May 3, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:54
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Of priorities, this here is a skinny budget. | |
| It will be fleshed out in full. | ||
| But when you're talking about cuts to the National Park Service, cuts to climate science research, cuts to UN peacekeepers, to the NIH, rental assistance at a time when the rent is too damn high, what does it tell you about the priorities, John, of this administration? | ||
| And we're not just talking, Alicia, it should be clear here, we're not just talking about cuts. | ||
| We're not talking about what you usually hear in Washington about, which is a reduction in the expected increase or even a one- or two-point haircut on these programs. | ||
| We're talking about tens of billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health and the Housing and Urban Development Agency. | ||
| So you had a big list there. | ||
| I think we're talking about basically a 20% cut, maybe a little bit more than that, in discretionary spending. | ||
| No one's ever seen anything like this. | ||
| It is responsive to Donald Trump's base. | ||
| It is responsive to Russ Vogt, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, basically the kinds of budgets that he used to write when he was the budget guy for the Republican Study Committee, which at the time was the extreme right wing group in the House, and its budgets never got more than a handful of votes. | ||
| So we're seeing the dream of Donald Trump to slash the federal government, to cut taxes for the wealthy. | ||
| And, you know, we will see what Congress says about it. | ||
| But for the time being, I think there is a clear direction of President Donald Trump to destroy as much as he can of the federal government as fast as he can. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| Of course, right? | ||
| I mean, at this point, they keep taking these actions that are, in this case, explicitly illegal. | ||
| And that's, you know, that's sort of a throwaway at this point because it becomes so much of a reflex of this administration. | ||
| And what they're out of is part of this larger plan, right? | ||
| Which is to target anything that they feel is oppositional. | ||
| And that's where we, as we get closer to the midterms, there's an irresistible temptation, which I know is true, to think about this in the standard political terms. | ||
| But I just want to caution everyone that this is different. | ||
| This is not just another election. | ||
| They are on an authoritarian run here. | ||
| They are trying to reshape our country using government. | ||
| In a way that reshapes our culture and what our government represents. | ||
| They're trying to take away so much of the basic protections and freedoms that we took. | ||
| So what's the issue with CBS and NPR? | ||
| One, revenge. | ||
| They've always hated them. | ||
| The right-wing media is always targeted as one of the villains, because they're a truth-teller. | ||
| And another part of that is, remember, most of the stations that will be affected are not the big cities, but actually in the smaller communities, the smaller stations. | ||
| The rural areas are the ones that are going to get hit the hardest on that. | ||
| Taking away an alternative voice just gives Trump and the rest of the right-wing media more power. | ||
| Well, Angela, you have political calling these cuts unprecedented, but I mean, all four of us know these are not surprising. | ||
| A lot of this is straight out of Project 2025. | ||
| Russell Vogt had been telegraphing that this is what they wanted to do if they came back into power. | ||
| There was a playbook, and now they are running the playbook, Angela. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they listed all the things they're going to do. | ||
| Nothing in here is even remotely, you know, sort of out of left field. | ||
| I mean, they are getting basically everything they wanted in terms of their first wave of cuts and reductions and gutting, and that is an intentional part of the plan. | ||
| The other thing, too, is that they're buoyed not just by the sort of whatever sort of confidence they have now in this authoritarian bent, they're also buoyed by history and a track record. | ||
| This is not the first time. | ||
| In 2017, a similar thing happened with his first term. | ||
| The budget had all these tax cuts in there. | ||
| It was a deeply unpopular budget. | ||
| Everyone was like, well, everyone's going to be mad at Trump over this. | ||
| They promised that the tax cuts were going to pay for themselves. | ||
| None of that came true. | ||
| The only thing that came true was that rich people got a massive tax cut out of Trump's bill that wasn't funded. | ||
| And yet, people still walked away. | ||
| With the broader... | ||
| Feeling an impression that somehow Trump is better on the economy than an alternative Democrat would be. | ||
| And that, to me, is the scary part about this, is that they not only think that they can jam this through, history says that they probably have a pretty good track record of not just jamming it through, but getting away with it. | ||
| Trump 1 and Trump 2, there's really an attempt to sideline the courts. | ||
| And there's always been this attempt to sideline Congress, but now to sideline the courts as well. | ||
| Well, I mean, they're doing a few things. | ||
| One is they're moving people around all the time to try to keep us from getting into the right court. | ||
| So we go to one court and get an injunction, then they move people to another. | ||
| I mean, even with this Alien Enemies Act, that piece you just played, he signs it on March 14th. | ||
| Doesn't tell anybody. | ||
| But we find out they're starting to get people ready. | ||
| Then they finally publish it on the 15th. | ||
| But the statute says very clearly you're supposed to publish the Alien Enemies Act proclamation. | ||
| If you want to use it, make it public. | ||
| but they're already trying to move it before it becomes public. | ||
| We find out that people are being moved. | ||
| We go into court and then they say, well, you're too early. | ||
| Well, it hasn't even published it. | ||
| But the people would have been gone. | ||
| And as you said, they were already. | ||
| The DOJ no longer enforcing justice. | ||
| The whole dismantling of DEI, everything the DOJ has done thus far, has been in support of this administration. | ||
| They've attacked the courts to undermine the court's trust with the public for when the courts actually do speak. | ||
| They are attacking the whole prospect of the nationwide injunction. | ||
| So it's going to make it harder for people to challenge the administration's actions. | ||
| They'll have to do it in every different jurisdiction. | ||
| That'll be entirely unwieldy. | ||
| They are subjugating law firms and they are trying to attack public interest firms, too. | ||
| All of that is about reducing the amount of legal resources available for this fight. | ||
| It is not a coincidence. | ||
| This is a strategy to make the law no longer work for the people. | ||
| We haven't really faced, I think, what will be the defining crisis. | ||
| Which will be the president either accepting a contrary decision, likely from the Supreme Court, on an issue of great significance, or trying to reject it and trying to defy it. | ||
| And that moment is coming. | ||
| You know, the word crisis comes from the Greek vernacular about health care. | ||
| Crisis is the moment in a disease where a patient lives or dies. | ||
| Don't want to be overly hyperbolic on a Friday evening, but we will have a crisis for the rule of law, I think, before this year is out. | ||
| And here's hoping that the institutions, the judges, the lawmakers, and the citizens hold on to that rule of law no matter what their impulses at the moment might be. | ||
| 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 line? | ||
|
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. Vance. | ||
| You It's Saturday, 3 May, in the year of our Lord, 2025. | ||
| We're here, we're going to get into all this. | ||
| Caniac, Citizen Kane's going to join us here shortly. | ||
| To go through this firestorm that's come up about the budget that Russ Vogt and the team put out yesterday from the White House. | ||
| We'll get into all of that. | ||
| I actually had a great honor to speak this morning already as a keynote speaker to the last day of the Center for Renewing America conference where Russ Vogt, Mark Paoletta, that entire team, Jeff Clark, all the great heroes. | ||
| of the interregnum in President Trump's four years that did all this and made sure the days of thunder and flood the zone were you could actually effectuate. | ||
| They're now in for the second hundred days. | ||
| Really one of the most dangerous and controversial times of the American Republic's history which we're now rolling out in the first couple of days. | ||
| MSNBC is actually right. | ||
| There are convergence of crises here, and whoever kind of wins the next hundred days is going to be really driving the agenda, and so it's quite important. | ||
| I want to go to Rome. | ||
| Ben Harnwell, yesterday I did this interview or republished interview I did with Archbishop Viganò. | ||
| I want to get to that in a moment. | ||
| Ben, where are you? | ||
| The reporting out of Europe is so important about what you've accomplished and what we've put together at our monastery is kind of the counter Steve, where do we stand with this upcoming conclave, sir? | ||
| good morning. | ||
| Well, I'm here live from St. Peter's Piazza. | ||
| You can get a sense of the fact that the Piazza is already now starting to fill up. | ||
| With pilgrims in expectation of the conclave by the fact that this mobile signal is slower than usual. | ||
| That's because there are a couple of thousand people behind me. | ||
| This always happens in Rome, when lots of people gather together, there is a diminution of mobile signals. | ||
| So that's an indication. | ||
| There's an excitement in the air, a buzz in the air. | ||
| People are starting to discuss now, in real terms, who the potential names might be. | ||
| I mentioned one name because I know this is something that you've been hammering on, on the war, and this is the danger to do with American-born Cardinal Prevost. | ||
| Already the world's mainstream media seems to have picked him. | ||
| As their flag bearer, you have articles by the New York Times, by Crooks, which is basically the Catholic version of the New York Times. | ||
| And they're pushing articles against him in his favour, one after another. | ||
| If I might just quickly highlight this, this is the guy to avoid, Steve. | ||
| This is one of the principal people we do not want to see come out onto that loja behind me with a new papal regnal name. | ||
| But already, to give an example of the things that people are saying, the National Catholic... | ||
| Reporter, known as the National Catholic Distorter for its accuracy, has highlighted Cardinal Prevost and his interest in dialogue. | ||
| Crux argues that Prevost would maintain Pope Francis's substance, but with more pragmatic, cautious and discreet leadership. | ||
| Steve, God save us from that. | ||
| No, this is, we got this, obviously we're fairly dialed in there, and from the very early, really, even before the funeral, but from the early days, there was this push behind the scenes to say, hey, let's keep the Americans on board because they're 80% of the cash flow, but we actually have somebody here that's more organized, but even more progressive than Bergoglio. | ||
| And so they feel that they got every win in the world. | ||
| They basically have this myth of no American pope. | ||
| They go through that. | ||
| They lock in the American church. | ||
| Particularly the donors are now feel obligated to back an American pope. | ||
| So they'll lock in the cash they so desperately need from the American church. | ||
| And they'll have somebody they think is even more organized than Bergoglio. | ||
| And they will have somebody that's actually farther to the left than he is. | ||
| Your thoughts, is that basically what the people driving this agenda behind the scenes are? | ||
| Yeah, but I have to say, I think they're slightly on the wrong foot this time around. | ||
| The difference from being when Pope Francis was elected in 2013. | ||
| And the difference is that they no longer have a friendly force guiding the international pressure, like, for example, Macron is doing in France on his cardinals, in the sense that they no longer... | ||
| The deep state, the global deep state, what Archbishop Vigano calls the deep church, it no longer has control of. | ||
| The White House. | ||
| And this is crucially important because it's a missing element now. | ||
| And this is the power of the Warren audience, obviously. | ||
| This is the power of MAGA. | ||
| What it does mean in this time round is that you cannot... | ||
| The Klaus Schwab, the von der Leyen, the people who set the agenda behind the scenes and then have it repeated via the Catholic Church, they can no longer use the White House to push their guy in. | ||
| this time around. | ||
| So they are doing exactly what you said, but we have a far stronger hand this time around. | ||
| I Hang on for a second, Ben. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to come back. | ||
| There's a lot to go through, including that interview. | ||
| Archbishop Viganò, I mean, he throws down hard and says there was actually a plot that was executed to make sure Bergoglio became pope, and he's very specific about it, about the deep state, the World Economic Forum, and what he calls the deep church. | ||
| We'll break it all down for you. | ||
| Ben Harnwell's live in Rome at the Vatican today. | ||
| Caniac, Citizen Cane, is going to join us also within this hour. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| One of the things we've been working on for years is to make sure that you understand capital markets, that you understand money, that you understand the intersection of money and power, because that's what this is all about. | ||
| Obviously, it's a spiritual war, but it manifests itself in the realm of the known. | ||
| And in the realm of the known, money talks. | ||
| So you have to understand it. | ||
| Particularly, you have to understand how gold has been a hedge against times of turbulence for 5,000 years of man's recorded history. | ||
| The end of the dollar empire. | ||
| This is Birch Gold, a joint effort between Birch Gold and the War Room. | ||
| Myself. | ||
| Go to birchgold.com. | ||
| Promo code Bannon. | ||
| We just put out the seventh free installment. | ||
| The Rio Reset. | ||
| What's going to happen in July in the middle of all this budget fight and all the geopolitical fights, all the geoeconomic trade wars, is the BRICS nations are coming together to look for an alternative to the dollar. | ||
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| Short break. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Okay, let's go back to the Vatican in St. Peter's Square. | ||
| Our own Ben Harnwell, tell us about Viganò really connected the dots of the Obama administration, the deep state in the United States, the World Economic Forum, the deep state internationally, these intelligence services, these political operatives, the money, and also talked about how it manifests itself in the deep church. | ||
| Walk us through the highlights of the interview, sir You lose them Well, I tell you this, the quote that caught... | ||
| Yeah, I can hear you. | ||
| Have you lost me? | ||
| Yeah, we're good. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| No, no, we got you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Have you still got me? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yes, go ahead. | ||
| The quote that really caught my attention here is when Archbishop Vigano says, hatred for the traditional mass is one of the hallmarks of the enemies of Christ. | ||
| And this being Archbishop Vigano, he's also clearly talking about Satan because his whole... | ||
| The ecclesiology of the present moment is definitely the reign of Satan over the world and over Christ's church as well. | ||
| I flag up for our Protestant brethren this fact. | ||
| Whether you buy into a lot of what the Catholic Church teaches in terms of its piety and its traditions or not, even Protestants will recognize that Satan in demonic possession has an absolute supernatural We'll | ||
| come to develop that point a little further, Steve. | ||
| The point is, and this is why Archbishop Vigano is absolutely heroic. | ||
| It's because he is speaking up for the ordinary pilgrims and Catholics who go to Mass every Sunday because all of the rest of the bishops, all the rest of the cardinals are not doing. | ||
| They are hiling shepherds at great personal cost. | ||
| Archbishop Vigano has been a tireless voice and I strongly recommend. | ||
| Look, Liz has pushed this out. | ||
| It's on the Warren website. | ||
| I'm going to push out this interview as well. | ||
| Everybody must read it because of what Archbishop Vigano is saying. | ||
| And I'll say this. | ||
| That guy has been in hiding, I think, for the last seven or eight years since he produced his expose, his dossier, on the child sex abuse scandal in the church and Pope Francis' lack of action, the fact that he was promoting cardinals constantly, like McCarrick. | ||
| Only Vigano spoke up. | ||
| And there is now... | ||
| Within the war room ambit, within the wider, if we ever take Trisulti, within the wider MAGA family here, there is now a direct line, this is the point I want to say, this is the direct line between Archbishop Viganò's solitary witness in defence of ordinary Catholics and this radio show, this television show, this transmission. | ||
| There is that line. | ||
| This is the show that speaks out. | ||
| And says the message that all the Catholic media are too afraid to touch. | ||
| This is where people need to come to find out what is the horrific stories that are taking place over my shoulder in the Vatican, Steve. | ||
| How is this going to play out now? | ||
| How is this going to play out in this conclave? | ||
| Because we saw what Viganos said before. | ||
| Hey, you had the political muscle. | ||
| Of the progressive left globalists back in 2012 and 2013 that manifested itself by getting Bergoglio in. | ||
| Now their alternative is to come with an American to try to get the Americans to buy off, to keep the cash flow from the American church, which the Vatican desperately needs because they have an insolvency crisis. | ||
| Plenty of assets, assets all over the world in real assets, real estate, but they have limited cash flow because so many of the folks in the old regular church don't go anymore because it's gotten too radical. | ||
| And the traditional church, as you know, we've tried to cut these guys off from getting access to the money. | ||
| But in Prevost, they've got somebody who's actually more lethal than Bergoglio because he's more organized, he's more radically left, sir. | ||
| Steve, look, that's exactly the point here. | ||
| You've got two questions here, two issues. | ||
| You've got the role of the laity in the ability, the talent, the resources that the laity have, which is not being used. | ||
| And I'd like to close with that point when I come back to the laity. | ||
| And I think that the laity should have a role in what's taking place over my shoulder in just a few days' time in the treason of the Pope. | ||
| But you also have the Vigano point as well. | ||
| So these two things, to do with the fact that the church is bankrupt, one of the reasons that the church, the Vatican, has no money is because you had a lot of serious, pious, sincere American businessmen giving money every year to the Pope and his initiatives via the Papal Foundation and what have you. | ||
| They had a difficulty in getting the money coming in. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because Pope Francis was constantly doing two things. | ||
| He was criticizing capitalism, and he was playing up his hatred of America. | ||
| Well, how are you going to get American capitalists to give money if all you're doing is showing contempt and hatred for them? | ||
| And in fact, indicating that American capitalists are the very antithesis of Christ's gospel. | ||
| So that is one of the reasons that the Vatican is heading towards bankruptcy. | ||
| And I can only regret the fact that not my pope died before the incoming hit the fan on that one, because he should have been around to see this particular disaster that he had created for the church and for the faithful. | ||
| Staying on the point of the faithful. | ||
| This church has a medieval organisation, right? | ||
| Its structure, the faith goes back 2,000 years, but its essential governing system goes back 1,000 years, 1,230 years, and it hasn't really changed. | ||
| One of the things, and I close with this point, Steve, one of the things as a practising Catholic that really offends me is that I have no real say in the running of the church. | ||
| And that wouldn't be a bad thing if the bishops and the cardinals who are charged with running the church were doing a good job. | ||
| But they're doing an appalling job. | ||
| They're doing an appalling job on what really belongs to their office, like Christ has entrusted to them, which is feeding the sheep, preserving the faith. | ||
| Well, if we judge them on the metric of preserving the faith, we can see how badly they've failed. | ||
| But even on the worldly things, like the governance of the church. | ||
| The discipline of priests and bishops. | ||
| It's doing an even worse job. | ||
| And those guys over my shoulder, their approach to us has never changed since the Dark Ages. | ||
| The laity's job is to pay, to pray and obey. | ||
| They came up with happy talk about involving the laity, but fundamentally we're closed out of that room in four days' time when they start choosing a Pope. | ||
| We're locked up and we're supposed to applaud. | ||
| Whoever they pull out there on their balcony. | ||
| And that's really, I think that's disgraceful and offensive because they're failing and because it's patronizing. | ||
| And it wasn't always that way in the church, Steve. | ||
| Let's go to that. | ||
| 1,600 years ago, the laity of the Rome picked the Pope. | ||
| Well, let's go to that, because one of the criticisms they throw at us is that, oh, you guys are just nothing more than your traditional Latin mass, but the structure, the power structure you want is close to Protestantism. | ||
| That's one of the big things that Luther and the Reformation are about, that we're trying to impose a more Protestant hierarchy or a more Protestant organization on the church. | ||
| Your response? | ||
| Well, firstly, from the official Catholic position. | ||
| What is the problem with that? | ||
| They love the Protestants. | ||
| They have breakfast meetings with them. | ||
| They have prayer gatherings with them. | ||
| The people that they don't like are us, the traditionalist Catholics, the people that don't think the faith should change as it moves down the generations. | ||
| But if that is their criticism of us, oh, that's Protestant, well, isn't there a certain dissonance here? | ||
| Because all they do is praise Protestantism, right? | ||
| From the fact when Not My Pope pulled up in St. Paul VI. | ||
| Excuse me, the Pope Paul VI audience hall, the bust of Luther. | ||
| They love Protestantism. | ||
| What's the problem? | ||
| Second point, Steve, and I'll close with this, which is more fundamental. | ||
| CCP generals have the ability to pick Catholic bishops under this secret, toxic Vatican-China agreement. | ||
| That agreement that's so toxic, we're not even allowed to see it. | ||
| Don't tell me, Vatican. | ||
| That the CCP generals, when they're persecuting the faith in China, can pick bishops, but we can't. | ||
| That's just disgusting. | ||
| Ben, where do people go to keep up with this? | ||
| By the way, I also want to announce that Jack Posopic is going to go over to work with Ben for the coverage. | ||
| We're going to have a wall-to-wall or the Conclave, and I think we're going to try to get Jack over there as soon as possible. | ||
| He'll go with a special correspondent for the War Room because we're going to take a ton of his time. | ||
| He'll also be doing a show from over there. | ||
| We'll take a ton of his time. | ||
| And we'll make a formal announcement of that, I think, tomorrow or Monday. | ||
| Where do people go to get all your contents, particularly over the weekend, because things are going to run pretty hot on this? | ||
| Well, Steve, I can't wait for Posse to come out here. | ||
| We'll finally see who's able to drink more, the Poles or the Brits. | ||
| I'm on Getter, Steve, at Harnwell. | ||
| My profile is at Harnwell. | ||
| It's the Brits. | ||
| We know the answer before we even ask the question. | ||
| I'll drink that guy under the table. | ||
| Naval career unknown. | ||
| On Getter at Harnwell. | ||
| Thanks, Steve. | ||
| God bless. | ||
| Catch you on Monday. | ||
| He doesn't want to hear about the intelligence officer. | ||
| People should understand, Ben Harnwell is one of the most competitive people I've ever met in my life. | ||
| That's one of the reasons I love him. | ||
| Ben Harnwell, thank you so much, brother. | ||
| Look forward to getting you back here on Monday and reading all your content over the weekend. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Grace and Mo have pushed out. | ||
| Up on our site is the interview, I think, complicit clergy. | ||
| One of the great groups of young priests in the country have pushed it out. | ||
| We're going to try to get it up everywhere. | ||
| Extremely controversial. | ||
| We ask very tough and pointed questions. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Archbishop Vigano gave amazing answers. | ||
| Stunning answers. | ||
| If you want to understand the deep state and the deep church, he's the guy. | ||
| And he got excommunicated for it. | ||
| He's been excommunicated by Bergoglio for his efforts to try to free the traditional Catholics within the Catholic Church. | ||
| Birchgold.com. | ||
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| Ended the dollar empire. | ||
| Get to Philip Patrick and the team today. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Caniac on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
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The party has replaced the power of the purse. | |
| Congress no longer defends its institutional prerogatives or not very much. | ||
| That said, I think you'll see some pushback in some areas. | ||
| For example, the low-income home energy assistance program, LIHEAP. | ||
| This is a program where you've got hundreds of thousands of people getting heating and cooling assistance in a variety of states, among them the big swing states, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all throughout the South, where you get air conditioning assistance from the LIHEAP program. | ||
| That's one that's popular that I think there will be some pushback on. | ||
| I think you'll see some pushback on the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. | ||
| But overall, I think Republicans are going to do their darndest to support Trump. | ||
| And I think what has changed... | ||
| Since 2017 is that you've got a Republican Party in Congress that is not only much more aligned with Trump, but very, very afraid of his base in primaries, which is the most likely way that any of them will lose. | ||
| And so I think they're going to do what they can to pass what he wants and maybe make a few adjustments here and there. | ||
| They were so very clear what the tradeoff actually was. | ||
| Usually they leave that part out of the budget. | ||
| They don't make it clear what they're going to take away from you. | ||
| In this case, they were very clear. | ||
| I think the first question I asked was really important in response to the current landscape because that strange confusion and tension about the defense pending is critical. | ||
| One of the things within the larger sort of right-wing ecosystem that obviously helps sort of have that swirling cauldron of support for Trump's narratives and false narratives and support for him is this weird... | ||
| There are obviously contradictions and tensions everywhere, but one of the tensions is in defense spending. | ||
| There's a traditional sort of hawkish, you know, as much defense spending as you can possibly get. | ||
| And then there's another part of their coalition that is much more nationalistic, wants to look inward, much more populist, wants to butt and cut defense spending first and really take it away. | ||
| And so in a strange way, this confusion actually helps them. | ||
| Because if you're sitting in the right media right now, depending on where you tune in, that's the one place where they're saying different things. | ||
| Some are saying the opposite. | ||
| When it comes to the other thing, they're all saying that there's not going to be any cuts or sacrifice. | ||
| It's only waste, fraud, and abuse that they're getting rid of in Medicare and Medicaid to the extent they ever acknowledge that. | ||
| But that's the part where I think it's an advantage. | ||
| That's something to really hammer home so that fracture becomes a full-blown crack. | ||
| The salvation here has to be the populace. | ||
| And the salvation is clearly not Congress, which has not been doing anything. | ||
| The courts can only do so much. | ||
| Remember, a lot of what we're talking about is something that may be illegal, but there's a whole lot that's going on that is legal and just improvident. | ||
| And so that's where you really need those pulse. | ||
| I mean, that is why that is ultimately the key issue. | ||
| But what we're seeing in terms of the attack on the judiciary, I mean, nobody should be surprised. | ||
| This is a man who is a convicted felon in that sitting now in. | ||
| In the Oval Office, we saw him attack prosecutors and the courts for the entire time that he was under indictment. | ||
| Now you will start seeing the exact same thing. | ||
| It's the reason he has attacked the media. | ||
| Anybody who stands up. | ||
| And part of it, even when he loses, is fear. | ||
| So the idea of attacking the law firms is that they have the fear they will obey in advance. | ||
| The attacking of universities is so you have fear in obeying in advance, even if he loses. | ||
| The international students, international scholars thinking twice about coming here. | ||
| Scientists thinking, you know what? | ||
| Better to be doing this in Canada, in England, in France. | ||
| I mean, the repercussions because of the nature of what he is doing, even if the courts ultimately say you can't do this, are enormous. | ||
| Well, he sees his next hundred days the way he's seen his last X number of days in life, which is that it is about him. | ||
| It's not about us. | ||
| It's not about we, the people. | ||
| It's not about a world in which we try to fulfill the implications of the Declaration of Independence. | ||
| And this is not some reflexively partisan anti-Trump. | ||
| It's simply the case. | ||
| And we're not... | ||
| We don't do ourselves any favors. | ||
| We aren't, I think, doing our jobs as citizens if we don't call them as we see them. | ||
| And what we've seen for the last decade, and it's now been a decade, is that we are living in an age of Trump. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| He has set the terms of the debate and many people are defined now by their reaction to the terms he has set. | ||
| I think without any fear, really, of serious contradiction, I think we can say that he is taking a cult of personality. | ||
| He has used that to take over a major political party. | ||
| And he is now in his second term of trying to make the world in his image, as opposed to an image where We can all figure out a way to live lives of prosperity and purpose. | ||
| And it's a remarkable thing. | ||
| No American president has ever held this kind of grip, has ever had this kind of grip, on the American imagination. | ||
| And I don't like saying things are unprecedented. | ||
| It's against my business model. | ||
| But in this case, it is unprecedented. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| What a Saturday morning. | ||
| John Meacham, one of the great haters, actually said, I'm going to replay that one the second hour, that this is the age of Trump. | ||
| What we've said on this show for years and years and years, John Meacham says you can't dispute it. | ||
| It's the age of Trump. | ||
| And no American president. | ||
| Meacham's the historian of the presidents. | ||
| One of them, but the Morning Joe crowd. | ||
| The Washington Consensus just said no American president has ever had a grip on power like President Trump. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| From Meacham, not from War Room, not from Bannon, from John Meacham. | ||
| Stunning. | ||
| I want to bring you Cain now. | ||
| The president of Media Matters, who's a really smart guy, hates MAGA, hates Trump, hates War Room, hates all of us, but a smart guy. | ||
| I'll play that clip in the middle of that again. | ||
| By the way, the team did a magnificent job of bringing all the different elements of these clips together for the last couple of days. | ||
| He got it. | ||
| So, Caniac. | ||
| One of the things I love about Citizens Free Press, and I was at the Drudge of the right, it's ten times better than Drudge. | ||
| You are at where Drudge was with peak Drudge, back with... | ||
| Andrew Breitbart was one of his—it was Andrew 12—it was 12 on, 12 off. | ||
| Andrew drew 12, Drudge drew 12, back in the 2004, 5, 6, all the way up to 10, 11, until Andrew went separate ways to do the Breitbart. | ||
| We financed the Breitbart site, and then Drudge lost it after Trump won at 16. Whether he got bought off or invested, who knows? | ||
| But it radically shifted, but also got lazy. | ||
| It's nowhere—it doesn't have the impact. | ||
| It's also not brilliantly thought through in your stack. | ||
| Tell people why, because yesterday when the budget came out, and you and I are in sync on this, and this is, remember, Rush votes the architect here. | ||
| This is Project 2025. | ||
| This is CRA. | ||
| I just gave the keynote address over there this morning, the third one I've done for the three years they've been kind of up and running since they've had these conferences. | ||
| You know, it's 22% on the discretionary side. | ||
| The defense budget's a major increase. | ||
| Although the defense guys are yelling at us. | ||
| But you immediately, when this thing goes up, Kane has got the way to look at it, I think, the sophisticated way, in the stack, red and green. | ||
| He's letting you know this is important. | ||
| You need to pay attention here. | ||
| And you're all over this, like, hey, this is not nearly enough. | ||
| This is a nice first cut, but we're not going to get there here. | ||
| So walk me through. | ||
| What is your obsession? | ||
| With federal spending, what is your obsession? | ||
| How has that driven you as a news person? | ||
| Because you weren't a news person for decades, you're a trader. | ||
| You know, Wall Street guy, you know, you're trading securities daily and playing golf, working on that handicap. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, you're one of the most significant people in the world on news. | ||
| But it was driven by your obsession with federal spending, sir. | ||
| Yeah, that's correct. | ||
| First of all, I got to say, Meacham got it completely wrong. | ||
| I just got to put this in there. | ||
| It is not a cult of personality. | ||
| It's the will of the people. | ||
| This is what MSNBC doesn't understand. | ||
| They don't understand the working class coalition and that Trump, we aren't driven by Trump. | ||
| We're driven by the ideas behind America First. | ||
| Now I'll get to your question. | ||
| You're exactly right, Bannon. | ||
| You remember our conversation as well that we've had in different texts. | ||
| I was interning for CNN in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1987. | ||
| I was a young kid of 20 years old. | ||
| I was doing my resume tape on the overnight shift in the last two weeks of the internship. | ||
| Now, this is early CNN. | ||
| This is Bernie Shaw, Bernard Shaw. | ||
| This is 87. I think it existed for just a couple of years. | ||
| So it wasn't a left-wing. | ||
| You know, sort of a hateful left-wing rag. | ||
| And so I'm over there in the overnight, and one of the overnight producers is like, the national debt just crossed $2 trillion. | ||
| $2 trillion. | ||
| I'd never really even heard about the national debt. | ||
| Didn't understand the difference between debt and deficits. | ||
| And that sort of struck my interest at that point. | ||
| And you can go back and talk to my friends. | ||
| Starting back in 87 is when I started to get extremely upset about this stuff because I was looking at, you know, future, you know. | ||
| Unfunded mandates, the future money that was going to have to be laid out. | ||
| So it's been a, you know, this has been a thing that's been going on now for 40 years for me. | ||
| So yeah, you talked about Drudge. | ||
| You and I in our various discussions, I know how tight you sort of, obviously you were with Andrew, but as well with Drudge himself. | ||
| And you talked about the heyday, you know, 02 to sort of 2010 when... | ||
| When Drudge was really pushing it out, and I was a reader of that site, and I just always thought that there needed to be an alternative. | ||
| Not that Drudge was doing it wrong, but just that he didn't do enough stories in a day. | ||
| He would do 50, 60. Maybe back then he was doing closer to 100. | ||
| But you're correct in pointing out that he's not really even trying anymore if he's still running the site, because they're really just doing 50, 55, 60 stories. | ||
| So I always thought there should be an alternative. | ||
| I knew it would change my life. | ||
| I mean, look, this is 415 straight weekends that I'm working. | ||
| As you know, it was the eighth anniversary of Citizen Free Press' launch just two days ago on May 1st. | ||
| It was May 1st, 2017. | ||
| So this is 3,000 straight days. | ||
| So I knew that once I started, that if the site became popular, that I would never be able to stop, right? | ||
| So I put it off a long time. | ||
| And I didn't actually, to wrap this up, I didn't actually wait for Trump, excuse me, for Drudge to turn on Trump as he started to in that March, April, May period of 2017 when the Comey stuff was first breaking. | ||
| That was just when I happened to launch. | ||
| So I did not launch because Drudge turned against Trump or turned against America First. | ||
| I launched just because I thought there needed to be another side up. | ||
| With more links every day. | ||
| So that is what led to May 1st. | ||
| I've got a lot more, but I'll let you interject. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| We're going to go to a commercial break. | ||
| I'm going to keep you around for a while because I want to get to for people to understand the site, the stack, and particularly you do the best. | ||
| Pulling together of different – whether it's Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, all the great blogs out there to talk about really the underlying economic and financial crisis we have. | ||
| This summer, the second 100 days – this is the speech I just gave at CRA. | ||
| We're going to have the convergence of multiple crises. | ||
| Both the kinetic part of the Third World War, coupled with the issue about Trump being a commander-in-chief, the constitutional crisis on the deportations, coupled with this financial and economic crisis. | ||
| Let's hang on for a second, Kane. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| The situation down in Texas, we're going to start covering in detail. | ||
| Well, we're covering in detail, but I mean, we're going to have the players on starting next week. | ||
| There's something deeply wrong in the state of Texas right now. | ||
| It's a MAGA state. | ||
| The House has been taken over, given by the RINOs to the Democrats, and they're passing some incredibly just bizarro laws. | ||
| Also, this question of what's going on with these mosques and these Islamic centers. | ||
| We're going to get to all of it. | ||
| Got to break it down. | ||
| 972 Patriot. | ||
| Patriot Mobile. | ||
| Glenn Sturrie and the team out of Tarrant County have helped turn around the state. | ||
| President Trump won it by 14 points. | ||
| They've got the best phone service in the country. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Today's the day you do the shift. | ||
| Do the switch at 972-PATRIOT. | ||
| Patriot Mobile. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| Like I said, Glenn's on the team. | ||
| Make sure you check out Patriot Mobile. | ||
| You don't need to be convinced about the company as one of the great alternative Patriot companies in this alternative economy. | ||
| Because, folks, I said this morning to breakfast, in 28, if the radical Democrats steal it... | ||
| We allowed them to steal it, and the deep state has not been shattered. | ||
| And I'm not crazy about the trajectory on that, where I love so much other stuff is going on. | ||
| Let's be honest. | ||
| MTG put that tweet out, and people should listen to MTG on this. | ||
| I think she spoke from the heart, and she spoke for a lot of people in the base about things. | ||
| They're coming hard. | ||
| They're coming hard. | ||
| That's why 972 Patriot. | ||
| Do the switch today to Patriot Mobile. | ||
| So I'm just doing some math here, Kane. | ||
| 87 would make this, it was 30 years then roughly from that day as an intern when you found, you heard about this thing called the national debt to the day really when you launched Citizens Free Press, about 30 years. | ||
| Okay, of you doing other things. | ||
| For eight years, every day you've worked this relentless. | ||
| You're back to the old drudge, even pre-Andrew, right? | ||
| So you're doing it 24/7. | ||
| To Patriot Mobile. | ||
| I want to make sure something, because the convergence above this budget, but I would actually argue in the reality of CNN at that time, and the reason it resonated was not Bernie Schar, who's a hardcore lefty, was Lou Dobbs. | ||
| President Trump, the formation of this movement, Lou Dobbs is the railhead of the guy that was saying back then, trade, trade deficits, and the focus was Japan, because very quickly, After the crash, you know, Japan crashed, right, in the early 90s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And never really to recover, although they've got massive trade deficits with us. | ||
| China took it over because the Bush hunter in the early 90s and the Clintons gave a most favored nation in WTO and really, you know, pardoned with the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| So as we're here today, we have from a young man as an intern, we had only two train of debt. | ||
| We had a very small trade deficit. | ||
| We had some, but not huge. | ||
| We had a pristine balance sheet, basically. | ||
| We were a manufacturing hegemon still. | ||
| We were starting to lose it. | ||
| The 80s, you start to see losing it, right? | ||
| 70s and 80s. | ||
| But the catastrophe... | ||
| Before us, as you went about your Wall Street trading, did it ever dawn on you as you were a trader that the country was being gutted both by trade and by the spending? | ||
| Because those are the double whammies that have us in the freaking jam we're in today, sir. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely it dawned on me, dude. | ||
| Ross Perot. | ||
| I mean, I was 100% on the Ross Perot train and not because I thought, you know, yeah, he was talking about the national debt when Clinton and Bush weren't, but he was also talking about what was going to happen to the jobs and the giant sucking sound, obviously. | ||
| So I saw that coming and I didn't buy it even at the time. | ||
| I didn't really drink the Kool-Aid that the cheap textile jobs would go overseas and go to Mexico, and the higher wage jobs would come back so quickly and so easily. | ||
| And they obviously haven't, and Perot has proved to be correct. | ||
| So yeah, I saw it. | ||
| But yeah, Ben, I want to really get into this budget stuff. | ||
| Because you talked about it. | ||
| Look, you played MSNBC. | ||
| These guys are freaking out about $163 billion in cuts to non-defense discretionary, right? | ||
| That was like $750 million in the previous budget, in last year's fiscal year budget, and we're cutting it down to the $580 million range. | ||
| And they're freaking out because these are all the programs they love. | ||
| They don't want a 23% cut in any. | ||
| They don't want a 2% cut in any of it. | ||
| Getting into why I was upset yesterday and why every time there's something about the budget, why I break it down, is this. | ||
| All I'm looking for, Bannon, is a path to a balanced budget. | ||
| And I understand that Trump didn't talk a huge amount in this. | ||
| Campaign season about the national debt, but it's an understood thing. | ||
| You and I both realize, and others as well, the importance of it. | ||
| So I was sort of hoping that in four years, we could knock this thing down $600 billion a year and get the deficit back, you know, by 2028, approaching that zero mark, right? | ||
| Because the whole point, what people need to understand about the deficit and obviously in the accumulation of the annual deficits... | ||
| I gave some charts to your producer before the show today to show how interest has really gone from the sort of $300 billion a year range. | ||
| To this year, this fiscal year, we're only halfway through it, and we're at $582 billion. | ||
| You see it right there. | ||
| So on $37 trillion in national debt, if you're having to finance it at 3.284%, it's going to cost $1.1 trillion. | ||
| So that's going to make it the single largest. | ||
| Non-discretionary item in the budget. | ||
| It's going to be larger than defense. | ||
| We heard yesterday defense is likely to be $1.01 trillion and interest on the debt at $1.1 trillion. | ||
| So why does this matter? | ||
| Think about it, people. | ||
| We only bring in $5 trillion, about $5.1 trillion in total federal revenues, right? | ||
| We're spending $7.5 trillion. | ||
| We're bringing in $5.1 trillion and $1.1 trillion of it is interest on the debt. | ||
| That's 20% of our total federal revenues that we're having to spend on the money. | ||
| I'll quickly say, you know, when I put links in the stack, like, look at the national debt four years from now, right? | ||
| This day in 2029 at $47 trillion. | ||
| First of all, we're going to be lucky if it's at $47 trillion. | ||
| It's very possible that it's going to be closer to $50 trillion. | ||
| And the point is, the financing cost on $50 trillion at 3.24%, that's $1.6 trillion. | ||
| Trillion dollars in interest payments. | ||
| You know, I've always I've been I've been worried about this for 30 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Wondering what's the breaking point? | ||
| Well, the breaking point is the bond market. | ||
| You and I both realize we saw what happened three weeks ago when the bond market kind of did a few wiggles and waggles when it wasn't when it was a little bit worried about this Republican budget. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| When the bond market goes, when it decides that it needs 1% more or 2% more on every length of Treasury, then we can no longer finance our debt. | ||
| As people have said, how do countries go bankrupt? | ||
| Very, very slowly and then all of a sudden. | ||
| All it really takes is for the bond market to give up on U.S. Treasuries. | ||
| The reason I'm screaming right now and the reason I'm screaming all over the website is we're finally getting close to that choking point, Ben. | ||
| We're getting close to the point where interest on the debt is so large, it takes up such a percentage of our federal revenues raised that we can no longer spend on anything. | ||
| And so that's why I'm sounding the alarm now. | ||
| Because rather than Trump putting on $10 or $11 trillion, just like Biden did, I'm not just blaming Trump. | ||
| And Trump's numbers were much lower, by the way, before COVID. | ||
| Before COVID, Trump had gotten the... | ||
| The Obama annual deficits down from like the $1.8 trillion range down closer to a trillion. | ||
| So he was making progress. | ||
| So I'm not putting this on Trump. | ||
| And I understand how this is all politically difficult to do. | ||
| These are actual cuts. | ||
| But the point is, if we let it get to $50 trillion or $47 trillion, the interest on that is going to be almost insurmountable. | ||
| So that's why I'm raising the alarm now. | ||
| Hang on one second. | ||
| We're going to take you through a break. | ||
| The great Kane, Citizen Kane is with us and I got one more bombshell to drop coming out of Japan. |
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