433 - Steve Bannon Emergency Podcast

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Tim Dillon Show – Episode 433: Steve Bannon Emergency Podcast

Release Date: February 27, 2025

In Episode 433 of The Tim Dillon Show, host Tim Dillon welcomes former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon for an in-depth conversation on the current American political landscape, economic crises, the influence of big tech, immigration policies, and the looming threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The discussion delves into Bannon's perspectives on populism, the deep state, and strategic pathways for re-establishing economic and national sovereignty.

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1. Steve Bannon’s Relationship with Donald Trump

Bannon recounts his first meeting with Donald Trump in August 2010, highlighting Trump's deep understanding of China's economic strategies and the trade deficit. Bannon emphasizes Trump's authentic populist approach, distinguishing it from what he perceives as the mislabeling of Trump’s ideology by critics.

Steve Bannon [01:35]: "Trump got immediately. I mean, he had a very deep understanding of China, had a very deep understanding of the trade deficit."

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2. The Decline of the Democratic Party and Rise of Populism

Bannon critiques the modern Democratic Party for abandoning the working class in favor of the elite, including billionaires and the credentialed class. He argues that this shift has marginalized voices that advocate for working-class solutions, leaving populist nationalism as the primary response from figures like Trump.

Steve Bannon [04:25]: "The Democratic Party has abandoned the working class. What they are is you had these billionaires at the top..."

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3. Financial Crisis and Bailouts: Impact on the Little Guy

Discussing the 2008 financial crisis, Bannon criticizes the manner in which bailouts favored large financial institutions while ordinary citizens, particularly minorities, suffered significant losses in home equity. He advocates for holding elites accountable and restructuring how bailouts are handled to prevent socialized risk.

Steve Bannon [15:00]: "They got paid back the money and they got some returns. But what you should have gotten is some sort of package to own that you should have owned these companies."

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4. The Influence of Big Tech and Social Media

Bannon expresses concern over the symbiotic relationship between big tech companies and the government, describing it as a "Faustian bargain." He warns that this alliance has led to a loss of control over technological advancements, particularly in AI and social media, heightening national security risks.

Steve Bannon [26:15]: "TikTok is much bigger... It's so much more sophisticated."

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5. The Deep State and National Security Council

Bannon elaborates on his belief in the existence of a "deep state" — a parallel command structure within the government dominated by entrenched elites who undermine presidential authority. He likens this structure to the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome, suggesting it obstructs genuine populist leadership.

Steve Bannon [38:32]: "The Deep State is a real thing."

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6. Immigration Policies and H1B Visas

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on immigration, particularly the impact of H1B visas on American workers. Bannon argues that these visas are exploited to underpay American citizens and create dependency, advocating for a stringent overhaul or moratorium on such programs to protect domestic labor markets.

Steve Bannon [56:18]: "People shouldn't... They have not shown me and cause they all backed off coming after me on H1B visas."

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7. China and Potential Conflict

Bannon outlines the strategic threat posed by the CCP, emphasizing the necessity of decoupling American economic and technological dependencies from China. He predicts a potential conflict within the next five to seven years if the US does not take decisive action to sever ties and restrict China's access to American capital and technology.

Steve Bannon [73:12]: "If you don’t do that, I believe we’ll be in a shooting war in the South China Sea and around Taiwan in five years."

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8. Future Elections and Taxation of the Wealthy

Looking ahead, Bannon discusses the importance of building a robust populist coalition to counteract the entrenched elite's influence. He advocates for tax reforms targeting the wealthy and large financial transactions to bridge the national deficit, stressing that such measures are both logical and necessary for fiscal stability.

Steve Bannon [84:12]: "If you look at the $4 trillion... we have to cut spending enough... you gotta tax the rich."

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9. Capitalism vs. Corporate State

Bannon distinguishes between true capitalism and what he terms the "corporate state," where monopolistic practices and regulatory captures by big businesses stifle competition and exploit the working class. He calls for dismantling these concentrations of power to reinvigorate a fair capitalist system that benefits all Americans.

Steve Bannon [87:20]: "We have a capitalist system. Well, we have a capitalist system with no capitalist. Think about it. 70% of the people in this country don't own financial or real assets."

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10. The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism

Addressing technological advancements, Bannon warns of the "Singularity" and the ethical implications of transhumanism. He emphasizes the need for American leadership in AI to ensure that technological progress aligns with national interests and does not exacerbate existing social and economic disparities.

Steve Bannon [65:12]: "Transhumanism. The number one of all the problems we have."

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Notable Quotes

• Steve Bannon [01:35]: "Trump got immediately... he had a very deep understanding of China."
• Steve Bannon [04:25]: "The Democratic Party has abandoned the working class."
• Steve Bannon [15:00]: "But what you should have gotten is some sort of package to own that you should have owned these companies."
• Steve Bannon [26:15]: "TikTok is much bigger... It's so much more sophisticated."
• Steve Bannon [38:32]: "The Deep State is a real thing."
• Steve Bannon [56:18]: "People shouldn't... They have not shown me and cause they all backed off coming after me on H1B visas."
• Steve Bannon [73:12]: "If you don’t do that, I believe we’ll be in a shooting war in the South China Sea and around Taiwan in five years."
• Steve Bannon [84:12]: "If you look at the $4 trillion... we have to cut spending enough... you gotta tax the rich."
• Steve Bannon [87:20]: "We have a capitalist system with no capitalist."

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Conclusion

In this episode, Steve Bannon articulates a comprehensive critique of contemporary American politics and economics, emphasizing the need for populist reforms to reclaim sovereignty and protect the working class from elite manipulation. His insights reflect a persistent concern over the concentration of power within both governmental structures and corporate entities, advocating for strategic policy shifts to restore balance and equity in American society.

Transcript

[Steve Bannon]

Take me out to the ball game. What are you doing?

[Unknown Host]

Did you know DirecTV has the most MLB games? So you're singing?

[Steve Bannon]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

They put your favorite teams front and center. Right. When you turn it on, buy me some cold cuts and Flapper Jacks.

[Steve Bannon]

Those aren't even the words.

[Unknown Host]

I'm allergic to peanuts.

[Steve Bannon]

Stream DirecTV, home of the most MLB games. Visit DirectTV.com claim based on total games offered on national and regional sports networks. RSN is available with choice package or higher. Availability of RSNS varies by zip code and package.

[Unknown Host]

Steve Bannon, thank you for coming on.

[Steve Bannon]

Thank you for coming to the war room.

[Unknown Host]

We were just talking about New York and that you. You like New York?

[Steve Bannon]

Love New York. New York's my favorite city. Why is it? Well, Hong Kong is my favorite city, but New York's a cool.

[Unknown Host]

Hong Kong is amazing.

[Steve Bannon]

Yeah, I can't go there anymore because I've been banned. I've been sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party, so I can't really. Yeah, I'm the only civilian in history. So at one minute afternoon on the 20th of January 2021, the Chinese Communist Party fully sanctioned four people. Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, who's a deputy National Security Advisor. Peter Navarro, myself. I was a civilian at the time. It's the only time a civilian. So I can't have any association with any Chinese company. I can't go to Taiwan or can't, I guess I could go to Taiwan. I can't go to Hong Kong, can't go to Shanghai. And I lived in both of those places for a while. So I love, love Hong Kong, love Shanghai.

[Unknown Host]

That's unfortunate. But New York, you're good. You're good.

[Steve Bannon]

Good.

[Unknown Host]

You're still good.

[Steve Bannon]

Good.

[Unknown Host]

You can come.

[Steve Bannon]

So. Yeah, no, I used to.15 broad down in Broad Street, Brooklyn Heights, and up right across from the public library.

[Unknown Host]

It's great. When did you first meet Donald Trump?

[Steve Bannon]

Met Trump In August of 2010, before that midterm election. Okay. A guy named Dave Bossi, I was making films for as a documentary director, said, what are you doing tomorrow? I was editing a couple of films. I said, well, I'm editing these films. I got to get out before the election in September. And he says, well, can you go up and take a meeting with me tomorrow? And I go, no. And he says, well, I really need you to come with me. And I go, why? He says, well, I'm going to go up and meet Donald Trump. I go, that's great, but you know, I'm slammed. I'll just, I don't need to meet Trump. I'll just skip the meeting. He goes, no, no, you got to come up because making a presentation, he's thinking about potentially running for president and he wants to go through what it would take in a primary. And I said, of what country? Right. It's just not, it's just not feasible. At the time I didn't think. And then, so we went up, made up Dave is probably a four hour presentation. I gave the kind of the populist part of it and I realized right away what a serious guy. He. I tell people he's the only person in that time. I spent a ton of time in D.C. and of course, obviously in New York. But I said, what would take hours to explain to somebody at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey about the Chinese Communist Party and the trade deficit and everything that they wouldn't believe because they think we're like building each other's country. Trump got immediately. I mean, he had a very deep understanding of China, had a very deep understanding of the trade deficit. He was kind of a student of Lou Dobbs. Lou Dobbs had been hammering this for 20 or 30 years. And Trump religiously watched Lou Dobbs and then of course read all the papers and came to a very different conclusion than the elites in this country, that our relationship with China at the time was healthy for the country was not. And Trump knew that not just intuitively had a very deep understanding of that. And so when I left and he also, he would ask me because it was the Tea Party, right? That November was the biggest. The Republican Party won 63 seats in the House, right. It was a massive thing from the Tea Party and Trump. So I was given, Dave was a kind of a standard stock Republican conservative. I was giving him the Tea Party and the populist nationalist pitch. And Trump goes, well, that's what I am. And a popularist. And I go, no, no, no, no, it's populist. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, popularist. And I go, no, it's actually a populist. And he goes, no, it's a popularist. So I just quit trying to change it. And then on the train on the way back, we took the Asela back and I'm sitting there thinking about the meeting and I turned to Bossi and I said, you know, he actually understands things at a deeper level, right? I understand what he means by. I think I get what he means by popular. Remember, he's a McLuhan Ness figure, right? Everything like Marshall McLuhan the media is the massage. The media. Modern communication theory for mass communication.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Steve Bannon]

Trump understands that at a, such a.

[Unknown Host]

Deep level, at a cellular level, cellular.

[Steve Bannon]

Level that people don't understand. Like he understands.

[Unknown Host]

Even his detractors, the people who hate.

[Steve Bannon]

Him, don't get it. Don't get it, don't get it.

[Unknown Host]

And they don't get it. And his power and they, they. What's, what's amazing to me is I've grown up, you know, I'm 40 and I've grown up and I've, I've seen, you know, I've paid attention to politics for the majority of my life. Every election, you know, is some type of referendum on something. I've, I've never seen a party as out in the wilderness right now as a modern Democratic party. They've never, they don't know how to deal with him. They don't understand his appeal. He, you said this brilliantly on another interview. They've never fully been interested in why he was popular. They're only getting interested now. And that was something brilliant that I was very interested.

[Steve Bannon]

Remember, he's a Democrat, I'm a Democrat. I come from a working class Irish Catholic Democratic family, Union family. He's a Democrat. We understand the power. Every major political movement in this country has been predicated upon working class and lower middle class people. It just has. That's the power. Trump understands it. That's his audience. That's why I say mass communication. He understands how to have a emotional but also mental connection with a mass audience. Working class. The Democratic Party has abandoned the working class. What they are is you had these billionaires at the top, the Wall street guys, the Silicon Valley guys. Then you have the credentialed class. All these people with college degrees and Ivy League degrees are sitting there like an MSNBC telling you the way things are going to be. And then they have a kind of a mass of, of, you know, the poor right below the working. They've abandoned the working class to us. This project on populist nationalism I've been working on for 15 years, 14 or 15 years, and they seeded the ground. It wasn't that hard because if you, if you go after and present yourself as somebody that could potentially be a solutions provider or at least prepared to listen. The working class is looking for solutions. They're looking for people to listen to them. That's where Trump stepped in. He changed the Republican Party from a country club party to a party. Working class people in under 10 years, from the time I made him in 2010, to 2000. And he really started getting really involved in probably 20, 12, 13 in 10 or 12 years. He totally changed a party to be a working class party. Because one of the big things, the Democrats just ceded it to us. They didn't try to fight it. They're not trying to fight it today. The people that actually speak about populism, Ro Kahana, who's very smart talking about economic patrons or Fetterman, they're kind of on an island.

[Unknown Host]

They're marginalized.

[Steve Bannon]

They're marginalized. You don't see them on I keep telling. I said you don't see them. It's one thing to talk populism, another thing to get into it. You don't see those guys on MSNBC every night. You don't see them talked about, pushed every day in Democratic circles. And these are the guys that are at least trying to come up with working class and populous solutions. And they're kind of on an island right now. The Democratic Party has just totally seen it because that credential class, they're too precious to want to, you know, get down and kind of deal with working class issues.

[Unknown Host]

Why did Bernie Sanders, who had a similar position on immigration at one point to yours, maybe not exactly similar, I don't know.

[Steve Bannon]

I had it toy somewhere.

[Unknown Host]

We talked similar.

[Steve Bannon]

We took, we just lifted Bernie Sanders shit. I mean, come on, we just took it. He was 100%.

[Unknown Host]

He said open borders is a Coke brother's proposal. Like that's something they wanted.

[Steve Bannon]

Yes, he understood that.

[Unknown Host]

And he understood they wanted to drive down wages at what point? And Bill Clinton said similar things because.

[Steve Bannon]

Bill Clinton, remember the Clinton's power all came from the white working class. That's how they survived in. That's how they survived in Arkansas. That's how he won the presidency. And that's how Hillary Clinton saved herself, at least for a while, against Obama when Obama ran the tables on her in the primary in 2008.

[Unknown Host]

What changed in the Democratic Party?

[Steve Bannon]

The cultural of it. The cultural issues overwhelmed it. And that's why Bernie Sanders never had a shot as soon as he look the capitalist today, the whole invasion of the 10 to 12 million. And I'm just talking about people that came from January 20, 2021, when Biden took office till Trump. That's a 10 to 12 million people. That was the Koch kind of corporate class, the chamber of Commerce guys with the open borders people. But what they did is they wanted to kill inflation by flooding the zone with low skilled workers. I mean, the Federal Reserve was very open about this. They said they were gonna do this and they did it. That 10 to 12 million. Well, Bernie Sanders, you can't defend American workers, you can't defend American citizens of every ethnicity and race until you're prepared to go hardcore in immigration. You can't have the world come here to your own country. Your family's been here for generations, busting their ass to make this country better and to make the communities better and have the world come in here and compete with you. Not just with the low skilled jobs, but also with the phoniness of the H1B visas and that we don't really have any legal immigration in this country. It's all a scam.

[Unknown Host]

So there's also a visa and I wanted to talk to you about this.

[Steve Bannon]

It's the press wages. The whole thing's the press wages. And they're winning. And this is why Bernie, this is why Bernie. I say Bernie Sanders. The reason people say was Bernie. Bernie's a fucking pussy.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, he did.

[Steve Bannon]

He had two shots at the Clintons. The Clintons are the epitome of the neoliberal, neocon, globalist. Okay? And they're like the mafia, right? These are hard people. There's nobody harder than Hillary Clinton. She's tough. Okay? She's tough. He had two shots at her.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Steve Bannon]

I got brought into the campaign not cuz I knew anything about politics. I'd never been in a campaign office in my life, but I had focused for a couple of years working with Peter Schweitz and other people on taking down the Clintons. I got brought in because they were so far behind that they needed somebody to. If you were gonna win, you had to bring Clinton's numbers down. Cuz President Trump at that time, candidate Trump, you could argue anywhere from 8 to 14 points down in mid August of 2016 to close that gap. You gotta bring the heat on Hillary Clinton. And I was brought in as that because I knew the Clintons and Bernie Sanders, I keep telling people he had two shots at her, never laid a glove on her. It was a pillow fight. Right. If you're gonna get those people, you gotta get up in the grill and rip their face off. Because they're tough and they're neoliberal neocons. They're very vulnerable. But Bernie had kind of ceded that ground. That's why he's not really had a much of an impact on this populist. Think about it. We've had a populist nationalist revolt in this country and Bernie Sanders has been a marginal figure to it. How did that work? And in the Democratic Party today, this is why Rokahana and Fetterman are kind of on an island. They don't really have a huge constituency in the Democratic Party.

[Unknown Host]

What in your estimation, I mean, you talk about as the age of Trump, which is clearly the age of Trump. You said it started at, in 2008 with the tea Party, with the bailouts. This is, I think I've heard you say something like this, that the anger.

[Steve Bannon]

Financial collapse.

[Unknown Host]

The financial collapse.

[Steve Bannon]

You had financial collapse.

[Unknown Host]

Obama's administration, largely chosen by Citigroup. You had a lot of people brought in from the financial sector. And what do you think the response from the Democratic Party should have been?

[Steve Bannon]

Well, first of all, you should have put these things and look, it would take and steel balls. But you had to do it. Number one, we should have let the banker. We should have let Goldman Sachs go bankrupt. We should let AIG go bankrupt.

[Unknown Host]

Their argument would be that the entire global economy would collapse. I mean, this is what they were saying to me. I was in that business many years ago and they were saying they were coming into our office going, if these bailouts are not signed, the American economy falls and then the world economy falls within three days.

[Steve Bannon]

Yeah. Now I don't know if that was 100% true. We know that from congressional testimony of the Banking Committee. Is that, is that when. So they put Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on Monday, I think the 15th in London, first put it in bankruptcy. And they didn't realize Lehman Brothers was the center of the commercial paper market, which is what funds companies overnight for the cash. Because guys are not sitting there with liquid cash to run their operations, right. They have an investments or bonds or whatever. The commercial paper market freezes. All of a sudden you got everybody in a freefall, right? And on Thursday, Hank Paulson, who I used to work for at Goldman and Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve Secretary of Treasury, go to Bush's office into the Oval Office and they say, hey look, we need a trillion dollars cash infusion by 5:00 or the American financial system will collapse in 72 hours in the world financial system two days later. And Bush in a profile on courage goes, hey, we checked the Constitution. It's not my problem. You gotta go see this lady named Nancy Pelosi. Only they have the ability to kind of unlock, you know, to print that kind of money or to, you know, to, to authorize that. They go up to Nancy Pelosi and this is how, what the system's like. There's a guy in Alabama that, that was on the. He was the minority side, the Republicans in the House on the Banking Committee. They made everybody put their blackberries and everything outside. This guy, when they get out and talk about this, he texts his brokers and say, buy the QQQs short the market for tomorrow morning at the open. Yeah, he made a. He made a couple hundred thousand bucks.

[Unknown Host]

He's in your. Is that a coup?

[Steve Bannon]

Well, no, here's what it is, is that you gotta have some accountability and responsibility first. You gotta keep your head clear and say, well, hang on. Because what Hank Paulson did is took care of Goldman. They were in the boardroom of. They were in the conference rooms of Sullivan and Cromwell at that time preparing the bankruptcy of Goldman Sachs, right? They were in the conference rooms preparing the bankruptcy of GE Capital. They were in the rooms, in the conference room. The big whitestreet law firms preparing the bankruptcy of aig. I mean, these companies were going down. What they did on, on Goldman Sachs is that they signed a one line thing that said starting Monday, Goldman Sachs is a bank holding company, right? They just made it a bank holding company with one line. And so come Monday morning, they could go to the Fed window and borrow at, you know, 2%, lend it to their clients at 4% and take that. That vig would be a couple of billion dollars a month. That would kind of bail them out. They got a bailout. All these, every one of GE Capital, Merrill lynch, all of them got bailouts.

[Unknown Host]

By the, on the backs of the taxpayer.

[Steve Bannon]

But the little guy, first off, the little guy didn't get a bail. Worse. Hispanic and black, particularly working class, where the guys got wiped out of their equity in their homes, right? Because all These, all the CMOs, all the mortgage packages collapse. So guys, they just blow them out, turn it over to the banks. The banks walked in, they were picking these things up for 50 cents to the dollar. Not that they wanted them at the time, but the equity holders, you had a generation of particularly minority homeowners that got zeroed out. My point is, is that yes, there probably had to be some bailouts, but not the way it's done. And people say, well, Bannon, why are you talking about. Because the way we put this money in, they got like, got recouped and got like 12%. I said, yo, dude, at Goldman Sachs, if companies in trouble like that, yeah, you walk in, you blow out management, you blot the equity, you lend them the money. The new management team gets to earn into 20% of the equity and then the guys that put the money up get a bunch of warrants. Where's the warrant package for the, for the little guy? Go back to 2000.

[Unknown Host]

There are no guarantees for the American taxpayer.

[Steve Bannon]

Nothing, Zero. They got paid back the money and they got some returns. But what you should have gotten is some sort of package to own that you should have owned these companies. I would even say quasi nationalized the banks. They proved that they were incapable.

[Unknown Host]

Make a lot of people in this town nervous when the way you more on Wall Street. Yeah, well that's what I mean but.

[Steve Bannon]

I mean like fuck them. You got to. If you're not making them nervous, you're not doing your job. As you game is. The game is total rigged. It's completely rigged against the little guy. The little guy. And the same time they went to Silicon Valley and did a deal with the oligarchs the little guy in this country and this is a revolt. The guy making 35, 45,000 bucks a year, right. The entire world's system rests on his shoulders. Okay. Not just the American economy and paying the taxes here, but the kind of the post war international rules based order which is if you look at the Eurasian landmass from Western Europe and NATO to the Middle East, Persian Gulf to around the Straits of Malacca and South China Sea up to Japan around the rim of the Eurasian landmass you have these four big nodes and there you have commercial America. It's commercial relationships, capital markets, trade deals which were upside down on everyone on. You have some sort of a little bit of cultural back and forth. But you have an American security guarantee. It's the reason our defense budget is a trillion bucks.

[Unknown Host]

So the reason our dollar has value.

[Steve Bannon]

It has value. But that dollar during the, during the. Yes, we're the prime reserve currency after Bretton Woods. And that's how you have to. We took it over from the Brits. That's how you run an empire. We were a hegemon, at least for a moment in time. But the question now because of the drop in purchasing power, the inverse of inflation over Biden's thing, this is why you have the BRICS nations saying hey maybe we got to get on a different system.

[Unknown Host]

Tell people the BRICS nations, brics are.

[Steve Bannon]

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa started with that. These that have natural resources that were kind of binding together saying hey, the west, right, really Western Europe and particularly the United States are screwing us. Right. We are selling them their natural resources at dollars. And these dollars are depreciated over time. They're doing a devaluation on us. And so they were going to bind together first. They kind of figured almost like think about hey how do we redo the cartels like the OPEC back in the 90s or think of that. Then it became maybe, maybe our combined purchasing power. Maybe we do another currency we bundle together. Maybe it's China. The CCP was always trying to destroy the US And Trump just comes out the other day and says hey BRICS nations, I love the fact you're having conferences and talking about some sort of go back security. Anybody even thinks about putting 100% tariff on everything, right to try to blow them up.

[Unknown Host]

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[Steve Bannon]

But back to the financial crisis. You have a collapse. And here's the problem I got with them. It's not capitalism. You've socialized the risk. In other words, if it collapses, the little guy bails it out. But you've given unlimited upside to the elites in the history of this nation. The greatest concentration of wealth in our history took place in the Obama administration. On the surface of it, he's the most progressive guy and he's doing some stuff, but that's all pro wrestling and where it really matters, money and power. They have the greatest concentration of wealth to the top 1%. Because what they did is they took the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, which is about $880 billion in bushes there, and they basically flooded the zone with liquidity to prop up real assets, real estate assets and stocks and bonds. And so if you owned financial or real assets that run, you had, which you had nothing to do with, they took the interest rates to zero. By the way, if zero interest rates kills the little guy, because you got your little passbook savings account or checking account, you get no interest. So for those five or six years when interest rates are near zero, big guys can borrow the money, but you're sitting there and you have no capital accumulation because your little savings account, checking account has no interest on it. So it benefits everything. It was to benefit the wealthy and the power guys. And quite frankly, Geithner and the people at the Fed knew this. And they had some guy named Christopher Leonard, wrote a book called the Lords of Easy Money. He went back and read all of the conferences and meetings of the Federal Reserve governors, which by the way is kept secret for 10 years. He went back to the 10 year and he's got the transcripts where the guy, I think it was Dick Fisher in the Fed chair in Dallas is sitting there when they're doing this. He goes, hey, you understand we're going to eviscerate the working class in this country, we're going to destroy the middle class. We're propping up this entire bailout on these guys shoulders and they get nothing. In fact, not only they're going to pay for it, they're going to get crushed because of these zero interest rates of which they can't get access to capital. That's exactly what happened. That's the time I realized every time you've had a financial crisis in the world, you've had a populist reaction. And that's when I said this will. Now, I didn't meet Trump till years later or really get to know him politically until like 2013 or 14, but I knew as sure as the turning of the earth you were going to have a populist reaction to that. You had it first in the Tea party. And then later you had it in the Trump MAGA movement. But this has played out pretty much to the way that it normally plays out. And we're still in a horrible situation. We haven't gotten to 2008. More importantly, nobody associated with that collapse that made all that money and all those fees beforehand, nobody's been held accountable. Nobody.

[Unknown Host]

Do you think that. Fast forward to the situation that we see now where we're talking largely about the financial industry that's very cozy with government. You have Hank Paulson going in, talking cozy.

[Steve Bannon]

It owns a government own stock and barrel.

[Unknown Host]

It seems to me, and perhaps to you, that there is another industry right now moving in that wants to own the government and that is the tech industry. That seems very cozy, very close with the government. You've been outspoken and you're one of the only people who's been publicly outspoken about the dangers of that.

[Steve Bannon]

Well, at the same time, around, right after 2000, around 2008, this is when Obama became aware of the power of social media. There's this famous meeting at San Francisco Airport where the guys at Facebook come to him with his team and they tell him about the power of Facebook. Cuz he's running as a populist outsider against the Clinton machine. Nobody gives Obama a chance. He's an anti war populist outsider. Nobody gives him a chance at first against the Clinton apparatus, right, The Clinton mafia. He does this. A lot of it's through social media. They have an implicit bargain later with the oligarchs and what I call the algorithmic age. They allow the, you know, the Facebooks, the Twitters, the Googles, all the big platforms, the big platforms that charge, they essentially reach a Fausti impact, which is we're a hegemon globally. Right. And what we need to do in the age of the algorithm is keep the commanding heights of technology so we make an implicit deal with the oligarchs. You're going to have no Justice Department interference, no Federal Trade Commission interference. We're not going to try to break you up. They're going to have no antitrust pressure at all. We're going to allow you to become the richest people on earth. Okay? And, and, and, but you have to give us the commanding heights in the AGE algorithm. And here's what have we found out that we're what, 10 or 12 years into this. And we know on the two, in the age of algorithm social media and AI, they've blown them both on social media. If you look at our social media, it's fairly Cumbersome. It's not exactly revolutionary.

[Unknown Host]

TikTok is much bigger.

[Steve Bannon]

TikTok is not just bigger, it's so much more sophisticated. A thousand times the Chinese Communist Party. It's so lethal because of its addictive nature. TikTok is not on mainland China they have a version of TikTok that's not so addictive. And they don't let the content they let in the west. This is how powerful is. We've blown it. As far as social media goes, they're orders of magnitude more sophisticated and ours is quite addictive. But theirs is much more. But then on artificial intelligence is even worse. Now what do you think Deep Seek is a Psyop or a Sputnik moment? Right. It's both bad. But I think you have to infer the fact it may be a Sputnik moment. They are basically saying that our theory of the case in artificial intelligence was kind of mass machine learning. Right. Power through and you need all this new energy for the data centers. They're saying that theirs is a totally different profile. So what happens? We've lost the commanding heights in the two very technologies in the algorithmic age. We made the Faustian bargain on with these guys. There's look, there's 75 electric vehicle companies. Google has Bing and Duck Duck Go. There's no competition for Google. There's no competition. Or Facebook. There's no competition Amazon. Amazon destroyed half the small businesses in this country flooding the zone with Chinese Communist Party product. There's no competition to really competition to to X or to Twitter because we let them go. And there's no Justice Department. That's why I'm a neo Brandeisian when it comes to the Justice Department. Here's the I'm a Lena Khan fan.

[Unknown Host]

You're a Lena Khan fan. Break them up. Break them up.

[Steve Bannon]

If she had been allowed. And look, here's Kamala. When Steve Bannon talks about Lena Khan 10 times more than Biden and particularly Kamala Harris, that tells you it's a fixes in the Democratic Party is controlled by all these corporateness. This is the thing of Trump. You've got Gail Slater, you've got Andrew Ferguson, you then have Mike Davis and others in war room that are neo Brandeisians and kind of think hey Linda Kahn, we'd love to have her back. Explain that term to people from Brandeis Judge Justice Brandeis. Louis Brandeis had this theory back in 30s that you have to watch out for private concentrations of power that would then partner with government. If you wanted to get to a totalitarian government. Right. You would have major concentrations of private power built around monopolistics.

[Unknown Host]

They often called the corporate state.

[Steve Bannon]

Corporate state. Yeah, exactly. And says that is a danger to liberty and freedom right now. He was sure he was an FDR guy, etc. You've had it. Then a school came up in kind of the 80s from Chicago called the Chicago School, that really looked at it from consumer pricing. Right. That everything's got to be to the benefit of the consumer. And so it's kind of a gentle way to go on antitrust.

[Unknown Host]

It's buying people off. It's going, your jobs don't exist anymore. But the T shirts are less money.

[Steve Bannon]

Exactly, exactly. Or even in. Even in competition. When they look at mergers that what's the price? And they do all these kind of Cato liberty. It's a very libertarian school. It hasn't worked.

[Unknown Host]

And it's just basically, we can immiserate your lives, but if we give you enough Creature Conference, if we give you Netflix, if you can, doordash Taco Bell, which I've done, then that's. I'll admit that. But if you can do all of those things, stop complaining that you can't send your kids to college.

[Steve Bannon]

Exactly.

[Unknown Host]

That's kind of the layman's way to say.

[Steve Bannon]

And so in Neo Brandeisian, is to get back to what Louis Brandeis said, is that these great concentrations, which is really.

[Unknown Host]

That's the last time if I'm ever asked to leave a plane, if I'm ever dragged off a plane for heaping abuse on a flight attendant who deserves it, I am going to scream, I am a Neo Brandeis as I am dragged off the plane.

[Steve Bannon]

You'll get that. What Brandeis saw, though, is the. Is the Chinese Communist Party's model. Remember, we did all this after, after Tiananmen Square, when Bush 41 sent Schoolcroft over to say, no, we're going to get you. You got to calm down this political stuff. But we see you as a partner on the manufacturing side on a global basis. We will get you in the World Trade Organization. We will give you most favored nation status. We'll do all this. And the theory, they said, oh, we will take the Chinese Communist Party and turn them into a liberal democracies. These will all become Jeffersonian Democrats. The exact opposite happened. We recreated their model of state capitalism in authoritarian power. And that's what you have today with the oligarchs in Silicon Valley. Now, here's the beauty of it. Here's how great the oligarchs are that we've made them the most. We've made them the richest people on earth, we've made them some of the most powerful people on Earth. And then exactly when they're exposed for being phonies in what you made the Faustian bargain for on both social media and particularly artificial intelligence, what do they do?

[Unknown Host]

They flip.

[Steve Bannon]

Well, hold it. They do. Let me get to the flip in a second. They turn around and say we need a bailout. They say, all you hear right now is that in this city you're hearing we need a Marshall plan, we need a Mercury astronauts plan. We need to turn over all the national labs, the weapons labs, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, where they, where they made the nuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb. We need to turn all the national labs to the guys in Silicon Valley because now we've had a Sputnik moment and the Chinese Communist Party have taken the commanding heights. I go, hang over a second, this is a. And they're talking 500 billion to a trillion dollar bailout for the exact same guys that did this. In addition, understanding the math, right, and Elon understood it first given his engineer's brain, and really backed our play. But the rest of them hung out until 11:00pm Eastern Standard Time on the 5th of November when Pennsylvania fell. When Pennsylvania fell, you know, Zucker, Bezos, all of them became populist nationalists. They go, we're in. And they got down with their checks to Mar? A Lago, genuflected, right, and became supplicants to Trump. And this is why I say these guys are dangerous. They're all progressive Democrats. They were made what they are by the Obama administration. They're all progressive Democrats. They are totally phony. All they want to do is go to where the source of money is so they can keep being oligarchs. Because right now if you look at them and look at who the theoreticians they look for, but they're not really on the spectrum of like MSNBCs here and war rooms here. And some guys are more open borders and Globus, others are hardcore populist nationalists. They're in a whole other spectrum. And that spectrum is what I call techno feudalism. They've been taken out of the world of capitalism. It's no longer markets and profits since we haven't allowed any competition and allowed these become these massive companies. They are really digital platforms in rent, they're rent seekers, okay? And their idea is very feudalistic. It's like venice in the 15th century. It is that the railhead is like the liege lord with the digital platform and everybody else is a peasant or what I call a digital serf. And this is how you're going to run it. And they have this network, they call it the network state. There's books at it about it now. Let's talk about it. And this is what these guys believe. And it's quite dangerous. This is why I think you've seen the impersonal nature of what's happening at Doge, which I support. Going after the administrative state, well, that's.

[Unknown Host]

Always been a theme of yours. You want the deconstruction of the administrative state, of the bureaucracy.

[Steve Bannon]

Yes.

[Unknown Host]

What is Elon doing and what is the Doge team doing that you wouldn't do or would do?

[Steve Bannon]

Let's talk about three things on Elon. Number one.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Steve Bannon]

And where I'm his biggest supporter. Have given him more credit than anybody. Number one, he was the first of the oligarchs because I think of his engineering brain to really look at where we were politically. And he worked through the math to say, hey, look, this Trump thing is actually this populist nationalist movement, which is what I call MAGA plus plus low information voters, plus part of the Make America Healthy Again. These housewives who were red pilled during the pandemic, particularly about what their children were being taught in school.

[Unknown Host]

That's right.

[Steve Bannon]

And the health thing with the mask. Kind of the Nicole Shanahan crowd. Right?

[Unknown Host]

That's right.

[Steve Bannon]

The Malibu moms now around Trump. There's always, you have to understand, there's always a countervailing tension with Trump, with people who want Trump to be more Trump. Right. Versus those say you got to calm down, you'd be nice and look for the mythic traditional suburban mom that if you say nicer things, she'll vote for you. I keep saying that's never going to happen. Elon came in at a time in the campaign, in the spring and summer of 2024, when that was actually being talked about. He sat down with Charlie Kirk's guys and worked through the math of a ground game. A ground game we supported to do this MAGA plus the brother wrote a quarter of a billion dollars in checks. $250 million. $50 million a month over five months. And I tell people, if you're not, if you don't know about American Politics Day, when you see huge donors like the Adelsons or the Mercers and people talking about putting in $100 million, $150 million, that's over a Cycle, a presidential cycle. This brother wrote 250 in the last five months. 50amonth. To back a ground game, not to put it up on fancy commercials, which most of the billionaires get picked off with. Number one, he backed our play. Would President Trump have won without that? Yes.

[Unknown Host]

Right.

[Steve Bannon]

But we wouldn't have known that answer at 10 or 11 o'clock on the Tuesday the 5th. That would have probably taken a couple of days to work through, and I'm not so sure. We'd have had 53 guys in the U.S. senate, probably 51. It'd have been much tighter. Okay. And it was tight enough already. So he definitely had a huge aspect. Number two, he immediately got, like nobody else has got the deconstruction of the administrative state. He understands that we have a fourth branch of government that's not in the Constitution, that's kind of a permanent government. And they don't care if Trump's passing through or AOC or Bernie Sanders are passing through. They run the deal like they're going to run. And here's what it is. When you take over the government, when you win, you get 4,000 people, you get 3,000 that can hit the date plates running immediately. Okay? All you need there is basically a security clearance, right? A pass on drugs. Right? And a security clearance. And you can go and you can staff at these mid level and junior levels. Immediately you get a thousand that have to be sent and confirmed. Those are senior people, but you have 4,000 in the government. You have about two and a half or three million civilians. You have about two and a Half million to three million military. So let's say five to six million there. Plus you have contractors, another at executive level, another 5 million. So it makes sense. You have about 10 million people that run this apparatus that cost six and a half to $7 trillion a year to run, right? Or it transfers money, but it costs a huge amount of money to run. Plus it oversees, I don't know, 60 or 70 trillion dollars of assets, right? All the land, all the oil, everything that we control. That apparatus is so out of control that in order to get down to a sustainable model where we can actually get close to a balanced budget, it's got to be deconstructed. You have to take that apart, right? It's gotta be made smaller and you gotta make some tough decisions because programmatically they do a lot of things. And quite frankly, with the economic distress we have and the corporations bailing on, paying decent wages because they've invited the world in here to compete with American labor in American labor's home, that you have more working class people on Medicaid, you have more people on economic security like food stamps. So it's a tough call. But he saw immediately this is how you have to do it. And if you're ever to get to the deep state, which is the aspects of the Pentagon intelligence community intelligence you got in CIA, people should know, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I came to to this through hard evidence of seeing it in the first term and dealing with. You have this, you basically have the CIA. You have aspects of the DNI crowd, which is 17 separate intelligence record of national intelligence, intelligence, which has everything. Everybody's got NSA has got the guy, they can look into your phones. They know everything that's going on, everything. Then you've got the Justice Department with aspects of that and you got DHS with ATF and others, you got the FBI, you have elements of the Defense Department like dia. That is the deep state. And what I say is it's like the Praetorian Guard in the Roman Empire. They are actually so powerful now that they can decide like the Praetorian Guard is who's the emperor and who's not. This is why they turfed out Trump and they basically plugged in Biden.

[Unknown Host]

Would you agree with this? Somebody who's smart described this as a parallel command structure that is existing outside of the executive branch where the president is not read into certain intelligence. He's lied to about troop levels in Syria and things like that. They're conducting business with countries outside of the purview of the White House. And somebody called this a parallel command structure.

[Steve Bannon]

I would only difference I would make. You're 100% correct. It's not parallel. It is the command structure. When you sit there, when you sit there and get a briefing from these people, they will look you in the eye and lie to you. I was put in charge in the first days of working with people like Erik Prince and others to come to a plan. The president wanted out of Afghanistan. We'd already been there, I think going on 18 or 19 years in the Pentagon in the apparatus. And I keep saying it, I never called it the deep state. It says not a deep state. It's up in your face. Right, right. And they will sit there and make up their own numbers and lie to you. Just. I talked to them at one time. I said, listen, I gave him some points in time about briefings. I wanted, I said, I want to see the briefing of this about Afghanistan. Over the 20 years. This time, this time, this time, this time, this time, because I knew what they were going to show. They were going to show every time, whether the president was Bush or Obama, that, hey, we're here. If we just have more money in three years, it's going to be perfect. It's like seeing these small companies.

[Unknown Host]

Who's driving this agenda? Is it Raytheon, General Dynamics?

[Steve Bannon]

It's a combination of people.

[Unknown Host]

It's the Council on Foreign Relations.

[Steve Bannon]

It's definitely the outside companies, but it's also the guys like Brennan, as people have been here forever, been in the intelligence.

[Unknown Host]

Brennan is the guy that keeps coming up bad dude. He's a very dangerous individual. He's a dangerous person.

[Steve Bannon]

Dangerous. But there's clappers.

[Unknown Host]

They're dangerous.

[Steve Bannon]

There's a hundred Clapper Hayden, although those are the guys you see at the very top, right? But they also have. They have coaching trees like Belichick, etc. So it's deep into the apparatus, in the apparatus. And this is the thing they have called the interagency.

[Unknown Host]

Did they have anyone in the Trump White House? The first one, yeah.

[Steve Bannon]

When you. Okay, so I asked Mike Flynn, I said, look, let me see the charts for the. This is the first day I want to see the charts for the National Security Council. When I came off sea duty in the 70s and came back, I came back to the Pentagon to be a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, basically a junior officer. Grundoon, this is in 1981, when Reagan's like, the guys in the Pentagon at that time thought the National Security Council ran the world. National security council had 25 people. You'd had Kissinger, you had Brzezinski. And then they picked Richard V. Allen because they didn't want some Dr. Strangelove type, right? Reagan didn't. That had 25 or 30 people. And the guys in the Pentagon said, these fuckers run the world, right? They're too powerful. Flynn comes back on the first, like the first day. He goes down with Jared and the President. He's got these charts. Like this is like this thing. I said, mike, I didn't want to see the entire national security opera. I don't want to see the Pentagon. He goes, no, no, this is the National Security Council. I go, what? 292 billets. If you look at it, they're into everything. And I go, my God. I said, how many political appointees we got? He says, about 40 or 50. I said, well, hey, heck, no offense, we don't know 40 or 50. MAGA guys that step in there right now, we have to get rid of some of these. These are called detailees. They come from the Pentagon, they come from the CIA, they come from dni, they come from dhs. It's essentially the way the deep state runs the system. They have. Think about it, with 292billets. They have billets meaning meeting slots where a person goes. Where somebody. Yeah, it's 292 bodies, but they have a billet boom where they plug a person in. We want to get rid of those.

[Unknown Host]

So they know that new administrations coming in are not always going to have these 200, 300.

[Steve Bannon]

No. Obama, no. In fact, it's impossible. First off, you don't even have. You don't have the allocation of political appointees.

[Unknown Host]

You might have 25.

[Steve Bannon]

25, the thing.

[Unknown Host]

So by making it larger.

[Steve Bannon]

And they have a phrase, I call it their fetish. They have a thing called the interagency process. In other words, everything has to go through. The CIA's got to sign off the State Department. You got to remember, the CIA has a military aspect to it. The State Department has an intelligence aspect to it. The deep state is like kudzu and it's run by the CIA. The CIA controls behind the scenes, and.

[Unknown Host]

The CIA is run by the billionaires.

[Steve Bannon]

Well, the CIA reports to. First off, an elite class of Americans have just been, you know, from OSS to the CIA, very Ivy League. When I talk about the credential class, the traditional control of the CIA has been kind of Ivy League. Harvard, Yale, Harvard Law School. Yes, Princeton. A little bit of that's changed, but not the mentality. The very mentality is that Cold War liberalism. They are the guardians of this republic.

[Unknown Host]

That's right.

[Steve Bannon]

Right. And you have these politicians, whether they're clowns like Bill Clinton or neophytes like Obama or dangerous individuals like Trump, they can wander in and out, but they are the guardians of the republic. Very like Plato's guardians. They are the guardians of this republic. America's become a hegemon because of them.

[Unknown Host]

They decide we're gonna stay in the Ukraine for three years.

[Steve Bannon]

First off, you decide. They decide why with so many. And this is one of the things I told McMasters, he would sit there and go, we got the greatest team and we're gonna do all this. I said, dude, I said, you've had Bush, you've had Obama, and now you got us. You've had a center right group of neoliberal conservatives in Bush. You've had the biggest group of progressives ever under Obama. And I said, we're here for 20 years. I said, you've had smart guys around this table. Why has it never changed? And the reason it never changed is that the neoliberal neocons have an apparatus. That apparatus is the deep state. And this is why I say if AOC or Bernie was there, they'd be just as dismissed. This is what eventually impeached Trump. They saw Trump as such a danger. This was the whole Russia hoax. This was a guy named Colonel Derek Harvey and an army sergeant called Higgins were two brilliant guys that understood this. They actually went through and came back and made a presentation. Here are the deep staters that actually in the National Security Council, right? And here's who their names are in ranked order, the ones that should, should be turfed out. The number one name was this Eric Camarillo guy who eventually was the whistleblower on the Trump call to Ukraine. The guy, the original whistleblower was a guy that two years before they identified as one of the most dangerous guys because he's a deep stater.

[Unknown Host]

I love factory meals. They're high protein and, and, and you can do anything you want with them. You can do keto, you can do a high protein diet, you can do a low carb diet. What's so special? And I have them and I've tried them and they're tasty. I love a taste. Yum, yum, yum. Because they're tasty when you eat them. I invite my friends over for dinner parties and give them all factor meals. And they're thrilled. They're actually thrilled because I'm like, let's enjoy each other's company but be healthy. I love all the different options that factor has because you never get bored. So many meal, like I was on a meal, I'm literally, and you might think this is a joke, but it's not. I was on a meal plan once and literally it was just, it was, it was boiled chicken. It was boiled chicken they would serve, they would send it to me. They would send it to you in like a little box. It was like a boiled chicken. And then it was like a blood like substance, kind of like a thick blood every day, three times a day. And that was boring and gross. Factor is different because it has different varieties of all of the different meals. Calorie, smart protein plus keto. You can also get wholesome smoothies, breakfast and grab and go snacks because sometimes you want to grab and go. And I've realized that time is so important. What is time really, no one can explain it to you. You can listen to hours and hours of people babble and you still don't even really know what it is. You just know that you're all. You always need more of it, but it's infinite. You know what I mean? So here we are again. But the thing about the Grab and Go is you grab one of these things, these bars, these chewies, and you're in your car and the kids are, oh, I left my notebook at the house. Oh, you're never going to be anything. I turn around because you're forgetful. You don't take it seriously. And if you keep leaving your folder in the house, you're going to be a homeless person. And that means you're not going to have a house. And I know that that seems fun now because you like playing in the backyard, but you know when it's not fun, when all you have is the backyard, you actually only like the backyard because you can come into the house. But if I took the house away and it was just a backyard, we'd have a real hellish life, which is what you're going to have if you don't remember your folder, okay? But because I had a Grab and Go Keto snack, what I'm able to do is turn this car around and get your folder. Because I didn't spend time making pancakes or scrambling eggs. I had a little Factor snack. Would I have liked to have more of a meal? Maybe I would have. But because this Factor Snack enables me to get your folder, I'm giving you a shot at a life, okay? I'm giving you a shot at a goddamn life. Which is something that was never done for me, okay? My father was a drinker. The thing about the Factor is the calories. You have the keto, you have a lot of options. It's really great because we can't. With the cooking and the wok. Get the wok out. You ever try to cook when you have the wok? It is fun to walk because things go up the side and you can, but that's a whole nother. But it's tough. The walk. Eat smart with Factor. Get [e-mail] Factor podcast. Use Factor podcast. Get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. That's Factor podcast@Factor Meals.com. listen, if you like my show, which you should, because it's good, use my promo code, okay? That's code Factor podcast@factor meals.com Factor podcast to get 50% off shipping on your first box. And you know this is really important. It supports our show and it supports your metabolic life.

[Steve Bannon]

The Deep State is a real thing. And this is why you see President Trump going after Hammer and Tong right now. Also, Elon's hitting it from a different angle. He's kind of going after the administrative state. He'll get to the Deep State because one of their slush funds like usaid, USAID has essentially always been a CIA front that you see. Yes. Do they have water projects in India? Do they have some stuff in sub Saharan Africa? They do. That's all on the surface. To make you feel better, they're running this thing. Particularly the funding, all the funding, all the media against Orban in Hungary, funneling, you know, funding money to all these Source backed institutions, NGOs and NGOs on this on the southern border to do the invasion. All that was, a lot of that was funded by usa.

[Unknown Host]

This is somewhat unrelated, but I guess perhaps incredibly related. You know, why did the media take very little interest in the person who almost killed the president?

[Steve Bannon]

It's 100% related. There's no interest. The assassination time. But think about it, the media, you know, I was just watching the, because of the classic on TCM the other night in the Oscar month, they had all the President's Men, right? You go back and look, it's a great movie, a great, fabulous movie, a classic. But if you go back and look at the 60s and 70s, yeah, they.

[Unknown Host]

Were killing them every other day.

[Steve Bannon]

And the people, New York Times, the Washington Post, these people were anti institutionalists. They were all over the FBI, they were all over the CIA, they were all over investigative reporting. That's completely flipped the Democratic Party and the mainstream media became the defenders of the institutions. This is why every night you hear them banging on us. Oh, they're trying to get out of NATO. They're trying to do this. They're trying to tear down. They got Cash Patel and Dan Bongino at the FBI. They have Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic Party. And I think they know politically they're in a tough jam. They became the defenders of a corrupt system. They became the defenders of institutions that clearly have to be at minimum reformed and I think quite frankly purged and taken down and rebuilt. So they're defenders of that. All the mainstream media is the biggest defenders. I mean, in the Washington Post, David Ignatius comes on Morning Joe. We call it the Langley Bugle. The Washington Post, you're getting the pure thing from the, you're getting the CIA's point of view that day when you see Ignatius, you see the same things in the New York Times. Big reporters on defense. You're getting the Pentagon's perspective. So the mainstream and liberal media have.

[Unknown Host]

Perpetual war for perpetual peace.

[Steve Bannon]

Invade everywhere and invite everyone in.

[Unknown Host]

Invite everyone in and invade every Steve Saylor quote. Invade the world. Invite the world.

[Steve Bannon]

Invite the world.

[Unknown Host]

And then you have a citizenry here that's immiserated, that is paying for all these wars. Their lives are terrible and getting worse, getting worse.

[Steve Bannon]

And their kid and their kids futures are shot. And they're manning. Remember, it's these kids, the family. It's the children of the, of the. Of this eviscerated middle class and working class that kids are walking patrol in the Hindu Kush are with the 101st Airborne Brigade in Romania, on the Ukraine border, are in the two carrier battle groups in the Red Sea.

[Unknown Host]

They're calling this democracy. They're calling you a fascist. They're saying Steve Bannon's a fascist. What he's describing right now is democracy. Have you noticed the way this is being presented?

[Steve Bannon]

And this is why I love it. That's what I love about it. We're winning elections with Vigor coalition in.

[Unknown Host]

The woods with the goat head is democracy. The council is democracy. You know what I mean?

[Steve Bannon]

Well, they're total. It's authoritarian. It's authoritarian model like the Chinese Communist Party. They want a couple of industries, state capitalism where they have elite merger right between big government and big business. There they control things. And what I find so laughable is we're actually winning elections. Let's take 24 after having the 2020 election stolen from us in being now. Debanked, deplatformed. Remember I'm de platformed everywhere. War room's not.

[Unknown Host]

How did they do that when you talk about that? Because I will have to ask you. Because people will jump on that and they will say that nobody found any proof then no Republicans and no courts.

[Steve Bannon]

Here's the proof. Here's one of the pieces of proof we got in 2022. The people remember we got 63 and a half million votes in 16. I thought we did a pretty damn good job. We got 74,4 million votes in 2020, including we picked up 12 House seats. So you're telling me that. You're telling me in a Nancy Pelosi. I think we won 14 and they won two. So net 12. We picked up 12 house seats in that election.

[Unknown Host]

What do you think the mechanism is?

[Steve Bannon]

It's mail in ballots. I'm not a machine guy. I think it's Mail in ballots. It was very evident what they did in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin and in Michigan it was mail in ballots. And remember, he only won by the same margin that we did, the 72,000. You know, when you accumulate Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that's what Biden won by. You take the other states, these are small numbers, right? 10,000 in Georgia, you know, 9,000 in Arizona. It was mail in ballots. But here's the point. Where are the argument being where they've gone since then? They didn't vote in the midterm elections, right? They didn't vote in 2024. And so where are they?

[Unknown Host]

Disoriented, disenchanted or. They don't exist.

[Steve Bannon]

They don't exist, okay? They don't exist. They 100% don exist. They're disenchanted. They don't hate Trump. Oh, they only vote cuz they hated Trump. They don't hate Trump any less. They see him as a hero. It's ridiculous. We can win. This is why on democracy, we love democracy. Cuz you're not gonna beat us right now our coalition is building, right? Trump got 39% of black men in the country to vote for him. Not just that, a lot of black men are just not gonna vote for the Democrats. Remember, they don't vote for the Democrats. It's one to us. If they vote for us. It's a two banger, right? Hispanics. Starr County, Texas, a hardscrabbled county In South Texas, 97% Hispanic and blue collar, the most Hispanic county in the United States voted for Hillary Clinton by 60% in 2016. In 2024, Trump won it by 16%. The Hispanic working class is coming our way. The African American working class is coming our way. If, if in President Trump's.

[Unknown Host]

But this is why you've urged Elon Musk be careful with Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.

[Steve Bannon]

And Medicaid, Medicaid. I keep telling people, don't think, you know, in the old days, oh, Medicaid was an urban thing. And I said, you can't take a meat ax to it. I said this is not about race anymore. This is about economic distress. If you go and look in Idaho and you know the American redoubt up in Montana and Wyoming and you know, the Christian readout, I think there's something like 80 or 90% of the babies born in Idaho are on Medicaid. Medicaid is now for the working class, the white working class and the Hispanic and black. These are our voters, right? You have to be very careful Medicaid, you have to get the illegal aliens off and you have to put work requirements. But just don't think you can go in and put a meat axe to it.

[Unknown Host]

Because your project to destroy the distinction between citizen and non citizen is entirely, not only to drive down wages, but to kind of destroy any idea of what a contract, a social contract, a national identity. Yeah, national identity. And a contract between the citizens and the government saying, I give you this, I am owed that. Yes, but if we destroy the distinction between citizen and noncitizen, right?

[Steve Bannon]

Look at the non citizen, look at the non citizen Medicaid. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's shocking, right? The noncitizen been given everything. Look at, look at the 10 to 12 million illegal alien invaders. And I don't blame them. You and I would do the exact same thing. You were invited here by the federal government.

[Unknown Host]

Right?

[Steve Bannon]

People shouldn't, on your, your audience should not lose track of the fact that in these reconciliation things we're talking about for the mass deportations, it's $175 billion we're asking for, not just to secure the border, but for the mass deportations.

[Unknown Host]

You're talking really about the people that came in the last four years.

[Steve Bannon]

I'm only talking, I'm right now not concerned about anybody that came in before January 20th of 2021. Because the way I calculate it, there's 10 to 12 million and plus a million bad hombres, right? Criminals. I was in Danbury, 10% of the prison. It's a prison of. For 800 people, I think. 800 inmates. Some 1200.

[Unknown Host]

Some of my family from Ireland came in the early 1900s. I think a few of them just to get them out, just to make a point. If I could write a few names down and you could pass it to Tulsi Gabbard just to make a point. Hey, we don't.

[Steve Bannon]

It's not about race. No, no, no. I'm saying the guys coming over from Ukraine, you go to Montauk, you've said.

[Unknown Host]

The H1B visas, where tech people are bringing in. So my question to you is, and.

[Steve Bannon]

This is a question, I'm a hardcore, but remember, I'm hardcore. To me, everything revolves around the American citizen. I don't care your ethnicity, your race, gender, or whatever, your religion. If you're an American citizen, it should be like the Roman citizenship. You get a special deal. The whole system depends upon you. The whole world's economic system comes down your shoulders. You're Paying the taxes to really finance the hegemon. In addition, your sons and daughters are the ones. You're in Romania with the 101st. You're on the carrier battle group in the Red Sea. You're on patrol in the South China Sea.

[Unknown Host]

You're defending the order.

[Steve Bannon]

You're defending the order, the whole system. And yet you are the one that's screwed over consistently. That's gotta flip. Everything's gotta be like for instance, these visa programs. They shouldn't work unless they work for American citizens. And what I mean by that, you've.

[Unknown Host]

Said there's a lack of black and Hispanic people in tech. I mean zero.

[Steve Bannon]

Okay, the most progressive. Think about it. The most progressive people on earth in the Obama administration created an apartheid state. Silicon Valley is an apartheid state. There's no blacks or Hispanics. And the South Asians or Indians are there as indentured servants. They're working for a third to 50% less than American citizens, often in kind of horrible conditions with four or five guys to a condo and working 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Because if they complain, they get the boot. Okay? It's not acceptable. And not just that.

[Unknown Host]

Ramaswamy says it's cuz Americans are lazy and watched too much tv or they're not educated or they're.

[Steve Bannon]

They have not shown me and cause they all backed off coming after me on H1B visas. I said show me one thing. I want to see one fucking billet. One person in any of those billets of the millions are here. 1. Show me one in that billet that has a better education or better skill set than an American. They can't show me one. They can't show me one and they won't show me one because it doesn't exist. It has nothing to do. And when the media says high skilled, these are not more, these are not high skilled. This is basically, this is basically the, the essentially the mass programmers, right? This, this is not. It's all about getting it cheaper for 1/3. Because most of the cost of these companies is in the programming, right? Or the technicians. The technical aspect of it, they pay 1/3 to 50% less. They have higher margins, they have higher stock price, they get bigger, bigger. Their warrant packages worth much. The math here is not complicated. But they can't show that the H1B visas are bringing in more educated. We have plenty of educated people in the United States. Now people in the United States are going to want to get paid a certain amount because they're not going to pay you against the world. Number two being Americans, you got a little cussedness and grit. This is what hey. And you're gonna be vocal about what working conditions are. That's what it means to be American. That same grit and tenacity and getting up in people's faces is the same reason that we won World War II, the same reason we won the Cold War. The same reason they're calling those same Americans or their sons or daughters are on the carrier battle group in the Red Sea. You can't separate them. And here's the problem is we've invited the world. It is not acceptable in this nation to bring in foreign workers. To compete against American workers for these jobs is bullshit. It should be. I want a total moratorium until we get sorted exactly what's going on. And until those billets on H1BS which are so corrupt I would shut it all down, all of it. I deport immediately everybody. I would give every billet in 60 days, every job in 60 days to an American citizen and Bob's your uncle. And we have to be this hardcore. I am very hardcore in these things because if you don't take it to an extreme, you're never going to change it. The capitalists always want to have lower wages and more malleable population.

[Unknown Host]

And it's not even capitalism. It's crony. You know what I mean? It's the corporate state.

[Steve Bannon]

Yes, it's the corporate state. We don't have capitalism.

[Unknown Host]

Bezos, Andreessen, guys like the reason they're all oligarchs. Do they love America and well what's.

[Steve Bannon]

No they but here's listen their network, they're oligarchs. What they love is their money and their power. Have they ever sacrificed for anything in this country? When President Trump came up for the first time that that and tried to give working class people and it showed in the 2019 numbers that that blue collar wages increasing at a faster rate than white collar wages. Non college graduates higher than college graduates. Did they support him? No. They deplatformed, Debanked him. They have no. Do you see those guys volunteering to go overseas and defend their country? No. What they want to do is go to the Pentagon and get a big fucking fat Pentagon contract right to leech off this nation. No, they're not good guys. And I keep telling people in our party don't think they support us, cuz they don't. They're very good at knowing where power is. And right now they think that before Obama and the Clintons were the Power and Biden. Now it's us that just like they betrayed them and flipped on them, they flipped out their creation of progressive Democrats. They are progressive Democrats.

[Unknown Host]

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[Steve Bannon]

I don't listen. I think he's a different category than I would say the other. And look, I'm not a fan of many aspects, like, but like I said on the, on the. On the two big ones, backing our play in 2020 for the deconstruction administrative state and the third, which is, you know, this populist revolt going throughout the world, which he's been very vocal of backing in places like England and in Germany. And I tell people, I said, look, this brother brings the two tactical nuclear weapons of modern politics. Unlimited money, two wit. He wrote a $250 million check. And it doesn't affect his. He's still got baby mamas lined up. Right. It doesn't affect his lifestyle. Right, Right. Plus, he's got a platform. He can bind what he wants to bind and loose what he wants to lose. He can drive up the awareness of something or crush it. Right. So with those two things, there's not a centrist government in Europe that can withstand this. There's very little money in European politics. The entire campaign for Brexit, which is really taking England's sovereignty back. And the Remain guys are very powerful. It's the establishment. That entire campaign was about £25 million. It's nothing. So he's got unlimited Power, and I think directionally, he's trying to do some good things. I've got problems with one I'm not.

[Unknown Host]

Does it worry you that one person has that much power?

[Steve Bannon]

It always worries me. It worries me that the concentration of power in Silicon Valley and the concentration now. President Trump has a special relationship with him. We all trust President Trump. President Trump stays on top of this. It's just that you have to. One of my bigger problems with Elon Musk is transhumanism. The number one of all the problems we have. We have massive financial problems, massive geostrategic problems, and massive immigration and sovereignty issues. All of those problems are solvable, tough decisions. We've let a lot of good alternatives go away. It gets tougher and tougher every year. They can all be solved, and they can be solved by rational policies, and you can solve those in debate. And some days you're going to win, some days you're going to lose. Underneath that, we have the most important time in the history of the Homo sapiens upon us. We are converging on something called the Singularity. And it's just not AI. AI is one part of it. You have artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. You also have regenerative robotics. You have quantum computing. You have advanced chip design. You also have CRISPR and gene, gene splice manipulation, manipulation. That's all converging on spot called the Singularity. On this side of that, you have the Homo sapien. Something that's been around, I don't know, for a hundred thousand. Whenever all the other, you know, species fell aside, fellow, we survived. Okay, so you have the Homo sapien for, I don't know, a hundred thousand or a million years. On the other side of that, you have Homo sapien 2.0. And the pressure, as if people under 35 or 40 didn't have enough pressure on them, because they have more pressure than any generation in this country, I think, of pressure on them, of economically, of socially. You're now going to add another pressure, which is for their children.

[Unknown Host]

You enhance yourself.

[Steve Bannon]

Exactly. Even not yourself. If you're saying, no, I'm going to see this thing through as what I am, and I'll make myself better. But you look at your kids and you say, hey, look, I worked my ass off and I went to an Ivy League school, I went to a great university, I became great in a sport, I became great in my profession or my love, my hobby, whatever it was, and you're going to sit there and go, let's chip the kids. There's only so many slots at Harvard. There's only slots at University of Michigan. There's only so many slots at Wisconsin or Arizona. The whole world's chipping them. You're going to have these debates and you're going to sit there at night going, do I chip the kid or not? Honey, chip the kids, chip the kids. And I'm saying this is going to cause as a society and a civilization, we're not ready to have that conversation yet. And by the way, it's going to drive, it's going to drive politics. Look at Elon. And this is why. Because the industrialists in Silicon Valley are taking the typical easy way industrialists have in the issue about labor and about manufacturing instead of still trying to do the great American innovation and kind of the Tom Peters management in search of excellence management by wandering around like having the R and D facility next to the manufacturing facility so the engineers could walk to the floor and see the artisans, these guys, and get production, you know, better production experience, get down the learning curve, make things better. American innovation was always our greatest, was always our greatest power. What we did is we outsourced it. We just shipped the factories over to China because you know why? For efficiency. We want cheaper labor. It's easier to do that. We keep the R and D here and guess what? It was never the same again. But we got lower labor costs. You either send it to China or you outsource it to India. That was the lazy way to do it. And it had a massive impact on, on manufacturing. The same thing's happening in AI and this is why people have to wake up. AI's got two paths that can go down. An efficiency path that I'm just going to use AI and blow out everybody under 35 years old that's in their first administrative manager or tech job or I can use it as an engine of innovation, right to work. And right now we're taking the. Just like the guys made the basic mistake of doing, the what I call the mass type of AI, which is the model that we're using, right? Which is machine learning in a mass way that requires massive data centers, massive replication, massive energy like ChatGPT and things like that versus what deep seek is right now.

[Unknown Host]

Do you think Deep Seek is legit? Do you think they were able to accomplish this?

[Steve Bannon]

Or do you think I'm not smart enough to know? But here's what I would say. Even if it's a psyop, we have to, I think, assume for the purpose of discussion going forward, it may Be a Sputnik or quasi Sputnik moment. And what we're going to do about it, because now we're in a horrible situation because now the oligarchs come to us and say, well, Bannon, how can you sit there and say we should be broken up? How can you want Lina Khan and these. You're Neo Brandeisian. How can you want to break it up? Now more than ever, we need to have national champions. Now more than ever. You must make us. You must make another Faustina Bard point to that.

[Unknown Host]

Where they say we need supremacy in.

[Steve Bannon]

That they're saying it now. Technology sector, this is the 500 billion dollar ballot. They turn to us and say, we need a Mercury program, we need a Marshall program. You need to turn the national labs over to.

[Unknown Host]

Taxpayers have to fight.

[Steve Bannon]

The taxpayers have the. They ain't putting it up. And the venture capitalists, they're looking for a bailout. Anytime you hear Mercury program, anytime you hear Marshall program, understand that's coming out of your paycheck.

[Unknown Host]

And is this similar in your mind to when people say we need to go into Iraq and into Afghanistan and we need all this money and it's.

[Steve Bannon]

The same, the same thing as the bailout of the banks. It's always looking for the loan. Yes. And obviously going there, the little guy pays for it. It's your sons and daughters that are in Iraq or Afghanistan that are doing it. And you're paying for it. And not just your taxes, your private equity. Remember Zuckerberg and all these guys came out of graduate schools. They didn't have any money. The people invested Peter Thiels and people like that. It's all pension fund money. So it's Oregon State pension fund, it's CalPERS, it's Alabama teachers Fund, all of their money. This is the Greek tragedy. Part of this, the American working class and middle class have essentially, through their work and hard work and savings, right, has paid for their own destruction, has paid for. That's the Greek tragedy. Part of it. Your greatest strength was turned against you. Your ability to be a good householder, your ability to actually have something. Your ability to pay your taxes on a regular basis and have a little something put away. That that's what the venture capitalists and the hedge funds used to shift the jobs overseas and destroy not only your own economics of your personal life, but to make sure that your children and grandchildren essentially live like Russian serfs. That's the revolt that you're seeing now. People can't totally articulate it. Number one is the system's never explained to you. You never explain how up here on Capitol Hill you can run these massive deficits. Well, how can it be paid for? How come we're not bankrupt? We have this money machine called the Federal Reserve that can just create money, that we can create the bond. Well, we can't sell to foreign countries. We can just create ourselves. And that's how you end up with 125% of GDP in debt with a trillion dollars being added every hundred days. And inflation's not going to go away until you stop this massive federal spending. It's not a supply chain issue anymore. It's too many dollars chasing too few goods. And as we keep having these massive deficits, the inflation's going to be embedded in the system. And as we have to refinance, you're going to refinance it at higher rates. You're not going to get rid of this inflation. It's a death spiral.

[Unknown Host]

Two final questions. Is a conflict in your mind with China at some point inevitable? We've heard people come on the news and they say a conflict is within five to seven years. Pentagon runs a study that says within five to seven years. Now, some of this seems like it is based on the need for more money and more spending and more. Or is this, and you know more about China than a lot of people and you've studied and read about it. Is it going to be military conflict? Is it going to be economic conflict?

[Steve Bannon]

This is the book, and I'll get you a copy. Unrestricted warfare, written by two colonels back in the 90s off of the Gulf War. And what they said is foreign devils are so sophisticated in armaments and particularly remote armaments and targeting, that we never want to get into a shooting war with foreign devils. That unrestricted warfare will be cyber, psychological, political, economic. We will do everything. In fact, they announced in 2019, there's a people's war. The Chinese Communist Party is at war with us today. That's where you see the mass infiltration into the United States. That's where you see the taking of so much of our technology we don't need. And Sun Tzu tells them in their belief, the moment they have to go kinetic, they feel they've already lost number one. They don't want to fight the foreign devils in a kinetic war because they understand one thing we can do is get up on it and fucking blow shit up and kill people. Okay? We're very good at that. They considered that defeat. They wanted to defeat us beforehand. My point, the only People that throw off. Think about that. We allowed the Chinese Communist Party, which is a dictatorship that's killed a quarter of a billion of their own people, right? I mean, they make Stalin and Hitler look like pikers, okay? They've murdered in concentration camp, starvation through the Cultural Revolution, the great leap forward, the collectivization, and today the Gulags. They have, you know, a quarter of a billion of their own people. And the forced. If you can't, the forced abortions, yet another 3 or 400 million Chinese, particularly Chinese female babies. So these people are murderous dictatorship. Yet we interact with them, we're in business with them like they're part of the Kiwanis club. If you want to support Lao baijing, which is the only way they can be overthrown, that's a name for. It's old hundred names, because there's basically 100 names in the Chinese language, right? 100 last names. So old hundred names is a term for the common man in China. Common man and woman. If you want Lao baijing to overthrow him, we just have to do two things. You cut them off completely from any access to American capital, and I mean any. No stock market, no equity, no lending, nothing. Zero. And you cut them off 100% from American technology. They will collapse. I believe in 100 days. They cannot exist unless they have access to American capital or access to technology. This is why I'm one of the leaders of the decoupling effort, right? And President Trump, he wrote an executive order on Friday and signed it. That's probably the toughest thing we've done about no involvement at all with technology companies of any company that does Chinese military. It's the first time we've really. Somebody's put down the law. That's the way you take care of the Chinese Communist Party. If we don't do that, I believe we'll be in a shooting war in the South China Sea and around Taiwan in five years. And people have to understand, I don't care about your moral, whether you think you're supporting Taiwan for a democracy or not. Advanced ship design, you know, 30 to 40 to 50% of our advanced chip design comes from Taiwan. There's chip and it's not easily replicable. The Koreans have tried it, the Japanese have tried it. We're trying here in the United states with the CHIP Act. We are 10 or 20 years away from those plants. Advanced chip design is both an art and a science. We don't have it. They have it in those plants in Taiwan. It's 80 miles from the mainland. China. It's a horrible situation. President Trump thinks about it all the time. You talked about the Pentagon, and I used to. That's where I spent half of my career at sea was there. The other half is in the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. So I've steamed those waters right now. There's not been a war game in the Pentagon. They've put this out in the last seven or eight years that we've won defending Taiwan. Wow. Right. And they know that. So. And if. If they take Taiwan, the American economy will drop into a depression. They understand that. That's why it's kind of a standoff right now. But we have to get much more aggressive on the CCP or we're gonna pay for it. And we do that by restricting Wall street and restricting Silicon Valley from being in business with them.

[Unknown Host]

The salutes that Elon, I think might have done one by mistake or you did one. These things that people are getting very upse. Got a lot of press at CPAC or whatever it was.

[Steve Bannon]

I gave a motivational talk, and at the end, I always give a wave to the audience. What they did is they took a nanosecond clip and said, bannon's throwing a. A, A Nazi or Roman salute. They just came out today. Byron Yorker over the Washington examiner came out with a. A photo of. Of Kamala Harris doing the same thing a couple of years ago where she waved to the audience.

[Unknown Host]

Just silly.

[Steve Bannon]

No, but what they're trying to listen the speech. I gave the speech and said, because.

[Unknown Host]

You go like this, you go, but it's your problem.

[Steve Bannon]

I'm waving to the crowd.

[Unknown Host]

I just did it.

[Steve Bannon]

You're waving to this. And by the way, the French guy. Yeah, with the French guy, it's easy to do. With the French guy that said he wouldn't come. They had a thing, a Front Nationale, where I talked to their group. Seven years ago, I did the exact same thing. I went up and waved to the crowd like that. And I go, oh, God.

[Unknown Host]

Nothing you've said today indicates that you have any adoration for or sympathy for any. Any of the Hitler.

[Steve Bannon]

But what they didn't want to do is cover the speech. In the speech, I said, the whole world's media's there. The same guy. The whole world's media is there. They're not there to see Bannon because they get enough of me yelling at the microphone four hours a day. They get Elon Musk. They don't need more Elon Musk. They get Elon all the time. They don't need Trump. Trump, another hour in the thing today, signing executive orders and blowing them up when he's asking questions. Trump's so far in their head, I sit. And they're not there for J.D. they get enough of J.D. too. They came because they want to see where the power in this country lies, is with this populist movement. And they can't understand it, and they can't destroy what they don't understand. And so they're all there to see these people. And I said, you are the power, Trump. When Trump went back to Mar? A Lago after they stole the 2020 election, hey, the entire Republican Party abandoned him. Everybody was de banked, de platformed, all the oligarchs kicked him off everywhere. It was his base that said, fuck this. If you're in, we're in. And when he said, I'm in, understanding. And this was the greatest moment of moral clarity and one of the greatest profiles in courage. You take Kennedy's book. Read them all, all eight examples. I think he's got 10 examples. They don't compare to Trump. Trump understood if I do this and are not a good little boy and stay in Mar? A Lago and build more golf courses and write my memoirs, if I come back and try to reclaim the presidency that was stolen from me, they will try to throw me in prison, they'll try to bankrupt me, they'll try to destroy my country. He understands.

[Unknown Host]

Maybe they'll try to kill you and.

[Steve Bannon]

Eventually try to kill you. He is the American Cincinnatus. This is his famous mythical Roman general that went back and retired. And when the nation was having a crisis, right, in a war, they went to him and said, you got to come back and save us. Trump came back, and that's why it's General Washington, Lincoln and Trump. This will be known as the Age of Trump. And here's the thing. They're not in history. They're not going to give a fuck about Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, J.D. vance. They're going to care about Donald Trump and MAGA. They're going to say, this guy was a billionaire that came and basically formed a populist nationalist movement that gave the country its sovereignty back and gave the country its freedom back. And that's why I think he's not only one of the greatest presidents we've ever had, he's one of the two or three greatest Americans we've ever had. And this is why I'm a huge proponent of trying to see if he can't stick around as long as possible because. At least for another term after this. Because.

[Unknown Host]

Well, that would require amending the Constitution.

[Steve Bannon]

Well, we'll see about that. No, but then, people, you don't think.

[Unknown Host]

He'Ll be too old?

[Steve Bannon]

Certainly won't be too old. Look at his energy now. His energy.

[Unknown Host]

Great energy.

[Steve Bannon]

Great energy and sharpness. Listen, a guy like this comes along once a century. Sure, we had one in the 18th century.

[Unknown Host]

But he'd have to win again, right? I mean, let's say it would be another election.

[Steve Bannon]

Yes.

[Unknown Host]

Because this is what people tend to.

[Steve Bannon]

Always say, no, no, no, no. No winning more elections. We're not concerned about that. We think that this guy is on a roll right now. We think we're building our coalition now. We have to deliver. Right. There's gonna be. Some people should understand the next three or four months are gonna be a firestorm on this capital about spending, about taxes. And I'm a big proponent that if we can't cut spending enough, if there's not enough revenue coming in from tariffs, you're gonna tax the rich.

[Unknown Host]

You're a Steve Bannon, tax the rich.

[Steve Bannon]

I said in the Oval in 17 when, you know, he had Gary Cohen, Mnuchin and Jared myself, and I told the president then you gotta take the upper bracket and we gotta tax him. We gotta increase.

[Unknown Host]

What's the upper bracket?

[Steve Bannon]

Well, here's what I'm saying is that right now, where does that start?

[Unknown Host]

Before I get on board with this.

[Steve Bannon]

Hang on. You're probably going to fall into that. No, right now, if you look at. No, Steve. If you look at the $4 trillion.

[Unknown Host]

These private planes are expensive and they're dangerous.

[Steve Bannon]

If you look at the $4 trillion. So if we don't extend the tax cuts. Right. There's basically, as Scott Best said, there's a $4 trillion tax increase coming. If you take couples filing together under $400,000 combined, that is essentially 2.6 trillion of that. Okay? So that covers. And I would actually say increase that maybe to 500,000. Then you have a couple hundred band for pass throughs of entrepreneurs with small companies. That leaves about a trillion dollars for the, for the, for the, for the top 5% or the top 3% and that. So that those tax cuts would not be renewed. Their taxes would go back to the previous tax.

[Unknown Host]

39.

[Steve Bannon]

Yes, and I'm actually saying that.

[Unknown Host]

And I could get behind. I could say that's okay.

[Steve Bannon]

I appreciate that.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, I don't. I'm just saying I think.

[Steve Bannon]

Is there any way we could now.

[Unknown Host]

Hold taxes after $8 million.

[Steve Bannon]

Well, they do that now, I think, on, on, on estate taxes. Let me give you one more piece of, of, of, of news, though. That's in the existing taxes we have today. So I'm a proponent of. President Trump is too. No tax on tips.

[Unknown Host]

Yes.

[Steve Bannon]

No tax on overtime. No tax on first responders, military, veterans, et cetera, podcasters, right wing podcasters. No tax on Social Security. That adds up when you accumulate it, that's about another trillion dollars. So our gap goes from 2 to 3 trillion.

[Unknown Host]

Gotcha.

[Steve Bannon]

And so we gotta close that. And my point is, the best way to incentivize the oligarchs and the wealthy and the lords of easy money on Wall street to help us cut spending is they've got to get in back of. Because the puppets here in D.C. respond to those guys. You've got to have your lobbyists, you've got to have everybody help us work on cutting spending. If we can't cut spending, we can't continue on a $2 trillion deficits. Not only may you not get, in my view, not get the extension of the Trump tax cut, I think you got to talk taxes on financial transactions. Taxes on. You got to kill the carried interest. You have to kill all of the.

[Unknown Host]

Carried interest they should have killed a long time ago. No one's killed it.

[Steve Bannon]

No one's killed it.

[Unknown Host]

Chuck Schumer and everybody.

[Steve Bannon]

It's not. And by the way, the Democrats always fold. Remember, Democrats fold in the first hundred days. I'll show you what funnies there are in the first hundred days of Biden's regime. They came out with all this tax on billionaires. Remember that? They had a program tax on billionaires. It never even got through a committee. They just because the Democratic Party has controlled by billionaires. And so this is, I think, where we gotta get tough. I just saw a poll today that 50% of Republican voters, President Trump's supporters, 50% agree that if we gotta close this gap that they support taxing the wealthy. I just think it's, I think it's just gonna happen. And to me it's just logical.

[Unknown Host]

I'm not against it. And I think that we should care for. I've always said, listen, I lived in California for many years, pay high taxes. And I said, if I was living in a place where it was nice and people were being supported and cared for with the money, it's great. But if I'm paying 13 and a half percent of my money and someone is using the bathroom in the middle of the parkway.

[Steve Bannon]

I'm asking questions like Bill Maher and others. I finally started to wake up to the fact after the Palisades debacle of exactly what you're paying for. Listen, I'm not for higher taxes. What I'm for is fiscal sanity. We're in a financial crisis. If we can't. If President Trump's geoeconomics on tariffs, cuz he doesn't think of tariffs as a 25% tariff on a Mexican avocado or some under the hood part from Canada. He looks at it as we have a premium market that's basically supported and made robust by working class people. You have to, if you want to get through the golden door, you got to pay a premium. Like you get a skybox at a sporting event or a front row ticket to a concert. You either move your manufacturing here and create jobs or you're going to pay a price for it. He believes. I think like Navarro, eventually a third of our total revenue can come from external sources, not internal. But if we can't cut spending, get more duties, fees and tariffs from outside sources, that gap at $2 trillion is not sustainable and it's just going to keep driving inflation. It's got to be cut if you want to get under a trillion dollars and Doge doesn't come up with those types of cuts, which I think right now is still to be seen, there is ways for an abuse but we can't get to those cuts. Eventually you have to get additional revenues. Those revenues to me should come from financial transactions carried interest others and obviously the wealthy that can made us so well from the 2008 collapse. I mean we've created more wealth for them. The Wall Street Journal today just has a report out that the entire economy, you know, 70% of is or a third of the purchasing power, but 70% of the overall is driven by the top 3% people making more than $350,000 a year. I think that's not. We can't continue into that system.

[Unknown Host]

No, that makes sense.

[Steve Bannon]

We have a capitalist system.

[Unknown Host]

We gotta keep it.

[Steve Bannon]

Well, we have a capitalist system with no capitalist. Think about it. 70% of the people in this country don't own financial or real assets. Right. They have to have a piece of the action. If you have everybody the piece of the action. And this is not socialism. These people never ask for anything.

[Unknown Host]

No, that's not fairness.

[Steve Bannon]

It's also practical. President Trump keeps saying it's a revolution of common sense. Common sense means let's get everybody to be a capitalist. Let's get everybody to be owner of something. Financial assets, real assets, skin in the game.

[Unknown Host]

Care about the community.

[Steve Bannon]

Care about the community. Once you incentivize people with actual ownership, you create a capitalist system. Right now we have a oligarchic system, right, That's a huge government, a handful of players in each industry, whether it's media, whether it's defense contracting, whether it's big pharma, health, the oligarchs in Silicon Valley that have elite merger or elite capture, right? Or regulatory capture. This has to be broken apart. And they're just not going to sit there and say, oh, this is brilliant. Why didn't we think of that? We'll just toss you the keys. Every day is going to be a fight. And we're asking people in your audience, as you become awakened to what reality is, you know, understand they're always going to try to throw, oh, it's Nazi salutes, or these guys are nativists, or they're racist. We're everything. We're anything but. We're saying that the greatest resource this country's ever had, ever had, is its people, particularly working class and middle class people. It is what has created more value, more, more wealth, freed more people than any nation in the history of the earth. And what we have to do is make sure that they're incentivized and rewarded for that. And we do that, this thing is going to thrive like nobody's business.

[Unknown Host]

Steve Bannon, thank you so much for coming on. You got Trump elected. Can you get me elected to the.

[Steve Bannon]

I didn't get Trump. Trump got himself.

[Unknown Host]

Well, yeah, but you were instrumental in it.

[Steve Bannon]

I had a small role.

[Unknown Host]

Could you make me the mayor of the Pacific Palisades?

[Steve Bannon]

First off, first off, I'm still going to work on your thing. You want to opt in for the, for the. No tax cuts for the podcasters, right?

[Unknown Host]

No, I'm very serious about that because we're the new media and we have to pay. I pay this lug, I pay producers, I pay people their meals.

[Steve Bannon]

All these guys bitched and moan when they got here. They weren't paid enough and they all bitch and moan.

[Unknown Host]

I'm telling you, the podcasters are the most suffering. I mean, yes, the working class and whatever. And Ukraine, I can't hear about that anymore. The podcasters, we're spending the money know. All right, thank you. Steve Bannon, thank you for coming.

[Steve Bannon]

I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Unknown Host]

Thank you so much.