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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Which is them, the Democrats' fault. | ||
| They'll try and blame Republicans. | ||
| It has nothing to do with us. | ||
| It's the Democrats' fault. | ||
| What I want to do is we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year that go to insurance companies. | ||
| I want that money to go to the people and let the people buy their own health care. | ||
| And everybody loves it. | ||
| It's become our issue. | ||
| Now, before I do that, I'll meet with the insurance companies, just as I met with the drug companies, as you know. | ||
| We're meeting with four other drug companies, Johnson and Johnson. | ||
| But they've all agreed. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is War Room. | ||
| We're passing the baton over on REV to John Solomon and Justin. | ||
| We're going to continue on the War Room channel here. | ||
| We're going to continue with the press conference, and Captain Finnell, Natalie Winners, will join us immediately after the president answers questions. | ||
| Most favored nations. | ||
| Nobody thought that was possible. | ||
| I don't think any other president ever tried to get it because they never thought they could. | ||
| But with respect to the insurance companies, I want to meet, there's essentially 14 of them, 10 big, but there's a total of 14 pretty much all pretty big. | ||
| And I want to meet with them, and I want to say, I want you to cut your rates way down, way, way down. | ||
| And maybe if they do that, we'll be able to not cut them out. | ||
| We'll be able to continue to deal with them, which is probably a little easier process. | ||
| I think the best process is pay the money directly to the people, let them buy their own health care. | ||
| But I'm going to meet with them the first week back. | ||
| I do it now, but they're trying to come up with a schedule. | ||
| They want to meet badly. | ||
| They've told me. | ||
| But they want to come up with a schedule. | ||
| I said, make it a good schedule. | ||
| Your rates have to come way down. | ||
| We're also going to meet with other insurance companies because under Biden, the insurance rates have gone through the roof. | ||
| Auto insurance, home insurance. | ||
| I mean, insurance companies are making far more than they're entitled to make. | ||
| So we're going to be doing that. | ||
| But just in the meantime, we'll be meeting with the insurance companies in the first week, the first few days back in Washington because they're trying to come up with a proposal that will satisfy me. | ||
| Thank you very much, everybody. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| I hope you're going to enjoy the battleships. | ||
| They're going to be beautiful. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And have a great Christmas if I don't speak to you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Right there, the President of the United States, Secretary of War, Secretary of Navy Phelan, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a massive new shipbuilding program just announced. | ||
| I'm going to bring in Captain Finnell. | ||
| So Captain, given that you're one of the world's leading experts in this and you've been a huge advocate for basically, it was like a punchless of what Captain Jim Finnell has been arguing for on the warm over the last couple of years. | ||
| Give us your assessment. | ||
| First off, what was actually announced and how does that fit into kind of the architecture of how you see returning the United States to be a global naval power? | ||
| Well, the specific announcement, Steve, was for this new battleship class, the Trump class, and the announcement that two ships would be built from this class in the next two and a half years, and that these ships, these battleships, would be 100 times more capable than our previous battleships that we had in World War II, the Iowa class, which you remember from your time in service. | ||
| I still remember seeing an Iowa-class battleship fire a full broadside. | ||
| What will be different now is that they'll be much the same size as the old ones, maybe a little bit bigger. | ||
| They'll have, as the President said, they're going to be made from steel, thick steel, so they're going to be survivable. | ||
| He talked about sturdy and survivability. | ||
| And then he talked about this 100 times more powerful, which means they're going to have a lot of vertical launch cell tubes. | ||
| Our Arleigh Burke-class destroyers have 96 cells. | ||
| So, this would probably have hundreds of more cells to be able to launch these long-range anti-ship cruise missiles that are going to go at supersonic or even hypersonic speeds, along with the guns. | ||
| He mentioned guns that are going to have turrets and guns that are going to be able to fire not just kind of shells like the nine-inch or 16-inch guns that we had, the nine 16-inch guns that the Iowa class had, but it'll have the ability to fire rail guns, lasers, and then again, other kinds of munitions that are going to have much longer range than the old 16-inch shells, which were about 26 miles. | ||
| So, we're going to have, we're talking about a long way away. | ||
| And I think the Secretary of the Navy was, I was really pleased with Seknaf Falan's statements. | ||
| He really, as you said, he went down this list of things that we've been really banging on for 20 years about what we need to do. | ||
| And the biggest thing that he said was, we are going to go after the, we're not just going to swat down arrows, we're going to go after the archer. | ||
| And then, put that in vernacular, he's talking about war at sea. | ||
| We're going to go after those ships that can sink us, and we're not just going to have ships that go to sea that just protect themselves by shooting down incoming missiles. | ||
| So, for the last 35 years, we've been focused on power projection ashore in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and then this kind of defense, you know, defending against incoming air-launched missiles. | ||
| But we haven't really thought about what does it mean to go after other Navy fleets because there hadn't been a peer competitor naval fleet since the Soviet Navy went away in, you know, when the Soviets collapsed in 91. | ||
| So, we've been 35 years, 34 years of not having a peer competitor. | ||
| But in that time, the PRC, the People's Liberation Army Navy, has built themselves into a peer competitor. | ||
| And what I heard tonight was a president who's preaching from the bully pulpit as we've been asking for. | ||
| And then, what's different than his first administration, I think he had the same desires in his first administration, but he didn't have a team, he didn't have the right people around him, and they were not able to execute. | ||
| They did some things, I'm not, they reversed the decline that Obama had really done, and Biden continued. | ||
| They stopped that in his first administration, but I think now they've spent the last 10 months with this office of shipbuilding and these new plans for these new systems and this outlook of, hey, we have to fight and win wars at sea. | ||
| And I was very glad to hear the comments about survivability, fighting and winning, shooting the archer, not just schwatting down arrows. | ||
| The idea that we're going to build and continue to build aircraft carriers was also very welcome to my ears, along with these battleships. | ||
| And he used the phrase battle groups. | ||
| You know, when you were in the Navy and when I joined the Navy, we had carrier battle groups, CVBGs. | ||
| And in 2004, when I was on board the USS Kitty Hawk out in Japan, the U.S. Navy changed the naming structure and called them carrier strike groups. | ||
| And I have a feeling we're going to go back to the nomenclature of carrier or battle groups, whether they're battleship battle groups or carrier battle groups. | ||
| But we're going to be into this mindset of we're fighting wars at sea. | ||
| And so what I would like to hear from the Secretary of the War in the future is he always talks about the warrior ethos, which is very important for the War Department. | ||
| Let's start talking about what does the warrior ethos mean in the naval and maritime arena? | ||
| Because it's not the same as in the land arena with grunts going ashore or grunts running around in the desert or the jungles and fighting land war. | ||
| There is a warrior ethos at sea, and that needs to be built as well. | ||
| And I think the Secretary of Navy and this new leadership will get around to that. | ||
| But that needs to be discussed as well. | ||
| And then obviously the big thing is the people to be able to build this. | ||
| So the president was asked that question. | ||
| He was asked, if you looked at all those questions, 80, 90% of the questions had nothing to do with what this press conference is about, which is kind of typical. | ||
| But it shows you how this nation and our reporters and the press don't understand naval warfare at all. | ||
| So we have more education to do with the press to get them to focus on what this is all about. | ||
| And one question was: what about people? | ||
| Where are you going to get the workforce? | ||
| And so one of the things that we can do is we can get the Veterans Administration to start opening up avenues for veterans to be able to go back and get shipbuilding, welding, those kind of degrees on their GI bills and things of that nature. | ||
| That kind of creativity, along with using artificial intelligence and robotics. | ||
| So we're going to need people, as the president said, and we're going to need smart to use our construction techniques to the new 21st century, like we see the Chinese doing. | ||
| We need to get on board with those kind of building tech tactics and techniques and procedures. | ||
| So there's a lot of work to be done. | ||
| I'm very excited. | ||
| This is exactly what I've been asking for. | ||
| I'm very, very happy. | ||
| It's an early Christmas present, but we need to make sure that we execute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's all about, like you say, it's two things. | |
| I love the fact he said surface warfare officer. | ||
| Of course, we've talked many times. | ||
| I've told the audience the president loves victory at sea. | ||
| He mentioned that there. | ||
| Getting back, I actually love the fact, and already some of my shipmates on the Paul F. Foster, I'd love the fact he's naming it the USS Defiant. | ||
| They're still saying, hey, we ought to name them after naval heroes. | ||
| And I realize there's a lot of room for that. | ||
| But I kind of got turned off when they started naming them after U.S. senators. | ||
| And quite frankly, I'm not a huge believer in even naming the carriers after presidents. | ||
| I think you ought to, you know, when I was in the service, there was the Kitty Hawk in the Yorktown and the Lexington, right? | ||
| You had these tremendous carriers of lineage. | ||
| So I'm old school that way. | ||
| We've had a, we've got to face facts, though. | ||
| We've had a terrible track record. | ||
| The United States Navy, in particular in combatants, we've had a terrible track record. | ||
| I don't know, last 20, 25 years, we've built electoral ships. | ||
| We've had classes of, I think it's frigates or cruisers that just don't work. | ||
| It's like we lost our ability as a maritime power, we lost our ability to actually beat naval engineers, naval architects, to actually construct these. | ||
| And some have been total disasters, even the concept of littoral ships, correct me if I'm wrong, they were kind of built for the close-in warfare around the China coast, and they've turned out to be an absolute disaster. | ||
| Do you still have confidence, given the, quite frankly, the suboptimal track record of the Navy and the Defense Department and the American shipbuilding community to actually build cutting-edge combatants, sir? | ||
| I think we have the engineers that can design these things and do them. | ||
| But I think what needs to happen and what hasn't happened over the last 30 years with the littoral combat ship and the Zumwalt class and the failures with the Ford to get her out, it took over a decade. | ||
| And the consolation class, those failures are horrific. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Nobody paid a price for it. | ||
| So what the president and the secretary of the Navy need to say to these folks at NAVC and these other organizations inside the Navy, hey, you have to get this done. | ||
| And if you don't produce, and if you start doing your typical cost overruns and adding on this and adding on that and trying to delay this, you're out. | ||
| We need people to produce and we don't need excuses anymore. | ||
| So it's time for people to perform inside the Navy architecture. | ||
| And if they don't perform, then they got to get rid of them. | ||
| Just like General Marshall got rid of the non-performers before World War II inside the Army. | ||
| It has to happen. | ||
| We can't just pass people along anymore. | ||
| It's not acceptable to take a kid and can't read and pass them on to high school out of grade school. | ||
| Warfare is about choices and hard choices. | ||
| Here, you've had the national strategy memo. | ||
| The national security strategy memo came out. | ||
| We're going to get Pete's Heggs, Secretary of War. | ||
| It's required by law, I think, in 30 days to put out the military context. | ||
| That's so we've had an overall strategy, and it's quite different than we've had before. | ||
| I was very proud in President Trump's first term, we kind of put the global war on terror, not on the back burner, but kind of space and talked about the great power struggle, particularly with the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| It's the first time it'd really been addressed like that. | ||
| Now you've gone to even another cut of that, where you're talking about hemispheric defense. | ||
| You know, Greenland, the Panama Canal, increase in Navy. | ||
| Europe's really back all the way to, like I said, page 29 of a 33-page document. | ||
| But there's trade-offs, Captain. | ||
| We just passed an NDAA. | ||
| I think it's roughly going to be, if you add everything up over a trillion dollars defense budget, we're running $2 trillion a year in deficits. | ||
| You still got big army. | ||
| The Marine Corps is under tremendous pressure right now to come up with a new mission. | ||
| They're all over the Marines, the great Marine Corps. | ||
| The Air Force has got requirements. | ||
| I mean, you're going to have to make, if you have this shipbuilding program, and I will tell you right now, this announcement today struck less fear and our existential threat enemy in Beijing than it did in the Army and the Air Force senior cadre of officers in the Pentagon, because now they're going to be fighting for, now they're going to be fighting for resources. | ||
| Where are you going to make, understanding we don't have an unlimited defense budget, where do you think these change, you know, where are we going to find the money? | ||
| Oh, it's easy. | ||
| There's a lot of legacy stuff. | ||
| We just read today that the Pentagon failed its eighth audit in the last eight years. | ||
| So we have fraud, waste, and abuse. | ||
| We have programs that don't need to be in existence today. | ||
| They're in mostly inside the land warfare arena. | ||
| So while we need to have a standing army, we do not need to have the size and the scope of the army that we have today. | ||
| People, and you've mentioned it many, many times on your show, Americans are not into invading other nations anymore. | ||
| We want to defend our homeland, hemispheric defense, and then we want to have the capacity to do that. | ||
| And that requires having a Navy. | ||
| And our Navy, as I've mentioned over and over again, has been gutted, cut in half from 1986 until today, 600 ships to under 300 ships. | ||
| That's not acceptable. | ||
| So it's not a partisan thing to say, zero out some of these Army programs. | ||
| That's not partisan. | ||
| That is called national security. | ||
| So the president's going to have to get involved with some of these Army folks, and he's going to have to cut some of these programs and the scope of them because they're pouring billions into them. | ||
| And every time we take a billion out of an Army program, it's got to get pushed into the shipbuilding program of the United States of America. | ||
| And as it was made known in this press conference today, that in turn turns into jobs for Americans. | ||
| All kinds of new jobs, high-paying jobs, respectable jobs, careers that can make people proud to be Americans again and can build up our national security. | ||
| So I think it's going to come across partisan and there's going to be a great, as you said, they're the ones that are probably worrying the most now. | ||
| And there'll be a pushback and a campaign. | ||
| We just saw General Flynn's brother was interviewed on Epic Times in the last two weeks, and he actually said, I mean, I don't know him personally. | ||
| I know General Flynn, respect him highly, his brother as well. | ||
| But he actually said, we've got to quit looking at the Western Pacific as a blue theater. | ||
| It needs to be looked at as in kind of an army-centric way, and we need to have the army there leading on this. | ||
| Respectfully, that's not right, and it's not true. | ||
| And the fight that the Chinese have been building, the military they've been building, is a military to defeat our Navy. | ||
| And we need to have a Navy that can punch back against that and make sure that our western and eastern shores of the west coast of America and the Atlantic, because the Chinese are pushing into the Atlantic, are not under assault from the Chinese Navy. | ||
| And if we don't do something now, they will be like the Soviets were in the late 80s when they were having boomers sitting off our coast. | ||
| I will just tell you, like I said, the biggest, I have a lot of respect for General Flynn's brother, but the whole strategy of how you're going to go about it. | ||
| This is why the military strategy coming out from Pete in the next week or two is so important to implement that. | ||
| Some of the biggest fights you're going to have is in the Pentagon amongst our own services. | ||
| I just remember when I was a young naval officer, we went to the Western Pacific and then our second deployment, we were in the Persian Gulf and the North Arabian Sea where the United States Navy really had never been because of the hostage crisis. | ||
| That was a Navy that was, I don't know, I think we had 270 ships. | ||
| It was the Carter Navy. | ||
| And I came back and went to work for the Chief of Naval Operations, 090, one of his deputies. | ||
| And we got the mandate from the president to build a 600-ship Navy. | ||
| And the fights inside the Pentagon, because those resources, the defense boss was going to increase, but it was a huge fight for resources at the time. | ||
| It was pretty intense. | ||
| The one thing I remember, though, Captain, is that the industrial base of the United States, the American worker, we were still a superpower in manufacturing. | ||
| You had a highly educated workforce. | ||
| And I don't mean people that had college degrees and PhDs, but I mean people who had come up to a system of being artisans and craftsmen. | ||
| You really had an industrial base. | ||
| I mean, Peter Navarro is going to come on tomorrow and talk about saving the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. | ||
| You just don't have that today. | ||
| So where are you going to build these? | ||
| I mean, how are you going to build this? | ||
| We're very good, don't get me wrong, at building submarines. | ||
| We're still by far the best in the world. | ||
| Fast attack and ballistic missiles. | ||
| We can still build aircraft carriers, although you mentioned, I think, though Ford was a decade late in arriving and massive cost overruns. | ||
| Just given the fact of our limitations and the fact that we just don't have the workforce that we used to have. | ||
| And the president, you know, President Trump, he's action, action, action. | ||
| He goes, I want two in the next two years. | ||
| I think we're ordering another nine or 10 and eventually 25 of just this class. | ||
| And he's got a lot more ideas. | ||
| You can tell there. | ||
| Where and how are you going to build these? | ||
| Let's say you got the naval architects and the engineers so we don't make the mistakes we've had in these other classes of ship. | ||
| Let's say you get that part done. | ||
| Let's say you fight the fight and you figure out where the resources are. | ||
| How is the United States of America, given what we've done to our workforce in our industrial base, where are we going to build them? | ||
| Well, the shipyards have to be acquired. | ||
| So we need more shipyards, one. | ||
| Two, building ships the way we built ships after the 1942 Ocean Navy Act, where you had Rosie the Riveter and Welders and all these manual humans in the loop. | ||
| Those days can be transformed with artificial intelligence and robotics. | ||
| And so one of the things that our shipbuilding industry is behind on lagging the rest of the world, except for in specialty areas, like you said, in nuclear submarine production, where there's still a lot of humans involved, is we don't use that kind of latest technology. | ||
| And so we need to get the kind of the Silicon Valley arena into this arena of shipbuilding and bring them together to speed up that process so that we can have concurrent modular building in different locations and then have these things assembled by robots and other things that can automate it. | ||
| So there's a lot of work to be done there. | ||
| I know that Newport News Ship Guard has been working towards that over the last 10 years. | ||
| They've been looking at it, but it needs to go into hyperdrive now. | ||
| And so I think this is one of the challenges. | ||
| It's not going to be easy, but the first step on a journey is always the first step. | ||
| So we need to get going. | ||
| We have the president's put the guide on out there and we need to follow that and start marching towards it or sailing towards it. | ||
| And when people say we can't, then identify what the can't is and then find the fix to that can't. | ||
| So we need a lot of can-do people inside the system. | ||
| And that's going to be hard, no question. | ||
| And we have tried in the past, but at least under the first Trump administration. | ||
| This time, I think it's a different agenda now because it's very, very clear that the Chinese Navy is the existential threat to America's national security. | ||
| And we need to have this fleet. | ||
| And it sounded like from what I heard from the SECNAV, he has the agenda of things that they haven't just come up with this on a cocktail napkin, back of the napkin over the weekend. | ||
| This is something they've been thinking about for a year. | ||
| And, you know, this is like the thing with the command ships. | ||
| We have numbered fleets, as you know. | ||
| The 7th Fleet is out in Japan. | ||
| The 6th Fleet is in Europe in the Mediterranean. | ||
| We have the 5th Fleet in Bahrain. | ||
| We have 4th Fleet down in the Latin America area with the new commander just announced. | ||
| But all of our numbered fleets used to be afloat when I joined the Navy. | ||
| Today, the only really afloat-numbered fleet is 7th. | ||
| Now, 6th, the guys in the med will get upset. | ||
| The 6th sometimes goes to sea. | ||
| But really, only the one fleet that was afloat was the 7th Fleet, but it's on the oldest ship in the Navy, the USS Blue Ridge, is over 50 years old. | ||
| So what I just heard was we're going to go back and make these battleships our floating command ships. | ||
| We're going to put our numbered fleet commanders back at sea. | ||
| We're going to change the culture of the Navy. | ||
| And as you change the culture of the Navy, that demand signal is going to get directly translated across into the shipbuilding industry and our engineers and things of that nature. | ||
| So that's part of this, is to energize the guys and the gals that are afloat to have them have the kind of the lead on this is what we need. | ||
| This is why we need it. | ||
| And let's get it done now. | ||
| And I don't think we've had that for quite some time. | ||
| It's all been done inside the beltway, coming up with the best solutions for people that are out forward. | ||
| We need to reverse that. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| My revered 7th Fleet. | ||
| I was a member of that at one time, the fleet that's always at sea. | ||
| Captain Finnell, thank you so much. | ||
| I know you put articles up on American Greatness. | ||
| Where can people get the articles? | ||
| Yeah, just I haven't had one up in American Greatness for a couple of weeks, but if I write, that's where it'll be. | ||
| Otherwise, I'm off the net. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay, sir. | ||
| Captain Finnell, thank you so much for staying up late and joining us here for the president's big announcement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, and Merry Christmas. | |
| Merry Christmas, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Natalie Winners joins us. | ||
| Natalie, first I'm going to ask you, you're our Beijing watcher. | ||
| This announcement that President Trump, and it's deeper than just a class of ships, you can tell with a huge armada off the coast of Venezuela. | ||
| The president then announces today from Mar-a-Lago, which with Pete and Marco there, they thought it was going to be, we're going to have a Christmas bombing of Caracas. | ||
| How do you think this is viewed in Beijing right now, given the tensions between the two, given what we're doing on AI? | ||
| How do you think Beijing, because I can tell you right now in the Pentagon, the Army and the Navy, or the Army and the Air Force are absolutely furious, and there's going to be a massive fight inside the building about the allocation of resources. | ||
| What do you think is happening in Beijing? | ||
| Well, look, I think this is a rejection of managed decline. | ||
| And I think this is a vertical that the Chinese Communist Party has a significant and severe upper hand on. | ||
| And the fact that the Pentagon, the fact that President Trump is so, I think, vocally trying to push back against that and evidently shepherding resources. | ||
| We got the rhetoric. | ||
| I think we need to make sure that we follow through on this is something that's certainly going to cause, I would say, fear there. | ||
| I think I would probably tack this on to what the $11.1 billion weapons package that was sent over to Taiwan too. | ||
| Obviously, anything going on from a naval or sea perspective has to do with that area. | ||
| But I think that to really accurately depict the picture of how advanced China is in terms of the numbers of ships that they have, there's some really compelling statistics that I think the audience should hear. | ||
| If you do it by whole count, just for military vessels, China currently outnumbers there at around 370. | ||
| The United States is at around 290. | ||
| Obviously, the United States still goes with tonnage or displacement is the metric where we definitely trounce the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to that. | ||
| But the sort of secret with all of those statistics is that that only counts military ships. | ||
| That doesn't count civilian ships, Coast Guard vessels. | ||
| And we obviously know that China operates very heavily under military civil fusion. | ||
| And as you say, I'm a Beijing watcher. | ||
| It was not too long ago I was in Hong Kong and I was watching from the window of the hotel over in the harbor a ship rolling in. | ||
| Where I turned, I was like, is China like invading? | ||
| Because it looked like a battleship that was just coming in to, you know, just an average area of Hong Kong. | ||
| And it was just a Coast Guard ship. | ||
| Point being that every single Chinese vessel that is created, it's not just that they're retrofitted, but they're created to have military standards. | ||
| So they can, at any point, they're essentially dormant military vessels, much like all of their state-owned enterprises and any company is there, can be flipped on and turned into a ship that is engaged in war. | ||
| And when you really broaden out the comparison of how many ships we have versus what China has, it really is more of an outpacing of about one U.S. ship to every 20 Chinese ships. | ||
| And that number only expands when you start to add more and more, whether it's just, you know, surface combatants and then when you broaden it out to Coast Guard vessels. | ||
| And I also think that it's really quite concerning when you look at commercial shipping too. | ||
| China accounts for 50 to 55 percent of global shipbuilding tonnage, whereas the United States is at 0.2 percent. | ||
| And the United States has lost 70 percent of its shipyards since the Cold War, building about, it was, I think, one ship every three days during World War II. | ||
| Now it takes us, I don't even know how long to get a ship because the defense primes are just busy sucking up money and not showing anything in return. | ||
| So the fact that the Trump administration is choosing to go after this, I think is a very serious tell that they mean business. | ||
| Again, this is just rhetoric. | ||
| We need to see it backed up. | ||
| But this is, I think, an area that China has really focused on and deployed resources to become dominant in. | ||
| We've seen it certainly in the last few years, really making sure all their supply chains in this realm are domestic and at home and not at the whim or the mercy of the United States or the rest of the world. | ||
| But I also think that this is very important as we get closer to 2027. | ||
| Often that year is misquoted as when Xi Jinping wants to invade Taiwan. | ||
| That's just by when they think they can. | ||
| And I think that when you talk about what's going on with the Navy, at the sea, that that is the area that at least we should be talking about. | ||
| I know there's a lot of focus on Venezuela, but that's what's more important. | ||
| And the last thing I would say, because I do think that when you talk about where the flashpoint for the kinetic component of World War III is going to break out, sure, you could make the case it's Ukraine. | ||
| You could make the case it's the Middle East. | ||
| You could make the case it's a lot earlier than that. | ||
| But if maybe the next flashpoint is going to be Taiwan, I think it's important to understand the political dynamics at home right now in China, which is though Xi Jinping is very strong, what he fears most is a military coup or a military takeover. | ||
| And what would, I think, really create that is if an invasion of Taiwan that is supposed to be very stealth and quick did not actually happen. | ||
| Basically what you saw happening in Russia and Ukraine, a long, protracted conflict is only going to give the Chinese generals that he has been purging over time at a level like we've never seen the sort of pretext and the conditions to seize power from him. | ||
| So that's why what's going on from a military perspective with regard to the buildup in Taiwan is so important because it's not just that it affects U.S.-China relations. | ||
| I think domestically, that is the most powerful kind of arrow in the quiver where you could see any movement on Xi Jinping. | ||
| You know, I think that this is part of this was the statement that we're not only just take it seriously, we're going to get out of the littoral ship business and we're going to get, I mean, President Trump was as aggressive as you're possibly about combatants. | ||
| We're going to make these flagships, et cetera. | ||
| So you did a tour of both Southeast Asia and then you had Taiwan and the amazing interview you did. | ||
| For the audience, because I don't think people in the States understand that the specter of China, of the CCP, is all over Southeast Asia. | ||
| And obviously it's something they think about nonstop in Taiwan. | ||
| Just tell our audience how almost overwhelming it is to Chinese potential projection of power in that entire region of the world. | ||
| Well, let's start with Taiwan. | ||
| I mean, what we talk about here, right, the gray zone warfare, the hybrid warfare, I mean, that is the lived reality of the Taiwanese people every single day. | ||
| And I think that the sort of prevailing consensus, my kind of assessment too, from having spent time there, is that the Chinese Communist Party sees that as probably the most viable path forward to take over Taiwan, because the question is essentially how would the United States get involved if they were to blockade or do anything sort of more in that realm as opposed to outright kinetic conflict. | ||
| Also, of course, with mainland Mainland China viewing Taiwan as a part of it. | ||
| It's not necessarily in their interest to go and kill millions of Taiwanese people. | ||
| And like I said, I do think the largest factor that's keeping Xi Jinping from doing that is the belief that if it's not a swift victory, he really threatens his own political dominance and ascension. | ||
| So the fact that the United States is building up is probably really one of the strongest deterrent factors that you see going on there. | ||
| But the disinformation campaigns, the manipulation, the cyber attacks, everything that they are doing in Taiwan, I would describe it as a test run or a battleground, sort of a petri dish for what they want to do in the United States, all the way down to election interference, hacking election machines, toying with candidates, essentially buying off entire political parties, making it so, you know, political candidates over there are actively opposed to Taiwan being able to defend itself. | ||
| So the political warfare there has progressed so much further than what we've seen here, which is why I take such an interest in it. | ||
| And I think it's incumbent upon us to learn what is going on over there. | ||
| Because if we don't fight to keep out PRC influence here, that is what America's future will look like. | ||
| Throughout the broader Southeast Asia region, which I've now spent a lot of time in over the last few months, I mean, China owns it. | ||
| I mean, perhaps that's a bleak, you know, black-pilled take. | ||
| But we've spent so long here, right? | ||
| That was always sort of my favorite refrain from my legacy media bettors over at the White House that dismantling USAID was coming after American soft power. | ||
| The not-so-secretive secret in the room with the room being the world abroad is that American soft power has been kind of absent for a while. | ||
| And American soft power is exporting ideologies that the people on the ground there do not support, do not believe in. | ||
| Meanwhile, China is dealing in Belt and Road infrastructure, ports, stealing technology, basically importing their people to these third world countries and taking over the entire economy, essentially hacking not just the critical infrastructure, but the entire economy, cultures, and societies of dozens, dozens of countries, even countries in Europe have signed on to Belt and Road. | ||
| And I mean, you see it. | ||
| I mean, I'd encourage people to actually go over there. | ||
| Even you see it in an hour drive, whether it's the countryside or the most urban areas. | ||
| All of the new construction projects that are going on, it's all Chinese money. | ||
| The rare earth mines that are being built, even in countries like Lao, which of course border China, but there's negligible infrastructure there. | ||
| It's all Chinese. | ||
| And the businesses that are running it, they're all Chinese. | ||
| They're importing Chinese people to do the work, short of it being the slave conditions that they have the native population working in. | ||
| But it really is quite alarming and deafening to see the kind of bleak Thucydides trap mindset in action, whereby it is a world in which China replaces the United States as the rolling kind of global hegemon. | ||
| But it's moves like this that give you a little bit of hope that we can push back. | ||
| But we should not underestimate the pace and rapidity and the iron fist, for lack of a better word, that China is moving with. | ||
| Natalie, hang on, because I want to, you wrote a piece on your sub stack that we didn't really have time to fully develop. | ||
| Plus, there's this piece in the New York Times about young people and H-1B visas. | ||
| It's the whole question of: have we tightened up enough? | ||
| I mean, people, I think, are going to be shocked by your report about this, what Health and Human Services with the Right Hand is trying to undo with what Stephen Miller and others are trying, and Christy Noam are trying to get done on This still, what I call illegal, legal immigration or these refugees, which is just outrageous. | ||
| At the same time, this young generation is waking up to the fact that H-1B visas and who's stealing their jobs. | ||
| Natalie Winters is going to be with us after the break. | ||
| Also, Admiral Sonny Masso, we're going to continue to get some perspective of this massive shift in shipbuilding and strategy under President Trump. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
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| Back in a moment. | ||
|
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In this moment, in this anthem, is living. | |
| We sing to roll the people who never made it home. | ||
| To us, their stories will be told. | ||
| We stand as one. | ||
| J6 new single reached number one, I think on Saturday, and then again on Sunday. | ||
| Make sure you go to iTunes and download it. | ||
| We're in hot competition with Mariah Carey. | ||
| Don't want to lose that one. | ||
| The album's going to be released on 6th of January, right? | ||
| We're going to try to get a little event going there. | ||
| Also, a film. | ||
| I'll have a clip from that tomorrow. | ||
| We'll talk about a film that Real America's Voice and Parker Sig and the team, Dan Floyd, put together a really very powerful film about all this documentary. | ||
| So, Natalie, where I've got you, too. | ||
| You wrote a piece that I don't think we had enough time to develop. | ||
| We did have you on about the leakage kind of in the system. | ||
| The right hand's undoing what the left hand's doing about refugees, and now you have HHS are paying for a whole program. | ||
| At the same time, there's a very important piece in the New York Times. | ||
| I want to make sure Grace and Mo helped push it out to all our force multipliers about the younger generation waking up to the fact of H-1Bs, and you are all over the article, and the worms all over the article because we've been at the forefront of fighting this. | ||
| And I think you may, I think your thing is that, hey, I think young people have been awakened this before now. | ||
| But because it's so frustrating when you read your investigative report on the refugee situation, which billions of dollars going into this fiasco, which got to be shipped out of here, and you see these young people once again having to bear the brunt of this H-1B scam. | ||
| Ma'am. | ||
| Well, this New York Times article is quite interesting. | ||
| We'll give them credit for identifying War Room as one of the top and most influential podcasts in the country, but I think that's about where their correct assessments end. | ||
| I love how the legacy media always does this thing where they pretend like nothing is an issue until they finally cover it. | ||
| And then once they cover it, they're like, wow, all these people suddenly care about this random issue that in reality, it's been what has animated Americans for decades. | ||
| It's sort of the, you know, Trumpian escalator effect where it's like, no, the Republican base would have always voted for a candidate that cared to cease all immigration. | ||
| It's just they never were actually presented the chance. | ||
| So I would humbly tell the New York Times that you should put your article through the fact check process again because you're extremely wrong to suggest that young Americans are just now, let alone all Americans, starting to care about the H-1B visa thing. | ||
| It's not just some trend issue or some fad issue. | ||
| It's something that gets to the core of what right-wing populism, of what Trumpism about, which is the idea of what does it mean to be an American citizen. | ||
| Steve, I know you've talked about the idea of maximizing the value of American citizenship, but I think maybe we should just settle on the fact that your government should not be actively working to suppress your wages, replace you, and destroy your culture, let alone with some third-world, third-rate, inferior foreign-speaking culture that has absolutely nothing in common with what we value here in the United States. | ||
| But I think the interesting angle that they really hook onto is how it's young Americans, particularly having a kind of bleak economic future. | ||
| But I think the most important part of that, Steve, is what you're talking about is the kids who do everything right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| The kids who study as hard as they can, only to be rejected from their dream school because they were born a straight white male. | ||
| The kids who do everything right and go to the top colleges, which, you know, having been to one, I can tell you you don't learn anything there that's that's worth anything. | ||
| You have to unlearn everything that you learn or just go work for Steve Bannon instead. | ||
| That's the path I took. | ||
| But the kids who go there and study really, really hard, you know, they're turned over for their job at the top firm that they want to go to because they're being replaced by some foreigners. | ||
| And when you look at the statistics of how many Americans hold degrees in these advanced fields and how many of them are actually working in them, it's like upwards of 50% of people who can't even get jobs in these industries, yet we're continuing to graduate year after year, thousands of people in these fields when there's already a shortage of jobs. | ||
| So I think it's the idea of the good faith American spirit of wanting to do everything right. | ||
| And then your government is making it as such that you literally cannot get a job where young men cannot feel like they can support a family. | ||
| So the New York Times, obviously, they totally missed the forest for the trees. | ||
| But I do think it's interesting that they're finally dabbling and covering this issue because that's how you know that you're starting to hit the critical point where even the legacy media can't ignore it. | ||
| And I also think to sort of link this to what you were talking about, the piece that I broke, it just shows you how systemic this issue is. | ||
| And frankly, the corruption and perversion of what is, I think, the American civic spirit and idea of community, which is first and foremost, helping Americans, putting Americans first. | ||
| America first can be humanized as putting Americans first. | ||
| And I'm all for helping people, but we can't continue to help people from countries who, when they get here, they don't assimilate. | ||
| And frankly, I would take even 1% assimilation. | ||
| We're talking about people that actively hate this country and are committing fraud to the tune of billions of dollars more than the GDP of the country that they came from. | ||
| And I'm looking at you, Somalia and Minnesota. | ||
| And specifically in regard to Minnesota, the story at the meta level of what I broke is that the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is under the purview of HHS, so make sure you tag RFK and anyone who works there on Twitter. | ||
| We got to get this story out. | ||
| But they have been deploying, as of September, the end of September of this year, millions of dollars of grants to very far-left organizations for refugee resettlement, helping to naturalize, give citizenship green cards, take your pick to refugees, illegal aliens. | ||
| It's sort of nebulous. | ||
| This is included in the United States Federal Register. | ||
| As you know, Steve, I spend my evenings reading the Federal Register, and this was tucked away in there. | ||
| Frankly, I think it's hypocritical as the Trump administration is talking about how they want to cease immigration from every country. | ||
| Obviously, these are rogue bureaucrats doing just that, going rogue, but we also need to be watching these people. | ||
| Blaming the deep state kind of becomes old after a while when we know that we're capable of fixing it because they're just admitting their plans in the federal code that I found within a five-minute search on the internet. | ||
| But $2.5 million was given to the community sponsorship hub. | ||
| That's a group in St. Paul, Minnesota. | ||
| Quite interesting in light of all the fraud investigations we've seen going on there. | ||
| But that group in particular, Steve, is actually a partner of the Biden State Department, though it was originally founded as part of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. | ||
| It gets even better. | ||
| You have Open Society Foundation members on their board, and all over their website, they talk about actively opposing President Trump and his immigration restrictionist agenda. | ||
| But apparently, these are people that we are giving millions of dollars to, not just to support their organization, but to literally help third world refugees that are likely committing fraud become citizens or stay here longer. | ||
| Then, this is really going to make the audience aghast. | ||
| So, buckle up for this one. | ||
| This audience is obviously very well aware of Catholic charities. | ||
| No shade to the Catholics, no shade to charity, but this is not a charity. | ||
| This is a basically, I mean, can we call it a human trafficking organization that is responsible for facilitating mass migration into and right? | ||
| $4.5 million to Catholic charities to help disseminate migrants throughout the entire U.S. as I said, running through September of this year to September of next year, $4.5 million to the left-wing tip of the spear of refugee movement. | ||
| Our HHS, through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, is currently funding that. | ||
| Natalie, where do we go? | ||
| I want to make sure we push that over to the guys at HHS. | ||
| I mean, this is the problem. | ||
| You got some people, you know, there's another big raid today. | ||
| We'll have more discussion on this tomorrow, what they're finding out. | ||
| People are talking about it's $9 billion, it's $18 billion, yet you still have parts of the government. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It's like the thing's so vast to organize that you've got these bureaucrats that continue to feed their buddies at whether it's Lutheran charities or Catholic charities or the Jewish group that worked down on the border on all these resettlement scams. | ||
| And it's got to stop. | ||
| All of it's got to stop. | ||
| And I realize Stephen Miller and these guys are overwhelmed with what they're trying to do, but that's why somebody's got to go through here and say, guys, if we're going to stop what's happening in Minnesota, we've got to stop what's happening in Minnesota. | ||
| Where did they go to get this to push it out, ma'am? | ||
| You can go to nataliegwinters.substack.com. | ||
| It's the most recent article I published. | ||
| Or you can obviously go to my ex anywhere else. | ||
| I have them linked, but read the piece and share it. | ||
| And thank you, Steve, for having me on. | ||
| You had a wonderful speech at Amfest. | ||
| I think you're going to beat Mariah Carey on the charts with that one if you don't get banned on Spotify for posting it. | ||
| Ben Shapiro, the bride at every wedding. | ||
| Natalie G. Winters, thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us tonight. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| Natalie Winters, all over the CCP. | ||
| Admiral Sonny Masso. | ||
| Admiral, we always have Aaron Masso on here about naval strategy. | ||
| He's got the Historical Society building the museum. | ||
| So, Admiral, you're a surface warfare officer. | ||
| It's not that the Navy, we got about 10 minutes here, and I want you to take your time on this. | ||
| It's not that the Navy hasn't tried to deal with the surface Navy. | ||
| You've had the littoral combat ship. | ||
| You've had the Zumwalt class thing. | ||
| You got the Constitution class, the aircraft carrier, the Ford, I think, was 10 years out. | ||
| Why is this announcement today so important, given particularly the current history of where our shipbuilding program has been, sir? | ||
| Well, thank you for the opportunity to comment on this. | ||
| And we are so excited about the Golden Fleet. | ||
| What is profound about this is that over the past 20 years or so, I think the Navy's been timid in asking for what they needed more than for just settling for something that was just as good. | ||
| So I think the announcement that the president made with respect to the battleship and everything else is so spot on. | ||
| And I'd like to give some credit to the director of the OMB, Mr. Russell Vogt, because he is a champion and he has been inspired by our president. | ||
| But in addition, he's assembled a really quality team of experts, including a gentleman named Jerry Hendricks, who's written some amazing books. | ||
| And he's a real strategist, Elbridge Colby, who's a friend of your program. | ||
| But for us, this is something that is very exciting to us on so many levels to extend even to the deal the president brokered with Finland to help us in the icebreaker business. | ||
| Our icebreakers were Coast Guard ships, Polar Sea, Polar Star. | ||
| They were more than 65 years old. | ||
| They were tired girls, did God's work for a continuous amount of time. | ||
| But the Finns are going to build us 11, and that's going to be exactly what we need to do the things that we need to do as a Navy, particularly up in the pole. | ||
| Sonny, one thing that struck me from Marlago is, and you and I have talked about this a lot, the president's a big fan of the Samuel Elliott Morrison Victory at Sea, that whole thing. | ||
| He knows this very intimately. | ||
| He's a student of kind of naval military history. | ||
| He was very aggressive in language. | ||
| I mean, these are going to be steel-hauled. | ||
| As you know, the ship I served on you with, our first ship was aluminum. | ||
| You could put probably a 30-yard six through it. | ||
| I mean, this was like a throwback to the old Navy. | ||
| I've kind of felt like I was listening to Admiral Nelson there. | ||
| I mean, the president could not have been more aggressive about the warfighting capability, the combatant capability of this, including talking about, you know, putting the fleets, the numbered fleets on these ships as afloat command ships. | ||
| Your thoughts? | ||
| Well, you know, again, as you said, it was inspirational. | ||
| And again, the Navy was afraid to ask for something as robust but as necessary as this new battleship and command and control platform might be. | ||
| And one of the things that was very inspirational was that he gets, okay, he gets the fact that new weapon systems and thus new propulsion systems on our ships have to be designed and developed. | ||
| So we're talking about bringing hypersonic missiles. | ||
| We're talking about railgun. | ||
| We're talking about laser-guided missiles that will be propelled or given the power generation from electric drive propulsions and some unique ways forward. | ||
| So that just as our, you know, 50 years ago, when we were on the Paul F. Foster, the transition was from 1,200-pound steam to gas turbine. | ||
| And so I think, you know, we'll see a heuristic approach in propulsion, which will allow us to fight with new weapons that are very capable and will be able to solve a multitude of problems. | ||
| I know that there have been some naval architects, and I want to say from some Big Ten schools, maybe Michigan comes to mind, but what they're looking at is a unit sail away price on these vessels for somewhere between four and four and a half billion dollars. | ||
| And the way that I really am enamored with the president's vision is we're going to lay it out and we're not going to change it 10,000 times. | ||
| We're not going to send it to some smaller shipyard that has never built a ship of this nature before. | ||
| So we'll probably be laser focused on Huntington Angles, General Dynamics, maybe Bath Ironworks. | ||
| But I think that we're thinking all of the right strategies to prevent issues in the Gulf of Hormuz or Taiwan Straits, some of those locales. | ||
| This is going to be a game changer for our Navy. | ||
| I just hope that we can get this moving along smartly so that it doesn't lose its energy at the end of his present term. | ||
| Well, you know, as you know, the president, this is his baby, so he's running with it. | ||
| Sonny, just share with you, you served on joint commands. | ||
| I said earlier, I think that the fear in the heart that this announcement put in Beijing is only greater in the Air Force and the Army parts of the E-ring in the Pentagon right now, because there's going to be a massive fight on the allocation of resources. | ||
| Give us your best thoughts on that, sir. | ||
| Well, I'm not going to disabuse the notion that maybe we have too many four-stars and they do sort of bump into each other in the field. | ||
| I'm reluctant to suggest what should be reduced from a four- to three-star job, but it gets crowded in all of the combatant command staffs. | ||
| A number of years ago, we took out the Joint Forces Command. | ||
| It used to be the United States Atlantic Command, and it became Joint Forces Command. | ||
| And we sort of, other than a couple of functions, we sort of stood that down. | ||
| And I don't think anybody missed a thing. | ||
| And I would, and I've served in UCOM, CENTCOM. | ||
| I haven't, about the only one was South and Northcom. | ||
| I haven't served, but I've been a part of staffs in all these locales. | ||
| And I don't, you know, I'm scratching my head wondering why that's a bad thing to do, honestly. | ||
| Do you think the scramble for resources, I mean, where are we going to get, where are you going to get, are you going to take this out of the Air Force? | ||
| You're going to take it out of the Navy's existing budget? | ||
| Are you going to take it out of the Army? | ||
| How do you actually pay for this? | ||
| Because he's talking about ordering 25 ships, right? | ||
| I think an initial order will come in right away with another nine. | ||
| Yeah, where will it come from? | ||
| I honestly don't know, but I will say that probably in reality, it'll be a reallocation. | ||
| When I was the commander of the Bureau of Naval Personnel, whenever we would get these pay raises, you know, they sounded great on paper. | ||
| You know, we're going to increase pay 2.5%, and we'd all be celebrating spiking the ball in the end zone. | ||
| But then they would come back to me saying, well, we've got to take it out of hide. | ||
| They're not giving us the money for this. | ||
| We have to find it where it is. | ||
| So I think there will be some repriorities. | ||
| Now, I do know that there will be some heavy investments, as there should be, in the cyber domain. | ||
| Spacecom, General Salzman has been probably one of our great leaders standing up that organization. | ||
| And regrettably, he's going to be leaving here in under a year. | ||
| But they likely will make an allocation from, I think the Army will probably see this as a hit. | ||
| The Navy is going to have to redefine some of their priorities because I think some of that money is going to come from there. | ||
| And they're going to have to carefully look at research and development budgets and things of that nature. | ||
| And hopefully with an eye toward acceleration of doing this faster rather than slower, I think that this could really be a game changer for our national defense. | ||
| I didn't really answer your question. | ||
| I don't really, because I don't know. | ||
| But I do believe everyone's going to contribute, but the Navy is going to be hit the hardest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think the key, it's called the Trump class, and President Trump's going to want action. | ||
| Before we go on, talk about the Navy Museum, what you're working on for the Historical Society. | ||
| Well, thanks very much. | ||
| You know, we could use a little bit more support from the Navy senior leadership, but we've got an amazing plan to build a museum and open the doors around 2030 timeframe in the DC area. | ||
| And we've got a number of amazing folks who've contributed already. | ||
| The Taylor family from Enterprise Runnel Carr, he, Jack Taylor, served in the Battle of Midway, and they've bequeathed a lot of great artifacts for us that he's collected from the Battle of Midway. | ||
| Dr. Koch, Dr. Bill Coke, his passion is the War of 1812, and he's bequeathed an $85 million artifact collection that we're very happy to receive. | ||
| So what we want to do is tell stories about these events, but in addition, we want to get into the community and enhance education of high school students. | ||
| Sonny, where do people go? | ||
| Tell us where you get to YouTube. | ||
| We got about 30 seconds. | ||
| Your YouTube, and where do you go find out more about the museum? | ||
| Yeah, the Naval Museum Development Foundation.org, NMDF.org. | ||
| You can donate. | ||
| You can find out more. | ||
| We're real excited, very excited. | ||
| And it's going to be something everyone's going to be very proud of. | ||
| Sir, Sonny, thank you so much. | ||
| We're going to have you back on and talk about the Venezuela attack maybe right after Christmas or the proposed with an armada. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Merry Christmas. | ||
| Merry Christmas, Steve. | ||
| God bless. | ||
| Yeah, tell Mo I sent my love to. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| We'll be back at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. | ||
| It's going to be packed tomorrow already. | ||
| We're already booked. | ||
| And we're also going to be in both the Vatican and Bethlehem on New Year's Eve, right here in the road. | ||
|
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See you tomorrow morning. | |
| What happened? | ||
|
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So we had to blow that first seven-minute break to go into Battleground to keep the press conference. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I noticed that. | ||
| I noticed when I looked up, I said, did I have that time right? | ||
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I looked up. | |
| It was like 34 minutes. | ||
| I said, man. |