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Bannon`s War Room
Episode 4152: WarRoom Boxing Day Special
Episode 4152: WarRoom Boxing Day Special...
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- [00:03]
Raheem Kassam
This is the primal scream of a dying regime. Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. Reasons I got a free shot. All these networks lying about the people, the people have had a belly full of it. I know you don't like hearing that. I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. It's going to happen.
- [00:24]
Stephen K. Bannon
And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
- [00:28]
Will Upton
MAGA MEDIA I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
- [00:35]
Raheem Kassam
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
- [00:45]
Stephen K. Bannon
War ROOM here's your host, Stephen K. Ban. Well, welcome to the War Room on a very special Boxing Day special. For those of you who have followed the War Room and indeed the old Breitbart News daily radio show, know that it's somewhat of a tradition in the War Room that Stephen K. Bannon hands over the reins to me for Boxing Day. For the Boxing Day special every year where we kind of do a roundup of the year's events, we explain a little bit what Boxing Day is because I know that it is particularly a British tradition, but we're trying to kind of make it a thing again here in the United States. So welcome to the War Room on this Thursday, the 26th of December, the year of our Lord 2024. I will do somewhat of an introduction for myself for those of you, because I know this audience is growing every single day, every single week, every single month, and of course, every single year. But for those who don't know me or might have kind of seen me, but don't really know where I fit into this whole operation. My name is Raheem Kassam. I am, of course, British. You can probably hear from my accent. I used to work for Nigel Farage, the now reform leader in the United Kingdom. I've worked for and with Stephen K. Bannon for far longer than I wish, quite frankly, and far longer than he wishes, I imagine, quite frankly. I was the London editor of Breitbart.com for many years. I'm now the editor in chief of TheNationalPulse.com, which I want to talk to you guys a little bit about over the course of this show, as well, as well as all of the other fantastic new right leaning truthful media sites and operations that are out there at the moment. And you know, I guess my role now in this, in this broader movement has Been, I think the New York Times referred to me as the ombudsman of the MAGA movement for quite some time, or perhaps I think maybe I referred to myself as that and they quoted me. But that is kind of where we sit. That is what the national pulse does. We are very much the first to a lot of stories that you hear about kind of two days, two weeks, sometimes two years down the line. A couple of days ago on the show, Steve noted how I was in Ukraine in 2013 trying to wave the ring the alarm bells and tell people, hey, you know, we face an existential crisis, we face a hot war, there's a color revolution going on here and you can see that across the board with so many things. So I was one of the co founders of the War Room with Steve Bannon, with Jason Miller, back when it was originally an audio only show, before Real America's Voice came along and picked it up and did such a great job in distributing it and producing this televisual experience that you have. But yeah, Jason Miller, myself and Steve, we kind of went through all of the early impeachment detail. We had members of Congress who would stop by and we operated it exactly like an actual political war room. There were stacks of papers highlighted, which we were going through. We had a team of great researchers at the time and we'd be in that office, we'd be in that war room from about 7:00 in the morning through midnight most days throughout that impeachment process, going through deep diving all of the information, all of the data, cross referencing the links. When they did that to President Donald Trump, they had just so much in terms of apparatus, staffing, money at their disposal and the counter narrative operation between the lawyers and kind of what we were doing externally with the War Room was really a very, very tiny, tight knit group of people who just kind of came together and said, we believe this to be a complete and total lie. We're gonna go through these documents the same way that you guys are. All the witness testimonies. Those of you who followed along with impeachment, I mean, you will remember on a day to day basis just what an intensive labor process that was. We'd never been through anything like that before. It was a first for many of us, going through that level of detail, that level of data, all these foreign names, all of the Ukrainian names, all of that would come up. And honestly not to take anything away from what the show does today, but that was kind of my favorite iteration of the show because we were we were just so heavily invested in the actual witness testimony and things. That's where I live. That's where the national pulse is. That's what we do for a living. We actually get into the nitty gritty. We get into the detail of things. And it's my absolute favorite thing to do. You can say the same about polling data. We've been doing that for years upon years. You can find me writing about this stuff back 10, 15 years ago maybe about how the polling industry works, why you get certain levels of responses. You know, when this Ann Seltzer thing came up in Iowa, it was so obviously immediately obvious to anybody who understands how to go through numbers like that and to go through detail like that that it was a complete fraud. And it was another fraud, another hoax being perpetuated not just on the American public, by the way, remember how much the rest of the world has invested in who the President of the United States was. So it was another hoax perpetuated on. On the world, on the global community as they like to call it in Washington D.C. and at the Hague and in Brussels and in the city of London. The global community was being hoaxed yet again, as we were back in 2020, as we were during COVID And isn't it funny, you know, when war room impeachment not even had wrapped up, but we had this pandemic coming down the pipeline. And again, this show was at the cutting edge when that information was coming out of Wuhan. People are sick, people are falling down in the street. Nobody knows what this is. We put the two and two together on the first, on the very first episode of Warren Pandemic, we had Jack Posobec, we had a bunch of others later on, amazing whistleblowers, doctors, some of us, some of them who are no longer even with us today, I'm afraid, but just shows kind of how far this all goes back and how invested people were in the truth telling process, in all of that that you had concurrently, you had to have a war room impeachment and 2020 operation running parallel with a war room pandemic operation that kind of doubled the scope, doubled the research level of everything that was coming out of these offices. And of course, real America's voice was there with us all along the way, helping us with that to get the real information out. Hey, there's a lab that we might want to look into. Hey, that lab actually may have been funded by the US taxpayer. Hey, they've got this deal with Anthony Fauci and Peter Daschuk. And it was Natalie Winters who first made the connection between Dr. Fauci and Peter Daschak back in the early days of War Room Pandemic. And of course, everything you're seeing now today as a part of the investigations that are gonna be taking place as a part of what Kash Patel is gonna be doing inside the F all of that as a direct result, you can run the pattern right back down to that moment. All right, that's the tale of the tape, everything that came out of this forum. So I'm delighted to be here with you all today and bring you a show that is. You know, I wouldn't say that it is the most intensive of shows in terms of the day to day news of the operation today, but it is an intensive show when we think about where we go now over the next four years, how the next administration gets staffed up properly, accurately, with true believers, with people that are willing to put their shoulders to the wheel on getting the right things done. Because really, ladies and gentlemen, I know this audience especially probably doesn't need me to say it, but you know, you have four years, you really only have about 18 months. Well, you really only have about 12 to 16 months really, to hit the ground running to get what needs to be done in day one and week one. By the way, probably the most important parts of all of this. And we're here kind of acting as the ombudsman for all of that, you know, calling, I think you say, calling balls and strikes. Right. Making sure that the people who have let down President Trump over the last four years. Yeah, I think of it as kind of the dark years, the wilderness years, the Mar a Lago years, whatever you want to call it. But so many people, so many people. And you know, I say this not as a political talking point, but like we lost friendships, personal, long term friendships over that primary, over the GOP primary with all of these people who kind of toddled off into the DeSantis camp because there was a promise of a paycheck or a job or whatever it is. And don't get me wrong, Governor DeSantis has done a wonderful job governing in Florida. I don't need to tell this audience that, and I certainly don't need to tell the people who lived in Florida throughout the pandemic, especially that. Right. And the fight that he's taken to the school boards on the transgenderism, on the books that he's deviant books that they're trying to shove down your kids throats. But what he did was he Made a fundamental. I know I'm jumping around here a lot, but that's kind of what I do. It's kind of what my mind does. So you got to stick with me for the changes here. To quote back to the future, Desantis came along, and he kind of acted like. And his team around him acted like, okay, we need to find some way to marry the old GOP Bushy era Chaney, what's his name, Karl Rove, with his little whiteboard and all that. We need to marry them with the MAGA base. And kind of what they ended up doing was trying to force it down the MAGA bases throats, that this was the only way that they were gonna win another election. And they were telling us day in and day out, you're never gonna win an election with Trump. You're never gonna get the Electoral College victory, let alone a popular vote victory, right? And I kind of looked at it at the time, and I was like, listen, you guys are entitled to your views. You're nuts, but you're entitled to your views. I mean, there wasn't a single person in that camp, by the way, who I think of as a savvy political operator. And I tell them that to their faces, and I've told them that to their faces. You know, some of our old friends jumped ship and went over there. So it's been. It's been a heck of a year. It's been a heck of a last 18 months. I know that so many of you out there know that as well. I meet so many of you out there when I'm on the road, you know, I'm not just. I'm not just holed up on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. all the time, although I'm there far more than I wish I was, quite frankly. But I've been there through the dark years, through the wilderness years. There were only a handful of us, of these people that you see on television and in podcasts and on social media who actually showed up at Mar A Lago when President Trump announced he was running again. Lot of people hedged their bets. A lot of people didn't show up that day. And by the way, we kind of got mocked for it. Olivia Nussey, RIP to her career, you know, Olivia Newsy, who wanted to get jiggy with rfk, you know, over text message, she wrote this nasty piece saying, like, hey, you got Raheem Kassam, Seb Gorka, and Brick Suit man as the most recognizable faces at Mar a Lago during the announcement. So Perhaps it's not going all that well for President Trump. I called her up and I said, hey, F you, I'm sorry to speak in such unglamorous terms on Boxing Day, but I told her, you know, you are making fun of me for being one of the people who actually sees where this thing is going. Mark my words. Watch where it goes. Now, who knows where she is right now after she got unceremoniously defenestrated by her bosses over there at New Yorker. But listen, some people get it and some people don't, right? Some people understand the trajectory of history and some people don't. And what you saw back then, what you saw during that primary campaign was, again, one of these things that we see all the time. And we cannot allow it to happen in January. We cannot allow these people, these Never Trumpers, these people who are ready to jump ship to go over into the White House or into the State Department or be on these landing teams. I'm sorry. You made your bed, now lie in it. You made your choice. You can figure that out for yourselves. So over the course of this show, we're going to reflect on this last year. I very much appreciate the beautiful music. I'm afraid my words may not be so beautiful over the course of the next two hours, but, hey, we're not taking a break this Christmas. We're spending this time to get all our ducks in a row, to get all our plans in place and to make sure that, like there was in 2016, you know, we went in there and you had all the staff go in there, and you had three factions go in there, right? You had the Family faction, you had the RNC faction, and then you had the MAGA faction, right, The Bannon faction. And everybody's just kind of at each other's throats. And some people didn't get what they want, and some people got rolled and whatever. We're here to make sure that that doesn't happen again. Everybody has to be on the same page. And that page, that Donald J. Trump won a mandate from, the American, historic mandate from the American people, and he must be allowed to execute on that mandate without anybody standing in his way, without anybody leaking to the press, without anybody, any of these anonymous people or Deep State holdovers, it cannot be allowed to happen. So we're going to have Will Upton on the show with us, my political editor, Jack Montgomery, as well, my deputy editor, Chris Tomlinson at the National Pulse. Also, we're going to walk you through all of these things. Stick around. Stay tuned. Follow the national Pulse at the NatPulse on X. We'll be right back.
- [15:00]
Raheem Kassam
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- [16:12]
Will Upton
War Room.
- [16:13]
Stephen K. Bannon
Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. Well, we've given Stephen K. Bannon the day off. Here it is Boxing Day, the 26th of December, the year of our Lord 2024. And we'll be getting into that and a lot of the twelve days of Christmas, which we tend to do every year at the National Pulse to remind people of the importance and what it means, what the yuletide period actually means and why each separate day kind of has something spiritual associated, religious, very Christian iconography associated with it and how we need to think about those days, how we need to think about those moments. Jack Montgomery will be on with us later on to unpack all of that and he does just a magnificent job at it. I want to say, while I have your attention, your undivided attention, there's nobody right now to come in over the top of me and say, hang on, hang on, hang on. I want to say, well, I have your undivided attention. You know, the last couple of weeks I've been on the road and that has been more and more of my life. I always tell myself that I'm going to take a little step back, take it a little bit easier, you know, maybe just kind of take a, take a secondary role, maybe write another book. There's so much to be written about the last 10 or 12 years as well. I've been in so many of the rooms that you wouldn't even believe, by the way, hearing some of the conversations, meeting some of the characters. And so I want to do all that for history's sake, really, to get that down on paper and on the record. And then I get dragged into something else. And, you know, whether it was the New York Young Republican Gala, I mean, by the way, for those of you that don't know, gala season, as they call it in the political world, in the nonprofit world, is so much fun, but absolutely mind boggling as well. You kind of just, every night you're doing the same thing and you're seeing a lot of the same faces and you kind of, you know, going through the motions, doing all the networking. What are you hearing? What do you know, what's the latest? It's great. It's obviously a great opportunity for people to come together. There's nothing better, by the way, than FaceTime, than actual face to face human interaction. And we, too often we are talking down the line to each other like this, right? Too often we are, we are FaceTiming on our phones rather than in person or zooming or Skyping or telephone calls or text messages or DMS or whatever it is, right? And you can, you can't really, I don't think you can ever escape, you know, just how important it is to shake hands with somebody, to look them in the eye, to pat them on the shoulder, you know, to be present in a moment with somebody. And so these things are great for all of that, but man, are they exhausting. And they happen all around the country. So I started in D.C. we did a couple of things over there, went up to New York, we did the gala there. Thousand plus people at Cipriani in Manhattan, the finest venue in New York City. Planting the MAGA flag right there in lower Manhattan. And a huge shout out to Gavin Wax and Vish Bora and the whole team over there at that New York club they started with, they had 40 members. When they took over the club like four years ago, they just passed 1600 paid up members who are, who are, they're not just there to party, although they are very good at that. I can testify to that firsthand. And it takes a lot for Raheem Kassam to give people their partying dues. Believe me, I have a high bar, high tolerance. But they're there, they're door knocking, they're canvassing, they're doing the phone calls. They were instrumental in just how much the ground shifted for Donald Trump. I mean, that Madison Square Garden rally, that was just absolutely Historic for multiple reasons, but was absolutely historic. Would never have happened were it not for Gavin and the team. The Bronx rally, same thing. The trip to the bodegas, the endorsements from the steamfitters union, you know, all of these things that were part of a wider peace. That piece being victory, right? That piece being a victory so gigantic, so massive, so overwhelming, that the Democratic machine downed tools the day after the election. They said, we don't know what to do with this. We don't know how to handle this. Now, I'm not saying they're gone away, absolutely not. And I think we cannot be for a second complacent about where they stand as an operation right now, because they're going to get more radical, they're going to get more extreme, they're going to become more vengeful as wounded animal being cornered. And they will lash out and lash out. And I think we're going to see it on January 6th in Washington, D.C. and I want everybody coming into town to be extremely careful and have their wits about them, because I think there are going to be some fringe elements who are in the midst of taking over, by the way, in the midst of taking over the left wing in a massive way. And you saw Chenk Uyghur go over to Amfest and kiss the ring, right? And if you didn't see it, you should see it, because they understand. They get. Now, all of these people who for the last decade have told me, looked at me square in the eye and said, I don't know how you can do this populism stuff and holding their nose while they say it. It's dirty, it's filthy, it's disgusting. Why do you want to be around ordinary people? And I always look back at them and say the same thing, is that the ordinary people built this country. The ordinary people built Western civilization. And there's absolutely nothing ordinary about them. They are, in fact, the extraordinary people. It's the people who are the leeches on that effort and whether it is the security effort for the people who serve their country, served in the military, anything like that, or whether it's the people who have physically. Who physically get their hands. One of the things that I learned, and I'll bring Will Upton into this conversation in a second, one of the things that I learned, having spent many years with Steve Bannon over the years, up close and personal, understanding his mental framework, how it all works, because I think we all agree, ladies and gentlemen, he's kind of nuts, right? In the best way you can see the cogs moving, you don't know quite where they're going to go and you kind of just have to try your best to follow along. Is the old Breitbart news radio show. That was one of the things that really clued me up onto how you actually get to understand what's going on out there in the country. I mean, you know, I can go to New York and I can go to LA and I can go to Phoenix, but you know, the big cities will scarcely tell you anything real. They might give you a vague sense, especially out in some of the suburbs, what's going on in people's day to day lives. You know, affordability, things like that. And actually you got to get far deeper into it. I know I don't have to tell you this, but it was that radio show and the reason it was that radio show was because it was a call in show. And so I think we were, what were we up at 6 to 9am so you had to be in the studio at 5am, which for those of you who know me, you know, it was difficult because sometimes I would come straight from the pub to the studio and it's 6:00 in the morning and the entire core boards are lit up, everybody wants to, hey. And I remember them by name, you know, Lou in Connecticut, Vinnie in New York. You know, Vinny's no longer with us, I'm afraid. You know, we stayed friends. You know, he was, he was a fantastic guy and his family and his, and his kid. Absolutely fantastic people serving their country. And you would hear from them every single day, what's going on in the country. All these people would call in and they were truck drivers and they were homeschooling moms and they were the farm owners. And you get to grips with a level of information, a level of detail about the lived experiences of the so called ordinary Americans. What I think of as the extraordinary Americans, right, People who actually roll their sleeves up and get their hands dirty and leave a legacy for their kids and for their grandkids, the generational struggle that they face. Will Upton, let me bring you in here. We've got a couple of minutes here in this blog, but I want to carry over to the next one too. I've developed bannonitis, which is, which is the involuntary ability to rant down a camera lens. I call it bannonitis. So you have to forgive me, but we got another block on the back of this as well. Well, we've had an extraordinary 18 months and you and I have known each other actually, for far longer than we've worked. I was so delighted when you came to me one day and you were like, hey, you know, I'm a free agent if you got anything going at the national polls. Because I was like, nobody knows that town. Nobody knows maga, you know, at an institutional level, better than Will Upton. I think you show it every day on the site. Let's get into the last year and if you have any thoughts on the things I just said, please feel free to weigh in. But let's, you know, let's talk about the last 18 months to bring people from, you know, because it went so quickly, right? It went so fast. But in a lot of ways, it was probably some of the most painful stuff that we'll ever go through in our political lives. Will.
- [25:57]
Will Upton
Yeah. That primary was woof and happy Boxing Day. No, I think you bring up a really good point. You're talking about the call in show. This is something that I noticed during the primary and it carried over to the general election. That started the DeSantis campaign. They completely missed sort of the primary electorate. Focus sort of on your traditional, predominantly evangelical, predominantly upper middle class, sort of high income, moderate education level to high education level evangelical voter. But since 2016, Trump has sort of brought in a whole new demographic to the Republican Party, typically working class. Large portion of them are Hispanic, smaller portion are black men, large portion are white males without a college education. And Trump is the only one who has ever really sort of offered these people anything on the policy front, whether it's immigration, whether it's trade, reassuring jobs. This has been sort of the message that has propelled the MAGA movement, the America first movement, the sort of anti foreign interventionism movement has propelled all of this forward. And, and the early days of the primary, I kind of sat there and looked at the DeSantis campaign and they had their big Twitter rollout and they were kind of messaging on sort of the, you know, Florida were woke, goes to die, things like that. And none of this really, I thought, resonated with what is now a large portion of the GOP electorate. These people are actually registered Republicans now, especially after 2020.
- [27:43]
Stephen K. Bannon
Hold that thought right there. Hold that thought right there because we've got to go to a quick break, but hold it right there. You're absolutely right. It was a failure to recognize the moment. It was a failure to recognize the changing nature of the GOP base and what Donald Trump had actually brought to the equation here. Without that, no electoral college vote, no popular vote, we'll Be right back with Will Upton here on the War Room Boxing Day special. Don't go anywhere.
- [28:09]
Will Upton
May God bless War Room.
- [28:12]
Stephen K. Bannon
Here's your host, Stephen K. Ban. Welcome back to this Boxing Day special. You're in the War Room. I'm Raheem Kassam, one of the original co founders of this show, obviously under Stephen K. Bannon alongside Jason Miller. And we have all had kind of, I would say, kind of a busy year, quite frankly. Although one of us did go on vacation in Danbury for, for a couple of months over the summer. Came out with a, you know, wonderful tan, looking all svelte, you know, it's great. Yeah. I don't know, but Steve's got the day off today, so I'm in the driver's chair here leading you through this Boxing Day special. I'm delighted to be with you, ladies and gentlemen. It's one of my, probably, actually, I mean, say one of my. It is my favorite audience in the whole world because I meet so many of you every single time I'm out there at these events. Obviously, we did Amp Fest, Amfest, sorry, last week with Charlie Kirk and the extremely, I mean, just mind blowing, Turning Point operation that was there. I think their staff, the volunteers that run that event, a lot of them just kids, right? College kids volunteering their time, their spare time to make sure that event runs effectively. I think they now number in the thousands, actually, or at least 1,000 people that they have there on the ground in Phoenix at that convention center. And it's just an incredible sight to behold because, look, I've run things all my life. Will Upton. We bring Will back into this in a moment and Will will tell you that I am a particularly hard taskmaster at times. I don't sort of deal very well with what I perceive to be lethargy or laziness or things like that. Not to take any shots at Will directly, by the way, but it's just a blanket attitude that I have towards everything that I've ever run in my life. And for Charlie to be running an operation like that and to have as many people working under him as he does, I mean, you've got to understand agenda. But I know lots of you run your own companies out there and know how hard it is you're getting into the numbers that he's dealing with. 20,000 attendees, thousand plus people helping run the event. You got to deal with Social, Social Security, Secret Service, you got to deal with the local police departments, you got to deal with all of these things. And it's just, it's extraordinary. So you make sure that you support those people, that you go to those events. I love it because I get to meet so many of you, and I have almost broken wrist by the end of it from shaking so many hands and taking so many selfies. But it keeps us going because we don't get that level of support. You know, when I walk down the street in Washington, D.C. you certainly don't get that level of behavior. People coming up to you in restaurants, in bars. Yeah. I can't even begin to tell you how much it means to me when somebody says to you, oh, I read your work, I share it. You know, we're members of the National Pulse. That is, by the way, that is the music to my ears because we are 100% reader supported. I don't want to have to put a paywall on it. Although, you know, if people don't join up voluntarily, we're gonna have to get there. We have to underwrite this organization. We have to keep it going. We have to keep the real news out there and grow the organization. By the way, and the website, for those of you who want to join is simple. It's thenationalpulse.com war room. Okay. Thenationalpulse.com war Room. It's two bucks a week, ladies and gentlemen. Less, quite frankly. I think it's $1.73 a week. So I'm not asking you. By the way, we have a donate section. If you want to donate money. It's bigger than nationalpulse.com donate. And if you want to, you know, throw more cash, that's great. We love all those people. I'm extremely grateful for it. But our sustaining base of people, our thousands upon thousands of members are what keeps us going day in and day out. And I'm gonna keep talking about it over the course of this episode because I will be frank with you. We go into a year now where a lot of people take their foot off the accelerator. They go, oh, well, we won the election. So, you know, we can just kind of let Trump and the team now make America great again. Right? It doesn't really work like that. You know, you have to have your allies across different sectors running interference. You know, we have to have the Will Uptons doing the requisite fact checks on the false narratives that are being perpetuated out there. We have to have in depth reporting, real news reporting. You said it saw it this week, this last couple of days when they released the or leaked, I should say The Congressional Ethics Committee, Ethics being. The word leaked in a deeply unethical manner. They're reporting to Matt Gaetz to sully him up, to besmirch his name, to try and tell the world he should never come back to Washington, D.C. he's not allowed in these hallowed halls. Forget the fact that we've been paying off sexual harassment accusers for the last several decades at least, and using taxpayer money to do it, by the way, your money, ladies and gentlemen, to do it. No, Matt Gaetz is the problem because he went to a couple of parties and maybe he had a sugar daddy relationship with a girl one day, by the way, a girl who is overage. You know, these lies that they tell about this underage girl. And Matt's approach to this, always the same, bring it into a courtroom. Then if you have the evidence that this ever happened, show it to a court of law and let me defend myself against these allegations in a courtroom. And guess what? They never do that very thing. I wanna bring Will Upton back into the conversation here. Will, that's obviously been one of the main themes of the last couple of days. I interrupted you over the course of the break. We were talking about the prim. Let's marry those two up. How do we get here? Let's talk about Kevin McCarthy, let's talk about Mike Johnson, let's talk about this budget crisis that we got going on here. Because it's crazy to me the way that the GOP establishment appears to have learned absolutely nothing.
- [34:30]
Will Upton
Yeah, Kevin McCarthy was ousted for basically trying to marry a debt limit deal to a CR with government funding. This is something that he had promised he would not do when he was first elected. Speaker was part of the conditions of him becoming Speaker. And Matt Gaetz rightfully held his feet to the fire on it. And for the first time ever in United States history, a motion to vacate the Speaker's chair actually passed through the House. The last time it was used was in the 1910s against Speaker Cannon, who actually used it against himself in like, a power move to basically, like, lay it on the table and be like, I'm the big guy in the room. But yeah. And then you fast forward. Today we find ourselves again in the same situation now. You know, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, they kind of put us in this budget scenario where we have to do this continuing resolution every December, right before Christmas. It used to happen, you know, at various points throughout the year when funding would kind of run out, but now it just. It's set for December. And the whole goal is to jam members right before Christmas and sort of ram through a big expensive se and call it a day. Now, thankfully this time we had a lot of pushback from activists and just rank and file people at home and rank and file members of Congress that prevented a 1500 page continuing resolution. A continuing resolution should only be like anywhere between four to nine pages, really. It's just changing a date and saying we're extending government funding for three months. But thankfully there was kind of a groundswell of pushback against it. And we ended up with about 116 page continuing resolution. It's only that long really, because it had a bunch of disaster aid for the victims of the hurricanes in Florida, North Carolina, then wildfires out west. But like, if it had not been for that, you know, Mike Johnson probably would have ran through this 1500 page bill in the dark of night. And very few members of Congress, if any, other than the men behind closed doors who wrote it, would have ever read the damn thing.
- [36:44]
Stephen K. Bannon
Yeah, I think that's right. Well, you know, the spotlight being on these people seems to change their at least public statements and public behavior just a smidgen. Right. Just enough to kind of all they're really interested in is taking a little bit heat off them. But I keep telling people, you know, you can play whack a mole with this House speaker as much as you want, but unless you get to the crux of the issue, right, the structural problems up on Capitol Hill, then you're gonna be playing whack a mole for the rest of your life. So let's talk about that a little bit here because look, it comes down to this big major corporation can buy a member of the House or a member of the Senate. And I keep telling people, hey, listen, they didn't write their own pay rise into that 1500 page legislation. The lawyers, the lobbyists, the appropriators who wanted that bill passed wrote in a bribe in the form of a pay rise into that, into that bill. That's what it was. So talk to me a little bit and talk to the audience who doesn't really understand how that bill. Because look, Mike Johnson ain't sitting there writing a 1500 page bill. Okay, who's writing that and how do we make them famous?
- [37:50]
Will Upton
Yeah, so the people who write these bills, it's the Appropriations Committee, it's key members of the Senate and the House, usually committee chairs. A good way to identify some of them is to see like who kind of got bills that they had that they had sponsored that really hadn't moved. If they suddenly appear as a new title in this bill, that's a good bet that person had a hand in it. There's a certain senator from Texas who I know a lot of people, like Ted Cruz, he had the Take It down act, which is an anti deepfake bill. It had sort of languished in the Senate for the better part of years. All of a sudden, I believe it was title nine in the 1500 page. Cross whole bills in there. But mostly it's written behind closed doors. So you don't know exactly who is in that room. But it's going to be sort of leadership aides and then your appropriators and powerful committee chairs. And this is the way Congress really runs. Like we sit there and people want to criticize Mike Johnson and sort of point the finger at him. And at the end of the day he is the speaker and the buck does stop with him. But in the House, the day to day, the stuff that we really don't like, often the real perpetrators are these committee chairs or the Appropriations Committee and are their staff and their sort of lobbyist buddies. They're sort of paymasters at the end of the day. That's who's really behind a lot of this stuff. And I think that as we sort of move forward into this next Congress, it would kind of behoove people, I think, to sort of look into who's running Appropriations now. The former Kate Granger, of course, just showed up in an assisted living facility and hasn't taken a vote since July. Thankfully she stepped down from the committee last spring. But you know, and looking at, you know, Tom Cole runs the committee now, Congressman from Oklahoma. But you know who some of these committee chairs are and really pay attention to what legislation they're moving and what they're doing on their day to day. Because that's where the real power lies in the House especially.
- [39:56]
Stephen K. Bannon
See Will. I mean, maybe I'm crazy. I'm one of these guys who thinks if you're going to do all of this stuff now, right, Doge and, and really turn everything on its head, let's talk about Manifest Destiny, right? We're talking about Canada, we're talking about Greenland, we're talking about the Panama Canal. If you're gonna do all of these, and even, even if you're gonna talk about them, right. If you're gonna start introducing that kind of revolutionary thinking back into the American national psyche, then you gotta apply that same level of radical thinking to Capitol Hill too. I want to see an open source bill making process right on the blockchain where people can see every single person. Who is it on the committee staff who's added this line and why and what are their interests? Who is it on the appropriation staff that added this line? And you know what is, what is it about them? What are their names? Who are these people? You work for the government. You're a public servant. You're using tax taxpayer money and by the way, you want a hell of a lot more of it to spend on your pet projects, then I think we need to know who you are. And that is my pledge over the course of next year. Because if we're not going to get the money directly out of this right now, day one, then at least we need to know who is on the receiving end of that lobbyist and lawyer. Cash will hang over, hang over on the break. I want to bring you back for the last segment in this hour. We've got Jack Montgomery in the next segment talking to us about the 12 days of Christmas. Going to bring in Chris Tomlinson, another one of our great writers over at the National Pulse, to talk about what's going on in Europe at the moment because it is blowing up over there right now. Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, we're going to go through all of it. I hope you all had a very happy Christmas. But we are back with our shoulders to the wheel here at the War Room. I'm grateful for you joining us. Make sure you're following us on social media. All the War Room pages across all of it. The National Pulse on X. I'm raheemkassam R A H E E M K A S S A M across all the different platforms. Coming in hot on the gram, as Boris would say. Stick around. We'll be right back after this break. War Room here's your host, Stephen K. Band. Welcome back to this special Boxing Day edition of the War Room. I'm Raheem Kassam, joined by our political editor at the National Pulse, Will Upton. Will, we've got a brief segment here. I know I've talked. I told you I got bannonitis. It's just basically where you cannot disconnect from the microphone here in front of you. And this suddenly becomes your best friend for two hours and I want to throw it to you now. Where are we summarize over the last 18 months. Anything you want to reflect on from the last 18 months. But where are we going? And let's maybe talk a little bit about the transition process. And how I wish they hadn't driven that wedge between Project 2025, that employee database. Remember, Project 2025 was not the document that everybody held up and said, oh, this is crazy town, blah, blah, blah. And that Trump had to end up distancing himself from the original 2025 project was just a database of Pure Maga staffers who had worked in the first admin, who were true loyalists. You know, these people who put their shoulder to the wheel every single day. 2016-2017-2018-2019, who didn't abandon Donald Trump after January 6th. There are so many people out there who did. And that was what that thing was originally for. And then it all got muddied up. You know, you could talk about heritage and all of this stuff, but let's talk about that because as I understand it to this day, you know, the staffing process coming along a little slowly and there are some, and there are some people that we need to be looking out for.
- [43:55]
Will Upton
Yeah, yeah. So they're just now getting landing teams up at a lot of these agencies. These are usually kind of experienced staffers who are around either in the first administration or prior presidential administrations who are sort of in charge of getting in there, sort of seeing where things stand and then beginning to bring in sort of that permanent political staff that Trump will appoint. You know, with Project 2025, you're absolutely right. Like that Heritage every year puts out a mandate for leadership and it's basically a big policy book. It's not Project 2025, but it's, you know, the database was 2025, where it still seems like they're going to try to draw a lot of names from, for people who appoint to a lot of these positions in the federal government. But a lot of this sort of infighting there, I think has slowed. That process is absolutely correct. But you know, the transition is underway. It is moving slowly. Although I would credit them on their economic team that they put together is absolutely fantastic. You know, Scott Besant over at treasury is the next Treasury Secretary. Very incredible economic mind. His number two, Michael Falkender I worked with at the Treasury Department, he'll be the Dep Sec. Michael is one of the most brilliant human beings I've ever seen kind of in action. Steven Mirren was just named the Council of Economic Advisors. He'll be chairing that. Stephen was kind of our in house economist at Treasury. He's really the only reason why I know anything about economics. Whenever I just questions, I just ask Stephen. And I still do still consult him quite a bit. You've kind of got this team slowly getting into place here. That is really the guys that were around the last time that were able to sort of put together that robust and sort of booming Trump economy. So on that front, I think that we've got kind of the ducks in order and things are running pretty smoothly elsewhere. We've seen some problems. The State Department is always a concern and it's a place where you really, I think, truly need people who are battle hardened and battle ready because your careers over there, your career federal employees, your career bureaucrats, your career diplomats, it is a viper's den. These guys, some of them are almost more loyal to the kind of the countries or regions which they work with than they are to the United States. And they are predominantly far left leaning and they hate the president elect. So I think there's a concern there that we're maybe going too soft and to go along to get along at the State Department, which again, I want to flag as a big concern. And then of course, we're going to see, you know, both within sort of the GOP establishment and among the Democrats, the big guns come out for people like Tulsi Gabbard and for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And we've already seen it with Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense. But, you know, the delay in getting the landing teams down I think is concerning. But it does seem like, at least on the economic front, but they've got things well underway.
- [47:11]
Stephen K. Bannon
Yeah, I think that's right. Well, I think I tend to agree with you on that. The State stuff really worries me. Some of the domestic stuff worries me as well. Seeing, seeing certain people going into certain landing teams. Now listen, some, some of the people have gone in and then, you know, maybe, maybe somebody like Rahim Kassam has dropped a tweet or two and suddenly they're not in anymore. And that's okay, you know, if we need to be the clearinghouse, if we need to be the ombudsman, I'm happy to be unpopular with the people I love being unpopular amongst. You know, I'm not interested in being a good buddy to those people who have worked in Rhino Hill offices for all their lives or Ronna McDaniel's RNC, quite frankly. And you'll never, you'll never change my mind about those things. I don't want to hang out with you. I don't want to come to your little receptions where you drink, you know, bladdered wine. You know, cross me off the list. Delete my email address, delete my phone number. I'm not that interested in it. Right. What I will say is this. I don't think you can be too hard on that situation. I think, you know, the tendency of President Trump to be a uniter is. It's a good character trait. It says lots of good things about him as a human being. But in going back into Washington, D.C. i don't think you can be too hard and too vindictive, quite frankly, against the people who abandoned you, the people who talked BS about you for so many years. That applies across the board. Whoever you're hiring in politics, in media, like, we should be building up new media organizations, not inviting the CNNs back in, not inviting the ABCs back in. You know, there's a lot to talk about with that as well, how the press operation works, all of that. Will, we got about a minute to go here. Tell people where they can find you, how they can follow your work, and what a great boss I am.
- [48:58]
Will Upton
Yeah, yeah, you can follow me on X. Formerly Twitter. It's just Uupton W u p T O N. You can read all my writing at the national pulse. That's thenationalpulse.com and Raheem's a great boss. I mean, we see eye to eye a lot, so it makes things easy.
- [49:14]
Stephen K. Bannon
But that's absolutely true. You know, the real secret of it is that I actually just listened to the things that Will said and kind of, and kind of connect the dots. So he's the real mastermind behind the operation, as with Jack, as with Chris, as with my whole team, by the way, Sandy and all the guys who have such an amazing, amazing contribution to how the National Pulse operates. Will, happy Boxing Day. I hope you had a very happy Christmas. And we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll talk after the show. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Stick around. We got a killer second hour here in the break. However, you can just go to thenationalpulse.com war room. Sign up. If you're already a member. By the way, go to thenationalpulse.com gift and give somebody else the gift of real news. We'll be right back after this break.
- [50:10]
Will Upton
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- [50:47]
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