May 9, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:01
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pray for our enemies. | |
| Because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
|
unidentified
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The people have had a belly full of it. | |
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
|
unidentified
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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. Back. | ||
| Welcome to The War Room. | ||
| It's Thursday, May 8th in the year of our Lord, 2025. | ||
| It may be the fourth hour of War Room programming, but we have an extremely packed show, I guess. | ||
| No rest for the wicked, no rest for our enemies, I guess, foreign and domestic. | ||
| We're going to be covering all of that, the enemy within. | ||
| I guess you're not allowed to say that, but I guess in Trump's America you can, because it's true, just like you can say waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| I always say emphasis on abuse. | ||
| Is a real thing of your taxpayer dollars. | ||
| And frankly, your citizenship status. | ||
| Call me crazy for thinking the idea that the social contract that we have here in this country, your government shouldn't work to, I don't know, replace you, suppress your wages, and, I don't know, leave us less safe at home and abroad with an open border. | ||
| But luckily, we have President Trump back in office. | ||
| And through that, a wonderful conduit to expose so much of that aforementioned waste, fraud, and abuse, obviously, has been done. | ||
| Though we're still waiting on some of those receipts, but uh... | ||
| I was going to say, I don't know if I'll hold my breath. | ||
| I'll digress on that point. | ||
| But I guess the media has been picking up the slack there. | ||
| Luke Rosiak over at The Daily Wire has been doing some wonderful investigations on a ton of verticals, but particularly on the African Development Foundation, which I think as your piece is uncovered is just rife with fraud and corruption. | ||
| I guess no shock there. | ||
| Headline being African aid agency used foreign pass-throughs to hide money that went to D.C. staff. | ||
| And friends, Luke, if you want to walk us through. | ||
| Thanks, Natalie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for having me. | |
| This is basically a USAID-like agency, and I never even heard of it until I saw these pieces in the left-wing media that positioned it as brave resistance heroes for standing up to Doge. | ||
| The Guardian called it the little agency that could. | ||
| Because what happened is when Doge went in to audit its books, its staff locked the doors and physically would not let them see the finances of this foreign aid agency. | ||
| And that went on for a few weeks, and ultimately the U.S. Marshals had to come and forcibly take control of this building. | ||
| This government agency, finally the President of the United States, got to control the – it required basically almost military force to seize control of this building. | ||
| And so people are positioning its resistance as principled, and they had all these reasons why they didn't think Trump should be in control. | ||
| And I wondered what the real deal was, and it didn't take me long to figure out the place is basically a crime scene. | ||
| That's why they didn't want Doge coming in. | ||
| And so I talked to employees there who... | ||
| Almost uniformly kind of acknowledged this place was so corrupt. | ||
| And what they were doing was they were sending money to Africa like they were required by law to do. | ||
| But then they were forcing the Africans to send the money back to them under the table. | ||
| I literally have a receipt of a $17,000 wire going to like a low level assistant in D.C. They had other people who were being paid by. | ||
| Grantees like Africa 24, which is a news outlet in Africa that were then paying DC bureaucrats. | ||
| So it really does seem like essentially a money laundering scheme that's designed to trick Congress into thinking this is a low overhead charity that's just sending all its money to Africa without realizing a lot of that money is coming back right here to DC. | ||
| It's quite interesting because you hear from MSNBC, right, the idea that, no, no, we support getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse, too. | ||
| We just think maybe DOGE isn't the proper blunt force instrument to actually be, you know, the battering ram to go after a lot of this. | ||
| But then, of course, they never actually cover stories like this. | ||
| Can you sort of give our audience maybe some of the contours, flesh them out, of who exactly these people are who are working in these agencies? | ||
| You know, I would take it they're sort of career appointees. | ||
| They're not political appointees, but are they entrenched? | ||
| Democrats, is this just sort of the, you know, faceless bureaucracy? | ||
| Who exactly are these people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, they're complete Democrats that then get these supposedly nonpartisan roles. | |
| I mean, one of the guys, Travis Adkins, was in charge of this agency, and he was a Joe Biden appointee to USAID. | ||
| In 2021. | ||
| And then in 2022, he becomes a nonpartisan president of this agency. | ||
| And so even during the Trump administration, he was set to continue to be the president until Trump came in and cleaned house. | ||
| You also have a guy named C.D. Glynn, who was the president for years prior to that. | ||
| And he was a DEI officer at USAID. | ||
| And then he became head of this group, the African Development Foundation. | ||
| And then you also have basically some bureaucrats who are pretty heavily implicated in serious misconduct, potentially criminal at this agency. | ||
| Who just have really no background at all. | ||
| In fact, the chief financial officer had declared bankruptcy and had his house foreclosed on. | ||
| And then they make him the chief financial officer of a government agency. | ||
| So he can't even manage his own finances, but we're putting him in charge of millions of dollars. | ||
| And so there are all these cases where it really seemed so sketchy. | ||
| And in one case I found... | ||
| This chief financial officer, Matthew Zahieu, he was steering money and contracts and grants to a friend of his that was supposedly this African, but really it was a guy he worked with at the Department of Veterans Affairs who was himself a contracting officer. | ||
| So this guy is in charge of giving out contracts, and then he creates his own company and it receives a contract from his friend. | ||
| And they pretend it's an African company, or they say it's an African company, but at the same time, this is a guy who's living in the D.C. suburbs, who's working for the federal government, and who's receiving actually COVID funds intended to save U.S. jobs at the same time that they're claiming it's an African company receiving charity funds from this U.S. aid outfit. | ||
| There were all these people telling USAID to like, this is just one of any number of things that like seem like a basically a criminal enterprise at this foreign aid agency. | ||
| And it turns out USAID actually, USAID inspector general looked, sees this guy's, the CFO's phone, looked at his bank records and found, sure enough, he was receiving payments, secret under the table payments like kickbacks from his friend when he steered government funding to him. | ||
| And so that kind of explains why this African Development Foundation was giving contracts for travel during COVID when nobody was traveling. | ||
| And so you have basically about $45 million a year of money going out the door, supposedly to Africa, but it's just a complete financial house of cards, and everybody on the inside will tell you that. | ||
| And nobody on the left really talked to these employees, and most of them, to kind of circle back to your point, I mean, most of them, yeah, of course, they're like Democrat voters who work at these foreign aid agencies, but they were some of the first to tell me, This is a bad idea for the left to make this liberal agency like the face of the resistance against Doge because they know that they're locking the doors actually because they're hiding criminal or that kind of terrible conduct. | ||
| It's not because of some principles. | ||
| And so they're actually worried because they are Democrats. | ||
| The Democrats are stepping on a rake by holding up this agency as like this little noble Goliath, noble David. | ||
| Slaying the Goliath of Elon Musk. | ||
| But it really is funny because I don't know that Doge even knew about all this stuff that's coming out in this four-part series that's running all this week in the Daily Wire. | ||
| They just kind of had this, which almost makes it worse, right? | ||
| Because it's almost like you could just throw a rock anywhere in D.C. and hit a federal agency and find this kind of terrible misconduct. | ||
| Either that or they just have a really good instinct for it, for kind of sensing where something's not right. | ||
| But this is what Elon Musk has said. | ||
| Time and again, is when people resist that basic accountability, like let me see your books, it's usually because they're doing something wrong. | ||
| And that's actually exactly what we found here. | ||
| Well, yeah, and I think it makes the apoplexy over that, you know, what was it, 17 fired. | ||
| IG is purely performative. | ||
| These people were not good at their jobs. | ||
| They were not good at conducting oversight. | ||
| They're probably, you know, in on the grift. | ||
| But I'm curious, too, because another, I think, big refrain, strapline that you hear is by shuttering agencies. | ||
| I'm sure this one would be an absolutely perfect example. | ||
| You know, you're crippling American soft power abroad. | ||
| I always say, well, if American soft power was so great, particularly in Africa, then tell me why what upwards. | ||
| 90% of the countries there signed on to China's Belt and Road, and essentially every port or infrastructure project there has been seized, either I guess now or in the future, by Beijing. | ||
| But this sort of infrastructure is a microcosm for how the United States has advanced this term of soft power abroad. | ||
| Do you think that this is sort of, again, just another death knell for that idea that agencies like these provide any demonstrable benefit to our standing in the world? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, a lot of good points there. | |
| Your first one, USAID IG, knew about this for years. | ||
| They found the secret payments to the CFO in January of 2024. | ||
| And they filed a criminal, like a search warrant application, laying it all out last year. | ||
| He's still not arrested. | ||
| There was a lot of stuff that the USAID IG knew about this agency, and they didn't do anything. | ||
| And so there's this idea that the Democrats are now saying, as you alluded to, like, oh, we acknowledge we need certain reforms. | ||
| We should just go slow. | ||
| They did not, in fact, go slow when they were in charge. | ||
| They did not go at all. | ||
| They didn't do anything. | ||
| And so now the idea that we should listen to them, I mean, they had basically years to reform this agency and nobody did anything. | ||
| And to the point about, is this going to harm Africans or harm the US? | ||
| I mean, basically what I've seen in my reporting is government agencies oftentimes devolve into places that exist to pay the salaries of government employees and their primary... | ||
| The goal is to justify their continuing salary. | ||
| And so what happened here is they were actually, we think of Africa as being predisposed to corruption, but here you had government employees for America who were pressuring the Africans to be corrupt. | ||
| And so we would tell them, all these foreign aid agencies on the American side, we'd tell Africans, don't just give out contracts to your friends. | ||
| You've got to compete everything. | ||
| You've got to advertise it publicly and compete. | ||
| We were actually telling them, look, we're going to give you the contract, but it's on the condition that you give a... | ||
| We're going to give you a grant, but you have to give a contract to my previous employer or to my friend, or you have to put my employees on your payroll. | ||
| And so, you know, there are employees at this agency who acknowledged it was actually undermining America's role as if we want to be regarded as like a beacon of morals. | ||
| I mean, these were not, they were not doing that. | ||
| They were out to get money for themselves. | ||
| You know, another example that's kind of funny. | ||
| They were pushing a pyramid scheme on poor Africans. | ||
| Herbalife, it's like the multi-level marketing scheme that had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| Hang on, they were pushing Herbalife on Africans? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because their board member, John Aguanabi or something, he was the vice president of this government agency and he was also CEO of Herbalife. | |
| And so they start pushing Herbalife. | ||
| On to Africans. | ||
| So we're told if you cut this government agency, you're cruel and heartless and you want poor African orphans to die. | ||
| But when they were in charge, they were like, how can we make a buck off of these peasants? | ||
| How successful was that attempt at a pyramid? | ||
| That is absurd. | ||
| You've got to walk the audience through that in detail. | ||
| How did it roll out? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, this guy John Aguanabi was actually appointed to this African Development Agency, first by, I believe, George W. Bush, and then reappointed by Barack Obama. | |
| And right after, Herbalife had to pay a fine for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and then also a fine for being a pyramid scheme. | ||
| They tried to go into Africa and build their brand there. | ||
| And they said, we're going to give some money to Africans, and then we're going to give them free products, and we're going to provide an Herbalife employee as a mentor. | ||
| And so I don't exactly know what happened after that because there was a lot of secrecy around it. | ||
| But the first thing they did is they pretended that it was a partnership with the Herbalife Foundation, like some sort of 501c3 counterpart. | ||
| But that's not what it was. | ||
| It was with a for-profit company. | ||
| And so they were just trying to build their brand in Africa. | ||
| And this is a firm that had to pay money because basically it tricks people into thinking you're going to get rich by selling Herbalife and you wind up poor. | ||
| That truly may be one of the most outlandish stories that I've ever heard on this show. | ||
| And that is a pretty high or I guess low bar. | ||
| But to your point, the fact that you can't even, no knock on you, but necessarily answer my question because the information is not readily available to speak to sources and methods as to how you sort of produced this story. | ||
| If you were able to have access, you know, replicate this agency by agency, or at least to some of the, you know, sub whatever foundations under the USAID umbrella or purview, do you think that, you know, from your perspective, having done a lot of reporting on agencies like this, that you would find similar waste, fraud, and abuse, take your pick of which one it exactly is, how it, you know, gets sorted out, but that you would find this across the board? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I think this is one of the more over-the-top examples. | |
| I think when you look at the tiny little agencies, it gets way worse because there's not like layers of accountability. | ||
| If you get a couple of corrupt people, there's nobody looking over their shoulders. | ||
| So honestly, I mean, obviously, I think there's waste, fraud, and abuse, a lot of it in every cabinet department. | ||
| But one of the things I've done a number of stories of over the years is these little agencies that nobody's ever heard of, they go completely off the rails. | ||
| And I guess you could say that is government when left to its own devices if there's not checkpoints. | ||
| That's what they're going to do is devolve into things that exist to pay the government employees above all else. | ||
| But yeah, this is one of the worst. | ||
| And then you hear about other little agencies. | ||
| One of them was called the U.S. Institute of Peace. | ||
| They had guns in the building, and they also tried to block Doge from coming in. | ||
| You're burying the lead. | ||
| It was, what, a full-blown armory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So yeah, the little agencies, I mean, we're not going to balance the budget by cutting these little agencies, but they are pretty telling about whether this idea that... | |
| People are mad about Doge. | ||
| Elon really is right. | ||
| I mean, if you're super mad about being audited, you might just be a criminal. | ||
| And this was all going on for years. | ||
| It's the left-wing employees who work there who are the first to say, this agency was so bad, and now it's, in their mind, unfortunate that it makes all the foreign aid industry look bad. | ||
| But to be honest, nobody did anything about this. | ||
| And there's all this documentation where some of these grants were being run by the CFO, which is not appropriate. | ||
| They have people that are supposed to be figuring out which Africans to give it to. | ||
| But the CFO was doing all these sketchy things. | ||
| They were paying employees through random LLCs to keep the money under $10,000 so they didn't have to report it to Congress. | ||
| They were literally just having people that worked in the headquarters in D.C. who were just getting paid by random African companies. | ||
| The whole thing was unbelievably corrupt and then meanwhile the top people, they would... | ||
| Abuse the staff, make them cry, oftentimes make them work without pay when they couldn't get the secret LLCs to pay them. | ||
| So they're basically having slaves. | ||
| And so the whole thing is hypocritical. | ||
| I mean the idea that they would be lecturing conservatives that you're callous and cruel and you want Africans to die. | ||
| We gave these people $50 million a year to help Africans since 1980. | ||
| And they didn't really use it. | ||
| They were using it more on themselves. | ||
| They were buying first-class travel and $1,000-a-night hotel rooms in violation of federal rules. | ||
| They let the NBA players choose who taxpayers were going to give money to in Africa so they could hang out with celebrities. | ||
| And then ultimately they used their... | ||
| They used federal money to this guy, C.D. Glynn. | ||
| He was in charge of this agency, and he would use the money to build his own brand, paying government money to speak at conferences and to serve on prestigious boards and so on. | ||
| And now he's president of the PepsiCo Foundation. | ||
| So this is a guy that fell upwards, and now he's managing $70 million, and he's giving out all these DEI grants through Pepsi. | ||
| Well, Luke, I think you've successfully outraged, I guess I'll speak for myself, me and probably our audience too. | ||
| So naturally, if they want to keep up with the rest of your reporting, you really do great work. | ||
| Where can they go to follow you and read everything? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Check it out on Daily Wire. | |
| It's a four-part series. | ||
| So yeah, you'll see another one go up on Friday. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us, Luke. | ||
| We'll have you back on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Warren Posse, that. | ||
| And I think our next guest, Brian Kennedy, you're going to have a tough time beating that. | ||
| A bunch of our tax dollars being used to, I guess, buttress Herbalife pyramid schemes in Africa. | ||
| I think every word in that sentence gets crazier. | ||
| Maybe it just should have gone on in Ukraine, although I don't know at this rate if we audit that what we're going to find. | ||
| Still waiting for my comprehensive full scale. | ||
| Audit. | ||
| Brian Kennedy, I wanted to have you on, though, speaking of other things that we need to audit, and frankly, I would wager deport all of them. | ||
| That is Chinese international students who are all essentially beholden, if not outright controlled by the Chinese Communist Party per, as you well know, Article 7 of China's national intelligence law. | ||
| I want to get into this really explosive story about what's been going on at Stanford. | ||
| It's not just a run-of-the-mill Chinese Students and Scholars Association stuff or Confucius Institutes. | ||
| It shows you... | ||
| Really, I think the whole of society approach that they have taken, even so boldly on American college campuses, to sort of recruit spies. | ||
| And I think intellectual property theft is too nice or euphemistic a term, just straight up stealing military and trade secrets. | ||
| But walk us through this story. | ||
| Yeah, thank you, Natalie. | ||
| Great to be with you. | ||
| They weren't selling Herbalife in China or Ukraine. | ||
| If only. | ||
| Yes, probably there will be some scheme like that somewhere. | ||
| But look, Communist China spends annually in the United States $16 billion on intelligence and influence operations. | ||
| So they're going all around the country trying to find every piece of intellectual property they can steal, every person they can compromise. | ||
| And every method in this country by which we have become prosperous. | ||
| They wish to extract from us our wealth via our intellectual property and the methods that we use to learn and to produce things. | ||
| One of their targets is the modern university. | ||
| They chose in this really excellent piece in the Stanford Review, Stanford. | ||
| And going to all the students that are there and making sure that they were going to the most high-tech parts of the university or the parts of the university that were teaching the most important engineering and other scholarly methods of both learning and then building the technologies of the future. | ||
| And so the story lays out how they interviewed... | ||
| All sorts of students and faculty on campus, and many of those faculty were afraid to talk about it, as were many of the students. | ||
| But it was clear that there were Chinese operatives on Stanford campus working with Chinese students to learn various methods and various personnel on campus. | ||
| Now, I would say, Natalie, that Stanford was known as a place that... | ||
| That is certainly excellent. | ||
| It's an excellent university just at the level of rankings nationally. | ||
| But Stanford has also been a place for over 20 years that has rejected the teaching of Western civilization on campus. | ||
| Quite famously, conservatives were arguing about this back in the 90s and in the 2000s, that Stanford had That might have been a signal to the Communist Chinese that Stanford was a place that they could penetrate and that there would be receptive people on campus to at least friendly relations with Communist China. | ||
| The article talks about some $64 million that the school receives from Communist China in various ways, whether it's tuition. | ||
| Or direct grants through cutouts that may be influential. | ||
| And so once a university receives $64 million, they're less likely to want to kick people off of campus. | ||
| Now, the essay concludes with the idea that America has to be competitive. | ||
| And it's not going to be competitive if communist China steals all of our secrets. | ||
| So something has to be done about it. | ||
| That's the right attitude. | ||
| It doesn't say that all the students should be kicked off of campus, the Chinese students, but that's certainly part of it. | ||
| I would say when it comes to these Chinese students on American campuses, they contribute roughly, and this is one of the reasons they're still on campus, they contribute today roughly $30 to $40 billion in tuition paid by their families or the Chinese Communist Party or certain Chinese organizations that fund their tuitions. | ||
| But almost all of these students are children of the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And so it's not like this is some poor student from Shanghai who just gets to come to American universities because of just how good they are. | ||
| These are part of the elite in communist China. | ||
| And they're coming here, unfortunately, to not learn. | ||
| They do learn, of course, but they come to extract from America the knowledge and expertise we have and bring it back to communist China. | ||
| And with that comes the fact that they have to report to handlers in their consulates. | ||
| And so they're basically agents. | ||
| There's 230,000-some students in America who operate this way. | ||
| Communist China also has something called their Thousand Talents Program, I should add, where they're really targeting their university professors and people within the American academic community more broadly who they think can be instrumental in providing such knowledge and resources to the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| I mean, you have corruption in Washington that your last guest described. | ||
| This is very purposeful. | ||
| This is a plan. | ||
| And they mean to insert people into the United States to influence events in the United States. | ||
| And that $16 billion annual budget to influence things is working pretty well. | ||
| And unfortunately... | ||
| I think the Trump administration is not moving quickly enough to root this out of our system, but it has to be rooted out. | ||
| Well, and to that point, Brian, I think it's interesting. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| The principal deputy assistant attorney general, Pamela Carlin, obviously a paramount impeachment witness, but someone who I think led a lot of the kind of anti-election integrity threats for prosecution was Pamela Carlin, who was a very high-level Stanford law professor. | ||
| Of course, you have the Hoover Institution there as well, and obviously significant research that I think was sort of overlapping with the transgenic mice manipulation stuff they had going on at UNC and ultimately at Wuhan. | ||
| So it's certainly an interesting place. | ||
| Bren, I've got to have you bounce because we've got another very packed, I guess, second half of the show. | ||
| But in the meantime, if people want to follow you, stay up to date. | ||
| Thanks, Natalie. | ||
| It's presentdangerchina.org. | ||
| And on X, I'm Brian T. Kennedy 1. Thank you, Natalie. | ||
| A must follow. | ||
| Brian, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
| We'll be joined after the break. | ||
| We've got Bradley Thayer. | ||
| And interestingly enough, Brian Blaze, for those of you who watched the show yesterday, Laura Loomer was coming after him, so we wanted to give him a chance to respond. | ||
| I look forward to you guys getting to decide. | ||
| We'll be right back after this short break. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Vann. | ||
| you you Welcome back to The War Room, as you guys probably watched the show yesterday or you've seen the reporting. | ||
| Laura Loomer, we had her on to talk about what I think is an issue very near and dear to our hearts here in the war room, that is the Medicaid, kind of Medicare cuts, the ongoing big, beautiful bill, the tussle back and forth. | ||
| We had Laura on, who was, I think, picking up on some kind of left-wing media coverage of essentially a dear colleague letter that had been sent around talking for reforms for Medicaid. | ||
| Obviously, there's some problems with that program, but I think our audience, maybe they have a little bit of PTSD. | ||
| Just making sure that those reforms are not going to touch the people who actually need it. | ||
| We are, I would say, no amateurs when it comes to waste, fraud, and abuse in D.C. But the CEO... | ||
| Of the guy behind the letter, which I believe was added through metadata on the PDF that Congressman Chip Roy had posted, like I said, was in the crosshairs of Laura Loomer, is actually joining us now. | ||
| We believe our audience should be informed with information to make their own decisions about issues that are obviously as important and integral to them as healthcare. | ||
| So Brian, Blaze, I'm honored to have you on the show. | ||
| Thank you for coming on. | ||
| I guess I'll read a headline just to kind of give maybe those of us who are late to the story. | ||
| Coke-funded group authored House GOP letter demanding Medicaid cuts. | ||
| I want to get into that. | ||
| Like I said, we'll let our audience decide. | ||
| But if you can just maybe give us a little bit of background, exactly who you are, how you kind of ended up in this fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, and thanks for having me on, Natalie. | |
| I appreciate the opportunity to respond. | ||
| I am president of Paragon Health Institute. | ||
| I started, I worked in the Trump administration during term one. | ||
| I started on day one. | ||
| I was at the National Economic Council, and I led the development of President Trump's health care agenda, really implementing his vision for health reform. | ||
| Based on choice and competition and taking on a lot of the waste and corporate welfare that's in federal health programs. | ||
| So I was there for two and a half years. | ||
| I worked on a variety of regulations to address problems with Obamacare. | ||
| To expand options for families and small businesses, I worked on the price transparency rules, which were really groundbreaking Trump efforts to make sure that people knew prices in advance of receiving health care. | ||
| I left the administration and really defended and supported a lot of what the president was doing and his accomplishments. | ||
| I founded Paragon Health Institute to build off of those successes. | ||
| And really, for the last three years, we've been leading the fight criticizing the actions of the Biden administration, which have led to lots of waste, fraud, and abuse in these programs that led to enormous inflation. | ||
| In the fall, I was selected to head the Health and Human Services transition team for President Trump. | ||
| So I did a lot of work putting together a second-term agenda so President Trump could hit the ground running. | ||
| And there's already actually been quite a few accomplishments that President Trump has had in healthcare that have come out of that work that I was doing for the transition. | ||
| So I think some of the coverage of it maybe where some of our audience, and perhaps it's a mischaracterization, we're always open to hearing both sides, but the idea that it was cutting people who deserve or need to be on Medicaid, which I think is a lot of the MAGA base, I'm sure a lot of our audience. | ||
| But the idea that this letter was something that was spun up, that you were sort of the architect behind a lot of it. | ||
| I think the fact, too, that they had linked your organization to taking, you know, Coke money, not necessarily someone that's super hard. | ||
| Or MAGA, given that, what, right now they're busy, you know, suing President Trump over his slew of tariffs. | ||
| So how would you sort of pitch that letter? | ||
| How can you ensure to our audience, who may be a little skeptical when they hear, you know, cuts and Medicaid, that the cuts that you're pursuing or advocating for are not going to infringe upon people who desperately need those services with the political corollary and ramifications, you know, as we approach midterms, that just being a woefully unpopular issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So thanks for that question. | |
| You know, President Trump was elected to represent the forgotten man and to take on the swamp in D.C. And nowhere is the swamp more powerful than in our health care industrial complex. | ||
| So there is waste, fraud and abuse throughout these government health programs and particularly in Medicaid. | ||
| The Medicaid program has been abused by a lot of... | ||
| You know, last month we did an article that highlighted how California was enabled to develop this scam that was approved by the Biden administration that resulted in $10 billion going to the state that the state then used to expand Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants. | ||
| That has happened in other states as well. | ||
| Like we're targeting a lot of the waste, fraud, abuse and really bad incentives that is hurting the average American and rewarding a lot of these crony interests of big insurers, big hospital systems have made a lot of money. | ||
| Off of Medicaid. | ||
| You know, the letter that you're talking about, what Paragon does is we provide, so I provided principles for reform to a wide array of Republicans in Congress. | ||
| You know, mostly stuff with all stuff that we do publicly as well. | ||
| We put out tons of information about problems in the program and how the program is... | ||
| Not working for those who it was intended for, you know, the truly vulnerable and really is being taken advantage of by these corporate interests. | ||
| So they adopted some of the principles in that letter that they then sent to the House Republican leadership. | ||
| I would say with respect to Paragon's funding, you know, we're funded by a broad range of foundations and individuals, but Paragon accepts no Corporate money. | ||
| We really think it's important to produce unbiased policy research that informs the debate and that helps really implement what the president's vision is to weed out all of this waste, fraud, abuse, and corporate welfare throughout these programs. | ||
| I think this is a really important conversation to have. | ||
| Obviously, there's going to be ongoing back and forth between the probably more MAGA populists, right? | ||
| That is maybe the home of the war room and some of the more traditionally fiscal conservatives. | ||
| And I'm just curious, too, on the financing of your organization. | ||
| I think there was probably a jump scare to seeing Coke or whatever the entity I know rebranded since they gave what was about $2 million in 2021. | ||
| But I know Laura Loomer had also brought up one of your old tweets, which I'll just... | ||
| I know you probably don't want to disclose your donors, but, you know... | ||
| If we want to believe you that you're out here advocating, you know, for the forgotten man, like you said, President Trump does, can you shed some more, maybe perhaps, you know, insider sunlight on who exactly is funding your outfit, you know, whose interests you represent, and how maybe you've reformed, or maybe just explain that tweet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So, I mean, that tweet was almost 10 years ago. | ||
| And obviously, a lot has changed since then. | ||
| And I've learned a lot since then. | ||
| And I, like I said, I was proud to enter the White House on day one of President Trump's first term and serve him to the best of my ability and serve the country to the best of my ability for two and a half years. | ||
| You know, I got to take my children into the Oval Office before I left and have a very special moment with the president. | ||
| I think the president... | ||
| Did enormous good in his first term to promote positive health policy. | ||
| And I probably wrote more than anybody in the country about the positive impact that President Trump had with his health policy agenda to help people that have been harmed by government policies and to take on corporate interests. | ||
| And I've continued that work again. | ||
| Focusing on the problems with the Biden administration, criticizing their wasteful spending and the corporate interests that so controlled the Biden administration and led to rampant inflation, and then working, being selected to lead the Health and Human Services Policy Transition Team and devoting enormous time. | ||
| To trying to help the president hit the ground running with a winning agenda in the second term. | ||
| And one of the things that we worked on in that transition was what we could do with all of the fraud that is in Obamacare. | ||
| It is really benefiting a lot of insurance companies because they're getting enrollees who aren't eligible for the program. | ||
| And the administration proposed a really important rule a month and a half ago. | ||
| I have been the most vocal person in the public sphere. | ||
| Promoting what the Trump administration has done there. | ||
| So I think, you know, my record of working for the president, supporting the policy agenda of advancing American health care freedom and taking on corporate interests. | ||
| I mean, I think it speaks for itself. | ||
| I've done it for my entire 15 year career and most of it working for the president or working on the outside to advance a lot of those policies. | ||
| And feel free to push back if you disagree, but I'm just curious. | ||
| This letter, I think, has now been spun up. | ||
| Obviously, Politico covered it, a bunch of left-wing media outlets talking about how, you know, it shows that President Trump is trying to come for Medicaid for these cuts. | ||
| And again, perhaps that's a media spin, but retrospectively, do you still stand by the letter? | ||
| Do you wish it would have gone over differently? | ||
| And if you do, can you say now, can you confirm for all that? | ||
| I'm sure, you know, numerous politicos take your pick on the media spectrum listening that for the people who need it, for the MAGA people, the people who helped get President Trump elected, that if they need Medicaid, if they're not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So let me say, Medicaid is an important safety net program. | |
| We want to improve it for those who really need it. | ||
| And the policies that I'm advocating for would be directing resources. | ||
| To the individuals that really need Medicaid and away from the corporate interest, getting rid of this scam that allowed California to get $10 billion of federal taxpayer money to expand Medicaid to illegal immigrants. | ||
| And I think there are no, like, this is not about... | ||
| Cutting the Medicaid program. | ||
| This is about creating a more sustainable Medicaid program and dealing with Biden's massive spending increases in Medicaid. | ||
| Because of Biden, Medicaid is projected to be more than a trillion dollars more expensive over the next decade. | ||
| They kept people on the program much longer than they were eligible, and they enabled a lot of these corporate welfare scams that have made health insurers and big hospital systems rich. | ||
| But haven't helped Americans, right? | ||
| American life expectancy hasn't increased with all of this spending and corporate welfare that we've had from a massive expansion of the Medicaid program. | ||
| I want Medicaid to work much better for those who need it. | ||
| It's not cuts. | ||
| In terms of looking at the policies under consideration, The best description is this is slowing an unsustainable rate of growth. | ||
| It is taking the rate of growth from 5% a year to 3% a year if you're able to enact these reforms. | ||
| And I think we do need to have important reforms that take away the slush funds that have gone to left-wing states like California and New York for them to put so many people on the Medicaid program, including people who came into this country illegally. | ||
| Brian, I really appreciate you coming on. | ||
| We always like when we can share both sides of an issue here in the War Room, despite all the criticism that we get for being a deranged platform for the craziest of the crazy MAGA voices. | ||
| Brian, we really appreciate you coming on. | ||
| If our audience, I'm sure, I don't know how familiar you are with the War Imposse, but I'm sure they probably still have some questions for you. | ||
| I'd love to get in contact with you or at least follow you. | ||
| Where can they go to do that? | ||
| Do you have an email, a website? | ||
| Are you on social media? | ||
| I assume Twitter, but anywhere else? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would love that, Natalie, and thank you for that opportunity. | |
| They can go to ParagonInstitute.org. | ||
| They can check out our research, and you can see how many of the policies and how many of the weekly newsletters that I put out have been supportive of President Trump's health policy agenda and critical of the policy agenda of President Obama and President Biden. | ||
| Brian, thank you so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Have a good one. | ||
| See, we're even siding. | ||
| Take that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is it? | |
| Probably Daily Mail, New York Times, CNN. | ||
| That's just one week of attacks on myself and this show. | ||
| But I digress. | ||
| We got about five minutes left that I want to... | ||
| Well, I guess before we get to Bradley Thayer... | ||
| We've had a very packed show all day today. | ||
| You've got to make sure you're checking out birchgold.com slash Bannon or texting Bannon to 989898. | ||
| As you can tell with any issue, health care, I don't know, I guess we're going to get into the CCP right now. | ||
| The elites that we have in charge running this thing, I don't know how up to the task they are. | ||
| Luckily we have President Trump, but you know there's a deep state that vastly outnumbers him. | ||
| So make sure you're checking out birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| We are joined now by Bradley Thayer. | ||
| Dr. Thayer, I'm just reading. | ||
| The news was this morning. | ||
| And it seems like one of the Pakistani jets that was used to down an Indian aircraft was Chinese-made. | ||
| I know they seized an island out in the South China Sea. | ||
| I think it was in the Philippines or Philippine Island. | ||
| Sandy Kay not too long ago. | ||
| It seems like they're escalating a lot of their conflict as President Trump's trade war, though I hate that term because they started it, not us. | ||
| That's victim-blaming. | ||
| Heats up. | ||
| I'd love to sort of get your just general meta-analysis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, thanks Natalie. | |
| It's wonderful to join you again. | ||
| The points I would make are three. | ||
| First, that President Trump is doing exactly what he needs to do with respect to the Chinese Communist Party, which is putting great pressure on them. | ||
| Through the tariffs and that element, but also, Natalie, you'll remember back in February when there was the memorandum, the key points of the memorandum were released with respect to measures that the Trump administration was taking, with respect to purchasing farmland, for example, in the United States, with respect to minimizing or taking elements to pressure New York firms not to invest. | ||
| So, President Trump is doing exactly what he needs to do. | ||
| On the economic front, he's successfully waging economic war against the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| The second point is the CCP are supremely vulnerable at this time. | ||
| This is one of their key points of history, like 1989 and a few other points in their history where pressure brought by the United States and other states against them can have a very significant impact on the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| So that's very important to keep in mind. | ||
| They're very vulnerable, and Trump certainly understands that vulnerability. | ||
| The third point I would make is that they're a hyper-aggressive state. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party, in part driven by ideology, the ideology of communism, of course, is hyper-aggressive at all times and at all places. | ||
| And the CCP is no exception to that iron law. | ||
| Really, the ideology of communism. | ||
| So the support for Pakistan, which is for many, many years, of course, for decades, China has backed Pakistan against India. | ||
| As you mentioned, the South China Sea, where you have overt aggression. | ||
| The CCP sees the South China Sea as their property. | ||
| They own it. | ||
| And they are aggressing against the U.S. ally, the Republic of the Philippines, and other states as well. | ||
| To that, I'd add Taiwan, right? | ||
| The consistent pressure against Taiwan that we've seen through their military exercises, through statements that Xi Jinping has made and Chinese Foreign Ministry has made about the inevitability, really, of the conquest of Taiwan is quite alarming. | ||
| Additionally, that aggression is evinced through political warfare. | ||
| Natalie, you know that extremely well, of course, in the United States, in the West. | ||
| But we're also watching very closely South Korea and how Chinese Communist Party influence is affecting the election, the run-up to June 3rd, when the South Koreans will have, of course, a very important election. | ||
| So for the CCP, it's aggression all of the time. | ||
| The Trump administration certainly recognizes that, recognizes their vulnerability, and Trump is doing what he can do, of course, on the economic front to continue to pressure them and to keep that pressure on them. | ||
| So all of those are points to keep in mind, of course. | ||
| We should expect this hyper-aggressive state, of course, to do precisely that, right? | ||
| They're aggressing. | ||
| And they have, of course, for so many years on the economic front, on the political warfare front. | ||
| And we should be very worried about really that turning into kinetic confrontation in Taiwan or elsewhere. | ||
| Or, of course, there's always the possibility that the Indo-Pakistan conflict escalates and that China comes into the side of Pakistan on that. | ||
| Heaven forbid, of course, we don't want that outcome to occur. | ||
| So there's never a dull moment, of course, when you're dealing with the CCP, as you well know. | ||
| Dr. Thayer, I wish we had more time. | ||
| There's nothing that I love talking about more than the Chinese Communist Party and their political warfare operations. | ||
| But until I can have you back on, in the meantime, if people want to follow you, stay up to date with your writing. | ||
| You're on Getter. | ||
| You're big on Getter, because I remember I made you get a profile picture. | ||
| Where can people go to do that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bradley Thayer Getter, Bradley Thayer Truth, and Brad Thayer at X. Thanks, Natalie. | |
| Thanks very much. | ||
| And you did. | ||
| Thank you, Dr. Thayer. | ||
| As they always say, right, we only needed a strong president to fix the border. | ||
| Well, I would add, we only needed a strong and maybe uncaptured, like, I don't know, Hunter Biden, maybe, for example. | ||
| If that's your son, you're probably not going to be able to talk very tough to the Chinese Communist Party, right? | ||
| Joe Biden is, as I believe I told CNN, essentially dead, as he may have been if he even wanted to tariff the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| Even if he got a strain of populism, take over his, you know, basically corpse. | ||
| He couldn't have even wanted to tariff them if he wanted to. | ||
| He's so compromised. | ||
| It's nice to have a president who can actually put America first because they're not beholden to other foreign interests or the enemy within. | ||
| Have a good one. | ||
| I will probably see you tomorrow. |
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