Episode 5326: Global Impact On The Closed Strait; Rushed Election In Virginia Leaves Room To Steal
Stephen K. Bannon addresses a U.S. Navy blockade in the Strait of Hormuz that cut traffic by 80% amid Iranian seizures, aiming to pressure China while criticizing EU inaction. He details Virginia election fraud allegations involving a 70,000-vote error and claims the SPLC staged the 2017 Charlottesville rally with $270,000 to smear MAGA. The episode concludes by contrasting Florida's redistricting with Democratic plans to admit D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, warning that such moves alongside $39 trillion in U.S. debt will trigger financial market instability. [Automatically generated summary]
To the regime in Tehran, the blockade is tightening by the hour.
We are in control.
Nothing in, nothing out.
Iran's battered military, the IRGC specifically, has been reduced to a gang of pirates with a flag.
They cloak their aggression in slogans, but the world now sees them for what they are criminals on the high seas.
They don't control anything.
They're acting like pirates, acting like terrorists.
They're the ones who lay indiscriminate mines, who shoot at random ships, who killed 45,000 of their own people, innocent protesters in the course of weeks.
It's Friday, 24 April in the year of our Lord, 2026.
We are going to get back into the Commonwealth of Virginia today.
We're going to get into the Southern Poverty Law Center, all of it.
Scheduled.
We got Carolyn Wren, hopefully, Steve Cortez, others.
Aaron Joyce is going to join us from the come up.
I want to start with Captain Fanel.
So, Captain, you're the first one that talked about a blockade and what a blockade could do on the show weeks and weeks ago.
And you and I talked about this pirate situation down on the cliffs overlooking the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf with this collection of Persians and Bedouin brigands.
Is Pete correct?
Because the briefing today, and I thought the general was fantastic.
I think there's some confusion, and maybe I'm confused, and you're going to help me out here.
But we've got a blockade with now three carrier strike groups.
And that blockade, you don't go in or out unless you've got essentially the permission of the United States Navy and the commander in chief.
And we know that they've done a full blockade from Iranian ports.
And as Eric Bowling said, they're all, hang on, they're all types of things they're trying to slip and slip away, but we're doing that.
But the traffic coming out of the Persian Gulf is still down.
When you look at all the publicly available sites, it's still down 80%.
So the pirates do have a stranglehold on Hormuz itself, sir.
Yeah, there's no question that Iran is through what I would consider to be this cognitive warfare by the discussion of mines after we announced the blockade.
And then this issue with what they did this last weekend, or a couple of days ago, when they seized these two Mediterranean shipping company large container ships.
And those were now in Iranian control.
They attacked five vessels, as the chairman said.
They retained two.
They did that with these Boston whalers.
And the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy actually put out a video yesterday, a two minute video showing a Boston whaler skimming along in smooth, clear seas, glassy seas.
And they approach one of the MSC ships.
And when they get there, the ship is already dead in the water.
There's no fire, there's no attack.
It's just already sitting dead in the water.
And the hatch at the water line is open.
And a ladder is already down, and the Boston Whaler pulls right up, and these Iranian Rev Guard sailors jump off and come up, and they have this, you know, takedown apparently, or this simulated takedown.
So there's a lot of theater that the Iranians are putting out there, which has paralyzed the international shipping company.
Our blockade is in place, and we are specifically focused on any ships that come into Iran or out of Iran.
So All other international shipping that's in the Gulf, and there's over 750 vessels in the Gulf right now, those ships are allowed to go out if they're coming out of any other port outside of Iran, and we don't query them.
We know who they are.
If we have a question, we may query them.
But if they're squawking AIS, Automated Identification System, then they're going to be free to sail out.
But they're not.
But on the other hand, some have.
And over the course of the blockade, Or over the course of these entire 55 days, there's been over 300 ships that have transited to Taiwan Strait.
Most have gone through this new Iranian toll booth or north of the normal traffic separation.
So they're transiting through the north of the transit separation scheme, south of the transit separation scheme.
We saw five of these cruise liners slipped out over the weekend, last weekend.
And then there's some that have gone through the traffic separation scheme.
But in those 55 days, there has not been any mines detected.
Not one mine has been detected, not one ship has been hit by a mine, yet the entire international community.
Is paralyzed by the threat of mines.
And now, with these two seizures, that continues.
So, but talking about the efficacy of the blockade from our side, let me give you an example of a proof of it.
Just in the last 24 hours, a 30 year old Iranian VLCC, very large crude container ship, named the Nasha, was in Bandar Abbas and is now steaming up into the Persian Gulf towards Karg Island inside territorial waters of Iran.
This is a reflection of the Iranians not able to be able to offload their oil that they must continue to produce to keep their system running.
And that oil is going to Karg Island, which contains 90% of Iran's oil.
And they're worried because they had about 13 million barrels of reserve capacity on Karg Island.
And the estimates that I'm reading say that they had about a 12 day reserve.
The blockade went into place on the 8th of April.
So that's April 20th.
So this week, In this next, at some point, and that's why they had to pull this old 30 year old ship out of mothballs to go up there and offload oil production.
The Chinese Communist Party gets some, they've got a deal with Iran to take as much as they can get.
But they've also got deals with Saudi.
They've got a 20 year output deal with Saudi Arabia.
Why strategically are we allowing Saudi, UAE, and Qatar?
Vessels to come out when some of that, not all of it, but some portion of that is going to the Chinese Communist Party.
And you agree with me that it's principle to principle here.
The more heat we put on the CCP, the better situation we're going to have here to get a culmination of this done, principle to principle, and for what the issues we have in the Taiwan Straits, sir.
And I would submit to you that that pressure is, in fact, happening, even if we consider that there may be one or two tankers that are getting out through these other Gulf states.
But again, as you said in your morning show, 80% of the traffic is cut down, is reduced.
So China is being dramatically affected.
And the proof of that is.
What happened this week when Xi Jinping came out in the PRC press?
He's been silent for 50 days, hasn't said a word.
The paramount leader of the People's Republic of China has not said anything about this war.
He's let his foreign ministry and his surrogates in the Global Times and others say things about how they feel about it.
But Xi had never said anything until a few days ago, and he came out and said, I think this is something that needs to be resolved, and we should open.
And have normal passage of all shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
That is evidence that this is having an impact on the People's Republic of China.
And there's other evidence too, as Eric Bolling mentioned in your morning show.
The question is Do you agree with me that this thing about Islamabad and you got this foreign minister going, he's going to Islamabad, that's all nonsense until you deal with this.
And your recommendation is that, hey, I'd like to have it some other way, but it looks like you're going to have to go kinetic, at least at some level up the escalatory ladder on these guys, sir?
The diplomatic stuff, in my opinion, is just part of a process that doesn't really lead to the final solution.
And right now, if the international community and Europe and everybody else is up in arms about the strait being closed, then we need to go in and we can zap these little mosquito boats.
We've already sent two destroyers through the strait to prove that there's no mines.
But we can do some nominal mine clearance with robotics and other platforms.
And then we need to start putting pressure on the international shipping community to move.
And I will tell you, because I follow these things, the international shipping community, the shipping community writ large, they don't want to take any risk.
They don't want to take any risk.
And my pushback to them would be you did so in the tanker wars in the 80s, and you have to do it again today to prove to the world that this is not happening.
I got it, it's going to cost a lot, but it's going to cost a lot more if you bottle this up indefinitely.
We can show them that it's open.
We can show them it's clear, but they're going to have to take the first step.
Am I unfair when I'm calling out the Arabs and not doing enough here because it's their oil that's really getting out and getting monetized, that their special forces, their navies have got to get engaged here?
I haven't seen any Arabs out chasing mosquito boats.
I haven't seen any Arab fighters going over there, and I certainly haven't seen any special forces.
So, if you look at their various challenges here brought by the RNC and other Republican entities, they're basically making two types of challenges here.
One is substantive.
So, they're arguing that the way the question was phrased on the ballot was unfair, was misleading.
And there is some legitimacy to that.
I mean, the question asks, do you want to, quote, restore fairness to the process?
Who's going to realistically vote no on that?
I mean, a lot of people did, but it's slanted.
I don't know if it's slanted enough to win the legal challenge.
But the second category is the procedural challenges.
And that's where I think the challengers have some real heft behind their arguments.
For example, one of the laws says if you're going to do this, the Virginia General Assembly has to pass a law and then voting, the referendum can't start for 90 days after the law is passed.
Here, We're not even 90 days out now and the voting's done.
So I don't know how Virginia is going to defend that.
There's another procedural quirk, I guess, that says the way you have to do this is the Virginia General Assembly has to pass a law, then you need to have an intervening election, then a second General Assembly needs to pass the law again.
And the argument here that you're hearing from the defenders is, well, the 2025 governor election, that's the intervening election.
The problem is that overlapped with the first vote.
So there's some procedural nuance here that I think is going to be a real problem For people defending this outcome.
And I think it's going to give the Republicans a chance to actually get it knocked down on the legal challenges.
Ellie Onik, one of CNN's legal experts, that literally, when he's on there, he's just bashing Trump, the Trump movement, anybody associated with Trump.
When he says, oh, yeah, I think they got some real problems there on the procedural side, that's like a papal bull.
It's like, it's incredible.
Aaron Joyce, you're the founder of this data company that looks at everything you're dealing with elections.
But I want to ask you first, because you've been a real activist in this.
Are people in the Commonwealth, and particularly people like yourselves, one of the leaders, are you holding out hope that the courts are going to come in and bail us out, ma'am?
Well, the fact that they counted, you have to have two intervening elections, as your guests have explained on past shows.
And they tried to count the early vote period from 2025 as an intervening election.
The election was already underway, a million ballots had been cast.
The reason that two intervening elections Requirement in the Constitution of Virginia is so important, is so people can think it through.
They can understand who their representatives are, what they're voting for.
This was so rushed that we just found a 70,000 vote ballot difference in the final results from Tuesday night.
So the Department of Elections will take the 45 days of early voting, the results there, they're unofficial, they're not certified yet, but they're a solid number.
They roll that into the election night votes as well.
So, they take that one third of the early vote, the 45 days of early vote, roll that into the summary data from the election night voting and give you a result.
And we found a 70,000 vote difference.
The votes were up by 70,000 from early voting that we never saw.
I mean, we monitor the 45 days every day.
We monitor what's being mailed in, we monitor what's being voted on a machine.
So, we started raising some questions, and Chesterfield had actually doubled its votes by accident or somebody who was uploading or sending over the voter data.
In the big database in the sky, I suppose, was basically accidentally, we think, doubled Chesterfield's count.
Chesterfield's final was 79,000 yes and 70,000 or so no.
And yet there's an extra 70,000 coming in.
Nobody noticed this except us.
We've pointed it out and the corrections were made.
But across the board, we see this.
We see localities that are losing, that are down, say, 230 down in Arlington.
So what they had for early voting in Arlington for 45 days.
Whatever they're showing on election night for early voting is down by 230.
We don't know why.
Prince William County down 237.
Richmond City down 278 early voters.
And so we tally all that up and still it's off by about 15,000 or so.
Here's what I make about as well is we got to get a right count on this thing.
I tell you what I'm going to do.
I have my producer, I want to talk to you about coming on our Saturday show because this needs a full couple of segments because.
From the Seth Kessels of the world, so many people were coming to me and saying, Hey, there's something screwed up about this, and we've got to sort this out because there's a tight grace.
It's the sheer fact that this election was rushed.
And this is why I get back to the two intervening elections rule in the Constitution, because this gives people a chance to prepare on the big question of whether you want to change your Constitution.
Instead, this was kind of rushed out, and the data is rushed into here.
And it's a lot of data to keep track of.
And if I could just add, Steve, to what your last guest said Matt Kittle, we work with a lot of grassroots.
Full disclosure, we're nonpartisan.
We take all comers for our analysis service, and we've built software, a bunch of volunteers, and we're grassroots.
We've built software to do this unique view high propensity, low propensity, lean left, lean right, lean Republican, lean Democrat.
But the biggest complaint we hear from the grassroots is that the Republican Party or the RPV, I guess, or the GOP data, whatever they call it, they need to do a better job with helping the grassroots get that data.
Because right now it's basically a big six figure.
Cost to get the kind of intense data analysis that you need for elections these days.
And that's what all the consultants get.
The grassroots needs to get better.
And that's what we hear a lot.
And that's why a lot of people come to work with us and partner with us on the data analysis that we do.
And we're blessed to have some very talented people who founded this nonprofit.
We also did it because we could see a need that nobody is really following this data in a way that needs to be followed.
That's EPEC, Electoral Process Education Corporation.
We're the little nonprofit with the big name and big data.
And some big brains behind it, I would add.
EPEC.info, that's us.
We're on Substack, epic.substack.
Epic Team is our X account.
We're on Getter.
We need to go and fire up our account there, but we do have a Getter account and Truth Social.
But start at Epic if you want to be a volunteer.
We'll walk you through the process.
We're happy to work with people and we explain and we help educate people on what this data is about and how elections are so technologically driven and how we need to keep an eye on it.
But just to update Chesterfield, they did correct.
So they took the 70,000 double votes out.
And so now the early voting data for 45 days is now matching the elections.
You know, I had some people since I came on yesterday push back on me a little bit, saying that they are more confident that the Supreme Court will end up doing the right thing.
I still remain skeptical, but I would say I'm less doomsday than I was yesterday.
And so, but again, this is going to be up to those judges there to make this decision.
And so I really hope they do the right thing.
This was blatantly unconstitutional.
Like, there was no question about that.
And it was laid out in the lawsuit.
But like, you know, they have a militant.
Psychotic attorney general there and a Supreme Court that gets reelected by the legislature.
You were very starry eyed when you came out of Auburn, but you're one of the most cynical people given your battle scars over the years in politics.
How can you possibly think the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Virginia, all the Democrats are going to sit there and go, oh, yeah, I see it.
Not a problem.
When you got the lead story in Axios this morning, it's how the Democrats already have a massive operation going through, how they're going to impeach President Trump, how they're going to impeach members of his cabinet, how they're going to put his family in prison.
I'm still fairly doomsday, don't get me wrong, but there was like a glimmer of optimism that I was being convinced of.
But I will say, I'm very much for right now.
Richard McCormick is leading the Make DC Square again.
That's what we should do.
Fight fire with fire.
Screw it.
Make DC.
President Trump can do it by executive order and take over Arlington and Alexandria, put them in the district of Columbia, let them be represented there.
So, Caroline Wren, Please, man, don't be messing with my Commonwealth now.
We're trying to break that up.
Let's go to Florida.
Karl Rove's not, I think Karl Rove heard that you're going to Tallahassee as the brawler you are to assist in any way you can to make sure this thing happens, this redistricting in this special session.
But Karl Rove's not happy with that.
He's not happy with President Trump doing this, et cetera.
What is his argument about this, and what is your argument about why this must be done, ma'am?
Well, if there's any type of proposition, I think it's a good idea.
Karl Rove typically doesn't.
And so he came out of it, it was either this morning or yesterday, I was reading, and said that he did not believe the Florida redistricting is a good idea because it would help the Democrats, which his claim is that there are some like R plus eight members in the Florida Congress, a lot of like the South Miami folks.
And if you add some new districts, it might pull a couple of the Republicans from theirs, making theirs a little bit more competitive.
Which I don't think so.
I think there's been a huge population growth in Florida, and it's been Republicans who have been moving here.
And so, also, I would ask Karl Rove if you actually believe Florida redistricting would help Democrats, then why did Hakeem Jeffries go epiplectic about Florida yesterday and say this is the biggest danger and we're going to fight?
This is a war.
So, the Democrats view Florida as a war, but Karl Rove seems to think he already wants to surrender a war and a battle that we haven't even started yet, which is not that surprising.
Yeah, because Karl Rove's attitude is the same as the Indiana legislators.
They care about what the mainstream media thinks.
They think they're defending democracy.
And the left is always, they take that talking point, but the left doesn't care.
They're here actually to fight.
And so I think what the left's plan is right now, I mean, they tell us what it is, is that they are fighting this redistricting fight so hard because they need to win the House.
They think they're going to in 2026.
They may either tie the Senate or be down one or two.
They think they could take the Senate in 2028 and then win the presidency and then.
We know exactly what they're going to do.
They will nuke the filibuster, which we're unwilling to do, and then they will make D.C. and Puerto Rico states, adding four new permanent Democrat senators.
They will pack the Supreme Court.
They will pass a new Voting Rights Act.
They will grant mass amnesty and impeach Donald Trump, which they will have done that if they take the House.
That is obviously their play.
Of course, they're going to do that.
And meanwhile, Republicans are still just saying, so we can't even pass the Save America Act.
It is unbelievable to me.
Every single Democrat is on record.
Saying that we're going to nuke the filibuster when we come in, and here are all the reasons why.
Look at they just, you know, put aside.
You watch the Democrat talking points of Virginia, they're like, This is horrible, this is a terrible thing to be done, but it has to be done to fight the Republicans.
Well, I wish Republicans had that attitude.
You can think that we need to preserve the Senate institution and the nuking the filibuster is bad.
However, recognize the time we're in, recognize that the Democrats are going to do it when they take over.
We have all three branches of government right now.
You have wasted one year.
We're now going to halfway through the second year that is totally wasted.
In Florida, the governor is supposed to propose a map.
Nobody's seen it yet, and he will to the Florida legislature, and they'll debate it in a special session that's going to start next week.
And so the map will add anywhere between what this is what people think one and five new districts that people think could be Republican leaning.
But it's important to note that this is in Florida.
It is not about partisan politics as to why in Virginia, that's what this was.
They were open about it.
Florida, there really has been massive population growth.
The map was drawn for a 21 million person state.
It was based off the 2020 census.
Florida is now at 23 million people.
And when with the population shifts, the map has to shift.
Otherwise, you're underrepresenting millions of Floridians who deserve their representation based on today's population, not yesterday's census.
And so I think the goal of this special session should be to align these districts with where millions of new residents have settled in Florida and correct imbalances caused by the fastest growth rates in the nation.
If you wait until the 2030 census, then the census happens.
It takes two years for that to come out.
Then you're looking at 2030 coup.
And then you go into a session.
We will lose.
You will have four upcoming elections in Florida.
Based off of maps that are so massively outdated due to the population boom that came to Florida after COVID from 2020 till now and is still increasing.
And so I think that they have to get this done.
DeSantis will be leading the charge here.
I'm very hopeful that he's able to get this done.
He's been a very savvy operator.
Him and the legislature do not get along well, but my God, this is very important.
And this is also doing what is right for the state.
And you agree with me the stakes couldn't be higher given Axios confirmed today, the massive machinery and back of the destruction of President Trump, his family, and the MAGA movement, ma'am?
So, I was on it literally every single night in primetime, it would rotate among the shows.
By the way, President Trump asked me to go there.
I was working in 2017 after he won, decided to not join the administration.
Instead, I went over to Fox News.
So, I was a Fox News contributor for the first year of the Trump presidency.
As you can imagine, that was pretty cushy job, pretty easy.
The president had me at the Christmas party in late 2017 in December.
And my wife and I, we were invited to go and have a private time with the first couple, which was wonderful to get to see them privately in the midst of this huge Christmas party.
He said, Okay, that's the good news.
We took a picture, of course.
He's like, The bad news is I need you to go work at CNN.
I said, Oh, gosh, okay, fine.
I'll do it for the cause.
I'll do it for you.
He negotiated my contract, by the way, which is kind of funny and very Trumpian.
So he literally negotiated the terms of the contract, including the pay.
He said, I'll make sure they pay you.
But it was brutal work, as you can imagine, going on.
Don Lemon and Cuomo.
Every single night.
And for a year and a half, I was on every single night until I was taken off the air at CNN.
And the reason that I was taken off the air was that I had become too effective and too consistent in debunking the Charlottesville hoax, which was the whole centerpiece of their network.
In fact, it was the centerpiece of the entire anti Trump media ecosystem.
That was the foundational lie, the Charlottesville hoax, supposing that President Trump had somehow praised the thing.
As my late friend Scott Adams used to say, this was the tent pole hoax.
It was the foundation on which all of the other lies were really based.
But this was, to them, the nuclear weapon.
This was the dirty bomb against President Trump.
And his movement.
Of course, it was entirely based on a lie, as is clear if you look at the actual transcripts and the actual full videos unedited of what President Trump said in that very contentious presser after the Charlottesville events.
I was pretty effective at debunking this lie, and I made a Prager U video that went super viral with a lot of help from President Trump.
And because of that, CNN said, Hey, Cortez, we're going to take you off the field.
And here's what they did, which is even worse.
I said, Okay, hey, you know what?
This job isn't much fun anyway.
Why don't we part ways?
Let me out of my contract.
They said, Oh, no, no.
We are going to pay you to not go on television.
So they literally paid me to not work, to not be on the air at CNN, but I was still under contract and exclusive, so I couldn't go on other shows.
I couldn't go on alternative media shows like this, I couldn't go on Fox News.
So they literally paid me to be sidelined.
That's how important this issue was to them this myth, this hoax that President Trump had praised racists when, in fact, the exact opposite is true from the transcript.
He expressly condemned the neo Nazis who were there.
Well, now the new news, of course, is the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
And this indictment reveals that the underlying event itself so, not only was the hoax a grand lie, but the underlying event itself it was staged, it was financed and organized by the SPLC, by the leftists from that NGO, from that advocacy group, the SPLC.
They're now indicted for it because that is a fraud.
And specifically, they paid $270,000.
We're talking real money $270,000 to the guy who organized that very Charlottesville event.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, this indictment and what will follow is so important to make sure that we can break up the deep state and the color revolution destroying this republic.
And look, they found criminal cretins who were more than happy to take this money an enormous amount of money, a lot of money for anyone, but especially for these types of people.
You're exactly correct.
And these northern liberals, okay, who all work for the Southern Poverty Law Center, they sit in their luxury office in Montgomery, Alabama.
It's known locally as the Poverty Palace.
That's how opulent.
Their headquarters are because they've gotten over the years hundreds of millions of dollars from all of the biggest companies in America, all the biggest corporations that you support as a consumer, folks.
Unfortunately, those corporations are giving massive amounts of money to SPLC under the guise of fighting hate, when in fact, they are highly partisan political actors.
And we now know worse than that, a criminal enterprise.
This is a crime.
This is a fraud.
That's why they have been now indicted.
They were literally trying to create hate so that they could then claim that they are fighting it.
This would be like the fire department of a town going and acting as arsonists and starting fires all over town and then saying, hey, we need more budget.
We need more authority to fight all these fires that are breaking out in our town.
That is what the SPLC did.
And why did they have to do that?
It's because the demand for hate from the left far exceeds the actual supply of hate that is out there in American society.
Well, clearly, and they did make that point that this is ongoing and it better be because I think there's a lot more here, obviously, right?
As bad as this example is, it is certainly not isolated.
It's not the, There's never one cockroach, right?
This isn't the only incident.
So, yeah, very curious about who else was getting paid.
I suspect, for example, I suspect, we'll see if it is revealed, that a lot of the kind of caricature, almost foolish people on the right, actually, who seem to have some platforms but make no sense and sort of embarrass our movement, I suspect a lot of them are on the payroll being paid by the left, whether it's SPLC or other organizations.
But how many events in recent political history that we thought were organic were, in fact, staged?
I would argue quite a few.
We now know the Charlottesville one.
And listen, I know as much about Charlottesville as anybody, okay?
I've spent years literally debunking the Charlottesville hoax.
Even I didn't realize, though, that the underlying event itself was staged, financed, and organized by leftists.
I mean, that's the reality by leftists using corporate money, again, from the biggest companies in America.
So this is just the beginning.
It's a really important expose.
There's so many different tentacles to this.
And thankfully, we're in a different place where it's a lot harder now.
For them to spread this kind of myth, this kind of hoax, like the Charlottesville hoax, because corporate media doesn't have nearly as much power and big tech is at least being monitored regarding its censorship.
And I want to, because people, I want to make sure, particularly younger people or new people to this movement, have to understand how this was central to their argument.
They concocted this, they knew this is so evil and so demonic that we got it.
And man, you fought this thing on CNN, it was really magnificent.
Steve, where I got you here, I got a minute or two.
Birchgold, take your phone out.
Text Bannon, B A N N O N, at 989898.
The ultimate guide for investing in gold and precious metals in the age of Trump.
Most importantly, get to Philip Patrick and the team over, and you can talk about gold as a hedge in times of financial turbulence.
Steve, I got about two minutes.
Just your assessment.
We heard the other day that the UAE, and now Scott Besson told us, I guess, in testimony, many people in the Gulf are looking for these credit lines.
What's your sense of?
Of the capital markets through this entire shift to the war, and the center of gravity of the war being now the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, sir.