Episode 5286: Enemies Of This Republic Have Targeted Texas; The Lies Of Amnesty
Stephen K. Bannon opens the April 9, 2026 episode by declaring enemies have targeted Texas, debating Eric Bowling on Iran's potential Strait of Hormuz nationalization evidenced by low tanker traffic and oil fungibility issues. They condemn the Dignity Act as mass amnesty for over 10 million illegal aliens while Rosemary Jenks directs listeners to fact sheets debunking criminal waiver claims. Dr. Brett Thayer suggests President Trump bypass intermediaries to deal directly with Xi Jinping, leveraging China's oil dependence to resolve the Iran crisis, ultimately framing the conflict as a domestic battle against internal threats rather than solely foreign aggression. [Automatically generated summary]
At the same time, control of physical flows has been fully taken by Tehran.
Satellite tracking between 1 March and 7 April shows only 92 tankers carrying crude, refined products, and liquefied natural gas leaving the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, of which 60 were either Iranian owned or transporting Iranian cargo.
Among the remaining 32 vessels, roughly one third were destined for India.
The implication is clear.
The strait has not been formally closed, but it has been operationally nationalized.
Now, you keep talking about the oil markets totally fungible.
Do we actually have the option if we were to walk away?
Because yesterday, I think, in the NATO meeting, the NATO General Secretary, who President Trotz was very close to, he likes this guy a lot.
And they really worked together well to try to get the European nations to meet the bare minimum of their financial commitments to really building independent armed forces that can work together in what is called an alliance.
And I believe part of the bad news was he just said, look, these people don't have the political will.
But more importantly, if they haven't invested in their armed forces, where they really cut it is in their navies.
The Royal Navy is a mere shadow of itself.
The French Navy is not anything to what it was.
The Italian Navy is tied up, not stopping migrants from coming from North Africa into Italy.
So they really are not going to be much help here.
Do we really have, since you keep telling me the market's fungible?
Is it a possibility?
Is it actually, do we have an option of not having the Navy go in and open this up to say, you know what, pox in all your houses, we're out, the straighter herd moves is your problem, you go fix it?
Because if you tell them it's their problem, even with Japan and the South Korean Navy, which punch way above their weights, it's just not possible for those people to keep it open over a long period of time.
They just don't have the resources and the maritime capabilities, sir.
But there's okay, so Steve, very, very little of our oil and petroleum comes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Yes, we do get helium, we get some byproducts, jet fuel, butane, but it's a tiny fraction of what we use and certainly what we import that comes from friendlier countries.
I'm just trying to figure out why we are risking billions upon billions of dollars.
Trump is risking his kind of reputation as a badass globally.
If he backs down to this little Iran military that we allegedly have obliterated, Why do they still have this trade?
How about you just go, you know what?
It's not our fight.
You deal with it.
Europe, you're at risk.
Asia, you're at risk.
You guys deal with it.
It's not going to affect our.
It does to a certain extent.
When I say fungible, it's like money, it's all oil.
But in order for it to be perfectly fungible, the Middle Eastern oil would have to spike $50, $60 a barrel higher than the West Texas intermediate, which is not going to happen.
If it does, it'll come back down.
And it would take that much to make up the difference of transportation and the cost of retooling.
A refinery, and no one's going to do that because the minute it comes in conjunction again back to where it was, they have to retool the refinery back to their own Middle Eastern crude again.
It's fungible, but not perfectly fungible like money.
So, my point is, this is not our fight.
Listen, you know what was our fight?
Obliterating their ability to deliver a nuclear weapon.
And allegedly, according to everyone, including Pete Hegseth, and everyone you talk to, even the other side, we've done that.
We've blown them into the dark ages as far as being able to.
Prohibit them from delivering a nuclear weapon to the United States.
If they start it up again, bomb the facilities again.
They'll never get it.
But I see no reason other than saving face to stay to play this game about the Strait of Hormuz.
Do you know how long they would charge $2 or a dollar a barrel in the Strait if we weren't playing ball with them?
About five minutes, because India, Asia, Japan, Europe, they'd all say, screw you.
No, we're not going to pay your dollar per barrel.
I mean, remember, a typical oil tanker through that Strait is 2 million barrels.
There's big ones with $4 million.
So every oil tanker at $2 million, a big one at $4 million, at some point they're going to say, screw you, Iran.
No, we're not playing this game anymore.
Supply and demand, Steve, money always slicks the easiest path.
And the easiest path is when we get out.
Right now, us staying in there is more bullish to the oil market than us just leaving.
Now, I get it.
You know Trump.
I know him a long time.
You know him better.
Can he do that?
And still feel like he has a way of declaring a victory on things.
He should just do that.
We pull out, we eliminate objective met, no more nukes.
You guys play around, you guys deal with the lunatics trying to charge you more for oil.
Eric Bowling across all social media platforms and YouTube is where you get the edge, which is non political about male performance.
But this is too big of a moment in time.
I think these discussions, Steve, that we're doing it in the morning and in the afternoon are highly needed for folks to realize exactly what's going on out there.
Again, Watch War Room, you find out what's going to happen next.
Watch Fox, you find out about puppies, cooking segments, and what just happened.
We commit to the audience, there'll be no puppies on War Room.
Eric Bowling, I remember the old Navy, my kid brother's a naval aide, or they had a recruiting poster, right?
Sign up or we'll shoot the dog.
And they had the thing, the gun to the dog's head.
I guess that was funny back in the 1980s.
Maybe now people take umbrage with it.
Thank you so much, Eric Bowling.
See you this afternoon.
I still, my argument, Thayer's going to join us in a second about Napoleon.
He would scale up.
He said, if you can't fix the problem you got now, take it to the next scale, fix it there.
But fix it.
If you're going to set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.
I'm more and more, I'm just saying, why deal with these intermediaries that are lying and retrading you at every possibility?
And this is why we have all this confusion.
Just say, hey, look, we'll stand down if we have to, like we are until.
May and would meet with the Chinese Communist Party.
We'll go principle to principle.
President Trump in the room with Xi.
Let's just cut out all the middlemen, particularly the Pakistanis, cut them out.
Cut out the Revolutionary Guard.
They're only living on the cash that the, and I believe, support for their weapon systems that the Chinese Communist Party had given them.
The Chinese played their card.
They're very involved here, as we knew and said the entire time.
So let's deal with President Trump, principle to principle, Xi.
We're going to get back to that in a second.
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To the US dollar, and it's not should not be lost on you to trying to get that toll paid in the Strait of Hormuz in Chinese currency.
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Do it today, Brandon Hall.
I just had Chip Roy on here.
We're talking about the geopolitics of the world and this fight and the negotiation and President Trump's.
Got this strategy and he's hammering away and he's getting hammered.
But to me, the bigger fight and the urgency and the emergency and the imminent threat the imminent threat ain't coming from Tehran, folks.
Not buying it.
Haven't bought it from the beginning, not buying it now.
Imminent threat is coming from care and these Muslims down in the great state of Texas.
And they're on a march.
And as I said, it's not about whether.
The Revolutionary Guard and the mullahs and whoever's left as the Ayatollahs and those guys are winning or not.
They think they're winning.
They believe they're winning and they believe they have the initiative.
In the great state of Texas, even with what we did on Proposition 10 and other people coming to the barricades now, and you see when we did a call to action, so many patriots turned up to stand in front of the microphone and have their voices heard in this Texas Education Board.
You've got a terrorist organization in care.
That is rallying their people, and they believe they are winning.
Let me repeat that.
They believe in their heart of hearts, they're winning, and they believe that they can see down a decade or two where the state of Texas is part of an Islamic republic that's called the United States of America.
That's their plan, and they think they're on a path to execute on that plan.
Brandon Hall, how are we doing down in Texas, sir?
But I'll tell you, Steve, their plan to take over the state, the state of Texas, and our nation, it stops right here at the State Board of Education because we're going to make sure not only are we going to play the defensive game and make sure that they don't infiltrate our curriculum here in the state of Texas, we're actually going on the offense to erase historical revision that's been in our textbooks for a long time that erases the Christian foundation of our country.
They want that Christian foundation erased.
They want to paint our founding fathers as racist and manifest destiny as bad so they can create a void.
That they can slip into.
But I'm happy to report to you the War Room posse showed up in a big way this week.
And I'm happy to tell you, Steve, it's actually working.
We're still fighting through this.
We're still debating it.
We're only on second grade right now.
So we have to finish everything else today.
We've been working very hard on this, but I'm very pleased with the direction things are headed right now.
And a lot of that is because of the attention that you've put on this and the great Patriots in the War Room posse.
And then it's the agency, people using their agency.
Tell me what the difference was when you saw these patriots come to the microphone in Austin the last couple of days versus what we saw back, I think, in October, November when 91 people showed up and 89 of them were Islamists, sir.
We win when the grassroots are motivated and take action and people use their human agency.
Full stop.
We have a long history of doing that since President Trump came on the scene.
We have a long history of doing that.
And even beforehand with the Tea Party, but President Trump took us 30 years into the future by him stepping in and walking away from his business and walking away from his media empire and business empire and all that.
But the lesson is, and this is why they haven't been able to replace Trump, although Republican establishments are dying to do it because they can't get to low propensity, low information voters.
And it's not that people don't, a lot of people in this country just don't care about politics.
It's just not part of their life.
Now, those people who understand that something's wrong with the country respond to President Trump and respond to the MAGA movement.
And you can see whether it's the Commonwealth of Virginia, the state of Georgia, what's happening in Texas with Ken Paxton, I can speak dozens and dozens and dozens of examples of what's going on in this country.
You know, Steve Stern, the precinct strategy.
Yes, and we're not winning every day because you're not going to win every day.
History shows you, human nature shows you, you're not going to win every day, just not.
The key is to be resilient, to be anti fragile, right?
You know, it's kind of anti fragile who's resilient.
Those Persians that are dug in over there in Tehran, face facts, they're resilient.
They took a bombing, they've taken a bombing that's virtually unprecedented for its concentration, probably in human history.
And if it's not, you've got to compare that to what we did over Nazi Germany and how we firebombed Tokyo.
And those are pretty extreme examples.
Our movement is absolutely anti fragile, absolutely resilient.
And we have a history, if we don't. quit, we eventually win.
Nothing that we're doing now or working on is, including in Tehran, including in the Strait of Hormuz, is more important than what is happening at a deck plate level in the state of Texas.
Because the enemies of this republic, and they are enemies, the enemies of this republic have targeted Texas as the jewel in the crown of this union.
And they are very focused because the economy and the people and everything they've targeted.
And the lesson that we're learning.
And you've learned this the last couple of days of the Texas Education Board.
You are the Calvary.
There's nobody else coming to save us.
The people coming to save us are you in this audience.
And you saw it the last couple of days.
This Texas Education Board is fascinating because you have an open mic, people can come and give their opinions.
And the flooding of the zone of grassroots people from their heart.
You don't need a PhD in education, you don't need to have gone to an Ivy League college.
Hell, you're a Texan.
Just come up and tell us the way it is.
And it was so powerful.
Brandon, this is what's given you guys momentum to sort this out.
Now, I guess we're going to go all the way through today and into tomorrow till we finally put this to bed.
And this will be a crushing blow to the Islamists because they thought they had a victory.
And they've thought they had a victory because people just aren't paying attention.
They got too much to do in their lives.
But once you put the spotlight on this, patriots sit there and go, I'm not going to let that happen.
Number one, I'm not going to let it happen to my kids and grandkids.
But more importantly, I have an obligation.
To everybody that came to that state and worked for decades and decades and decades to make it the jewel of the crown.
Because if you've gone through Texas and traveled through Texas, you understand there's a couple parts of that state that you don't come to mind that we can turn this into an economic paradise.
We're working on history standards right now, but someday the history books are going to be written about what happened when the Islamists showed up in America and Texas to take over.
What the history books are going to say is that the state of Texas woke up before it was too late and we took our history back, we took our country back, and we're actually going to promote patriotism in America first to our children and their incredible history because history is such a gift that we have to give to our children.
Their heritage is Americans and Brandon, you can find out more about this.
Let's get that, Grace and Mo, if we can put that live stream up.
I want to follow that today.
Thank you, sir.
Great patriot, sir.
It's the little guy that has driven, we've had great leaders, we've had tremendous leaders in this country.
Just been incredible.
You go back and look at the history of this country, though.
It is when the little guy puts it on their shoulders, the man and woman out there, the silent majority that we've had from time immemorial, particularly at the American Revolution.
When they put it on their shoulders, guess what?
We win because these are tough people.
Okay, I've got a lot to do and limited time to do it.
Let's play.
I got Rosemary Jenks.
You've got to understand there's an amnesty bill out there, folks, driven by Republicans.
Let's see Laura Ingram talking to one of the biggest wimps in the House, and then we'll bring Rosemary in.
If you have committed a crime, if you have committed a crime, yes, I have, Laura.
If you have committed a crime, you should be removed from the country.
Period.
Number two, what we are trying to do is say if you have been in the country for more than five years, in other words, if you came here during Joe Biden's administration, you don't qualify.
How does an immigration officer determine, millions and millions of people, determine continuous presence and tell me the considerations they take into account to determine that?
You have to be able to meet the qualifications of the program.
And that means that the Department of Homeland Security is going to make the determination as they always have based on the current structure and guidelines that are in place.
But the bottom line here, Laura, can I make a few points?
But you can't come on this show and say to my audience that you can't have committed a crime to be eligible under the Dignity Act because there are several crimes that are nonviolent that do not qualify for inadmissibility.
And on top of that, There are multiple instances, including family unity, public interest, and just discretion on the part of immigration officers.
I can't imagine Democrat immigration officers under a Democrat president in the future was going to hold this strict.
You know, we're not going to let any criminals in.
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They claim that they have zero tolerance for criminal aliens in this bill.
And that is an absolute fabrication.
The bill includes very specific waivers for criminals.
If you're convicted of multiple misdemeanors, you get a waiver.
If you've been deported, you get to come back and apply for amnesty.
If you illegally voted, You get a waiver.
So, this is if you're in a state or federal gang database, that information can't be used against you.
This is lunacy.
Oh, and by the way, it also gives amnesty to all of the employers who have been hiring all of the illegal aliens because none of the information in their applications can be used to hold the employers accountable.
I'll do a rant this afternoon when I can have a couple more Warpath coffees, get jacked up and come in hot.
But Rosemary, most importantly for this audience, because we immerse them in information and then they can use their agency, where do they go to you?
Because you've dedicated your life to this.
You're one of the great patriots in this country.
Compare her to Salazar.
Rosemary Jenks has defended American workers from the first time I met her years ago, decades ago.
So where do they go today to find out about this bill and the lies?
But look, I don't want to hear about criminal aliens and bad guys.
Yes, of course, we're going to get the bad guys out.
But that's just a sop.
So, people can sit there and go, no mass deportations.
We're going to deport all of them, every one of them.
They're all going to go.
They all have to go.
And we should stop all these scams like the H 1B scam, stop it, send them all home, and a 10 year, minimum 10 year moratorium on all immigration.
Then we got time to kind of set this thing up, sort it out, make sure American workers are the priority above all, and set up an immigration system that's kind of fair.
But it's going to take a decade to do that, and we need a time out.
Then I'll have a great rant on this this afternoon.
Thank you, ma'am.
Appreciate you.
Dr. Thayer, kind of one of our resident strategists, I want you to go back.
You mentioned something on this show a couple weeks ago about Napoleon.
Talk to me about when Napoleon had problems that looked like they were like Gordian notch and couldn't do it.
He would say, I want you to scale this.
If you tell his marshals, first off, he says, it's your thing that you've got to figure it out.
It ain't my job to figure it.
It's your job to figure it out.
He would tell them scale up your problem.
Talk to me about that and specifically apply it to the current situation in the Persian Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz, in the entire war with Iran right now, sir.
What Napoleon did is recognize the logic of escalation, that with a great coterie of marshals as he had, marshals and generals, these were individuals who could be trusted, and they could be trusted to execute his vision of the plan.
He had the objective, and he was confident in assigning them their missions, knowing that they would be completed.
He also emphasized the importance of focusing on the objective.
Very importantly, there's one thing on which to focus, and that's going to have to be achieved.
Final point with respect to Napoleon is that he recognized that he was the master of improvisation.
And here he reminds me so much of Trump.
Napoleon said, The battle begins and the issue develops.
And what he meant by that is he's going to start the battle, he's going to start the campaign.
But because Napoleon was a master in art of the deal, right?
He was a master essentially of With a mind for war, genius for war, he was always going to be able to outfight his opponent who didn't have Napoleon's skills, didn't have Napoleon's abilities.
So, if we reply that to Iran today, what do we see?
We see that President Trump is recognizing that however valuable the Iranians are as interlocutors, Beijing is going to really decide this issue, that China has.
A dominant voice, an important, if not dominant voice, in Tehran.
So the question of who rules in Tehran is going to be decided in large measure by Xi Jinping because of the dependence of Iran on communist China.
So President Trump is recognizing that if he takes this to be resolved with Xi Jinping, as you suggested, that has advantages for the United States.
There is A modest coincidence of interest here that Beijing wants oil out of the strait as the U.S. wants the strait open.
President Trump, like Napoleon, is a master of the deal.
They both have a genius for war in their respective fields.
Napoleon, obviously kinetic, Trump, in everything else, as well as the kinetic.
So he's going to be able to outfight Xi Jinping and get him to place the appropriate pressure.
On Tehran.
At the same time, there's U.S. military might and U.S. military in theater, obviously, that could be called upon equally to go back to the kinetic, to go back to warfare if that's going to be required.
So we want to recognize, I think, the similarities between those individuals and to recognize that President Trump, again, a master deal maker, is going to be able to ensure that he's using Beijing to put pressure on Tehran.
To bring to resolution the issues that we have at hand and to ensure that the fragile pieces escape.
The Persians have been negotiating for, I don't know, 3,000 years.
They fought the Greeks, they fought the Romans, and now they got the Americans as the, also the British.
Therefore, I guess the British were subterfuge and the Americans.
So they've taken on the best of the West, right?
These guys also have a bureaucracy that goes back long before the mullahs.
They're kind of an organized hierarchical society as far as this goes.
They have a way of negotiating, which is just to tap you along.
History shows this, just to tap you along.
Why, given the fact that we've defanged them and declawed them a lot in our military operation, go through the punch list, has been very successful.
I just don't know now because they're double dealing you all the time.
You see it even in the beginning stages of this ceasefire where they're putting out this maximalist thing, which President Trump said, I threw it in the trash can.
And you guys are lying because we're actually dealing with another document and we're pretty far down.
We've at least got some sort of basis of agreement.
They're just going to, all they're going to do is obfuscate and lie constantly.
And the powers, this is a great power.
You've told me, hey, the whole world is shifted now from the global war on terror to a great power struggle, particularly the two great powers, the Chinese Communist Party and the United States of America.
And this is a global conflict.
And they are so far deep inside the wire here than we are there.
So they're inside the wire, taking this fight to us here every day at universities, on Capitol Hill, on Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm.
You look at finance, you look at all of it.
They're deep inside of here.
And they also think they're winning.
So, why wouldn't we have Trump, who's the master deal maker, and China's always been his central thesis, particularly as you're running them out of the Western Hemisphere, and just have a mano a mano with Xi in Beijing, May 13th?
It's on the books.
I don't know why we're dealing with Grun Dunes in Pakistan, who are totally controlled by the CCP 100%.
And also, they're Iranians.
Just say, guys, let's put a pin in it.
I'm going to deal with your paymaster and we'll figure something out.
I know you're over at CPI, the great group that coordinates so much activity.
They're absolutely spectacular.
What Senator DeMint and Mark Meadows have done is just absolutely, absolutely extraordinary.
Talking about scaling up.
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Tej Gill, thank you for joining us.
Tej, I know you've got many of your colleagues and comrades and compatriots that have served over there that are very upset about what's going on.
I should let you know, I knew Tej for about a decade.
He was my head of security.
I knew him for about a decade.
And one day, Tej, I guess, shaved and showed up.
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That beard is a serious beard.
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But Tage, tell me about all the innovations.
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Talk to, get a minute or two, tell us about the company, what you got, and why people should go check it out, particularly people that are not really coffee fans or think that you got to dump milk and sugar into coffee.