Kash Patel defends the FBI's Trump-era leadership, citing a 20% homicide drop while refuting claims of frivolous spending. Tyler O'Neill and Steve Cortez accuse the SPLC of anti-Christian bias and fraud for targeting conservative groups like Focus on the Family. Mary Holland joins to critique the New York Times' Big Pharma defense regarding RFK Jr.'s MAHA agenda, which faces legislative stalls. Economic analysts warn that high debt, rising yields, and the costly Ukraine war are crushing real wages, urging an immediate end to the conflict. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson fortifies the dollar against China via UAE swap lines amidst corruption allegations involving Zelensky and Yermak over misappropriated aid. [Automatically generated summary]
We need a serious budget, but we also need serious leadership.
And I will say this there is one clear priority in Trump's overall budget, and it isn't law and order, it is war.
Because while Trump is proposing cuts to programs that really do keep people safe, he wants to increase war spending by half a trillion dollars.
And I don't need to tell anyone here we are not going to bomb our way to safer communities.
So I intend to help rip that budget up and write bills that keep families safe.
But beyond that budget, We need serious leadership at the FBI that the American people can trust.
And I am deeply concerned about the reports that your leadership has not been serious.
We need somebody at this agency who's focused on solving criminal cases, not passing out branded bourbon or jetting around the globe.
Your job is to be reachable.
And I know Senator Van Hollen asked you about this, but I got to say, if you want to pass out liquor or pop bottles in a locker room, stick to podcasting, leave law and order to people.
Who really do care about justice and appearances?
That is really critical.
And it's what I am really deeply concerned about, and so are many people.
This is what real leadership looks like at the FBI.
Every one of you was given it.
This is what's happened under my tenure at the FBI in the Trump administration 20 point drop in the homicide rate, 45,000 violent offenders arrested last year, twice as many as 2024, 2,450,000.
Criminal gangs disrupted, that's a 322% increase from 2024.
6,900 child victims have been located since I've been in the seat, that's a 144% increase.
2,900 child predators and human traffickers arrested, that's a 70% increase.
And we've arrested eight of the top 10 most wanted fugitives in the world in 14 months, that's twice as many in the four years combined.
That is what the men and women of the FBI are doing, well resourced.
Everyone should take a look at this.
If people want to continue the baseless, fraudulent, false personal attacks at me, that's great.
Keep the target on me, as I've always said, but the mission has never been better.
Unlike the baseless reports, the only person that was slinging margaritas in El Salvador on the taxpayer dollar with a convicted gangbanging rapist was you.
The only person that ran up a $100,000 bar tab in Washington, D.C. this lobby was you.
The only individual in this room that was drinking on taxpayer dime during the day was you.
And like other hate groups that SPLC lists, they weaponize Christian rhetoric against LGBTQ people.
And I think that's really important to mention because they sow division and ideas that tear families apart by perpetuating political notions that LGBTQ people can't be, for example, truly Christian unless they deny who they are.
And that's one, just patently false.
And two, it's really dangerous because it sets families against one another.
I've long said they are the tip of the spear when it comes to demonizing conservatives and Christians in America today.
And that video particularly highlights one of the worst examples to me.
Where, you know, I grew up listening to Adventures in Odyssey.
I think many of us on the conservative side know that Focus on the Family is this longstanding conservative Christian organization that calls for, you know, that pushes for family values, that encourages parents to raise their children in the admonition of the Lord.
And, you know, all of this is conservative Christian, but it's also, it has implications and good lessons for those outside of the Christian community.
But You know, the focus on the family is the longest, most well known conservative Christian nonprofit in America.
And the SPLC, for a long time, said that they're not anti Christian.
And the only ever piece of evidence they put for that was that they didn't put focus on the family on the hate map.
So, essentially, by their own reckoning now, you know, last year they put focus on the family on the hate map.
They deep sixed that language protecting themselves from the anti Christian charge.
And then they had this guy, R.G. Cravens, come out.
And justify putting focus on the hate map.
And his justification essentially says what we've all known for years that the SPLC puts conservative Christian groups on the hate map for the sin of disagreeing with LGBTQ ideology.
Talk to me about what this means in Alabama with an attorney general, because you've been saying, hey, you've done the analysis, you wrote the book, you've come out with these great articles as peace.
Right here about focus on the family.
But is there action?
You know, we had the federal issue, the warrants there, the indictments there.
But what about the state level, the state of Alabama getting involved here?
Because they're headquartered in Alabama, correct?
Actually, this isn't the first attorney general to get involved after the indictment.
First, we had Attorney General Utmeyer in Florida who filed an action here, also, a subpoena demanding records.
For how the SPLC sells itself to donors, and then where the SPLC takes that donor money and whether, you know, how much of that donor money ever went to these so called informants.
These really are called field sources in the indictment.
These are the members of the Ku Klux Klan and other groups that the SPLC says they exist to help dismantle, where the SPLC was actually paying these people.
The SPLC says that it was all just informants so that they could prevent.
Violence from these people later on.
And they have a couple of examples where there were federal charges against people in these groups that the SPLC says this was a tip from an SPLC informant.
But the indictment also shows that, you know, people like an organizer of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally were not just being paid by the SPLC, but also had their racist posts supervised by the SPLC.
So, you know, we have to see exactly what the full truth is.
And that's why it's good that we have these attorneys general taking action in addition to the federal indictment, demanding from the SPLC donors, because in these situations, the SPLC doesn't just stand accused of committing wire fraud and bank fraud and conspiracy, but the facts of the indictment, the pleadings in the indictment, lead to.
To a reasonable suspicion that they're also violating Deceptive Practices Acts on the state level.
So, particularly in Florida, particularly in Alabama, the SPLC has other offices throughout the South.
So, I'm curious to see if we're going to see more attorneys general issuing these subpoenas.
But this one, since it is Alabama and the SPLC is headquartered there, really underscores how serious this investigation is.
Yeah, they're sitting on, and I think this is based on different parts of the 990 because I've always been focused on this $740 million figure that's their endowment.
I think there's another section in the 990 that talks about $820 million.
In either case, this is an obscenely wealthy organization.
And this organization, you know, they could run for years and years without raising another cent.
And they also have offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.
They have money and investments offshore that raise a lot of serious questions.
I mean, if you're a 501c3 nonprofit, why do you have offshore accounts?
That's a question that I hope.
We're going to see an answer to in this federal indictment and in the investigations following.
But there are many other things to look at the SPLC for.
Particularly, there are also important defamation lawsuits from the conservatives who have been branded hate groups and put on a hate map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan essentially for disagreeing with the SPLC's agenda.
So, Mary Holland joins us from the Children's Health Defense.
Mary, you're so nice.
You've been coming on for years now, I think five or six years, ever since the pandemic.
You're always, you know, you're so nice, you're generous, you're calm, your demeanor, everything, but you always hammer it.
When you left last time, you kind of had a toss away line.
You said, you know, because we were talking about the New York Times going to Bobby Kennedy and all the falsehoods and the reporting and their defense of Big Pharma.
And you said, hey, you know, they have an unhealthy obsession with Bobby Kennedy, and particularly in defense.
Of the undefensible, this about vaccines and about defending big pharma.
And lo and behold, they come up.
This is the folks.
This is the headline of the New York Times story.
RFK Jr. is driving a vast inquiry into vaccines despite his public silence.
I said, Hey, the guy, he doesn't say anything and they still got to go after him.
Talk to me about this article, ma'am, because this shows you you're correct.
This is what I think people, the disconnect, and even with me sometimes.
When we think of the New York Times, besides being the paper of record of our beloved republic, it's liberal, it's progressive.
Wasn't it years ago that they were the people warning about big corporations and big pharma?
How did it flip that MAGA, the working class and middle class in this country, are saying something's not right here?
But the New York Times is obsessed by protecting big pharma and, quite frankly, not having a conversation, but destroying.
This is the politics.
In the media personal destruction.
How did that flip when the most progressive liberal paper in the country that used to, I thought before I was in politics, you just go after big pharma and all the big corporations all the time.
They're now the lead.
They're the tip of the spear of going on offense to destroy anybody that would actually bring this topic up.
Steve, I think there's a book to be written there.
I still am perplexed by this transition.
You know, I used to read the New York Times and think that it was really based on facts.
But being a parent of a young man with autism, I have followed the New York Times on pharma and on autism for 25 years.
It has never told the truth, it is always slanted.
And it is, I think, you know, it's a deep state project, right?
This is government and pharma and then the media coming in, the universities, the medical profession.
They're afraid of the truth, they're afraid of the liability.
They will be afraid that they will be shown to have been complicit in this massive epidemic of vaccine injury.
Vaccines are dysregulating people's immune system.
They're causing death.
They're causing severe injuries of all kinds.
COVID made this much more obvious to the American public.
But this isn't the first time that medicine and government have been in collusion with really dangerous things like the opioid epidemic.
This is really a reduction of the way that the opioid epidemic went down.
So, I don't know the exact way in which it's shifted, but I can tell you that for the last 30 years, they've been miserable on accountability for the vaccine injury that we see.
But can the audience take that Bobby is there's a team there, and we're still grinding through on all the objectives that President Trump agrees with to get to the bottom of this vaccine problem?
One, how Congress has shut you guys down on all the junk food issues that you want to do, right?
The processed foods.
And number two, the entire rest of the MAHA agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill, and principally because the MAHA movement, which is their new, you know, the media's obsession, you literally have no political stroke.
So it's like at least 10 million people, this is a top priority.
It's an 80-20 issue that pharma should not have liability protection for vaccines.
That's an 80-20 issue based on a poll that Zogby did for Health Freedom Defense Fund and for Brownstone.
But Politico's own poll, Steve, like not three weeks ago, is that 46% of Americans do not approve of medical mandates and they don't trust mainstream vaccine science.
So we are so close to a tipping point.
So it's not so surprising that they'd be coming out with kind of You know, misguided fake news right now because we are really getting to be a majority of the population.
This was just a story the other day about in Louisiana, when the media targets that you realize they've got a problem, they know something is building momentum.
I tell you, the Make America Healthy Again and the Health Freedom Movement is just at the very beginning stages of building political power, but it is.
Quite powerful, and it's absolutely essential for the midterm elections.
So, what they did the other day in Louisiana oh, you never hear about it, it's an internet thing.
I couldn't disagree more.
Of course, Politico with two of those articles.
In South Carolina, the vote is no, okay, that didn't agree to extend this session to have the possibility of having a special session.
I think the five we identified today.
The five individuals we identified today all voted no.
We'll have more on that.
If I can't get Caroline Reno DeGrasse up in this hour, we'll have him back first thing in the morning.
Also, there's a housing bill that is coming forward now by the White House that's going to really focus on young people being able to buy their own house.
So, Steve Cortez, we had some inflation numbers today.
I know you've been running some math.
Talk to me about President Trump said, Hey, if this thing would have been 1.7 if we hadn't gone to war, is that correct?
Is he getting the right information from Navarro and Besant and the team?
Listen, I think the pre war trajectory for the economy was terrific.
Real wages were growing very well, not as quickly as we wanted, but we were going in the right direction, both on prices and in wages.
And those are the two things that matter most to most Americans not the stock market, not asset prices.
But unfortunately, because of this war of choice, we're heading in the exact opposite direction now.
And real wages are now diving south in a very significant way.
We got a very troubling inflation report today.
The bond market sold off hard in price, meaning yields up.
10 year yield at 4.46 right now as we speak.
As I've told you before, this has been the level that has held the market in recent months.
I believe we get above 4.5, we've got a very serious problem.
I think we quickly then get above 5%.
30 year yield is already above 5%.
If we look at most forward looking inflation gauges, and I'm talking real world ones, not economist opinions.
They are foreboding right now.
So I think this just adds to the impetus that we need to wrap up this war as quickly as possible.
Because I do not believe that Americans who were already in a foul economic mood pre war are going to long sustain this kind of economic pain for a mission that has not been sold to them as existential and truly necessary to the United States.
Yeah, I think that President Trump said he was not going to discuss it in China.
I think the way you get a solution that doesn't drag out through the midterms, because the Persians right now, Whether they do or not, they believe they have the upper hand and they're going to try to drag this thing out as long as possible.
Philip Patrick and Birch Gold, Steve Cortez on economics and capital markets in the other side.
Okay, what Mary Holland was talking about you don't have your medical freedom until you've got the ability to break the stranglehold of the drug distribution, big pharma, the drug distribution companies like McKesson, and the drug stores.
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Also, want to thank Patriot Mobile, this huge grassroots battle down in Texas.
We're going to be shifting the flag down next week to head to Texas.
Patriot Mobile, nine seven two, Patriot.
Talk to somebody in their customer service that has an East Texas accent about why they're the best mobile service in the world.
Check it out today.
Also, you can ask them about their Christian values.
In the companies and efforts that they support.
Stephen Cortez, you've been very concerned about the bond market, particularly the 10 year bond going over 4.5%.
With $39 trillion in debt, even small increases in interest rates become monumental for the United States.
We're already spending more on interest than we are on defense, and we spend a heck of a lot on defense.
So it matters to every single American.
And it drives so much of their prosperity, even if they don't pay attention to bonds, because every interest rate in your life, from a credit card interest to a car loan to a mortgage, all of it is based on that benchmark 10 year treasury yield.
And what we have as bond markets right now, globally, it's not just the United States, by the way, there is a global revolt against profligate governments all over the world.
But I'm most concerned, of course, about right here.
And what the bond market has said since the beginning of this war is you already have a debt problem.
If you pile on top of it an extremely expensive war, We are going to punish you.
We, meaning the borrowers, we're going to demand more interest to continue to loan this kind of money to the United States.
So I think we're at a very precarious point here.
Historically, just in recent months, I mean, I'm not talking decades back, this level, roughly 4.48%, but just under 4.5%, has been key.
And I fear, as somebody who traded bonds for 25 years, and I believe that if we get north of 4.5%, we're going to quickly get to 5%, and then we're going to really hit some significant pain points.
This can get dangerous very quickly.
The United States, because of dollar supremacy, which we have Earned over a century plus.
But because of dollar supremacy, we have had the luxury of being able to finance at times exorbitant debts and do so at low interest rates.
That time may well now be passing because the dollar is holding its own against other fiat currencies, but it's getting killed against other alternatives, property, crypto, gold.
So wealthy people are saying, I want tangible investments or I want scarce investments like crypto, things that cannot be inflated away, and I'm taking that over the dollar.
I think we're at a very, very precarious point here economically.
The war is exacerbating all that.
Again, pre war, we were actually in a good spot towards starting to rectify this situation.
Wrapping up the war would do not just good for America's security, I think, long term, but also for getting back to economic stability, not to mention the political benefits into November.
Philip Patrick of Burskos is going to be on in a second to talk about many of these issues, particularly King dollar and the pressure that the Chinese Communist Party would love to see come off the petrodollar.
So, Zelensky and his team of mafia like figures steal mountains of money from their own Ukrainian citizens and from you, America.
Now, corruption, it's a way of life in Ukrainian politics, but Zelensky's junta, they steal at a scale.
That would make a Chicago alderman blush.
Andrey Yermak, he now faces corruption charges, crimes, after resigning in disgrace as part of the Operation Midas scandal, so named because it involved toilets literally made of gold.
Now, Yermak, he wasn't just Zelensky's number two, he was effectively the co president of Ukraine, omnipresent and all powerful.
Well, Steve, we now have further evidence, really bombshell evidence, that both Yermak and Zelensky, these are the potentates of.
Plunder.
They are stealing not only from their own people, but stealing from us, from the United States.
And we have shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into escalating a war that is not in our national interest, much of that money being pilfered by these corrupt mafia like figures.
And by the way, credit to some of the honest cops, the diligent investigators in Ukraine, who at great risk to themselves are taking this important action to try to crack down on that corruption.
But what we should do from here is obviously no more aid.
To Zelensky.
We will no longer shovel borrowed money that we don't have.
Speaking of our debt and our obligations here, we are borrowing money to send to a corrupt regime so that much of it can then be skimmed off by oligarchs and criminals at massive scale.
Steve, you know, I mentioned Chicago aldermen.
Okay, they might have $10,000 in a shoebox.
No, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being stolen at a time in these schemes.
This new scheme involving Yermak is over $100 million in total.
Real estate, money laundering.
And you're mock, it's impossible to exaggerate just how important he is to Zelensky.
People who know Ukraine well know that Zelensky, in many ways, is sort of the colorful, funny comedian front man.
Yermak was always the one pulling the strings, he was always the strategist, right?
He had to resign in disgrace because of the Operation Midas scandal.
Now he is facing very serious charges.
We don't need any more evidence here in the United States to know.
Stop sending money.
And I think President Trump is taking the right steps to pressure both sides, both Putin as well as Ukraine.
And by the way, his trip to China could play an important part here, of course.
Because China has particular leverage with the Russian side of that equation.
That, look, Russia, you can't afford any longer these kinds of human losses.
I mean, it's catastrophic.
They're losing as many people as World War II, at least at the front lines, not civilians, but troops.
On the Ukraine side, you no longer have a sugar daddy in the United States.
We will no longer throw money at a corrupt regime, provably corrupt regime.
Both sides are going to give things they don't want to give.
You are going to come to a negotiated solution, and the United States is going to extricate itself.
From the Black Sea, because it was never in our national interest anyway.
Our focus in foreign policy is going to return to the real threats, which are across the Pacific, not the Atlantic.
And in terms of alliances, not Zelensky, but building up real alliances in our own hemisphere here at home.
Philip Patrick, first off, I'd like you to respond to Steve Cortez's assessment of what the numbers show today, particularly these issues around the bond market, sir.
The Supreme Court just supported the state of Missouri in the map, the redrawn map that we fought so hard for.
I think there may be even another seat in Missouri.
I'll get to that tomorrow.
I'm going to have to grasp Caroline Wren to the degree we can free them up from the ramparts to be on this redistricting war, folks.
Bad news out of South Carolina, but there's still a way we can get to those six.
Walk you through that tomorrow.
Um, we started the show with one of our former hosts and colleagues and contributors, Kash Patel, uh, getting hammered but giving as good as he got in the Senate today, which is pure cash.
In fact, he notified me, said, Hey, that was pure war room there.
So that's why he played that great clip at the beginning.
We're going to end it today with also one of our contributors, the current Secretary of Treasury, Scott Besson.
Philip Patrick has been a contributor now for five or six years.
So there's a piece in the New York Times, and this piece is about how the U.S. is trying to ensure the dollar's dominance.
During economic turmoil, subheadling, as the government has been devising plans to keep the dollar dominant, China has been making its own moves to increase global influence in the Chinese currency, the yuan.
You just said we used to have a monopoly.
Scott Besson is basically telling people that, hey, one of his principal responsibilities as Secretary of Treasury is defense of the dollar as the prime reserve currency.
We are now in contested dominance.
Is that the phrase you used?
And is this the type of activity you expect to see?
In a world where this is now contested dominance, sir.
And I think this story, in and of itself, was very telling because it's saying now the quiet part out loud.
We are actively fighting now to defend the dollar's dominance.
Besson's been discussing currency swap lines for a while.
I know we had a temporary one with Argentina.
Now he's looking at it in the Gulf and Asia, specifically now for the UAE to make sure that they have access to enough US dollars for trade.
Particularly, oil trade.
What a swap line is for those who don't know, it's fairly simple.
We give another country dollars and in return, we get their local currency.
And the idea is instead of letting China, as you mentioned, come in and say, hey, you can use our Chinese yuan, we kind of fill that gap.
Now, the UAE isn't broke, right?
They just don't have ready cash right now.
Obviously, oil sales are getting hit shorter term.
So a swap line is a way to give them liquidity today.
Otherwise, they may choose to do something else, sell, for example, longer term US dollar exposure like Treasuries would.
Which would put significant pressure on the bond market.
So, the point essentially is to keep the country inside of the dollar based system.
This is definitely smart moves from Besson, right?
This is economic statecraft in action.
I think Trump and Besson understand very well that when oil starts trading outside of the dollar, America starts to lose enormous leverage.
And as I've said before, it's really encouraging starting to see the administration using carrots along with sticks.
Besson ultimately is doing what his number one job is, which is to defend the US dollar.
However, we have to understand that there are risks with this as well.
By defending the dollar, we do create more obligations for ourselves, right?
If Washington is constantly borrowing, constantly printing, constantly sanctioning, and now backstopping foreign dollar markets, people eventually start to ask the question how strong is the dollar really if it needs defending in this way?
As we've said many times, China's not replacing the dollar.
The yuan has its own problems, lack of liquidity being probably the major one.
But the world is clearly now starting to look for alternatives.
You can see it in gold, you can see it in crypto, local currencies, bilateral trade systems.
And that's why gold is becoming more and more important.
Dollars settle transactions, but gold settles trust ultimately.
So, you know, when confidence in the paper system starts to fracture, Central banks, investors, they move towards assets that don't depend on promises.
So that's why we're seeing such an uptick in precious metals.
It's why we're seeing central bank demand hitting record highs.
And like I said, I think what Besson is doing is very smart.
And I think it's slowing down what is, as time passes, starting to feel more and more inevitable.
So he's working with the tools he has.
But like I said, the fact that we're having to defend the dollar shows us that the problem is mounting.
He is, for this time, it's the reason we pushed him so hard.
He was on the show as a contributor.
Part of that was to get.
Media training and media savvy.
We are very fortunate to have Scott Besson as the Secretary of Treasury, somebody that knows capital markets and particularly knows this part and has strong relationships for years as a fund manager with the senior levels of South Korea's government on the finance side and the Japanese.
Because there's a, you know, to defend the dollar, like I said, we can have a national conversation about should we be the prime reserve currency or not.
But quite frankly, with the amount of debt we have and what we have to do right now, You have to stick with it and you have to defend it.
Real quickly, where do they go to get you, Philip?
Because people want to be able to contact you over at Birch Gold.
It's been a pretty good hedge for 3,000 years of man's recorded history.
Philip Patrick, thank you.
Why do we cover this so much?
And why do we start on the end of the dollar empire six years ago or five years ago?
We knew this day was coming and we knew it was important for a blue collar and middle class audience to understand it and have access to that information.
It's one of the reasons the show is as powerful as it is because without understanding currency and capital markets and money, You can't understand power.
And once you understand money and power, you can use your agency to leave a big imprint on the political world.
Stick around.
Second hour of the war room.
We're going to do a special on trade and China from the eyes of an entrepreneur next.