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|---|---|---|
| So we're lowering that to 3,000. | ||
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unidentified
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Okay. | |
| And we're also targeting the two counties here. | ||
| And we're going to do enhanced surveillance. | ||
| And from now on, anyone who wires money out from one of these money service businesses has to check a box saying whether they are on public assistance. | ||
| And if you are on public assistance, we are going to start pushing that you cannot wire money out of the country. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, gosh. | |
| And what if they lie and they don't tell us what assistance? | ||
| Well, then we're going to follow it up and we are going to push that you can no longer do that. | ||
| The American people, our generosity, has been taken advantage of. | ||
|
unidentified
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Our generosity is funding al-Shabaab and Iranian interests. | |
| It could be. | ||
| Well, the money. | ||
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unidentified
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This is really bad. | |
| The money is supposed to go for alleged asylum seekers and their families and children. | ||
| And if you are wiring the money out of the country, one of two things must be true. | ||
| You are getting too much money and your benefits should be cut, or you are part of this conspiracy. | ||
| Where did that money come from? | ||
| We're going to find it out. | ||
| That's what Treasury does. | ||
| IRS has a group called Criminal Investigations. | ||
| President Trump is committed to restoring accountability to put Minnesota back on the right track. | ||
| Under President Trump's leadership, the entire administration is focused on delivering results for the American people. | ||
| Our citizens have a right to know that their tax dollars are not being diverted to fund acts of global terror or to fund luxury cars for fraudsters. | ||
| Democratic Governor Tim Waltz has allowed welfare programs and fraud to spiral out of control. | ||
| Out of control, billions of dollars intended for hungry children, housing for disabled seniors, and services for children with special needs were diverted to people who cheated the system, some of whom are not even American citizens. | ||
| At Treasury, we are thoroughly investigating the fraud, including funds sent to Somalia through money service businesses, which provide financial services outside of a formal bank. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| You're going to not get a free shot 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 lie? | ||
| 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. | ||
| here's your host steven k man saturday 10 january year of our lord 2026 We're going to get to in a moment what is happening in Minneapolis, also Grapevine, Texas. | ||
| This amazing conference we had yesterday topped off by Gert Vilders, Glenn Beck, and myself, Grant Stinchfield, and others about the Islamization of Texas. | ||
| We're going to get to all that in a moment and also talk to you about the launch of War Room Texas on Monday. | ||
| But first, the Secretary of Treasury joins us. | ||
| You know, I talked about last night in my speech in Grapevine, the tale of three cities: Tehran, Minneapolis, and Grapevine, Texas. | ||
| But, Scott, with you, Mr. Secretary, it's really two tales of one city. | ||
| We had you there, and we covered this wall to wall. | ||
| Your amazing speech, I think, to the Economic Club to talk about the economy. | ||
| Then you toured various factories. | ||
| You had roundtables. | ||
| You stayed there for two days. | ||
| You had the great Laura Ingram out there with you, incredible interview, and Laura showing enormous bravery, you know, dealing with that mob out there. | ||
| But can you just give me your assessment? | ||
| And right there at the end, spontaneous combustion in a restaurant where the good citizens of Minneapolis, I think, are telling us, hey, this is the guy that's Trump's guy on the economy, and we're kind of liking what we're seeing. | ||
| And I don't remember, I think the first time in the history of the Republic, maybe it happened to Hamilton back at the beginning. | ||
| I don't remember anybody in any audience or just customers, basic Americans, decent Americans breaking out in USA chants when a Secretary of Treasury walks into a restaurant. | ||
| Just tell us the two tales of one city, because we saw following you one, and then we had the Besobics out there and Julio and others with these riots. | ||
| And then last night couldn't have gotten more dangerous. | ||
| A thousand Antifa surrounded the Hilton, broke into the hotel. | ||
| I mean, really kind of potentially wanted to hold the ICE agents hostage. | ||
| Your thoughts, sir? | ||
| Steve, good morning. | ||
| Good to be with you. | ||
| And look, what we're seeing out here is what's going on in larger America. | ||
| It's a tale of two Americas. | ||
| We've got people who gather for college football every Saturday, go to church on Sunday, and then we've got these protesters who have nothing to do except attack ICE agents, whether it's in Portland or Minneapolis. | ||
| And I can tell you there is this big, silent majority, big, silent majority. | ||
| When I was in Maynard's restaurant on Lake Wazetta or Lake Minnetonka, and spontaneous combustion, people started chanting USA. | ||
| And that wasn't for Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary. | ||
| That is for the MAGA movement. | ||
| That is for the Trump presidency. | ||
| They love what's happening. | ||
| They see that the economy is getting better. | ||
| They see that President Trump has saved this country and they like his policies. | ||
| He secured the border. | ||
| He's made free trade, fair trade. | ||
| And now this year we are going to see the economic benefits. | ||
| And it couldn't be different. | ||
| Minnesota NICE was taken advantage of. | ||
| My sense is that the people of Minnesota, having been very generous, are now feeling abused and used, and they want answers. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, I noticed in the time I've known you as a friend, you've been a colleague and a contributor here, known you for years, and then going to be Treasury Secretary, running this huge hedge fund. | ||
| I want to go through what message did you tell the business leaders and the companies, and you're a listener. | ||
| What feedback did you get from the business community of Minneapolis and the different entrepreneurs you went around and saw? | ||
| What feedback did you get? | ||
| Any mid-course guidance, any recommendations? | ||
| What did the folks out in Minnesota tell you? | ||
| Well, folks out of Minnesota, the business people here, we are in the great American industrial heartland, and it's the exact kind of businesses that President Trump is trying to bring back. | ||
| There are gigantic family-owned businesses here, and Tim Waltz and almost a generation of Democratic politicians have taken advantage of the fact that these folks are not mobile, that their families have been here maybe multi-generational, maybe they moved here in the 70s, 80s, 90s. | ||
| Up until the early 2000s, Minnesota was business-friendly. | ||
| Now it has the second highest corporate tax rate in America. | ||
| They are feeling besieged, and they think that the government isn't on their side. | ||
| I was at a very large home products factory, a factory called Cambria, and the owner there could not have been more grateful for the tariffs. | ||
| And he said there's still more to do on trade. | ||
| That if we could bring his Southeast Asian competitors into Fair Trade, that he could have three to four more factories the size of his to supply the U.S. building industry. | ||
| But he says that whether it's Chinese, the Indians, the other Southeast Asian competitors keep copying his products and trying to undercut him. | ||
| And President Trump has helped save his company and save, I believe it's 1,800 jobs here. | ||
| So we're hearing the same thing from everyone. | ||
| They love the one big, beautiful bill. | ||
| The expensing, 100% expensing provision has made new investment possible. | ||
| I was at Winnebago, and I guess they are very innovative. | ||
| They are trying to design what their customers want. | ||
| A lot of that has to do with batteries, and they've undertaken a big battery initiative, research development center down in Florida, and they would not have done it without the President's 100% immediate expensing that was in the July 4th bill. | ||
| So we've just got to sit back. | ||
| The manufacturing renaissance is beginning. | ||
| I saw, I did a roundtable with community banks. | ||
| I saw the largest bank out here, U.S. Bank Corp. | ||
| And they said, contrary to the New York Times and even the Wall Street Journal this morning, that their clients all up and down the economic chain are in excellent shape. | ||
| Consumers are spending. | ||
| So this narrative that the job market is tough and that people are pinched. | ||
| They've never seen it before if the consumer is spending like this. | ||
| What is the Wall Street Journal seems to are they looking at a different set of numbers because they've been consistently, I think, negative on everything that's happening. | ||
| I mean, I look at the math and I come to a very different conclusion. | ||
| They look at, I think, the same math that you and I look at. | ||
| They come to a different conclusion. | ||
| How do you reconcile that? | ||
| Look, Steve, that any data set is an average or median, a central tendency, and there can be outliers in the data. | ||
| They just immediately gravitate to this doomsday scenario because the Wall Street Journal editorial board can't stand the president's policies. | ||
| A bunch of grumpy old men over there do not want to admit that they have been fantastically wrong. | ||
| Everything that they have stood for is crumbling, that they created this terrible trade situation. | ||
| I mean, look, Steve, in October, we had the best trade number, the smallest trade deficit since 2009. | ||
| I've been in the investment business 35, 40 years. | ||
| When I first started, 1980s, 1990s, trade used to contribute to GDP. | ||
| But then we got to these massive trade deficits, and as Ross Perot said, it was a giant sucking sound. | ||
| So everyone was, oh my gosh, it was unexpected that the GDP was so strong in October. | ||
| It was strong because of exports. | ||
| And again, what's not going reported anywhere is that the trade deals that President Trump has done, and Jameson Greer has negotiated the details in a magnificent way, magnificent way, is the headline is always the tariff. | ||
| The U.S. has put a 15% tariff on Europe, 15% tariff on Japan, 18%, 19, 20% on Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam. | ||
| The other side of that ledger, Steve, is why we saw that big GDP number, because Jameson is going in with a machete. | ||
| And with President Trump's backing and insistence, our trading partners are taking down their high tariffs down to zero. | ||
| They're removing the non-tariff trade barriers. | ||
| And that's why we're seeing this export flow pick up. | ||
| And nobody wants to talk about that. | ||
| The other thing, too, is, as I've said many times, that the Trump economic, and I want you to read. | ||
| They had exports up 30%, imports down 30%. | ||
| Smallest trade deficit we've had in decades. | ||
| And the Financial Times of London and the Wall Street Journal will just not take that basic number and just address it. | ||
| Also, the tariffs, there's been no data at all to show there's been any price increases. | ||
| Joe Lovarney said, your guy over at Treasury, we're about to have a disinflationary boom, which is extraordinary. | ||
| I tell you, Scott, hang on for one second, Mr. Secretary. | ||
| We're going to go to commercial break to pay a few bills here. | ||
| The Trump economic plan, which is a combination of the supply-side tax cut to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, coupled with the reorganization of commercial relationships globally from the post-war economic rules-based order, | ||
| which only ripped off workers and the American citizens, that now the tariffs as a forcing function, remember, either going to force you to bring manufacturing jobs back here. | ||
| Remember, we had the Secretary on, I think, about a month ago, right before the Christmas holidays. | ||
| He was in South Carolina. | ||
| I believe a Germans had put in some advanced technology. | ||
| I think it was in magnets, right? | ||
| That's what the tariffs were. | ||
| And now you see that exports are up 30%. | ||
| Imports are down 30%. | ||
| There's no discernible inflation through the tariff numbers. | ||
| What's not to love? | ||
| This is the execution of the plan. | ||
| And this is why the doom and gloomers at the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times of London, the business section of the New York Times, Bloomberg. | ||
| I'm just picking some random examples. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to return to the war room and the Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant on some basic math of the Trump economic revolution. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Mr. Secretary, you were on a roll there about what the trade policy has done in combination. | ||
| I mean, that's the pincer move. | ||
| You got the commercial relationships, the trade policies. | ||
| What's blown me away is, first off, just the history of it, then the first term, how difficult it was because these things are so complicated. | ||
| They're such scale, and they've gone through so many different operations, and the government have to sign off on it. | ||
| I don't think people quite appreciate the urgency you people had to actually start to get trade deals in place in six months and actually start to see the benefit of normally these things take years. | ||
| It took years to negotiate previous trade deals with Korea and Japan and others. | ||
| You guys are doing them in six, seven, eight months and having them going to immediate impact and then monitoring it. | ||
| And you're seeing not just capital markets respond, but also corporations respond, sir. | ||
| Steve, President Trump's economic agenda is a three-legged stool that I've talked about quite a bit before. | ||
| So, the first is trade, we've talked about that. | ||
| Trade deals are on track, successful, percolating along. | ||
| Tax policy, another leg of the stool. | ||
| One big, beautiful bill. | ||
| No one said it could be done. | ||
| It was done by July 4th. | ||
| With President Trump's leadership and Mike Speaker Johnson, Leader Thun pushing both bodies of Congress to get that done. | ||
| So, check. | ||
| And then, three, the unheralded part or the third leg of the stool is deregulation and deregulation against all parts of the economy. | ||
| Because when I'm out here in Minnesota, these folks like making things. | ||
| Like, this is a manufacturing hub. | ||
| They are great at it. | ||
| They innovate, they build, and that's what they want to do. | ||
| And with the deregulation, I think one of the surprises for me coming into government was how hard we had made it in the U.S. to build things. | ||
| Like, forget the unfair trade. | ||
| The EPA had just chased everyone out of the country in terms of the manufacturing. | ||
| So, yes, it was cheaper to build in China or India, Mexico, but you just couldn't build here. | ||
| And President Trump, Lee Zeldin at the EPA, is knocking down those barriers. | ||
| At Treasury, we have cut back on unnecessary financial regulations. | ||
| We're going to keep things safe and sound. | ||
| But Oliver Wyman estimates that our moves in deep financial deregulation have increased the ability for banks to lend by $2.5 trillion to the U.S. economy. | ||
| And then energy deregulation in terms of what we're doing. | ||
| We've got to power this boom that we're seeing in the economy. | ||
| Steve, right now, if you take the Atlanta Fed GDP now and the inflation numbers, we have 8% nominal growth, 8% nominal growth. | ||
| We're holding spending flat, and we are going to grow our way out of this debt problem. | ||
| The unheralded thing that happened last year was we'll see where the final calendar year number settles, but the U.S. deficit for calendar year 2025 is going to be between $250 billion and $500 billion lower. | ||
| So between approximately 1% of GDP and 1.5% of GDP, and that's with high GDP numbers. | ||
| So the third quarter GDP that surprised everyone was 4.3%. | ||
| The private sector GDP was 4.7 or 4.8%. | ||
| We cut government spending, so we had a contraction in the government. | ||
| And the private sector boom is powering this thing. | ||
| It really is kicking in. | ||
| And I think 2026 is going to be even better because I'm also the IRS commissioner. | ||
| So I can see the tax refunds that are waiting to go out to Americans. | ||
| One of the things I announced at the Economic Club of Minneapolis was we're starting the tax filing season about the earliest we've done in a decade, January 26. | ||
| And these refunds to working Americans, because of the President's signature policies, no tax and tips, no tax and overtime, no tax on Social Security, auto-deductibility of American-made cars, is going to result in over $100 billion, maybe $150 billion of tax refunds going to working Americans in the first quarter. | ||
| Americans will change their withholding schedule and they will get an automatic bump in their take-home pay. | ||
| So I am very optimistic that we are going to have substantial non-inflationary growth. | ||
| As Joe Livorne says, for 2026 I noticed the President is taking a pretty strong populist drive in the last couple of weeks. | ||
| I mean, he is a populist, but going after, talk to me about it, it looks like the private equity guys no longer try to block them from buying homes, getting into the real estate market, maybe I think condos and apartments, maybe also. | ||
| Yesterday he said he's going to limit credit cards to 10 percent. | ||
| He had the oil companies there, but talk about Venezuela, but he's also hammering them, jawboning them about full-spectrum energy dominance. | ||
| He wants the price of energy even to come down more. | ||
| Talk to me about these things that are happening right now that President Trump's directly going after the affordability issue. | ||
| Yeah, look, he wants corporate America to get on board with the American people. | ||
| And think about what's happening in Venezuela. | ||
| We'll see what happens in Iran. | ||
| And he had mostly big oil in, but I can tell you that I've been part of the talks. | ||
| Private oil companies, the Wildcatters, and these are substantial individuals. | ||
| They are chomping at the bit to get in. | ||
| And CEO of Exxon came out and said, well, we need to see substantial change in Venezuela before we can do much. | ||
| There is substantial change in Venezuela, and you've got to live in the future. | ||
| Because what will happen, just like with fracking, just like with fracking, that the individuals come in, they make billions of dollars, and then they sell on to the oil majors. | ||
| So I think this narrative that the big oil won't be involved, these wildcatters are big oil. | ||
| And then Chevron, who has been a fantastic partner over the years in dealing with Venezuela, with the sanctions, they've really managed a difficult regime really well, is going to do more. | ||
| So my sense is that Chevron will have the lead there. | ||
| And then these other initiatives, of course, private equity should not be buying single-family homes. | ||
| They have a huge tax advantage over individual buyers. | ||
| And everyone says, well, it's not that much of the market. | ||
| I've been in markets 30 or 40 years, and markets are made by the marginal buyer. | ||
| And many of the real estate markets that have seen the most inflation, whether it's Atlanta, Phoenix, a lot of those Southeast markets and Western markets are where private equity is most prevalent. | ||
| So we're not going to make them divest. | ||
| We don't want to cause a dramatic price decrease, but we want to make it fair for everyday Americans, and we don't want there to be a tax arbitrage between corporate buyers and homeowners. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, by the way, you're correct. | ||
| Harold Hamm was saying, hey, let me end the country and I'll show you. | ||
| I'll go find you some good cheap old Venezuela. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, about this debacle in Minneapolis, I think is spread all over the country. | ||
| This thing about the fraud, the scams, really paying for the left, but you know, these immigrants or migrants, whatever you want to call them, shouldn't be on the government dole, but they are stealing like crazy, shipping hundreds of millions of dollars out. | ||
| I know the president, you have talked about that a lot. | ||
| You're kind of the enforcer. | ||
| Can you give us your overview of what you at Treasury are going to do, sir? | ||
| Steve, Treasury's job is to follow the money. | ||
| And we've done it for centuries. | ||
| And in the 20th century and coming into the 21st century, we've taken down the mafia. | ||
| We are in the process of dissecting and taking apart the Mexican drug cartels, following their money. | ||
| And now we are taking a very bright light to these Somali fraudsters. | ||
| And we will follow the money. | ||
| We will know how this happened. | ||
| We will know where it went. | ||
| We will know that if al-Shabaab was a recipient. | ||
| So, and we've taken several measures. | ||
| One, we are putting in a geographic targeting order for the Hennepin and Ramsey counties, Minneapolis-St. Paul's, where these Somalians live. | ||
| A lot of the money goes out through what are called MSBs, money service businesses. | ||
| They get wire transferred out. | ||
| So, what we've done, we are taking the suspicious activity threshold down from $10,000 to $3,000. | ||
| And, Steve, the important thing now: you have to check a box if you are wiring money out of the country on whether you are on public assistance or not. | ||
| Because if you are wiring money out of the country and you're on public assistance, one of two things must be true: your benefits are too high because the generous people of Minnesota are giving you those benefits for you and your family. | ||
| They are not giving them to your uncle in Mogadishu. | ||
| So, either the benefits are too high or you are part of this nest of fraud. | ||
| And neither is a good look. | ||
| But we are going to trace all of these LLCs and where the money is. | ||
| Someone put it very, very well yesterday, said that the care payments have become a big business. | ||
| It is a cottage industry out here teaching people how to form LLCs. | ||
| They're skimming money at every point. | ||
| And make no mistake, the Democratic establishment, best case, they turned a blind eye. | ||
| Medium case, they enable it. | ||
| And worst case, we are going to find that they are recipients. | ||
| And, Steve, Minnesota is going to be the genesis for the protocols that we use nationwide. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, where did they go on social media to keep up with you and your activity, sir? | ||
| They can go on to my Treasury X account at the Secretary, U.S. Treasury, and we're going to be posting a lot of our findings on there. | ||
| Mr. Secretary, thank you for kicking off the weekend by Jordan War. | ||
| Appreciate you, sir. | ||
| Fight on. | ||
| Godspeed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good. | |
| Good short break. | ||
|
unidentified
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Back in a moment. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Van. | ||
| Okay, we're going to get to Texas momentarily in Minneapolis, Tehran, all of it. | ||
| But I want to, I got John Gardner on here. | ||
| John, it was a, and you represent, you've got this organization about small manufacturing. | ||
| You're talking about a small manufacturing renaissance in this country. | ||
| You've been part of the Peter Navarre, let's say, mindset on bringing manufacturing or rejuvenating manufacturing here in the United States. | ||
| It was a year ago, tomorrow, that you approached us. | ||
| You had the great idea of the external revenue service. | ||
| Now, the president has had that designated. | ||
| They're working on it over at Treasury. | ||
| And the president's talking about a trillion dollars coming in on tariffs. | ||
| You think you've had a pretty good first year, sir? | ||
| Yeah, I think we've had a great year, especially, you know, the business media casts a light that, oh, we have $2.2 trillion paid in income tax, and that's too much to replace. | ||
| However, the thing that stands out to me is that $600 billion by 2022 numbers is what 90% of the lower income taxpayers pay in America. | ||
| Imagine replacing 90% of the income tax that Americans pay. | ||
| How much that would help the working families and the middle class? | ||
| And I'm with you, Steve. | ||
| I think you've called for, hey, taxes on millionaires are okay, but let's help the working class and the people trying, you know, where an extra 500 bucks a month really gets them a lot farther. | ||
| And we can replace 600 billion of that easily. | ||
| And, you know, I want to remind the president here, he posted this on Truth last year where he said he was creating the External Revenue Service on January 20th, 2025, and that for far too long, we have taxed our great people using the internal revenue service. | ||
| And he's really trying to steer America back to the original vision the Founding Fathers had. | ||
| The Founding Fathers never intended for the citizen to be an indentured servant to the government. | ||
| And they proved this. | ||
| Income tax was never a conversation with the Founding Fathers ever. | ||
| The very first legislative act they passed was the Tariff Act, and they passed on July 4th, which had a lot of meaning for the Founding Fathers, Independence Day. | ||
| And that first major piece of legislation said, whereas it is necessary for the support of the government for the discharge of the debts of the United States and encouragement and protection of manufacturers that duties be laid on goods, wares, and merchandise imported. | ||
| So they never had a plan to punish the citizen and garnish their wages. | ||
| And I want to ask the audience who may believe in, you know, be anti-tariff. | ||
| What is a truly more limited government? | ||
| What provides more personal liberty to the citizen? | ||
| It's been pitched to the American people that when you go to the store and you can choose from ChiCom products or products from India and you don't pay a tariff, that's more personal liberty and you have more freedom of choice. | ||
| But I say, and President Trump is going to say and prove that you have more freedom of choice when you can choose, hey, I'm going to buy a foreign good and I choose to be taxed or I'm going to buy an American-made good and choose not to be taxed and not pay income tax. | ||
| That is a truly more limited government when we remove income tax on the citizen and we pay our bills with external revenue. | ||
| And, you know, what is more freedom of choice? | ||
| Buying something and saying, I choose to be taxed or buying an American-made good and saying, I choose not to be taxed and not have income tax. | ||
| And so that's why I believe external revenue and tariffs actually are more limited government and they actually are more personal liberty for the citizen. | ||
| And on the note of personal liberty, the 16th Amendment, which created income tax, has no boundaries on it. | ||
| The 18th Amendment was passed prohibiting alcohol or and we repealed it. | ||
| And the main reason we repealed the prohibition on alcohol was because personal liberty. | ||
| And I think it's time we start to look at putting some parameters on the 16th Amendment and its intrusion in the citizen's life. | ||
| And I think, you know, what fascinates me the most, Steve, is how did we get, you know, Andrew Breitbart said politics are downstream of culture. | ||
| And how did we get to the point in America where, you know, this is a 1919 ad from a toy maker. | ||
| And he says, for your country's sake, buy American-made toys, be a partner of Uncle Sam of all American industries. | ||
| See that your money is helping American grow. | ||
| Buying format toys won't do it. | ||
| That way, your money goes overseas and doesn't come back. | ||
| By insisting on American-made toys, your money stays here, every bit of it, to work for your own country and for you. | ||
| But now we're at the point in the business culture that we have a toy maker suing the president and his administration because of the tariffs. | ||
| And now it's in front of the Supreme Court. | ||
| Where is the patriotic and moral fiber of the business culture in our America? | ||
| And I believe it was eroded with this embrace of unilateral free trade. | ||
| Now, I believe in free trade within the borders of our nation, unilateral free trade. | ||
| And I will, it means that no matter what another country does to us, no matter how much they tariff us, no matter how much they steal our intellectual property, we do nothing. | ||
| And this was advocated for. | ||
| And this is where the cultural disconnect, and we need the next generation, the turning points and the Prager Hughes and all the next generation to get this cultural shift away from tariffs are bad. | ||
| And let there be no doubt that Milton Freeman, when he called for no tariffs, he called for no unilateral tariffs. | ||
| He says, this is capitalism freedom, page 88. | ||
| I believe it would be far better for us to move to free trade unilaterally. | ||
| And he went on and on about no matter what another nation does, but he didn't calculate what is the true cost of unilateral free trade. | ||
| He didn't calculate the cost of national security, the cost of intellectual property theft with communist China, which is the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of civilization, the cost of our cities dying, the mecca of industry dying and having the societal costs of paying for homeless people and paying for drug rehab clinics. | ||
| Those were not factored in the cost of supply chain issues. | ||
| And so I think that we need to change our definition of free trade and unilateral free trade to America first free trade and America first capitalism. | ||
| In my book, I define America first capitalism as a production-based economy protected by a wall of tariffs accompanied by free trade only within our borders. | ||
| And the last note, because I don't want to go on too much, is, you know, free trade really erodes the freedoms that capitalism builds. | ||
| Unilateral free trade does. | ||
| So much so, in fact, that Karl Marx encouraged free trade. | ||
| In his 1848 speech on free trade, Karl Marx said, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. | ||
| It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade. | ||
| Free trade breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeois to the extreme point. | ||
| Is that not what's happening in America today? | ||
| And under free trade, the whole class of small manufacturers is ruined and thrown into the ranks of the working class. | ||
| This is a direct quote from Karl Marx. | ||
| This is all happening in America today. | ||
| And, you know, no one who cares about America should desire the ruin of the whole class of small manufacturers. | ||
| So people who side with unilateral free trade are siding with Karl Marx because he thought free trade would hasten the fall of capitalism. | ||
| So I'm really excited to see how President Trump's steering us more in alignment with the founding fathers' vision for America and away from the economist dogma that has really, you know, we got 30% export growth, 30% import drop, smallest trade deficit we've had. | ||
| The big guys are on board. | ||
| How are we going to revolutionize for the small? | ||
| What I love about you is your renaissance of American industry and manufacturing through, I think, people that have factories with 50 employees or less manufacturers, the way the country used to be in these little job shops. | ||
| How do we rejuvenate that? | ||
| Well, the numbers are 90% of American manufacturing companies are 50 employees or less. | ||
| 75% are 20 employees or less. | ||
| And this is the one that always gets me. | ||
| 48% of American manufacturers are five employees or less. | ||
| And that's really, you know, President Trump just kind of said no dividends and no CEO pay for the big primes because he wants them to speed up their production. | ||
| And that's great. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| But where the bottleneck is in the supply chain is with the small manufacturers, because they're the tier two, three, and four suppliers that the big companies rely on. | ||
| The big companies, a big factory doesn't, they don't make everything. | ||
| They don't make all the inputs that go into their stuff. | ||
| And so, you know, Secretary Hegsteth was just out here touring the big factories in El Segundo and around. | ||
| And there doesn't seem to be an understanding of what the small manufacturers need and that they are the true engine of production in America. | ||
| And, you know, what we need is access to capital. | ||
| You know, the SBA, I'm sorry to say, I don't like to say negative things, but they really haven't done much for the manufacturers. | ||
| They increased the line that you can get from 5 million to 10 million, which a lot of guys that are five and 20-man shops don't need. | ||
| They waived fees if you're in a certain NACE code for borrowing. | ||
| Big deal. | ||
| It's 10, 20 grand amortized over 25 years. | ||
| And they have this new loan, the MARC loan, which basically just has manufacturing in the title. | ||
| It's the same as a former cap line loan. | ||
| And here's the biggest thing. | ||
| It needs lender adoption. | ||
| That's the biggest thing. | ||
| The SBA can do everything they want, but lenders need to adopt, agree to lend like this. | ||
| And first, it needs to pass Congress. | ||
| So we're looking at a year or two out. | ||
| That's going to be three quarters of the way through the administration. | ||
| We need to do something now to get capital to the smaller manufacturers. | ||
| And some of the policies have, you know, we need to build refining capability here in America because material prices are going through the roof for the manufacturer. | ||
| And I know for a fact from a lot of my guys, it's limiting hiring within industry. | ||
| You know, manufacturing employment's going down. | ||
| Manufacturing industry itself has been in contraction for the last 10 months. | ||
| I'm sad to say, I think a lot of, I think, listen, President Trump is doing his job. | ||
| He's building, he's getting us cheap energy. | ||
| He's out there getting rare earth deals. | ||
| He's getting the foundational building blocks for a manufacturing economy in place. | ||
| He's only one guy. | ||
| He can only do so much. | ||
| The rest of the administration needs to follow his mandate and really understand that if we want to get manufacturing going, it's the smaller guys. | ||
| But, you know, President Trump is the man as a person is doing his job. | ||
| He can't do anymore. | ||
| But I think there's a, I mean, how many voices in the administration are for small manufacturers? | ||
| I mean, you know, how many of them have owned small manufacturing companies? | ||
| Not C-suite John Deere guys. | ||
| And they don't listen. | ||
| You know, me and friends try to approach an administration and there's one quote. | ||
| I don't want to sell out a friend, but basically a friend of mine who has a critical aspect of American manufacturing, critical, critical, was told, you know, loans from the government to his facility were communist. | ||
| So there, again, it's the free trade idea. | ||
| The government shouldn't pick winners and losers when it comes to industry, but it's okay to pick winners and losers with farmers. | ||
| It's okay to give Argentina $20 billion. | ||
| It's OK to give other countries foreign aid, but, hey, we got to we got to be careful when we're helping manufacturers because we don't want to look like communists, which most other countries subsidize their manufacturing industry. | ||
| So I don't know if that answers your question, Steve, but, you know, we really need the administration to start listening to us and some of the things that we're saying. | ||
| John, where can people go and get more information on on everything you're talking about? | ||
| People are quite interested in the public. | ||
| What's that topic, particularly the rejuvenation of small manufacturing? | ||
| Where do they go? | ||
| JohnGardnerAuthor.com and on X, Getter, and Instagram, John Gardner VOH. | ||
| And my new website's John Gardner. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Thanks for having me on. | ||
| This is John Gardner. | ||
| Hold up. | ||
| What's the new website? | ||
| I want people to go to it and check it out. | ||
| JohnGardnerAuthor.com. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| Great work. | ||
| The rejuvenation, the next phase is the rejuvenation of small manufacturing. | ||
| Like John said, what is it? | ||
| 90% of manufacturers in this country are under 50 employees. | ||
| Just absolutely incredible. | ||
| Birch gold, a lot of turbulence. | ||
| Gold near an all-time high, silver near an all-time high. | ||
| It ain't the price. | ||
| It's the process of how it got there, particularly over the last couple of years. | ||
| You need to understand the centrality of the dollar as the prime reserve currency in your life. | ||
| So check it out. | ||
| Birchgold.com, promo code abandon the end of the dollar empire. | ||
| It gives you direct access to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| Make sure you go talk to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| They can tell you all the different ways you can get into gold. | ||
| Physical gold with, I don't know, IRAs, 401ks, all of it. | ||
| Most importantly, they will teach you why gold has been a hedge against times of financial turbulence for thousands of years. | ||
| Why is gold gold? | ||
| They'll teach you. | ||
| Trust the process. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to turn in the world. | ||
| We're going to Texas. | ||
| Next. | ||
| Amazing, amazing event yesterday. | ||
| Got a bunch of Texans here to talk about it. | ||
|
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next here's your host stephen k band Brian Harrison joins us. | |
| So, Brian, we had this event. | ||
| We're going to play clips at the top there. | ||
| I want to thank Real America's Voice, Patreon Mobile, everybody that put this on from Grant Stinchfield to everybody, Americans of Freedom, American Freedom Alliance, Karen. | ||
| But, you know, there's a primary on the third. | ||
| There's this proposition on the ballot, ban Sharia law from Texas. | ||
| However, I thought Sharia law was already banned, and I thought the Muslim Brotherhood and CARE have already been designated as terrorist organizations. | ||
| So what's the hubbub, Bub? | ||
| Well, you got it half right. | ||
| You know, the governor, Governor Abbott, very correctly did designate CARE and the Muslim Brotherhood as terror organizations. | ||
| That's the correct thing to do. | ||
| I'm grateful he did it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| As to the, you would be forgiven for thinking that Texas has banned Sharia law because there has been no shortage of gaslighting coming out of the Austin Establishment Unit Party for a long time, putting out public proclamations that Texas has banned Sharia law. | ||
| The only problem with this is that I'm in the legislature. | ||
| I know the laws we have and that we vote on. | ||
| And yeah, there is no such law that has been voted on really at all. | ||
| And in fact, it gets worse. | ||
| You know, people talk about this Sharia compound down here that's going up, this Epic City. | ||
| And they brag that we passed a law to ban Epic City. | ||
| You know the problem with that, though, Steve? | ||
| In the law to quote, ban Epic City, there was an exception put into the law to exempt Epic City. | ||
| So yeah, so the problem is we've got a bunch of performative theater going on down here in the run-up to the primary. | ||
| And Texans don't want rhetoric. | ||
| They want results. | ||
| So if we're going to designate CARE and Muslim Brotherhood as terror organizations, which they should be, let's have some investigations. | ||
| Where are the arrests? | ||
| If we're going to say that the position of the Texas government is that we have banned Sharia law, the most important thing people might take away from this interview is that Texas hasn't banned Sharia law, but we could. | ||
| And so I actually think the Texas legislature, because the Texas people demand actions, not just rhetoric, we should start doing things right now. | ||
| We should do oversight. | ||
| We should have legislative hearings to help educate the Texans who may not understand the truth that we haven't banned Sharia law and the threat from Sharia law. | ||
| So we should have legislative hearings and we should start doing it right now. | ||
| We shouldn't wait a couple of years. | ||
| Texans deserve action and they deserve it now. | ||
| Let's go back to this. | ||
| This speaks to a larger problem. | ||
| And I want to pull the camera back just for a second because it's the same thing, the frustration, the MAGA base with Capitol Hill, what I call the Duma. | ||
| It's not a Congress anymore. | ||
| It's the Duma. | ||
| It's politics as performance art. | ||
| It's a do this is all it's all performance art. | ||
| And then it only doesn't change. | ||
| It actually gets worse because the theater kids have put up the performance and people say, hey, that's been taken care of. | ||
| They talked about that. | ||
| We did that. | ||
| Let's get on to a new problem, sir. | ||
| No, that's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, they do the absolute bare minimum that they think they have to do to get away with it because the only thing they care about, most elected officials, is their next reelection. | ||
| They don't care about the voters. | ||
| They forget about the voters the second they get elected. | ||
| And the problem, both in the U.S. Congress, by large, and then the Texas legislature, which by the way, still lets the radical leftist Marxist progressive Democrats completely control the Texas House of Representatives. | ||
| They still elect our speaker, the Democrats. | ||
| What they do is they've turned their backs on the people they're supposed to work for to embrace popularity, complacency, and comfort in the swamp. | ||
| And so they pass a bill that might have a good title or headline. | ||
| But the reality is the substance of the bill either doesn't do what it's supposed to do or it actually undermines the objective goal here. | ||
| And the reality is that the elected establishment and the Texas government for far too long has been telling the voters they're going to stand up to the radical leftists, but they've actually been empowering them. | ||
| And Texans have been lulled into a sense of complacency by many elected Republicans, assuring them that the problem is solved. | ||
| And mailers are going out all across the state of Texas right now, misinforming people, saying we have banned Sharia law and the gaslighting has got to stop. | ||
| And the only way we've been able to deliver real conservative victories, you and the posse know this better than anybody, is when we hold the establishment's feet to the fire. | ||
| Congress has made itself largely irrelevant and the Texas legislature has made itself largely irrelevant in the sense that we're not doing real oversight. | ||
| For example, we're still funding the lowest hanging fruit here. | ||
| We should stop funding radical violent Islamist organizations that have ties to terror-affiliated organizations that advocate the overthrow of the United States. | ||
| And unfortunately, we have tens of millions of dollars at least likely going to these organizations and we should stop doing things like that. | ||
| We need less theater, more action, more results, because the stakes couldn't be high. | ||
| The videos you're seeing coming out of what happened in London with the results of unchecked mass migration, that could absolutely happen here in Texas. | ||
| And the Austin swamp, they're trying to silence my voice. | ||
| They're trying to take me out in seven weeks. | ||
| They're trying to take out anybody who demands accountability and is able to go directly to the American people and the people of Texas, like the posse, like you do, Steve, and demand results, not just rhetoric. | ||
| And that's why we got to start doing more legislative oversight. | ||
| Legislative hearings, let's go. | ||
| Let's have special sessions. | ||
| There's no need to wait till next year to start debating something that maybe we'll do in two years. | ||
| Let's get action on Sharia law in 2026. | ||
| Texans do not need to be forced to wait two more years. | ||
| And quite frankly, Texas nor America can afford it. | ||
| Are you notifying the speaker right now? | ||
| I mean, how do we get the oversight? | ||
| The special session will come later, but how do you get the oversight immediately so you can have hearings that are public and the folks in Texas can see what people actually say when they're there in front of you guys? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| So yes, I will be formally submitting a request to the speaker. | ||
| And most of the time, people do this very quietly under the radar. | ||
| I don't intend to be quiet about this. | ||
| I intend to be very public that both the Texas House, where I serve, but also the Texas Senate could do this too. | ||
| The Texas legislature must get its head out of the sand. | ||
| And right now, in the next couple months, we need to start having very public, televised, public legislative oversight hearings on the threat posed from radical jihadists, on the threat from the massive expansion of Sharia law and possible Sharia compounds and no-go zones in the state of Texas. | ||
| So there's no reason that they should not do it. | ||
| And I'll tell you right now, Steve, I look forward to talking to you about this as we go forward because the only way that's going to happen, and I'm going to be as loud about this as I possibly can as an elected member of the Texas legislature, but the only way we're going to do this is the same way we knocked off the president of Texas A ⁇ M, ended the biggest DEI program, stopped illegals from registering vehicles. | ||
| It's if the grassroots, freedom-loving patriots and the posse melt the phone lines of the establishment under the corrupt pink dome in Austin and demand action. | ||
| But you know what, Steve? | ||
| We've had a lot of successes just in the last several months, and there's no reason we can't have some optimism that we can have some success here. | ||
| But the reality is we have to. | ||
| The future Western civilization is on the line, as you say all the time. | ||
| As goes Texas, so goes America, as goes America, so goes the world. | ||
| Texas is on the front line in the battle for the future and the next generation. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| 20 seconds. | ||
| Your social media feed. | ||
| Where do people go? | ||
| Please go at BrianE. Harrison on X, at BrianE. Harrison. | ||
| Please like, follow, share at Brian E. Harrison. | ||
| And then the swamp is trying to take me out in the primary. | ||
| So go to votebrianharrison.com and help out there. | ||
| VotebrianHarrison.com. | ||
| Always great to be with you, Steven. | ||
| And a great event last night, by the way. | ||
| Great job. |