All Episodes
Aug. 27, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:54
Episode 4738: Minneapolis Shooter Identified; Truth Behind Gun Free Zones
Participants
Main voices
j
john lott
08:51
m
michael lucci
07:12
n
natalie winters
18:04
Appearances
b
brandon m showalter
04:54
j
joe scarborough
01:46
m
mike benz
04:08
t
tom winter
01:29
Clips
b
brandon johnson
00:33
t
tim walz
00:26
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Anybody who is using this as an using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity.
We should not be operating out of a place of hate for anyone.
We should be operating from a place of love for our kids.
tim walz
Minnesota ranks the highest per capita for being a safe haven for transgender individuals in Minnesota.
unidentified
And can I just say we can talk about economic growth and feeding children and growing the economy and creating jobs simultaneously with talking about everybody's human rights matters and we shouldn't be demonalized.
You can do both.
joe scarborough
Would you also like to get federal funding to help put 5,000 more cops on the street in Chicago?
Would that help drive down crime?
unidentified
Well, look, policing by itself is not the full strategy.
joe scarborough
No, I understand.
You've talked about the other things you want, and I said those are good and important programs.
unidentified
But I'm asking also, would 5,000 more police officers on the street in Chicago be helpful to go along with all of those social programs that a lot of cities are engaging in and having success with?
Look, here's the best way I can put it, Joe, is that in the 90s when I was in high school, we had 3,000 more police officers and we had 900 people being murdered every single year in Chicago.
brandon johnson
It's just not policing alone.
unidentified
Of course, we want more detectives on the state of the world.
I know it's not policing alone, but I know it's not policing alone.
joe scarborough
You've told me everything else you want.
I'm curious, and this does come down to an ideological difference between people.
Do you believe that the streets of Chicago would be safer if there were more uniformed police officers on the streets of Chicago?
unidentified
I believe the city of Chicago and cities across America would be safer if we actually had affordable housing.
joe scarborough
Look at that.
unidentified
That's not the question I asked.
joe scarborough
My question is, and I just need a yes or a no.
Do you believe the streets of Chicago would be safer if you got all of those other extraordinary programs put back into place, which do have a history of being successful, if that's complemented by having 5,000 more cops on the streets of Chicago?
unidentified
I don't believe that we should narrow it down to just police officers, John.
That is an anti-quedit approach.
I'm saying we've invested in detectives.
Mr. Mayor, are you hearing what I'm saying?
I'm agreeing with you that all of these other social programs are extraordinarily important.
I just need a yes or a no, and then this will be the last time I ask.
If you get all of those other social programs that 800 million that New York City does, Los Angeles, other people do with great success.
And I think that's enough of that.
I know we call Democrats soft on crime, but I think full stop, we can just call them pro-crime because apparently now, although I guess they've always hated police officers, now they're very okay with saying that on MSNBC of all places.
You are in the war room.
It is Wednesday, August 27th in the year of our Lord 2025.
Had a whole show planned for you, but with the breaking news coming out of Minnesota, I wanted to dedicate a lot of our time to what is really going on there.
Obviously, because the shooter's identity, it doesn't fit the legacy media's narrative.
Predictably, a lot of the social media accounts and surrounding details have been wiped.
natalie winters
I'm sure it'll be another Thomas Matthew Crookes situation.
unidentified
I don't see the same impetus to get to the bottom of anything there.
Instead, you saw that clown, that sham of a mayor, Jacob Fry, I believe is his name, who opened the cold, talking about how you, the war room posse, the viewers of the show, are not allowed to use what happened, like I said today, at a Catholic school.
We're going to get into the details, as anything to promote transphobia or anti-transgenderism hate.
Well, bro, you missed the point.
natalie winters
The hate crime that happened was not this audience.
unidentified
They're not people who've been sounding the alarm about the mental illness that is transgenderism, aka dysphoria.
natalie winters
It's what happened this morning.
unidentified
Robin Westman shot and killed two children, including injuring 17 others, at a Catholic school during Mass in Minneapolis.
And I think we can call this what it actually is.
Not going to use the nice euphemistic terms that the media will use, even if they dare to touch the story.
This is essentially domestic terrorism, if not a hate crime.
And I hate that word has been so watered down by those on the left, the SPLC, the ACLU, you name it.
This is motivated by hate, very clearly motivated by anti-Christian hate.
Even in some cases, on, I believe, one of the barrels or one of the chambers he had written, Kill Trump Now, writing, Where is Your God?
You know, I know we're told so much that language matters and pronouns matter from the side that supports and promotes people who commit atrocities like this.
Well, I don't really think pronouns matter.
natalie winters
I think terminology matters about what you determine a school shooting to be.
unidentified
And it's a domestic terrorist incident.
natalie winters
I know we had no issue classifying anything January 6th related like that, but this is really, frankly, 10 times worse.
unidentified
But why I did that juxtaposition in the cold, not just a time juxtaposition between Tim Waltz and what we saw happen today, but also between what is just the absolute degeneracy and chaos going on in Democrat states and cities.
You see the Chicago mayor, maybe even more of a clown than Jacob Fry, who can't even say that I actually think deploying police to the streets of Chicago.
That's right, Chicago.
What is it worse than I think Iraq and Afghanistan maybe combined in just a weekend alone?
But apparently no cops there.
It's not woke enough for that wonderful mayor.
I guess he's better than Lori Lightfoot, but not by much.
But I think it's worth noting there's been a lot of, as you can imagine, reporting into the state of affairs when it comes to the issue of transgenderism in the great state of Minnesota.
It was actually Tim Waltz who was flagged, if you can believe it or not, in 2023 by the head of Minnesota's Catholic schools.
I believe he penned a long op-ed saying that school safety was being compromised, particularly at the hands of these radical gender activists.
natalie winters
It's just anti-Catholic, anti-Christian sentiment that had been fomenting not just across the country, but particularly under the leadership of Governor Waltz.
unidentified
And do you know what his answer was?
Well, it was probably an awkward clap, but it was also not just to do nothing.
natalie winters
That would have been better.
unidentified
He actually declared Minnesota to be a trans refuge.
That's right, stripping parents of all rights to their kids if they decide one day that they want to become a trans student, even at the ripe age of three, that you can't veto that.
You have to go along with it.
I think this goes back to what we have always said.
natalie winters
This is a battle between good and evil.
unidentified
It's not Democrat or Republican.
I think Trump was the forcing function to prove the break of that party system.
But this is about people who are just pro-humanity and anti-humanity, who support death, who think it's okay to kill people because they're Christians, or think that we need to condone and outright support the crazy gender transition of people who take drugs that make them even crazier than they are and start shooting up schools.
Frankly, I wouldn't add, or I would rather add, that we don't just need mass deportations.
We probably need mass detransitions, or certainly we need to play much harder with these states that receive federal funding that are supporting this type of hormones altering and the puberty blockers, whatever euphemistic term they want to whitewash it as, shouldn't be receiving your tax dollars, let alone when all their state officials are going to go up and hit the sticks to say that there's no issue with the transgender community.
natalie winters
They're just great.
It's actually you.
unidentified
It's MAGA.
natalie winters
It's the right-wing Christian zealots, the Christian nationalists that are responsible for this.
unidentified
No, you guys are the ones with blood on your hands.
You're not going to spin this.
And we're definitely going to keep digging into Robin W.
I think that was the online name that the manifesto was posted under.
I want to go to Brandon Schowalter.
I just waxed on probably way too long, but I hate being lied to.
Although I guess they're Democrats, so I can't expect much more.
But the transgender issue in Minnesota, they're pretty radical, with Tim Waltz at the forefront.
Can you just sort of talk about your general assessment of what happened today, but just how systemic failures, maybe failures is too nice a word, but this intentional promotion of the transgender ideology, let us hear.
Fascinating question, Natalie, and thanks for having me.
It really is so disturbing.
And first things first, heart goes out to all the families who are suffering, who've lost their kids and family members today in that horrific massacre.
The state of Minnesota functions as kind of the trans hub of the Midwest.
I really put it alongside the West Coast states, which I consider the epicenter of trans ideology in terms of both the medical practices that are happening out there.
I mean, yes, we've seen pushback from the Trump administration now with executive orders and federal agency action against this.
But Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan have both championed transgenderism very effusively.
And I was watching the Cold Open there with Mayor Fry talking about the hatred toward the trans community.
Natalie, I think that just goes to show how utterly out of touch people are when you do see that like the Covenant School massacre, where it was a transgender identified shooter who killed all those children at that Christian school.
And now you see this and there have been other shootings where these deeply disturbed, confused people have carried out these horrific crimes.
I'm not going to make the correlation causation fallacy and say that the hormones of the blockers caused psychiatric distress and then that caused the shooting.
No, we're all individuals.
We all are capable of do evil.
But I just would wonder, if a white Christian had gone to a LGBT activist meeting and killed a bunch of people, would Mayor Fry have said those things about the hatred towards the Christian community?
I don't think so.
This is a death cult dogma that has captured the minds of most mainstream, purportedly mainstream Democratic politicians such that they fall over themselves and go out of their way to make sure that we just don't hurt the feelings of these poor darling trans activists that, meanwhile, as they rampage and commit horrific acts of violence, they're just so careful that we don't hate them.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I, as a Christian, I have no hatred in my heart for, you know, genuinely confused people.
What I do despise and what I think most Americans despise is this nihilistic ideology that is full of death and destruction.
And if people can stomach it, I know Champaign Joshi has this, the full video, the 11-minute video that has since been deleted from YouTube of the shooter.
This is just a cult of death.
He hated Christians.
He hated Jews.
He had a target body with Jesus face pinned on it.
He had kill Trump on his magazine.
He hated Israel.
He hated gays.
He hated religion.
brandon m showalter
It's a cult of death.
unidentified
And so that ideology, that mindset has consumed the Democratic Party's mind in terms of what they value most.
And I couldn't help but notice also that old picture.
This was taken a few years ago.
It may have been when they were declaring trans Minnesota a trans refuge state, or maybe it was some other policy.
Either way, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan wearing a t-shirt saying, protect trans kids, complete with a knife blade on it.
brandon m showalter
So it goes to show you what their priorities are and how quickly they fall over themselves to promote transgenderism, even in the wake of a school shooting where Christian children are murdered at prayer.
That's how high this goes.
unidentified
And I just don't think that the same would be true if the shoe were on the other foot.
It's a mania.
It's a dogma that has captured the minds of the Democratic Party at the very top.
And until they learn that and until they see what a cult dogma it is, I don't think their political fortunes are going to change.
But really, this isn't even about that.
Today, we should be focused on the families who have endured their worst nightmare.
brandon m showalter
But it really is shameful to see transgenderism even be brought up as something we need to protect in the midst in the wake of such a shooting.
I hope they get to the bottom of this.
unidentified
And I give my best regards to the law enforcement who are doing the investigating now.
Well, yeah, I mean, if it had been a white male, you know, privileged, I'm sure that's how they would describe it, shooter, they'd probably have a live feed in the corner, if not providing live commentary.
They'd have a special report tonight on MSNBC, CNN, ABC, I've been in the middle of the day.
brandon m showalter
And I would condemn it in the strongest of terms.
unidentified
I would condemn it in the strongest of terms.
Okay, we'd not, I mean, there's nothing remotely Christian about shooting up a, I mean, it's just, you're so right.
Like, it's, and people notice the double standard here.
And can you talk a little bit more about the manifesto?
As far as I'm aware, I haven't seen any of the legacy media outlets even get within a you know 10-mile radius of talking about some of the things that he said.
It seems like it's really just spin on X.
Well, X is what I've been familiar with.
And that 11-minute video that I just referenced, if people do, I mean, you want to pop an antacid and try to get through it.
It's absolutely brutal.
We, if you're a Christian and you're watching this, you need to pray on your knees for deliverance from evil because this is besieging the younger generation.
brandon m showalter
It is a cult of death.
unidentified
It is demonic.
brandon m showalter
I've had non-religious people say to me that they're not even sure that they believe in God, but when their kids get involved in this gender confusion stuff, it convinces them that there's demonic spirits at work in the world.
unidentified
I mean, there's something about this wickedness that drives them to the edge of their sanity to the end of themselves.
And I think people just really need to pray.
Yes, the manifesto and the video will not surprise you, but it's particularly disturbing in this case.
We're coming up against a break.
If people want to stay up to date with this story, where can they go to follow you and get more of your analysis?
X on Twitter, at BrandonM Show, and the Christian Post for sure.
brandon m showalter
ChristianPost.com.
natalie winters
Thank you, sir.
We appreciate it.
unidentified
Thank you.
Kill America's Voice, family.
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tim walz
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unidentified
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Continued divide between Trump and the Federal Reserve putting us behind the curve again.
Can the Fed take the right action at the right time or are we going to be looking at a potential economic slowdown?
natalie winters
And what does this mean for your savings?
unidentified
Consider diversifying with gold through Birch Gold Group.
natalie winters
For decades, gold has been viewed as a safe haven in times of economic stagnation, global uncertainty, and high inflation.
unidentified
And Birch Gold makes it incredibly easy for you to diversify some of your savings into gold.
If you have an IRA or old 401k, you can convert that into a tax-sheltered IRA and physical gold, or just buy some gold to keep in your safe.
First, get educated.
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Again, Bannon to 989898.
natalie winters
Consider diversifying a portion of your savings into gold.
unidentified
That way, if the Fed can't stay ahead of the curve for the country, at least you can stay ahead for yourself.
Welcome back to the war room.
Honored to be joined by the brilliant John Lott, who I think single-handedly may be responsible for creating some of the most powerful data to debunk what is it, the I think left's always very quick knee-jerk reaction to any time there's a shooting to scream gun control, although this time it was fused with you know protect trans the transgenderism cult.
But I'm just curious, you know, your thoughts in terms of these gun control laws, the left's kind of go-to argumentation.
I think we've even sort of seen it here saying that, you know, oh, we need stricter gun laws.
I'm sure Tim Waltz is probably already pushing that.
Just how wrong they are.
Sure.
Well, thanks for having me on.
john lott
Look, the ones I've heard, the first one I've heard was background checks.
unidentified
You could have had, they're talking about background checks on the private transfers of guns.
It's not even clear that that would be relevant for this case.
But the thing is, even if we had had such laws in effect and they had been perfectly enforced, there's not one mass public shooting this century that would have been stopped.
You know, we also hear about assault weapons bans.
You look at the, first of all, we don't even know an assault weapon was used in this case, but you look at the last 25 years or so, 15% of the attacks involved a rifle of any type.
And the thing is, there's no difference in terms of their ability to go and do the attack between that and some other semi-automatic gun.
You know, they all fire one bullet per pull of the trigger.
You know, an AR-15 is like a small caliber hunting rifle, semi-automatic hunting rifle.
It fires the same bullets with the same rapidity.
You know, the big difference there is the outsized cosmetics, what it looks like on the outside.
john lott
And just to go and ban guns primarily based on how they look and has nothing to do with how they function has never been obvious to me.
unidentified
But here's the bottom line, and that is, I want to do something.
I don't want to, I want to do something that actually matters, that's related.
And one thing that you see time after time in these mass public shootings is that these attackers go to places where their victims aren't able to defend themselves.
john lott
They go to these gun-free zones.
unidentified
We don't know everything with this individual yet by far, but time after time in their diaries and manifestos, these mass murders explain in detail why they pick the targets that they do.
john lott
But the media refuses, absolutely refuses to go and talk about those parts of their diaries and manifestos.
unidentified
And what do they go after?
john lott
They go after gun-free zones because their goal is to get media attention.
unidentified
And they know the more media attention they're going to be able to get, the more people they kill.
And so if they go to a place where their victims are defenseless, they're going to be able to go and kill more people and get more media attention.
So, you know, in Minnesota, it's a crime for you, anybody, even somebody with a concealed carry permit, to take a gun onto school property.
You know, so let's say this individual had lived.
They killed two people, wounded something like 17 others.
You know, they'd be facing many life sentences in jail for all those crimes that they committed.
Do you think taking two years away from maybe their sixth life or their seventh life is going to make it so, okay, well, I can live with six life sentences, but you take two more years for my seventh life, and that's going to stop me from committing the crime.
The point for law-abiding citizens, though, if you or I were to go and become a felon and have to spend years in jail, our lives would be completely changed.
You know, it would completely destroy our lives.
john lott
That would be a massive penalty.
unidentified
And so, what you've done is, however, unintentionally, and I can believe the desire was to try to create a safe area there, what you've ended up doing is passing a law that makes it clear that the only person that's going to have a gun there is going to be the bad guy who wants to go and do harm.
john lott
And so, these gun-free zones actually serve as magnets for these attacks.
unidentified
There's a reason why something like 92% of the mass public shootings take place in these gun-free zones because it makes it easier for these people to go and be the only person with a gun to go and kill people.
And I guess you can extrapolate that out to DC, right?
natalie winters
A city where it's essentially impossible to own a gun to underride the crime rate is so high.
unidentified
And I guess another thing the media won't touch, how that is actually going down, at least from the homicide, assault, and burglary perspective, over the last, I guess, now about around two weeks.
I'm curious your perspective, how you think President Trump's DC crackdown, as we're told it is, is going from a data perspective.
I think it's going extremely well.
Look, again, it's just this notion: if you want to stop crime, you have to make it risky for criminals to commit crime.
And you can do that by allowing victims to be able to go and defend themselves, as you were mentioning.
But you can also do it by making it riskier through higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates, longer prison sentences.
And the president is dealing with all of those different issues that are there.
And so, you know, we have about 1,300 law enforcement officers or patrol officers in DC.
So that means about 400 are on duty at any point in time.
And, you know, that's for a district of 721,000 people.
You can understand why the police union complains about being stressed incredibly thin.
They're like 800 officers short of where they should be.
So when Trump puts over 500 FBI and ICE and DEA agents out on the street, when he has over 800 National Guard officers out there, that's essentially more than doubling the number of patrol officers that you have.
And so the mayor just announced in D.C. that there's been an 87% drop in carjackings.
There's been something like a 24% drop in violent crime that's there.
You know, these are huge drops.
john lott
But the biggest change has probably been with regard to homicides.
unidentified
If you take the rate of homicides last year, okay, in 2024, the odds that you could go 13 days, which they just did, without a homicide, is one in 800.
That's incredibly low.
And the other thing that just drives me crazy with regard to the Democrats, because they claim that they care about the poor, that they care about blacks.
The latest data that we have is for 2021.
And what you find is that 96% of those who were murdered are blacks.
And so, you know, they claim black lives matter, but apparently they don't matter when it's Trump that's enacting a policy to go and save them.
And John, just give me a minute.
natalie winters
We saw the Chicago mayor basically saying we don't want, you know, increased police presence, police force here.
unidentified
What are your thoughts on his rationale?
Well, it's like so many of these other Democrats.
He just refuses to go and do the obvious things to go and make it risky for criminals to go and commit crime.
You know, he wants to go and claim that basically crime is due to poverty that's there.
You know, the empirical work that academics have done indicates that you can explain about 55% of the variation in crime rates due to law enforcement type things, higher arrest rates, conviction rates, prison sentences, the death penalty.
john lott
Only a couple percent of the variation in crime rates can be explained by anything that has to do with poverty or unemployment or incomes or any of those types of other factors that are there.
unidentified
Age obviously has a distribution.
Other demographics have things to do with it, but not poverty.
So, you know, the fact that he just can't get it out that, yeah, we need to have more police and having, you know, 5,000 more police, as Joe Scarborough was asking about, it's just, you know, for him to not be willing to say, yeah, having 5,000 more police would make a real dent in terms of crime.
Look, in Chicago, in many recent years, you've had arrest rates for murder that have been in the teens, below 20%.
And that's just the arrests.
Many of those individuals weren't being prosecuted by the Soros-type district attorney for Cook County.
And even when they were prosecuted, not all of them were convicted.
And it may be in the teens, but that's on average for the hard ones to go after are the gang shootings.
john lott
There's the ones it's hard to get people to be able to go and be willing to testify in, to come forward.
unidentified
And the thing is, when you have such low rates of arrest and prosecution and conviction, that makes it hard for people to be willing to come forward because they think to themselves, geez, I come forward, I say that I saw something and nothing happens to these guys.
And I just risk against the break.
I know the audience is going to want to get access to all of your data and analysis before we have you back on where can they go to do that and follow you.
Well, thanks.
And go to our website at crime research.org, crimeresearch.org.
A very wonderful website.
John Lott, thank you so much for joining us.
natalie winters
We'll have you back on soon.
unidentified
Mike Benz after the break.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance.
Is the continued divide between Trump and the Federal Reserve putting us behind the curve again?
natalie winters
Can the Fed take the right action at the right time or are we going to be looking at a potential economic slowdown?
unidentified
And what does this mean for your savings?
Consider diversifying with gold through Birch Gold Group.
For decades, gold has been viewed as a safe haven in times of economic stagnation, global uncertainty, and high inflation.
And Birch Gold makes it incredibly easy for you to diversify some of your savings into gold.
If you have an IRA or old 401k, you can convert that into a tax-sheltered IRA in physical gold or just buy some gold to keep in your safe.
First, get educated.
Virt Gold will send you a free info kit on gold.
Just text Bannon to 989898.
Again, Bannon to 989898.
natalie winters
Consider diversifying a portion of your savings into gold.
unidentified
That way, if the Fed can't stay ahead of the curve for the country, at least you can stay ahead for yourself.
Welcome back to the war room.
natalie winters
We are joined by Mike Benz, who you are, I guess, in an undisclosed location.
unidentified
I won't dox you.
You just presented to the State Policy Network talking about media literacy, all these sort of euphemistic terms, how they're coming after our kids with a lot of these programs.
Can you just give us a few minutes on what you're talking about and how it links back?
We got the tweet.
We can put the picture up on screen to a lot of this USAID stuff.
Yes.
mike benz
So this is the media literacy scam.
unidentified
This is something that you've pointed out.
I think that tweet of yours has 34 million views on it, where you pointed out Biden's declassified internet censorship plan relying on USAID to, quote, combat online disinformation by promoting, quote, media literacy.
You'll also see on that list in that screenshot, DHS, the Department of Education, the State Department, and USAID.
mike benz
So that's four different federal government agencies all providing funding, grant money, and using, quote, digital literacy as a way to, quote, combat online disinformation.
unidentified
Now, this goes back to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump and the, quote, fake news epidemic that the blob said was responsible for his win.
So what the blob oriented at that time was to revive effectively an old, sleepy, mostly dead field called media literacy and redefine it to mean that media literacy is a way to combat mis and disinformation, to take this kind of existing concept and use it as a predicate to launch a censorship operation within U.S. schools at the state and local level.
The way it works is this.
While parents and members of parent-teacher associations or state assemblies think that media literacy means they're teaching your kids how to read the media, what they really mean is if you don't read the right media sources, you are illiterate and need to get your mind right.
And so this has become the de facto way of creating blacklists in order to block access to or the ability to cite news or information that comes from alternative news sources.
Basically anyone who's not the New York Times or the Washington Post in schools all over the country.
And they have spammed this weapon up to the hilt.
12 states have now made quote media literacy a mandatory course in K through 12 schools and have mandatory media literacy education tech firms like Newzella and NewsGuard installed in school Wi-Fi's and school devices.
So this basically blocks the ability to listen to the conversation we're having right now.
And this was actually part of Norm Eisen's playbook as well.
Natalie, if you can believe it, that 2025 democracy playbook from Norm Eisen published in January this year called for a huge push on quote digital literacy in schools and in the private sector and for more money to flow into the space.
And until the time of our speaking, there has not been a single punching back, but I am proud to present to you today model legislation.
I have a spinny chair, so I'm going to do a ceremonial spin in the spinny chair.
I propose model legislation to completely blow this concept up.
12 states have made it illegal to not have mandatory state brainwashing through media literacy.
I want 27 states to make it illegal to do it in the state.
The same way this was done with the 1619 project and critical race theory and DEI.
The same can be done on the media literacy.
All of these contracts that are effectively forced onto these school systems to contract out to these media literacy firms.
Well, they're not going to be able to do that if states pass this model legislation.
And I'm very excited at the prospect of being able to take our schools back.
natalie winters
Mike Benz, I think I say thank you on behalf of the entire War Room posse.
That's great to be doing legislation at a state level to keep our classrooms free of all this very scary stuff.
Imagine if people couldn't watch War Room.
unidentified
It'd be a much worse world.
We've got a PAC show.
You know, I usually keep you longer, but we've got to get to some stuff in Texas and stuff in China.
natalie winters
So in the meantime, if people want to follow you, maybe read this legislation, where can they go to do that?
unidentified
Follow me on X at MikeBenz Cyber.
Check out our foundation website, foundationforfreedomonline.com.
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Mike Benz, as always, thank you.
Awesome.
Speaking of, I guess, both Michael's and state level legislation, I'm honored to bring on Michael Lucci of State Armor, who you guys do great work when it comes to combating the threat that is the Chinese Communist Party.
But really from a nuanced level, you get down to the nitty-gritty, whether it's the influence ops, the sister cities, the United Front Work Department, this sort of euphemistic charm offensive.
You're saying not on our watch.
So thank you.
But before we get into the sort of Chinese student stuff, obviously there was the big New York Times piece talking about Chinese influence of elections up in New York.
You have been helping coordinate a lot of what Texas has been doing in terms of really, I think, leading, being the tip of the spear when it comes to countering malign Chinese influence.
natalie winters
Can you walk us through some of the bills that were just signed yesterday?
unidentified
Yesterday, Governor Abbott, who's been the best leader in the country on these issues, signed three key pieces of legislation.
One, no CCP, no trend agua, none of these terrorist organizations can buy or rent property in Texas.
michael lucci
Two, ending sister cities with adversary nations, China, Russia, North Korea.
unidentified
And then three, first in the country, probably first in the world to create a new criminal statute for what's called transnational repression.
michael lucci
Short form of that, the Chinese government reaches in here and attacks people in the state of Texas.
unidentified
It's happening in Texas, happening across the United States.
So Texas, first state in the country, probably the first jurisdiction in the world to define transnational repression and say, we're going to send you to jail for a very long time if you try that here.
But on top of that, Governor Abbott issued, say, five executive orders, another 10 pieces of critical legislation to block the Communist Party in all sorts of way, getting our pensions out of China, blocking their genomic harvesting, which is a really sort of heinous thing.
They're gathering genomic data across the United States for all the wrong reasons.
And so there's a huge swath of legislation that was enacted in Texas this year.
michael lucci
Every other state needs to be looking at what's happening here, but the federal leaders as well on higher education.
unidentified
Texas enacted legislation that's going to send you to jail for a long time if you do what one Chinese researcher was just caught doing this week, which is stealing trade secrets.
michael lucci
Texas is making that a 20-year prison sentence with a new law that goes into effect in just the next week.
unidentified
protecting our higher education system, screening researchers, all sorts of critical legislation that needs to happen, as I said, at both the state and at the federal level if we're going to stop the Communist Party.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting way sort of building from the bottom up a very robust defense to Chinese influence and infiltration, right, starting at what seem to be these innocuous things like the sister cities or the academic exchanges.
But as you well know, this is part of a multi-billion dollar political warfare effort that Beijing very strictly controls and deploys quite strategically, right, to curate these sort of Western politicians or academics or think tanker types or media types to push and peddle their line.
I'm curious, kind of relating this to what was, I mean, we've been talking about it here in the warm for a while, but I guess maybe for the New York Times readers, when they're not busy taking China Daily advertisements, they publish years later, investigations into Chinese infiltration, particularly in New York.
But can you just sort of give us, you know, an overview of how exactly this compromise network works and why it's so important to sort of use that to reverse engineer the policy solutions to combating it?
michael lucci
So the name of it is called the United Front apparatus, but really think of it as a political warfare machine.
Think of it as you're trying to win an election in the United States every single day.
unidentified
That's why what the New York Times covered, and they deserve credit for this because they've been ignoring this problem for a while.
michael lucci
Over 50 organizations in the city of New York, all with ties to the Chinese government, working on behalf of the Chinese government while actually operating under American nonprofit law.
unidentified
So they're engaging in electioneering, which is illegal for them to do under nonprofit law.
michael lucci
But set that aside, they're running broad influence operations to try to take out politicians who say support Taiwan and insert politicians, and they don't care the party, insert politicians that support the global agenda of the Chinese Communist Party.
They also inserted spies into the governor of New York's offices.
unidentified
You know, she's under indictment now with her husband.
They're inserting spies across governments where really you have a soft underbelly, New York, California, Minnesota, where the leadership's really not watching very closely.
So what they're doing in New York, over 50 civil society orgs, they're really just arms of the Communist Party.
michael lucci
They're operating to enhance the Communist Party's power within the United States.
unidentified
And then they're crushing dissent against the Communist Party.
michael lucci
New York also had an illegal police station where the Communist Party was policing ethnic Chinese in America, in New York City itself.
unidentified
So that's transnational repression.
michael lucci
That's the kind of thing that Texas said, you're going to go to jail for a really long time if you do it here.
unidentified
But in New York, unfortunately, they still have free reign.
And I think that the FBI really needs to start looking at some of these deep blue jurisdictions, California, New York, where the Communist Party is really just running wild.
I mean, Gavin Newsom is running right along with them in California.
The governor of New York had spies in her office.
They're now under indictment.
I think you really need federal law enforcement to dig in deeply into these networks, suss them out.
And if, you know, the President Trump, he should sanction all these entities.
michael lucci
There are proposals to just sanction the entirety of what's called the United Front, cut off all their funding, send all the agents home and denaturalize anyone who became a citizen of the United States by lying about their affiliations and loyalty to the Communist Party.
unidentified
That's what we need to win this political war just on our own soil, set aside the global conflict we have with the Communist Party.
Michael, if you can hang with us through the break, I have been a very staunch advocate of sanctioning anyone, even tangentially tied to the United Front.
Frankly, I would subpoena all of the lobbyists that worked on behalf of a lot of these influence groups, too, not just to get the names of the people who participated in all these meetings, but I think those people should face criminal charges, frankly, for treason.
I mean, collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party, let alone military-linked entities, let alone helping them target the Achilles heel of the American political system so they could get, I don't know, a better ROI for China's preferred policies.
Yeah, I think we call that treason.
I think maybe you're a traitor, call me crazy.
Let's drill down on that after the break.
natalie winters
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unidentified
We're going to make the case for why we need to sanction the United Front, certainly not double the VisaCap for Chinese students, aka spies, aka sleeper cells, take your pick.
This is not run-of-the-mill academic exchange.
They are the enemy, and we shouldn't be training the people we may one day meet on the battlefield.
natalie winters
But we know they don't prefer kinetic conflict.
unidentified
We'll be right back after this short break.
Here's your host, Stephen Kay-Ban.
Welcome back to the war room.
natalie winters
We're still joined by Michael Lucci of State Armor.
unidentified
Now, Michael, the Trump administration got very close in sort of both direct and indirect ways in the first term to sanctioning a lot of these United Front entities, or at least really strongly warning, I believe it was the National Governors Association, from collaborating with any of these sort of Chinese counterparts, the one particularly engaged in the CHARM offensive.
They revealed a lot of these companies or these sort of entities as being military proxies and collaborators, obviously sanctioning, adding to the entity list a lot of these kind of groups.
I'm just curious, make the case.
You know, a lot of admin people watch this show.
They love Steve, can't blame them.
But why you think going after the United Front is a really, really useful arrow in the quiver to combat malign Chinese influence?
I take the Chinese leader seriously when he says that the United Front is his number one weapon to defeat the United States.
michael lucci
He places that ahead of the People's Liberation Army, which he puts at number two, and the Communist Party itself, which he puts at number three.
unidentified
I think he means it when he says that.
And why does he think that's his number one power against the United States?
Because it subverts our democratic system and our constitutional system.
It erodes the rule of law.
But for their purposes, it allows them to extract extraordinary value from the United States while also damaging our system.
michael lucci
So it's a way to use our system against us, to use our open system against us by extracting value and damaging our democracy at the same time.
unidentified
Easy example, as I know we're talking about higher education, the greatest heist in the history of the world has been committed by the Communist Party against the university system and corporate America.
They have extracted literally trillions of dollars of intellectual property, and then they monetize that every year.
They get a return of hundreds of billions of dollars every year on the trillions of wealth that they stole from us.
That is all by design.
There are 150 Chinese student scholar associations on campuses across the United States.
michael lucci
This is one example.
Our State Department says that they are controlled by the United Front.
unidentified
In other words, they are part of Beijing's global political warfare machine.
michael lucci
They should not exist.
unidentified
All of these influence operations that we see, you can talk to some Chinese students on campus and they will tell you, if I say this thing, my parents get visited back home.
So they're subverting constitutional rights inside the United States against Chinese immigrants, Chinese Americans, regular American citizens.
michael lucci
They're broadly undermining our system and they win by inches.
unidentified
That's why the United Front is so important to them.
michael lucci
They turn our institutions against ourselves.
They win by inches.
unidentified
And so perhaps they don't win an invasion against President Trump in this term, but they will win inches this entire time unless we eject this entire political warfare machine.
michael lucci
It's the only choice we have.
The alternative is we let them slowly defeat us over time.
They've already done this to some of our allies, New Zealanders, Australia.
They are swamped with United Front influence operations.
unidentified
We have to eject them here, and then we have to help our allies eject them from their countries.
Otherwise, we will continually be surrounded by these influence operations.
And Michael, just one more time, if people want to follow you, get engaged.
You guys are always sort of sounding the alarm against a lot of, I think, Chinese infiltration, whether it's the Microsoft stuff, the Visa stuff, the United Front, where can they go to get engaged, reach out, and follow you?
StateArmor.org is our website.
At StateArmor is our handle on Twitter and then at Michael Lucci on Twitter as well.
Constantly investigating, working with lawmakers, stopping the Communist Party at the state level.
natalie winters
Thank you, sir, for joining us.
A very noble mission.
unidentified
We appreciate it.
Thank you.
And Denver, if we have that clip, we can roll it.
Otherwise, I will talk about the United Front and Chinese Communist Party immigration for a while.
But I guess MSNBC, I believe they participated in a lot of the pay-for-play dinners with Chinese lobbyists too.
So it all runs together, although take your pick, because all legacy media networks did.
I told you, legacy media wasn't going to touch the manifesto, right?
Or any of the clips, the videos that are obviously proclaiming extreme hatred for President Trump and all things transgender promotion of all things transgenderism.
Let's watch an MSNBC guest panelist.
He doesn't look weird enough, well, he looks pretty weird, but not weird enough to be a host, contort himself intellectually into why he can't explain Kill Trump Now was written on the chamber.
natalie winters
Let's roll it.
tom winter
One of the things that we're still trying to get a better handle on, we're still going through the videos and going through the writings.
unidentified
So just to describe it to folks, there are YouTube videos where there's a number of either journals or they look like journals where there's a number of writings, not all of them in the English language, there's some sort of Eastern European language that's used.
Some of it is in English.
And this individual is writing about a whole host of things.
Won't get into all the particular details.
As we stated last hour, we're not here to do the bidding of this individual so that we can basically put out the information they were hoping to gain out of this shooting, which is killed in an eight and a 10-year-old.
tom winter
You referenced those that are at the hospital, the kids ages six to 14.
unidentified
Some of them are in critical condition.
Four needed to be operated on.
What investigators are focusing on are these videos when they were specifically made.
There's some dates that are associated with it.
The bottom line, the bottom line messaging on this, suicidal thoughts, quote, extremely violent thoughts is how one person in law enforcement phrased it to me.
There's a reference to prior mass violence attacks.
There's a whole host of different writings, some of it nonsensical.
tom winter
There's a handwritten diagram of the interior of a church.
unidentified
Not clear if it's this church.
And there's all sorts of things that this individual is muttering and whispering under their breath.
So that's the latest as far as the investigation goes.
tom winter
What specific ideology or motivation will be assigned to this to be determined?
unidentified
That's the latest.
That's as far as the investigation goes.
Yeah, when else have you told us that?
I think about what the origins of COVID, the COVID vaccines, the truth about January 6th.
These people don't want to investigate it because they know it proves, yet again, the war room right when we don't want to be right that the Democrat Party is a death cult.
They don't protect or worship humanity.
They hate Christianity.
natalie winters
They steel man that as Christian nationalism.
unidentified
These people are disgusting.
And I guess we'll take you out with the wonderful Jen Saki, though, to her credit, I guess she worked essentially for a dead man, so I don't even know if she would know how to respond to a school shooting.
But she wanted to weigh in, the brilliant genius that she is, quote, when kids are getting shot in their pews at a Catholic school, mass and your crime plan is to have National Guard put mulch down around DC, maybe rethink your strategy.
How about this, Jensaki?
natalie winters
Maybe rethink your strategy of working for what probably one of the foremost networks in the country, which is hemorrhaging cash and personnel day by day, but that's responsible for pumping this country full of indoctrinating material, making kids want to become trans, hate Christians, and carry out acts like we saw this morning.
unidentified
I don't need advice from you or your failing show last time I checked.
natalie winters
Worms on the up and up, and I think you basically lost your prime time slot.
unidentified
Thanks for the advice.
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