Episode 5199: WarRoom Sunday Special War In Iran Continues Pt 2
Stephen K. Bannon and Rabbi PW Wallicki condemn Democrats as Marxists while advocating unconditional surrender for Iran amidst Israeli strikes on Hezbollah leadership. Captain Jim Finnell details U.S. disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, whereas Jack Posobiec highlights drone attrition against air defenses. The Texas Senate runoff features Caroline Wren attacking John Cornyn's "deep state" ties, while Brandon Weiker and Dr. Thayer reveal industrial missile bottlenecks and China's rare earth leverage. As Iranian cluster bombs saturate Israel's defenses and Houthis shift to the Red Sea, the conflict risks expanding into the Horn of Africa. Ultimately, China's internal purges and economic straits suggest they need Trump to avoid tariffs, turning resource chokeholds into a strategic bargaining chip despite CCP military instability. [Automatically generated summary]
Fat Trump, if you listen to this, you listen good, because what I'm getting ready to say is what a lot of people in this country speak for, who I speak for, and I speak for a lot of people.
You hear me, you fat ass.
This is what we believe.
You're right.
I got Trump derangement syndrome.
I hate the motherfucker.
And you know what?
I don't want to get rid of it.
I don't want to get better.
I want to get worse.
I want to hate him more.
I pray to God in heaven, God reign the righteous reign of Trump derangement syndrome on me.
Pray for me, Lord.
I'm your vessel on this earth.
Pray for the people that listen to this.
We want more.
We want to hate the son of a so much that we can't see straight.
They wanted the commander in chief to be elected by the entirety of the nation.
And they're even talking about impeaching him if they take the House of Representatives.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have an enemy within, and it is the Democrat Party.
Every reprobate, miscreant, and malcontent is in that party.
The Marxists and the Islamists are in that party.
Do they act like they love the nation?
Do they?
When we have men and women in uniform, Democrats and Republicans and independents, fighting an enemy, fighting terrorists, the greatest terror regime in American, in world history.
Well, I mean, the Lebanon situation has been an open soar since the official ceasefire.
And I say official ceasefire because it hasn't really been much of a ceasefire that was struck over a year ago.
And, you know, the Lebanese government had committed itself to disarming Hezbollah by the end of 2025.
And of course, they did nothing about it, not because they didn't want to, but they're actually incapable of disarming Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is a much stronger army, even in its weakened state, than the Lebanese army itself.
And there's also this Shiite population that would have resisted.
But now that Hezbollah made the tragic mistake, a mistake, frankly, I'll be perfectly frank, the Israelis were hoping they would make, of firing missiles at Israel in support of the Iranian regime.
They just invited the Israelis in to finish the job and disarm Hezbollah themselves.
So that's what the Israelis are doing now.
They're going in there, and the Lebanese are playing this funny game where they're no longer complaining about Israeli airstrikes as they used to.
It used to be when Hezbollah would attack Israel, Israel would attack Hezbollah positions, and then the Lebanese government would make noises about being upset about Israel attacking.
And now that's not happening.
You actually have even Shiites in the population, even the Amal party, which is a Shiite party that for decades has been the partner in the government with Hezbollah, which also functions as a political party.
Amal voted to declare Hezbollah illegal the other day.
So Hezbollah is now isolated in Lebanon.
Israel's going in to finish them off.
And I'll also say on a personal note, my son, who's a commander in the infantry in the Givati Brigade, told me that he's actually entering Lebanon any day now.
Well, talk about Israeli policy now because the ID, the Israeli Air Force delivered a hammer blow the other night to the command structure of, and it looks like they are focused on the command structure maybe more than the Americans.
It looks like ours, with Captain Finnell's degradation of the ability to actually fight either force projection on their people or force projection on their neighbors.
You're still, it looks like the Israeli Air Force is still very focused on leadership decapitation.
But this war is expanding not just in the Gulf with Persian versus Arab, it's also expanding in Syria and Lebanon and other areas, maybe even with the Kurds.
The Syrians themselves aren't, I mean, we're not going to be butting up against Ashara or anything like that.
But you do have the issue with the Kurds in Iraq is a sticky one.
I don't see Israel right now being involved in that, although they did bomb a few Iranian IRGC bases on the Iranian side of the Iraq-Iran border, trying to set the stage for a Kurdish incursion.
But there's no agreement between the Iranian Kurdish groups and the Iraqi Kurdish groups, who are both in Iraq.
If that's confusing, sorry, that's the way it is.
The Iranian Kurdish groups are based in Iraq, but they don't get along with the Iraqi Kurdish groups who are more aligned with the Iranian regime and Turkey.
This can get a little confusing, but the key arena that Israel is focusing in besides Iran is Lebanon.
Lebanon is on our northern border.
Steve, let's pull back the camera.
Israel's doctrine of defense changed after October 7th, and it is no longer based on an evaluation.
I've said this on your show before.
It's no longer based on an evaluation of our enemies' intentions.
And are they deterred?
Are they not deterred?
Can we make an agreement with them?
Can we appease them with some economic deal with the West?
It's no longer based on that.
It's simply based on an evaluation of capabilities.
And when there are regimes or groups that pledge openly that their goal is the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jewish people, as the Iranian regime does, as Hamas does, as Hezbollah does, so long as they have any capabilities to harm Israel, we will deal with those capabilities.
And I was listening to Sam Fattis before, and he's absolutely right.
The Israelis' goal is to eliminate the threat.
And the bottom line is: if you allow your country to be taken over by insane people who do crazy, reckless things, then FAFO, unfortunately, there is a price to pay.
And I'm with you on the Iranian people.
I'd love to see a healthy regime change.
But whatever comes after this regime, no matter how chaotic it is, from Israel's perspective, is not going to be as dangerous as the regime itself.
And therefore, Israel is going to protect itself and it's going to look after its own interests.
Do we want a regime that's more peaceful with us and that is stable?
But top of the agenda for Israel is simply eliminating threats wherever they may be.
And the threat from Lebanon with Hezbollah, it's been festering too long.
The Lebanese government has not been willing to do anything about it.
So Israel's stepping in and doing something.
And it seems that the Lebanese are actually in favor of Israel dealing with the problem once and for all, even though they're not being too vocal about it.
But just so we can be realist, though, in a lot of the Levant, you see all this propaganda coming out that we want a free and democratic Iran and Persia.
And President Trump continues to talk about the happy ending that is like World War II when we rebuilt Germany and supposedly denazified and we took out Imperial Japan, although we didn't make any changes structurally.
The same people that ran Japan in 1939 were essentially the same people that ran Japan in 1946, the samurai families that run the trading companies.
They ran it.
They put a little phony thing on a constitution and all that, but they ran it.
So we didn't really make fundamental changes in either nation.
But it was on the surface a happy ending.
Well, here, and I think Sam said it.
I don't care if Persia and Iran go into a 30-year hellhole.
I could care less.
They brought the Islamic Republic on.
We had the Shah, and maybe he didn't get there.
Maybe he wasn't democratically elected, but the country had a thriving middle class or at least was trying to do that.
Obviously, it was very Western, and that seems like it didn't assimilate into Persian culture.
But these people and their parents and grandparents brought it on.
They're going to have to.
And I would have loved to had a situation where just economically with Scott Besson who was destroying their currency and destroying the economy.
And now we know, and this is the hidden game that nobody talks about.
We never went to what UAE threatened the other day in Dubai, which was to cut off the money.
All the Persians' cash is not really in Switzerland.
It's all in Dubai.
And this is one of the reasons the sanctions have never been 100%.
People say, well, how can you have these sanctions?
They don't really work because the Arabs, they're playing double games all the time.
And that's why when UAE threatened to cut off their money from Dubai, next thing you know, Dubai's getting lit up.
You know, Dubai is kind of like Tortuga was for the Caribbean pirates that went against the British Empire back.
You know, and that's what Dubai is.
It's a pirate cove.
And now you're getting down to it where you're starting to steal, take their assets, take all their cash and throttle them down.
But I don't care.
They brought it on themselves.
If they're a hellhole for 50 years, they're a hellhole for 50 years.
I don't see it.
If we spend one penny in Ukraine or here reconstructing it and not that penny in East Palestine, East Palestine, Ohio, to me, that's a crime.
Well, my thoughts, you said something really interesting just before when you were talking about how, in the Japanese regime after World War II, it ended up being run by a lot of the same people who were running it before.
And you said there was no real significant change, but there was.
And it connects directly to what President Trump just said: that he wants unconditional surrender.
Because the major change that happened, even though Japan was run by the same people, is that they dropped the genocidal imperialist ideology that led them to slaughter so many people in the Far East and create the Second World War in the Pacific theater.
So, and look at Nazi Germany.
Nazi Germany also, unconditional surrender, led to them becoming a fairly benign state that dropped the genocidal ideology.
You know, in January 1943 at Casablanca, is where Roosevelt first said that peace can only come to the world by the total elimination of the Japanese, German, and Italian war power, which means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
That was, he used that term then.
And there's a direct causal relationship between the unconditional surrender and the breaking of those genocidal ideologies.
And this connects with what you were saying before about Mamdani in New York.
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You can also talk to Philip Patrick and the team about the ownership of physical gold, particularly as a hedge against times of geopolitical and financial market turbulence.
And the commodities markets are going to be turbulent.
Next couple of weeks, Jim Finnell is going to talk to us about the straits of Hermuz momentarily, and maybe even the insurance mark poso is going to come in to another naval intelligence officer.
But talk to Philip Patrick and the team do it today.
The eighth free installment on the online version is coming out just in a matter of weeks.
So we'll get all that.
Make sure you talk to Philip Patrick.
That's what we do.
We give you access to the top folks over there.
Take use of it.
Rabbi Willicki, I understand you have a big piece coming out in the Jerusalem Post that's going to walk through.
Plus, you're making your maiden voyage on Fox today.
We make stars here at the War Room.
We pride ourselves in providing a platform that makes future stars.
You're about to start turning.
But your piece in the Jerusalem Post is you've been talking to me, been working on this for a while.
It's quite interesting.
And this is why I think as much as, you know, in the audience and everything, and we're trying to present all sides here so people can make decisions for themselves, because this ain't going away on Tuesday, folks.
It's just not.
We'd love it to, but it's not.
So your piece is about regime change and how there's seven or eight versions of this, but you don't think any of them are going to turn out to be great.
Is that my understanding of the Jerusalem Post column?
Well, let's start with the last line of the piece, which is that no matter what comes after this, nothing will be as bad as the regime that has been there for the last 47 years.
I don't care what comes after it.
Nothing will be as bad.
But President Trump the other day indicated that he prefers a Venezuela option, which is a kind of, you know, take out the top people and keep the bureaucrats and the structure in place so that you can prevent chaos.
And there's a lot of merits to that.
There's also downsides.
In the piece, I walk through what that might look like and what the pros and cons are, or sectarian violence.
There was rumors about the Americans arming and assisting the Kurds, the Israelis also.
And if the Kurds come in there, that's going to disrupt things.
And then you have Mech.
You have all sorts of different factors here.
So I walk through the different options for what regime change could look like.
And basically, none of them are very good.
In addition, you mentioned my being on Fox tonight, Steve.
I think what you're implying is that War Room is the farm team for Fox.
I don't know if that's going to sit so well with the posse.
But yeah, I am going to be on there.
So if any of you ever deign to watch Fox on the big weekend show at 7 p.m. tonight, I'm going to be appearing somewhere in there.
That's what they tell me.
And I've also been on, I've been featured in a docuseries they've been running on Fox Nation about King David for the last few weeks.
So yeah, my maiden voyage on Fox is coming.
And I know you have some other guests waiting.
I'm just going to give my coordinates and sign off, Steve.
I really appreciate, you know, you just mentioned that on War Room, you try to give all sides.
And I tell people all the time in my community that only on Steve Bannon's War Room does everyone get a say.
And my voice is heard.
And then you have the people on the other side.
And you're really giving your audience a full picture of the different approaches to this, you know, to the situation.
Yeah, Steve, I'd like to say that, you know, if we look back, and there's been a lot of folks that said that, you know, the Iranian is insider, observe, orient, decide, and act OODA loop.
And I would say that that has been clearly destroyed this last week.
And we're really inside and driving the tempo and the scale of operations.
And when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz and the movement of the Ford down into the North Arabian Sea, we should look back to the period from 1981 to 1987, what was called the tanker wars.
And in that first year, in 1981, Iraq and Iran attacked five ships.
Seven years later, in 1987, Iran and Iraq both combined attack 451 ships.
So it was an escalation over seven years.
In that time period, we were able to escort ships and successfully keep the strait open.
And we had never attacked the mainland of Iran, the main country of Iran.
Now we're in a situation completely the opposite, where we have gone in and decimated their coastal defense cruise missile sites, their navy, their submarines, their radars, their command and control.
And we're now contemplating bringing our ships in to do escorting, along with this development finance corporation that the president offered up to provide reinsurance for the 12 PI clubs that provide the shipping industry the insurance in the Strait of Hormuz.
And so if you look at the chart, I gave Brandon Cameron a chart that you could, if they can pull it up, that shows that when the war started on the 28th, there were about 100 ships that transited the Strait of Hormuz.
The next day, that went down to 18.
And then by the now, on the 6th, the latest data that we have from the UK, there's about a total of four ships of cargo vessels and tankers, another couple.
So it's starting to increase.
The dark fleet from Iran is still running.
Iran's Karg Island, which is their main place to load up and fuel up their ships, is still functional, still whole, and there are Iranian ships there.
And the Iranians have 38 of VLCCs, very large crude oil containers ships.
And so those ships are vulnerable to being seized or sunk.
And so we'll see what happens.
But it looks like the Iranians know that for them to get money, not only does the UAE have to keep their assets unfrozen, they also have to keep providing oil to China so that China can keep pumping money to them.
And so I think right now we're at a point where we're going to start seeing in this next week, like we've seen with the rollback of the IADS, the integrated air defense systems, and the rollback of the missile launchers in the open, we're going to start seeing a movement towards having ships go through the strait.
And one Greek company called Dynecom has already said we're going to start sending ships through there.
And they're sending through one or two at a time.
And I expect that to increase, which will put a new dynamic on this.
And so I think we are driving the OODA loop, not the Iranians.
I think their responses are erratic, sometimes time, sometimes obviously very lethal.
But as this news tightens, they're going to be less able to use their military, which is why the president and Rabbi Walicki reinforced that.
Unconditional surrender can only come when you take the gun out of the Iranian regime's hand.
And that's what we're about.
And that's what we're doing.
And oh, by the way, I lived in Japan several years and hundreds of years of Bushido was transformed.
So it is possible.
It's just not going to be a carbon copy of World War II to that degree.
Well, Steve, you know, we're looking at what Iran's up to.
And ultimately, the situation is this.
You know, I remember hearing early on in the Ukraine war a lot of analysis saying Russia's, you remember this, Russia is about to run out of munitions.
Russia is about to run out of missiles.
Remember, we heard that in the first couple of days, the first couple of weeks, Russia's broken.
And here we are.
It's now been four years since Russia launched their invasion of Ukraine.
And they've continued.
And in some ways, they've actually ramped up their production capabilities.
And when I see what Iran's doing, you really have to look at similar strategy because what they're doing, in a sense, is a move to asymmetric warfare and attrition warfare through these saturation attacks based predominantly on the ballistic missile force, which they have, these underground bunkers, the underground launchers, and then also their incredible saturation offense capabilities in terms of drones.
And when I mean the drones are incredible, I don't mean that they're very special at all.
They're, in fact, dumbfire drones, these one-way drones, FPVs, which some people refer to them as.
And what you're looking at here is a cheap drone, a very cheap drone, $30,000, $25,000.
And Brett Velikovich over the drone warrior, you got to go and follow the work that he's done on this, talking about how these cheap weapons are designed to go up in favorable dollar-for-dollar exchanges against an air interceptor missile, which might be $10 million, $15 million, $20 million.
So the goal over time isn't necessarily for them to defeat your air defense in terms of shooting it down or destroying your Patriot ATHAD missile batteries.
They certainly intend to, but the goal, of course, is to attrite your ability to make war over the course of expending millions and millions of dollars while they're putting up cheap drones over and over.
And that's what we see them moving to again and again.
Also, this tit-for-tat exchanges, of course, the desalination plants.
I saw Sam Fattis was talking about that.
That's going to go up very quickly.
And of course, what are we also seeing?
These, now the Iranian president came out and said that he didn't take credit for it, but potential strikes on the oil pipelines up in Azerbaijan, down to Baku, over to Turkey.
Okay, we've got geostrategic things we have to get to in a moment.
Pozo is going to stick around.
I got Brandon Weika, Dr. Thayer.
Financial Times is reporting the Chinese Communist Party actually made a statement yesterday.
They want the meeting with President Trump in April, which I think is pretty stunning because they've basically been, I think, cucked. this entire time.
So it's quite fascinating what's happening here.
We're going to get some of our top experts to jump into this in the wars of progressives.
I want to turn now, though, to an important matter at hand.
This is the situation on the runoff in the state of Texas.
Caroline Wren joins us.
Caroline, you've been at the tip of the tip of the spear, you and Boyle and a couple of others, of driving this narrative about John Cornyn has never supported MAGA.
In fact, he's been verently anti-MAGA, and he's been virantly anti-President Trump since President Trump came on the scene, but he's been a do-nothing Bushite for his entire career, and that's why he has nothing positive to talk about.
And, you know, I just think the Texas Senate race is by far the most important race of the cycle.
And all eyes right now are on President Trump to see who he endorses.
And look, I understand it is very rare for a sitting president to endorse against an incumbent senator in his party.
Now, President Trump rightfully endorsed a primary challenger to Senator Bill Cassidy, who deserved it.
He voted to impeach Trump.
But I would actually argue that Cornyn is much worse than Senator Cassidy.
For every controversial decision President Trump has made, and of course, by controversial, I mean something that Morning Joe and Mika don't like.
But for every, I guess, controversial decision, there is a statement from John Cornyn criticizing President Trump about it.
And, you know, we knew Cornyn was bad, but the barrage of opo that has dropped on him over the last 72 hours, exposing Cornyn's record, I am in shock just how bad it is.
I decided to get out my copy of Government Gangsters here by Kash Patel.
In this book, Kash Patel lists out, there's an index of names of the worst and most corrupt deep state actors.
And I went through the list of names, index, name by name, and just search that person's name and then John Cornyn's statement.
Literally without fail, John Cornyn has defended every single bad actor listed in this book.
I mean, like, it is just, it is amazing to me that he goes out of his way.
When Trump criticized Gina Haspel, for example, Cornyn went on television and said she was doing a fantastic job.
And when Trump fired Mark Esper, Cornyn went on TV and called it unhelpful and unnecessary.
When Trump criticized Dr. Fauci for refusing to open schools and businesses, John Cornyn called Fauci a national treasure.
When Biden nominated notorious Russian hoax co-conspirator Lisa Monaco for deputy AG, Cornyn took to the Senate floor to give a full-throated, glowing endorsement for her nomination.
When Trump wanted to fire Robert Mueller, Cornyn defended Mueller's honor, saying it would be a huge mistake for Trump to fire him.
When Trump fired James Coney, Cornyn went on TV and called it a troubling and terrible decision.
Where Cordin, I mean, repeatedly. praised and slobbered over James Comey, calling him a good and decent man.
Quick reminder, James Comey called for the assassination of President Trump.
When the sham E. Gene Carroll verdict came out, Cornyn ran to MSNBC to say that this, because of this verdict, Donald Trump was unelectable and shouldn't run again.
When Alvin Bragg was indicting Trump, John Cornyn defended Bragg and said the process was necessary and needed to play out.
Regarding January 6, John Cornyn compared it to 9-11, then called the J6 attendees, quote, white supremacists, domestic terrorists, insurrectionists, rioters, seditionists, and anarchists.
He then asked then FBI director Chris Ray if a new law was needed to charge the J6 attendees with domestic terrorism.
And when the Senate tried to impeach Donald Trump for a second time, Cornyn's only complaint was that the impeachment process was actually holding up them and delaying Biden being able to get his cabinet nominees confirmed.
And I could go on and on with these statements.
I was just going through this book, Googling John Cornyn's statement on that person.
And without fair, he has defended each one of these deep state actors.
And, you know, these could like maybe be defensible statements, a few of them.
If you're Susan Collins and you represent a state like Maine that's a purple or blue state, John Cornyn represents Ruby Red Texas.
You could have been quiet or you could have said something in passing.
This is a pattern recognition.
He is adamantly a defender of the deep state.
He despises President Trump.
He detests MAGA.
And the biggest mistake we can make is allowing this guy untethered with a reelection to do.
He did this understanding.
Now, here's what he bet.
He bet that MAGA was finished.
He bet that Trump would never come back.
And what he wanted to do was to do whatever it was in his power to do to bury it deeper.
Go back to January 21, when they ran President Trump out of Washington, D.C., essentially into exile into Mar-a-Lago.
That was a defining moment.
John Cornyn, not just try to do what a politician does, he was a strong advocate of the deep state for the total destruction of MAGA and Donald J. Trump.
There is in no circumstance and anybody that works for him or put money in or supports him is against MAGA and against the interest of President Trump.
And the people that are showing him phony polling.
This is my point, Caroline.
I've spent five weeks down here now and met all the aggressors.
There is a significant element of the grassroots in Texas and in MAGA that under no circumstances will vote for John Cornyn.
If John Cornyn is the nominee in November, he will lose.
He will lose significantly because there is a core that see what you're talking about.
And it stuns me that the Paxson campaign didn't have this out, but I know you're going to put it out in a systematic John Cornyn did it systematically to defend the deep state against the American people, against MAGA, and against President Trump.
And now people that are anti-John Cornyn and pro-Paxon and pro-MAGA and pro-President Trump are going to start putting this out.
He'll be swamped with this stuff.
This is not going to go away because these weren't just passing comments.
There's a pattern here that he took upon himself even more than Lindsey Graham or Mitch McConnell.
He took upon himself as part of that leadership team to lead the fight against MAGA and to lead the fight against President Trump, ma'am.
I think he's much worse than those others that you just said.
And, you know, you're right.
Like a lot of these other senators probably privately feel this way.
These kind of dinosaurs have been in there forever.
But, you know, they're at least somewhat politically savvy.
Cornyn went out of his way every single time to run to his best friends on MSNBC and criticize Donald Trump.
And right, you know, the Corning campaign keeps you this line of, oh, he voted 99% of the time with Donald Trump.
Okay, whatever.
What does that even mean?
Like, that is not the point here that we are trying to make.
And they all, all the Republican, you can make up those type of statistics and say they all, you know, vote together.
But I mean, there were massive investigations coming out of the Judiciary Committee, of which he's been a long-term, you know, very senior ranking member on.
And there are so many questions about, you know, Russia, these other, he didn't do anything.
He didn't fight to stop any of this.
In fact, he was probably encouraging it.
I mean, he was behind a lot of this stuff and championing these same people that have just targeted Donald Trump over and over again.
And then after the other thing that's driving me crazy about this is I just think back to that time, and especially around in 2020, when they took the election from us, you had Ken Paxson out there authoring a meekest brief supporting President Trump.
On January 6th, Ken Paxon was on stage with Donald Trump at the White House ellipse saying this is outrageous.
They stole the election from Donald Trump.
While John Cornyn was calling us all domestic terrorists and trying to figure out a way to conspire to get us all, you know, charged and lock up in jail for the rest of our lives.
Like, how could this be even a decision that's happening?
But you mentioned earlier, I mean, the problem is that the folks around President Trump advising him, they want Cornyn.
I don't know why, but they do.
And so President Trump is the busiest man in the world right now.
He's our commander in chief, and we are at war.
And so we're out here just kind of yelling these things, posting these clips.
The reason they're pushing Cornyn is because they hate Paxton.
Why do they hate Paxton?
Because at Breitbart, we were there.
Ken Paxton destroyed the last remnant of the Bush dynasty when he took the goofballed, dumb-as-a-brick grandson who ran against him and beat him by 20 points.
And we had a runoff, and he beat him by more points then.
That was the whole collection of people around Trump were all bushies.
They're all involved in that.
Don't think we haven't had long odds with Ken Paxton before, okay?
This is something that the Caroline Rens and the Steve Bannons and the Mad Boyles, we didn't show up to this party last night.
We've been fighting this for almost a decade now.
And this is why Paxon, Paxton is symbolic.
And he's made in those days, in those days of the phony inauguration of an illegitimate regime that stole the 2020 election and destroyed this country with allowing in 15 to 20 million illegal alien invaders and destroyed us financially that we're still digging ourselves out of.
Ken Paxton is glazing Biden and welcoming Biden and approving Lisa Monaco.
That's inside baseball.
She was the demon that set the whole thing up over at DOJ.
Merrick Garland's some figurehead.
And he's glazing her.
He's glazing Fauci.
He's glazing Esper.
This is the core of the deep state that was against people.
And at that time, Ken Paxton comes in and he's the first AG.
Folks, go back in time.
We had no other defenses.
President Trump was a lion and winner down at Mar-a-Lago.
We had Ken Paxton.
A third of the Warrum audience was so depressed they left.
I said, we got to rally.
Victory begets victory.
Victory begets victory.
And we're going to come back in the darkest days of 20 January and 21 January of 2021.
I said, we're going to return bigger than ever with Trump.
And people said, you're a madman.
You're a nutcase.
I go, no.
And you know who believed it?
And you know who stood in the breach and delivered was Ken Paxton.
We would never have had the victory in 2024, ever.
And the people around, and this is why Don Jr. and the smart folks over there and the good folks over there came to Paxton's defense the other day.
There would be no 2024 if it had not been for warriors like Ken Paxton that bet it all.
The odds against this Carolina, as you remember that time were so long.
And that's what, and that's when you see the definition of heroes.
When they know the odds are long and they go, I don't care.
It's because it's the right thing to do.
Ken Paxton has flaws.
He ain't perfect.
Donald Trump's got flaws.
He ain't perfect.
Caroline Ren, Steve Bannon got flaws.
They ain't perfect, but they're in this fight.
And Ken Paxton's been in his fight in the darkest and toughest days, ma'am.
I would say I thought that the Cornyn endorsement was a done deal.
I mean, Alex Eisenstadt, who's probably one of the best sourced reporters with the White House, he reported three days ago that Donald Trump has made his decision.
The Atlantic reported it too, which I was a little more skeptical.
But I mean, I think that the Cornyn endorsement is, I have to be honest with your audience, I think it's still sitting on his desk.
If I were a betting person, I say that he comes out and endorses Cornyn, which is just, you know, would be a terrible decision.
But at the same time, the president's going to do what he's going to do.
But I'm not going to, you know, just lay down right now.
Right.
Now is the time to fight and to get everyone to speak up.
Everyone I know and talk to is for Paxton.
And so it is so important.
I'm just telling people right now, please be loud.
If you have President Trump's cell phone number, please text him and make sure he knows that you support Paxton.
Please let him know why.
Call him.
Go meet with him.
Try and get in front of him here because his endorsement does matter.
Could Paxton still pull it off?
Maybe.
But Donald Trump has the most important endorsement that I've ever seen in politics.
Well, Steve, what's interesting here is that we were told out of D.C. and we saw a post from the president's account on True Social that it looked like an endorsement was forthcoming probably about the midpoint or late last week.
And it seems that Paxton's move, which was just an incredibly brilliant move, I don't know who possibly could have been down there in Texas advising on the campaign for moves such as this.
I can only speculate really as to which war room leaders may have been there.
But this move regarding the SAVE Act really seems to have changed the entire conversation and the entire frame of the endorsement, making the entire thing hinge on the SAVE Act.
Because essentially, what this is has been, and I'm just going to say it, it was a bluff.
It was a bluff because Senate GOP leadership, Steve, they have not put the SAVE Act on the fast track the way that they should have.
Senate GOP leadership, what have they spent their time doing this week, Steve?
They spent their time this week.
The Senate GOP leadership, I want to remind you, and this is going viral because I called it out on Twitter this week.
They spent their week putting up a plaque for January 6th up in the United States Capitol, one that the House rejected, by the way, for the defenders of democracy on January 6th.
That's what the Senate GOP leadership spent their week on.
Where was Ken Paxton on January 6th?
Oh, that's right.
He was standing with President Trump and the MAGA faithful who wanted an honest adjudication of the 2020 election, just like War Room and all of us associated all along have always called for.
That's where Ken Paxton was.
So look, when you look at John Cornen, I would say his candidacy is in real trouble with whether or not he gets an endorsement or a cleared primary and all of these things.
The MAGA faithful, I just don't think, Steve, that they are going to come out in a November election, in a general election for him.
This could potentially lead to James Tallarico entering the United States Senate from Texas, which is a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide since the days of LBJ.
I mean, look, I would not count anything out beyond President Trump.
He is the dealmaker in chief.
He's the greatest deal maker that we've seen in American history since Ben Franklin got the French in on behalf of the Revolutionary War.
He's the greatest deal maker since then or when John Adams was over working with the Dutch to finance the whole thing.
So, you know, greatest.
greatest deal maker since the revolutionary generation.
I wouldn't put anything past President Trump.
That said, both sides are digging in.
You got Israel up this weekend, and they are pounding Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.
You've seen over 100,000 people have already fled southern Lebanon.
The suburbs of Beirut are turning into a ghost town.
I mean, you look at some of the footage that's coming out of there, and the reason that they're not taking civilian casualties in these apartment blocks and others is that the people have fled.
So you've already got a humanitarian crisis there.
You've got people fleeing areas of central Tehran, which are getting hit, lit up.
You, of course, saw the oil fields and the oil supplies lit up in Tehran last night.
Looked like the fuel burnings out of Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.
So going back to the original Gulf War, some of those striking images that came out.
And then as well, you do see the Iranians, they're slipping their cluster bombs.
Some of them, because they're using these saturation attacks, they are starting to penetrate the iron dome.
So you are seeing some of these get through here, the rocket fire, the drone fire.
It is starting to get in.
It is starting to have effects on Israel proper on television.
In my opinion, the war is set to expand even more.
The Iranians have been degraded, as I have said.
They have not been destroyed.
They have shifted their munitions now from what were the older missile systems, as Jack was just noting, to now these more advanced systems.
There is a massive strain on the particularly the Qatar and Israeli air defense interceptor arsenal.
So if this thing continues to go on as you and I believe they will, well, then the defense of these countries gets even more precarious.
I also want to point out the Houthis have not yet opened up on the Red Sea.
The Saudis are moving most of their oil transportation away from the Strait of Hormuz into their Red Sea port.
I think the Houthis are waiting for them to be totally reliant on that, and then they're going to seal it up.
But we now have the issue of the Eritrean coastline.
The Ethiopians have taken operational control.
They are saying they're going to allow U.S. or Israeli forces to use ground-based missiles to break up the Houthi capabilities across the way in Yemen.
What that means is, Steve, we're now talking about a war expanding not just to Azerbaijan, not just to Beirut, you know, and all these other places, but now possibly in the Horn of Africa as well.
They probably said some very pretty things to each other, but ultimately the reality is there will not be the ability to surge production the way we need to do.
Remember, we need at least 200 tomahawks per year.
We're not producing anywhere near that in 24 months.
That is an industrial bottleneck that has to be overcome.
And by the way, who controls the rare earth minerals that go into the creation of these systems?
That's the People's Republic of China.
And they are absolutely not going to let their chokehold on that go away now.
If they meet with Trump in Beijing, they're going to tell him, you stop the war or we're cutting you off from the rare earths.
China is the beneficiary of all of this right now, contrary to what some of the reporting earlier was saying.
I don't know if I agree with that, but the Financial Times of London has said that they've actually gone public and they want President Trump to come for a state visit.
Correct.
Thayer, you got to explain this to me.
They just get destroyed in Venezuela.
They're getting destroyed.
Their guys are getting destroyed in Iran, and they're not doing anything about it.
How is this not a how do they not lose face by having a state visit where President Trump comes in like a conquering hero, sir?
Well, Steve, because the Chinese Communist Party is in desperate straits.
Economically, as we saw this week and last week, right, the economy is in free fall.
They're in dire straits in that respect.
And they're looking for president, they're desperate for President Trump to save the Chinese Communist Party.
Xi Jinping is going full Stalin on the military, right?
He's purging the military.
You saw his address to the People's Armed Police and the PLA today at that meeting of the delegation from those two bodies where he said there's no room for anybody who's disloyal to the party.
So the CCP is in dire straits and they need President Trump to come in and say no changes to tariffs or tariff relief, no changes to investment, right?
Despite what President the Trump administration has stressed, there's still investment in communist China and no changes to the students, right?
They still need to get the intellectual capital and knowledge from the United States through legal and illegal means.