | ||
| When it came time for them to settle down or become homeowners, that became a big thing. | ||
| And you could walk through those phases of American life and see it came with this demographic wave post-war. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. And it's not only that. | |
| They were so big and powerful that they were able to arrogate resources from their elders and from their offspring to build up their own lifestyle. | ||
| And so that struck me as really interesting. | ||
| But it's so hard to get at because you've got two things that are moving at the same time that it didn't really make much of a narrative. | ||
| But in looking at that period, I then discovered that the paradigm for almost everything that happened politically between the Kennedy assassination and the Trump nomination was civil rights. | ||
| It's basically a, you know, it's like a second constitution thanks to which a, you know, usually judicial but also kind of regulatory elite gets to. | ||
| Have a second look at democratic decisions, you know? | ||
| And so in that civil rights style of government, although it had a lot of, like, moral prestige behind it, really actually traveled very far from the sort of, like, moral causes that gave it its impetus. | ||
| From the original civil rights movement. | ||
| And so it would become what? | ||
| Just performative or become hollowed out? | ||
|
unidentified
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That was one problem. | |
| I mean, one problem is that it becomes performative and insincere. | ||
| But the other problem is that It spread. | ||
| I mean, so I think that when civil rights started, people thought it was really about fixing some things in the Deep South. | ||
| I mean, even outside of the Deep South and outside of about four states, all these states were reforming. | ||
| So I think people thought... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I came from the South. | ||
| I'm from Richmond, Virginia. | ||
| But when I went, and this is after I was a naval officer, I'd seen some of the world, at least the Pacific. | ||
| When I went to... | ||
| A certain university in Cambridge. | ||
| I was shocked about how segregated Boston was. | ||
| This is in the 80s. | ||
| It was just a very segregated... | ||
| There didn't seem to be any integration. | ||
| You had Roxbury. | ||
| You had the Southeast. | ||
| You had the city. | ||
| You had the Brahmins. | ||
| It was a very structural... | ||
| Coming from the South, you would think, oh, this has all been worked out before the Civil War. | ||
| It turned out it had not been worked out before the Civil War. | ||
|
unidentified
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Coming from Boston, I had kind of a different perspective on it. | |
| I mean, the black community in a place like Massachusetts is very different than a black community in a place like Virginia. | ||
| In Virginia, it's been there for, you know, 350, 400 years. | ||
| In Massachusetts, it's an immigrant community. | ||
| It all came in the 20th century. | ||
| Civil War of the century or 20th century. | ||
|
unidentified
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In the 20th century. | |
| I mean, and so... | ||
| I will also say another thing for you guys in Boston, particularly in Cambridge. | ||
| If you have even a hint of a Southern accent, they literally think you're... | ||
| We're the dumbest cracker in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is the most prejudiced city in the world if you're from the South. | |
| That's really interesting. | ||
| At Harvard, if you speak with a Southern accent, they just think you're a moron, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, well, how about that? | |
| I'm sorry about that. | ||
| I got through it. | ||
| Today... In the online, in our chat rooms, etc., we have an audience, a lot of boomers, okay? | ||
| And we have a young staff, and the young staff is very much in the internet, and particularly this new ecosystem of the Trump movement, a lot of it has come from, you know, online community. | ||
| And they have a pejorative term, you think like a boomer, right? | ||
| It's not, they don't say it in a positive, you're thinking like a boomer. | ||
| That's so boomer, particularly in handling of technology or knowing what's cutting edge, etc. | ||
| Did you ever think that that... | ||
| The boomer generation never thought that it would be a pejorative. | ||
| They always thought they were kind of the best and leading America to a new enlightenment, didn't they? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. But in retrospect, you can see very clearly that there were a lot of things that were really keeping us cosseted. | |
| And one of the things was the Cold War. | ||
| There really was not a lot of variety in the strategic predicaments that a global power would face. | ||
| We just had to mind the Russians. | ||
| It was not like a big, ricocheting, multifactorial world, you know? | ||
| That was one thing. | ||
| But I think that also the stability of large corporations, or the seeming stability of large corporations, meant that a lot of people, you know, in the 60s and 70s could imagine navigating their whole lives within one building. | ||
| You know, which is harder to do today. | ||
| That's impossible today with these young people. | ||
| I mean, even a job, it's all gig economy. | ||
| Do you think, one of the things that strikes me in coming to politics late and coming after doing a number of things and coming to D.C. with the leadership, I'm shocked for a country that has been a hegemon up to here recently and now it's being questioned. | ||
| The lack of seriousness of people, D.C. is a very provincial. | ||
| It doesn't come across as a global capital. | ||
| And the lack of not just sophisticated kind of people that seem to be on top of like this massive budget crisis we have, the financial crisis we have, and all these different crises, you don't have a lot of, I just don't know, particularly in political. | ||
| And almost cultural leadership. | ||
| Is that just my own prejudice or you think we – as a global power – when I look back at the British and the Romans and maybe it's just the way the books are written. | ||
| But it seems like – but you look at their decisions and how they thought things through. | ||
| It was just a much deeper level of seriousness than the leadership. | ||
| You know, like even today, it doesn't compare, and this is not about President Trump, but just the general environment of D.C. doesn't compare to like World War II when it seemed to me you had almost giants that were making these decisions. | ||
| Is that just the way history is written? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course it's not. | |
| No, of course you've got a point. | ||
| We have a very unusual kind of empire, world civilization, whatever you want to call it. | ||
| There are a few... | ||
| Factors, I think, that have kept us from being more Machiavellian. | ||
| There's a certain sort of like an ability that leaders have always had to sort of like ruthlessly make a big decision and decide. | ||
| And one of them is that we've always been an extremely rich country and we've developed this habit of buying off people rather than laying down the law. | ||
| We're a very feminist country. | ||
| Women have a lot more of a role in this country than they did in the leadership of any other country. | ||
| That's another thing. | ||
| There are a number of factors involved. | ||
| Do you think the fact that we became so rich so quickly, that even the trauma of the Civil War and things like the Great Depression, we're not culture... | ||
| Cultural ending, right? | ||
| Do you think that had anything to do with maybe the lack of seriousness that we haven't had? | ||
| Like today, I happen to think in the convergence of these crises that we have and the lack of kind of leadership we have at so many different levels, this thing is going to metastasize. | ||
| And one thing will build on that. | ||
| The crisis will just build. | ||
| And we haven't had to go through. | ||
| Long periods where you had 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years of hard decisions. | ||
| Tough decisions and trade-offs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You think that's where we're going? | |
| I think it's where we're going. | ||
| When I look at the different trend lines and I see people... | ||
| They're always looking for a fairy godmother like Elon Musk to come and find a trillion dollars of fraud. | ||
| And so all of a sudden you wouldn't have to cut the budget. | ||
| He would find it. | ||
| Or artificial intelligence is now going to bail us out. | ||
| There's always something next that's going to bail us out. | ||
| And it's kind of wishful thinking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. Although artificial intelligence is interesting. | |
| Could I ask you a question? | ||
| Sure. You can do anything you want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the same realm. | |
| I mean, in that light, one of the things that interests me most now is the way we're operating at two different... | ||
| I think that Trump has probably convinced most of the country, the way he convinced most of the country on China, he's probably convinced most of the country that in the long term, our dependence on foreign manufacturing is unsustainable. | ||
| That our trade deficits are unsustainable as well. | ||
| So I feel like You could ask almost anybody, even in Cambridge, and they'd say, yeah, it probably is. | ||
| It would be nice if we had factories that we could convert to making artillery shells, etc., etc. | ||
| But there is this nearer term. | ||
| Problem of sort of like coordinating investment so that we don't find ourselves with nothing when we cut off the Chinese. | ||
| I say this all the time, and I'm one of the guys that the architects are believing this. | ||
| We're at a full embargo to the Chinese. | ||
| They've been at economic war with us for a long time, stealing the $600 billion a year in technology. | ||
| We've financed the whole thing, Wall Street and private equity. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| We're at a full embargo right now. | ||
| And I tell people, we're at a full embargo with the Chinese. | ||
| And in 90 days to 100 days, the shelves are going to start being empty. | ||
| I mean, President Trump took that meeting the other day. | ||
| It wasn't random that he had Walmart and Costco. | ||
| And those guys said, hey, look. | ||
| We understand what you want to do and we want to get more American product and we want to do this, but there's a lag time here on supply chains and understand we're going to hit a wall. | ||
| This is why I think just before we came on, President Trump keeps talking about, hey, there's some side meetings going on, and she kind of put it out. | ||
| I ain't making any calls and we're not having any meetings. | ||
| Because these guys have been – look, from the time we brought them in to the World Trade Organization and the most favored nation in 2000. | ||
| They have broken as they're supposed to because in their concept of war, going kinetic is like defeating itself. | ||
| They never should have to fight the foreign devils with military equipment, and they know that we're better than that. | ||
| So ever since then, when they gained that system, the cyber deal they cut with Obama, they didn't live up to in 2015. | ||
| A couple of years later, Hong Kong in 2019, they totally tore it up and took over Hong Kong. | ||
| Trump worked two years to cut a deal. | ||
| That was a more serious thing that we're talking about today with Lighthizer. | ||
| They walked away after two years of negotiation and ready to sign and walked away. | ||
| He then did the skinny deal in January of 2020 when they sent the Wuhan lab virus over here. | ||
| They didn't fulfill anything on the skinny deal. | ||
| They have never fulfilled one item of anything they had to fulfill in six major negotiations they've had of signed deals ever. | ||
| And because they see this another way, it's an incompatible system and they have no interest in coupling. | ||
| They don't mind decoupling. | ||
| So you're right. | ||
| The time scale, and it's going to be a factor. | ||
| I'm going to talk about this tonight. | ||
| You have to, and I don't know if we've prepped. | ||
| Well, that is a concern of mine, | ||
|
unidentified
|
and I was, you know, hoping you could tell me how we were going to get to that. | |
| Do that get to the long term? | ||
| One way we can get to the long term is, first of all, you have to do these deals with the East Asian countries. | ||
| You have to do Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines, and India. | ||
| You latch those in. | ||
| Right before he came on, I was saying, Europe has notified us, or it's in the European press, that the EU has basically told people they are not prepared to decouple. | ||
| Our deals do have a part of it that says... | ||
| Because the deal is going to take a long time to work out. | ||
| But the memorandums understand the architecture of it is you're going to be more in our trading program with our laws and customs than these guys. | ||
| And Beijing warns retaliation against nations doing U.S. deals. | ||
| The EU has notified us that they're not going to decouple. | ||
| They're not going to agree to anything. | ||
| And this gets to my point about we're underwriting their security. | ||
| And that's why the two battle groups in the Red Sea, although they're there clearly for the Houthis and the UAE and the... | ||
| The Saudis and Israel. | ||
| So it's a mess. | ||
| Are you working on any book today? | ||
| Is there anything you'd give us a headline? | ||
| What excites you that would get you enough to break through your procrastination? | ||
|
unidentified
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What excites me is the simultaneity of all these revolutions. | |
| The complexity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. Well, and the interplay between... | |
| You know, what's going on in Silicon Valley and what's going on in the populist world and what's going on in the world of... | ||
| Well, the oligarchs are totally out of control. | ||
| The four guys control artificial intelligence, which is just one aspect of the singularity. | ||
| Because we're hurtling towards a point that Homo sapiens is on this side and Homo sapiens plus is on that side. | ||
| And that may only be a couple of years away, maybe three or four years away. | ||
| That's a huge problem. | ||
| And you have more regulations. | ||
| On a Korean nail salon in D.C. to get licensed to actually do people's nails and the makeup and other things than you have on the four oligarchs running all artificial intelligence, which is seen as already been a disaster. | ||
| And DeepSeek today released that everybody that's using DeepSeek, all your information is going immediately to the Chinese Communist Party for manipulation. | ||
| So artificial intelligence is a massive – I'm a Luddite. | ||
| I would very much like to slow down artificial intelligence, full max, until we think it through. | ||
|
unidentified
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There's this old, you know, Reaganite idea that you absolutely cannot slow the progress of technology. | |
| Do you have sort of pointers on how that could be done? | ||
| I've got some of the top guys in AI are actually on our side. | ||
| We're putting something together. | ||
| Slow the move to artificial general intelligence. | ||
| Once you get to artificial general intelligence, first of all, it's probably gone right now. | ||
| It's probably too late to stop it, although we're going to try to put up something. | ||
| But listen, technology from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, my belief is, did much to free men and women from the horrors of some of this labor. | ||
| Now, with surveillance technology, we're going to apply it. | ||
| The increases in technology oppress individuals. | ||
| It's very oppressive. | ||
| I mean, we know this from... | ||
| We're banned. | ||
| This show is one of the largest shows in America. | ||
| We're banned on virtually every platform. | ||
| Banned in perpetuity. | ||
| On Facebook, on Spotify, on Instagram, on Twitter. | ||
| Banned on all of it. | ||
| Because we were Trump's site for the stealing of the election of 2020, and then we were the first ones on the pandemic. | ||
| In the third week of January of 2020, we're the ones that came on, shifted the war room pandemic, we shifted the war room pandemic, and told them, hey, it's out of Wuhan, and here's what happened. | ||
| And, of course, it was conspiracy theory and everything like that, and now it's all mature. | ||
| We've got to bounce. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Great. You have social media? | ||
| Where do people go to get your articles? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not on social media, I'm afraid. | |
| You're so good. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's a website people can go get your books or just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, just go to the Claremont Review. | |
| Yeah, because I read your stuff all the time. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
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| For, I don't know, 4,000 years of mankind's history, times of financial turbulence, and financial turbulence we have. | ||
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| Listen to it. | ||
| We'll see you tomorrow morning live, 10 a.m. Eastern Day, 010, back here in Kansas City, Missouri, at the conference for Hillsdale College. |
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