Stephen K. Bannon frames President Trump's impending conflict with Iran as a historic, medieval-style showdown, urging prayer for enemies while advocating an "Iranian Anaconda Plan" to strangle regime revenue. Guests debate whether the state is shattered or robust enough to unify through martyrdom, warning that targeting civilian infrastructure risks war crimes and exploiting troop doubts. The discussion expands to China's internal threat via the petrodollar and Strait of Hormuz tolls, predicting recession if oil prices skyrocket, while addressing domestic deportation needs and constitutional military authority without direct invasion. Ultimately, the episode portrays this moment as a critical geopolitical pivot where economic warfare and theological enemies redefine American strategy. [Automatically generated summary]
In your understanding of commander in chiefs making decisions on strategy and using the military instrument to effectuate that strategy or implement it, where do you put this decision in your top 10?
Where does this go?
And what would be around it?
What other ones could you point the audience to to say, hey, understand the gravity of the moment?
And this is, you know, there's a lot of people saying, hey, their MAGA voice is saying no.
I think Tucker.
Wall Street Journal is just reporting, he said, don't follow the orders.
Look, there'll be plenty of time to debate how we got here.
Right now, we have probably 100,000 or more young men and women in harm's way.
We've got to win this thing.
Now, your definition of victory, mine is probably quite different than Captain Fennell's and Patrick K. O'Donnell.
But we're in it now.
So, where do you put it?
As on these, on the, on the, your top 10 or on the spectrum, as you look at major decisions that commander and chiefs have had in using the military instrument.
The fact that they get the nuclear weapon and they threaten us.
I mean, they're threatening the world economy right now with the Straits of Hormuz and the Red Sea.
This can't go on.
This is irreconcilable, Steve.
They have to go.
And it's one way or another.
And the key to it is the Iranian, the center of gravity is the Iranian people.
I mean, the whole reason, one of the reasons why we are here is because they rose up two months ago.
And that problem for that regime has not gone away.
It's going to get way worse.
They killed 45,000, and it's going to get way worse for those people.
And they're going to foment an even greater uprising.
The question is we need to support that in various ways.
I mean, this is something we have 250 years of irregular warfare experience.
We pioneered it.
You fight irregular wars with irregulars.
And the number one thing, I mean, we go back to the Civil War.
I wrote an article for Breitbart a month ago called the Iranian Anaconda Plan.
You know, it wasn't popular at the first battle of asses.
Everybody thought they were going to run to Richmond and the war would be over.
Now, you got to strangle, in that case, the South, and you have to strangle the Iranian oil in their revenues, go after it in every way possible, and it will collapse.
So let's talk about Trump saying he's going to take down the civilization tonight.
Iran might be second only to China in terms of the longevity and continuity of civilization, depending on whether you want to go back to Cyrus the Great or.
Or the rise of Islam that's either 2,500 years old or well over 1,000 years old.
But it's one of the longest continuous civilizations in world history.
And the thing about a civilization like that, they're actually not fragile or brittle at all.
They're actually very robust because they've been through many, many crises, et cetera.
Your prior guest, obviously very knowledgeable, he's still talking about this uprising.
There's not going to be an uprising, there's not going to be regime change.
We're past that.
We've proven that that's not going to happen.
A good estimate would have been it was not going to happen before the war started, but it's clearly not going to happen now.
You know as well as I do that war tends to unify the population, whatever internal divisions they may have.
Now, here's where it gets interesting to your point, Steve, about the internal enemies.
I'll take this.
I believe Senator Kelly from Arizona was one of five or six basically veterans who said, who warned the U.S. military, do not obey illegal orders.
And then there may be repercussions from that.
But what are we hearing now?
That taking out civilian infrastructure, power plants, desalinization, railroads, et cetera, these are war crimes.
Now, we don't, maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but the fact that we're hearing about war crimes, Iran saying we're going to circle them with civilians.
So if you blow up the plant, you're going to kill all these civilians.
Now, they don't mind being martyrs.
That's one of the things the White House does not understand about political, about Islam in general.
They think it's the will of Allah.
They don't, they go straight to heaven.
They don't mind.
They're paradise.
They don't mind being martyrs.
So now you're going to blow up civilian infrastructure, which might be a war crime.
You're going to kill civilians, otherwise innocent, who probably definitely are a war crime.
And you've got United States senators warning the military not to follow illegal orders.
This is a setup.
Trump's walking right into it.
And it's one of many problems with this where I think we're using a fairly conventional military doctrine and we don't understand we're up against a theological enemy.
Patrick A.K. O'Donnell and Jim Fennell have made pretty strong cases that the regime has been shattered, that this is now going into part two, looking at it as a system for state collapse.
Do you believe that's where we are?
You just said, hey, the regime hasn't collapsed and they're fighting asymmetrically.
This is one of the most significant decisions or pieces of intelligence.
And this is why it all comes down to one person.
Has to make this decision.
This is why our system is structured like this.
The commander in chief, Article II, makes it down to the office of the president, one person to make this decision.
How do you weigh and measure this decision he'll make of whether this regime is already done, right, and basically shattered?
And so now we're going to go to the next phase of state collapse or the counter argument that, hey, these guys think they're winning, they've shut down Hormuz.
They got West Texas Intermediate as a piece of evidence at $117 a barrel, and they just doubled down and said, Hey, look, you get tough with us tonight, we're going to shut down the Red Sea, sir.
They think they're winning, but as a pro American analyst, I would say they're probably right.
They probably are winning by their terms, by their definition, which is are we still here?
Are we still functional?
You know, you've heard about the Mosaic Defense.
They haven't actually had to use it that much, but if you're a brigade commander and you get cut off from central authority, you have authority to launch.
Weapons on your own.
Have we done physical destruction?
Absolutely.
The physical kinetic performance of the military has been brilliant, but it doesn't matter because the regime is still standing.
I mean, once you kill, we killed all the leaders, 30 or 40 on day one, then we killed all the replacements.
So another 30 or 40.
We're talking about top theologians, generals, political officials, et cetera.
We can keep killing them, I suppose, with good intelligence, but they keep replacing them.
So always somebody ready, standing in line, so to speak.
And again, this kind of war just makes them stronger politically, culturally, from a civilizational perspective.
So you're not going to see regime change.
Now, can we keep blowing things up?
Yes.
But we're getting, they're setting, they're sucking Trump in.
They're getting closer.
We're getting closer to committing what are arguably war crimes.
Now, the United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court.
So we're not going to be hauled in front of any Nuremberg style trial.
But I dare say it might have planted some doubts in the minds of some military officers, which is, But aren't these, but this is nothing, but hang on, but this is nothing compared to what we did over Nazi Germany and what we did in the firebombing of Tokyo before the nuclear weapons, because the electricity and the power generation in the world, those are all inextricably linked to the war machine of the theocrats, right?
This talk of war crimes is a desperate attempt to try to put doubt in actually military commanders' minds and young sailors and young soldiers.
Which American history in the application of American power goes against, doesn't it?
The firebombing of cities in Japan actually caused more damage and casualties than the atomic bombs.
The atomic bombs were approximate cause of ending the war.
But what we did in Tokyo and quite a few other cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians who were burnt to death because they all had wooden structures and we were dropping napalm, basically, on them.
But that was before the post war war crimes trials, the Yamashita precedent.
Uh, the Nuremberg trials and the latest uh changes in the Geneva Commission.
Today at the Texas School Board, we had to rally, help rally folks.
And remember, you don't have better patriots in Texas to get people to come and testify against care and the Muslim Brotherhood and care and these terrorist organizations that are getting Muslims down there to say, yeah, we should write the history books.
You know, the Alamos based upon Islamic design and take out all the presidents.
And we're going to put a big, huge infusion of how important Islam has been in the history of this country, right?
At the same time, you've got.
This, you know, we have a war.
We have a budget given to us that's going to have trillions of dollars of deficits, $200 billion for this war right here.
And of course, our great allies, UAE, has not, to my knowledge, they've talked about it and people put pressure on them, but have not shut down the pirate cove of Dubai to seize the assets like we seized the assets of the Russians in the Ukraine war, to seize the assets of the Mullahs and shut them down financially.
And of course, in the Straits of Hormuz, they're charging a $2 million fee per ship.
The kind of pirates that are down there on that southern coast, who are not totally Persian, I think there's a lot of Bedouins down there that have done this for centuries, are charging $2 million per ship.
And guess what?
They're charging it in Chinese currency to break the petrodollar because they look at China as their ally.
And Captain Fennell continues to remind me you got to keep the main thing the main thing.
The main thing is that we have an enemy that is every bit as powerful as us, that we fund, we give technology.
That's the Chinese Communist Party.
All in this nation, totally infiltrated.
Now we have a situation from Dearborn, Michigan to Minneapolis to New York City, where they control the financial capital of the world with Mandami, a radical Marxist jihadist.
And in the great state of Texas, they are all over, folks.
They're all over it.
And we're fighting back, but they think they're winning down in Texas.
Understand our enemy's mindset.
They think they're winning here in the United States.
Because inside the wire, we have 25 million illegal alien invaders, and the political people in the White House are telling the president we can never say and use the word mass deportation again.
Our enemies think that they're winning here inside the wire, inside the United States of America.
And what are we doing?
We are in the Middle East, which is a sideshow to a sideshow.
And we're there and about to go tonight to one of the most important moments in world history, according to our commander in chief.
And if we rain hell down on these people, hell we can rain.
There is absolutely no doubt about that.
And the steely resolve, and I think you saw this over the weekend, where CENTCOM and the military.
Pulled off an incredible operation of just nothing but bravery and valor on part of both the pilots themselves and the rescue teams and the pilots that came in, the special forces and the huge firefight.
It shows you what these young men and women can do, the steely resolve.
That's the best of the best.
And of course, in the best of the best, when we have these budgets, think about it for a second.
You still have to go to outside charity to build homes for the people that don't have limbs.
How many veterans do we have in the streets of this country?
How much PTSD have we not addressed?
We're losing the war inside this country.
If we don't face this, it's going to be over.
Jim Rickards, thank you for taking time away.
I know you were recording other things for strategic intelligence, and everybody should go to your website right now to get it.
Tell me about strategic intelligence for a second before you sum up your strategic thoughts on this of the most important days.
You can go there, subscribe to our flagship newsletter, Strategic Intelligence, where we talk about exactly what we're talking about on your show what's coming next, what's happening, kind of looking over the ridgeline.
But getting back to Iran, Steve, I'm not saying what Trump's proposing is definitely a war crime.
That's a big subject.
I'm saying the fact that we're having the debate shows the pernicious influence of what Senator Kelly did and the others who were raising the issue of following illegal orders.
The Iranians picked up on it.
So there we go.
Second thing, Talk about closing the Straits of Amush, starving Iran of revenue.
Are you ready to turn the lights out in South Korea?
Because that's what you're talking about.
See, and I said this on the show last week.
The reason the industry has not shut down, the reason the lights are not out, because there was a lot of oil and natural gas underway outside the Persian Gulf when the war started.
And it took days or weeks to get there and still being unloaded.
Now, right about now, is when the pipeline dries out.
I say pipeline.
There's nothing in transit now because the Straits have been closed for over a month.
This is where the crunch comes in.
And don't Think for one second the stock markets are efficient.
That's one of these egghead myths.
Stock markets are very inefficient.
They'll wake up one day and all of a sudden adjust in an incredible way.
And they have not, stock markets and bond markets have not priced in what we're talking about, which is escalation of the war, which seems to be Trump's only option.
The Straits of Hormuz remaining closed.
And you're already seeing it not just at gas at the pump, airline tickets have gone up 50% in a very short period of time.
There's no jet fuel.
We're going to run out of oil and natural gas.
The refineries are going to shut down, etc.
That's what we're talking about, a major, not just a recession.
You know, those happen.
This is almost unprecedented.
Probably have to go back to the Great Depression for something like it.
So markets are going to adjust for that.
We've got the war crimes debate going on.
I think the U.S., you know, look, as you said, we're in this thing.
We need to be a lot smarter.
And this is what I did for 10 years at the CIA.
I wasn't jumping out of helicopters.
I was doing asymmetric warfare, financial warfare, cyber warfare, various warfare.
Ways of shutting down economies without necessarily dropping more bombs.
I don't think we're really being that smart about this.
Of course, a lot of people said, a lot of people just said, take it.
Napoleon can't defend it, just take it.
But what about, because I think Antietam was a good example because it shows you where you're trying to get the moral authority.
And there's a lot of questions about this right now.
You have a very cogent argument why we have the moral authority to do this.
I think that's one of the things that this debate and debate will only intensify, particularly as this is protracted.
And it gets bloodier, right?
So, but as a commander, this is not a this is not this, and this is why this constitution, this is why the constitution is written like it's written to put that power in an office with one person.
There's no war council, there's no you know, take a vote, there's no take a vote here, it all comes down to one person.
So, give me another example of where you think this has been in that top five.
President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb and end the war.
That's a tremendous responsibility.
He's opening up the possibility of destroying civilization itself, but also it's the opportunity to destroy Japan, which we know would have fought to the death pretty much.
That regime was absolutely convinced they would have fought to death.
Hundreds of thousands would have died.
Americans would have died as well as Japanese citizens had that decision not been made.
They had a problem at the beginning of the country where we had too much debt and not enough revenue.
Kind of a problem we got today Revolutionary War debt.
And Alexander Hamilton came up with a plan.
He says, you know what?
We got to start putting some excise taxes on people.
And let's maybe one of the ones we do it are these, I don't want to call them moonshiners, but guys making this great whiskey out in Western Pennsylvania.
And we'll put an excess tax on that.
And these folks didn't take that lightly.
They said, I don't think so.
That led to this Whiskey Rebellion, which was really standing up to say, no, we're not going to do it.
Little known fact in history General Washington at that time actually came back and was going to lead the force.
I think it was 12 or 13,000 man army, bigger than a lot of the times he had his own Continental Army fighting the revolution.
And Hamilton, I think, was made a major general, lieutenant general.
And they started to lead this force.
Of course, the rebellion collapsed and everyone lived happily ever after in this country.
Although there's always been this fight about taxes, Cameron Kinsey joins us in President Trump's first term.
We got a problem right now.
I just saw the budget.
It's going to look like it's going to get worse.
Bigger deficits, bigger gap between what the federal government needs as far as cash goes and what the needs are of this government.
And people say, President Trump says he's getting away from income tax.
That is a long term goal of President Trump, saying if tariffs work, if these other things work, if the growth comes in, that eventually you won't have to pay.
Personal income taxes that is decades and decades away from ever having it.
So don't think just hey, President Trump told me I don't want to file.
You got to file, and Scott Besant needs every penny he can get.
Cameron, what have you got to help folks out there between the bid and the ask of what the federal government says you owe and what you think you owe, ma'am?
We have so many people calling in thinking that they can put this off or that they don't have to pay due to this administration.
And that is just not the case.
The IRS's job is to collect.
But fortunately, you have people willing to be in your corner through this.
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So that's why it's so important to have professionals in your corner.
We work with people like small business owners, salaried employees, retirees, even gig workers.
And I know, Ben, we mentioned this last time, Steve, about a free discovery and investigative call.
We are doing that all the way up until April 15th.
And this is significant because if you owe money to the IRS, you often have no idea what's happening behind the scenes.
And so you don't know what flags are on your account, whether a levy, Maybe pending whether there are wages about to be garnished, whether an agent has even been assigned to your case.
And so that research set normally costs hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, and is typically done once you become a client of ours.
But for the War Worm Posse, we are still doing this all the way up until deadline.
Well, Steve, I think the president has tried every which way to extend the deadline as you opened in the show and showed the different extensions.
He's also applied pressure, and even today with this combined strikes on Karg Island and the bridges and whatnot, to get across to whoever is running Iran at this point that it's better to negotiate than to go to this next phase.
I hope and pray that they make a deal and they bend a knee.
But if they don't, then you're going to see those second and third rings of infrastructure and the oil and the production, those rings that were in John Warden's systematic analysis of how to take down your adversary, those are going to be destroyed.
And they won't be war crimes.
We're not going to strike civilians.
The Iranians are saying they're going to put civilians around, but we'll watch out for that.
But we're going to shut down their ability to have electricity.
Their ability to transport goods, military equipment, and things of that nature.
And if they continue, he'll take out Karg Island and shut off their ability to get any oil revenue from oil sales.
That's an easy thing to do.
It could be done in a very short order by attacking pumping stations on the mainland of Iran or on Karg Island, and Karg Island would become useless.
So there are lots of ways to do this.
The Strait of Hormuz and these other places will come open, as the president said.
But that's the next phase, and it will get very intense.
And we just have to say, as Admiral Cooper said many weeks ago, we have to steady our resolve.
We're on a plan, the plan is working.
And the most important thing, I think, for this young generation of us boomers here that are talking about this, but for the new generation of young people, pay attention how the president went and tried to save the lives of every American, and he's not.
As we said, I was last on Palm Sunday, and we were talking about invasions of Iran with Marines.
And I called it a non sequitur.
I still call it a non sequitur.
We are not going to put Americans' lives at risk for this in the ways that we have done in the past.
The president wants to finish this off, end this regime's capacity to inflict harm on the region, and make us go back to having a kind of a peaceful Middle Eastern area, which allows us then to start paying attention to the main thing the People's Republic of China.
The regime's mentality, because they just told the New York Times that they cut off any diplomatic discussions, that they're out and essentially bring it.
When you have that mindset, how do you see this thing developing over the next couple of days?
It's the people of Iran, the civilians that don't back the mullahs and don't back the IRGC, they need to hunker down and get into bunkers and hide and protect themselves.
And then we on the west and our allies outside of Iran have to be prepared for a lot of ballistic missiles and drones that are going to come at us.
I know that we've had some people on the show that have said that we're going to run out of defensive systems here, they said it two or three weeks ago, and they said it with only a week left.
I think that's been exaggerated, and I think we'll deal with the remaining missiles that come, and then we will ratchet it up some more because there's more that can be done to the Iranian regime, and these are just the next phases of that.
Yeah, it seems like these red lines keep getting pushed out every couple of weeks.
There's a new red line, and we keep escalating further into this conflict.
I think once we go past a certain point of no return, there's no de escalating.
We just got to finish them off.
You know, hopefully, the Iran regime will come to the table and we don't have to bomb all their power plants and desalinization plants and basically cripple the Iranian people.
They went in there and they got this American backseater out.
He looks like this guy was a full board colonel.
He was riding the backseat with the F 15s.
There's some speculation that he may have been an air boss for a bigger mission.
We don't know.
That's all rumor.
But they put two MC 130 special operations birds on the ground in Iran and then rolled out little birds, launched them with SEAL Team 6 operators, and recovered this full board colonel, brought him back.
And then apparently they had bad intelligence about the airfield.
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Mike Lindell's going to be here in a second.
Tage Gill, we're going to have you back on tomorrow, Tage, to go through this.
I know a lot of you and your buddies got a lot of angst about this, particularly.
And for people who said the thing was flawless, the military was absolutely amazing.
But given guys that a lot of people are saying are close to surrender or have been destroyed, They put up a pretty good fight for a bunch of guys down in the middle of nowhere.
We lost a lot of aircraft and we put a ton of Tej Gills on this thing.
I think we had 100 guys, and I agree with you.
Another day, I don't know many weapons officers flying combat missions that are full colonels.
It's kind of surprising.
Tej, real quickly, sell me some coffee.
I need coffee and we're going to stay up late tonight.
Coverage starts at 8 o'clock.
Studio 6B will be there and we're going to do special coverage, Real America's Voice tonight.
The war room will be engaged in that as we do this countdown to this.
What President Trump says is going to be a historic day.
And uh, you know, with our president, I reached out for uh, you know, I told him he's praying for good discernment and that he has great discernment.
And he's, I've said it before, he does have a gift from God where you have problem solution and he's he knows what it'll manifest to it.
Say, and I think people so many times they say, Well, you know, he's doing this, it's going to be the end of the world, this is going to happen, or this is going to happen, and then you look three, four months down the road.
And it didn't happen.
It happened the way he thought it would happen, or it turned out to be a good thing.