Episode 5240: Iran Will Not Back Down Anytime Soon; SCOTUS Case Will Determine Midterm Elections
Stephen K. Bannon and Eric Bowling analyze Iran's defiant stance despite Trump's postponed strikes, noting Gulf states' anger over opaque US strategy and fears of being stranded by Tehran's missiles. The conversation shifts to a pivotal SCOTUS case on Mississippi's mail-in ballot limits, arguing original "Election Day" meanings could decide midterms, while Tim Estes warns that profit-driven AI giants like Meta risk child safety via Chinese supply chains. Ultimately, these intersecting crises highlight how diplomatic failures, judicial interpretations, and unregulated tech convergence threaten global stability and democratic integrity. [Automatically generated summary]
But, you know, when you put something in the corner, whether it's a dog or a rat or whatever you want to call it, you put it in the corner and it fears for its existential life.
You can yell at it all you want.
But when it's really afraid it's going to die, literally die, it'll do whatever it takes.
And now, the Iranians know that our biggest Achilles is oil prices higher.
If they feel they're going down, Steve, I believe they've already mined their own oil infrastructures to blow them up.
If they're going down, they're going to take that with them and stick it right up, you know, America's backside, so to speak.
You guys come tune in four o'clock in Real America's Voice and just watch us hang and throw it to Stephen K. Bannon because, like I said, you watch the war room, you leave smarter than when you entered it.
So, Steve, appreciate you and take it away, my friend.
And by the way, we'll see you in CPAC in Dallas or wherever CPAC is this year.
To take Eric Bowling's analogy, which I think is very powerful, I think the intelligence is trying to think through, is the Iranian regime and what's left of it is a cornered rat, a cornered rabid dog, or a cornered grizzly?
That is going to have quite an impact over this, I think, tumultuous week.
Here's what we want to do.
We're now in the war room.
I want to play the cold open.
I've got Sam Fattis.
He's going to join us really amazing show today, the five and six o'clock hour.
Well, look, firstly, I think tonight, Katie, the Gulf states will be breathing a sigh of relief for now because, of course, the president backing, climbing down on his ultimatum, meaning that it seems for now Iran won't retaliate to any US attacks on power plants like we've seen them hit energy facilities across this region before as Eamon mentioned.
So yeah, breathing a sigh of relief tonight.
But there is still a lot of anger amongst the Gulf countries, particularly here, the UAE over in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain as well.
They're all on a bit of a different page to Oman, I think it has to be said.
And they're angry because all along, ever since this conflict began, it seems that the US and Israel hasn't really been informing the Gulf nations of their strategy, of the moves that they're making.
And actually, some kind of Gulf analysts believe that the US and Israel are kind of making it up as they go along.
So there is an element of anger there, but also there's huge concern as well.
Because if what the President is saying, that this is coming to a close and that this war is pretty much over and the US can leave even though there are still thousands of troops on the way here, well it would leave the Gulf pretty much stranded because not far away you've got a very dangerous neighbor in Iran who've got the capabilities of launching ballistic missiles and dozens and dozens of drones as they have been doing into the likes of the UAE.
And they could do that whenever they want to, wherever they want to, as well.
So what the countries like the UAE and the Gulf are suggesting to America is that you've got to stay here.
You've got to finish the job.
And also, if there are any negotiations, then the Gulf countries need to be involved in those negotiations because at the end of the day, this conflict will hamper them more.
So we've seen the economic effects already that it's happening, that it's having on these countries.
We see the damage and destruction that's happened to infrastructure, civilian infrastructure in these countries as well.
So they will very much want a seat at that negotiation table.
And then, unfortunately, I came, I called Pete, I called General Cain, I called a lot of our great people.
We have great people.
And I said, let's talk.
We got a problem in the Middle East.
We have a country known as Iran that for 47 years has been just a purveyor of terror.
And they're very close to having a nuclear weapon.
We can keep going and get that 50,000 up to 55 and 60.
There's no end.
Or we can take a stop and make a little journey into the Middle East and eliminate a big problem.
And Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up.
And you said, let's do it.
Because you can't let them have a nuclear weapon.
So we are now having really good discussions.
They started last night, a little bit the night before that.
Operation Epic Fury, I love that name.
And it's very appropriate for what's taking place, if you know, in Iran, because we knocked out their Navy, we knocked out their Air Force, we knocked out their anti-aircraft, we knocked out everything.
And we did it with fury, actually.
As I announced earlier, based on preliminary conversations between the United States and Iran over the past two days, I've directed the Department of War to temporarily postpone planned strikes against major energy and electricity targets in Iran.
They have very, very big, new, actually, and very expensive billions of dollars it costs to build them one missile, one of our powerful ones, and it comes down to the ground like it was made out of dust.
But to determine whether a broader agreement can be reached, we've had very good discussions, very, very good discussions.
And you have to understand, I know my whole life has been in negotiation, but with Iran, we've been negotiating for a long time.
And this time, they mean business.
And it's only because of the great job that our military did is the reason they mean business.
They want to settle and we're going to get it done, I hope.
As far as the officials are concerned, we had a couple of interviews with foreign ministry spokesman and a diplomat.
And sort of tying into what we're hearing today from Donald Trump, there was a real reluctance amongst Iranian officials to get drawn into diplomacy.
What they say is they feel that they have been hoodwinked by the Americans twice, using diplomacy as a kind of mascarade, a kind of charade, during which Americans, they say, were preparing to attack them and then did attack them when talks were underway.
And they would be very reluctant to get drawn into further diplomacy, which I think makes me fairly skeptical about what we're hearing from the American president today.
While Iran is saying that there are no talks, Trump is saying that there are, and he said there's 15 points of agreement with Iran, including that Tehran commits to not having a nuclear weapon, and also this idea of enriched uranium that the U.S. would take possession of.
So talk to us about that.
Where is most of that held and what are the challenges in securing that?
Yeah, so there are a lot of challenges to that, Brianna.
And where most of it is held is basically in several places here.
We have Datans, which is one of the enrichment facilities.
You have Fordo, another enrichment facility.
And then the rest of them here, Tehran, Arak, Isfahan, those are all research facilities.
So the theory is that a lot of that enriched uranium that we have is probably held in Isfahan.
However, there is a distinct possibility that among those 970 or so pounds of enriched uranium, that they have been dispersed, that those scuba tank-size containers of the enriched uranium have been dispersed throughout at least some of these areas and perhaps in other areas throughout Iran.
The work that President Trump is doing, not only in Memphis, not only in Washington, D.C., but all over the country, ultimately, it will save and is saving tens of thousands of American lives.
It is, I'll use that word again, what President Trump has done on border security and public safety is a national miracle that will be studied not only for generations, but for centuries to come.
You know, Mr. President, as I look around this venue, I see, and I'm reminded again why we have the greatest warriors on God's green earth.
The men and women serving in uniform, the men and women serving and wearing the badge, and law enforcement, our police, our sheriffs around the state of Tennessee.
I'm reminded that Americans exist to protect this country day in and day out, and they've done it like we've done it here.
But what we didn't have was you.
We didn't have a commander-in-chief who backed the blue, who resourced the blue, who funded the military, who did whatever it takes to safeguard every single life.
And here in Memphis, Tennessee, you have put on a show for the world.
You have allowed us to go out there and capture gangbangers, rapists, murderers, drug dealers at record historic levels.
And for me, a first-generation Indian American kid whose parents fled a genocide in East Africa to become the ninth director of the FBI, I'm living the wildest dream you could possibly imagine, sir.
But it's thanks to you.
But more importantly, what I see when I look out across our great partners here in the interagency and our great legislatures and our great prosecutors and our great attorney general who has the guts to go out there and make arrests, turn them into prosecutions and put people in prison.
You are giving that dream to every single child in the state of Tennessee.
You are inspiring the nation and law enforcement to come up and wear the badge and wear the colors of this country and safeguard our men and women for generations to come.
This is an enduring mission, Mr. President, because you have made it enduring.
It is going to go on for generations to come.
They are going to try to achieve what you accomplished here, what Stephen said, in just one short year, and they're going to be doing it for decades because America was smart enough to elect you as our commander-in-chief.
So while we're out there fighting for the dreams of our children, just know, Mr. President, how many millions of dreams like mine are going to be lived thanks to your brilliant leadership.
Mr. President, thanks for delivering America the safest, safest, safest country on God's green earth.
You're here for the late afternoon, early evening edition.
Well, thanks.
That was a magnificent cold open.
We've got so much more to do.
I will have a comment after the break.
Sam Fettis is going to join us about converging all these forces of law enforcement and bringing down the crime rate in these big blue Democrat sanctuary cities, which I think is terrific because every human life matters and particularly working class African Americans, whites and Hispanics in these cities living in hell holes.
They deserve to live correctly.
But let's not forget about the mass deportations.
Let's get the mass deportations.
Stephen Miller, love you, brother, but mass deportations, that's the key word, mass deportation, not just bad ombre's.
I also want to read something before we go to break.
From America's greatest ally, this is the translation from Hebrew you just saw of Netanyahu.
Quote, and I'm quoting, earlier today I spoke with our friend President Trump.
Okay, let me add some editorial comment.
Whether he's your friend or not is not relevant.
He's your ally and he's the chief ally here.
And you don't mention that the entire time.
You don't say earlier today I spoke with our ally, President Trump or the senior member of this coalition, President Trump.
You say our friend, President Trump.
President Trump believes there's a chance to leverage the tremendous achievements we have made with the U.S. military to realize the war's goals of the agreement, an agreement that will safeguard our vital interests.
At the same time, we continue to attack both Iran and Lebanon.
We are crushing the middle cell program and the nuclear program.
And we continue to severely harm Hezbollah.
Just a few days ago, we eliminated two more nuclear scientists and the hand is still outstretched.
We will protect our vital interest in any situation.
Yes, Israel should protect their vital national security interests as every nation in the world should do.
But as an ally in this, I think when President Trump says, hey, look, I think we got to try to figure something out, or at least let me find out if either through the Pakistanis or the Turks with the corner either rat, rabbit dogs, or grizzlies, we can get somewhere.
I would think you'd just give us cheery eye eye and a salute and say, okay, we'll stand down like you're going to stand down.
They're not allies, and they're certainly not the world's greatest allies, and they've never been America's greatest ally.
Actually disgusting that they're going to continue to carry this war.
And of course, the Iranians came back and said, hey, we're prepared to continue to fight it.
President Trump has put this entire thing on his shoulders, including the risk to his presidency and the nation and his legacy.
Okay, Birch Gold is there to help walk you through the turbulence in capital markets, particularly in the market for gold and precious metals.
Take your phone out.
Text Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N-989898.
The ultimate guide.
It's totally free, no obligation, as all the information Birch Gold puts out.
What they really want you to do is make contact with Philip Patrick's team and let him and his team talk to you about all the various perturbations.
Philip, we'll get him on tomorrow.
As you can imagine, a little busy to talk about, I think last week was the worst week for gold, I don't know, in a long time, at least a decade.
So we're going to get everybody on to talk it through and make sure you fully understand it.
Birchgold.com.
It's not the price.
It's a process that drives value, of course.
Sam Fattis, President Trump.
And let me look, I don't mean to go negative on Netanyahu, but it does upset me that they're an ally that does their own thing at the worst possible times.
I just don't know how.
And if Marco Rubio or Pete approve this, then I think they, you know, and Marco Rubio has been in the witness protection program.
You know, he ought to come up and just kind of walk through why we have an ally that said they're going to continue the bombing.
And Iran says, bring it because, you know, Iran and the Israelis hate each other.
So they're going to go at it.
Where President Trump is either going through the Pakistanis or through the Turks and dealing with this guy or dealing with that guy to try to come up with some resolution.
One thing I think is important, and only the Intel community, which has been with the Joe Kent situation, really under the spotlight, as they should be, is this a cornered rat?
These, I mean, the war, I mean, obviously, I'm painting with a really broad brush here.
We're attacking the Iranians.
The Israelis are attacking the Iranians.
The Iranians aren't really fighting us.
I mean, they are firing at American troops, and unfortunately, we've taken some casualties.
But we attack them, and increasingly their response is, well, we're going to sink an oil tanker, or now we're going to blow up a desalinization plant, or we're going to blow up an oil production facility.
I mean, it's, we're all going to hell together.
If you guys want to keep at this, we're just going to burn the place down.
And let's keep in mind at the top of this, you got a bunch of guys who they're 12ers.
They believe this is the end of times, and they win on the other side of the apocalypse.
And in fact, it is their duty, their requirement to bring on the apocalypse.
That's the only way you get to Nirvana, if you will.
I'm mixing a bunch of metaphors there, but I think you get the point.
They are serious when they say that they will do this.
And I recruited a whole bunch of and ran a whole bunch of Iranian sources, including guys at very senior level.
So I'm not talking to you about something somebody told me once in a bar.
I'm telling you what I know from being face to face with these guys.
Now, that doesn't mean that every Persian is off in crazy land like this, but the guys at the top who are in control of this, they are 100% committed to this.
So when they say we'll burn the whole friggin Persian Gulf to the ground, you better believe them.
Doesn't mean you have to let them.
I'm just saying you better assume that that is not an idle threat.
What, as you see the president working through this and walk people through when you're using various, he's very close, you should know, to the field marshal in charge of the Pakistan Army.
I know he's had that individual to lunch at the White House.
He spent a lot of time with him.
He's also, whether people like it or not, he's very close to Erdogan and thinks very highly Erdogan.
I know that doesn't set well with some folks, but that's just a reality.
So he's working both.
He's working Erdogan, and that's the Witch, looks like the Witkoff-Jared angle.
He's also working the Pakistani guy that I think came to him with the Speaker of the House, whatever that means.
When you're doing this in real time and you've got weapons flying back and forth with each other, how difficult is what the president's trying to accomplish right now?
Look, one of the things we've been talking about is one of the challenges in fighting the Iranians is that they've moved to this decentralized command structure, right?
You can cut off the head of the snake.
It doesn't matter.
The thing keeps fighting.
Okay, well, that allows them to be resilient and continue to fight and resist our tactics.
But it also means, okay, now you're trying to get, now you're acting them to act as an entity with a single head, subject to a central control, when in fact they're not actually acting like that right now.
So to start with, you could be talking to somebody in Iran and he could be legitimately trying to negotiate peace.
And somebody else could be going on broadcast right now saying, we have no idea what the hell you're talking about.
There are no discussions ongoing.
And actually, both of those things could be true simultaneously.
Really, really hard.
I mean, both, look, you know, Erdogan obviously has its challenges, but bottom line is we got to find somebody who can bridge the gap here, somebody who can talk to both camps.
If I had a preference, I would choose the Pakistanis, not that they've been without issues in the past, but I think they are better.
I don't know where those talks stand.
I've been all day trying to figure that out.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in Pakistan as to whether there are or are not back channel negotiations going on.
With CENCOM, Admiral Cooper, they have their own intelligence group, obviously.
Joint staff has their own.
You've got the CIA.
You've got DNI.
Just at this level, what are the type of briefings that are going on for the president?
As he said, and he wasn't very clear because he didn't really say we're going to take a stand down from the military side, but that is kind of the implication, right?
What are the briefings that are going on right now?
And how are they providing information to the commander-in-chief so he can both oversee the war and try to get to some sort of peaceful resolution?
Well, he's going to be getting briefings not just on sort of, I was going to say tactical, that's the inappropriate term, not just the operational aspects of the conflict, but now we're deep into the weeds of personalities.
What is so-and-so in Iran or in Pakistan actually doing?
What did they say after they got off the phone with you?
This kind of thing, right?
This is where CIA ought to be earning its pay because you can't see what's going on inside somebody's head in Iran or in Pakistan off of a satellite, and they're probably not talking over an open line where you could hear them either.
And this is when you really get down to the value of human intelligence having those penetrations.
And unfortunately, I mean, you know my position on that.
We are not well placed.
I mean, we do not have the human intelligence collection capability we need to have because this is really critical.
When you get off the phone and the guy told you such and such on the phone, what the heck did he say to his senior aides in the room after he got off the phone?
That's the critical stuff.
And if you don't have that, you're guessing.
And the president is obviously really good at negotiations and reading people, but it doesn't change the fact that it would be better to know for sure.
The president, we may get the president at the sticks in a moment.
So we're going to jump over.
Sam, you know, and it don't seem like I'm picking on Netanyahu, who are singling him out because I'm not a big fan of the Arab allies either.
You know, the region.
As Eric and I talk all the time, we have regional partners.
We're trying to defend their oil assets, and they're pretty quick on the trigger to go force majeure.
I think Iraq went a force majeure last night to kind of get out of the contracts.
They're selling it at 55 bucks a barrel and now renegotiate at 120.
Our allies are economically incentivized as long as their infrastructure doesn't get crushed and the desalination plants don't get crushed to have this thing go on for a while so that they can sell it at 3x of what they've sold it for us.
And President Trump's full spectrum energy dominance was going to have it at $40 a barrel.
Look, they're going to do what all our allies do, Steve.
They're going to take care of themselves first and foremost.
And as long as you deal with them on that assumption and with that understanding and that we also should do, take care of ourselves first, then we're all good to go.
But when we start getting into this business where we think just because we call them allies means we can trust them fully or they're not going to put themselves ahead of us, then you're setting yourselves up for a fall.
I mean, that goes for the Israelis.
That goes for the Arabs.
I never had any problem with them because when they shove you, you just knock them back a few feet and let them remember who is really in charge and who's the big dog in the relationship.
And then we're all good.
But man, if you're just going to trust them, they're going to take you to the cleaners.
That is the lesson, I think, folks, of the 21st century.
Kind of the lesson of the 20th century, too, but we didn't take it.
There's a lot of talk going on.
A lot of people run around.
But at the end of the day, it's sailors, soldiers, Marines, is those 18, 19, 20-year-old, 21-year-old young officers, young non-commissioned officers that are making this happen.
It's on their shoulders it all rests.
Always remember that.
The shoulders of young American citizens of this country.
Short break.
Sam Fattis in the Supreme Court mailing ballots, baby.
One of our favorite topics up in Pennsylvania.
next in the word here's your host steven k band okay um Tim Estes, chairman of the Alliance for a Better Future, a major new group of conservatives and alliance coalition about artificial intelligence.
The cavalry has finally arrived.
It's going to join us here momentarily.
I still got Sam.
Mark Elias picked up what we said this morning.
Mark Elias, Steve Bannon, suggested that President Trump deploy immigration and customs enforcement agents to major U.S. airports as part of a test run for using them to meddle in the upcoming elections.
All I said was, hey, they can't work the machines, so they're just going to be checking IDs.
Maybe this could be a practice run.
And guess what?
CNN's telling me, we'll get a clip for you in the 6 o'clock hour.
As you know, Brian Glenn stayed two hours in line and didn't move an inch at Atlanta Airport last night.
He then got a car with one of our producer cameramen and drove to the Mississippi River from Georgia to be there today to cover President Trump, his visit to Memphis.
And now CNN's reporting is moving 40 minutes.
I don't know if that's ICE, but they must be checking IDs programs.
Something's moving in Atlanta because that thing was a mess.
It was a three to five hour mess.
Something's moving.
Sam Ferris, I'm asking you to put your other hat on as a grassroots leader with the great patriots in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which wait for it.
Mississippi insists that ballots can trickle in days or even weeks after Election Day.
That position is wrong as a matter of text, precedent, history, and common sense.
Mississippi all but concedes that the original public meaning of election included both offering to vote and the receipt of that vote or ballot by election officials.
We have lots of phrases that involve two words, the last of which, the second of which is day.
Labor Day, Memorial Day, George Washington's birthday, Independence Day, birthday, and Election Day.
And they're all particular days.
So if we start with that, if I have nothing more to look at than the phrase Election Day, I think this is the day in which everything is going to take place and or almost everything.
And then we have three points in time.
1844, 1872, 1914.
And we can ask, what would people have thought on those days is meant by this phrase Election Day?
We are understanding that the argument is not going so well so far for Mississippi.
And that could have really wide-ranging consequences for the midterm elections because Mississippi is one of 18 states and territories that similarly have a grace period for ballots that are marked by Election Day, meaning post-marked by Election Day, cast by Election Day, but are counted thereafter.
That could also have really broad consequences for members of the military, for example, who are subject to their own federal statute.
And as we were coming to camera, one of the liberal justices was questioning Paul Clement about that statute and how he would square that with the statute that he is arguing for closes Mississippi from extending that grace period to folks who are voting by mail.
I would say on its face, no, and that's why they're talking about the original public meaning of the word election.
There is nothing in the federal law that says that states may not count ballots received after election day if they are cast by election day.
What this all turns on is whose definition of election counts here and what are they going to use to sort of import into that definition of election.
We're going to look at legislative history.
Are we going to look at the founding?
What did an election mean?
Those are all sorts of arguments that the justices are playing with this morning.
But one of the things that the conservative justices are really interested in pressing on is what happens if somebody wants to recall their mail-in vote.
That's a way of their trying to demonstrate that a vote is not finalized when it's cast.
It's not finalized until it's counted.
And therefore, Election Day has to mean election day, that a vote that's not counted until afterwards isn't, in fact, part of the election.
Sam, you're not a lawyer, and you're certainly not an election lawyer.
And you saw the searing logic of Justice Alito there.
And that's why, even at however old he is, I hope he doesn't retire.
We just need that guy, I feel.
But mail-in ballots, and particularly when they arrive and how they're counted and all that, had a pretty big impact in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
So what do you and the grassroots leaders up there think about this whole thing of mail-in ballots?
And like, when did they have to arrive to actually count, sir?
Well, look, the whole thing is very simple, Steve.
You have to, you know, you don't, you don't get to show up at the polls after they're closed and cast a vote.
It's not that big a challenge for you to vote before the polls are closed to get your vote in by the end of election day.
Now you can show up in person or you can mail it in advance.
What this amounts to is cover for effectively this.
I'll give you this analogy.
It's like you got a football game and you come to the fourth quarter and the game is over.
And then one team just wants to go out on the field and keep kicking field goals until they win the game, right?
That's absurd, but that is where we have ended up.
Look, in 2020, to tell you how crazy this got, we had a federal judge at one point who intervened and said, because I'm worried about ballots taking too long to get to be counted, I'm telling you to bypass the processing facilities, U.S. Postal Service, deliver ballots directly from the mailbox to where they're counted.
So when you bypass the processing facility, that means, of course, there's no postmark.
You literally take the envelope and it goes to be counted.
And this happened all over Pennsylvania.
Okay.
Now we got ballots and we actually have no evidence of any kind to tell us when they were, when they were cast, and yet they were counted in vast numbers.
I mean, the solution to everything with an election is let's just stop with the complication and the obfuscation.
Let's be very straightforward here, have very clear black and white rules.
Very simple.
Everybody plays by the same rules and we see who wins.
I want to make people go to Anne Magazine because I really was going to have you on here today to talk about there was, I think, 70 to 100 drones over St. Petersburg in Russia last night that were shot down, taken down by the Russian military.
As you say, drones have changed everything.
I'm going to have you on in the next couple of days when we free up to do that.
But where do people go to get your content, particularly your substack and your social media, sir?
You'll understand what President Trump is dealing with and why it's not like when I was in the Persian Gulf and my kid brother back, he was 86, 87, I was 79, 80.
It's much more complicated and much more deadly today.
Escorting tankers is not quite as easy as people think it is, not today.
Okay, folks, we are dealing with a war.
We have massive financial and economic problems.
President Trump and Scott Besson are trying to get to.
We've got issues with voting and sovereignty and mass deportation of 25 million people.
I mean, the problems the country faces today, both externally and internally, are some of the biggest problems the nation, this republic's ever had to deal with.
And of course, on here every day, we try to bring the best minds forward to talk about it.
But given all that, kind of behind the scenes in the Imperial Capitol, Washington, D.C., there's a knife fight on issues that really deal with the future of our species.
And that is all this about artificial intelligence and the race to the singularity and transhumanism and all of it.
Tim Esses joins us now.
He's chairman of the Alliance for a Better Future.
These folks, which are a collection of conservatives, have been in this fight from the beginning behind the scenes.
But Tim, I guess today you guys are coming forward and say, hey, look, not only have we been in the fight, we're going to be at the forefront of this fight to make sure that this thing is sorted out.
Just walk us through what is the fight?
What is your alliance and where are you guys trying to drive this, sir?
Yeah, well, Steve, first of all, thanks for having me on.
I've been on once before with Joe, who's wonderful.
And I think we have been in this fight behind the scenes.
As you mentioned, we're the Alliance for a Better Future.
We are conservatives.
We are Christians.
We are parents.
We are backed by a majority of conservative and lifelong Republicans.
We have nine amazing conservative organizations that had members driving this policy.
These are pro-family, pro-American groups that have been working tirelessly going back to kids online safety efforts and then through all of the AI battles last year.
And we believe that the foundation of our AI policy needs to be human dignity, needs to be looking at how these things impact kids, impact families, impact jobs.
And we believe we can do that in a conservative, market-oriented way.
But that is not amnesty, right?
We've been fighting that for the last 18 months, and we are now becoming more public so we can fight that here in this year when the policy is potentially going to be set.
So we believe the president has laid out a solid initial framework, but it's still pretty sparse.
And the devil is in the details, and the details are everything.
And right now, too many of the details in some of these bills that might be part of it are clearly written by tech lobbyists as giant giveaways using certain legal tricks to avoid liability and accountability at a time when we need accountability from these are the wealthiest companies in the world.
Many actually have deep supply chain ties to China.
And we do not believe that Kowtowing to them and treating them like trust fund kids is the way you manage them.
And folks, remember, these guys have been behind the scenes fighting this as hard as anybody.
And we've had some great victories.
We pulled the two amnesties.
We defeated the one collectively.
We defeated the one in the Big Beautiful Bill.
And then we've defeated it in the NDAA.
And now they've got, you know, President Trump signed an executive order.
And look, President Trump understands we must be dominant in this technology vis-a-vis the Chinese Congress Party.
Now, I don't happen to believe the tech guys are helping out here in the Chinese Communist Party on either the ecosystem of training or universities or particularly chips and all that, but that's a topic.
We have to stop that.
That's inextricably linked, but a little bit separate.
But behind the scenes, you've been fighting.
And now you have a who's who.
And I'm going to hold you through the break so we get to like a minute or so left.
You have a who's who of conservative groups that have been the forefront of this whole thing about the family and getting birth rates up and the economics of the family and how the United States, the basic unit, as Burke told us, is the family.
But you're, you've got APP with Terry Schilling, you got Heritage, yourself, you got some, you know, nothing but hitters.
But you guys are literally David versus the biggest Goliath we've ever had.
I mean, they've got every lobbyist, they have every crisis communication, they have unlimited money, their wealth creation is unbelievable.
In a minute, and I'll hold you through, how does David expect to take on Goliath?
Well, in short, if you have God on your side and you have the American people on your side, you can win.
And we do.
So that's how we're going to beat him.
It's not the amount of money.
No amount of money can take a lie this big and make it true if there are voices speaking the truth to it.
And we're going to make sure there's enough investment going in and getting the truth out to make sure that this national policy lands in a place we can be proud of and that states can still protect their citizens in all kinds of ways.
So, Tim, you've put together a coalition or an alliance with kind of the best groups that have traditionally fought for the family, fought for children, etc.
What is going to be the lead of what you guys fight for against this Goliath?
They have the former Clinton political assassin, Chris Lahane, who invented the vast right-wing conspiracy driving their policy.
And Republicans are taking advice from this.
Like, we need to be really aware of what's going on on the other side, because I actually think a lot of these guys are just going to flip sides when the election's over if the House changes.
And so we are the ones who have been here.
We've been here in the 2010s.
We've been here in 2016.
We've been here for this president.
And we are saying, you need to be the protector of the American people.
You are the protector.
We believe in you.
And these other people are in there pushing what makes them money and not protecting the American people.
Because one of the things that we talk to people about, and I'd love hearing another voice on this, is that the groups you are pulling together have been in this fight for the family and children for a long time, some for decades and decades and decades.
But if you look at the possibility, I'm not saying it's going to do it, but the potential that we could lose the House and maybe the Senate.
These guys have all been progressive Democrats that kind of had their awakening at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time when President Trump took Pennsylvania, I think it was, in November of 2024.
They had their come to the come to Jesus moment.
You're saying, hey, we ought to take that into consideration as we work through these regulations and laws and statutes that really define where the human species is going to go for the next couple of hundred years.
I mean, I mean, why in the world would we listen to someone who put $400 million, ZuckBucks, right, into the 2020 campaign, tilting the odds, as Molly Hemingway in her wonderful book, I think, like tore the lid off, right?
And that Congress investigated.
Like these people didn't magically come to Jesus really, did they?
Because guess what?
They're still explaining how there should be no regulations on things like sexually abusing chatbots.
Like, where are they on the Guard Act that Senator Hawley's put out, which is a great piece of legislation that's pending?
These are things that are obvious, obvious things.
And right now, I see this cynical attempt going on to tie broad preemption and AI amnesty to kids' safety bills.
And that does offend me as a parent.
It offends me as a conservative.
We ought to be putting these kids' bills through this week, no strings attached.
If we are for protecting families, like these very strong kids' bills in the Senate should be coming to vote soon, and they shouldn't have any other preemption on it other than to be a minimum standard for the states to live by.
Come on, watch the video, share it around social, pile on, sign up.
We're going to be organizing.
We're going to be going into races, working with candidates to the grassroots levels.
We are going to make it known that if you have taken money from these tech billionaires, we have a recent, we have a poll that came out just today, probably the broadest poll that's been done on the way the American people look at AI, and especially Republicans look at AI.
86% of them do not want to support candidates that are basically tied up with tech billionaires.
86%.
81% want common sense guardrails.
And we think that means something close to what Senator Blackburn has proposed.
I'm a Tennessean.
I am blessed with an amazingly good senator.
I know Mike Davis, who is a strong ally of this program, has done amazing work there as well.
We think that's where the heart of this party is or the part of the movement is.
We believe there should be a national standard, but we think it has to be real.
And if it's not real, the states have to stand in the gap.
And we don't trust the people who tried to slam amnesty down last June and then try to slam it down again by tying it to the troops.
So they try to slam it down our throats, tying it to the president's biggest agenda, number one, and Marsha stopped it 99 to 1, as we remember, beautiful day.
They try to slam it by tying it to an unrelated defense bill.
Okay, more trickery.
And then they're going to try to tie it to kids stuff.
Let's have a real discussion on the right about what kind of guardrails are obvious for families, for kids, for workers, for risks.
You know, there's a whole nother conversation, not today, Steve, about the kinds of things that eventually go wrong with AI, much like, you know, gain of function type stuff that COVID showed us how bad that could go.
If these people can't explain how this is going to work by growing this AI, because that's what it is, I've been in AI 25 years.