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April 29, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:56
WarRoom Battleground EP 756: CCP's Ties With Elite Education
Participants
Main voices
d
dave walsh
11:36
n
natalie winters
17:25
s
steve bannon
13:53
Appearances
Clips
j
jake tapper
00:08
| Copy link to current segment

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 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.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼
And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
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. Baff.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
It's Monday, 28 April, Year of the Lord, 2025.
Natalie Winters joins us from the White House.
Natalie, I think momentarily we may be getting a feed.
So I think we may be jumping into the Oval, maybe a press avail.
We may be seeing it already on tape.
We'll figure it out.
But we just had Robert O 'Brien, you know him, the national security virus, the last one for President Trump, talking about India, the Chinese Communist Party.
I had an interview today with Steve Inscape of NPR, and I kind of went off on the fact that at these universities, I don't think we're being tough enough with about the 350,000 Chinese national students that are here, the additional personnel they have in the National Weapons Labs,
and some of these labs we're paying for for research, have Chinese nationals here.
What are your thoughts about the situation at Harvard, ma 'am?
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
Well, look, I think whenever we talk about Chinese Communist Party, foreign infiltration ops, there's obviously a lot of focus on how they try to abstain from things turning kinetic, because they say if you turn it kinetic, you've essentially already lost.
But I think what the important part is what you're really getting at, what I think we're seeing going on, or at least what we saw at the southern border, and even today I'd flag what's going on in the South China Sea, right?
China planting a flag on a Philippine island, just a dispute going on there.
I believe CNDK is the name of it.
But you're seeing this fusion, I think, between their...
Sort of typical tactics when it comes to the theaters of war, right?
More in the information, economic, psychological, lawfare.
That's, of course, their three-warfares doctrine.
But you're almost seeing this convergence of it becoming kinetic in this sort of roundabout way.
And Harvard, I think, is a perfect example of how the American people, it's not just that they're being misled, but they're being intentionally, I think, deceived, not exactly by the Chinese Communist Party, but by the American experts that they're sort of propping up.
They have a name for it.
It's called the borrowed.
But Harvard is a perfect example, at least in the CCP worldview, of being an elite institution carrying some weight,
some class in terms of influencing American political discourse.
They have collaborated with one of the premier United Front Work Department organizations by the name of the China United States Exchange Foundation.
Now, the United Front Work Department is the very systematic and calculated political warfare operation that emanates out of Beijing to the tune of billions of dollars.
Think Hunter Biden, but on an industrial scale.
And I know we like to talk about a lot of these universities collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party like it's a thing of the past.
Right. The Confucius Institutes were shuttered under President Trump.
They still have the CSSA.
That's the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which is where there's more direct espionage efforts going on.
But just two weeks ago.
It's the Harvard College China Conference.
It was April 14th.
And guess who, not only what their closing speaker was, but who their main partner in terms of sponsoring this event was?
None other than QCEF.
Now, just to go back real quick, QCEF has a very long pattern of collaborating, particularly with Harvard, also UChicago, a lot of America's top universities in terms of flying students.
overseas, training them, having them meet, in some cases even with PLA officials, touring Huawei offices, meeting with sanctioned companies like Hikvision, Huawei, DJI drones.
It really is a horrible program and tactic that they use to co-opt a lot of these Western elites.
But I think the important point is that in the same world in which our taxpayer dollars are going to subsidize Harvard University.
They're concurrently taking billions of dollars, and the disclosure is such that you'll never really know.
It's sort of the, you know, counter to, I guess, the act blue dark money, but it's by design.
But the Chinese Communist Party is still, as of two weeks ago, publicly sponsoring events with Harvard College.
And they also do the Harvard Kennedy School Conference, too.
But it's so blatantly in your face.
And frankly, Steve, the buried lead is that it's so in your face.
That means that they know they've bought off the highest, the upper echelons of the United States, of our society, that they can get away with doing it.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Now, when I talk about banning the students, Harvard's addicted to two things, maybe three things, but definitely two things.
U.S. federal taxpayer money to keep different programs going, Chinese Communist Party massive infusion of cash right from programs, and probably Qatar.
I sent you that piece today.
There's a study out that says, is it $29 billion, the Chinese Communist Party in Qatar?
Alone, those two have put with major U.S. universities.
Our universities that used to be some of the most cherished institutions in our countries are no longer American institutions.
This is why at Columbia you had 60% foreign students.
That stuff's got to end.
Federal money's got to stop right now.
They've got to purge these faculties.
They've got to purge.
And anybody that's a collaborator with the Chinese Communist Party has got to go.
All the kids, and some of these kids are innocent, the Chinese national kids, but right now, they've got to sign that pledge and they have to report every 30 days.
For right now, they've got to go.
All of them.
And you've got to open those slots up for American kids.
We've got to cut the money off from the Chinese.
Chinese Communist Party, we're in an economic war with them.
Right now, that sandbar that people, you know, oh, it's just a sandbar.
They are laying a stake to one of the islands as small as it is or a toll.
To make a statement against the Philippines that they're in charge of the South China Sea.
They got the nine-dotted map or chart that shows it's an inland sea to mainland China.
This thing's rolling hard.
And President Trump, you said it perfectly, the Sun Tzu part, if they have to go kinetic, they think they've lost, so they're going to do everything else except kinetic.
And the thing they do most...
Is that they know the foreign leaders can be bribed and bought off.
Natalie, it's a pretty sorry state of affairs.
Not only are the American elites can be bought off, they can be bought off pretty cheaply, can they not, ma 'am?
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I mean, I think the whole Confucius Institute issue is sort of the limited hangout version in terms of what is going on on these college campuses.
But I think if you even extrapolate more broadly what you're talking about, which I agree, we've been at economic war with them, if not, I would say veering into the territory of kinetic warfare for a very long time.
But even if you take away, if you say, OK, maybe these students aren't affiliated directly with the Chinese Communist Party, but table that for a second, we still shouldn't be educating and training and imparting, let alone a country with a history, repeated history at that of intellectual property theft and industrial
espionage, with the secrets, with the trades, with industry, with tips, with the brightest, though I don't know if the
And to that point, I think people don't understand that what the Chinese Communist Party is doing in every facet of American society, I mean, to call it war is an understatement.
If you read their military doctrine, which people recall, this is what I got my start in.
In terms of the investigative reporting, they have very, very calculated, the most heavily cited quote throughout their military doctrine is to subdue, the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
And that three warfares doctrine that I was talking about, it's psychological warfare, media warfare.
And lawfare.
And all of that together is how China has, I would argue, essentially taken over at least the Achilles heel of the United States, which is our ruling class.
But I just don't think that the people who are messaging on China, right, in the legacy media, they will never understand the threat, partly because they're paid off and we've exposed time and time again the trips that they've paid to take these journalists on in exchange for favorable coverage.
But the key point that I would make, too, for anyone who thinks it's so imperative, That we somehow replace the people who are going to...
They can be requisitioned by the state,
by China's Ministry of Intelligence, by their spy services, to do whatever the Chinese Communist Party is.
And if you know that that's a thing, I have no idea why you would be importing to the tune of hundreds of thousands of foreign students onto these college campuses where you see it time and time again.
People being indicted, arrested for stealing research secrets, for not disclosing that they're being funded by the Chinese Communist Party.
And your previous guest, Robert O 'Brien, what he really did that was so revolutionary during Trump 1 was that he really focused on enforcing Farrah and overhauling that.
We're using that as sort of a touchstone or at least a guiding light to go after what are the, as we speak, active 200 + registered foreign agents on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
When we talk about the lobbying firms and the law firms, part of the way that China has been able to co-opt the city is that explicitly...
Tied to whether it's Beijing Municipal Services or Shanghai.
Name your city.
These cities will retain Western law firms or lobbying firms, the ones on K Street that I'm not too far from, and they'll lobby for them for sort of, you know, meaningless, paltry issues.
But the real point is that they're on the payroll.
Not only are they probably hacking all their devices, but they are then, for all the rest of the American and Western corporate clients that they're working on behalf of, they're not going to compromise or come after the clients who are also paying them.
I think one of the most staggering and stunning statistics from the entirety of Trump One was when they classified, it was over, I believe, 25 Chinese companies as military collaborators, which, you know, military-civil fusion, it's not just an industry thing, it's a science thing.
know the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
But of those 20, 25 companies, four or five of them had active Western lobbyists working on their behalf, trying to get them government contracts, trying to, you know, protect their image in the Western press.
That's, if you extrapolate that out to every Chinese company, that's extremely damaging.
But all of this stuff is very well rehearsed.
And I think that most people are really naive.
unidentified
Yes.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Hang on.
I want to make sure the audience gets a full impact of this.
They're lobbying.
To get U.S. government contracts.
Think about that for a second, folks.
As if your pension fund hasn't been the private equity hedge fund money that shipped the jobs over there, that your tax money is not keeping this madness going.
That they have retained lobbyists to get government defense contracts.
I mean, it's insane.
You can't say, I mean, they're at a war with us.
They must think we're idiots.
We fund it, we let them steal the technology, or we train them up in it, or we just look the other way.
If our companies, to get access to their market, have to form joint ventures, the first thing they have to dump in is their intellectual property.
I mean, it's open season on the Americans.
Explain, just as a tutorial, just go back, explain to folks, when you say a united front entity or a united front effort, what does united front mean?
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
Sure.
So this is actually a branch.
It's led by the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
So this group oversees their foreign outreach efforts, not just limited to the United States and not even limited to the Western world.
It's sort of, I would say, the political institutionalization of what they attempted to do with the Belt and Road, the 140-plus countries that signed on to that.
That was using infrastructure and ports as leverage.
The United Front Work Department uses business deals, putting spouses on.
In some cases, blackmail, trips to China.
But a lot of these very euphemistic-sounding organizations, a lot of various city-level federation for return Chinese overseas, the whole sister city scam, the Chinese Association for International Unfriendly Contact, the Chinese People's Association for Foreign Contact.
They have these very innocuous but funny-sounding names, but they're very calculated.
And I would say just my overview, having tracked this stuff, people can probably tell it.
I geek out on this.
But in the early 2000s, like after they joined the WTO and were really focusing on the economic warfare stuff, they were very content, I would argue, with just sort of shaping and astroturfing the narrative about what exactly constituted China's rise.
And they wanted China to be looked at by the rest of the world as a model, you know, that they were a great country, they lifted all these people out of poverty.
But post-Trump entering office...
Maybe even a little before that.
I think that the influence ops sort of shifted where they were no longer content just shaping the narratives around China.
But that was when you really saw them, I think, start to do the more cultural subversion stuff here in the West.
And that's when you really get into the, you know, fifth dimension, fifth kind of generation warfare where...
By co-opting politicians who will push for immigration policies that lead to an open border, you then allow military-aged Chinese males with ties to the PLA to enter your country through that porous border.
When you have lax politicians who won't enforce agricultural laws, that's how you see China buying up farmland.
That's how you see politicians who won't call out Chinese spy balloons.
That's how you co-opt an entire scientific community to give our tax dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
And the list goes on, right?
Take your pick.
And academia, going back to Harvard, is also a perfect example of that because all of these stupid research papers and white papers that they put out, there's no meaning to them.
It's not like these researchers are sitting around wanting to write.
Dozens of pages about useless, woke stuff.
Those are then used to lobby members of Congress to adopt certain positions.
And when the Harvard-Ash Center is literally being funded by Chinese Communist Party-owned enterprises, and in some cases, I mean, Harvard...
Xi Jinping's daughter lives in Boston and goes to Harvard.
You know what I mean?
It's absurd.
The level of compromise, but the boldness of it shows you how deeply embedded...
They actually are.
I mean, there's a person who is right now a professor emeritus or whatever at the Naval War College who I exposed years ago for visiting and going to the Shanghai Academy for Social Sciences, which our own intelligence services have flagged as being the hotbed for how the Chinese Communist Party Flags and finds Western spies who will leak documents to them.
And we've seen several CIA people leak documents.
They have established channels.
So if a stupid, you know, naval war professor is...
Able to do that, and Naval War College was able to do that and get away with it.
This goes all the way to the top of society.
The idea that this is just Western greed and lust for the Chinese market, that's part of it.
Maybe that works with Mark Zuckerberg, though I'd argue he's compromised too.
But this is very, very, very calculated.
It's why I was able to have the investigative career that I had at the age of 19, because there was so much to report on that no one ever wanted to get into because they were bought off and paid for by them.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Given your professional expertise, what do you think it's going to take to put a blowtorch to this and to rid Harvard of this bacillus, ma 'am?
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
So I would start by Congress subpoenaing every Western lobbying firm that has worked on behalf of a Chinese Communist Party-linked company to get all the documents, to get the names of the people that they collaborated with, the journalists that went on these trips, the think tankers,
the students.
Just get the names first.
And then from there, I think you can kind of reverse engineer who's up to no good.
But I would have a zero tolerance policy for a lot of these people who have any affiliation with these Chinese Communist Party United Front Work Department groups.
The CCP, as I always described, is radioactive.
They're toxic.
Once you are awash in their influence ops, you don't escape.
I would say I maybe perhaps disagree with DOJ's decision to water down some of the FARA registration.
I actually think FARA is an important statute.
I don't necessarily think that what it currently is is all that great.
I would have reformed it before getting it out.
But I think that they should more intensely enforce FARA operations and make these universities have to disclose their funding.
I think that first and foremost and have them make the case to the American people while they're taking and actually, believe it or not, training leaders from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which has orchestrated the entire Uyghur genocide.
Harvard actually has a special program where they used to invite them over here.
They would bring them, they'd let them tour the Capitol and have them meet with members of Congress and instruct them how to be
I'm not kidding.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I don't know about the audience, but I'm all set to say that I think Natalie is ready to go into a cabinet position, or at least an undersecretary somewhere.
We do have a...
But while we got you, Natalie, we're going to use you.
Let's show...
We got the clip.
Let's show the clip from over the weekend.
unidentified
We journalists are a lot of things.
We are competitive and pushy.
We are impatient.
And sometimes we think we know everything.
But...
We're also human.
We miss our families and significant life moments in service to this job.
We care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public's trust.
What we are not is the opposition.
What we are not is the enemy of the people, and what we are not is the enemy of the state.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I thought there was no comedian this year at the White House Correspondents Dinner, ma 'am.
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
Maybe I'm pro-fact checkers, because fact check, false.
That's, of course, Eugene Daniels, the, I guess, newfound MSNBC contributor who, what, accuses us of being biased despite working for a network where a former Democrat press secretary now works.
They recently did a panel together.
I'll have to clip it for you.
They said some truly wild stuff.
I described that dinner as like a doomsday prepper bunker, because that's essentially what it felt like.
There was a lot of internal drama amidst the WHCA about whether or not...
They should actually have had the dinner, given the circumstances that we live under.
But I will say my takeaway when I went to some of the events this weekend is that new media, I mean, we've always been strong, but we've never been stronger.
And it's quite interesting to watch the legacy media people interact with the new media.
I would say much like myself.
They treat us like zoo animals.
They don't know what to do with us.
Maybe it's rooted in envy because their networks are getting spun off and sold and they have no viewership.
But I had some very interesting interactions.
But I just think that this dinner, I know I hosted the Friday show and I made the point to our audience that this is really a victory for them.
I mean, in the same way that President Trump has commandeered the Kennedy Center, Weekend is supposed to be something where all of my wonderful colleagues standing around me right now who are, believe me, apoplectic over all the illegal aliens, criminal legal aliens that have been deported.
You can see the signs behind me.
I don't know if they know what to do with those.
But that's a weekend that those people are supposed to celebrate and relish in the idea that there are these journalists, right, these pristine, untouchable pseudo-intellectuals.
You took that from them.
Our audience took that from them, not just by helping President Trump get elected, but by helping shows like this, people like you, people like me.
We have the platforms that we do to totally destroy and debunk their narratives.
And I just want to thank our audience and applaud our audience for having done that, because these people are the most smug, like I said, pseudo-intellectuals you will ever meet, who think they're better than you.
They have nothing but contempt for the American people.
They would scoff if we were covering the truck driver issue.
They would try to find a way to bring up, who knows, multiculturalism.
But it was an important marker, if you read the reports of it.
People were hugging longer than they could.
They were wearing flats instead of heels.
And I think that that's quite symbolic.
You want to talk about psychological warfare coming from the CCP?
Our audience can dish as good as they can take.
And they've dished a lot against this legacy media elite.
And it's quite glorious to see them not be able to have their parties at not just taxpayer expense ideologically, but it's...
It was great to see.
And I have some funny stories.
Maybe we'll have to do an after-hours edition, but me and the legacy media, it's an interesting thing.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Maybe we'll do that.
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
A lot of them are texting me.
I'm like, no, I don't want to hang out.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Exactly.
Slide into your DMs, right?
I want to go back to the phrase, though, that seems to upset them, and they've got to have to give a round of applause to.
This is a term we came up in the early days of...
The first Trump administration, when it was so obvious that everything was hand-to-hand combat.
And I really want to applaud Caroline Levitt, Susie Wiles, Taylor Bowditch, Stephen Chung, the entire, you know, media team over there and the chief of staff for really having the strength of purpose to kind of move these people aside and let some young fire breathers in.
From actually places that have audiences and have engaged activists.
The enemy of the people.
You could tell that we landed that one.
And that stings.
They have to go and try to reinforce the fact that we're not the enemy of the people.
Now, Eugene doesn't actually make the most, you know, he's not the most powerful speaker.
But in your hanging out with this group this weekend, is that something that stings a lot that they're now referred to as the enemy of the people?
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, and I think the fact that they're using that terminology, it means that it's stuck, right?
We won.
Like the fact that he says opposition, that's something that we talk about all the time.
Usually they would reject that framing.
It's an interesting phenomenon because though you would think that they would detest my presence being there and hate me, it's more of like...
A curiosity while also thinking like you're a mental patient, like you belong in an insane asylum.
And I think the biggest interesting thing to me, you see it sort of in their coverage, I think, of the new media.
But how they even speak to me, it's like as if they've never talked to someone with my beliefs before, which for a White House reporter, for someone who covers politics, that's sort of outlandish.
And I'm not saying that they don't hit the campaign trail and interview MAGA supporters, but I think that they have...
Truly a contempt for them.
They think that they're better.
They think because, you know, we didn't go to Harvard and get brainwashed by the Chinese Communist Party that somehow their voices matter more.
And I just think that it's wild that the new media beat is the advent of the new media beat.
It's this whole thing now, right?
We've been around for a very long time.
Like, I meet people who don't know what War Room is, and it's preposterous, right?
I mean, that's malpractice in terms of being a journalist.
So it's a very interesting kind of juxtaposition between two different worlds.
To break it back to China, it's like a Thucydides trap, right?
You have the two competing legacy media, new media, but it's...
It's weird.
I do it for the audience, but please don't make me do this forever.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
One reason I still don't think they've realized that we're there permanently, not just in this administration, but in Trump 28 and then thereafter, that this new media is not going away.
We only get stronger and bigger audiences and more relevant and more scoops every day.
They're kind of on the sidelines.
I don't think it's hit on them.
They think you're a curiosity.
They also think you're a curiosity that's just passing through.
They have not embraced the fact that you and the people that follow you are there forever.
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Natalie, social media.
unidentified
How do people follow you, man?
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
Natalie G. Winters on all platforms.
We'll have to find a way to do a special episode where I tell my stories from this weekend.
I met Kennedy.
How's that for a teaser?
unidentified
I hope you gave her the old what for.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
For that Daily Mail thing.
Anyway, we'll talk about that later.
Natalie, you're the best.
unidentified
Keep working, girl.
natalie winters ▲ ● ▼
Have a good one.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break.
A huge event today in Spain and Portugal.
Still not explained.
We had Dave Walsh on this morning.
We've asked Dave Walsh to come back.
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unidentified
Razor Flake.
Good evening.
Authorities across Spain and Portugal are tonight scrambling to restore power to large areas of their countries after one of the biggest power outages in recent history.
A cyber attack has been ruled out as the cause, with engineers instead blaming what has been called a rare atmospheric phenomenon that could take days to fully resolve.
Ashna Haranag sent this report from Madrid.
Carnage in Spain's capital.
No traffic lights at this roundabout makes for an almost lawless scene as cars and pedestrians navigate the disorder.
It's a picture replicated across the country and in Portugal too.
Both nations entirely cut off from power.
As the train network grounded to a halt, some stranded passengers in Valencia walked the rest of their journeys.
Railway lines deserted and phone lines dead.
By lunchtime, office workers poured onto the streets, dazed and disconnected.
We were working very well.
Suddenly the computer went down.
We thought it was a normal blackout, as it happens sometimes, but then we heard it was a cyber attack.
This was through information, through the poor connection we had to the internet.
After that we stopped having any comms, no access to the internet, nothing.
And then came the official announcements.
Travel is only advised if necessary.
State security forces have increased their presence and vigilance on the streets and roads.
But for the moment, no civil protection has been observed.
As for railway traffic, it has stopped, as you know, for the safety of passengers.
Passengers wanting to travel in and out of the countries are desperate for movement.
That's simply not happening.
Flights in and out are severely delayed or cancelled.
Madrid and Barcelona airports are running off contingency generators.
There are queues everywhere you look for taxis, staff desks and check-in.
People are desperate for information.
The dropout blamed on Spain's electricity grid.
Portuguese grid officials say due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines, a phenomenon known as induced atmospheric vibration.
It's estimated that full normalisation of the network could take up to a week.
Two countries thrown into darkness and the cause is still...
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, folks, this is 7 million people in a very advanced industrial country.
There's something not right here, and I want everybody to take notes.
That's why we covered it this morning as soon as I first heard about it and got some heads up from people that this was going to be big.
Dave Walsh joins us.
Dave, great job this morning.
What is the mumbo-jumbo, Dave, that they gave us at the end?
My eyes are crossed.
What is this new term, induced what?
And what are the things caused by?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
This is a phrase we have not heard before.
Today's word salad from the Spanish government.
Induced atmospheric vibration caused by overheating of transmission lines due to heat from the sun, from the atmosphere.
Nothing unusual about temperatures in Spain today, actually.
This is a remarkable explanation that has never been proffered before.
I have never heard of it.
We have never heard of it.
But I'm telling you, it smacks of when you have a system that is now 50% dependent, as theirs is, on variable part-time electricity sources, solar, wind, and battery storage, mainly solar.
You are vastly exposed to needing, one, the importation of huge quantities of electricity for when you don't have those resources, which generally is like 75% of the time.
Those resources aren't prevalent in enough abundance to create power.
So they do have a massive interlink with France for nuclear power and, of course, a robust activity with Morocco and Libya on natural gas imports to fuel their remaining gas-fired plants, which they're closing over time.
As they're also closing their nuclear plants, and they have a plan to close their last two coal plants in the next several years, an attempt to be 80% dependent on variable electricity generation resources, which means they'll be heavily dependent on France, Libya, and Morocco going forward.
Possibly, if they build an LNG terminal, be dependent on U.S. LNG coming in there also.
This is the risk of having an energy system for electricity that is based on a firm foundation of variable nature-based resources, not controllable by human command or what we call dispatchable.
And we are headed in the same direction here in our own system.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I want to go to that.
Is this part of the decarbonization effort?
Are they farther along than Germany, sir?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
They're in about the same place.
They're about equal to Germany in the percentage of the capacity of power generation devices installed that are renewable.
Solar plus wind in Spain is now about 66% of their installed capacity and about 50% of their electricity supply.
So to offset when that's not present, they now have massive importation of French nuclear.
And from their gas plants, gas coming from Libya and Morocco to offset all the time of day, the very lengthy time of day, that this kind of resource supplies nothing.
So you've got a very unstable grid.
And yeah, they're about equal to Germany.
Okay.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I want to go to the United States, but I want to break it down by states.
I want to talk.
Florida, South Carolina, and Texas.
Those are about as three MAGA states as you can get.
Red-blooded Americans live there.
Are we heading down a path in those three states to replicate what Spain and Portugal have done, sir?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
I'm sad to report in Texas we're there already on an installed capacity basis.
Texas is now about 55%.
Solar, wind, and battery storage.
ERCOT is the grid there.
The ERCOT plan for the next five years, assembled by all their power companies, is that the next five years will be 90% of the new capacity additions the next five years will be solar and battery storage.
Two hour a day, storage.
Six hour a day, solar.
So Texas will be in exactly the same place as Spain within five years.
It's almost there now.
And, you know, every summer we're talking because of that on this show about the electricity shortages imminent in the hottest days of the summer when they're just about out of power to meet normal air conditioning demand when it's 98, 99, which happens frequently in large parts of Texas.
Normal, normal days running out of electricity because of...
You don't have enough wind blowing late in the afternoon, and then solar power diminishes badly between 5 and 7. It reduces by like 80%, but the temperatures hang in there to about 92% of peak until about 9 at night.
So you get this massive risk window in Texas between 5 and 8 o 'clock when the temperatures remain very high, but the solar concentration for power generation gets very, very low after about 5 p.m.
Here is headed there.
The Florida plan for the next 10 years, Is to go from 30,000 megawatts of solar, grow by about 30,000 more megawatts, and only add about 2,000 megawatts of gas-fired power here.
So our whole plan in this state for the next 10 years is about 95% solar power, new capacity additions, and about 5% man-controlled, dispatchable, baseload, gas-fired.
It's horrible.
We're headed to the same place.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Hang on.
Hang on.
That's not horrible.
That's insanity.
There has to be something I don't understand is because the new capital equipment is because it's this new thing.
Why given and particularly now that Trump's in in Texas is Texas.
How could this possibly be?
You just told me that these two are on the path to be in quickly to be Spain and Portugal.
We know that model doesn't work.
We know it's absurd to even we mock.
We mock the Europeans for decarbonizing on a cult.
And here's what's so upsetting about it.
The people that brought on the cult of decarbonization have totally walked away from it because it could limit their ability to build data centers and have power centers that can power artificial intelligence.
As soon as they see something, they want more.
They run to that.
You don't hear any of this nonsense, any of this crap from these people anymore because they don't want to limit the power that they know that artificial intelligence has.
How can the state of Texas with Abbott and how can Florida with DeSantis and these legislatures and, no offense, I don't know, two-thirds of the population is MAGA?
How could this possibly be going down this path which is so obviously the road to perdition, sir?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
DeSantis won't address it.
He has never addressed it.
He has never spoken publicly about it.
But his Public Service Commission, appointed by him, has approved every single solar new capacity plan of Duke Energy, and especially NextEra, TECO, submitted to the PSC here for the last five years.
Under all those plans, those companies are installing nothing but solar power and battery storage.
It's not a diverse energy model at all.
It's one thing.
It's solar and battery storage for the next 10 years here.
On top of the fact that these two companies, Matigo, have spent about $13 billion in the last four years on this same stuff that operates here 22% of the time.
The known capacity factor in solar here is 22% operational, 78% not.
Utilities benefit from this in the following way.
The capital return on investment, they're guaranteed by the Public Service Commission is 10.8%.
The cost of this stuff has been four times more than building conventional combined cycle power plants, gas power plants.
So they win, win, win, because the CapEx churn, the CapEx investment is so much higher on which they get their guaranteed rate of return.
This is a big win for them.
They hide behind the notion of net zero decarb to defend, and they now hide behind the prior administration, hide behind the EPA in defending, adding nothing but this stuff.
That because it's so costly and so intermittent, drives up electricity costs through the roof.
Power costs have gone up here.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
But hang on.
MAGA ain't shy about saying, hey, this is not right.
Why do I not hear ratepayers?
Or maybe we do and our ear's just not out.
We'll give them a platform.
Why are the ratepayers in Texas and in Florida, which are the two railheads of the MAGA movement, why are they not sitting there going, this is outrageous.
We're being ripped off.
By the way, if you were doing this from something that had a longer good to it, you could see it.
This doesn't.
It was clearly a hoax, phony science.
And the reason I know that is all the people that promoted it ditched it immediately when it came between them and the ultimate power of artificial intelligence.
You don't hear any of this net zero crap anymore from the oligarchs.
Why are the ratepayers not in rebellion down in Florida and in Texas, sir?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
Government officials here seem to think people want this here.
They never cross-link the high cost of it with doing this.
The reality of it is never discussed in cost-based by the utilities nor government officials here.
Utilities are massive pack donors to government officials here to get elected.
Utilities are the second largest donor group in the state behind insurance companies.
They control the state house, the state senate, and the governor's thinking on anything about energy strategy, most notoriously NextEra.
Xterra's articulated CapEx stock program for equity growth of their firm is to be the world's largest owner of wind, solar, and battery farms in the world.
That is their articulated stock hype message on Wall Street.
It has served them well.
So now they want to backflip that into Florida and do the same thing here.
This places an embarrassment to them because they just built, five, six years ago, five major huge combined cycle plants.
We knew as much about CO2 five years ago when they did that.
Now they're beginning to throttle those back, run them part-time, intermittent, up and down, up and down, making them much more inefficient to back up solar that only operates here about 22% of the time.
Now, it's a big money game for the utilities that are a massive donor.
The general population, because they promote so much false information on this stuff being kind of free, which is entirely false information.
By the fact that this is somehow cheap energy.
It's way not.
It's four times more costly because it's so intermittent and part-time.
In Texas, the same thing's been underway.
There has to be a change, and the legislature there is considering now a requirement that half of new capacity in Texas has to be baseload, continuous duty, human-controlled.
That's now under consideration in Texas.
That's great news.
That would help solve this in Texas.
Over here, nothing of the sort's underway.
DeSantis has been duplicitous and quiet about the whole damn thing and has not been forthright with the people on the real cost of this in way reduced reliability, reserve margins going way, way down, and costs going way, way up, which they have.
They have.
Duke's cost here up 42% in the last eight years and about 32% in the last four years, largely because of this, because of the eight or so billion.
That they have planned to put into this, plus the $3 billion they put into this already, that generates almost no power.
It's very sad.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
It makes a lot of money for it.
What about the great, damn right, it makes a lot of money for it because they're putting in new CapEx and getting what the ratepayers to pay for it, what, guaranteed 10%?
What about the great state of South Carolina, another MAGA state, sir?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
South Carolina has recently extended the life of two coal plants.
The Santee Cooper generating company that's owned by the state, very unusual model in the Southeast, have a state-owned electricity utility generation company, has extended the life of White Plant Wina and its other large coal plant there for five to seven years because of the power shortage.
So that's good news.
Now, by the way, Duke Energy named a new president and CEO, Harry Sedaris.
Great guy, great engineer, understands all this.
Within two weeks of being announced, he's announced an alliance with GE Vernova to buy seven new advanced gas turbines.
Now, we're hoping a couple of them may come here to Florida.
South North Carolina get two or three or four of those.
Cincinnati get one or two of them in the whole Duke world and build some combined cycle continuous-duty baseload power, hopefully.
At the same time, back in Florida, the chairman of Florida Power and Light of Nextera has announced an alliance with GE Vernova.
To buy gas turbines for their hyperscaler clients around the country.
So here's FP&L and Xterra announcing for Florida, net zero decarb only, solar only, but for their hyperscaler AI clients nationally, they're buying a bunch of gas turbines to feed them 24-hour a day cost-effective power.
You talk about duplicitous kind of rhetoric from one company.
Solarize Florida, based on a net zero decarb philosophy, Ruin power capacity here and reliability, drive costs through the roof, but give hyperscalers exactly what they need, 24-hour-a-day combined-cycle gas-fired power around the country, supplied by Nextera.
Just announced by that, an alliance with GE for that purpose.
Not here for ratepayers, but for their hyperscale clients.
We have some awkward things going on here in this space.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Last thing, only 10% of Spain and Portugal Well, before we connected in this forum,
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
Texas had that happen in the winter, back three years ago.
Grid loss for about close to a week in the snowmageddon of three years ago in January.
In the last three summers that we've been chatting back and forth about Texas crisis in July and August that comes up about every two weeks, they've been that close to losing the entire grid in Texas.
When your demand exceeds supply, you can easily lose the grid.
You've got too much demand being placed on resources, causes units to shut down, causes a reconstruction of the grid logic and programming to get it back up and running.
It can take a week to 10 days.
That's a disaster.
Right on the verge of that, about five times in the last two summers.
Same set of issues as here.
And we haven't called it induced atmospheric vibration.
It's shortage of electricity to meet demand.
So they've skated by in Texas the last two years with a lot of demand curtailment and voluntary requests of users to scale back washers, dryers, air conditioning in the late afternoon.
And that's worked.
Fortunately, that's worked, but they've been that close also to losing the grid for up to a week or more in Texas the last two years.
Because this is what happens when you lose the grid.
It takes a while to reconstruct the system.
It's not physical.
There's a lot of programming and interconnections to make it re-sync and get back up and running.
You don't want to lose the grid.
Spain has done that.
It's a complete disaster.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Dave, I know you're following this one for us.
We'll talk to you tomorrow morning.
Where's your social media in the interim, sir?
dave walsh ▲ ● ▼
I appreciate the opportunity to speak about it, Steve.
It's on XTruthSocial and getter, DaveWalshEnergy.com.
Thank you.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
No, when you talk about it, my head blows up.
It can't.
I mean, it could happen anywhere else in the country.
It could not possibly happen in Texas and Florida.
But it's happening in Texas and Florida.
It just shows you.
Unless you keep them honest every day of the week, you just never know, right?
You just got to do it.
You got to be on top of it nonstop.
In this situation, Texas is out of control, that Texas house.
Anyway, Dave Walsh, you're a great man.
Thanks for doing this.
We're going to lose some of our contributors here in the next couple weeks that are going to go to jobs in other places, right?
To high office.
We'll make some announcements.
I hope one day Dave Walsh is one of them.
He's a guy that the administration needs big time.
And we need you.
What we're going to need is you to man the ramparts.
Scott Bessent is out today.
And what does Scott Bessent say?
Scott Bessent, I don't know if I have this.
Yes, Scott Bessent just tweeted out.
This is called Truth, folks.
We had another successful Big Six meeting today, and we hope to have a tax bill done by the 4th of July.
The House is moving quickly.
Happy announced a subsequent agreement.
Thune said today would be the summer.
Scott Besson, finally, this is why he's a safe pair of hands as Secretary of the Treasury.
With all the happy talk of Polly Pockets, he said this would never happen.
Scott comes out today and says, we hope by July.
That means those guys working through the Memorial Day weekend and grinding through to hopefully get it by the 6th of July or the 4th of July.
It's the first time anybody's put a real time frame here.
Even with all the hard work they're going to do, I think it's going to come later.
So watch, and this is why people are talking about Stefanik for Speaker of the House.
The House guys understand their whole summer's going to be shot.
Not that that's a priority for me, but there ain't going to be any August recess.
We're going to have to grind this one, folks, and we will be here every day documenting it for you.
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