Episode 5025: WarRoom Boxing Day Special 2025 Hosted By Raheem Kassam cont.
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Aired On: 12/26/2025
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Well, one of the things that I've been taking some time, I wouldn't say out this year, to do, because certainly it's been an incredible commitment, is to help build this place.
Butterworths, here on Capitol Hill, has become somewhat of a go-to.
If you believe the media, for a lot of MAGA world people, certainly become a very political hangout here in Washington, D.C.
But it might surprise you just how many Democrats, how many liberal media people actually walk through these doors.
And we'll get into a little bit of Butterworth's, what it is later.
I'm always very, very touched when members of the War Room posse come in and stop by.
We always have a great time together.
And of course, if you are going to the Kennedy Center, the Trump Kennedy Center, I should say, you also can present your ticket here and get a bit of a discount off your meal.
So that's just another cool thing that we are building that we have built.
So stick around, stay tuned.
We've got a great interview with our executive chef later on in this show just to talk you through a little bit of the why and the how this all came together.
But now speaking of the Trump Kennedy Center, I wanted to take you behind the scenes a little bit there.
The amazing team, Ambassador Rick Grinnell, Roma Daravi, Taylor Strand, Rick Lockery, and all of the others who are involved there.
You know, they have treated me like family since day one.
And I think it's so important that we help restore that once great cultural institution to greatness.
So let's enjoy a little bit of behind the scenes from the Trump Kennedy Center.
So here we are at Nats Stadium with Ambassador Rick Grinnell and his team at the Kennedy Center.
let's have a look around so yeah the idea is that families can come along bring their kids hang around in the outfield have some fun play some games and learn about the opera It's pretty good.
It's free, and people seem to have a good time.
unidentified
All right, here we are at my 25th birthday party at Nationals Park.
So on the other side now of the Kennedy Centre, and you've got more commentators doing work over here.
And you can also see all of the security popping up their heads for all the boxes, which is where presidents and the prime ministers and all of that who are in attendance are hanging out.
And you know, I always say it when I come to the Kennedy Centre, but such massive credit to Rick Rinnell, his whole team, Roma, who's right here, and Taylor.
Just they work so hard and they get so much, especially from the political left who have tried to make this their explicit political space.
Here we are inside the now infamous Butterworths on Capitol Hill for the very special Boxing Day edition of The War Room.
I'm joined now by my business partner at this dear place and our executive chef and our Sommelier and the guy who, when push comes to shove, scrubs everything in here from top to bottom and fixes everything.
And his name is Daniel Bart Hutchins.
Well known as Bart, if you come in here and you're looking for him, especially if you're a terrorist, ask for Bart.
As for me, I won't be of any use to you.
And, you know, there's been so much that has happened here, Bart, over.
A lot of this audience haven't been here, haven't even seen inside here, don't know what it's all about.
They may have read a thing or two.
But let's, before we get into the craziness, let's talk a little bit about how this came together because you're kind of not the sort of person that we would have thought would put together a place that has become known as a quote-unquote MAGA hangout.
Now, as I've already said on this program, I kind of repudiate that description.
I think it's definitely a hangout, but all sorts of people come through those doors.
But you were one of those people once upon a time, at least staring through the windows of this place.
Window licking, some might say, when it was something else.
But when I was a young chef, three blocks down the road, I was working at this tiny restaurant and I was low on the totem pole.
I wasn't the guy.
It wasn't my show.
I was just, you know, the chef.
I just executed the thing.
And so I would get off work and I would come down.
I lived right behind here.
And I would stare in the, there was a little scrap in the paper.
There was a little tear in the paper and I could see inside the building and you could see these ceiling tiles were here.
You could see the floor the way it is.
And it was this beautiful space.
And if you look around, the capital's right down the street.
And mainly what they have to eat or have to go to lunch meetings or have to go out after a long day is like a hamburger place and like a taco place.
And I sort of found that just incredibly embarrassing.
Because like when you think about a country that has its own culture and has its own people, one of the first things you have to figure out how to do is eat.
And you see this in like in some of the sort of great countries of the world, like France has an incredible eating culture.
And so when you're forming a nation, have you figured out how to eat?
And it was incredibly embarrassing to me that the people who sort of quote-unquote run this country had no idea how to eat.
I mean, ate so poorly.
And so the idea of building this beautiful dining room and this place where people could gather right here on the hill was so obvious when you looked at the building.
Like it was built to be this.
I'm not sure how it was ever anything else.
And so I would stare in this window.
This was almost 10 years ago now.
And so now here we are.
We've built this place and it's doing exactly that.
So it's sort of phenomenal that it happened that way.
Because, you know, when somebody, even when they text me, let alone, I was going to say when they walk through the doors, actually, when somebody texts me of an ordinary evening and says, hey, you open, you know, my first instinct is to reply, go find out yourself.
everybody said you'd be run out of town within three months yeah and and must have been galling to you because and they tried you you're you're You're a Democrat.
Yeah, I mean, like, the politics of America are changing rapidly.
And so part of the comfort to me of doing this thing that we get protested for and certain members of the media really hate us for and whatever it may be is that the dining establishment from the Roman Empire till now is a sort of populist thing, right?
This is not a private club.
This is not a country club.
There's no closed doors.
Anybody who wants to come eat and drink can come here.
And so what we're seeing right now is this populist shift on the left and the right, right?
I remember very distinctly in 2016, right after Trump took office the first time, I remember reading a tax plan by Steve.
And I was a Democrat at the time and I took it to my then girlfriend and I sort of was like, have you read this?
Because huge chunks of this are copy and pasted from the Bernie campaign that we had just worked on.
And so this idea that there's these like sort of this rich establishment that is hell-bent on ruining our lives affects you whether you're a Democrat, whether you're a Republican.
It really doesn't matter.
these oligarchs are here to take our money regardless.
And so, and your agency.
And your agency and your freedom and your way of life, to be perfectly honest.
And they want to replace it with things that make them money.
And so the interesting thing about this place, I have a very distinct memory early on of you and one of Bernie's former campaign staffers holding court at the end of the bar for almost an hour.
And if you didn't know who you were, you didn't know who she was, you guys agreed on almost everything.
I mean, it was very obvious that there was a certain populist bent to the whole thing.
And so this place has always had some of that, right?
Like as long as you can hold a conversation about those things, you're welcome here and you're more than happy to be here.
Because that's where politics are headed.
The left-right thing is getting destroyed.
It really is like, are you part of this ruling class or are you not?
And we're all going to find ourselves together and we're all going to hang together, so to speak, if we don't win.
And so that's been amazing.
Steve was an earlier supporter.
That was huge for us.
I've always been a fan of his, but it's been nice to get to know him this year.
And I want to move on to that a little bit if I can.
I think for the audience who kind of lament me playing a Steve role here and interrupting, I keep trying to convince Bart that we need to have our own podcast out of this building and talk about not just like who comes in here and the conversations that happen here and all that fun stuff as well, but it's about what you're talking about.
It's culture making, it's change making, it's setting the tone.
And from a populist perspective.
But let's talk about the food a little bit because that is an integral part of this place.
The audience brings the politics.
What we bring them is beauty.
What you bring them especially is A palate that I have scarcely reckoned with anywhere else in the world.
Tell us about your favorite things on the menu and how you got there.
And don't be afraid to talk about how brilliant British food is.
Well, this is going to be a long-winded way of getting there, but sometime after World War II, the sort of ruling powers that be decided they could replace our food with fake food, with food that has no nutrients, no calories whatsoever.
And what we did was we decimated the American farm, we decimated the American farmer, and we replaced it with a global supply chain where we get shrimp from China and we get beef from Argentina and we get corn from Brazil and we get all these things and they're shipped to us and in that shipment process they die.
And they're number one, they lose all nutrients and they lose everything that's good for you in eating food.
But more importantly, to me, because I'm not the healthiest guy in the world, they lose flavor.
They just don't taste as good, period.
There's no way to ship something hundreds of thousands of miles.
And they did this to make an extra 50 cents on whatever it was that they were doing.
And they did it in some regards to strip us of our way of life.
And so part of how we design a menu here is we work with local farmers who are within 200 miles of this place.
Like if something has to get on an airplane, we're not selling it.
What I prefer is on Monday mornings when we work with these Amish farmers up in Pennsylvania.
When they drop off the vegetables, if you're here early enough, you'll see a guy with the hat and the beard and he drove in on a truck that's 30 years old and he drops off the vegetables that he grew himself.
And number one, those things are better for you, but number two, they taste significantly better because they're not dead and they're not sitting in a thing.
And number three, for me personally, I get to know that like his family is going to take the money that I give them and they're going to spend it to have more kids and keep their farms and do whatever it may be.
And so we focus on those things and that's a very specific way of eating that honestly we've had to do some education on.
Because we're used to things tasting like the Cisco bag.
We're used to things tasting like a chicken finger out of a plastic bag.
All of us are.
I am to some extent.
You have to sort of like retrain your palate around those things.
But it's one of the ways that we have to sort of take back our agency in these regards is like you retrain your palate because those things do taste better.
They might not taste better the first time you try it because we're not used to it anymore because for 70 years now we've been fed junk.
But you'll have to tune into the podcast when we launch it to get that whole thing.
And by the way, I'll also say this: if you want that to happen faster, go to thenationalpulse.com forward slash war room, sign up, and we can put something together much faster.
It's, you know, it is one of those things where I know that it's better.
So whether they know what it is or whether they've tried it, I know once they do try it, they're going to be way happier than whatever it is they're usually eating.
And these things are not, they're new to us, but they're not new to the country and they're not new.
Like our grandparents would be really happy with this menu.
Like these are things that they ate.
So like the oyster thing, for example, like, you know, in New York in the Bay, it was full of oysters during the sort of Ellis Island import of new.
Americans.
And so one of the things you would do if you were an Irishman or an Italian coming over during that time is you knew that if you got to New York, like this had spread back to the old country.
You knew that if you got to New York, you could survive off of just grabbing oysters out of the bay because there's so much protein and so many nutrients long enough to get a job and to sort of become an American and to become part of this.
And so those things that we eat, the bone marrow, that's a way of not wasting cows, right?
Like we were once one of the greatest cattle countries in the world and hopefully will return.
And we got there by not throwing away the bones of the cattle.
We figured out a way to eat them.
We figured out how to make sauces out of them.
We figured out all these things.
And so I know if I can get people to eat these things, number one, they're going to enjoy them because they are delicious.
There's zero doubt about that.
We're a year in now and no one's ever said the food was bad.
They've said a lot of things about us, but they've never said it was bad.
In fact, you have rave reviews from the New York Times magazine, from Tom Sietzmer, the Washington Post, from virtually from the Wall Street, I mean, the Wall Street General front page, right?
You have rave reviews across the board.
And listen, I think one of the things that people need to realize is this was never opened as a MAGA place.
Like that wasn't in the business plan.
It wasn't in the business model.
It sort of just became that, right?
A lot of it because of who I am and bringing Steve in and Steve hosting so many parties here.
And then it just sort of snowballs, right?
That level of that type of person coming in.
So you've been sort of thrown in at the deep end because, you know, I don't think, I think most people own MAGA, maybe Maha is different, but most people in the OG MAGA movement don't really eat bone marrow, don't really try, don't really eat oysters.
And that's not the only stuff that's on the menu.
But you've become known for your tallow fries as well.
But you were Maha.
I always say I was MAGA before Trump, right?
Because we were doing the Brexit stuff and that in the years before.
I mean, this is part of the, this is part of the thing that I was talking about earlier, which is we, like the canola oils and the seed oils that we usually cook with, or most restaurants usually cook with, they're not made in America.
They're made largely in South America these days, largely in Asian countries these days.
And so if you want them, you have to bring them in.
Number one, they're gross.
They don't taste good.
But number two, you have to bring them in from far, far away.
And that's just like not part of what we do.
It's not part of what I've ever done as a chef, primarily from a flavor perspective, right?
Because they don't taste good.
But it's been interesting to watch the politics develop around this because people are all of a sudden are interested in this sort of nationalism that says like, no, no, no, the things we make are just as good as every other country in the entire world.
And so we grow amazing cows.
They have fat on them.
You can use that fat to fry things.
Why are we not, we make the best French fries in the world.
France will have an argument with that, but they're wrong.
And that goes across the political spectrum in a huge way.
Every chef that I respect and that I know has been doing that for 10, 15, 20 years now.
And they would never pitch it as like a Maha thing.
They would never pitch it as they would, they would not even say it's a nationalist thing, even though when I go to these other chef conferences and I meet a chef from Spain, per se, he'll go, no, no, no, we make the best pigs in Spain.
I'll be like, no, no, no, we make the best pigs in America.
So there's this like nationalist bent to all chefs because we're proud of the products that come from where we are.
And all of a sudden, but is it weird to vote that way?
It shouldn't be, but you know, that's sort of the question that we're having now.
And this place answers it a lot.
I mean, the food critics would come in and they would read about how it's a MAGA hangout before they would have the food.
And then they would taste the food and they'd go, oh, crap.
Like, this is actually really good.
We have to deal with this.
And it's forcing them to answer questions.
We've done this with almost all the journalists that have reviewed us.
We've kind of become friends with them to some extent because they're like, wait, this is really good.
I have to wrestle with these questions.
If I want good food, do I need a little nationalism in my politics?
Maybe.
Because that's what good food is.
I mean, the French are renowned for their good food.
And they're wrong about a lot of things.
And they've got some strange things going on, but they've never imported food ever.
And nobody thinks of them as this sort of far-right country by any stretch of the imagination.
But you will not find a Frenchman eating a steak from Spain to save your life because they make cows in France and their cows are better because they're proud of their country and they're allowed to be in a way that Americans really never have.
Well, over a year in, I mean, I wish we could spend more time talking about this.
Can't dedicate the whole episode to this, but I'm sure people will be fascinated by you, who you are, and they will be surprised when they follow you on social media because you speak quite differently on there than you do here.
But you'll see in a second that when somebody tries to counter-protest them, they don't actually, the police don't allow them the same free speech that they allow these far-left paid protesters.
So here I am outside the pub, dinner and a show for me.
And I sat there with this cacophony of noise for three whole hours, just to show them they don't bother us.
But we clearly bother them.
I don't know if it's the foie gras or whatever, but they seem to be taking out their anger on Capitol Hill's animals.
This dog was particularly perturbed by what they were doing.
Most of the residents who were walking past objected to what they were doing.
And so I put on a little protest of my own, grabbed our Queen Elizabeth portrait from inside the bar and danced around.
It was pretty perplexing to them, I think.
I don't think they've ever had somebody get in their face like that and make a mockery of them.
It did seem to upset them, and it especially seemed to upset the police.
Again, they are allowed.
These far-left paid protesters are allowed free speech.
But apparently, I'm not even outside out front on my own easement of my own restaurant.
And that's Washington, D.C. for you, ladies and gentlemen.
Nevertheless, I hope they come back.
The fact that the restaurant gets protested is a sign that we are getting under their skin.
It makes more and more people come to Butterworth on Capitol Hill.
I don't know how we got through it that quickly of what's gone on in the last year, a lot of it in and around my life, but I wanted to show you the things that I think a lot of people don't get to see, especially things that I'm really excited about, like the takeover of the Trump Kennedy Center.
I think it is important.
I think it is imperative that in addition to dominating the politics, that MAGA learns to dominate the culture too.
And, you know, in a lot of ways, it doesn't just mean imposing our will or our view onto the rest of the city or indeed the rest of the nation through those things.
The same can be said, by the way, for the Smithsonian institutions.
And I think you'll hear a lot more about that stuff in the year to come.
There's a lot of things that, you know, I can't tell you that I know is coming in the next year because it would give the opponents of these things a little bit too much of a heads up.
But there is so much coming down the pipeline that the President is working on, that Ambassador Grinnell is working on, that Secretary Hegseth is working on, that the Maha crowd is working on, and that indeed Stephen K. Bannon, the War Room and myself.
We've all got big plans for 2026.
So don't go anywhere.
We want you to stay engaged, stay tuned.
And on that note, it's been a pretty apolitical show.
We got into some policy in the first hour, but I've kept it a little bit more cultural.
We are at this, I hate using this phrase, but we are at this crossroads in the conservative movement right now.
I think a lot of people see it and a lot of people know it.
A lot of people who went to America Fest get it.
And a lot of people who spend, I think, too much time on websites like X especially get it at this point in time.
I actually deleted that app off my phone because it was just too much drama, too much emotion, not enough getting stuff done all day, every day, and too much for my blood pressure, quite frankly.
And I think as a movement, we have that ability.
We can choose at this point in time to keep fighting each other, to keep harassing each other, to keep insulting each other, to keep warring with one another, to keep floating theories and ideas and just all of these sorts of things that will only serve to separate.
And those of you who know me will know that for the past 20 years now, working in politics, I have done almost nothing but strive towards the truth, towards what is right, what is moral, what is correct, what is beautiful.
And I think all of those things are intrinsically linked.
So what I'm not saying is that people shouldn't be striving for the truth.
But what I am saying is that I think we can all do a little better at treating one another a little better, at not presuming bad intent, at not assuming negative connotations at every juncture.
That is what the left wants.
They want us fighting amongst each other.
They want us tearing chunks out of one another.
If anything in the last sort of eight to 12 years in this world has taught us, it's actually, in addition to the left not being able to meme, the left can't actually win without us letting them win, without us tearing ourselves apart.
And those are some of the things that I think we need to reconcile and we need to avoid in the new year.
This is the perfect time to start thinking about it.
Between today, Boxing Day and New Year's Day, we've got some time to prey on this stuff and to make sure that when we go into next year, with incredibly important midterms ahead of us and incredibly important presidential elections within just a couple of years of that, that you're going to have to once again put your shoulder to the wheel.
Just when you thought you were out, we will indeed be pulling you back in.
And one of the things that I wanted to close this show out on, I haven't spoken directly to the camera explicitly for this show a lot over the last two hours.
But one of the things I wanted to mention to you is when you see us building things, and whether it's institutions, spaces, events, news, websites, membership things where people can come together, communities, when you see us building those things, you know, when the left wants to do something like that, they have big corporations who throw in hundreds of millions,
if not billions of dollars, in behind them.
The Reed Hoffmans of the world, the George Soroses of the world, the CNNs of the world.
I'm talking about billions upon billions upon billions.
And while there are conservatives who are very wealthy and who support conservative institutions, mine in particular, I'll especially talk about the National Pulse.
You know, we from the outset took a decision for that website to be crowdfunded because strings come attached to big checks.
Always has been the case, always will be the case.
This is my experience over the last two decades.
And so when we relaunched the NationalPulse.com a couple of years ago, and I still think it is one of the best resources out there.
And I don't say that about any of my work on there.
The team over there, Jack Montgomery, Will Upton, Chris Tomlinson, Ann Lootie, the whole team that keep that place running all day, every day, with all the latest breaking news in formats that are easily digestible.
They do just an amazing job, but we are 100% crowdfunded.
And what I'll say is this.
If you take something like Wikipedia as an example, they do a big fundraising drive every year and they make tens of millions of dollars over the course of two or three days.
Well, we don't run off budgets like that.
We run off very small budgets, but it is up to people like you at home watching this to chip in and get involved.
And so if you join up now at thenationalpulse.com forward slash warham, that's the nationalpulse.com forward slash warm, it's $9 a month.
I mean, it is less than most of your Netflix or NBCs or ESPNs or any of those subscriptions out there.
It helps underwrite the site, the staff, the server costs.
Believe it or not, we get a lot of DDoS attacks, especially from China.
where we do a lot of reporting on the Chinese Communist Party and they don't like that.
So that's all on our backs and that's why I have particularly high blood pressure.
So I'm asking for your support at the moment, thenationalpulse.com forward slash warroom, $9 a month.
Or if you don't want to do that, if you don't want to, and there are discounts if you do annually, by the way, too, but if you don't want to do that, you can also just do a one-off donation at thenationalpulse.com forward slash donate.
And every penny, every dollar counts.
I don't do asks like this very often.
I think probably once a year on this show, on the Boxing Day special is when I do these asks in particular.
But at this point in time, I will be quite honest with you, we desperately need it.
After President Trump won, a lot of people dropped off.
A lot of people have stopped paying attention.
A lot of people think that we don't need to keep fighting these fights.
You know, we're in power now.
Why do I need to keep donating to these sites?
And that is a particularly wrong-headed way of looking at these things because especially in American politics, the election cycles, as well as the news cycles, are constant, are consistent.
And we continuously need to be fighting the right fights and putting the right information out there.
And I'm grateful to all of you for all of your support, the donors and the members who have been involved from early days.
I cannot thank you enough.
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It's not going to cost you anything to look at it.
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So it's been a pleasure for me to put this episode for you together.
I hope you subscribe at YouTube, Raheem Kassam, Raheem Kassam on all the social media platforms, the Nat Pulse and The National Pulse on all social media platforms.
And of course, make sure you support Stephen K. Bannon and the War Room all day, every day.