[Steve Bannon Emergency Podcast | The Tim Dillon Show #433](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9aXjWdGWH8) # transcript Steve Bannon, thank you for coming on. - Thank you, man. Thank you for coming to the War Room. - We were just talking about New York and that you like New York. - Love New York. New York's my favorite city. - Why is it? - Well, Hong Kong's my favorite city, but New York's a-- - Hong Kong is amazing. - I can't go there anymore 'cause I've been banned. I've been sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party. - Really? - Yeah, I'm the only civilian in history. So at one minute after noon on the 20th of January, 2021, the Chinese Communist Party, fully sanctioned four people, Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, who's the deputy national security advisor, Peter Navarro and myself. I was a civilian at the time. It's the only time a civilian. So I can't have any association with any Chinese company. I can't go to Taiwan or I guess I could go to Taiwan. I can't go to Hong Kong, can't go to Shanghai. And I lived in both of those places for a while. So I love Hong Kong, love Shanghai. - That's unfortunate, but New York, you're good. - Good. - You're still good. - Good. - You can come. - So yeah, no, I used to live in New York, 15 Broad, down on Broad Street, Brooklyn Heights, and up in right across from the public library. - It's great. When did you first meet Donald Trump? - Met Trump in August of 2010, before that midterm election. - Okay. - A guy named Dave Bossie, I was making films for, as a documentary director, said, "You know, what are you doing tomorrow?" I was editing a couple of films. I said, "Well, I'm editing these films. "I gotta get out before the election in September." And he says, "Well, can you go up "and take a meeting with me tomorrow?" And I go, "No." And he says, "Well, I really need you to come with me." And I go, "Why?" He says, "Well, I'm gonna go up and meet Donald Trump." I go, "That's great, but I'm slammed. "I don't need to meet Trump. "I'll just skip the meeting." He goes, "No, no, you gotta come up, "'cause I'm making a presentation." He's thinking about potentially running for president, and he wants to go through what it would take getting a primary. And I said, "Of what country?" Right, it's just not feasible at the time. I didn't think. And then, so we went up, made up. Dave has probably a four-hour presentation. I gave the kind of the populist part of it. And I realized right away what a serious guy he is. I tell people, he's the only person, and that time, I spent a ton of time in D.C., and of course, obviously, in New York. But I said what would take hours to explain to somebody at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey about the Chinese Communist Party and the trade deficit and everything that they wouldn't believe, 'cause they think we're like building each other's country. Trump got immediately. I mean, he had a very deep understanding of China, had a very deep understanding of the trade deficit. He was kind of a student of Lou Dobbs. Lou Dobbs had been hammering this for 20 or 30 years, and Trump religiously watched Lou Dobbs, and then, of course, read all the papers, and came to a very different conclusion than the elites in this country that our relationship with China at the time was healthy for the country, it was not. And Trump knew that, not just intuitively, he had a very deep understanding of that. And so when I left, he also, he would ask me, 'cause it was the Tea Party. - Right. - That November was the biggest. The Republican Party won 63 seats in the House. - Right. - It was a massive thing for the Tea Party. And Trump, so I was given, Dave was a kind of a standard stock Republican, conservative. I was giving him the Tea Party and the populist nationalist pitch. And Trump goes, "Well, that's what I am, a popularist." And I go, "No, no, no, no, it's populist." And he goes, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, popularist." And I go, "No, it's actually a populist." And he goes, "No, it's a popularist." So I just quit trying to change it. And then on the train on the way back, we took the Acela back, and I'm sitting there thinking about the meeting. And I turned to Basi, and I said, "You know, he actually understands things "at a deeper level." - Right. - "I understand what he means by, "I think I get what he means by populist." Remember, he's a McLuhan-esque figure. - Right. - Everything, like Marshall McLuhan, the media is the massage, the media, but modern communication, 30 for mass communication. Trump understands that at such a deep level. - At a cellular level. - Cellular level, that people don't understand. Like he understands-- - Even his detractors, the people who hate him. - Don't get it. - Don't get it. - Don't get it. - And they don't understand his power. What's amazing to me is I've grown up, you know, I'm 40, and I've grown up, and I've paid attention to politics for the majority of my life. Every election, you know, is some type of referendum on something. I've never seen a party as out in the wilderness right now as a modern Democratic Party. They don't know how to deal with him. They don't understand his appeal. You said this brilliantly on another interview. They've never fully been interested in why he was popular. They're only getting interested now. And that was something brilliant that I thought was very interesting. - Remember, he's a Democrat. I'm a Democrat. - Right. - I come from a working class Irish Catholic Democratic family, union family. He's a Democrat. We understand the power. Every major political movement in this country has been predicated upon working class and lower middle class people. It just has, that's the power. Trump understands it. That's his audience. That's why I say mass communication. He understands how to have a emotional but also mental connection with a mass audience. Working class, the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class. What they are is you had these billionaires at the top, the Wall Street guys, the Silicon Valley guys. Then you have the credentialed class. All these people with college degrees and Ivy League degrees are sitting there like on MSNBC telling you the way things are gonna be. Then they have a kind of a mass of the poor below the working. They've abandoned the working class too. It's this project on populist nationalism I've been working on for 15 years, 14 or 15 years. They seeded the ground. It wasn't that hard because if you go after and present yourself as somebody that could potentially be a solutions provider or at least prepared to listen, the working class is looking for solutions. They're looking for people to listen to them. That's where Trump stepped in. He changed the Republican Party from a country club party to a party of working class people in under 10 years. From the time I made him in 2010 to 2000, and he really started getting really involved in probably 2012, '13. In 10 or 12 years, he totally changed a party to be a working class party because one of the big things is the Democrats just seeded it to us. They didn't try to fight it. They're not trying to fight it today. The people that actually speak about populism, Ro Kahana, who's very smart, talking about economic patron, or Fetterman, they're kind of on an island. - They're marginalized. - They're marginalized. You don't see them, and I keep telling them, I said that you don't see them, it's one thing to talk populist, another thing to get into it. You don't see those guys on MSNBC every night. You don't see them talked about and pushed every day in Democratic circles, and these are the guys that are at least trying to come up with working class and populist solutions, and they're kind of on an island right now. The Democratic Party has just totally seeded because that credential class, they're too precious to wanna get down and kind of deal with working class issues. - Why did Bernie Sanders, who had a similar position on immigration at one point to yours, maybe not exactly similar, I don't know. - No, I had it totally similar. - It was very similar. - We just lifted Bernie Sanders' shit. I mean, come on, we just took it. He was 100%. - He said open borders is a Koch brothers proposal. Like that's something they wanted. - Yes, he understood that. - And he understood they wanted to drive down wages. At what point, and Bill Clinton said similar things. - 'Cause Bill Clinton, remember, the Clinton's power all came from the white working class. That's how they survived in Arkansas. That's how he won the presidency, and that's how Hillary Clinton saved herself for at least for a while against Obama when Obama ran the tables on her in the primary in 2008. - What changed in the Democratic Party? - The culture, Oliver. The cultural issues overwhelmed it, and that's why Bernie Sanders never had a shot. Look, the capitalist, today, the whole invasion of the 10 to 12 million, and I'm just talking about people that came from January 20th, 2021, when Biden took office till Trump. That's a 10 to 12 million people. That was the Koch kind of corporate class, the Chamber of Commerce guys with the open borders people, but what they did is they wanted to kill inflation by flooding the zone with low-skilled workers. I mean, the Federal Reserve was very open about this. They said they were gonna do this. And they did it, that 10 to 12 million. Well, Bernie Sanders, you can't defend American workers. You can't defend American citizens of every ethnicity and race until you're prepared to go hardcore in immigration. You can't have the world come here to your own country, that your family's been here for generations, busting their ass to make this country better and to make the communities better, and have the world come in here and compete with you, not just with working with the low-skilled jobs, but also with the phoniness of the H-1B visas, and that we don't really have any legal immigration in this country. It's all a scam. It's all a scam. - So the H-1B visa, and I wanted to talk to you about that. - Yeah, it's the press wages. The whole thing's in the press wages, and they're winning. And this is why Bernie, this is why Bernie, I say Bernie Sanders, the reason people say, was Bernie's a fucking pussy. He had two shots at the Clintons. The Clintons are the epitome of the neoliberal, neocon globalist, okay? And they're like the mafia, right? These are hard people. There's nobody harder than Hillary Clinton. She's tough, okay? - She's tough. - He had two shots at her. I got brought into the campaign, not 'cause I knew anything about politics. I'd never been in a campaign office in my life, but I had focused for a couple of years, working with Peter Schweitz and other people, on taking down the Clintons. I got brought in because they were so far behind that they needed somebody, if you were gonna win, you had to bring Clinton's numbers down. 'Cause President Trump at that time, candidate Trump, you could argue anywhere from eight to 14 points down in mid-August of 2016. To close that gap, you gotta bring the heat on Hillary Clinton, and I was brought in as that. 'Cause I knew the Clintons. And Bernie Sanders, I keep telling people, he had two shots at her, never laid a glove on her. It was a pillow fight. If you're gonna get those people, you gotta get up in their grill and rip their face off, because they're tough, and they're neoliberal neocons. They're very vulnerable. But Bernie had kinda ceded that ground. That's why he's not really had much of an impact on this populist, think about it. We've had a populist nationalist revolt in this country, and Bernie Sanders has been a marginal figure to it. How did that work? And in the Democratic Party today, this is why Ro Khanna and Fetterman are kind of on an island. They don't really have a huge constituency in the Democratic Party. - What, in your estimation, I mean, you talk about it as the age of Trump, which is clearly the age of Trump. You said it started in 2008, with the Tea Party, with the bailouts. This is, I think I've heard you say something like this, that the anger-- - The financial collapse. - The financial collapse. You had Obama's administration largely chosen by Citigroup. He had a lot of people brought in from the financial sector. And what do you think the response from the Democratic Party should have been? - Well, first off, you should have put these things, look, it would have taken steel balls, but you had to do it, number one, we should have let the bank, we should have let Goldman Sachs go bankrupt. We should have let AIG go bankrupt. - Their argument would be that the entire global economy would collapse. I mean, this is what they were saying to me. I was in that business many years ago, and they were saying, they were coming into our office going, if these bailouts are not signed, the American economy falls, and then the world economy falls within three days. Now, I don't know if that was-- - No, it's 100% true. We know that from congressional testimony at the banking committee. So they put Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on Monday, I think the 15th, in London first, put it in bank, and they didn't realize Lehman Brothers was the center of the commercial paper market, which is what funds companies overnight for the cash, 'cause guys are not sitting there with liquid cash to run their operations. They're having investments or bonds or whatever. The commercial paper market freezes. All of a sudden, you got everybody in a free fall. And on Thursday, Hank Paulson, who I used to work for at Goldman, and Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, Secretary of Treasury, go to Bush's office, into the Oval Office, and they say, "Hey, look, we need a trillion dollars cash infusion "by five o'clock, or the American financial system "will collapse in 72 hours, "and the world financial system two days later." And Bush, in a profile on courage, goes, "Hey, we checked the Constitution. "It's not my problem. "You gotta go see this lady named Nancy Pelosi. "Only they have the ability to kind of unlock, "you know, to print that kind of money, "or to authorize that." They go up to Nancy Pelosi, and this is what the system's like. There's a guy in Alabama that was on the, he was the minority side, the Republicans in the House on the banking committee. They made everybody put their BlackBerries and everything outside. This guy, when they get out and talk about this, he texts his brokers and say, "Buy the QQQs, short the market for tomorrow morning "at the open." - Wow. - Yeah, he made a couple hundred thousand bucks. - In your mind, is that a coup? - Well, no, here's what it is, is that you gotta have some accountability and responsibility. First, you gotta keep your head clear, and say, "Well, hang on," because what Hank Paulson did is took care of Goldman. They were in the boardroom of, they were in the conference rooms of Sullivan and Cromwell at that time, preparing the bankruptcy of Goldman Sachs. They were in the conference rooms preparing the bankruptcy of GE Capital. They were in the conference rooms of the big white-shoe law firms preparing the bankruptcy of AIG. I mean, these companies were going down. What they did on Goldman Sachs is that they signed a one-line thing that said, "Starting Monday, Goldman Sachs is a bank holding company." Right, they just made it a bank holding company with one line, and so come Monday morning, they could go to the Fed window and borrow at 2%, lend it to their clients at 4%, and take that VIG, would be a couple of billion dollars a month. That would kind of bail them out. They got a bailout. All these, every one of them, GE Capital, Merrill Lynch, all of them got bailouts. - And this is all on the backs of the taxpayer. - But the little guy, $35,000. First off, the little guy didn't get a bailout. Worse, Hispanic and black, particularly working class, where the guys got wiped out of their equity in their homes, right? 'Cause all the CMOs, all the mortgage packages collapsed, so guys, they just blow 'em out, turn it over to the banks. The banks walked in, they were picking these things up for 50 cents of the dollar. Not that they wanted 'em at the time, but the equity holders, you had a generation of particularly minority homeowners that got zeroed out. My point is, is that yes, there probably had to be some bailouts, but not the way it's done. And people say, "Well, Bannon, why are you talking about?" 'Cause the way we put this money in, they got recouped and got like 12%. I said, "Yo, dude, at Goldman Sachs, "if a company's in trouble like that, "you walk in, you blow out management, "you blow out the equity, you lend them the money, "the new management team gets to earn "into 20% of the equity, "and then the guys that put the money up "get a bunch of warrants. "Where's the warrant package for the little guy? "Go back to 2008." - There are no guarantees for the American taxpayer. - Nothing, zero. They got paid back the money and they got some returns, but what you should have gotten is some sort of package to own, you should have owned these companies. I would even say quasi-nationalized the banks. They proved that they were incapable. - A lot of people in this town nervous. The way you talk. - More on Wall Street. - Well, that's what I mean, but I mean like- - Fuck 'em, fuck 'em. If you're not making them nervous, you're not doing your job. - As you should. - The whole game is, the game is totally rigged. It's completely rigged against the little guy. The little guy, and at the same time, they went to Silicon Valley and did a deal with the oligarchs. The little guy in this country, and this is a revolt, the guy making 35, 45,000 bucks a year, right? The entire world's system rests on his shoulders, okay? Not just the American economy and paying the taxes here, but the kind of, the post-war international rules-based order, which is if you look at the Eurasian landmass from Western Europe and NATO to the Middle East, Persian Gulf, to around the Straits of Malacca and South China Sea up to Japan, around the rim of the Eurasian landmass, you have these four big nodes, and there you have commercial, America has commercial relationships, capital markets, trade deals, which were upside down on every one on. You have some sort of, a little bit of cultural back and forth, but you have an American security guarantee. It's the reason our defense budget is a trillion bucks. So the reason- - The dollar has value. - It has value, but that dollar during the, yes, we're the prime reserve currency after Bretton Woods, and that's how you have to, we took it over from the Brits, that's how you run an empire. We were a hegemon, at least for a moment in time. But the question now, because of the drop in purchasing power, the inverse of inflation over Biden's thing, this is why you have the BRICS nations saying, "Hey, maybe we got to get on a different system." - Tell people what the BRICS nations are. - BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Started with that, these nations that have natural resources that were kind of binding together saying, "Hey, the West, really Western Europe, and particularly the United States are screwing us. We are selling them their natural resources at dollars, and these dollars are depreciated over time. They're doing a devaluation on us." And so they were gonna bind together first. They kind of figured, almost like, think about, "Hey, how do we redo the cartels, like the OPEC back in the '90s?" They were thinking of that. Then it became maybe our combined purchasing power, maybe we do another currency, we bundle together, maybe it's China, the CCP, who was always trying to destroy the US. And Trump just comes out the other day and says, "Hey, BRICS nations, I love the fact you're having conferences and talking about some sort of go-back security." Anybody even thinks about putting 100% tariff on everything, right, to try to blow 'em up? - Has your child ever been caught under a tractor trailer or another piece of farm equipment? If they have, it's time to call Morgan & Morgan. It's America's largest personal injury law firm. Has a friend of yours ever been paralyzed from riding a jet ski? If that has happened, it's time to call Morgan & Morgan, America's largest personal injury law firm. Have you or someone you know received a third-degree burn from a cup of coffee at a drive-thru, where your hand is now gross? If that's the case, you have to call America's largest personal injury law firm, Morgan & Morgan. Have you slipped and fallen in a Wendy's and hurt your hip, and now you can't dance? 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If someone's friend's ferret bit you, for the people, they carry diseases, forthepeople.com/tim. - But back to the financial crisis, you have a collapse and here's the problem I got with them. It's not capitalism. You've socialized the risk. In other words, if it collapses, the little guy bails it out, but you give unlimited upside to the elites. In the history of this nation, the greatest concentration of wealth in our history took place in the Obama administration. On the surface of it, he's the most progressive guy and he's doing some stuff, but that's all pro-wrestling. And where it really matters, money and power, they have the greatest concentration of wealth to the top 1% because what they did is they took the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, which is about $880 billion in bushes there, and they basically flooded the zone with liquidity to prop up real assets, real estate assets, and stocks and bonds. And so if you owned financial or real assets, that run you had, which you had nothing to do with, they took the interest rates to zero. And by the way, zero interest rates kills the little guy because you've got your little passbook savings account or checking account, you get no interest. So for those five or six years when interest rates are near zero, big guys can borrow the money, but you're sitting there and you have no capital accumulation because your little savings account, checking account, has no interest on it. So everything was to benefit the wealthy and the power guys. And quite frankly, Geithner and the people at the Fed knew this and they had some guy named Christopher Leonard wrote a book called "The Lords of Easy Money." He went back and read all of the conferences and meetings of the Federal Reserve governors, which by the way, is kept secret for 10 years. He went back to the 10-year and he's got the transcripts where the guy, I think it was Dick Fisher, the Fed chair in Dallas is sitting there. When they're doing this, he goes, "Hey, you understand we're gonna eviscerate the working class in this country. We're gonna destroy the middle class. We're propping up this entire bailout on these guys' shoulders and they get nothing. In fact, not only are they gonna pay for it, they're gonna get crushed 'cause of these zero interest rates of which they can't get access to capital." That's exactly what happened. That's the time I realized every time you've had a financial crisis in the world, you've had a populist reaction. And that's when I said this will, now it didn't mean Trump two years later, or really get to know him politically until like 2013 or '14, but I knew as sure as the turning of the earth, you were gonna have a populist reaction to that. You had it first in the Tea Party and then later you had it in the Trump MAGA movement, but this has played out pretty much to the way that it normally plays out. And we're still in a terrible situation. We haven't gotten to 2008. More importantly, nobody associated with that collapse that made all that money and all those fees beforehand, nobody's been held accountable, nobody. - Do you think that, you fast forward to the situation that we see now, where we're talking largely about the financial industry, that's very cozy with government. You have Hank Paulson going in, talking- - Cozy, it owns the government. It's not cozy, it owns the government. Lock, stock and barrel. - It seems to me, and perhaps to you, that there is another industry right now moving in that wants to own the government. And that is the tech industry. That seems very cozy, very close with the government. You've been outspoken and you're one of the only people who's been publicly outspoken about the dangers of that. - Well, at the same time, right after, around 2008, this is when Obama became aware of the power of social media. There's this famous meeting at San Francisco airport where the guys at Facebook come to him with his team and they tell him about the power of Facebook 'cause he's running as a populist outsider against the Clinton machine. Nobody gives Obama a chance. He's an anti-war populist outsider. Nobody gives him a chance at first against the Clinton apparatus, the Clinton mafia. He does this, a lot of it's through social media. They have an implicit bargain later with the oligarchs in what I call the algorithmic age. They allow the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Googles, all the big platforms, the big platforms that charge. They essentially reach a Faustian pact, which is we're a hegemon globally, right? And what we need to do in the age of the algorithm is keep the commanding heights of technology. So we make an implicit deal with the oligarchs. You're gonna have no Justice Department interference, no Federal Trade Commission interference. We're not gonna try to break you up. You're gonna have no antitrust pressure at all. We're gonna allow you to become the richest people on earth, okay? But you have to give us the commanding heights in the age of algorithm. And here's what have we found out. That we're what, 10 or 12 years into this, and we know in the age of algorithm, social media and AI, they've blown 'em both. On social media, if you look at our social media, it's fairly cumbersome. It's not exactly revolutionary. - TikTok is much bigger. - TikTok is not just bigger, it's so much more sophisticated, a thousand times. The Chinese Communist Party, it's so lethal because of its addictive nature. TikTok is not on mainland China. They have a version, right, of TikTok that's not so addictive, and they don't let the content they let in the West. This is how powerful it is. We've blown it as far as social media goes. There are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than we are, and ours is quite addictive, but theirs is much more. But then on artificial intelligence, it's even worse. And now, what do you think, DeepSeek is a PSYOP or a Sputnik moment? - Right. - Right, it's both bad. I think you have to defer the fact it may be a Sputnik moment. They are basically saying that our theory of the case in artificial intelligence, which is kind of mass machine learning, right, power through, and you need all this new energy for the data centers, they're saying that theirs is a totally different profile. So what happens? We've lost the commanding heights in the two very technologies in the algorithmic age we made the Faustian bargain on with these guys. There's, look, there's 75 electric vehicle companies. Google has Bing and DuckDuckGo. There's no competition for Google. There's no competition of Facebook. There's no competition Amazon. Amazon destroyed half the small businesses in this country, flooding the zone with Chinese Communist Party product. There's no competition to, really, competition to X or to Twitter because we let them go. And there's no Justice Department. That's why I'm a neo-Brandeisian when it comes to the Justice Department. I'm a Lena Kahn fan. - You're a Lena Kahn fan. Break 'em up, break 'em up. - If she had been allowed, and look, here's Kamala. When Steve Bannon talks about Lena Kahn 10 times more than Biden, and particularly Kamala Harris, that tells you it's a fix that's in the Democratic Party. It's controlled by all these corporatists. This is the thing of Trump. You've got Gail Slater. You've got Andrew Ferguson. You then have Mike Davis and others in War Room that are neo-Brandeisians and kind of think, hey, Linda Kahn, we'd love to have her back. - Explain that term to people. - From Brandeis, Justice Brandeis, Louis Brandeis, had this theory back in the '30s that you have to watch out for private concentrations of power that would then partner with government. If you wanted to get to a totalitarian government, you would have major concentrations of private power built around monopolistic-- - It's a term that they often call the corporate state. - Corporate state, exactly, and says that is a danger to liberty and freedom, right? Now, he was an FDR guy, et cetera. You've had it, then a school came up in kind of the '80s from Chicago called the Chicago School that really looked at it from consumer pricing, right? That everything's gotta be to the benefit of the consumer, and so it's kind of a gentle way to go on antitrust. - It's buying people off. It's going, your jobs don't exist anymore, but the T-shirts are less money. - Exactly, exactly, or even in competition, when they look at mergers, that what's the price, and they do all these kind of Cato, it's a very libertarian school. It hasn't worked. - And it's just basically we can immiserate your lives, but if we give you enough Creature Conference, if we give you Netflix, if you can door dash Taco Bell, which I've done, and I'll admit that, but if you can do all of those things, stop complaining that you can't send your kids to college. - Exactly. - That's kind of the layman's way of saying it. - And so, and neo-Brandeisian is, to get back to what Louis Brandeis said, is that these great concentrations, which is really-- - That's the last time, if I'm ever asked to leave a plane, if I'm ever dragged off a plane for heaping abuse on a flight attendant who deserves it, I am going to scream, "I am a neo-Brandeisian," as I am dragged off the plane. - You'll get that. What Brandeis saw, though, is the Chinese Communist Party's model. Remember, we did all this after Tiananmen Square, when Bush 41 sent Scowcroft over to say, "No, we're gonna get you. "You gotta calm down this political stuff, "but we see you as a partner on the manufacturing side "on a global basis. "We will get you in the World Trade Organization. "We will give you most favored nation status. "We'll do all this." And the theory they said, "Oh, we will take the Chinese Communist Party "and turn them into a liberal democracy. "These will all become Jeffersonian Democrats." The exact opposite happened. We recreated their model of state capitalism and authoritarian power, and that's what you have today with the oligarchs in Silicon Valley. Now, here's the beauty of it. Here's how great the oligarchs are, that we've made them the richest people on Earth, we've made them some of the most powerful people on Earth, and then exactly when they're exposed for being phonies in what you made the Faustian bargain for on both social media and particularly artificial intelligence, what do they do? - They flip. - Hold it, let me get to the flip in a second. They turn around and say, "We need a bailout." They say, "All you hear right now is that in this city, "you're hearing we need a Marshall Plan, "we need a Mercury Astronauts Plan, "we need to turn over all the national labs, "the weapons labs, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, "where they made the nuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb. "We need to turn all the national labs "to the guys in Silicon Valley, "because now we've had a Sputnik moment "and the Chinese Communist Party "have taken the commanding heights." I go, "Hang on a second, this is a, "and they're talking 500 billion to a trillion dollar bailout "for the exact same guys that did this." In addition, understanding the math, right, and Elon understood it first, given his engineer's brain and really backed our play, but the rest of them hung out until 11 o'clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time on the 5th of November when Pennsylvania fell. When Pennsylvania fell, you know, Zucker, Bezos, all of them became populist nationalists. They go, "We're in," and they got down with their checks to Mar-a-Lago, genuflected, right, and became supplicants to Trump. And this is why I say these guys are dangerous. They're all progressive Democrats. They were made what they are by the Obama administration. They're all progressive Democrats. They are totally phony. All they wanna do is go to where the source of money is so they can keep being oligarchs, 'cause right now, if you look at 'em and look at who the theoreticians they look for, they're not really on the spectrum of, like, MSNBC's here and, you know, War Room's here, and some guys are more open borders, and Globus and others are hardcore populist nationalists. They're on a whole other spectrum, and that spectrum is what I call techno-feudalism. They've been taken out of the world of capitalism. It's no longer markets and profits, since we haven't allowed any competition and allowed these massive companies. They are really digital platforms and rent. They're rent-seekers, okay? And their idea is very feudalistic. It's like Venice in the 15th century. It is that the railhead is like the liege lord with the digital platform, and everybody else is a peasant, or what I call a digital serf, and this is how you're gonna run it, and they have this network. They call it the network state. There's books out about it now. It's talk about it, and this is what these guys believe, and it's quite dangerous. And this is why I think you've seen the impersonal nature of what's happening at Doge, which I support going after the administrative state. - Well, that's always been a theme of yours. You want the deconstruction of the administrative state, of the bureaucracy. - Yes. - What is Elon doing, and what is the Doge team doing that you wouldn't do or would do differently? - Let's talk about three things on Elon. Number one, and where his biggest supporter, I have given him more credit than anybody. Number one, he was the first of the oligarchs, because I think it was his engineering brain, to really look at where we were politically, and he worked through the math to say, "Hey, look, this Trump thing is actually "this populist nationalist movement, "which is what I call MAGA plus, "plus low-information voters, "plus part of the Make America Healthy Again, "these housewives who were red-pilled "during the pandemic, "particularly about what their children "were being taught in school, "and the health thing with the mask." Kind of the Nicole Shanahan crowd, right? - That's right, Malibu moms. - Now, around Trump, there's always, you have to understand, there's always a countervailing tension with Trump, with people who want Trump to be more Trump, right? Versus those who say, "You gotta calm down, you be nice, "and look for the mythic, traditional suburban mom, "that if you say nicer things, she'll vote for you." I keep saying, "That's never gonna happen." Elon came in at a time in the campaign, in the spring and summer of 2024, when that was actually being talked about. He sat down with Charlie Kirk's guys, and worked through the math of a ground game, a ground game we supported to do this MAGA plus. The brother wrote a quarter of a billion dollars in checks, $250 million, $50 million a month over five months. And I tell people, if you don't know about American politics today, when you see huge donors, like the Adelson's or the Mercer's, and people talking about putting in $100 million, $150 million, that's over a cycle, a presidential cycle. This brother wrote 250 in the last five months, 50 a month to back a ground game, not to put it up on fancy commercials, which most of the billionaires get picked off with. Number one, he backed our play. Would President Trump have won without that? Yes. But we wouldn't have known that answer at 10 or 11 o'clock on the Tuesday, the 5th. That would have probably taken a couple of days to work through. And I'm not so sure we'd have had 53 guys in the US Senate, probably 51. It had been much tighter, okay? And it was tight enough already. So he definitely had a huge aspect. Number two, he immediately got, like nobody else has got, the deconstruction of the administrative state. He understands that we have a fourth branch of government that's not in the constitution, that's kind of a permanent government. And they don't care if Trump's passing through, or AOC or Bernie Sanders are passing through. They run the deal like they're gonna run, and here's what it is. When you take over the government, when you win, you get 4,000 people. You get 3,000 that can hit the date plates running immediately, okay? All you need there is basically a security clearance, right? Pass on drugs, right, and a security clearance. And you can go and you can staff at these mid-level and junior levels immediately. You get 1,000 that have to be Senate-confirmed. Those are your senior people. But you have 4,000. In the government, you have about 2 1/2 or 3 million civilians. You have about 2 1/2 million to 3 million military, so let's say five to six million there. Plus you have contractors. Another, at executive level, another five million. So it makes sense. You have about 10 million people that run this apparatus that cost 6 1/2 to $7 trillion a year to run, right? Or it transfers money, but it costs a huge amount of money to run. Plus it oversees, I don't know, 60 or $70 trillion of assets, right? All the land, all the oil, everything that we control. That apparatus is so out of control that in order to get down to a sustainable model where we can actually get close to a balanced budget, it's got to be deconstructed. You have to take that apart, right? It's gotta be made smaller. And you gotta make some tough decisions 'cause programmatically, they do a lot of things. And quite frankly, with the economic distress we have and the corporations bailing on paying decent wages 'cause they've invited the world in here to compete with American labor in American labor's home, that you have more working class people on Medicaid. You have more people on economic security like food stamps. So it's a tough call, but he saw immediately, this is how you have to do it. And if you're ever to get to the deep state, which is the aspects of the Pentagon-- - Intelligence community. - Intelligence, you got, and CIA, people should know, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I came to this through hard evidence of seeing it in the first term and dealing with, you basically have the CIA, you have aspects of the DNI crowd, which is 17 separate intelligence-- - Directive of National Intelligence. - Intelligence, which has everything. Everybody's got NSA, has got the guy, they can look into your funds, they know everything that's going on, everything. Then you've got the Justice Department with aspects of that, and you got DHS with ATF and others. You got the FBI, you have elements of the Defense Department like DIA. That is the deep state. And what I say is it's like the Praetorian Guard in the Roman Empire. They are actually so powerful now that they can decide, like the Praetorian Guard is, who's the emperor and who's not. This is why they turfed out Trump and they basically plugged in Biden. - Would you agree with this? Somebody who's smart described this as a parallel command structure that is existing outside of the executive branch where the president is not read into certain intelligence, he's lied to about troop levels in Syria and things like that. They're conducting business with countries outside of the purview of the White House. And somebody called this a parallel command structure. - I would, the only difference I would make, you're 100% correct, it's not parallel. It is the command structure. When you sit there and get a briefing from these people, they will look you in the eye and lie to you. What I was put in charge in the first days of working with people like Eric Prince and others to come to a plan, the president wanted out of Afghanistan. We'd already been there, I think, going on 18 or 19 years. And the Pentagon and the apparatus, and I keep saying it, I never called it the deep state. It's not a deep state, it's up in your face. And they will sit there and make up their own numbers and lie to you. I talked to them one time, I said, "Listen, I gave them some points in time. "About briefings I want." I said, "I wanna see the briefing about Afghanistan "over the 20 years, this time, this time, this time, "this time, this time." And 'cause I knew what they were gonna show. They were gonna show every time, whether the president was Bush or Obama, that, "Hey, we're here. "If we just have more money in three years, "it's gonna be perfect." It's like seeing these small companies. - Who's driving this agenda? Is it Raytheon, General Dynamics? - It's a combination of people. - It's the Council on Foreign Relations, everybody. - It's definitely the outside companies, but it's also the guys like Brennan. It's people that have been here forever, been in the intelligence-- - Brennan is the guy that keeps coming up. - Bad dude, should be in prison. - As a very dangerous individual. He's a dangerous person. - Dangerous, but there's-- - Clappers, they're dangerous guys. - There's a hundred, Clapper, Hayden, all those are the guys you see at the very top. - Yeah. - But they also have coaching trees, like Belichick, et cetera, came up. So it's deep into the apparatus. And this is the thing they have called the interagency-- - Did they have anyone in the Trump White House the first month? - Yeah, but when you, okay. So I asked Mike Flynn, I said, look, let me see the charts for the, this is the first day. I want to see the charts for the National Security Council. When I came off sea duty in the '70s and came back, I came back to the Pentagon to be a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, basically a junior officer, Grandun. This is in 1981, when Reagan was like, the guys in the Pentagon at that time thought the National Security Council ran the world, National Security Council had 25 people. You had Kissinger, you had Brzezinski, and then they picked Richard V. Allen 'cause they didn't want some Dr. Strangelove type. - Right. - Reagan didn't. That had 25 or 30 people, and the guys in the Pentagon said, these fuckers run the world, right? They're too powerful. Flynn comes back on the first, like the first day, goes down with Jared and the President. He's got these charts like this, it's like, this is like, I said, Mike, I didn't want to see the entire National Security apparatus. I don't want to see the Pentagon. He goes, no, no, this is the National Security Council. I go, what? 292 billets. If you look at it, they're into everything. And I go, my God, I said, how many political appointees we got? He says, about 40 or 50. I said, well, hey, heck, no offense. We don't know 40 or 50 MAGA guys that step in there right now. We have to get rid of some of these. These are called detailees. They come from the Pentagon, they come from the CIA, they come from DNI, they come from DHS. It's essentially the way the deep state runs the system. They have, think about it, with 292 billets, they have-- - Billets meaning? - But slots where a person goes, means a body. - Where somebody goes, yeah. - It's 292 bodies, but they have a billet boom where they plug a person in. We wanted to get rid of those. - So they know that new administrations coming in are not always gonna have these 300 people. - No, Obama, no, in fact, it's impossible. First of all, you don't even have the allocation of political appointees. - But you might have 25. - 25. - So that's the thing. So by making it larger-- - You have to decrypt it, yes. - And they have a phrase, I call it their fetish. They have a thing called the interagency process. In other words, everything has to go through, the CIA's gotta sign off, the State Department, you gotta remember, the CIA has a military aspect to it, the State Department has an intelligence aspect to it. The deep state is like kudzu, and it's run by the CIA. The CIA controls behind the scenes. - And the CIA is run by the billionaires. - Well, the CIA reports to, first off, an elite class of Americans have just been, from the OSS to the CIA, very Ivy League. When I talk about the credential class, the traditional control of the CIA has been kind of Ivy League. - Harvard, Yale. - Harvard, Yale, Harvard Law School. - Princeton. - Yes, Princeton. A little bit of that's changed, but not the mentality. The very mentality is that-- - Cold War liberalism. - They are the guardians of this republic. - That's right. - Right? And you have these politicians, whether they're clowns like Bill Clinton or neophytes like Obama or dangerous individuals like Trump, they can wander in and out, but they are the guardians of the republic, very like Plato's guardians. They are the guardians of this republic. America's become a hegemon because of them. - They decide where they stay in the Ukraine for three years. - First off, they decide why, and this is one of the things I told McMaster's. He would sit there and go, "We got the greatest team, "and we're gonna do all this." I said, "Dude, I said you've had Bush, "you've had Obama, and now you got us. "You've had a center-right group "of neoliberal conservatives in Bush. "You've had the biggest group of progressives ever "under Obama." And I said, "We're here for 20 years." I said, "You've had smart guys around this table. "Why has it never changed?" And the reason it never changes that the neoliberal neocons have an apparatus. That apparatus is the deep state. And this is why I say if AOC or Bernie was there, they'd be just as dismissed. This is what eventually impeached Trump. They saw Trump as such a danger. This was the whole Russia hoax. This was a guy named Colonel Derek Harvey and an army sergeant called Higgins were two brilliant guys that understood this. They actually went through and came back and made a presentation. Here are the deep staters that actually are in the National Security Council. And here's who their names are in ranked order, the ones that should be turfed out. The number one name was this Eric Camarillo guy who eventually was the whistleblower on the Trump call to Ukraine. The guy, the original whistleblower was a guy that two years before, they identified as one of the most dangerous guys 'cause he's a deep stater. - I love factory meals. They're high protein and you can do anything you want with them. You can do keto, you can do a high protein diet, you can do a low carb diet. What's so special, and I have them and I've tried them and they're tasty. I love a tasty, yum, yum, yum. Because they're tasty when you eat them. I invite my friends over for dinner parties and give them all factory meals and they're thrilled. They're actually thrilled 'cause I'm like, let's enjoy each other's company but be healthy. I love all the different options that Factor has because you never get bored. So many meal, like I was on a meal, I'm literally, and you might think this is a joke but it's not, I was on a meal plan once and literally it was just, it was boiled chicken. It was boiled chicken. They would send it to me, they would send it to you in like a little box. It was like a boiled chicken and then it was like a blood-like substance, kind of like a thick blood, every day, three times a day. And that was boring and gross. Factor is different because it has different varieties of all of the different meals. Calorie Smart, Protein Plus, Keto. You can also get wholesome smoothies, breakfast and grab and go snacks 'cause sometimes you wanna grab and go. And I've realized that time is so important. What is time? Really, no one can explain it to you. You can listen to hours and hours of people babble and you still don't even really know what it is. You just know that you always need more of it but it's infinite. You know what I mean? So here we are again. But the thing about the grab and go is you grab one of these things, these bars, these Chewies, (mimics chewing) and you're in your car and the kids are, "Oh, I left my notebook at the house." "Oh, you're never gonna be anything," I turn around 'cause you're forgetful. You don't take it seriously. And if you keep leaving your folder in the house, you're gonna be a homeless person and that means you're not gonna have a house. And I know that that seems fun now 'cause you like playing in the backyard but you know when it's not fun? When all you have is the backyard. You actually only like the backyard 'cause you can come into the house. But if I took the house away and it was just the backyard, we'd have a real hellish life, which is what you're gonna have if you don't remember your folder, okay? But because I had a grab and go keto snack, what I'm able to do is turn this car around and get your folder 'cause I didn't spend time making pancakes or scrambling eggs. I had a little factor snack. Would I have liked to have more of a meal? Maybe I would have. But because this factor snack enables me to get your folder, I'm giving you a shot at a life, okay? I'm giving you a shot at a goddamn life, which is something that was never done for me, okay? My father was a drinker. The thing about the factor is the calories, you have the keto, you have a lot of options. It's really great because we can't, with the cooking and the wok, get the wok out. Ever try to cook when you have the wok? It is fun to wok because things go up the side and you can, but that's a whole nother. But it's tough, the wok. Eat smart with Factor. Get started at factormeals.com/factorpodcast. Use Factor Podcast, get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. That's Factor Podcast at factormeals.com. Listen, if you like my show, which you should 'cause it's good, use my promo code, okay? That's code Factor Podcast at factormeals.com/factorpodcast to get 50% off shipping on your first box. And you know, this is really important. It supports our show and it supports your metabolic life. - The deep state is a real thing. And this is why you see President Trump going after Hammer and Tong right now. Also, Elon's hitting it from a different angle. He's kind of going after the administrative state. He'll get to the deep state 'cause one of their slush funds, like USAID. USAID has essentially always been a CIA front that you see, yes, do they have water projects in India? Do they have some stuff in Sub-Saharan Africa? They do. That's all on the surface to make you feel better. They're running this thing, particularly funding all the media against Orban in Hungary. Funding money to all these source-backed, - NGOs, yeah. - Institutions, NGOs, and NGOs on the Southern border to do the invasion. All that was, a lot of that was funded by USAID. - And I mean, this is somewhat unrelated, but I guess perhaps incredibly related. You know, why did the media take very little interest in the person who almost killed the president? - It's 100% related. They didn't know much of the assassination attempt, but think about it. The media, you know, I was just watching because of the classic on TCM the other night in the Oscar month, they had all the president's men. - Right. - If you go back and look, - It's a great movie. - A great, fabulous movie, a classic. But if you go back and look at the '60s and '70s. - Yeah, they were killing them every other day. - And the people, New York Times, The Washington Post, these people were anti-institutionalist. They were all over the FBI. They were all over the CIA. They were all over investigative reporting. That's completely flipped. The Democratic Party and the mainstream media became the defenders of the institutions. This is why every night you hear them banging on us, oh, they're trying to get out of NATO. They're trying to do this. They're trying to tear down, they got Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the FBI. They have Tulsi Gabbard. The Democratic Party, and I think they know politically, they're in a tough jam. They became the defenders of a corrupt system. They became the defenders of institutions that clearly have to be at minimum reformed, and I think quite frankly, purged and taken down and rebuilt. So they're defenders of that. All the mainstream media is the biggest defenders. I mean, in The Washington Post, David Ignatius comes on Morning Joe. We call it the Langley Bugle, The Washington Post. It's you're getting the pure thing from the, you're getting the CIA's point of view that day when you see Ignatius. You see the same things in The New York Times, big reporters on defense. You're getting the Pentagon's perspective. So the mainstream and liberal media have become-- - And this is just perpetual war for perpetual peace. - Invade everywhere and invite everyone in. - Invite everyone in. - And invade everywhere. - To Steve Saylor quote, "Invade the world, "invite the world." - Invite the world. - And then you have a citizenry here that's immiserated, that is paying for all these wars. Their lives are terrible and getting worse. - Getting worse. And their kids' futures are shot, and they're manning. Remember, it's the family, it's the children of this eviscerated middle class and working class that kids are walking patrol in the Hindu Kush or with the 101st Airborne's Brigade in Romania on the Ukraine border, are in the two carrier battle groups in the Red Sea. - They're calling this democracy. They're calling you a fascist. They're saying, "Steve Bannon's a fascist. "What he's describing right now is democracy." Have you noticed the way this is being presented? I'm sure you have. - Yes, 100%, and this is what I love about it. We're winning elections with the vigor coalition. In the woods with the goat head is democracy. The council is democracy. You know what I mean? - Well, they're total, it's authoritarian. It's authoritarian model like the Chinese Communist Party. They want a couple of industries, state capitalism, where they have elite merger, right, between big government and big business. They're the control things. And what I find so laughable is we're actually winning elections. Let's take 24. After having the 2020 election stolen from us and being now debanked, deplatformed. Remember, I'm deplatformed everywhere. War room's not on any-- - How did they do that? When you talk about it, Doc, 'cause I will have to ask you, 'cause people will jump on that, and they will say that nobody found any proof, and then no Republicans, and no courts. - Here's the proof. Here's one of the pieces of proof we got. In 2022, the people, remember, we got 63 1/2 million votes in '16. I thought we did a pretty damn good job. We got 74 million votes in 2020, including we picked up 12 House seats. So you're telling me that's just, you're telling me in a Nancy Pelosi, I think we won 14 and then they won two, so net 12, we picked up 12 House seats in that election? - What do you think the mechanism is for-- - It's mail-in ballots. I'm not a machine guy. I think it's mail-in ballots. It was very evident what they did in Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin and in Michigan. It was mail-in ballots. And remember, he only won by the same margin that we did, the 72,000. When you accumulate Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, that's what Biden won by. You take the other states, these are small numbers, right? 10,000 in Georgia, 9,000 in Arizona. It was mail-in ballots. But here's the point. Where are those guys-- - Wouldn't the argument be-- - Where they've gone since then? They didn't vote in the midterm elections. They didn't vote in 2024. And so where are these-- - Are they disoriented, disenchanted, or they don't exist? - They don't exist. They don't exist. They 100% don't exist. They're disenchanted. They don't hate Trump. Oh, they only vote 'cause they hated Trump. They don't hate Trump any less. They see him as a hero. It's ridiculous. We can win. This is why on democracy, we love democracy 'cause you're not gonna beat us. Right now, our coalition is building. Trump got 39% of black men in the country to vote for him. Not just that, a lot of black men are just not gonna vote for the Democrats. Remember, if they don't vote for the Democrats, it's won to us. If they vote for us, it's a two-banger, right? Hispanics, Stark County, Texas, a hardscrabble county in South Texas, 97% Hispanic and blue collar, the most Hispanic county in the United States, voted for Hillary Clinton by 60% in 2016. In 2024, Trump won it by 16%. The Hispanic working class is coming our way. The African-American working class is coming our way. If in President Trump's-- - But this is why you've urged Elon Musk, be careful of Social Security and Medicare. - Oh yeah, and Medicaid. - And Medicaid. - Medicaid, I keep telling people, don't think in the old days, oh, Medicaid was an urban thing. And I said, you can't take a mediac to it. I said, this is not about race anymore. This is about economic distress. If you go and look in Idaho and the American readout up in Montana and Wyoming and the Christian readout, I think there's something like 80 or 90% of the babies born in Idaho are on Medicaid. Medicaid is now for the working class, the white working class and the Hispanic and black. These are our voters, right? You have to be very careful. Medicaid, you have to get the illegal aliens off and you have to put work requirements. But just don't think you can go in and put a mediac to it. - This project to destroy the distinction between citizen and non-citizen is entirely, not only to drive down wages, but to kind of destroy any idea of what a contract, a social contract-- - In national identity, yes, 100%. - National identity and a contract between-- - 1,000%. - The citizens and the government saying, I give you this, I am owed that. - Yes. - If we destroy the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, right. - Look at the non-citizen in Medicaid. It's shocking, right? The non-citizen has been given everything. Look at the 10 to 12 million illegal alien invaders and I don't blame them. You and I would do the exact same thing. You were invited here by the federal government. People shouldn't, your audience should not lose track of the fact that in these reconciliation things we're talking about, for the mass deportations, it's $175 billion we're asking for. Not just to secure the border, but for the mass deportation. - And you're talking really about the people that came in the last four years. - I'm only talking, I'm right now not concerned about anybody that came in before January 20th of 2021 because the way I calculated, there's 10 to 12 million and plus a million bad hombres, right, criminals. I was in Danbury, 10% of the prison, it's a prison for 800 people, I think. 800 inmates has got 1,200-- - Some of the members of my family from Ireland came in the early 1900s. I think a few of them, just to get them out, just to make a point. If I could write a few names down and you could pass it to Tulsi Gabbard, just to make a point that, hey, we don't know where it is. - No, no, no, I'm saying the guys coming over from Ukraine, you go to Montauk-- - No, and you've said the H-1B visas where tech people are bringing in. So my question to you is, and this is a question-- - I'm a hard core, but remember, I'm hard core. To me, everything revolves around the American citizen. I don't care your ethnicity, your race, gender, or whatever, your religion. If you're an American citizen, it should be like the Roman citizenship. You get a special deal. The whole system depends upon you. The whole world's economic system comes down on your shoulders. You're paying the taxes to really finance the hegemon. In addition, your sons and daughters are the ones, you're in Romania with the 101st, you're on the carrier battle group in the Red Sea, you're on patrol in the South China Sea. - You're defending the order. - You're defending the whole system, and yet you're the one that's screwed over consistently. That's gotta flip. Everything's gotta be, like for instance, these visa programs, they shouldn't work unless they work for American citizens. And what I mean by that-- - And you've criticized, you've said there's a lack of black and Hispanic people in tech. - Zero. - Zero. - Okay, the most progressive, think about it, the most progressive people on earth in the Obama administration created an apartheid state. Silicon Valley's an apartheid state. There's no blacks or Hispanics. And the South Asians or Indians are there are there as indentured servants. They're working for a third to 50% less than American citizens, often in kind of horrible conditions where four or five guys to a condo and working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, because if they complain, they get the boot. Okay, it's not acceptable. And not just that-- - The necromancy says it's 'cause Americans are lazy and watch too much TV, or they're not educated, or they're-- - They have not shown me, and 'cause they all backed off coming after me on H-1B visas, I said, "Show me one thing. "I wanna see one fucking billet, one person, "in any of those billets, of the millions are here, one. "Show me one in that billet that has a better education "or a better skillset than an American." They can't show me one. They can't show me one, and they won't show me one, because it doesn't exist. It has nothing to do, and when the media says, "High-skilled," these are not high-skilled. This is basically, essentially, the mass programmers. It's all about getting it cheaper for one-third, because most of the cost of these companies is in the programming, right, or the technicians, the technical aspect of it. They pay one-third to 50% less. They have higher margins. They have higher stock prices. They get bigger, bigger. Their warrant package is worth much. The math here is not complicated, but they can't show that the H-1B visas are bringing in more educated. We have plenty of educated people in the United States now. People in the United States are gonna wanna get paid a certain amount, 'cause they're not gonna compete against the world. Number two, being Americans, you got a little cussingness and grit, this is what, hey, and you're gonna be vocal about what working conditions are. That's what it means to be American. That same grit and tenacity and getting up in people's faces is the same reason that we won World War II, the same reason we won the Cold War, the same reason that Colin, those same Americans are their sons or daughters are on the carrier battle group in the Red Sea. You can't separate 'em, and here's the problem is we've invited the world. It is not acceptable in this nation to bring in foreign workers to compete against American workers for these jobs. It's bullshit. It should be, I want a total moratorium until we get sorted exactly what's going on, and until those billets, on H-1Bs, which are so corrupt, I would shut it all down, all of it. I'd deport immediately everybody. I would give every billet in 60 days, every job in 60 days to an American citizen. And Bob's your uncle, and we have to be this hardcore. - Zuckerberg, yeah. - I am very hardcore on these things 'cause if you don't take it to an extreme, you're never gonna change it. The capitalists always want to have lower wages and more malleable populations. - And it's not even capitalism. It's crony, you know what I mean? It's the corporate state. - Crony, yes, it's the corporate state. - Zuckerberg. - We don't have capitalism. - Bezos, Andreessen, guys like this. - They're all oligarchs. - Do they love America? - Fuck no, but listen, they're oligarchs. What they love is their money and their power. Have they ever sacrificed for anything in this country? When President Trump came up for the first time and tried to give working class people, and it showed in the 2019 numbers that blue collar wages increasing at a faster rate than white collar wages, non-college graduates higher than college graduates, did they support him? No, they deplatformed, they debanked him. They have no, do you see those guys volunteering to go overseas and defend their country? No, what they want to do is go to the Pentagon and get a big fucking fat Pentagon contract, right? To leech off this nation. No, they're not good guys. And I keep telling people in our party, don't think they support us 'cause they don't. They're very good at knowing where power is. And right now they think that we're, before Obama and the Clintons were the power, and Biden, now it's us. Just like they betrayed them and flipped on them, they flipped, they're a creation of progressive Democrats. They are progressive Democrats. I'm going to do the ad for Blue Chew now because it is a unique online service with the same active ingredients as Viagra and Cialis. And that means it is a pill that you take and you chew, and then your pee pee gets hard, and you're able to perform in ways that will astound you and others, hopefully. But I'm going to do this ad in the style of a Alanis Morissette '90s song. ♪ Your soft dick is disgusting ♪ ♪ I hate your drunken floppy cock ♪ ♪ Take your pill so you can please me ♪ ♪ My smelly vag wants your hard dick ♪ ♪ I hate your soft dick ♪ ♪ I send photos of your soft dick ♪ ♪ When you're asleep to my mother ♪ And we've got a special deal for our listeners. Try your first month of Blue Chew free. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. Visit bluechew.com for important details and safety information. And we thank Blue Chew for sponsoring the podcast, Put Your Hard Dick In My Pussy, or I'll Put It In A Blender. - Is Elon Musk using Trump? - I don't, listen, I think he's a different category than I would say the other. And look, I'm not a fan on many aspects, but like I said, on the two big ones, backing our play in 2024, the deconstruction of the administrative state, and the third, which is this populist revolt going throughout the world, which he's been very vocal of backing in places like England and in Germany. And I tell people, I said, look, this brother brings the two tactical nuclear weapons of modern politics, unlimited money, two wit. He wrote a $250 million check. It doesn't affect his, he's still got baby mamas lined up, right? It doesn't affect his lifestyle, right? Plus he's got a platform. He can bind what he wants to bind and loose what he wants to loose. He can drive up the awareness of something or crush it. So with those two things, there's not a centrist government in Europe that can withstand this. There's very little money in European politics. The entire campaign for Brexit, which is really taking England's sovereignty back, and the remain guys are very powerful, it's the establishment. That entire campaign was about 25 million pounds. It's nothing. So he's got unlimited power. And I think directionally, he's trying to do some good things. I've got problems with one. I'm not-- - Does it worry you that one person has that much power? - It always worries me. It worries me that the concentration of power in Silicon Valley and the concentration, now President Trump has a special relationship with him. We all trust President Trump. President Trump says on top of this, it's just that you have to, one of my bigger problems with Elon Musk is transhumanism. The number one, of all the problems we have, we have massive financial problems, we have massive geo-strategic problems, all the, and massive immigration and sovereignty issues. All of those problems are solvable. Tough decisions, we've let a lot of good alternatives go away, it gets tougher and tougher every year. They can all be solved. And they can be solved by rational policies, and you can solve those in debate, and some days you're gonna win, some days you're gonna lose. Underneath that, we have the most important time in history in the history of the Homo sapiens upon us. We are converging on something called the singularity. And it's just not AI, AI is one part of it. You have artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. You also have that regenerative robotics. You have quantum computing, you have advanced chip design. You also have CRISPR and gene, gene splicing. - Manipulation, yeah. - Manipulation. That's all converging on a spot called the singularity. On this side of that, you have the Homo sapiens. Something that's been around, I don't know, for 100,000, whenever all the other species fell aside, we survived, okay? So you have the Homo sapiens for, I don't know, 100,000 or a million years. On the other side of that, you have Homo sapiens 2.0. And the pressure, as if people under 35 or 40 didn't have enough pressure on 'em, 'cause they have more pressure than any generation in this country, I think, of pressure on them, of economically, of socially, you're now gonna add another pressure, which is for their children. - Do you enhance yourself? - Exactly, or more than that, even not yourself. If you're saying, no, I'm gonna see this thing through as what I am, and I'll make myself better, but you look at your kids, and you say, hey, look, I worked my ass off, and I went to an Ivy League school, I went to a great university, I became great in a sport, I became great in my profession, or my love, my hobby, whatever it was, and you're gonna sit there and go-- - Let's chip the kids. - There's only so many slots at Harvard, there's only slots at the University of Michigan. There's only so many slots at Wisconsin or Arizona. - Chip the kids. - The whole world's chipping 'em, you're gonna have these debates, and you're gonna sit there at night going, do I chip the kid or not? - Honey, chip the kids. - Do they chip the kids? And I'm saying, this is gonna cause, as a society and a civilization, we're not ready to have that conversation yet. By the way, it's gonna drive politics. Look at Elon, and this is why, because the industrialist in Silicon Valley are taking the typical easy way industrialists have, in the issue about labor and about manufacturing, instead of still trying to do the great American innovation, and kind of the Tom Peters management in search of excellence, management by wandering around, like having the R&D facility next to the manufacturing facility, so the engineers could walk to the floor and see the artisans, these guys, and get production, better production experience, get down the learning curve, make things better. American innovation was always our greatest power. What we did is we outsourced, we just shipped the factories over to China, because you know why? For efficiency, we want cheaper labor. It's easier to do that, we keep the R&D here, and guess what, it was never the same again. But we got lower labor costs. You either send it to China, or you outsource it to India. That was the lazy way to do it, and it had a massive impact on manufacturing. The same thing's happening in AI, and this is why people have to wake up. AI's got two paths it can go down, an efficiency path that I'm just gonna use AI and blow out everybody under 35 years old that's in their first administrative, managerial, or tech job, or I can use it as an engine of innovation to work. And right now, we're taking, just like the guys made the basic mistake of doing the, what I call the mass type of AI, which is the model that we're using, which is machine learning in a mass way that requires massive data centers, massive replication, massive energy. - And that's like cat GPT and things like that. - Versus what DeepSeek is, right? Which is, now-- - Do you think DeepSeek is legit? Do you think they were able to accomplish this, or do you think this is-- - I'm not smart enough to know, but here's what I would say. Even if it's a psyop, we have to, I think, assume, for the purpose of the discussion going forward, it may be a Sputnik or quasi-Sputnik moment in what we're gonna do about it, 'cause now we're in a horrible situation. Because now the oligarchs come to us and say, "Well, Bannon, how can you sit there "and say we should be broken up? "How can you want Lena Kahn in these, "you're a neo-Brandeisian, how can you want to break it up? "Now more than ever, we need to have national champions. "Now more than ever, you must make us, "you must make another Fauci embargo." - Is there any point to that where they say we need supremacy in that technology sector? - They're saying it now. They're saying this is the $500 billion ballot. They turn to us and say, "We need a Mercury program. "We need a Marshall program. "You need to turn the national labs over to us." - And the taxpayers have to fund it. - The taxpayers have to, they ain't putting it up, and the venture capitalists, they're looking for a bailout. Anytime you hear Mercury program, anytime you hear Marshall program, understand that's coming out of your paycheck. - And is this similar, in your mind, to when people say we need to go into Iraq and into Afghanistan, and we need all this money, and we need to-- - It's the same thing as the bailout of the banks. It's always looking for the loan, and yes, and obviously going there. The little guy pays for it. It's your sons and daughters that are in Iraq or Afghanistan. - That are doing it. - And you're paying for it. And not just your taxes, your private equity. Remember, Zuckerberg and all these guys came out of graduate schools. They didn't have any money. The people invested, Peter Thiels and people like that, it's all pension fund money. So it's Oregon State Pension Fund, it's CalPERS, it's Alabama Teachers Fund. All of their money, this is the Greek tragedy part of this. The American working class and middle class have essentially, through their work and hard work and savings, right, has paid for their own destruction, has paid for, that's the Greek tragedy part of it. Your greatest strength was turned against you. Your ability to be a good householder, your ability to actually have something, your ability to pay your taxes on a regular basis and have a little something put away, that's what the venture capitalists and the hedge funds used to ship the jobs overseas and destroy not on your own economics of your personal life, but to make sure that your children and grandchildren essentially live like Russian serfs. - Are in debt. - That's the revolt that you're seeing. Now, people can't totally articulate it. Number one is the system's never explained to you. You never explain how up here in Capitol Hill you can run these massive deficits. Well, how can it be paid for? How can we not bankrupt? But we have this money machine called the Federal Reserve that can just create money, that we can create the bond. Well, we can't settle foreign countries, we can just create ourselves. And that's how you end up with 125% of GDP in debt with a trillion dollars being added every hundred days. And inflation's not gonna go away until you stop this massive federal spending. It's not a supply chain issue anymore. It's too many dollars tasting too few goods. And as we keep having these massive deficits, the inflation is gonna be embedded in the system. And as we have to refinance, you're gonna refinance it at higher rates, you're not gonna get rid of this inflation. It's a death spiral. Two final questions. Is a conflict in your mind with China at some point inevitable? We've heard people come on the news and they say a conflict is within five to seven years. Pentagon runs a study that says within five to seven years. Now, some of this seems like it is based on the need for more money and more spending and more, or is this, and you know more about China than a lot of people, and you've studied and read about it, is it going to be a military conflict? Is it going to be an economic conflict? - This is the book, and I'll get you a copy, "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two colonels back in the '90s off of the Gulf War. And what they said is foreign devils are so sophisticated in armaments, and particularly remote armaments and targeting, that we never wanna get into a shooting war with foreign devils. That unrestricted warfare will be cyber, psychological, political, economic. We will do everything. In fact, they announced in 2019, there's a people's war. The Chinese Communist Party is at war with us today. That's where you see the mass infiltration to the United States. That's where you see the taking of so much of our technology. We don't need, and Sun Tzu tells them, and they believe, the moment they have to go kinetic, they feel they've already lost. Number one, they don't wanna fight the foreign devils in a kinetic war, 'cause they understand one thing we can do is get up on it and fucking blow shit up and kill people, okay? We're very good at that. They consider that defeat. They wanna defeat us beforehand. My point, the only people that throw off, think about that, we allow the Chinese Communist Party, which is a dictatorship that's killed a quarter of a billion of their own people, right? I mean, they make Stalin and Hitler look like pikers, okay? They've murdered in concentration camps, starvation, through the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the collectivization, and today, the gulags they have, you know, a quarter of a billion of their own people in the force. If you can't, the forced abortions, you add another three or 400 million Chinese, particularly Chinese female babies. So these people are murderous dictatorship, yet we interact with them, we're in business with them like they're part of the Kiwanis Club. If you wanna support Lao Bajing, which is the only way they can be overthrown, that's a name for old, it's old hundred names, 'cause there's basically 100 names in the Chinese language, right, 100 last names, and so old hundred names is a term for the common man in China, common man and woman. If you want Lao Bajing to overthrow 'em, we just have to do two things. You cut 'em off completely from any access to American capital, and I mean any. No stock market, no equity, no lending, no nothing, zero, and you cut 'em off 100% from American technology. They will collapse, I believe, in 100 days. They cannot exist unless they have access to American capital, or access to technology. This is why I'm one of the leaders of the decoupling effort, right? When President Trump, he wrote an executive order on Friday and signed it, that's probably the toughest thing we've done about no involvement at all with technology companies, of any company that does Chinese military. It's the first time we've really, somebody's put down the law. That's the way you take care of the Chinese Communist Party. If we don't do that, I believe we'll be in a shooting war in the South China Sea and around Taiwan in five years, and people have to understand, I don't care about your moral, whether you think you're supporting Taiwan for a democracy or not. Advanced chip design, 30 to 40 to 50% of our advanced chip design comes from Taiwan. There's chip, and it's not easily replicable. The Koreans have tried it, the Japanese have tried it. We're trying here in the United States with the CHIP Act. We are 10 or 20 years away from those plants. Advanced chip design is both an art and a science. We don't have it. They have it in those plants in Taiwan. It's 80 miles from the mainland China. It's a horrible situation. President Trump thinks about it all the time. You talk about the Pentagon, and that's where I spent half of my career at sea was there. The other half was in the North Arabian Sea in Persian Gulf, so I've steamed those waters. Right now, there's not been a war game in the Pentagon, they've put this out, in the last seven or eight years that we've won defending Taiwan, and they know that. If they take Taiwan, the American economy will drop into a depression. They understand that. That's why it's kind of a standoff right now, but we have to get much more aggressive on the CCP, or we're gonna pay for it, and we do that by restricting Wall Street and restricting Silicon Valley from being in business with them. - The salutes that Elon, I think, might've done one by mistake, or you did one, these things that people are getting very upset about. You just got a lot of press at CPAC, or whatever it was. - I gave a motivational talk, and at the end, I always give a wave to the audience. What they did is they took a nanosecond clip and said, "Bannon's throwing a Nazi or Roman salute." They just came out today, Byron Yorker of The Washington Examiner came out with a photo of Kamala Harris doing the same thing a couple of years ago, where she waved to the audience. - So this is just silly. - No, but what they're trying to, listen, the speech, I gave the speech and said- - 'Cause you go like this. You go, but you're probably waving. - I'm waving to the crowd, yes, yes, yes. - You can wave, you can wave. I just did it, I just did it. - Yes, yes, yes. - This is the clip. - You're waving to the, and by the way, with the French guy, yeah. With the French guy- - It's easy to do. You can do it, you go, "Hi." - With the French guy that said he wouldn't come, they had a thing, a front nationale, where I talked to their group seven years ago. I did the exact same thing. I went up and waved to the crowd like that, and I go, "Oh, God." - Nothing you've said today indicates that you have any adoration for or sympathy for any- - It's absurd. - Any of the Hitlerian, right. - But people know, but what they didn't want to do is cover the speech. In the speech, I said, "The whole world's media's there." The same guy, "The whole world's media's there. "They're not there to see Bannon." 'Cause they get enough of me yelling at the microphone four hours a day. They get Elon Musk, they don't need more Elon Musk. They get Elon all the time. They don't need Trump. Trump, another hour in the thing today, signing executive orders and blowing them up when he's asking them questions. Trump's so far in their head. I said, "And they're not there for JD." They get enough of JD, too. They came because they want to see where the power in this country lies is with this populist movement, and they can't understand it, and they can't destroy what they don't understand. And so they're all there to see these people, and I said, "You are the power." Trump, when Trump went back to Mar-a-Lago after they stole the 2020 election, hey, the entire Republican Party abandoned him. Everybody was debanked, deplatformed. All the oligarchs kicked him off everywhere. It was his base that said, "Fuck this. "If you're in, we're in." And when he said, "I'm in," understanding, and this was the greatest moment of moral clarity and one of the greatest profiles in courage. You take Kennedy's book, read 'em all, all eight examples, I think he's got 10 examples. They don't compare to Trump. Trump understood, "If I do this, "and are not a good little boy and stay in Mar-a-Lago "and build more golf courses and write my memoirs, "if I come back and try to reclaim "the presidency that was stolen from me, "they will try to throw me in prison, "they'll try to bankrupt me, "they'll try to destroy my country." He understood-- - And maybe they'll try to kill you. - And eventually try to kill you. He is the American Cincinnatus. This is this famous mythical Roman general that went back and retired, and when the nation was having a crisis, right, in a war, they went to him and said, "You gotta come back and save us." Trump came back, and that's why it's General Washington, Lincoln, and Trump. This'll be known as the age of Trump. And here's the thing. They're not, in history, they're not gonna give a fuck about Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, JD Vance. They're gonna care about Donald Trump and MAGA. They're gonna say this guy was a billionaire that came and basically formed a populist nationalist movement that gave the country its sovereignty back, and gave the country its freedom back. And that's why I think he's not only one of the greatest presidents we've ever had, he's one of the two or three greatest Americans we've ever had, and this is why I'm a huge proponent of trying to see if he can't stick around as long as possible, because, at least for another term after this, because-- - Well, that would require amending the Constitution. - Well, we'll see about that. We'll see, no, but then people-- - You don't think he'll be too old? - Certainly won't be too old. Look at his energy now. His energy is-- - He has great energy. - Great energy, and sharp. Listen, a guy like this comes along once a century. We had one in the 18th century. - But he'd have to win again, right? I mean, let's say it would be another election. - Yes. - 'Cause this is what people tend to always say about, right? - No, no, no, no, no. Winning more elections, we're not concerned about that. We think that this guy is on a roll right now. We think we're building our coalition. Now, we have to deliver, right? - There's gonna be some, people should understand. - You have to deliver. - The next three or four months are gonna be a firestorm on this Capitol about spending, about taxes, and I'm a big proponent that if we can't cut spending enough, if there's not enough revenue coming in from tariffs-- - You're gonna tax the rich. You're gonna see that and tax the rich. - I said in the Oval in '17, when we had Cohen, Mnuchin, and Jared, myself, and I told the president then, you gotta take the upper bracket and we gotta tax, and we gotta increase the tax rates. - What's the upper bracket? - Well, here's what I'm saying is that right now-- - Where does that start before I get on board with this? - Hang on, you're probably gonna fall into that. - No. - Right now, if you look at-- - Steve. - If you look at the four-- - These private planes are expensive, and they're dangerous. - If you look at the $4 trillion, so if we don't extend the tax cuts, right? There's basically, as Scott said, there's a $4 trillion tax increase coming. If you take couples filing together under $400,000 combined, that is essentially 2.6 trillion of that, okay? So that covers, and I would actually say increase that maybe to 500,000. Then you have a couple hundred billion for pass-throughs of entrepreneurs with small companies. That leaves about a trillion dollars for the top 5% or the top 3%, so those tax cuts would not be renewed. Their taxes would go back to the previous taxes. - 39. - Yes, and I'm actually saying that if-- - And I could get behind, I could say that's okay. - I appreciate that. - I mean, I don't, I'm just saying. - I think-- - Is there any way we could start taxes after $8 million? - Well, they do that now, I think, on estate taxes. And let me give you one more piece of news, though. That's in the existing taxes we have today. So I'm a proponent of, President Trump is too, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on first responders, military, veterans, et cetera. - Podcasters. - Right-wing podcasters, no. No tax on Social Security. That adds up, when you accumulate it, that's about another trillion dollars. So our gap goes from two to three trillion. - Gotcha. - And so we gotta close that. And my point is the best way to incentivize the oligarchs and the wealthy and the lords of easy money on Wall Street to help us cut spending is they've gotta get in back of, because the puppets here in D.C. respond to those guys. You've got to have your lobbyists, you've got to have everybody help us work on cutting spending. If we can't cut spending, we can't continue on at $2 trillion deficits. Not only may you not get, in my view, not get the extension of the Trump tax cut, I think you gotta talk taxes on financial transactions, taxes on, you gotta kill the carried interest. You have to kill all these games. - Well, the carried interest, they should have killed a long time ago. - They should have. - No one's killed it. - No one's killed it. - Chuck Schumer and everybody. - It's not, and by the way, the Democrats always fold. Remember, in the first 100 days, to show what funnies there are, in the first 100 days of Biden's regime, they came out with all this tax on billionaires. Remember that? They had a program tax on billionaires. It never even got through a committee. They just, because the Democratic Party is controlled by billionaires. And so this is, I think, where we gotta get tough. I just saw a poll today that 50% of Republican voters, President Trump's supporters, 50% agree that if we gotta close this gap, that they support taxing the wealthy. I just think it's just gonna happen. And to me, it's just logical. - I'm not against it, and I think that we should care for, I've always said, listen, I lived in California for many years, pay high taxes. And I said, if I was living in a place where it was nice, and people were being supported and cared for with the money, it's great. But if I'm paying 13 1/2% of my money, and someone is using the bathroom in the middle of the parkway, I'm asking questions. - Like Bill Maher and others have finally started to wake up to the fact, after the Palisades debacle of exactly what you're paying for. - Listen, I'm not for higher taxes. What I'm for is fiscal sanity. We're in a financial crisis. If we can't, if President Trump's geoeconomics on tariff, 'cause he doesn't think of tariffs as a 25% tariff on a Mexican avocado, or some under the hood part from Canada, he looks at it as we have a premium market that's basically supported and made robust by working class people. You have to, if you wanna get through the golden door, you gotta pay a premium, like you get a skybox at a sporting event or a front row ticket to a concert, you either move your manufacturing here and create jobs, or you're gonna pay a price for it. He believes, I think, like Navarro, eventually, a third of our total revenue can come from external sources, not internal. But if we can't cut spending, get more duties, fees, and tariffs from outside sources, that gap at $2 trillion is not sustainable. And it's just gonna keep driving inflation. It's gotta be cut. If you wanna get under $1 trillion, and Doge doesn't come up with those types of cuts, which I think right now is still to be seen, there is ways for an abuse, but we can't get to those cuts. Eventually, you have to get additional revenues. Those revenues, to me, should come from financial transactions, carried interest, others, and obviously the wealthy that can have made up so well from the 2008 collapse. I mean, we've created more wealth for them. The Wall Street Journal today just has a report out that the entire economy, 70% of it is, or a third of the purchasing power, but 70% of the overall is driven by the top 3%. People making more than $350,000 a year, I think. That's not, we can't continue into that system. - No, that makes sense. - We have a capitalist system. - We gotta keep it. - Well, we have a capitalist system with no capitalist. Think about it. 70% of the people in this country don't own financial or real assets. You have to, they have to have a piece of the action. If you have everybody the piece of the action, and this is not socialism, they're not, these people never asked for anything. - No, this is fairness. - It's also practical. President Trump keeps saying it's a revolution of common sense. Common sense means let's get everybody to be a capitalist. Let's get everybody to be an owner of something. Financial assets, real assets. - Skin in the game. - Skin in the game. - Care about the community. - Care about the community. Once you incentivize people with actual ownership, you create a capitalist system. Right now we have a oligarchic system, right? That's a huge government, a handful of players in each industry, whether it's media, whether it's defense contracting, whether it's big pharma, health, the oligarchs in Silicon Valley that have elite merger or elite capture, right? Or regulatory capture. This has to be broken apart. And they're just not gonna sit there and say, "Oh, this is brilliant. "Why didn't we think of that? "We'll just toss you the keys." Every day is gonna be a fight. - It will be. - And we're asking people in your audience, as you become awakened to what reality is, understand they're always gonna try to throw, "Oh, it's Nazi salutes, or these guys are nativists, "or they're racist." We're anything but. We're saying that the greatest resource this country's ever had is its people, particularly working class and middle class people. It is what has created more value, more wealth, freed more people than any nation in the history of the earth. And what we have to do is make sure that they're incentivized and rewarded for that. And if we do that, this thing is gonna thrive like nobody's business. - Steve Bannon, thank you so much for coming on. You got Trump elected. Can you get me elected to the-- - I didn't get Trump. Trump got himself elected. - Well, yeah, but you were instrumental in it. - I had a small role. - Could you make me the mayor of the Pacific Palisades? - First off, first off, I'm still gonna work on your thing. You wanna opt in for the no tax cuts for the podcasters, right, that whole thing? - No, I'm very serious about that because we're the new media and we have to pay. I pay this lug, I pay producers, I pay people. I pay for their meals, Steve. - All these guys bitched and moaned when they got here. They weren't paid enough and you-- - They all bitch and moan. I'm telling you, the podcasters are the most suffering. I mean, yes, the working class and whatever, and Ukraine, blah, blah, blah. I can't hear about that anymore. The podcasters, we're spending the money. You know? All right, thank you, Steve Bannon. Thank you for coming. - Thank you, brother. - I appreciate it. - Appreciate it. - Of course, thank you. - Thank you for having me. - Thank you so much. - Thanks.