Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson warn that Israel’s escalation against Iran risks dragging the U.S. into a Third World War, threatening Trump’s 2024 coalition built on opposition to endless wars and mass deportations. They accuse a "deep state" within the CIA, Pentagon, and DOJ—backed by figures like Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham—of sabotaging Trump’s policies while pushing for military conflict, comparing it to Iraq War deceit. Bannon frames California’s defiance of ICE as neo-Confederate rebellion, demanding aggressive raids to assert federal control before domestic unrest erupts. With 200 days left, they urge replacing agency officials and exposing institutional corruption, calling it a spiritual war for America’s future. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald J. Trump gets elected in November on the back of this amazing coalition, unprecedented coalition, different parts of American society.
You never thought of anything in common.
Trump paints a picture that makes it really obvious that the old structure, left versus right, Democrat versus Republican, is basically BS and a control device, I think.
This is my interpretation anyway.
So he creates this brand new coalition.
New York Times writes almost nothing about it because it's such a massive threat.
You described earlier and more precisely than anybody by far is the defining fact of American politics, and it kind of feels like it's being blown up over this war on Iran.
Well, I think if you look at the three planks, stop the forever wars, seal the border, and deport the illegal alien invaders.
and redo the commercial relationships in the world around trade deals and bring high-value-added manufacturing jobs back here, they're trying to shut all three down.
But the one that they're obsessed with the most, which I find strange, is the the forever wars.
They've got to be in the forever wars, and particularly in the Middle East.
I mean, this is what, and I'm a big supporter of Israel.
And I'm telling people, hey, if we get sucked into this war, which inexorably, Looks like it's going to happen on the combat side.
It's going to not just blow up the coalition.
It's also going to thwart what we're doing with the most important thing, which is the deportation of the illegal alien invaders that are here.
If we don't do that, we don't have a country.
And you just see right now, they're doubling tripled out.
This is actually potentially a real civil war in our biggest cities.
And President Trump has to have our backing.
And this came out of nowhere.
I mean, the trade deals, you saw he put together the Liberation Day, but they've been thinking about it a long time.
I mean, Trump's been talking about this since Lou Dobbs back in the 90s.
He lays that out there.
It's very sophisticated.
He's got Scott Besant running around with Lutnik.
They're trying to make these deals.
He's sealed the border already in the first 60 days.
Now we're really going down and actually having the deportation, see the fight.
And then out of nowhere comes a war with Persia.
It's like a shooting war with Persia, a massive shooting war with Persia.
How did this happen?
And that's why I've been up as a defender of Israel and someone that's very pro-Israel.
I've been saying, hey, this is going to be the end of Israel because of the way these decisions have been made.
And you have, I think, shockingly today, earlier when we had you on the show, you bring up a point that we have to address, which I think it's the thing itself.
What is it about this apparatus?
When you have a coalition that's like 1932 that's coming together, like Roosevelt had Harvard professors and crackers and execrats and ranchers out west and big city bosses and the Irish and the Italians, and he put it all together and they juggled it.
We have hardscrabble Hispanics on the rear Grand Valley to South Texas.
We have tech bros.
We have, you know, economic nationalists.
We have economic populists.
We have people that want to stop their forever wars.
There's three planks.
And right at the beginning of it, you know, and it's on the 10th anniversary of coming down the Golden Escalator.
That was 10 years ago, Sunday.
And I tell people, as many triumphs and tragedies, victories and defeats, good days and horrible days, when we're winning and sometimes we're losing, those 10 years of everything that's gone on, it's just a preamble for where we are today on the convergence of these crises.
And now, all of a sudden, a shooting war where they're taking the Nimitz battle group.
Out of the South China Sea and sending three carrier battle groups now to the North Arabian Sea, Red Sea, plus Arleigh Burke destroyers and a whole fleet in the eastern Mediterranean.
We're prepping for a major shooting war.
And how did it happen?
I think what's most shocking is what you said.
Hey, it was like Iraq.
You're inexorably just drawn in decisions.
Kind of just happened.
It's like, what's happened over the last 72 hours?
How do we even get to this point?
How did this actually happen?
Who made these decisions when we had the intel out there that this was not like a thing?
This was something that was going to happen a year or two from now.
Phoebe admitted to Bret Baier on Sunday night.
And so the question before us is not simply the Israel proclamation And if we don't sort it out now, and I mean right now, that's what we have to have a throwdown.
We have to name names.
We have to expose it.
If we don't throw it out now, throw it down now in the summer of 2025, we're not going to have a country.
Forget the midterms.
Forget the next election.
We have to have this.
What happened in Ukraine?
What the CIA has done?
What DNI is doing, what the Justice Department, what the FBI, what DIA and the Pentagon, because right now we only have a tenuous grip on those.
We have two people at the FBI, Cash and Bongino.
We've got a handful of people over at the Justice Department in a massive 30-some person, 15,000, 20,000 person operation.
We have three or four people at DNI with 17 agencies.
We're putting a couple of people in there.
At the Pentagon, we got Pete and a handful of guys.
They're turfed out.
He's lost 10 people since we've even got there.
And every time Bridge Colby tries to do something, Bridge Colby's on the front page that he's an appeaser.
So my point is that now we're getting down to it.
With all these converging crises, we have an apparatus.
That reports to Wall Street, to foreign investors, to Silicon Valley, in business with the Chinese Communist Party, that's running the deal.
And now's the time.
If we don't lance the bull over this, this country, if you can't turn around with Trump, the Trump team he has, people like you, myself, they're blessed to have these apparatuses.
If we can't do this now, it's not going to get done.
And so that's why, to me, it's gone of everything we're doing.
Stopping the forever wars, redoing the commercial relationship of trying to bring jobs back, and sealing the border and sending home, deporting 10 million, which is going to be massive, almost like a civil war in these big cities.
Of all of those, and I've always said that deportation is the most, to get our sovereignty back, the war we have to have now, the throwdown we have to have now, is with the deep state.
And we can't, I think we've looked away too often.
We're just kind of kicking the can down the road.
And if we can't do it now with Trump, it's not going to get done.
It does feel like Fox News is playing, and I never criticize Fox because they were so kind to me, but they are playing a central role in the propaganda operation here, it feels like.
And by the way, we need to get a vetting on Ukraine.
We need to get a vetting on Ukraine.
Because it's a zero probability that without our satellites, without targeting the information, without fire control information, there's no chance that the Ukrainians, as courageous as they are, as much valor as they have, could have pulled out something so complicated.
And so this is right now the fight.
The fight has to be we have to take on the deep state.
We have to name names, and we have to basically take these organizations and take them apart, and then you're going to unmask everybody in D.C. that's not really on your side.
You're going to unmask all those people that say they're conservative and say they're Republicans.
When they start protecting this, you're going to say, well, hang on for a second.
This doesn't mean we're a constitutional republic.
Trump's commander-in-chief.
This is what a constitutional republic's about.
I don't care if AOC's the president later on or Bernie Sanders or J.D. Vance, another right winger.
Right now, we have a system.
That's like the Praetorian Guard.
It's got its own national security policy.
It's got its own reason for existence.
And it doesn't care whether it's progressive like Barack Obama or an economic populist nationalist like Donald Trump.
And so that is the fight we have to take on today.
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There's this mad scramble in Washington on the right to invoke Trump's name and to make the case that, no, no, I represent Trump.
He's on my side.
I'm true MAGA.
And you wind up with these kind of hallucinogenic scenes where you have people who hated Trump or never Trump.
And most of those guys, almost all of them, to a person for the Ukraine war.
People in your audience should understand one principal thing.
We are farther down the pike.
In a kinetic part of a Third World War than how World War II started.
If you go back from September 1939, the invasion, the start of the European War, not the Asian, but if you start with the invasion of Poland by the Germans, and you go to June of 1941, the invasion of Russia by the Wehrmacht, and you look at that time, which really they called the Phony War.
You look at the casualties from the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the fall of France.
You look at what happened in North Africa early on.
Finland, throwing 300,000 Finland.
You add it all up.
It's not half of what's happened between Ukraine and Gaza today and now in Persia.
We are much bloodier.
We're in a shooting part of the Third World War.
The Third World War is not about to start.
It has started.
And that's what Trump is saying.
What he wants to do is everybody lay their guns down.
Let's get to the table and figure out a tenuous, at least certain, you know, subtle piece that we then use capital and trade and commerce and try to rebuild these countries.
And let's get people back to work and maybe tamp this thing down.
Whereas the apparatus is doing, is it, That's where we are right now in the summer of 2025.
And this thing is going to be in the next 200 days.
The next 200 days are some of the most perilous times for the American Republic in its history.
Because if we don't get this sorted, we're going to be drawn in totally into a conflict as a combatant.
As not a supplier of logistics or as an actual combatant, a participant in the situation in Ukraine, what they did in Russia, in the situation of what Israel is right now doing to the mullahs, as bad as they are and as evil as they are, right?
We're going to get sucked into a shooting war of which it'll be 10 years and the casualties will dwarf anything you saw in World War II.
One of the lessons that we never talked about from World War II since you...
And Winston Churchill's entire political opposition went to jail with their wives.
With their wives for the duration of the war.
And some of them died.
That's been completely just a fact.
And you can call those people whatever you want and they may have been terrible people, whatever, but they were his political opponents and he put them in jail.
And Roosevelt did, you know, sick the federal government on opponents of the war.
I went to prison on a misdemeanor, but it was kind of one of the same things.
I wouldn't testify.
I wouldn't turn because I said this committee is not legitimate, doesn't have a ranking member, doesn't have a minority council, is totally legitimate.
Plus, he's got executive privilege.
That's good enough for me.
And if I have to fight this and I think it's going to go to the Supreme Court, although I've served my prison sentence, I'm taking it up to the Supreme Court because I had a pretty good ruling, not terrible, from the...
It's definitely going to happen.
Look what's happening to you.
I mean, I've known you for a long time, and I sit down and look at what they're saying about Tucker.
I said, what is Tucker saying so bad?
He's kind of laying out these arguments that ought to be debated right now in the halls.
Tom Cotton's coming out and saying all these influencers and podcasters When we had a debate about the Ukraine, about defunding Ukraine in the Senate, we beat them.
This is why Mitch McConnell...
Because why?
Because the podcasters and influencers are much closer to the MAGA base and can deliver the heat into the House and the Senate, and they know that.
I'm all for having a War Powers Act debate right now.
Let's have the American people weigh in, because you're going to see the American people are 90% against.
And even people that support Israel are saying exactly what we're doing here.
We thought we had this thing in Gaza you had to clean up with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Next thing you know, we're dropping, we're bombing Tehran and you're taking incomings.
What's happened in Tel Aviv over the last 24 hours is pretty shocking because you're taking these ballistic missiles.
What's Trump's been saying?
Everybody calm down.
Let's get back to the table.
I can get actual thing.
He said, I can get it.
We can take it apart.
We can blow it up if we want to, but I can cut a deal.
And Witkoff and Trump, if you've got to talk about two dealmakers that don't I feel more confidence with Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump trying to work something out than continue on the shooting war where, trust me, with a carrier battle group heading over there and all these tankers heading over to the Middle East, we are prepping right now.
To come in on the offensive side of combat sorties, and that's a game changer.
As bad as it is now that we're a combatant, because we are a combatant, which I say, if they're unilateral, why do we get sucked in here?
Where is that decision?
Where you said, hey, Steve, decisions just get made.
On November 5th of 79. I'm a destroyer officer, navigator on a destroyer in a carrier battle group.
We're doing the changeover from San Diego, from we're home point.
The 3rd Fleet to the 7th Fleet all takes place in Hawaii, the Hawaiian operator.
You do like three or four days of workup because they have a certain different lingo and a different tempo.
So you've got to get to how they do it.
We get called in in the middle of the night in the red phone.
Everybody line up single file and head into Pearl Harbor.
Well, Pearl Harbor...
And Honolulu is up there, so it's not like World War II.
It's very dangerous.
We go in there and we hear the hostages have been taken.
And now all of our assets in Korea, in the South China Sea, and in Japan are heading towards We had a couple of white painted destroyers in Bahrain, but we were not used to that.
So they go, we follow a carrier all the way to Korea because you had to be, we were a gas turbine.
We were the only ones who could keep over the carrier.
They're working up for I tell people, if you haven't been off the coast of Iran, or Persia as I call it, it's like the landscape of the moon.
This is the most inhospitable place on Earth.
I've been there.
The Straits of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, the North Arabian Sea.
And our carrier battle group stayed.
we rotated out after about four months.
People stayed and eventually, a couple months later, actually did the failed res car You could see every day.
They had the lift capacity.
The helicopters were practicing.
We were actually going to do plane guard against potential Russian fighters in the Persian Gulf, put the radars up, because nobody knew what was going to happen.
It was a failed effort.
But I tell people, and it turns out the Nimitz is now about to be decommissioned.
This may be their last cruise.
They were there 50 years ago.
It was the first time they really got commissioned.
Their first assignment was, And Gonzo and Camel Station in the North Arabian Sea.
So these are big decisions the Pentagon makes when they, particularly today, when they decide to take a carrier battle group, strike group, away from the South China Sea in the defense of Taiwan, given how on pins and needles we are there, because the Chinese Communist Party are not doing exercises.
They're doing rehearsals for an invasion.
To take that out and to take it to the North Arabian Sea is signaling the world.
That we're about to do something.
And that's what's so scary right now.
And when you get to your theory that these decisions, you're just getting inexorably drawn in.
Now we have all of our basically air assets that are ready to launch combat sorties on Tehran and whatever else happens.
They're in place.
So it just takes, it's not like you make a decision, well, it takes us a week to get there.
I think the reason they're not criticizing John Ratcliffe, and John Ratcliffe's a good man, but you have to remember, John Ratcliffe was a mayor of a small town in Texas that went to Congress, did a great job.
President Trump likes him a lot.
He's got Mike Ellis over there, but they're two guys.
We don't have 10 political appointees, which we should have.
They also, with the interagency process, they control the entire process.
This is why downsizing NSC was so important.
When you have this, we had these detailees that come from all the different departments, because NSC should have 30 people, but it had 250.
There are 60 political appointees, right?
And there's 280 come from different agencies to do all the different paperwork.
They have the interagency process.
The CIA controls that process.
They control the process at the Pentagon.
They control the DHS.
They control over the Justice Department.
They are embedded deep because they've been around so long and they know how to embed deep, right, with the smartest people out there.
And so if you don't get control of that, you're not going to get control.
They're like a Praetorian Guard right now.
We have to lance this.
This is like the late stage of the Roman Empire, when the Praetorian Guard kind of ran the deal and they would put forward every legionary captain that they thought was going to be good for a time.
And they are planning right now to thwart President Trump's second term.
Make sure they wait him out, and they're going to have a hand-selected person for the third term.
They're so clever that if you criticize them, they will leak to people that you work for them.
I happen to know.
Which is kind of brilliant.
If you're an effective critic of CIA, Joe Kent.
I've lived this personally, but also Joe Kent is a wonderful man, a totally sincere man.
Great man.
Former CIA contractor, lost his wife in Syria in Obama's Syria war and became an opponent of the way things are running.
And they, CIA played in his primary.
And the way they did it was by convincing Republican primary voters that Joe Ken, who's the single most effective critic of CIA in the United States, I mean, like, wow!
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The guy just came out about the Kennedy assassination and the House and Senate.
It's the church committee.
The biography of the church committee came out about a year or two years ago.
He talks about when his first forum, Frank Church was going to be one thing, but they got Gary Hart in there who had just been elected.
Mike Mansfield, the old head of the, you know, really a guy who knew how to run things, right?
Mansfield from Montana.
Pick both of them.
Church to head the committee, but Gary Hart was going to be assigned to the CIA to find out what went on.
So Hart's seeing Colby and seeing some of the former directors, and they tell him, say, hey, the guy you really got to see, all of them tell him, say, nice to have dinner.
As Elon was the special government employee to do Doge to try to get waste-front abuse, I think because we're at war now, and the war we're at is an internal war.
It's an internal war with this apparatus that we finally have a leader that will have the back of people that will go in because he wants it taken down.
I think he's getting terrible advice around that.
Someone like you, not to organize it, but who knows the history of these institutions and, quite frankly, where the bodies are buried.
Have to come in as a special government employee to help get the people on the ground organized.
We have to go to war against the deep state now.
If we don't go to war with the deep state immediately and have a couple of wins that we can point to and some momentum and put them on their back leg, their back foot in the next 200 days, nothing in America is going to change.
And we should be clear about who's serving its interests.
Tom Cotton, who's the chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, was one of the primary drivers of secrecy around the Kennedy files.
So Tom Cotton, I think, was born in the 80s.
And I like Tom Cotton a lot.
I know him.
I know his wife who worked at CIA.
Nice, super nice people.
But when it came down to it, when Trump gets elected and gets inaugurated in January, Tom Cotton's, he's denied this, but he's lying because it's true.
I know for a fact.
Tom Cotton's running around being like, whoa, whatever we do, we can't put people in place.
We're going to declassify all the Kennedy assassination files.
62 years later, I think Tom Cotton was born in the 80s.
Why would Tom Cotton be so concerned about releasing the Kennedy documents that he's trying to prevent people from getting jobs on the basis of his belief that they might reveal those documents?
Now, you know, assassins in CIA and Navy SEALs, I mean, their heart's beating out of their chest before that happens because they understand it may be the last time they take a breath on Earth is when they fire.
So they are really ready to meet their maker and they're highly focused.
The last thing they're going to do on Earth is get that target.
That is just these cartons just suppressing by a few feet.
This guy's giving testimony.
And it's unbelievable.
They go, well, you were there?
Yes.
What were you doing?
He says, I was eating a chicken sandwich, a bag of Fritos, and a Coke.
And they're going, you're right next to him, and everything's going, and you're hanging on the edge of it.
And then all of a sudden, Jerry Ford steps in and goes, excuse me, I have a question.
Do you have a criminal record?
And the guy goes, excuse me?
He goes, do you have a criminal record?
And the guy goes, well, I was picked up.
No, no, no.
You're a felon, right?
And the whole conversation drops.
I go, oh, my God.
We're literally at the moment.
Literally 10 minutes before the shot takes place, we have a witness that's there.
Yeah, because the president's most popular president in American history is undone by a naval intel officer posing as a journalist.
Exactly.
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So you wonder, like, a lot of this is taking place in private, and it's one of the great frustrations as an American is you don't know what your government's doing, and you have no way to find out.
Even when it's done 60 years ago, you don't know.
But some of it's taking place totally in public, the Tom Cotton stuff, and it grieves me to say this because I like Tom, and I think he's smart, really smart, actually, and a good guy in a lot of ways.
But he's acting on behalf of CIA, not on behalf of the people of Arkansas, obviously.
But then there's Lindsey Graham, who's, like, florid, out in public.
Like, there's no kind of hiding who Lindsey Graham is, and what is that?
And I'm adamant about this, and Pompeo also, because I think there are arguments around the Logan Act that they're over there countering what the commander-in-chief is trying to do.
Look, I think, number one, he's very involved in the Pentagon, on our services committee, the Pentagon, the building runs like the building's going to run.
I mean, it's a trillion dollar.
Why, when President Trump says we're going to go to a hemispheric defense from Greenland to block the Russian submarines?
To Alaska, maybe Canada for the Arctic, because that's the new great game of the 21st century.
If you add the supplement that's coming in, the reconciliation bill with the NDAA, you're over a trillion dollars and it's only going to keep increasing.
This is the way the defense contractors make money.
They embed it over there.
They kind of run the building right now.
You don't see any pushback by armed services.
In fact, every district's got huge plants.
As you know, our industrial policy that we do have is really around arms manufacturing.
And it's a high margin business and we want to sell weapons to the entire world.
It's that system that's running the country.
Remember, the difference between President Trump's first term and his second term is what happened under Biden is a massive concentration of power because they didn't back Lena Kahn or the antitrust people like we have now in President Trump's administration, like Gail Slater and what's happening to the FTC under Andrew Ferguson, taking big tech to court and trying to break them up.
Right now, you have Wall Street, you have big tech, you have big agriculture.
You have big pharma.
You have the big healthcare industry.
You have the defense contractors.
You have the concentration of these massive industries that have every lobbyist, every communications expert, all the big law firms on their payroll.
If you and I want to start today and say, hey, guess what?
We want to take on one of the industries.
Let's take on big ag.
You literally can't get a great law firm to represent you or a great lobbyist because they're all hired by these guys.
We said when we gave China everything after Tiananmen Square, when we gave most favored nation status and WTO and access, that the more they get prosperous because they were a backward agricultural country at the time.
The more prosperous they get, the more they'll become like a liberal democracy like the United States.
Was in a nomenclature and a vernacular that American people hadn't heard from a politician about the border, about deportations, about China, about bringing jobs back, about ending the forever wars.
Remember, as the campaign went on, he goes to South Carolina.
Karl Rove, never, who was my neighbor and always got along with him.
Again, perfectly charming guy, sort of.
Very, not a good person at all, but smart and, you know, Carl.
But after that, that was the moment I realized it was in that Greenville-South County debate that all that mattered to them was a projection of force abroad.
That's when Bill Kristol turned against him was that night.
And if you look, you can look it up.
Check his Twitter feed.
The day before, Crystal was like, you know, Trump's kind of a pig, but he's our pig, and actually we can kind of use him, and maybe we should make peace with Trump.
Bill Crystal said that, who I used to work for for many years.
The day after that Greenville debate, he took the position that he has now, which is, you know, we'll destroy the country to prevent Trump from exercising power.
Like, he was a sworn enemy of Donald Trump's after that when he came out against the Iraq War.
How weird.
If you killed a child in a DUI, you're drunk, you accidentally run over a child, there's no possibility you could meaningfully advance in American life because people would say, we've forgiven you, Steve, but you did something that's so horrible.
If we don't stop it now, it's going to work all the time.
They think that playbook.
Of lulling the American people to sleep and telling them there's these evil people that have to be taken down.
And if they're taken down, everything's going to be fine after that.
And that we face an apocalypse if that doesn't happen.
They're running the Iraq War playbook over again with almost some of the same players or at least the protégés, right, in the verticals of who those players were.
The Republican Party is controlled opposition, okay?
Because they've never really put in a fight.
Let's go back to the three central tenets of Trumpism.
you know, immigration, border and sovereignty, trade and ending forever wars.
The official apparatus of the Republican Party Do you think that's still true?
It's 100%.
Look what happened here in the last 24 hours on the immigration side.
All of a sudden, they promulgated that because of big agriculture's needs.
That we can no longer have raids on farms, raids in hotels, all of it.
That had to be counter by President Trump saying, hey, there's 20 million illegal aliens.
I'm going to get them all out of here.
And then today, or this morning, he came out with, we're going to triple down the raids in sanctuary cities, right?
I'm going to get all these guys out of here.
No, there's a huge institutional fight led by Fox News, right?
Their biggest is the forever wars.
But if you look at the Wall Street Journal.
And if you look at Fox News on the trade and bringing jobs back from China, they're very ambivalent about that.
They're talking about the cost of living.
I mean, they're putting up that, you know, because they're all free traders, which is the way the country got in the first place.
They're also quite ambivalent on the immigration and mass deportation.
Remember, mass deportation is just not the criminals.
You have to get, President Trump said today, $20 million.
I say it's $10 million came in on Biden's watch.
They all have to leave.
But you're seeing a lot of ambivalence of that.
They're saying the Wall Street Journal says, well, no, they add 2%, 1.5% to 2% to GDP, right, because they buy so much stuff.
Number two, they've driven down wages among particularly low-skilled black and Hispanics.
I say this is why we put the coalition together.
This is why 39% of black men are voting for us.
This is why South Texas is now MAGA territory because they understand their wages to be driven down.
I think the Republican Party hates the basic tenets of President Trump's platform, particularly the one they most hate is ending the forever wars.
That's tied to both Wall Street.
It's tied to the defense industry.
It's also tied to this mentality that we have an American empire.
Remember you and I saying, hey.
We want to go back to being a republic.
The founders of our country, when they set the Constitution, they looked to Republican Rome.
That was their source of things, not the Roman Empire.
What we've done, in fact, they said, I think it was General Washington, don't go over.
We have enough to do here.
Let's do this.
And I think that that's what we've gotten so far off track, and we have an American empire.
That empire has to be taken apart brick by brick because all it's done is to basically destroy the inner workings of the United States and just particularly destroy the very people who are the cannon fodder in these wars, right?
Ari, who every day went to the podium and told us, just another day away from fighting weapons of mass destruction.
How can they sit there and lie in the nation?
Now, I am quite serious.
Given, because you're a product of Washington, D.C., there's no one better in an emergency.
We have an emergency.
We have a break-the-glass emergency.
To actually be an advisor to the president, right?
In a temporary thing, then you, who know the whole, you know the canvas.
Not that you're organized, but you could sit there in the NSC, in the tank, or the tanks of the Pentagon, but down with the Kennedy room, and actually walk through, this is the apparatus, this is what we have to do, this is what we have to do with the FBI, this is what we have to do with the CIA, this is what we have to do with DNI, the Pentagon, and then we have people execute that.
Where I live normally is very, you know, it's not thriving at all.
It's poor and there are lots of problems and people die of drug ODs and all that, but you don't feel, a lot of people die of drug ODs, but you do not feel this kind of, when we sold our house five years ago, my wife sold it over the phone, and next thing I know, there is a, it was a great house, beautiful house, super pretty house, not huge, but beautiful, in the District of Columbia, and she sells it to a CIA officer.
But of course.
And the next thing you know, there's a Ukraine flag flying from my flagpole.
And I'm not making this up.
And my neighbor sent it to me.
He's like, oh, look what happened to your house.
A house I really loved.
And I was like, wow, that's just a metaphor!
But okay, so let me ask you.
You've made a couple of allusions.
I almost don't want to ask you because it's upsetting.
And I keep telling people, I thought we settled this.
About federal law and states' rights in succession in the mid-1860s.
We had a civil war to determine the outcome of this.
We've had that discussion.
We've had that argument.
It's been settled.
I said this to President Trump in the first term, that this whole thing of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states is absolutely a neo-Confederate mentality that you can have.
John C. Calhoun, as his vice president, was going to stop and go down and defend South Carolina.
He said, we're not going to do these tariffs.
And Jackson said, I'm going to call the army down there.
And if Calhoun's defying me, I'm going to hang him from the first lamppost.
I mean, Jackson was a guy who was going to take immediate action.
What's happening in California is kind of the equivalent.
You've had the sanctuary cities, and if President Trump had not sent the troops in and federalized the National Guard, what would happen in L.A. was what we see in all these cities.
It would explode.
have been the summer of love of 2025, where there was a lot more rhetoric than actually action.
One of the reasons President Trump had Bill Barr and Esper and all these people that wouldn't execute what he wanted.
Now he's got a team.
And that's why I'm so glad he came out last night and says, I'm doubling and tripling My recommendation on the show the day after this stuff happened over that weekend was President Trump ought to triple the ICE raids and he ought to go to schools.
Hey, they've got to go.
Right?
They have to go.
And it's not pleasant.
We've got to be very humane about it.
But you have to have a show of force.
And if you need to send in the Army, if you need to send in the Federalized National Guard, we have to do it.
California is the railhead of this.
That's why you have to break it there.
It's going to obviously pop up in Chicago and New York, but you have to take an I've known Stephen a long time ago.
Andrew and Stephen Miller and Ben Shapiro, Alex Martin, they all came out of kind of West L.A. Right?
Ben may have been the Valley, but they're all West L.A. guys.
Stephen Miller has been saying since the time I knew him, the war for America is going to be won or lost on the streets of Los Angeles.
He's said this now for almost 20 years.
And this is what this fight, and this is what's so disturbing about the timing.
We're totally focused on that, and President Trump actually implementing the deportations of mass deportations.
And all of a sudden this thing breaks out in Persia, in the Middle East, and now the whole country is just focused on that.
It's almost like a time diversion to get our attention.
There was no—it didn't have to happen on Thursday night.
We were told, well, it was leaks, oh, there's a bomb and they're going to have it, and, you know, this is something they have to have immediately, immediately, immediately.
He comes on Bret Baier and says, well, it's 12 or 13 months.
We've heard the 12 or 13 months for 20 years.
Maybe it is 12 or 13 months, but that doesn't mean you have to act on Friday.
Why is it Thursday and Friday when we're in the middle of actually the most important part of this Third World War?
Is the 10 million invaders we've had in this country, or 20 million according to President Trump, they all have to go.
You understand that there's many bad actors that came in on this, right, that are now sleeper cells in this country.
Everybody's got to go, and we have to do it.
When I talk about Third World War, the central battlefront for the United States of America is internal to the United States of America.
This is why we have to focus on this in the timing, because there's no coincidences of how all of a sudden we're asked to do bombing runs in Iran a half a world away.
And it sucks up all the media attention that you don't even you don't.
And Homan and Stephen Miller, there ought to be three more raids tomorrow, and we've got to get the focus back on that.
And by the way, the American people, the American people don't.
I think it's like 60-40 where they agree with President Trump on these mass deportations.
Remember, one of the reasons we're winning the African-American vote is President Trump does not believe, like the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris, in mass incarcerations.
He believes in mass deportation.
When I was in prison, the only thing I put up from Danbury was like on the 26th of August.
I said, hey, victory's at hand.
I can tell from the prisoners in Danbury, the young Hispanics and blacks who hate the Democratic Party.
And they particularly hated Kamala Harris.
Because they said, look, the Democratic Party is for mass incarcerations to I mean, these guys were smarter than guys going to Yale and the political science department because it's a lived experience of them.
And they support mass deportations because in a place like Danbury, 10% of the prison is bad hombres from these other countries that are the most dangerous criminals, convicts you have in these prisons.
People at the street level have our back on this.
This is this new coalition.
But we have to succeed in this.
We have to succeed in the deportations and getting wages to rise.
In fact, I think there was just something in the Wall Street Journal.
They said wages for low-skilled workers are coming up, right?
Because guess what?
You have less non-citizens here competing.
So people in their own country shouldn't have to compete against a non-citizen for a job.
This is President Trump's, the centerpiece of the entire Make America Great Again movement.
And that's why it has to succeed.
And everybody now in the official political apparatus is trying to thwart him in this.
And this is why it's so important for him to go.
And the deep state is also, remember, one of the reasons that DHS is burning through money and there's not as many deportations.
You talk to the guys at the White House, you talk to the guys at DHS, they're still playing by the old playbook.
In other words, they have to have a deportation order from a court.
They go to a guy's house and make sure there's no kids around.
They take like...
Well, obviously, that's the old playbook.
You have to get much more aggressive on your deportations.
I think Miller and Holman are trying to change the culture over there to actually do it.
But even there, the apparatus, the administrative state's got its own mind on how they're going to do things.
I think this is one of President Trump's big battles.
My last question has to do with like, the first principle from which these positions flow, which is, But there is another very powerful segment, which is most of the U.S. government, that believes the opposite.
Ten years ago, I'm on an Antract train to New York from Washington for work at Fox, and I get a call from a neocon writer called Julia Ioffi, who I think is Russian-born, writing for the New Republic.
And she says to me, and at this point, I'm like, she thinks I'm a neocon or something, but...
And she goes, Trump's calling himself a nationalist.
She was, like, way offended.
And it was just prima facie, like, nationalism bad.
And I said, well, I'm a nationalist.
And she goes, she's not stupid.
And she goes, you're a nationalist?
I said, well, I don't know.
I think I am.
I mean, I like America.
I think the U.S. government should work for America.
She was, like, horrified.
And I don't think I've ever spoken to her again.
Why does that idea, which is non-threatening, it's not a Nazi idea.
It's like a basic idea.
It was the founder's idea that the U.S. government should act on behalf of Americans.
Yeah, and this is why neoliberals, this is why neoliberal neocons, the whole Fox apparatus, this is what the Murdochs are, they're much, there's just a difference, you know, Gore Vidal said, it's just two sides of kind of the same coin that run the American empire.
And you see so many people I've seen come here in Congress and people I've known that come here and they get corrupted.
And they get corrupted because that basic human nature of being attracted to money and power is very tough.
And we're in a situation now that… This war against this apparatus is going to be as brutal as the war we're fighting in the streets of Los Angeles today to make sure that actually Los Angeles is part of this American republic because right now California is not, but the major cities in this country led by Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Then the fight that we need you on, and the fight we need you on, you have a unique historical understanding of the institutions of this town and the smarts.
We need a handful of smart people around President Trump.
They're saying, this is the, look.
We've put Cash and Bongino in the FBI.
We've put Ellis and Ratcliffe's CIA.
We've put a handful of great people at DOJ.
We've put Pete and a handful of great people at defense.
We've put Tulsi and Joe Kent and a handful of people at DNI.
Damn, if I got anywhere near any kind of institutional power, which I've never sought and I don't seek now, but if I ever did, you know, I think the Tom Cottons and the donors and people like that, I mean, I think that would be really hard.
unidentified
They'd put kiddie porn on my computer, I'd get pancreatic.
What they fear is sincerity, because I'm hardly the smartest person in D.C. Well, not in D.C., but I'm hardly the smartest person in this conversation at all.
And I don't think I have brilliant, cohesive, philosophical ideas or anything like that.
I'm just sort of a bumbling, middle-aged.
You know, hopefully try to be a Christian person.
But I'm totally sincere.
And that's why they hated MTG.
unidentified
Who's also, you know, We probably got the same SAT score, you know what I mean?
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