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WarRoom Battleground EP 764: Marxism And CCP Infiltration At Stanford
WarRoom Battleground EP 764: Marxism And CCP Infiltration At Stanford ...
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- [00:03]
Stephen K. Bannon
This is the primal scream of a dying regime. Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. 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]
Natalie Winters
And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
- [00:28]
Luke Rosiak
MAGA MEDIA I wish in my soul.
- [00:31]
Natalie Winters
I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
- [00:35]
Stephen K. Bannon
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]
Luke Rosiak
War Room here's your host, Stephen K. Banner.
- [00:53]
Brian Blaze
Welcome to the War Room. It's the Thursday, May 8th in the year of our Lord 2025. It may be the fourth hour of war Room programming, but we have an extremely packed show. I guess, no, no rest for the wicked, no rest for our enemies. I guess foreign and domestic, we're gonna be covering all of that. The enemy within. Well, I guess you're not allowed to say that, but I guess in Trump's America you can. Cuz it's true. Just like you can say waste, fraud and abuse. I always say emphasis on abuse is a real thing of your taxpayer dollars and frankly, your citizenship status. Call me crazy for thinking the idea that the social contract that we have here in this country or government shouldn't work to, I don't know, replace you, suppress your wages and, I don't know, leave us less safe at home and abroad with an open border. But luckily we have President Trump back in office and through that, a wonderful conduit to expose so much of that aforementioned waste, fraud and abuse obviously has been doge though we're still waiting on some of those receipts. But I was gonna say, I don't know if I'll hold my breath. I'll digress on that point, but I guess the media has been picking up the slack there. Luke Rosiak over at the Daily Wire has been doing some wonderful investigations on a ton of verticals, but particularly on the African Development foundation, which I think as your piece is uncovered, is just rife with fraud and corruption. I guess no shock there. Headline being African aid agency used foreign pass throughs to hide money that went to D.C. staff friends. Luke, if you want to walk us through the piece, get our audience outraged at what their taxpayer dollars have been funding. I'm not sure they'd love to hear it, but they need to hear it.
- [02:34]
Luke Rosiak
Thanks Natalie, thanks for having me. This is basically a USAID like agency, and I never even heard of it until I saw these pieces in the left wing media that positioned it as brave resistance heroes for standing up to Doge. The Guardian called it the little agency that could, because what happened is when Doge went in to audit its books, its staff locked the doors and physically would not let them see the finances of this foreign aid agency. And that went on for a few weeks. And ultimately the US Marshals had to come and forcibly take control of this building, this government agency. Finally, the President of the United States got to control the. It required basically almost military force to seize control of this building. And so people are positioning its resistance as principled. And they had all these reasons why they didn't think Trump should be in control. And I wondered what the real deal was. And it didn't take me long to figure out the place is basically a crime scene. That's why they didn't want Doge coming in. And so I talked to employees there who almost uniformly kind of acknowledged this place was so corrupt. And what they were doing was they were sending money to Africa like they were required by law to do, but then they were forcing the Africans to send the money back to them. Under the table, I literally have a receipt of a $17,000 wire going to, like a low level assistant in D.C. they had other people who are being paid by grantees like Africa24, which is a news outlet in Africa that were then paying D.C. bureaucrats. So it really does seem like essentially a money laundering scheme that's designed to trick Congress into thinking this is a low overhead charity that's just sending all its money to Africa without realizing a lot of that money is coming back.
- [04:30]
Brian Blaze
Right here to D.C. it's quite interesting because you hear from MSNBC, right, the idea that, no, no, we support getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse too. We just think maybe Doge isn't the proper blunt force instrument to actually be, you know, the battering ram to go after a of this. But then, of course, they never actually cover stories like this. Can you sort of give our audience maybe some of the contours, flesh them out of who exactly these people are who are working in these agencies? You know, I would take it, they're sort of career appointees. They're not political appointees. But are they entrenched Democrats? Is this just sort of the, you know, faceless bureaucracy? Who exactly are these people?
- [05:08]
Luke Rosiak
They're complete Democrats that then get these supposedly nonpartisan roles? I mean, one of the guys, Travis Adkins was in charge of this agency, and he was a Joe Biden appointee to USAID in 2021. And then in 2022, he becomes a nonpartisan president of this agency. And so even during the Trump administration, he was set to continue to be the president until Trump came in and cleaned house. You also have a guy named C.D. glenn, who was the president for years prior to that. And he was a DEI officer at usaid, and then he became head of this. This group, the African Development Foundation. And then you also have basically some bureaucrats who are pretty heavily implicated in serious misconduct, potentially criminal at this agency, who just have really no background at all. In fact, the chief financial officer had declared bankruptcy and had his house foreclosed on. And then they make him the chief financial officer of a government agency, so he can't even manage his own finances, but we're putting him in charge of millions of dollars. And so there are all these cases where it really seemed so sketchy. And in one case, I found this Chief Financial Officer, Matthew Zahu. He was steering money in contracts and grants to a friend of his that was supposedly this African, but really it was a guy he worked with at the Department of Veterans affairs who was himself a contracting officer. So this guy is in charge of giving out contracts, and then he creates his own company, and it receives the contract from his friend. And they pretend it's an African company, or they say it's an African company, but at the same time, this is a guy who's living in the D.C. suburbs, who's working for the federal government, and who's receiving, actually, Covid funds intended to save US Jobs at the same time that they're claiming it's an African American company receiving charity funds from this USAID outfit. And so there were all these people telling US Aid to, like, this is just one of any number of things that, like, seemed like a. Basically a criminal enterprise at this US at this foreign aid agency. And it turns out USAID actually, USAID inspector general looked, sees this guy's the CFO's phone, looked at his bank records, and found, sure enough, he was receiving payments secret under the table payments like kickbacks from his friend when he steered government funding to him. And so that kind of explains why this African Development foundation was giving contracts for travel during COVID when nobody was traveling. And so you have basically, you know, about $45 million a year of money going out the door, supposedly to Africa. But it's just a complete financial house of cards. And everybody on the inside will tell you that. And nobody on the left really talked to these employees and most of them to kind of circle back to your point. I mean, most of them, yeah, of course they're like Democrat voters who work at these, these foreign aid agencies. But they were some of the first to tell me, like this is a bad idea for the left to make this little agency like the face of the resistance against Doge. Because they know that they're locking the doors actually because they're hiding criminal or, you know, that kind of terrible conduct. It's not because of some principles. And so they're actually worried because they are Democrats. The Democrats are stepping on a rake by you know, holding up this agency as like this little noble Goliath.
- [08:49]
Stephen K. Bannon
Noble.
- [08:50]
Luke Rosiak
Noble David. Like slaying the Goliath of Elon Musk. But it really is funny because I don't know that Doge even knew about all this stuff that's coming out in this four part series that's running all this week in the Daily Wire. They just kind of had this. Which almost makes it worse, right? Because it's almost like you could just throw a rock anywhere in D.C. and hit A. Hit a federal agency and find this kind of terrible misconduct. Either that or they just have a really good instinct for it, for, for kind of sensing where something's not right. But this is what Elon Musk has said time and again, is when people resist that basic accountability, like let me see your books, it's usually because they're doing something wrong. And that's actually exactly what we found here.
- [09:33]
Brian Blaze
Well, yeah, and I think it makes the apoplexy over, what was it, 17 fired. IG is purely performative. These people were not good at their jobs, they were not good at conducting oversight. They're probably in on the grift. But I'm curious too, cuz another I think big refrain strap line that you hear is by shuttering agencies. I'm sure this one would be an absolutely perfect example. You know, you're crippling American soft power abroad, I always say. Well, if American soft power was so great, particularly in Africa, then tell me why, what upwards of 90% of the country countries there signed on to China's Belt and Road and essentially every port or infrastructure project there has been seized, either I guess now or in the future by Beijing. But this sort of infrastructure is a microcosm for how the United States has advanced this term of soft power abroad. Do you think that this is sort of again, just another death knell for that Idea that agencies like these provide any demonstrable benefit to our standing in the world.
- [10:31]
Luke Rosiak
Yeah, I mean, a lot of good points there. Your first one, USAID IG knew about this for years. They found the secret payments to the CFO in January of 2024. And they. They filed a criminal, Like a search warrant application, laying it all out last year. He's still not arrested. There was a lot of stuff that the USAID IG knew about this agency, and they didn't do anything. And so there's this idea that the democrats are now saying as you. As you alluded to, like, oh, we acknowledge we need certain reforms. We should just go slow. They did not, in fact, go slow when they were in charge. They did not go at all. They didn't do anything. And so now the idea that we should listen to them. I mean, they had basically years to reform this agency and nobody did anything. And to the point about, is this going to harm africans or harm the U.S. i mean, basically, what I've seen in my reporting is government agencies oftentimes devolve into places that exist to pay the salaries of government employees. And their primary goal is to justify their continuing salary. And so what happened here is they were actually. We think of africa as being predisposed to corruption. But here you had government employees for america who were pressuring the africans to be corrupt. And so we would tell them, all these foreign aid agencies on the American side, we tell, like, africans don't just, like, give out contracts to your friends. You got to compete everything. You got to advertise it publicly and compete. We were actually telling them, look, we're going to give you the contract, but it's on the condition that you give a. We're going to give you a grant, but you have to give a contract to my previous employer or to my friend, or you have to put my employees on your payroll. And so, you know, there are employees at this agency who acknowledged it was actually undermining america's role. As if we want to be regarded as like a beacon of morals. I mean, these were not. They were not doing that. They were out to get money for themselves. You know, one. Another example that's kind of funny is they were pushing a pyramid scheme on poor africans. They were, you know, herbalife. It's like the multi level marketing scheme that had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars.
- [12:42]
Brian Blaze
Hang on. They were pushing herbalife on africans because.
- [12:47]
Luke Rosiak
Their board member, John Abu or something, he's the. He was the vice president of this government agency. And he was Also CEO of herbalife. And so they start pushing herbalife onto africans. So we're told if you cut this government agency, you're cruel and heartless, and you want poor african orphans to die. But they were in. When they were in charge, they were like, how can we make a buck off of these peasants?
- [13:12]
Brian Blaze
How successful was that? Attempted a pyramid. That. That is absurd. What? You got to walk the audience through that in detail. How did it roll out?
- [13:21]
Luke Rosiak
Well, this guy, john aguanabe, was actually appointed to this african development agency. First by, I believe, george w. Bush, and then reappointed by barack obama. And right after herbalife had to pay a fine for violating the foreign corrupt practices act. And then also a fine for being a pyramid scheme. They tried to go into africa and build their brand there. And they said, we're going to give some money to africans, and then we're going to give them free products. And we're going to provide an herbalife employee as a mentor. And so I don't exactly know what happened after that, because there was a lot of secrecy around it. But the first thing they did is they pretended that it was a partnership with the herbalife foundation, like some sort of 501C3 counterpart. But that's not what it was. It was with a for profit company. And so they were just trying to build their brand in africa. And this is a firm that had to pay money, because basically, it tricks people into thinking you're going to get rich by selling herbalife and you wind up poor.
- [14:29]
Brian Blaze
That truly may be one of the most outlandish stories that I've ever heard on the show. And that is a pretty high, or, I guess, low bar. But to your point, right, the fact that you can't even. No, knock on you, but necessarily answer my question, because the information is not readily available to speak to sources and methods as to how you sort of produced this story. If you were able to have access, you know, replicate this agency by agency, or at least to some of the, you know, sub. Whatever foundations under the usaid umbrella or purview. Do you think that, you know, from. From your perspective, having done a lot of reporting on agencies like this, that you would find similar waste, fraud and abuse, take your pick of which one. It exactly is, how it, you know, gets sorted out. But that you would find this across the board?
- [15:13]
Luke Rosiak
Yeah, I think this is one of the more over the top examples. I think when you look at the tiny little agencies, it gets way worse. Because there's not, like, layers of accountability. If you get A couple of corrupt people. There's nobody looking over their shoulders. So honestly, I mean, obviously I think there's waste, fraud and abuse, a lot of it in every cabinet department. But one of the things I've done a number of stories of over the years is these little agencies that nobody's ever heard of, they go completely off the rails. And I guess you could say that is government when left to its own devices. If there's not checks and balances, that's what they're going to do, is devolve into things that exist to pay the government employees above all else. But yeah, this is one of the worst. And then you hear about other little agencies. One of them was called the US Institute of Peace. They had guns in the building and they also tried to block DOGE from coming.
- [15:59]
Brian Blaze
You're bearing the lead. It was what a full blown armory.
- [16:05]
Luke Rosiak
So yeah, the little agencies, I mean, we're not going to balance the budget by cutting off, cutting, you know, these little agencies. But they are pretty telling about whether, you know, this idea that people are mad about Doge. It, Elon, really is right. I mean, when you, if you're super mad about being audited, you might just be a criminal. And this was all going on for years. It's the left wing employees who work there who are the first to say this agency was so bad. And now it's, you know, it's in their mind unfortunate that it's being used to, that it makes all the foreign aid industry look bad. But to be honest, nobody did anything about this for years. And they, there, there's all this documentation where these, some of these grants were being run by the cfo, which is not appropriate. They have people that are supposed to be figuring out which Africans to give it to, but the CFO was doing all these sketchy things. They were paying employees through Random LLC to keep the money under $10,000 so they didn't have to report it to Congress. They were literally just having people that worked in the headquarters in D.C. who were just getting paid by random African companies. The whole thing was unbelievably corrupt. And then meanwhile, the top people, they would abuse the staff, make them cry, oftentimes, make them work without pay when they couldn't get the secret LLCs to pay them. So they're basically having slaves. And so this, the whole thing is hypocritical. I mean, the idea that they would be lecturing conservatives that you're callous and cruel and you want Africans to die. We gave these people $50 million a year to help Africans for since 1980. And they didn't really use it, they were using it more on themselves. They were buying first class travel and thousand dollar a night hotel rooms in violation of federal rules. They were. They let the NBA players choose who taxpayers were going to give money to in Africa so they could like hang out with celebrities. And then ultimately they used their. They used federal money to this guy CD Glenn. He was in charge of this agency and he would use the money to build his own brand. Paying government money to speak at conferences and to serve on prestigious boards and so on. And now he's president of the PepsiCo Foundation. So this is a guy that fell upwards and now he's managing $70 million and he's giving out all these DEI grants through Pepsi.
- [18:31]
Brian Blaze
Well, Luke, I think you've successfully outraged. I guess I'll speak for myself. Me and probably our audience too. So naturally if they want to keep up with the rest of your reporting, you really do great work. Where can they go to follow you and read everything?
- [18:44]
Luke Rosiak
Check it out on Daily Wire. It's a four part series. So yeah, you'll see another one go up on Friday.
- [18:52]
Brian Blaze
Thank you so much for joining us, Luke. We'll have you back on.
- [18:55]
Luke Rosiak
Thank you.
- [18:58]
Brian Blaze
Warren. Posse that. And I think our next guest, Brian Kennedy, you're going to have a tough time beating that. A bunch of our tax dollars being used to I guess buttress herbalife pyramid schemes in Africa. I think every word in that sentence gets crazier. Maybe it just should have gone on in Ukraine. Although I don't know at this rate if we audit that what we're going to find. So waiting for my comprehensive full scale audit. Brian Kennedy. I wanted to have you on though speaking of other things that we need to audit and frankly I would wager deport all of them, that is Chinese international students who are all essentially beholden, if not outright controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Per, as you well know, Article 7 of China's National Intelligence Law. I want to get into this really explosive story about what's been going on at Stanford. It's not just the run of the mill, you know, Chinese students and Scholars association stuff or Confucius Institutes. It shows you really, I think the whole of society approach that they have taken even so boldly on American college campuses to sort of recruit spies and the. I think intellectual property theft is too nice or euphemistic a term. Just straight up stealing military and trade secrets. But walk us through this story.
- [20:09]
Natalie Winters
Yeah, thank you Natalie. Great to Be with you. They weren't selling herbalife in China or Ukraine.
- [20:15]
Brian Blaze
If only.
- [20:17]
Natalie Winters
Yes, but probably there will be some scheme like that somewhere. But look, communist China spends annually in The United States $16 billion on intelligence and influence operations. So they're going all around the country trying to find every piece of intellectual property they can steal, every person they can compromise, and every method in this country by which we have become prosperous. They wish to extract from us our wealth via our intellectual property and the methods that we use to learn and to produce things. One of their targets is the modern university they chose in this really excellent piece in the Stanford Review. Stanford and going to all the students that are there and making sure that they were going to the most high tech parts of the university or the parts of the university that were teaching the most important engineering and other scholarly methods of both learning and then building the technologies of the future. The story lays out how they interviewed all sorts of students and faculty on campus. And many of those faculty were afraid to talk about it, as were many of the students. But it was clear that there were Chinese operatives on Stanford campus working with Chinese students to learn various methods and various personnel on campus. Now, I would say, Natalie, that Stanford was known as a place that is certainly excellent. It's an excellent university, just at the level of, you know, rankings nationally. But Stanford has also been a place for over 20 years that has rejected the teaching of Western civilization on campus. That quite famously, you know, conservatives were arguing about this back in. In the 90s and in the 2000s that Stanford had taken out from their core curriculum the teaching of Western civilization. That might have been a signal to the communist Chinese that Stanford was a place that they could penetrate and that there would be receptive people on campus to at least friendly relations with communist China. The article talks about some $64 million that the school receives from communist China in various ways, whether it's tuition or direct grants through cutouts that may be influential. And so once a university receives $64 million, they're less likely to want to kick people off of campus. Now, the essay concludes with the idea that America has to be competitive, and it's not going to be competitive if communist China steals all of our secrets. So something has to be done about it. That's the right attitude. It doesn't say that all the students should be kicked off of campus, the Chinese students, but that's certainly part of it. I would say when it comes to these Chinese students on American campuses, they contribute roughly. And this is one of the reasons they're still on campus. They contribute today roughly 30 to 40 billion dollars in tuition paid by the, by their families or the Chinese Communist Party or certain Chinese, you know, organizations that fund their tuitions. But almost all these students are children of the Chinese Communist Party and their parents are members of the Chinese Communist Party. And so it's not like this is some poor student from Shanghai who just gets to come to American universities because of just how good they are. These are part of the elite in communist China and they're coming here, unfortunately, to not learn, but to, they do learn, of course, but they come to extract from America the knowledge and expertise we have and bring it back to communist China. And with that comes the fact that they have to report to handlers in their consulates. And so they're basically agents. There's 200 and I guess 30,000 some students in America who operate this way. Communist China also has something called their thousand talents program, I should add, where they're really targeting their university professors and people within the American academic community more broadly who they think can be instrumental in providing such knowledge and resources to the Chinese Communist Party. So it's a very corrupt system, but it's, it's also intentional. I mean, you have corruption in Washington that your last guest described. This is, this is very purposeful. This is a plan. And they mean to insert people in the, into the United States to influence events in the United states. And that $16 billion annual budget to influence things is working pretty well. And unfortunately, I think the Trump administration is not moving quickly enough to root this out of our system. But it has to be rooted out.
- [25:51]
Brian Blaze
Well, and to that point, Brian, I think it's interesting, what was it? The principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pamela Carlin, obviously a paramount impeachment witness, but someone who I think led a lot of the kind of anti election integrity threats for prosecution was Pamela Carlin, who was a very high level Stanford law professor. Of course, you have the Hoover Institution there as well and obviously significant research that I think was sort of overlapping with the, you know, transgenic mice manipulation stuff they had going on at UNC and ultimately at Wuhan. So it's certainly an interesting place. Brian, I've got to have you bounce because we got another very packed, I guess, second half of the show. But in the meantime, if people want to follow you, stay up to date with everything you've got going on, where can they go to do that?
- [26:32]
Natalie Winters
Thanks, Natalie. It's a present danger. China.org and on X I'm Brian T. Kennedy, one thank you Natalie.
- [26:41]
Brian Blaze
A must follow. Brian, thank you so much for joining us. We'll be joined after the break. We got Bradley Thayer and interestingly enough, Brian Blaze. For those of you who watched the show yesterday, Laura Loomer was coming after him so we wanted to give him a chance to respond. I look forward to you guys getting to decide. We'll be right back after this short break.
- [27:00]
Stephen K. Bannon
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- [31:05]
Luke Rosiak
War Room, here's your host, Stephen K. Ban.
- [31:13]
Brian Blaze
Welcome back to the War Room. As you guys probably watched the show yesterday or you've seen the reporting, Laura Loomer, we had her on to talk about what I think is an issue very near and dear to our hearts here in the War Room, that is the Medicaid kind of Medicare cuts, the ongoing big beautiful bill, the tussle back and forth. We had Laura on, who was I think picking up on some kind of left wing media coverage of essentially a dear colleague letter that had been sent around talking for reforms for, for Medicaid. Obviously there's some problems with that program, but I think our audience, maybe they have a little bit of ptsd, just making sure that those, you know, reforms are not going to touch the people who actually need it. We are, I would say no amateurs when it comes to waste, fraud and abuse in D.C. but the CEO of the kind of, or I guess the guy behind the letter, which I believe was added through metadata on the PDF that Congressman Chip Roy had posted, like I said, was in the crosshairs of. Laura Loomer is actually joining us now. We believe our audience should be informed with information to make their own decisions about issues that are obviously as important and, you know, integral to them as healthcare. So, Brian Blaise, I'm honored to have you on the show. Thank you for, for coming on. I guess I'll read a headline just to kind of give maybe those of us who are late to the story. Koch funded group authored House GOP letter demanding Medicaid cuts. I want to get into that. Like I said, we'll let our audience decide. But if you can just maybe give us a little bit of background exactly who you are, how you kind of ended up in this fight.
- [32:45]
Bradley Thayer
Sure.
- [32:45]
Brian Kennedy
And thanks for having me on. Natalie. I appreciate the opportunity to respond. I am president of Paragon Health Institute. I started, I worked in the Trump administration during term one. I started on day one. I was at the National Economic Council, and I led the development of President Trump's health care agenda, really implementing his vision for health reform based on choice and competition and taking on a lot of the waste and corporate welfare that's in federal health programs. So I was there for two and a half years. I worked on a variety of regulations to address problems with Obamacare, to expand options for families and small businesses. I worked on the price transparency rules, which were really groundbreaking Trump efforts to make sure that people knew prices in advance of receiving health care. I left the administration and really defended and supported a lot of what the president was, was doing and his accomplishments. I founded Paragon Health Institute to build off of those successes. And really, for the last three years, we've been leading the fight, criticizing the actions of the Biden administration, which have led to lots of waste, fraud and abuse in these programs that led to enormous inflation in the economy. And then in the fall, I was selected to head the health and Human services transition team for President Trump. So I did a lot of work putting together a second term agenda so President Trump could hit the ground running. And there's already actually been quite a few accomplishments that President Trump has had in health care that have come out of that work that I was doing in the administrative for the transition.
- [34:43]
Brian Blaze
So I think some of the coverage of it maybe where some of our audience, and perhaps it's a mischaracterization, we're always open to hearing both sides. But the idea, you know, that it was cutting people who deserve or need to be on Medicaid which I think is a lot of the MAGA base, I'm sure a lot of our audience. But the idea that this letter was something that was spun up, that you were sort of the architect behind a lot of it. I think the fact too that they had linked your organization to taking Coke money, not necessarily someone that's super hardcore maga, given that right now they're busy suing President Trump over his slew of tariffs. So how would you sort of pitch that letter? How can you ensure to our audience, who may be a little skeptical when they hear cuts and Medicaid, that the cuts that you're pursuing or advocating for are not going to infringe upon people who desperately need those services with the political corollary and ramifications, you know, as we approach midterms that just be a woefully unpopular issue.
- [35:43]
Brian Kennedy
So thanks for that question. You know, President Trump was elected to represent the forgotten man and to take on the swamp in D.C. and nowhere is the swamp more powerful than in our health care industrial complex. So there is waste, fraud and abuse throughout these government health programs and particularly in Medicaid. The Medicaid program has been abused by a lot of left wing states. You know, last month we did an article that highlighted how California was enabled to develop this scam that was approved by the Biden administration that resulted in $10 billion going to the state that the state then used to expand Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants. That has happened in other states as well. Like we're targeting a lot of the waste, fraud, abuse and really bad incentives that is hurting the average American and rewarding a lot of these crony interests. Big insurers, big hospital systems have made a lot of money off of Medicaid. You know, the letter that you're talking about, what Paragon does is we provide. So I provided principles for reform to a wide array of Republicans in Congress. You know, mostly stuff with all stuff that we do publicly as well. We put out tons of information about problems in the program and how the program is not working for those who it was intended for. You know, the truly vulnerable and really is being taken advantage of by these corporate interests. So they adopted some of the principles in that letter that they then sent to the House Republican leadership. I would say with respect to Paragon's funding, you know, we're funded by a broad range of foundations, individuals, but Paragon accepts no corporate money. We really think it's important to produce unbiased policy research that informs the debate and that helps really implement what the president's vision is to weed out all of this waste, fraud, abuse, and corporate welfare throughout these programs.
- [38:05]
Brian Blaze
I think this is a really important conversation to have. Obviously, there's going to be, you know, ongoing back and forth between the probably more MAGA populists. Right, that is maybe the home of the war Room, and some of the more traditionally fiscal conservatives. And I'm just curious, too, on the financing of your organization. I think there was probably a jump scare to seeing Coke or whatever the entity I know rebranded since they gave what was about $2 million in 2021. But I know Laura Loomer had also brought up one of your old tweets, which I'll just read for the audience in March of 2016. This is why we can't have Trump. Entitlement reform is the most important issue, especially for fiscal conservatives. So I think maybe just help our audience sort of square, you know, as you could imagine, I think there's a lot of, you know, PTSD from sort of Trump, one of people who didn't necessarily back him, ending up in, you know, supreme or superior positions of power and not necessarily implementing his agenda. So, you know, I know you probably don't want to disclose your donors, but, you know, if we want to believe you that you're out here advocating, you know, for the forgotten man, like you said President Trump does, can you shed some more maybe perhaps, you know, insight or sunlight on who exactly is funding your outfit, you know, whose interests you represent and how maybe you've reformed or maybe just explain that tweet.
- [39:24]
Brian Kennedy
Sure. So, I mean, that Tweet was almost 10 years ago, and obviously a lot has changed since then, and I've learned a lot since then. And I, like I said, I was proud to enter the White House on day one of President Trump's first term and serve him to the best of my ability and serve the country to the best of my ability for two and a half years. You know, I got to take my children into the Oval Office before I left and have a very special moment with the president. Like, I think the president did enormous good in his first term to promote positive health policy. And I probably wrote more about, than anybody in the country about the positive impact that President Trump had with his health policy agenda to help people that have been harmed by government policies and to take on corporate interests. And I've continued that work, again, focusing on the problems with the Biden administration, criticizing their wasteful spending and the corporate interest that so controlled the Biden administration and led to rampant inflation and Then working, being selected to lead the Health and Human Services policy transition team and devoting enormous time to trying to help the president hit the ground running with a winning agenda in the second term. And one of the things that we worked on in that transition was what we could do with all of the fraud that is in Obamacare and is really benefiting a lot of insurance companies because they're getting enrollees who aren't eligible for the program. And the administration proposed a really important rule a month and a half ago to address this problem. And I have been the most vocal person in the public sphere promoting what the Trump administration has done there. So I think, you know, my record of working for the president, supporting the policy agenda of advancing American healthcare freedom and taking on corporate interests, I mean, I think it speaks for itself. I've done it for my entire 15 year career and most of it working for the president or working on the outside to advance a lot of those policies.
- [41:46]
Brian Blaze
And feel free to push back if you disagree. But I'm just curious. This letter I think has now been spun up. Obviously Politico covered it. A bunch of left wing media outlets talking about how it shows that President Trump is trying to come for Medicaid for these cuts. And again, perhaps that's media spin, but retrospectively, do you still stand by the letter? Do you wish it would have gone over differently? And if you do, can you say now, can you confirm for all the, I'm sure loomerous politicos, take your pick on the media spectrum listening that for the people who need it, for the MAGA people, the people who helped get President Trump elected, that if they need Medicaid, if they're on Medicaid, that that is not going to be stripped from them.
- [42:27]
Brian Kennedy
Yeah. So let me say Medicaid is an important safety net program. We want to improve it for those who really need it. And the policies that I'm advocating for would be directing resources to the individuals that really need Medicaid and away from the corporate interest, getting rid of this scam that allowed California to get $10 billion of federal taxpayer money to expand Medicaid to illegal immigrants. And I think there are no like, this is not about cutting the Medicaid program. This is about creating a more sustainable Medicaid program and dealing with Biden's massive spending increases in Medicaid. Because of Biden, Medicaid is projected to be more than a trillion dollars more expensive over the next decade. They kept people on the program much longer than were eligible and they enabled a Lot of these corporate welfare scams that have made health insurers and big hospital systems rich but haven't helped Americans. Right. American life expectancy hasn't increased with all of this spending and corporate welfare that we've had from a massive expansion of the Medicaid program. I want Medicaid to work much better for those who need it. It's not cuts in terms of looking at the policies under consideration. The best description is this is slowing an unsustainable rate of growth, is taking the rate of growth from 5% a year to 3% a year if you're able to enact these reforms. And I think we do need to have important reforms that take away the slush funds that have gone to left wing states like California, New York, for them to put so many people on the Medicaid program, including people who came into this country illegally.
- [44:26]
Brian Blaze
Brian, I really appreciate you coming on. We always like when we can share both sides of an issue here in the war room, despite all the criticism that we get for being a deranged platform for the craziest of the crazy MAGA voices. Brian, we really appreciate you coming on. If our audience, I'm sure I don't know how familiar you are with the Warren posse, but I'm sure they probably still have some questions for you. I'd love to get in contact with you or at least follow you. Where can they go to do that? Do you have an email, a website? Are you on social media? I assume Twitter, but anywhere else, I.
- [44:56]
Brian Kennedy
Would love that, Natalie, and thank you for that opportunity. They can go to paragoninstitute.org they can check out our research and you can see how many of the policies and how many of the weekly newsletters that I put out have been supportive of President Trump's health policy agenda and critical of the policy agenda of President Obama and President Biden.
- [45:19]
Brian Blaze
Brian, thank you so much for joining us.
- [45:22]
Brian Kennedy
Thank you.
- [45:24]
Brian Blaze
Have a good one. See, we're even cited. Take that. What is it? Probably Daily Mail, New York Times, cnn. That's just one week of attacks on myself and this show. But I digress. We got about five minutes left that I want. Well, I guess before we get to Bradley Thayer had a very packed show all day today. You got to make sure you're checking out birchgold.com bannon or texting Bannon to 989898. As you can tell with any issue. Healthcare, I don't know. I guess we're gonna get into the CCP right now. The elites that we have in charge running this thing. I don't know how up to the task they are. Luckily we have President Trump. You know, there's a deep state that vastly outnumbers him. So make sure you're checking out birchgold.com Bannon we are joined now by Bradley Thayer. Dr. Thayer, I'm just reading the news where it was this morning and it seem like one of the Pakistani jets that was used to down an Indian aircraft was Chinese made. I know they seized an island out in the South China Sea. I think it was Sandy or in the Philippines or Philippine island, Sandy Cay not too long ago. It seems like they're escalating a lot of their conflict as President Trump's trade war, though I hate that term because they started it, not us. That's victim blaming heats up. I'd love to sort of get your just general meta analysis of where you think we stand with the CCP right now.
- [46:43]
Bradley Thayer
Well, thanks, Natalie. It's wonderful to join you again. And the points I would make are three. First, that President Trump is doing exactly what it needs to do with respect to the Chinese Communist Party, which is putting great pressure on them through the tariffs and that element. But also, Natalie, you'll remember back in February when there was the memorandum, the key points of the memorandum were released with respect to to measures that the Trump administration was taking with respect to purchasing farmland, for example, in the United States, with respect to minimizing or taking elements to pressure New York firms, right, not to invest in the People's Republic of China. So President Trump is doing exactly what he needs to do on the economic front. He's successfully waging economic war against the Chinese Communist Party. The second point is the CCP are supremely vulnerable at this time. This is one of their key points of history, like 1989 and a few other points in their history where pressure brought by the United States and other states against them can have a very significant impact on the Chinese Communist Party. So that's very important to keep in mind. They're very vulnerable and Trump certainly understands that vulnerability. The third point I would make is that they're a hyper aggressive state, the Chinese Communist Party in part driven by ideology. The ideology of communism of course, is hyper aggressive all times and at all places. And the CCP is no exception to that iron law really of the ideology of communism. So the support, support for Pakistan, which is for many, many years, of course, for decades, China has backed Pakistan against India, as you mentioned, the South China Sea, where you have overt aggression. The CCP sees the South China Sea as their property, they own it, and they are aggressing against the US Ally, the Republic of the Philippines, and other states as well. To that I'd add Taiwan. Right. The consistent pressure against Taiwan that we've seen through their military exercises, through statements that Xi Jinping has made and Chinese Foreign Ministry has made about the inevitability really of the conquest of Taiwan is quite alarming. Additionally, that aggression is evinced through political warfare. Natalie, you know that extremely well, of course, in the United States, in the West. But we're also watching very closely South Korea and how Chinese Communist Party influence is affecting the election, the run up to June 3, when the South Koreans will have, of course, a very important election. So for the ccp, it's aggression all of the time. And the Trump administration certainly recognizes that, recognizes their vulnerability. And Trump is doing what he can do, of course, on the economic front to continue to pressure them and to keep that pressure on them. So all of those are points to keep in mind. Of course, we should expect this hyper aggressive state, of course, to do precisely that. Right. They're aggressing and they have, of course, for so many years on the economic front, on the political warfare front. And we should be very worried about really that turning into kinetic confrontation in Taiwan or elsewhere. Or of course, there's always the possibility that the Indo Pakistan conflict escalates and that China comes into the side of Pakistan on that, Heaven forbid. Of course, we don't want that outcome to occur. So it's. There's never a dull moment, of course, when you're dealing with the CCP, as you well know.
- [50:55]
Brian Blaze
Dr. Thayer, I wish we had more time. There's nothing that I love talking about more than the Chinese Communist Party and their political warfare for operations. But until I can have you back on. In the meantime, if people want to follow you, stay up to date with your writing. You're on Getter. You're big on Getter, because I remember I made you get a profile picture. Where can people go to do that?
- [51:14]
Bradley Thayer
Bradley Thayer. Getter. Bradley Thayer. Truth and Bradley. Thanks, Natalie. Thanks very much. And you did so.
- [51:19]
Brian Blaze
Thank you, Dr. Thayer, as they always say, right? We only needed a strong president to fix the border. Well, I would add we only needed a strong and maybe uncaptured, like, I don't know, Hunter Biden maybe, for example. If that's your son, you're probably not going to be able to talk very tough to the Chinese Communist Party, right? Joe Biden is, as I believe I told cnn essentially dead as he may have been if he even wanted to tariff the Chinese Communist Party. Even if he got a strain of populism take over his, you know, basically corpse, he couldn't have even wanted to tariff them if he wanted to be so compromised. It's nice to have a president who can actually put America first because they're not beholden to other foreign interests or the enemy within. Have a good one. I will probably see you tomorrow.
- [52:06]
Stephen K. Bannon
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- [53:16]
Trevor Comstock
Hey war room. Hope you're all doing well. My name is Trevor Comstock. I'm one of the co creators of Sacred Human and I wanted to share just a little bit more about our brand. For those who may not know of us yet, but about six months ago we decided to launch Sacred Human with really the simple mission being to provide American made natural supplements without all the artificial nonsense. So unfortunately, as many of you know, a lot of these big corporate supplements will include things like preservatives, artificial ingredients and other additives that really aren't benefiting your health. So that's why we created Sacred Human. Really trying to fill this gap of quality supplements and of course the beef liver being our flagship products. For those who don't know, beef liver is loaded with highly bioavailable ingredients such as vitamin A, B12, zinc, CoQ10, etc. And because it is 100% grass fed and natural, your body is able to absorb these nutrients far better than taking out any other synthetic multivitamin or any other synthetic vitamin in general. So we have some other amazing products, but if you'd like to check us out, you can go to sacredhumanhealth.com and cheers to your health.