June 10, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:06
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Gavin Newsom is daring Tom Homing to come and arrest him. | |
| Should he do it? | ||
| I would do it if I were Tom. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gavin likes the publicity, but I think it would be a great thing. | |
| He's done a terrible job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look, I like Gavin Newsom. | |
| He's a nice guy, but he's grossly incompetent. | ||
| Everybody knows. | ||
| All you have to do is look at the little railroad he's building. | ||
| It's about 100 times over budget. | ||
| We're putting a flagpole over there. | ||
| Under budget. | ||
| I always do under budget. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What did your intel tell you about these people causing all the problems in housing? | |
| Are they people ISIS trying to deport or are they professional agitators? | ||
| The people that are causing the problem are professional agitators. | ||
| They're insurrectionists. | ||
| They're bad people. | ||
| They should be in jail. | ||
| Trump is on plan. | ||
| This has been the plan. | ||
| Trump has selected California. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He selected Los Angeles and he selected Gavin Newsom. | |
| To wage this first political battle with a governor. | ||
| And he has been dictating the pace and the terms of everything for the last couple of months. | ||
| And he's now challenging Newsom and the Democrats and America to stop him. | ||
| Whether or not this is bad for Newsom or bad for Trump, it's bad for America. | ||
| It's bad for our democracy. | ||
| It's bad for the troops in uniform. | ||
| It's bad for ICE. | ||
| It's bad for the protesters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's bad for everyone. | |
| Who it's not bad for is Vladimir Putin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And North Korea and any other enemies that want to celebrate America divided. | |
| So I think this is a test case for Trump on whether or not he can roll over Newsom. | ||
| Is Newsom going to be a martyr or is he going to be an example of what can happen in other states? | ||
| But I think Trump is on plan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's moving forward and he's going to continue to do this and challenge other governors in days to come. | |
| but he picked Newsome and now it's on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you make of the fact that he says... | |
| No, it's just the opposite. | ||
| I don't want a civil war. | ||
| A civil war would happen if you left it to people like him. | ||
| And I liked him. | ||
| You know, I always got along with him. | ||
| Never had a problem with him. | ||
| But he's grossly incompetent. | ||
| He's an incompetent governor. | ||
| Look at the job he's doing in California. | ||
| He's destroying one of our great states. | ||
| And if I didn't get involved, if we didn't bring the guard in, and we would bring more in if we needed it, because we have to make sure there's going to be law and order. | ||
| You had a disaster happening. | ||
| And they now admit it was a disaster. | ||
| I watched the chief yesterday. | ||
| He was a good man, by the way. | ||
| And he said, well... | ||
| You saw what was happening. | ||
| So we did the right thing. | ||
| Everybody agrees to that. | ||
| But you have a governor who let the city burn down, didn't want water to be sent down to him. | ||
| I sent billions of gallons of water. | ||
| I wanted to do it in the first term. | ||
| They wouldn't do it over, I don't know, they have environmental reasons, but there were no environmental reasons. | ||
| I think it's just a political philosophy. | ||
| It's lucky for the people in Los Angeles and in California that we did what we did. | ||
| We got it just in time. | ||
| It's still simmering a little bit, but not very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Greer Pentagon was sort of scrambling last night to figure out what to do. | |
| The last thing they want is active duty troops taking on protesters on American streets. | ||
| They fought. | ||
| Mightily against that during the George Floyd protests. | ||
| And this is something that nobody thought that these demonstrations that seemed to be sort of routine demonstrations on Friday night would ignite into something that would require this level of military intervention, especially when you have, coming up this weekend, this... | ||
| You had all of these M1 Abrams tanks arriving. | ||
| There's going to be all this military hardware rolling down the streets of Washington, D.C. And there's a very real worry, again, among the career and professional military of this sort of look that we are militarizing the country. | ||
| The big picture is Los Angeles is a so-called majority-minority city and a majority-minority state. | ||
| There are more people of color that live in Los Angeles than white people at this point. | ||
| And many of those people are undocumented. | ||
| By some counts, 10% of the population of L.A. County, one of the largest counties, the largest county by population in the United States, is undocumented. | ||
| Maybe as many as a million people. | ||
| Those people are our neighbors, our co-workers, our classmates, our friends, our parishioners, fellow parishioners in churches. | ||
| They are part of the fabric of the city of Los Angeles. | ||
| And not in the last many decades, under Democratic nor Republican presidents, despite the fact that you had presidents with big deportation programs, Democratic and Republican, as you have so often reported, Have we seen the type of immigration enforcement we saw play out on the streets of Los Angeles on Friday? | ||
| And that struck fear into the heart of not just the undocumented community here, but of many U.S. citizen family members of undocumented people and many U.S. citizens who know those people. | ||
| Because that is removing people from this community who have been here, if not their entire life, virtually their entire lives. | ||
| There are so many mixed status families that live in Los Angeles that might have an undocumented parent or relative and U.S. citizen child or cousin. | ||
| who We've talked about this before. | ||
| The family separation policy of the first Trump administration in 2018 was a deliberate ripping apart of parents and children at the border to separate those families and inflict pain on those families. | ||
| But when I say mass deportation is family separation, when I say those signs that were held up, It is family separation in the interior. | ||
| It's taking parents away from their children, not at the border and not in detention centers, but at a Home Depot on the street corner or outside of a school. | ||
| At a workplace in the fashion district where they might be working in a factory. | ||
| It's a different form of family separation, and it's exactly the intent of this administration modeled after Nicole Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1954 operation with a name so racist, I'm not going to say it here to you right now, but resulted in a million Mexicans and some Mexican-Americans being sent to Mexico in the wake of the Bracero program coming here legally. | ||
| In the 1950s. | ||
| That's what the Trump administration is modeling this program after. | ||
| That's their stated goal. | ||
| They've talked about it. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| 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
|
The people have had a belly full of it. | |
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mega Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | ||
| I love Soboroff of MSNBC saying our colleagues, he means his gardener, his nanny, his maid. | ||
| These people are so hypocritical. | ||
| Monday, 9 June, Year of Our Lord 2025. | ||
| It's only ratcheting up. | ||
| In Los Angeles, my understanding from high officials is that they're going to double or triple the number of ICE raids today, as they should. | ||
| We've got 10 million illegal alien invaders to get out that came in on Biden's watch, including 2 million gotaways. | ||
| Ben Berquam joins. | ||
| I'm going to get back into the Pentagon. | ||
| The MSNBC reporter for the Pentagon, which I agree with Jack Posobiec, her press credentials should be removed immediately. | ||
| She not only questions whether there's a political appointees in permanent uniformed military services and civilians, but she basically says they're not going to pay attention to, and they totally disagree with, the commander-in-chief. | ||
| We know that's not true. | ||
| So they're either committing treason by not following the commander-in-chief, which they're sworn to do, or she's lying and should be removed. | ||
| I want to go to Ben Burkamp. | ||
| Ben. | ||
| My understanding is ice is not dialing down today, but that things can heat up. | ||
| They're also sending... | ||
| They have a No Kings rally everywhere where they're going to try to disrupt. | ||
| The unity and the celebratory nature this Saturday with the American people. | ||
| What's going on in L.A., Ben? | ||
| Yeah, Steve, you're right. | ||
| This is coordinated and it's just beginning. | ||
| We're seeing it right now. | ||
| They're just starting to ramp up. | ||
| I'm just a couple blocks away from where they burned those cars this morning. | ||
| This is the ICE building I was at this morning while it was pretty quiet. | ||
| You've got the groups coming out. | ||
| They just had a big protest. | ||
| SEIU and all the unions, which is ironic. | ||
| Labor unions out in support of illegal aliens, which if you are in a labor union, you should not support your dues going to that union if they're supporting illegal aliens coming in. | ||
| But now we've got this group, multiple groups, Antifa and different violent agitators are out here. | ||
| They're planning on more violence today. | ||
| Just around the corner of the building is where the fires were lit on the vehicles. | ||
| We've got police lined up right now blocking the entrances to the freeways, trying to prevent them from going onto the freeways. | ||
| We've got school kids that were coming out that were being taught Marxism, being let out of their schools early to come out to join this. | ||
| We've got National Guard on the other side of the building, and actually just over my shoulder here by the hospital, we've got National Guard lined up. | ||
| So it's set up. | ||
| To be another one of these situations. | ||
| But to your earlier point, ICE is not backing down. | ||
| President Trump's not backing down. | ||
| Tom Homan's not backing down. | ||
| They're just getting started. | ||
| And the whole point of this is to try to intimidate them into stopping the deportations. | ||
| Why is ICE going to come out this afternoon? | ||
| Why are they not picking these people up at these demonstrations? | ||
| Because they're not peaceful protests. | ||
| They turn violent. | ||
| These violent examples of what they're trying to accomplish, why don't the police, why don't they just take these people in ice, throw them in the back, and ship them out, sir? | ||
| Yeah, they should be. | ||
| They should be checking every single person here. | ||
| I mean, when you're flying a Mexican flag, there's a truck driving around flying a Mexican flag. | ||
| There's a lot of them out here. | ||
| If you're out here burning the American flag and waving some other foreign country's flag, we should check your papers on the spot. | ||
| And if you're here illegally, you should be deported. | ||
| Now, whether or not that's happening, I don't know. | ||
| I have heard different reports that ICE is actually picking people up when they arrest them. | ||
| If they arrest them for some violent act, they're checking whether they're here legally. | ||
| And they are deporting or working on deporting those people. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| I mean, they should be out in every single one of these crowds and going through every single one of the people that are out here, especially if you're waving a foreign country's flag. | ||
| One of the one of the engine room participants this morning sent me something that Glendale voted today to to I think their city council voted to pull the contract for ICE to basically share the the jail facility. | ||
| What about these government officials that are getting in the way? | ||
| Is there any, for instance, Bass, Why are we not taking action to arrest these people? | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| I don't have an answer for you on that, Steve. | ||
| It's frustrating. | ||
| I mean, you look at the left. | ||
| They can actually do an invasion into our country. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| We got some more of these lovely people here waving their foreign countries flag. | ||
| Oh, by the way, that's part... | ||
| That's America. | ||
| Put the camera back over. | ||
| Put the camera back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I only see you in your face. | |
| Excuse me, your beautiful visage right there. | ||
| That's what I want to see. | ||
| They're in your grill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To them, this is Mexico. | ||
| Yeah, sorry about the... | ||
| I want people to understand how in your face they are. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They're mocking you. | ||
| This is not your country. | ||
| This is Mexico. | ||
| And they're going to continue to do that. | ||
| This is why you've got the Palestinian flag, you have the Mexican flag. | ||
| You know, you're nothing but a colonizer. | ||
| You are here illegally. | ||
| By the way, Ben Berkwam, stay right there. | ||
| Can I get Ben's face again? | ||
| I've got to see that. | ||
| Our star, Ben Berkwam. | ||
| I don't need a split screen on me. | ||
| Wrong decision. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sly Stone from Sly and the Family Stone is dead at the age of 82. An American original. | ||
| We're going to play some of his music today throughout the day. | ||
| At the age of 16, I think it was 17 July, 1970, in the Richmond Arena, which is basically a trolley car barn turned into a basketball arena. | ||
|
unidentified
|
At 16, I was there for a blanket concert. | |
| It started at 8:30 in the evening. | ||
| The opening act came on, I think, at 8:30. | ||
| Sly and the Family Stone, as was their wont, came on a little later. | ||
| I think it was 1:00 in the morning. | ||
| They didn't have a curfew back then. | ||
| I think these guys played to Sly and the Family Stone, played, I don't know, two or three. | ||
| We're going to play some music in tribute. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| back to Los Angeles in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
���� Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | |
| Okay, Denver, do we have my clip? | ||
| Just tell me when it's ready. | ||
| Okay, just tell me when it's ready. | ||
| We're gonna play it for Jack Posovic. | ||
| Ben Burquam, what are you hearing about additional and further ice raids? | ||
| I think they should have come out and announced, hey, we're gonna do two. | ||
| If this is a baseline, we're going up two or three. | ||
| The only way to win here is to double and triple down. | ||
| The media, And the left-wing apparatus and deep state that run this country want us to blink, want us to back down. | ||
| This is why President Trump continues to double down. | ||
| But unlike 2020, we've got to deliver the goods here in the summer of love. | ||
| It just can't be tweets and talk. | ||
| It's got to be action. | ||
| President Trump was thwarted then by Milley and Esper, you know, who basically, to me, committed treason. | ||
| I don't know why they're not being investigated by DOJ already or by the Pentagon. | ||
| Elyse Milley in some sort of military tribunal. | ||
| They thwarted him in June of 2020. | ||
| We know that Bill Barr thwarted him. | ||
| So people around him were not loyal to him, not loyal to the Constitution. | ||
| He doesn't have that this time. | ||
| Let's rock and roll. | ||
| I also want to say now, Stephen Miller is a godsend to this country. | ||
| I've known Stephen since a very young man. | ||
| Stephen Miller has always said since I've known him, and I think even before when he was a young man, He has felt this in his bones. | ||
| He's from L.A. He's one of that magnificent crew of Andrew Breitbart and Alex Marlowe and Stephen Miller and others that all came from kind of West L.A. It's amazing, this kind of fire-breathing conservatives. | ||
| That have come from there. | ||
| And Andrew always said the battle for the future of America is going to be Los Angeles. | ||
| He was talking culture. | ||
| Stephen Miller's talking in the streets. | ||
| And this is where it's going to happen. | ||
| And Stephen Miller, I'm telling you right now, he is, we didn't have Stephen Miller, he is the mastermind of the domestic policy. | ||
| And he's mastermind of shutting down the border and giving President Trump all the tools. | ||
| That President Trump can use to actually execute, and that's what President Trump is doing as Commander-in-Chief. | ||
| Also, Stephen, you know, there's a lot of talk about, you know, Elon Musk. | ||
| I think you might have heard something here on this show once or twice. | ||
| And Katie Miller, who was fantastic in the first term, married Stephen. | ||
| They're a power couple. | ||
| If you think Stephen Miller's smart and tough, he's about half as smart and tough as Katie, the wife. | ||
| I've known her a long time. | ||
| She is a total and complete hammer. | ||
| And hey, people saying, oh, she went to Elon Musk. | ||
| Listen, thank God, in this republic, we've got somebody like Katie Miller that can manage the insane asylum that is Elon Musk. | ||
| Katie's got to stay there. | ||
| It's one of the best things that happened. | ||
| She's absolutely not just a power player. | ||
| She's a patriot. | ||
| Both of them, there are a couple that are patriots, and they're in enormous pressure. | ||
| And security risk. | ||
| People don't know this. | ||
| The security risk to Katie and Stephen has been very high because Stephen's up front. | ||
| Stephen Miller does not back down. | ||
| You see him on TV and he lays out and he's one of the quarterbacks here and making it happen. | ||
| Ben, we would like to see more. | ||
| We've got, I think, a 29 Palms. | ||
| We've got a brigade, a battalion, I think, a battalion potentially coming up from 29 Palms to the United States Marines. | ||
| And I think the audacious Benny Johnson may actually be in bed with him. | ||
| What do you know? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm hearing. | ||
| I just saw Benny's post earlier. | ||
| We just got some B-roll here. | ||
| These are the cars that they burned yesterday just going by us. | ||
| The cleanup just finally wrapped up around the corner from us. | ||
| But that's what I hear. | ||
| I hear Benny's embedded with them. | ||
| And they're going to be making their way down here. | ||
| But to your other point, I mean, this is one of the things, you've got to give it to the left. | ||
| They always circle the wagons. | ||
| And you look at what they did with the invasion on our southern border, they doubled down. | ||
| And now when you actually have President Trump rightfully going, you've got ICE and Tom Holman rightfully going and picking up not only illegal aliens, but illegal aliens that committed additional crimes, some of the most heinous you can imagine. | ||
| The left is doubling down, tripling down, and going after the very people that are sworn to protect our borders, to protect our country, which is what really makes us a country. | ||
| On our side, we're more worried about getting called names. | ||
| And the American people are sick of it. | ||
| I mean, when they hear Tom Holman come out and say, we're going to arrest Gavin Newsom, we're going to arrest Karen Bass, they want it to happen now. | ||
| And the longer it goes on where they don't, The Republicans, big talk again and not doing anything. | ||
| They want these arrests to happen. | ||
| And if they don't happen, Stephen's right. | ||
| This is the death of our country. | ||
| In fact, the building is spray-painted. | ||
| You can't see it right now. | ||
| Death to America. | ||
| That's what they want. | ||
| This morning, Ben, I jumped you a little bit because you went back to 30 million or more illegal aliens in the country. | ||
| I totally subscribe to that. | ||
| I was talking about just the ones that came in. | ||
| On Biden's regime to get out and get out now. | ||
| And the reason there's this difference is that the Republican Party never would step up to the plate and say, this can't happen. | ||
| We've got to deport these people. | ||
| They were too weak. | ||
| And the reason is this is hard. | ||
| For President Trump, there's one thing about the bad hombres, the criminals. | ||
| It's also, you've got to, all of them, everybody's got to be deported. | ||
| Hispanic citizens are getting crushed. | ||
| African-American citizens are getting crushed. | ||
| Their schools, their health care, the crime in the community, and their wages. | ||
| Nothing's better because of this. | ||
| Nothing is better for... | ||
| Are the wealthy getting their lawns cut cheaper? | ||
| Remember, they don't really pay the price because they're getting huge tax cuts. | ||
| They don't really pay the price for the collapsing medical system and emergency health care system and the education system. | ||
| That's all dumb. | ||
| That's because of the poor use of services. | ||
| Of course, there's unlimited upside. | ||
| For the wealthy to do this. | ||
| And this is why you see Soberoth and those guys, you know, they're laughing in your face. | ||
| This is what Stephen Miller's saying. | ||
| This is what ICE is doing. | ||
| It's the deportations. | ||
| When we opened the show and they said, hey, the trauma of actually people coming in, yes. | ||
| People that are here illegally, that came here on Biden's watch, have got to go. | ||
| We have programmed right now for a million. | ||
| Ben, tonight, tell me, how dice is this thing going to get tonight? | ||
| It's going to be ugly. | ||
| It's going to get more and more violent. | ||
| It's not a safe place to be if you live in LA. | ||
| A lot of businesses shut down when this stuff happens. | ||
| Because they know these guys are violent thugs. | ||
| Undoubtedly, they're going to take over the freeways again unless President Trump, unless the National Guard is allowed to do what it needs to do and actually give the spankings that these spoiled little kids deserve. | ||
| It's going to be really, really ugly. | ||
| And until the American people say enough is enough and stand up and say, we got your back, President Trump. | ||
| We got your back, Stephen Miller. | ||
| We got your back, Tom Homan. | ||
| That's what we need to see across the country. | ||
| We need to see counter-protests with people coming out and saying, we support you. | ||
| And thank God, Steve. | ||
| Thank God for President Trump. | ||
| Thank God for Tom Holman. | ||
| Thank God for Stephen Miller, for these guys that have the balls to actually do it. | ||
| We've had such wussy Republicans for so long to actually have guys that will come out and stand up and actually do what needs to be done. | ||
| And now we're in that point right now. | ||
| It's just getting started. | ||
| It's going to be ugly. | ||
| Ben, thank you. | ||
| Social media, where they get you. | ||
| I may try to track you now for the 6 o 'clock hour because we want updates on this. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| You're three hours behind us, but as it gets darker out there, it's going to get ugly. | ||
| The engine room up in Napa Valley did send me, I think they arrested 154 combatants up in San Francisco. | ||
| They need to have those type of arrests. | ||
| They need to arrest 1,000 people plus tonight and not just process them in and out, but I mean really arrest them for insurrection. | ||
| Ben Burquam, your social media. | ||
| Real America's Voice, at Real AM Voice on social media. | ||
| We're going to start posting some of the videos I've got already. | ||
| We're going to be obviously getting a lot more tonight, so stay tuned for that. | ||
| My Substack, if you want to subscribe, especially paid subscribers, really appreciate it. | ||
| It's Frontline America on Substack. | ||
| And my personal social is just my name, Ben Burquam. | ||
| I'll be posting the videos. | ||
| And anything breaks down here, Steve, I'll be getting back to you and Cameron, and we'll be jumping back on. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, you get to us right away. | ||
| Ben Burke on the scene as usual. | ||
| Can we play this clip from MSNBC? | ||
| Let's go ahead and play this clip from this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I need to differentiate when I say the Pentagon now because there is the Pentagon that are the political appointees of President Trump and then there is the professional Pentagon, the military people and the career Pentagon. | |
| The career Pentagon was sort of scrambling last night to figure out what to do. | ||
| The last thing they want is active duty troops taking on protesters. | ||
| especially when you have Coming up this weekend, this Trump military parade, army birthday military parade that Washington, D.C. is bracing for. | ||
| You had all of these M1 Abrams tanks arriving. | ||
| They're gonna be all, there's gonna be all this military hardware rolling down the streets of Washington, DC. | ||
| And then there's a very real worry again, among the career and professional military of this sort of, I think things are going to have to get a lot worse. | ||
| If you get to the point where American troops are being asked or tasked with shooting protesters, you will then see this discomfort manufacturer in public. | ||
| Right now, what you're seeing is just sort of, they are still trying to salute. | ||
| You have an insurrection. | ||
| President Trump is going to initiate the Insurrection Act. | ||
| It's just pure purview to do this. | ||
| I was on BBC this afternoon. | ||
| It'll be up in a while. | ||
| Where the correspondent, oh, these were peaceful protesters. | ||
| Far from it. | ||
| This gets back to the George Floyd situation. | ||
| Remember Esper and Millie, after he had the situation in Jackson Square, went back and decided amongst themselves that, hey, we're not going to actually report. | ||
| to President Trump as a commander in the street. | ||
| They made a pact between each other. | ||
| This is why Millie's got to be called back to active duty and court-martialed. | ||
| Go before a military tribunal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Either she's... | |
| I don't understand how Sean Parnell, who we've contacted this afternoon, how she has a press pass to the Pentagon. | ||
| Let me say something. | ||
| As a junior officer, when I came off a C duty after four years on the destroyer, I was back in the Pentagon working for the Chief of Naval Operations. | ||
| Hey, the media didn't roll like that. | ||
| The Pentagon would have pulled that press pass in a second. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Our salute to Sly Stone, dead, at 82. An American legend and an American classic. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| David Mamet on the other side. | ||
| That the election was stolen, and I was kind of iffy on it, right? | ||
| Next morning, 8 o'clock, the phone rings. | ||
| The woman on the phone says... | ||
| I said, wait a second. | ||
| Biden is calling? | ||
| It's Trump. | ||
| He's doing the Biden administration. | ||
| And he says, David, it's Donald Trump. | ||
| I say, oh, Mr. President, thank you for calling. | ||
| To what do I owe the honor? | ||
| He said, I saw you on Bill Maher yesterday. | ||
| You were great. | ||
| He said, but you wussed out on the question of the stolen election. | ||
| And then he talked to me for like 20 minutes about how the election was stolen. | ||
| But it wasn't. | ||
| Well, I think it was. | ||
| That Deborah had. | ||
| I'm not talking about the votes. | ||
| I'm not talking about counting the votes. | ||
| That the Hunter Biden laptop was suppressed. | ||
| The COVID information was suppressed. | ||
| Zuckerberg said himself that the White House pressured him not to bring forward the information on the laptop. | ||
| And Rasmussen said, had that come out, there would have been a 17-point spread. | ||
| Oh, please. | ||
| Well, look, look. | ||
| They don't see themselves. | ||
| Look, you like me have built a career out of nothing except talent and a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, but you're full of s**t. | ||
| I don't understand why you say that he did not say the words, I concede, cause half the country, which you just said, to riot. | ||
| No, I didn't say half the country. | ||
| I got another question. | ||
| I sit down, and all of a sudden you're attacking me about, I gotta come up here. | ||
| I have to come up with a new idea about Trump, and I have to talk. | ||
| What the hell do you care? | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| First of all, it was not my plan to attack you, and I'm sorry if you think I'm attacking you. | ||
| Well, okay, I'm sorry that you're doing it. | ||
| You started off with a very difficult question, and a question which you have very strong views, and I do too. | ||
| How would you like this part of the conversation to end, so that we can move on to something else? | ||
| What would end it to your satisfaction? | ||
| Well, we're at the 20-minute mark, so we could just end it. | ||
| What would end it to your satisfaction? | ||
| When you want it to end. | ||
| I don't want to piss you off. | ||
| I'm your biggest fan. | ||
| The fact that we don't agree on something so fundamental is still completely okay with me. | ||
| I don't get it the way you don't get me. | ||
| You just said I'm completely full of ****. | ||
| And of course, people who disagree to this level, they think that of the other person. | ||
| And what we have to do is, of course, learn to live harmoniously with people we just don't agree with that much. | ||
| So we can just get past this. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| We should. | ||
| And I'm happy to. | ||
| And there's a million things in here and in the movie that I think are great and I would love to talk about. | ||
| If you don't have a border, you don't have a country. | ||
| Talent, hard work, and a little bit of luck. | ||
| One of America's leading public intellectuals and one of her greatest playwrights, David Mamet, joins me. | ||
| David, in what world, how do we get to a situation where you have the MAGA movement and back of President Trump, the hardcores, where we have someone like David Mamet, who used to be, quite frankly, a fire-breathing liberal, is now defending President Trump and defending the MAGA movement, sir? | ||
| Well, I don't know that I was a fire-breathing liberal. | ||
| I certainly was a liberal because I was a congenital Democrat. | ||
| But my politics was limited to all those damned Republicans until I got blacklisted. | ||
| And then I figured out I'd better sit down and figure out what's going on with this wonderful country. | ||
| So I spent a few years... | ||
| And that a dedication to feeling rather than to reason and its expression in law, as it always leads to violence. | ||
| And that's what J.S. Mills said in On Liberty, and that's also what Rebecca West said in the 1950s. | ||
| She said, every liberal administration always ends in bloodshed. | ||
| So that's where you find me today, Steve. | ||
| You were blacklisted for, I think it was an essay you wrote. | ||
| Did they put it on the cover of Village Voice somewhere? | ||
| They put it on the cover of, and it exploded. | ||
| What was the topic of the essay? | ||
| And why did that get you blacklisted? | ||
| Well, I wasn't blacklisted for the essay. | ||
| I was blacklisted for the cover of The Village Voice because I was doing a play on Broadway at the time called November, which is a comedy about a president. | ||
| Nathan Lane played the president. | ||
| It's a very funny play. | ||
| And The Village Voice asked me to write an article about the play. | ||
| So I did, and I said, the play is really about political civility. | ||
| It's about the craziness that politics could lead us into. | ||
| And I said, we must be civil to each other. | ||
| And what's the test of that? | ||
| I have to be able to say your position such that you say that's correct. | ||
| You have to be able to say my position such that I say that's correct. | ||
| And then we adduce facts. | ||
| And any fact upon which we can agree... | ||
| I said, that's political civility. | ||
| I said, I haven't even been civil to myself over the years because I've been referring to myself as a brain-dead liberal. | ||
| So, next week, the Village Voice comes out. | ||
| The whole front page is why Dave Mamet says, I am no longer a brain-dead liberal. | ||
| And so I was blacklisted. | ||
| But the funny thing was, when I wrote the article, I was a very dead liberal, and I was admitting it. | ||
| Isn't that cute? | ||
| Which a lot of people of my generation, maybe younger, they will say that if you talk to them and say, how can you vote for these policies? | ||
| I'm a liberal, right? | ||
| So that's what I was saying, but I ain't a liberal no more. | ||
| I think that was around 2005. | ||
| Given what you're seeing on the streets of Los Angeles, can we still be in this fight for the country? | ||
| Is civility, as we fight for this to save our republic, is civility still high on your list? | ||
| Well, civility is important in the halls of Congress, and civility is important in the news, and it's important in the courts. | ||
| But at some point, a fight is a fight. | ||
| When Tim Walz made them evacuate the police station, that was Fort Sumter. | ||
| That was the beginning of a pro-Drobel civil war, which we have in front of us now. | ||
| And there's a great book written by a guy who was a Grand Duke of Russia, Alexei, a Grand Duke of Russia. | ||
| He was the head of the Air Force leading up to World War I. He was the cousin of the Tsar. | ||
| And he wrote a book in exile after the Bolshevik Revolution. | ||
| He said there was nobody home. | ||
| He said, we could have stopped the Bolsheviks in the suburbs of St. Petersburg with the company of infantry. | ||
| So at some point, if you are constantly calling at the poker table. | ||
| Someone's going to raise you out and steal all your aunties and send you walking back to Houston. | ||
| So as I was listening to you earlier, at some point, one has to stand up. | ||
| And when all other remedies are exhausted, the individual and the state have the right to defend itself. | ||
| You know California, you know Los Angeles. | ||
| Is that the moment we're in right now? | ||
| I mean, the president says, hey, he's going to call for the Insurrection Act. | ||
| He's already federalized the National Guard. | ||
| Over the wishes of the state governor, he is about to have a battalion of U.S. Marines, active duty, actually come up from 29 Palms. | ||
| Are we at that moment right now in Los Angeles? | ||
| Well, of course, yes, of course we are. | ||
| And what people haven't been saying, or I haven't been hearing, is that the idea of a sanctuary state and a sanctuary city is insurrection. | ||
| It's, and I don't understand, and I know that Trump wants to do reason first. | ||
| Of course he wants to do diplomacy first. | ||
| Of course he does. | ||
| But what he's looking at, what we're all looking at, is basically sedition and secession. | ||
| And at some point either has to stop, or the country's gonna fall apart. | ||
| Now, I was raised in Richmond, Virginia, and, you know, I said this. | ||
| I'd like to have your thoughts on this, about the sanctuary cities, sanctuary states. | ||
| Is Governor Newsom kind of sounds like a neo-Confederate? | ||
| I mean, there's one thing about federalism, but his, like, hardcore states' rights, this is like John C. Calhoun versus Andrew Jackson, is it not, sir? | ||
| Well, I don't think he's talking about states' rights. | ||
| I think he's talking about who, me, and if we don't let the illegals in, who's going to vote for me? | ||
| Because the Constitution is fairly clear, and the Supremacy Clause is fairly clear, and the insurrection clauses are fairly clear that someone has to stop this rioting, and that Bass is not gonna do it, and Newsom is not gonna do it, and his American citizens were entitled to the protection of the law, which is why federal law trumps state law. | ||
| But it hasn't done so for the last four, six, eight years. | ||
| And if it doesn't desert itself, we don't have a country left anymore. | ||
| And that's the issue that Trump ran on and got an overwhelming majority of us fellow Americans to say, yes, that's right. | ||
| And that's where we are now. | ||
| And we don't know. | ||
| But what we do know is that it's a fight. | ||
| Could it be settled peacefully? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| But it's going to have to be settled. | ||
| Well, we thought we settled it peacefully at the ballot box, where you said overwhelming, and the polls are coming up. | ||
| I want to go back, though, to something fascinating you said about Tim Waltz and about the summer of love of 2020, where this was not addressed as forthrightly as it looks like it's being addressed now. | ||
| You said he had the police leave the police headquarters. | ||
| You called that Fort Sumter. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Well, that was really the first shot of an escalation in what is a pro-drobal civil war between the people who want to have the rule of law and the Constitution and the people who would rather not. | ||
| And so we had a summer full of riots because not only individuals who were Misguided, and some individuals who like chaos, and there are a lot of them. | ||
| But organizations like Black Lives Matter, which sprang into being to capitalize on chaos and anarchy, took a lot of power and scared of a lot of people. | ||
| And we're still working our way out of that. | ||
| Where's it gonna end? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Before we go to break, I do want to pull up something from the book. | ||
| Trump is a hero, and his heirs, God willing, will increase the longevity of the American experiment. | ||
| Do you see that? | ||
| Is that what this fight's about on the streets of Los Angeles, sir? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Listen, I live here in Los Angeles because I like to be close to my taxes. | ||
| And my wife grew up in Edinburgh in Scotland, so like anybody from the British Isles, they see this weather. | ||
| They ain't never leaving. | ||
| But it's the edge of oppressiveness. | ||
| We have to evacuate our home during the fires because Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom and the fire commissioner of L.A. thought that DEI was more important than water. | ||
| It's a sick community. | ||
| And it's either going to be healed or it's going to dissolve. | ||
| and something is going to take place. | ||
| But what a lot of the idiocy So they say, let's do away with the Constitution. | ||
| Well, what do you replace it with? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, what rules do you employ? | ||
| To determine what you should replace it with, I don't know. | ||
| Well, then, in a legitimate conversation, your next question to the liberal would be, well, don't you think it's a better idea then to keep the Constitution? | ||
| But they say, no, no, no, we must rely on feelings. | ||
| What about the poor this? | ||
| What about the poor that? | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| But the Jewish law says, do justice, love, mercy, in that order. | ||
| That's not the other way around. | ||
| David, hang on for one second. | ||
| David Mamet joins us. | ||
| The book is Disenlightenment. | ||
| It is a must-read. | ||
|
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I'm going to make sure as many as it were when possible get it as possible. | |
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return with David Mamet in a moment. | ||
|
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| *Dramatic Music* | ||
| David, you talked to Bill Maher on his podcast about you had been on television or President Trump had seen you and then he called you the next day or called you shortly thereafter and said I wanted to make sure you understood about the stolen election of 2020. | ||
| How did that conversation go? | ||
| It was great. | ||
| David, I talked to him several times when we were both in the entertainment business. | ||
| I hadn't talked to him since then. | ||
| I said, "My God!" I said, "Mr. | ||
| President, thank you for everything, blah, blah, blah." No, he said, "Okay, okay, okay." But he says, "Well, you know the election was still." I said, "Yes, sir, Mr. President, you're absolutely correct. | ||
| I backed off." This is a big mistake. | ||
| A lot of people make it today. | ||
| They're called liberals, right? | ||
| Well, why get into trouble? | ||
| But he said, "Well, the counting of the ballots." Obviously, and the fake ballots and the mail-in ballots and the lack of voter ID and Zuckerberg getting strong-armed and the Russia collusion hoax and blah, blah. | ||
| But he went on. | ||
| He was great. | ||
| I thought, yeah, okay. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| He's got it. | ||
| Your first directorial effort was House of Games, which is an American classic. | ||
| You've just finished the film, Henry Johnson. | ||
| Can you tell us about it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I did a movie with Shia LaBeouf and an evangelical guy called Henry Johnson. | ||
| You can catch it at henryjohnsonmovie.com. | ||
| Play about a guy who's so involved in doing good that he destroys everyone he touches. | ||
| And he goes from being a well-fought executive in some outfit to being tried for embezzlement to going to jail and eventually getting involved in a jailbreak and ends up as a murderer. | ||
| And then the fun begins. | ||
| So we had a great time doing that. | ||
| And I'm about to start doing another movie in the fall. | ||
| So I went back after about 10 years. | ||
| The previous movie I did for HBO was Phil Spector with Al Pacino. | ||
| So I'm not going to go back after Henry Johnson and shoot another brand new movie in the fall. | ||
| So you're getting back into both writing and directing? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| How does someone... | ||
| I mean, normally someone's first director is tough. | ||
| That film is an absolute classic. | ||
| Of course, the cast, you absolutely had a loaded cast, but tell me about that. | ||
| Well, Peter Yates, the great director, Peter Yates, who directed, among other things, Bullet and Robbery and Friends of Eddie Coyle's Brit, but is a terrific Americanish director. | ||
| So I had this whole movie ready to go. | ||
| And he said, well, why don't you direct it? | ||
| So I said, well, okay. | ||
| I said, I did a lot of directing in the theater. | ||
| And I've done a lot of, watched 10,000, 20,000 movies. | ||
| I got to sit down and plan the thing out to the last syllable of recorded time. | ||
| Because other than that, So I was saying it's like when you fly an airplane, when you do your first solo, when you do your first solo, the first time you're alone in an airplane, they say, okay, do three landings. | ||
| And everybody says they're going to be the best landings of your life because all you have is precepts and technique. | ||
| And you say to yourself, You take what you do in your solo, the first thing you say, this is great. | ||
| And the second thing you say is, Lord have mercy, there's nobody in this stupid plane but me. | ||
| Henry Johnson, was that a play first, or is this an original screenplay that you then decided to direct? | ||
| No, I wrote it as a play for Shia LaBeouf, and we did it. | ||
| My friend Marjorie Lewis Ryan directed it in a little 80-seat theater in Los Angeles. | ||
| And then we finished our run, and the guy said, well, let's do it as a movie. | ||
| So we did it at the time of my life doing it. | ||
| Tell me about how did you get this idea? | ||
| Someone that's always doing good, all of a sudden everything he touches turns awful, or he hurts people because everything he wants to do and everything he does is good? | ||
| Well, it has to do with abortion. | ||
| And I said that they should advertise the film by saying it's not about abortion, because that's a pretty good advertising line. | ||
| But I met a guy and I was talking to him. | ||
| He's a friend of a friend. | ||
| And they said, come over for dinner with me and my wife this weekend. | ||
| He said, I can't. | ||
| I'm going up to Tehachapi Prison. | ||
| I said, oh. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| He said, well, I'm going to go see a friend of mine. | ||
| He's not really a friend. | ||
| He's an acquaintance. | ||
| He's up there doing six years for rape and manslaughter. | ||
| I said, uh-huh. | ||
| Tell me the story. | ||
| He said, well, there's this guy. | ||
| I knew him from college. | ||
| He's a friend of a friend. | ||
| And he has this affair with this young woman. | ||
| And she gets pregnant. | ||
| And he says, I want you to abort the child. | ||
| And she says, I don't want to. | ||
| He says, well, I'll give you money to abort the child. | ||
| She says, I'd really rather not. | ||
| So they spent one last night together. | ||
| They have a wild fling. | ||
| And while they're having sex, he introduces an abortifacient into her body and kills the child. | ||
| So he gets tried, and he goes to jail for six years. | ||
| And so this friend of a friend is going to Tehachapi to visit him. | ||
| I said, well, you're going to visit this guy? | ||
| And my friend says, "Well, you know, I think he's paying his debt to society." I think he's being punished. | ||
| He doesn't have a debt to society. | ||
| He has an undischargeable debt to that woman and her child. | ||
| Now he says, no, no, you're absolutely wrong, my friend. | ||
| He deserves compassion. | ||
| And when he gets out, I'm going to see that he gets a job. | ||
| So I started thinking about it, thinking, that's crazy. | ||
| That's absolutely nuts. | ||
| And now we find out that all the people on death row were probably pardoned by some second-level staffer in the White House. | ||
| So if we don't have a criminal system, everything always devolves to, quote, compassion. | ||
| We're in a lot of trouble. | ||
| You know, another Jewish thing is compassion to the evil is tyranny to the good. | ||
| So that's what this movie is about. | ||
| And I'm really happy with it. | ||
| It's a really good film. | ||
| HenryJohnson.com. | ||
| We're going to push it more in the second hour. | ||
| It's going to stick around with us. | ||
| Back to you with the score from The Right Stuff, a classic movie by Philip Kaufman off of a masterpiece by Thomas Wolfe, The Right Stuff. |
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