Oct. 20, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
53:17
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
| Because we're going medieval on this people. | ||
| You're going to not get a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
| MAGA media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
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Warum use your host, Stephen K. Ban. | |
| It's Monday, 20 October, Year of Lord 2025. | ||
| We're going to get back to the um was it the insurrection here in the United States of America and how ties to global players. | ||
| We're going to talk about the uh the plenum that's going on in uh Beijing right now. | ||
| Uh in all this controversy around Xi, is he in charge, not in charge? | ||
| Captain Finell's going to join me, come back in a moment. | ||
| Also the representatives of the new federal state of China. | ||
| Forrest Ava and Roy were all be here, and Jim Rickards on geopolitic politics in capital markets. | ||
| Gold once again blew through 4300, as you know, and we started partnering with Birch Gold years ago as 1100. | ||
| And we told you how this was going to happen. | ||
| We said it's not about the price of gold, it's about the process. | ||
| You understand geopolitics, you understand capital markets, you understand the centrality of the United States dollar, the good old Federal Reserve note as the world's reserve currency and where that's going. | ||
| If you understand that and you get we can teach you a little bit about pattern recognition, you'll be on your own. | ||
| And uh you've done a magnificent job. | ||
| And it's only going to get scarier and scarier, even with a guy like President Trump. | ||
| And man, if we didn't have President Trump, we'd be in the abyss right now. | ||
| Uh I'm honored to have on, I think, the single most serious public intellectual in this country. | ||
| Uh, and it's through encounter books that he's got a new book out that is going to be another another game changer. | ||
| So Roger Kimball and the guys encounter, great job. | ||
| It's one of the reasons I love Roger Kimball. | ||
| He's a man of um of utmost courage. | ||
| The author is Charles Murray, and we welcome Charles welcoming you to the war room, sir. | ||
| I believe that's the one. | ||
| The reason I say this, sir, you wrote two books, The Bell Curve and Coming Apart, that um you were eviscerated over by the by the established order of intellectuals and and and public intellectuals. | ||
| Both books were not only simply stunning analysis, but the prophetic nature of both is stunning. | ||
| And if they had read them and embraced the message, the country being a very different shape. | ||
| Why was the bell curve so controversial when it came out? | ||
| I think in the mid-1990s, sir. | ||
| The book has was had a subtitle, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. | ||
| And that was the topic of the book. | ||
| Uh, that uh IQ had become a lot more important in determining success in this country over the 20th century. | ||
| And it had created a cognitive elite that had unprecedented new influence over the culture. | ||
| And in the course of writing the whole book, we took on a topic that uh everybody asks about when you raise IQ, and that's the black-white IQ difference. | ||
| And we discussed it. | ||
| And we didn't say it was the apocalypse coming. | ||
| We we but we put out the facts. | ||
| And uh that is so controversial in this country, and it is such a touchstone for calling someone a racist that uh very few people actually read anything else in the book. | ||
| The core of the book, though, was about the the white working class and the pathologies that uh that they could eventually absorb, correct? | ||
| Well, it wasn't about how that that would how that would have how that would have a massive change to the country. | ||
| Country had a had a do centuries, although we had a working class, and quite frankly, a working cra class that wasn't really hardwired in to the economic system so much that we had basic social stability because this working class had not had not gone to certain pathologies which you identified, right? | ||
| Wasn't that the that wasn't and you talked about the concentration? | ||
| I saw this when I went to Harvard, that people would go and all of a sudden you had these elites, and they go to these elite universities, which were more powerful than ever, and people would would connect with each other and get married. | ||
| And so throughout the country, you had a you had a greater and greater concentration of these elites that were detached from the rest of American life, basically. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That was uh that was elaborated in coming apart, which was 2012 that I put that out. | ||
| And by that time, a lot of the things that my co-author and I had predicted in the Bell Curve were already coming true. | ||
| And of course, the title of the book is so self-explanatory. | ||
| The United States was clearly coming apart as of uh 2012 in a way that it had not been in, say, 1960. | ||
| It was divided into antagonistic classes, and the class on top was openly contemptuous of ordinary Americans, and that was creating problems even then. | ||
| If you read Charles Murray's two books, and um, and particularly the the evolution of the books and the argument, and you read coming apart in 2012, and you looked at what how they were trying to solve the financial crisis of 2008, of course you knew that someone like Trump was going to come and was going to become a political leader in this country. | ||
| People say, Well, how did you know? | ||
| How did you know this? | ||
| It's so evident, it wasn't hidden, and Charles Murray explained it to you. | ||
| And then with the 2008 and the financial the financial crisis had the elites bound together as a class, not politics, and took care of themselves. | ||
| They bailed themselves out. | ||
| The book, Chris Leonard's Lords of Easy Money, gets you get shows you the minutes of the Federal Reserve and the arguments and debates. | ||
| They knew exactly what they were doing. | ||
| They knew exactly what the consequences were. | ||
| That heroic governor of the of the Federal Reserve Board in Texas laid it all out, how zero interest rates and negative interest rates, all this was going to crush the working class and and and greatly damage the middle class in our country, all to bail out the very perpetrators of the problem. | ||
| So Charles Murray, after serious thinking and coming up with the bell curve, which is a called shot, and coming apart, which is a called shot. | ||
| How do you because Fox these the the standard institutions of the right did not come and have your back? | ||
| They wanted these arguments buried as much as the left did, did they not? | ||
| I mean, you had a few people that have you to speak, and there's always a couple of institutions will do it. | ||
| But by and large, these books were not out and not part of a central argument. | ||
| So one of the reasons when I read them, I said, This, hey, this is the here it's called populist nationalism. | ||
| That's going to be the thing. | ||
| People go, you can't call it you can't call it nationalism. | ||
| I go, Yeah, you can, because that's what's going to be about the American citizen. | ||
| How did it how did you feel when really institutions on the right didn't support you enough to say no, no, no, this guy's right, and this guy is telling us that if we don't turn this thing around, we're gonna head to a civil war, sir. | ||
| Well, I I had always been uh as as uh creating as much problems for some aspects of the right as I was for the left, because it has always been simpler in the minds of a lot of conservatives, I think, to uh to avoid talking about things that will make them look like bad guys. | ||
| And some of the things I was saying in coming apart were really saying of the cognitive elite, which includes people on the right as well as on the left, that you are betraying your your duty uh to the country, | ||
| that you are you are not fulfilling the traditional role of an elite, which is to provide A moral example to provide uh examples for other people to follow in your personal life, in your business life, and the rest, you were being unseemly. | ||
| And people didn't like to hear that. | ||
| They didn't like to hear it whether they were on the left or the right. | ||
| You're now out with a new book, and I'll be blunt. | ||
| Having been a fan and studied your your talks and your speeches and your writings and your research and your books, uh, I didn't see this one coming. | ||
| Taking religious seriously. | ||
| I want you to walk through how did this come about? | ||
| How all of a sudden this this focus of Charles Murray on Christianity come about. | ||
| Walk us through it. | ||
| It's not sudden. | ||
| It started in 1985. | ||
| It went like this. | ||
| Steve, I am like millions and millions of Americans who are well educated. | ||
| We've been successful in our adult lives, and religion has never been an important part of our life. | ||
| I was never a militant atheist. | ||
| In fact, I called myself an agnostic. | ||
| But the main thing was I just didn't think much about it. | ||
| And then my wife had our first baby in 1985, and she came to me after a couple of months, and she she said, You know, my love for this child goes beyond anything I've ever known. | ||
| And I think that I love her far more than evolution requires, which was a line that said, Look, I understand that uh women are supposed to love their babies if they want to pass on their genes, but something else is going on here. | ||
| And she thought it was a she was being a conduit for a larger love that she identified vaguely with God. | ||
| At that time she was like me. | ||
| Religion was not part of her life. | ||
| Well, she then embarked on a religious life that uh got deeper and deeper over the years, and I kind of watched from the sidelines, but then starting in the mid-1990s, I tried to do my homework, I tried to get more engaged. | ||
| I don't have a lot of spiritual perceptiveness, you know. | ||
| I'm kind of like a tone-deaf person who listens to Mozart and can't hear the beauty of the music. | ||
| And so, whereas she was approaching it from a very spiritual perspective, I kind of went at it from an empirical perspective. | ||
| I I got a variety of nudges that pushed me more and more towards saying that God not only exists, but it and this came as a huge surprise to me, we may be talking about a personal God. | ||
| I'm talking about a 20 25-year evolution. | ||
| It didn't happen yesterday. | ||
| And give us the can you give us the the signpost, uh the mileage markers uh along that 25-year journey. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you the uh the first one where I said uh I've got to take this more seriously, is when I researched and wrote a book called Human Accomplishment. | ||
| And part of that book looked at the arts and sciences in Europe from 1500 to 1900, which is just a stunning era of accomplishment in both the arts and the sciences, and a great deal of that it became apparent to me had been driven by Christianity, which I had not expected to find. | ||
| Well, I I ended up by saying Johann Sebastian Bach doesn't have to explain his way of looking at the world. | ||
| His music makes the case, and it's up to you to start taking this seriously. | ||
| That was one signpost. | ||
| And the next one is when I encountered the physics of the big bang. | ||
| And now I'm not talking about religious teachings, I'm talking about what physicists have discovered about the origin of the universe, which is that at the moment of creation, there were a whole bunch of settings that had to come out exactly right in order for us to live in a universe that permits life. | ||
| And the odds of those settings being exactly where they were calculated by the physicists at in excess of a trillion to one. | ||
| Well, that requires an explanation, you know, because I don't believe in trillion to one chances. | ||
| And I found myself believing that I lived in an intentional universe, and in part A universe that was intended to create life. | ||
| Third signpost. | ||
| And Steve, this will be familiar to many of your Christian uh listeners and viewers. | ||
| C.S. Lewis and the book Mere Christianity, a absolutely incandescently brilliant book. | ||
| Which, when you read it, you are constantly challenged. | ||
| You are in a conversation with a man who is brilliant and who also is a deeply devoted Christian. | ||
| And that set me off much more directly on the path that finally ends up with this book that's just come out. | ||
| Charles, can you hang up for one second? | ||
| We're gonna take a short commercial break. | ||
| Charles Murray is with us. | ||
| The book is taking religion seriously, and is by the most serious thinker in this uh great republic. | ||
| Charles Murray. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| We're gonna return to the warm in just a moment. | ||
| So I suggest you take some changes already. | ||
| You went and lost your pride But I'm American made I got American parts I got American me. | ||
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| Take your phone out, text Bannon 989898, get the ultimate guide for investing in gold and precious metals, don't forget silver. | ||
| In the age of Trump, most importantly, talk to Philip Patrick and team. | ||
| We'll try to get Philip back on here tomorrow, given everything that is going on, including in the box you can see the um Australian prime minister is going to arrive. | ||
| And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all about rare earth. | ||
| A counterweight to the Chinese chemist party. | ||
| More about that in a little while. | ||
| Charles Murray. | ||
| Charles, go back. | ||
| Human accomplishment, 1500 to 1900. | ||
| Unbelievable extraordinary, never done in human history in any culture, any civilization. | ||
| It's one of the things that makes the Judeo-Christian West different. | ||
| And you said that was all tied back to Christianity. | ||
| Or much of it was tied to Christianity from the both the scientist, the thinkers, the artist, all of it. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Well, let's first talk about the arts. | ||
| The uh great values that uh uh of Christianity, truth, beauty, and the good, this triad of transcendent transcendental qualities that artists were supposed to use as ideals and did use as ideals during the Renaissance and subsequently. | ||
| Whether the individual artists and um composers and writers were themselves devout was almost irrelevant because the environment was one in which they were trying to realize these ideals. | ||
| And as the art secularized in the late 8 19th and early 20th centuries, uh it they they started saying to themselves, oh no, great art is not supposed to express truth, beauty, and and uh the good. | ||
| It is supposed to challenge the audience. | ||
| And artists should not be concerned about uh about those false delusory ideals we should express our personal preferences, and their personal preferences turned out to be nihilistic and banal and oftentimes very silly, whether you're talking about music or or literature or the visual arts. | ||
| In the sciences, Christianity had a different kind of role, which is in a in a very real sense, the Catholic Church sponsored the scientific revolution. | ||
| The historians Like to portray science and religion as being hostile to each other and the Catholic Church as the great uh evil in this, constantly getting in the way of science, and that simply is a misreading of history. | ||
| Yes, were there were there episodes? | ||
| Yeah, but the overall message of Christianity was God is rational, God delights in having us explore and understand the mysteries of the universe, and that was an enormously empowering uh force for scientists in pursuing their work. | ||
| The um the physics of the of the big bang in these settings. | ||
| Can you take a second? | ||
| Because you're saying that mathematically that you can prove or mathematically, you led to the to the conclusion there has to be a supreme being or a god because of the way the big bang actually mechanically worked. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Theory predicts a lot of things very accurately in physics, but there's what they call brute facts, physicists call them brute facts. | ||
| These are values uh for various things that are not set by theory, they just happen. | ||
| So, for example, you have the uh ratio of the strong force uh of of uh within the atom and a very weak force of gravity. | ||
| If that ratio were slightly different, galaxies could not have formed, stars could not have formed, planets could not have formed, we would live in a universe of black holes or a universe of radiation. | ||
| That's that's one. | ||
| There are maybe a dozen other of these parameters that are arbitrary in one sense, but that also working together make possible the universe we live in, which in turn permits life. | ||
| I really like the analogy that uh Octavian philosopher came up with to illustrate this. | ||
| He said, suppose that you were sentenced to death by a firing squad of a hundred expert marksmen and they march you out and they fire and they all miss. | ||
| Well, you have you have a couple of alternatives. | ||
| One is to say, well, they all missed, I'm alive, there's no point in worrying about it. | ||
| And the other one is to ask why. | ||
| And in the case of the universe, it seems impossible that you would have this universe, trillion to one chance. | ||
| And the only alternative to that is no, these settings were driven by something else that was putting it together, or the alternative that physicists have come up with is to say we actually live in a world of multiple universes. | ||
| I find that very hard to swallow. | ||
| If you're talking about plausibility, I think probably the one universe we've got is uh all there is, and I also think that a trillion to one chance doesn't uh sound right. | ||
| And the third parsimonious, plausible alternative is to say there is a God who created the universe. | ||
| That's that's where I came out. | ||
| This uh being your book, by the way, you can get it at encounter books. | ||
| Um Roger Kimball would recommend we go to you guys go to the site and get the book, taking religious seriously, everyone should get this and read it. | ||
| If I look at the arc from the bell curve to coming apart to where we are now, you see, a quite quite contentious. | ||
| I argue in the show we're heading towards a civil war that this is an unbridgeable gap that can't be debated away. | ||
| Is taking religious seriously, are you laying that out as a potential that we can avert a a uh catastrophe in this country by returning to the Christian roots of this country, sir? | ||
| Well, uh actually, in coming apart, I was saying we really needed a kind of civic great awakening. | ||
| We've had religious great awakenings before, that we needed a new great awakening to turn things around. | ||
| And the good news, and I'm not generally optimistic about anything, is that there is some are signs that Christianity is starting to have a kind of reawakening of its own among intellectuals. | ||
| There are a surprising number of people in mainstream media who are now openly saying good things about Christianity in a way that you never saw in the 1980s and 1990s. | ||
| Uh, you have columnist Ross Dowtett uh and David Brooks, who's are devout Christians and openly say so. | ||
| You have a Yanor Si Ali and Neil Ferguson, who have not been, they were formerly atheists who who've uh converted, and a variety of other intellectuals who seem to all have come to the same conclusion at the same time. | ||
| My theory is, Steve, that we're coming out of an adolescence. | ||
| I look upon the 20th century as a time when science had provided all kinds of body blows to religion. | ||
| And like adolescents who say their parents are wrong about everything. | ||
| I think that intellectuals started saying that traditional religion had was entirely wrong. | ||
| Our intellectual parents had been wrong about everything and we rejected it. | ||
| And the nice thing about adolescence is you grow out of it eventually, and a symptom of growing out of adolescence is to realize that maybe your parents were smarter than you thought. | ||
| And I think that's what we're looking at now. | ||
| Now you can say to yourself, what difference does it make if if few intellectuals are suddenly less hostile to religion? | ||
| It can make a lot of difference. | ||
| It can change the mood, it can change the environment, it can change the willingness of people to think seriously about these questions. | ||
| So I'm not saying it's a strong movement. | ||
| I'm not saying it's going to transform things, but there is a possibility for a religious renewal, which could go a long way toward at least making solutions to some of these problems possible. | ||
| But I must say, Steve, uh I I wrote another book that got ignored because I was canceled called Facing Reality. | ||
| And in the last chapter of that, I talked about the prospects of a revolution. | ||
| And I have since privately, I don't think I published this anywhere. | ||
| I I kind of think of the election of Donald Trump in 24 as taking the putting a pressure cooker on vent, a pressure cook that was about to explode, and we're we've taken some of the pressure off that. | ||
| And that's good. | ||
| How far we will go in a direction of reconciling, that's up in the air. | ||
| Charles, we look forward to having you back. | ||
| Um where do people go to get the book and where can people go to get your writings, uh, website, social media, any of it? | ||
| And so it's mainly like everything else, Amazon carries all of all of my works, and you can get them there. | ||
| In the case of uh uh come uh taking religion seriously and counter uh website has it as well. | ||
| Is there do you have a website for your for your writings? | ||
| You have one central place to go to, or just go to Amazon or counter and get your books? | ||
| No, I have uh a page. | ||
| If you go to the AEI.org website, I have a page on that, and on that you can access all of my articles that I've written for about the last 30 years, and uh, and also a lot of videos, lectures I've given, things like that. | ||
| Also, if you go to on YouTube, you can pick up an awful lot of things that uh are at full length on YouTube. | ||
| We'll push we'll push people to it. | ||
| Charles Murray, thank you. | ||
| One of the greatest living Americans. | ||
| One of the greatest. | ||
| Thank you, Charles. | ||
| A modern day prophet, flat out. | ||
| A modern day prophet. | ||
| Been right on all of it since they tried to destroy him with the bell curve. | ||
| Do you understand Charles Murray? | ||
| You understand the financial crash of 2008 and how the elites bailed themselves out and screwed everybody else. | ||
| You could see that Donald Trump, a Trump-like figure had to arrive, and Trump arrived and scared and broke the establishment. | ||
| The process was still in there. | ||
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Triple's your host. | |
| Stephen Kann. | ||
| Um I'm informed by the War Room Engine Room that Amazon, I think, is now since the start of our interviews now out of books, the restocking order, or go over to Roger Kimball's encounter books. | ||
| An act of bravery of Roger to put it. | ||
| And this is the story of Charles Murray. | ||
| He spoke truth to power. | ||
| He spoke truth to the American institutions. | ||
| He spoke truth to the American people, and he's essentially banned the single one of the single smartest guys we've got in the country. | ||
| Think about that for a second. | ||
| And oh, by the way, the conservatives all ran for the Hills, except for a few brave institutions that would have Charles speak, and we're going to figure out something to do with him in Washington, D.C. to get him here for a talk. | ||
| It's so important to tie all the books together. | ||
| Bell curve coming apart, facing reality and now taking religious religion seriously. | ||
| And if anybody's ever going to push back on you for your Christian faith, read Charles Murray's book. | ||
| And of course, obviously he tells tells you to read mere Christianity as part of that. | ||
| Anyway, uh more on that, we're gonna have Charles Murray back. | ||
| Uh the new federal state. | ||
| This is gets I'm gonna go to for now about what's happening with China because all kind of rumors going on about Xi. | ||
| The new federal state uh people are going to join Ben Harnwell tonight. | ||
| We're gonna have a whole drill down of more geopolitics of so much is going on that President Trump is trying to set things right. | ||
| Um, as I know he's pivoting for intense work on the American economy. | ||
| Uh, but you gotta you gotta get the you gotta get the the situation globally, or we're gonna slide deeper in this third world war. | ||
| Captain Finnell, all kind of uh President Trump Bessants over there going to negotiate now. | ||
| Uh we got the uh we got the Australian prime minister here because of rare earth. | ||
| President Trump is starting to engage with uh with Lula as much as he hates that because of rare earth. | ||
| There's all kind of rumors coming out of Beijing that uh you know, Gordon Chang and guys, I really I love and appreciate are saying, hey, this may be the end of Xi's run in this whole rare earth thing, maybe the last card he played, but uh the established order over there is getting a little jiggy on Xi, think the economy's all messed up, he's crossways with Trump, he's threatening a he's threatening a kinetic war, but they can't win it, uh, and that he's gonna be removed. | ||
| Uh, you're my naval intelligence expert. | ||
| What say you, sir? | ||
| Well, Steve, this uh fourth plenum is uh, you know, the 20th party Congress for the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| It's a big event because what this fourth plenum does to set the stage for the next five-year plan called the 15th five-year plan that will cover from 2026 to the magic year of 2030 about where the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China are heading. | ||
| And so for the last year, uh there has been a lot of rumors about Xia is losing power. | ||
| And it started last October in 2024 with an article or a series of articles in the PLA Daily that talked about collective leadership. | ||
| And a lot of folks, good intention folks, interpreted that phraseology, collective leadership as being an indicator that Xi was losing power and that the party was starting to emphasize, well, we need to collectively lead this country. | ||
| We don't need a strong man, singular person like Xi anymore, who's busted the rules and the norms for succession of power as he kept power past his second five-year term. | ||
| Uh, but if you look at that series of articles, and then another article in December of 2024, they talk about democratic socialism or democratic centralism, excuse me. | ||
| And it's not democracy or a check on authoritarianism, but is a Leninist organizational system emphasizing unified leadership of the party and a tool that the party has used to curb internal corruption. | ||
| And so what we've seen over the last year is a series of purges of senior PLA officers uh that go back a year ago. | ||
| We saw leaders of the Ministry of Defense removed, and just this week we saw the formal announcement of nine more members, one of which was the vice chair of the Central Military Commission. | ||
| They have two chairmen or two vice chairs. | ||
| Zhi is the chairman of the Central Military Commission, and there's two uniformed officers. | ||
| One of them was taken away, General He, and the other, General Zhang, has been attributed as having the supernatural power to be able to purge all these military leaders that they say are loyal to Xi, and therefore Xi has lost power. | ||
| Um, and I can understand the argument and the wishful thinking that some folks have to think that Xi is now lost power of the PLA. | ||
| But what none of these analysts say, and where I think I try to bring in a unique perspective is you have to watch what's been happening with the PLA over this time period. | ||
| Not just this last year, but over the 12 to 13 years that X has been running, the People's Republic of China. | ||
| And as I've stated in other forums, there's just been the slow, steady expansion and aggressive nature of the PLA over this time period. | ||
| So these perturbations, these removal of these nine officers, oh, by the way, six of the nine weren't even active duty. | ||
| They had been former officers and they've been out of the system for some time. | ||
| So my assessment is that X still remains in charge of what they call the pen, the gun, and the knife hilt. | ||
| The pen is propaganda. | ||
| He's clearly in charge of propaganda in China. | ||
| We see him every day on PLA Daily, People's Daily, China Daily, Xinhua, Global Times. | ||
| He's in control of the messaging from the PRC. | ||
| He's got control of the PLA, in my opinion, based on what we see the PLA doing, like dual carrier operations this summer that went beyond the second island chain, or even just this last Sunday, uh a week ago Sunday, Chinese Coast Guard ramming Filipino ships in the South China Sea. | ||
| And then the third area is called the knife hilt, which is essentially the state security. | ||
| And Xi appears to have control of the state security inside China, and the people's armed police, and he seems to be in charge of the whole system. | ||
| And I think what happened in this process was that X was able to do some house cleaning in advance of today's start of the fourth plenum. | ||
| This was announced last Friday, and essentially Xi was able to ensure that nobody that was completely in alignment with what he has as a vision for the PRC for the 15th uh uh uh year plan, uh five-year plan, that they're out of the system now. | ||
| And so I think that's where we're at, is that he is firmly established in control. | ||
| Now, if I'm wrong, we'll know it's a good idea. | ||
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Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. | |
| I w I want to get to that in a second. | ||
| Rickards. | ||
| One of the most dangerous times in American history geopolitically. | ||
| It's one of the reasons you've got the Australian prime minister today, because Trump's no fan of that guy about about uh about the economic war Xia's unleashed on on uh rare earth. | ||
| Do you agree with Fanel? | ||
| I mean, this plenum is so important, particularly because it it's gonna be right before President Trump's gonna get into negotiate direct negotiations with Xi, Jim Rickards. | ||
| Uh well, Captain Fidel has his facts absolutely right, so I don't dispute that at all. | ||
| I disagree on the conclusion a little bit when he says they're doing naval operations with aircraft carrier groups beyond the second isle uh island chain. | ||
| Is that a sign of weakness or a sign of strength? | ||
| I might suggest it's a sign of weakness, in other words, putting on a little bit of a show. | ||
| A lot of the PLA generals who have been purged were actually appointed by X. Now, are they disloyal or is it uh is what's actually going on uh the PLA's cleaning house of X uh loyalists? | ||
| The problem is it's very opaque. | ||
| I don't want to pretend uh to have inside information in terms of what's what's going on there. | ||
| But uh, you know, look at look at the same facts and draw aside the different conclusions. | ||
| It is the case that Xia has been uh demoted in a sense, he now reports to a committee, and the committee is run the number of members on it, but the committee is run by the PLA, so he's already been knocked down the pay. | ||
| None of this is um and and Captain Fell's right about the propaganda outlets, but they don't actually want to talk about this. | ||
| They're doing it, but they don't want to talk about it. | ||
| But it takes other analysts and experts to kind of get to the bottom of it. | ||
| So my own view, yeah, facts are right, but I think Xi is in a very vulnerable position. | ||
| He's losing, you know, the term the mandate of heaven. | ||
| It's an intangible uh concept that you do the people support you or not. | ||
| And they do if you have what's called the mandate of heaven. | ||
| I think Xia has lost that. | ||
| This is what we talked about in the very first episode of war and pandemic on the 20th of January 20 uh 20, when Jack Basobi was here, and we talked about that. | ||
| Let me ask you given that, how is he doing? | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong, the the boldest stroke that I think they've done on economic warfare is here to threaten, can not just threaten to cut off Americans, even after negotiating a soft deal from heavy uh rare earths, which will grind our production lines in weapons and automobiles and you know, international harvester, John Deere, all of it to a halt in six weeks, sir. | ||
| Well, that's exactly right. | ||
| But that is that the last card. | ||
| It's a it's a tough car. | ||
| It's a powerful car, there's no question about that. | ||
| Uh and shame on the United States for not having, you know, for trusting the Chinese and not having thought about this as the result of the globalists and the Davis crowd and all that. | ||
| Uh and you're right. | ||
| You let's talk to Australia about it. | ||
| We have a lot of rare earths in the United States. | ||
| Some uh happen to be fairly knowledgeable, and the best are in some mines in Kazakhstan that are that are doing quite well. | ||
| But the you can't do this overnight. | ||
| You can identify the resources, work out agreements, get going by all means. | ||
| But this is a at least two years, probably longer to be uh self-sufficient, even with our allies, with the friendly trading group. | ||
| So um, yeah, we're we're in a very tough place right now. | ||
| Trump's probably gonna have to make a few concessions to get the Chinese to reopen that pipeline of uh of magnets and uh and rare earth-based batteries. | ||
|
unidentified
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But uh hang on, hang on, hang on. | |
| They're dig they're digging in. | ||
| You're give me the Jim. | ||
| By the way, we're gonna have to go to this bylaw starting a little bit early, I think. | ||
| Uh we'll we'll definitely get Fennel and Rickards back up somehow. | ||
| Rickards, what do you mean he's gonna make concessions? | ||
| I thought Bessett and these guys are saying they're digging in. | ||
| No no deal, no concessions, no deal, sir. | ||
| Well, let's be let's be like the Chinese, let's play a longer game. | ||
| The uh Captain Fennell is exactly right. | ||
| The Chinese economy, let's just talk about the economy, putting aside G, although they're clearly related, is extremely weak. | ||
| Their GDP numbers were weak. | ||
| They uh they lie about them. | ||
| So take you know, take a point or two off uh just for uh propaganda, and then if you do some analysis, um there's every reason to believe that China is very close to recession, their debt to GDP ratio is worse than the U.S. Uh, they have a worse debt problem than we do. | ||
| Um there's a dollar shortage going on. | ||
| People find that hard to believe, like, hey, didn't the Fed print 10 trillion dollars? | ||
| They did, but that money doesn't go anywhere. | ||
| They give it to the banks to buy securities, and the banks give it back to them in the form of deposits. | ||
| That money doesn't do anything, it's sterilized. | ||
| The money that drives the world economy comes from the banks, commercial banks, euro dollar banks, and they're pulling in their horns. | ||
| So there's every reason to believe that there's a dollar shortage, a possible monetary crisis, and China's in the in the middle of it. | ||
| So their economy is and by the way, six months ago they stopped reporting youth unemployment. | ||
| They had always broken down as a separate category. | ||
| It was about 27 percent when they stopped reporting it. | ||
| Well, that's just you know it's worse, because that's why they stopped reporting it. | ||
| So it's probably over 30 percent. | ||
| And after you kill 20 million girls, you go, which they did, you got a lot of men without women, and they tend to be the least attractive men in the economy. | ||
| So there's a there's an extremely volatile demographic time bomb sitting there on top of everything else. | ||
| What do you mean before we go to break? | ||
| We've got about a minute and a half. | ||
| What do you mean uh monetary crisis, Jim Rickards? | ||
| Now now you get my attention. | ||
| There is a global dollar shortage, and then the Wall Street now, Wall Street loves narratives, they're just stories, they're almost always wrong, not always, but usually. | ||
| So the net what's the narrative? | ||
| The narrative is everyone's selling treasuries, they're dumping the dollar, getting out of the dollar, U.S. interest rates are gonna go up, et cetera. | ||
| None of that is true. | ||
| And that's not an opinion. | ||
| We have data. | ||
| The Treasury issues what's called the tick report, TIC, every month. | ||
| You can see what countries own what they have not been dumping treasuries. | ||
| They wish they had more, as a matter of fact. | ||
| But you have to sell treasuries to get dollars to prop up your currency and prop up your banks. | ||
| There is some of that going on, but that's not a sign of uh, you know, uh getting out of the dollar. | ||
| That's a sign of saying I wish I had more, but the banks aren't landing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jim. | |
| Jim, you and Fennel, uh, my producer is going to deal with the guy go to the president in the Oval Office for the Prime Minister Australia. | ||
| We're gonna get you guys back up. | ||
| We'll figure it out, just stick around. | ||
| Let's go right to the Oval Office. | ||
| Rare Earth on the menu today. | ||
| Uh ships, vehicles, uh, guns, ammunition, everything, the whole thing. | ||
| We've been long-term, long time allies. | ||
| And uh I would say there's never been anybody better. | ||
| We fought wars together. | ||
| Uh we we never had any doubts, and uh it's it's a great honor to have you as My friend, it's a great honor to have you in the United States of America. | ||
| Please, would you like to say something? | ||
| Well, thank you so much, Mr. President, for the invitation here to the White House and to for showing us around the improved Oval Office and for what you're doing around here as well, and for the great honor as well of my delegation saying just across the road we could have walked, but they didn't let us we drove all of uh 20 meters there from Blair House, but it's a great honor to be able to stay there. | ||
| Uh we are great friends and we're great allies, and this is a relationship that's been forged in the battlefields of uh the world. | ||
| We have stood side by side for freedom and democracy, and uh congratulations, I must say, Mr. President, on the work that you've done with the Middle East is an extraordinary achievement. | ||
| And on defense, we've already had a discussion about uh taking it to the next level. | ||
| Our defense and security partnership with AUKUS is so important for us, and I I thank you for the support that the administration uh giving uh as well. | ||
| You've had the chief of the Navy here as well, uh, which will play obviously a very critical role uh with uh uh the subs and increasing the security for the region and the world, and our economic relationship is so important. | ||
| The US has a trade surplus with Australia, as you know, and we can continue to take what is uh every opportunity to improve the relationship even further and make it even stronger. | ||
| And today's agreement on critical minerals and rare earths is just taking it to the next level, seizing those opportunities uh which are before us uh to uh take our relationship uh to that next level, and it's been fantastic the contact that we've had together, the friendship that we've developed, and Australians love America, and I think Americans kind of like Australia too. | ||
| We do. | ||
| And uh, as we go forward, I think that today will be seen as a really significant day in our relationship. | ||
| So I thank you very much, Mr. President. | ||
| Well, thank you very much, Anthony. | ||
| It's an honor to send us, and we'll do it now. | ||
|
unidentified
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and then we'll take some questions some good ones i think okay | |
| Well, this is uh eight and a half billion dollar pipeline that we have ready to go. | ||
| That's right, so all ready to go. | ||
| Just getting started. | ||
| And uh, we're doing a real job on rare earth and uh many other things. | ||
| Uh, perhaps I could ask John to say a few words and then we'll exchange papers. | ||
| But just how are we doing on your naval purchases and all of the uh the submarines that we're working on with Australia? | ||
| How's that going? | ||
| Thank you, Mr. President. | ||
| Uh obviously, Australia is a very important ally of ours uh in the Indo-Pacific and in every battle they fought with us since World War One, uh, and have always been side by side. | ||
| The uh facility that they're building, Southwest is critical and very important to our uh our our ability to uh project power in in the Indo-Pacific uh and work with our allies. | ||
| So we're working very closely. | ||
| I think what we're really trying to do is take the original AUKUS framework and improve it for all three parties and make it better and clarify some of the ambiguity that was in the prior agreement. | ||
| So it should be uh a win-win for everybody, sir. | ||
| And the submarines that we're building for Australia are starting to really move along, right? | ||
| The process is uh getting very exciting, isn't it? | ||
| We're getting better. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Maybe we'll hold this up. | ||
|
unidentified
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okay Thank you very much. | |
| The August Submarine Packers Defence Pact that the Prime Minister just mentioned is a critical issue for Australia. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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You haven't really spoken much about it publicly. | |
| It was a deal that was done under Joe Biden to sell submarines to Australia at a time when you're not really making enough for your own names. | ||
| So can you tell us uh have you gotten across the details of the deal? | ||
| Do you support it and will you honor it? | ||
| It was made a while ago, and nobody did anything about it, and it was going too slowly. | ||
| We do actually have a lot of submarines. | ||
| We have the best submarines in the world, anywhere in the world, and we're building uh a few more currently under construction. | ||
| Uh and now we're starting, we have it uh all set with Anthony. | ||
| We've worked on this long and hard, and we're starting that process right now. | ||
| And I think it's really moving along very rapidly, very well. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, don't continue to stop any guy who says, "Valley will get the bar." Oh, it's getting. | |
| Oh no, they're getting away. | ||
|
unidentified
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At least 32 people have been killed in the case. | |
| Excuse me, you're next. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Um China's bad behavior has really only gotten worse since the AUKUS partnership was formed. | |
| With that in mind, is the door open for Australia to get additional nuclear-powered submarines or other military capabilities not already in the deal. | ||
| I think China's been very respectful of us. | ||
| They're paying tremendous uh amounts of money to us as uh in the form of tariffs. | ||
| As you know, they're paying 55%. | ||
| That's a lot of money. | ||
| They never were paying anything over years and years and years. | ||
| Uh but they were like anybody else. | ||
| A lot of countries took advantage of the US. | ||
| They're not taking advantage anymore. | ||
| No China's paying uh 55% and a potential 155% come November 1st, unless we make a deal and I'm meeting with President Xi. | ||
| We have a very good relationship. | ||
| We're gonna be meeting in South Korea in a couple of weeks, and uh we'll see what we can do. | ||
| Uh we have a very good relationship with China, but you know, it's been uh it's been probably a little bit like your relationship with China. | ||
| They try and take advantage, but most countries do. | ||
| I mean, I can say the European Union took advantage, and but not anymore. | ||
| We worked out a very fair trade deal. | ||
| Uh Japan, we worked out a very fair fair deal. | ||
| Uh South Korea, where I'll be meeting President Xi, we worked out a very fair deal, and I expect we'll probably work out a very fair deal with uh President Xi of China. | ||
| So uh most of you will be with us. | ||
| It's gonna be very exciting, and I think we're gonna work out something that's good for both countries. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are you the same? | |
| Are you at least interested in expediting the nuclear-powered subs to Australia? | ||
| Well, we are doing that, yeah. | ||
| We're doing it. | ||
| We have we have them moving very, very quickly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, I don't think you've ever been to Australia. | |
| Have you thought about coming to Australia and trying out some of the golf courses? | ||
| I would, and I actually have been to Australia, and they did play one of your great golf courses, have great golf courses there. | ||
| But I have been to Australia, actually. | ||
| Oh, I would. | ||
| In fact, I've been invited to go, and I'll have to give it serious consideration. | ||
| No, it's it's a real possibility. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did the Prime Minister invite me today? | |
| He did. | ||
| And perhaps we could time it up, must be said, with the President's Cup that Australia has as well. | ||
| What is the President's Cup? | ||
|
unidentified
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We'll organise a time suitable for you, Mr President. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr President. | ||
| Mr President. | ||
| Everyone please in the back, please. | ||
| Yeah, in the back. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, Mr. President, uh the Prime Minister mentioned that there's a trade in balance that's very heavily in America's favor. | |
| Uh why does America slap such heavy tariffs on a friend and our own? | ||
| Well, we don't, yeah. | ||
| Well, we do in some cases. | ||
| Uh we do in many cases, uh, because we've been treated unfairly, but actually uh the tariffs are very light. | ||
| The one thing is you buy a lot of airplanes, so that helps because you buy a lot of the beautiful Boeings, the best of the Boeings, Boeing, and by the way, Boeing is really doing well. | ||
| Uh they have lots of orders and they're really doing a great job. | ||
| They make a great plan. | ||
| Uh but uh Australia, because of its location, which is great, but one of the things dictated by that location is you have to order a lot of airplanes. | ||
| So I guess we have that advantage. | ||
| They need a lot of airplanes in Australia, and that gives us a little bit of an example. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, yeah, your Secretary of War, Pete Heggs, in a in his Shangri last speech in I think it was May uh warned about the uh potential uh likelihood or threat of President Xi ordering an invasion of Taiwan uh twenty twenty seven is also the year that fleet base West is supposed to start rotating those US and UK submarines. | |
| Uh do you see AUKUS as a deterrent for China in the United States Yeah I do. | ||
| I think it is but I don't think we're gonna need it. | ||
| I think we'll be just fine with China. | ||
| China doesn't want to do that. | ||
| First of all the United States is the strongest military power in the world by far. | ||
| It's not even close. | ||
| Not even close we have the best equipment we have the best of everything and nobody's gonna mess with that and uh I don't see that at all with President Xi I think we're gonna get along very well as it as it pertains to Taiwan and others now that doesn't mean it's not the apple of his eye because probably it is but I don't see anything happening. | ||
| We have a very good trade relationship. | ||
| We're going to have a very good, I think, when we leave South Korea. | ||
| It could be wrong, but I think we'll end up with a very strong trade deal. | ||
| Both of us will be happy. | ||
| I don't see that happening now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, given the trade surplus that the U.S. enjoys with Australia, would you consider lifting the tariffs that you've imposed on Australia? | |
| And can you give us any details about the critical reasons? | ||
| Yeah, well, the tariffs have been amazing because, you know, tariffs have been really a reason that I was able to settle almost all of the, you know, I've settled eight wars in eight months. | ||
| Not bad. | ||
| I have one more to go. | ||
| It's Russia, Ukraine, and I think we'll get there, but it's turned out to be nasty because you have two leaders that truly hate each other, you know? | ||
| You can't have it all, right? | ||
| They hate each other beyond all else, and it makes it actually a little bit difficult. | ||
| But of the eight deals, I would say because of tariffs, four or five of them were settled. | ||
| It's an amazing thing, the power of tariffs into terms of our country but tariffs have always been used against us we never use them against anywhere else and now you have a president that for national security reasons and other reasons is using them and we're uh we've become a very rich nation again and a very secure nation again but we've also become a nation that used that power of tariffs and the power of trade to settle five of the eight wars that I said I settled eight I'm very proud of that. | ||
| Nobody else has settled one I don't think there's been an American president that settled one. | ||
| I think there probably hasn't been outside of the two countries involved or however many are at war I don't think there's ever been an outside country that settled a war period. | ||
| So I settled eight in eight months. | ||
| I'm proud of that. | ||
| Now, in the meantime, I'm running a country that's right now we're the hottest country anywhere in the world. | ||
| We were dead. | ||
| A year and a half ago, we were a dead country. | ||
| Now we're the hottest country in the world, economically and otherwise. | ||
| But I will say this. | ||
| Australia pays very low tariffs. | ||
| Very, very low tariffs. | ||
| In fact, Australia pays among the lowest tariffs. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, the President's great concern in Australia. | |
| Please, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, are you concerned in Australia that it's taken nine months to get this meeting? | |
| concerns with this administration with its stance on Palestine climate change or even things the ambassador said about you in the past the Australian ambassador I don't know anything about him. | ||
| I mean if you said bad then maybe he'll like to apologize I wrote I know uh did an ambassador say something bad about it don't tell me I don't where is he is he still working for you on you said bad before I took this position Mr President I don't like you either I don't and I and it probably never will go ahead and you want go ahead behind you. |
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