Stephen K. Bannon is back in the War Room, and he's here to talk about the crisis in South Korea, and the Chinese Communist Party's betrayal of our ally, the United States. He also talks about the economic problems China is facing, and why they should be worried.
00:07:24.000And that's why yields on Chinese debt have absolutely collapsed.
00:07:28.000We actually saw the exact same thing here during COVID, despite the fact that the government was, again,
00:07:34.000spending trillions of dollars it didn't have.
00:07:36.000Yields on treasuries fell because the Fed essentially pledged to buy all of that debt.
00:07:42.000We also saw the exact same thing at the outbreak of World War I in Great Britain when they held, they pretended to hold, really,
00:07:51.000these bond rallies where they would get people to buy the debt of the British government.
00:07:56.000And that was supposed to be a sign of people's confidence in the British pound and in the British government,
00:08:03.000the fact that the yields on that debt were falling.
00:08:06.000Except it turned out that 100 years later, documents were finally released showing that the Bank of England was the chief purchaser of all of that government debt.
00:08:16.000In other words, there was no confidence in the pound.
00:08:19.000There was no confidence in the British government.
00:08:21.000And it was simply the Bank of England, again, buying all of that debt.
00:08:26.000So we're seeing the exact same thing today in China.
00:08:29.000That's why the yields on Chinese debt have absolutely collapsed.
00:08:33.000It's not because people all of a sudden have confidence in the Chinese regime.
00:08:49.000The problem here is that this devaluation of the Chinese Yuan, the renminbi,
00:08:54.000is going to give their exporters another big advantage over American domestic producers because it's going to affect the relative value of those currencies.
00:09:05.000In other words, it will make it look like Chinese goods are even cheaper than they already are.
00:09:10.000So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party aims to achieve right now in all of these monetary maneuvers is, again, to further rob the American people of our ability to compete with them on the world stage.
00:09:23.000And this is something that was going on back during the first Trump administration.
00:09:28.000The previous Treasury Secretary, Mnuchin, was supposed to be all over it.
00:09:33.000He only was for a little bit and then kind of gave up with policing the currency manipulations by the Chinese Communist Party.
00:09:41.000And I think Scott Besson is going to do a much better job than Steve Mnuchin did of really staying on top, again, of all the monetary manipulations out of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:09:51.000And we're going to have to not only stay on top of it, but we're going to have to punish these bad actors as they try to manipulate currency markets and give their exporters an unfair advantage over our domestic producers.
00:10:03.000This is about protecting American industry and protecting American jobs and therefore American people.
00:10:10.000E.J., are they – or Dr. Antony – are they doing this to front load and get ahead of – they know President Trump is going to come in with tariffs.
00:10:23.000They understand he's going to renegotiate these trade deals.
00:10:26.000Are they trying to do this to get ahead of it to make sure that they're even – not even more competitive, but they're basically loading up the debt to undercut prices?
00:10:36.000So this is where their state capitalism comes in.
00:10:39.000Is this to get ahead of what they know President Trump with Navarro and Besson are going to go?
00:10:48.000It's very similar to when retailers will jack up their prices right before Black Friday and then they have a so-called Black Friday sale where the prices are now 25 percent off.
00:11:00.000OK, but you just raised the prices 25 percent the week or the month before.
00:11:06.000The Chinese are trying – the Chinese Communist Party is trying to do the same thing here.
00:11:11.000So they're essentially going to make their exports even more artificially cheap than they already are so that when the currently proposed tariffs get actually put into place, it essentially just resets the chessboard so that they're hoping that things will be right back to where they were a month or two ago.
00:11:31.000Again, this is where I'm very, very hopeful that Trump, that Besson, that Navarro will be all over this.
00:11:38.000And one of the key ways I think that we can keep an eye on this, Steve, is something that Judy Shelton highlighted not that long ago in a recent book of hers where she talked about the currency manipulations that countries like China are engaged in.
00:11:52.000And a good way to monitor that would be to look at how much gold does the dollar buy versus how much gold does the renminbi buy.
00:12:01.000And as you see the renminbi falling behind gold faster than the U.S. dollar, that is a good numeraire.
00:12:07.000In other words, it's a good objective standard by which you can measure both currencies to see which is devaluing faster.
00:12:14.000Now, that's not to say that the dollar has been great against gold.
00:12:18.000That's one of the reasons why so many people, including myself, have been recommending that people buy gold as an inflation hedge.
00:12:25.000However, the Chinese renminbi has been even worse, and it's a sign that they are trying to devalue their currency even faster than we have devalued our currency here.
00:12:35.000And again, the aim there is to give themselves an unfair advantage in global markets.
00:12:41.000And so you can very easily then tie a kind of tariff or a non-tariff barrier to the relative gold price of different currencies.
00:12:51.000In other words, if you, Chinese Communist Party, are going to devalue your currency relative to gold, relative to the U.S. dollar, then we are going to impose a tax on everything you send to this country that makes up for the difference.
00:13:06.000If you're going to allow your currency to fall, to lose, let's say, half of its value, then we're going to put a hundred percent tax on that in order to, again, reset the playing field and try to put us on a level playing field.
00:13:20.000And again, all of this goes back to this idea that they are going to try to make up for the inherent failures within their system by siphoning wealth off of the American middle class, as you articulated, Steve.
00:13:34.740Yeah. E.J., can you hang on for one second? I just want to hold you for a few minutes after this break.
00:13:41.580Beggar thy neighbor in military might.
00:13:47.020Frank Gaffney and the team over there are showing that they're having a bigger military buildup for dollars than Hitler had starting in the mid-1930s.
00:13:56.720And now you've got the beggar thy neighbor monetary policies and the trade policies.
00:14:00.980When this all fails, and it will fail for the Chinese Communist Party, their pivot to keep to keep the folks at bay is to point to the foreign devils and say, we've got to go to war.
00:14:13.260That's why what's happening in South Korea.
00:14:15.380So South Korea to the Third World War is bloody Kansas to the Civil War.
00:17:37.820Illegal immigrants feeding wildfire epidemic in California.
00:17:41.960Now, very rarely do I unironically quote the Washington Post on War Room, but hey, it's 2025, new year, new me.
00:17:49.260Illegal immigrants who hike through the rugged forest and mountains of eastern San Diego County after making it across the border are causing a dramatic surge in wildfires because of the fires they light when camping out in the area, state and county officials said today.
00:18:03.220Now, I know we're talking about San Diego, which is about, what, an hour, hour and a half south, including L.A. traffic, so it's actually not that far.
00:18:10.400But I think we know under Joe Biden, these numbers have only multiplied by a radical, radical, radical increment.
00:18:58.920But the only one that wasn't, it's only because the cause was undetermined.
00:19:01.840And I guess it started in Mexico, so you could choose how you want to categorize that.
00:19:05.160And then in July of 2024, an illegal immigrant deported three, sorry, illegal alien, got to get my nomenclature right, deported three times, set a California fire that killed a mother and her two young children.
00:19:22.360And like I said, as someone who was born and raised in L.A. in a house that is now under currently evacuation orders, for those of you who spent time in L.A., you know what the whole beach scene is like.
00:19:32.260The Malibu area where all these famous historic restaurants have burned down.
00:19:36.600And it's homeless people, it's people parked out and camped out in cars.
00:19:41.140I mean, there are fires just waiting to happen.
00:19:43.100There's clips all over social media of mentally ill homeless people, illegal aliens, setting fires for just no known reason.
00:19:51.880And the police officers don't do anything about it.
00:19:54.840Not to go anecdotal, but my parents, who still live there, take my wonderful dog Rosie on a walk on the beach every single morning.
00:20:29.960I guess at least they know you have money so then they can, what, tax you and charge you with a crime because, hey, at least they know you'll be able to pay.
00:20:39.300Because in other words, you don't have papers.
00:20:41.420That's what it's like living in California, right?
00:20:46.480That's what happens when you have Democrat supermajority rule for so long.
00:20:51.380I mean, Newsom is responsible for more destruction right now than anything that allegedly happened on January 6th.
00:21:01.760And I guess they'd say, oh, well, hey, Democrat supermajority rule, it's so great, at least you can get, what, an elective abortion at nine months post-birth?
00:21:12.080Hey, at least your kid can transition at age six months.
00:21:18.680At least your driver's license in California, you can now be non-binary and use, what, the pronouns, you know, Z-Zer.
00:21:25.360Except the thing that they don't tell you is that that driver's license is probably going to be what you're using to escape a fiery inferno.
00:21:32.500Then you're going to have to abandon your car because the roads are so poorly maintained and the urban planning by all these brilliant, Harvard-educated expert elites that are running the city of Los Angeles don't know what they're doing.
00:21:43.000And by the way, it's a fire that never should have even happened in the first place.
00:21:50.480I want to put a video of Gavin Newsom, if you haven't picked up, he's the guy we're going after on this show, justifiably so, next to me.
00:22:01.580Now, do you guys remember, and you can just keep playing it, when Steve was in prison, like a true man, I believe I sat here, had something to do with immigration.
00:22:13.760And I sat here and I said, the Democrats' version of masculinity is making you sit in a cuck chair and watch the destruction of your country, the degradation and mental illness propaganda spreading against your children.
00:22:28.280And they want you to sit there and take it and do nothing about it.
00:22:32.200And that video of Gavin Newsom is that version of masculinity to a T.
00:22:38.160I'm so glad, dude, that you got the photo op.
00:24:25.240Can you sort of give the audience an overview, what it's like, if you're friends in the area, where we stand now with the fire?
00:24:31.280Yeah, luckily for us, we're further south in Republican Orange County.
00:24:38.820But we've had multiple friends have to evacuate the Palisades.
00:24:43.800Multiple people who worked at Breitbart have had to leave their houses because the – and Peachy Keene, she's a great Twitter person.
00:24:51.920She was in – well, she said she was near Pasadena, so I'm not doxing her or anything like that.
00:24:57.160So the fires – the fires are so out of control now that they – so to people who don't know the California landscape well, which is obvious because when people argue with me about California, it's pretty clear that they don't.
00:25:10.280You have the Palisades, which is in one of the most desirable places to live in the country and in the world, and it's a little bit north of Malibu, but it's in the Malibu area.
00:25:22.360I remember because I went to law school at Pepperdine being surprised at how rural Malibu was because if you grew up anywhere else, you hear Malibu and you think it must be this glitzy place.
00:25:39.640So when these wildfires hit, they just jump house to house, and they go through all of this dried forest that hasn't been well-maintained.
00:25:48.480And then the fire just kept spreading south, and it's also reached because of the winds, Pasadena and Santa Monica, which is a huge – we're talking a 40-mile area.
00:25:58.880Nobody thought the fires would get this bad because there had always been fires in Malibu.
00:26:07.700So this is going all the way up from the Palisades.
00:26:10.420If you have a map, people can look at the map, Pacific Palisades, all the way south, putting Santa Monica in danger, and then also heading east, putting Pasadena in danger, which is bizarre.
00:26:28.940Mike, before we go to break, just give me a minute.
00:26:31.520Your sort of overarching thoughts, our theory of the case here in War Room, the state has been mismanaged.
00:26:37.580You know I'm from Santa Monica from start to finish, starting with Gavin Newsom, all the way down to the DEI hires and all the woke stuff if you want to entertain that.
00:26:46.260But your thoughts on if you think that this really calls into question the leadership in California and Los Angeles?
00:26:53.980Yeah, there needs to be a federal response.
00:26:55.640One of the persons who I think deserves a lot of blame for this and a lot of rancor, I think we need to not be nice to these people, Maria Shriver.
00:27:03.000However, even though RFK Jr. is Maha now and there's an alliance there, that family members who attacked him, there were Kennedys who were on the city council of Santa Monica.
00:27:12.200These people have been ground zero for the destruction of California.
00:27:16.600Their liberalism has been ground zero, not RFK Jr., but the Kennedy family.
00:27:20.580So I'm saying that we've got to be careful how we talk about it because we don't want to insult RFK Jr.'s family.
00:27:25.920But people like Maria Shriver and them are saying, oh, I can't believe it.
00:27:30.200What do you mean you can't believe it?
00:27:31.580You vote for Karen Bass instead of Rick Caruso instead of voting for a visionary real estate developer who is basically a Democrat.
00:29:28.620Got to get up to speed on government gangsters before the cash confirmation hearings commence, which, as we have suggested, need to start January 21st, the very latest.
00:29:38.780We are still joined by the one and only Mike Cernovich, who is in California right now.
00:29:44.760Mike, I sort of want to pick up where we left off, but sort of through this lens of, you know, Rick Caruso versus Karen Bass.
00:29:51.000For people who don't know who exactly these people are, I think that's sort of an interesting insider jumping off point to more broadly demonstrate how California, Los Angeles politics have contributed to the situation that we're seeing unfold right now.
00:30:31.600Everywhere you looked, you were in awe.
00:30:34.180And Rick Caruso was one of the developers in Southern California.
00:30:40.080He did the – before Calabasas got famous from the Kardashians, he developed Calabasas.
00:30:45.640He developed the Grove, which was a big plaza.
00:30:48.360And he was known for using a lot of water features and making – blending shop – not to sound like an architect, but blending the water features and feeling like you're kind of in nature or kind of in a courtyard while also commercial shopping.
00:32:12.260He ran how you would have to run for California, which if you're a purist outside of California, not a great idea always to comment about California politics.
00:32:50.840And here's where I don't want to sound cruel, I don't want to sound grim, because people I do business with have lost their homes in Palisades.
00:32:58.160Close, close friends of mine have lost everything.
00:33:00.940Their houses are gone, the schools they send their kids to are gone.
00:34:34.240Under the Constitution, there's a case to be made that the federal government needs to come in to enforce the civil rights of the people to act in a reconstruction kind of manner.
00:34:44.160So I want the Trump administration, and I'm a citizen and resident of California, I want the Trump administration to exercise its constitutional power to come in and fix all the election fraud.
00:34:58.300They have this authority under the 14th Amendment, Section 5.
00:35:02.180They have the authority to enforce the rights, the civil rights of me, the citizen, which is being deprived by the state government of California, where people can't trust the elections, where somehow these Orange County Republican areas all went Democrat, even though everywhere else was trending for Trump.
00:35:18.140But somehow Michelle Steele lost her election, even though, you know, she didn't run a good race.
00:35:22.280And I said that to their faces and they wouldn't listen to me.
00:35:37.360I want the I want the federal government under Trump to come in and clean the state up and they have the constitutional authority to do so.
00:35:44.100Obviously, MSNBC Media Matters, take your pick.
00:35:52.000But to that point, we opened the show with a clip from MSNBC where they're already somehow indirectly trying to blame Trump for this, saying that he withheld disaster aid and the whole Gavin Newsom back and forth over wildfire response.
00:36:06.140So where do you think there is either the proven track record on the Trump side that shows that he would be up to task to do this better than Gavin Newsom or conversely?
00:36:14.660I know you've been tweeting up a storm all day, but I mean, when you really dig in, whether it's the salaries or just the the abject failure and the prioritization, I always think DEI is too sort of cheeky a term.
00:36:25.160It's everything that's anti straight white male.
00:36:30.280But make make make the case contrary to what MSNBC is saying, that Trump has botched emergency response, pandemic response.
00:36:39.320Well, this is why nobody other than conservatives watch MSNBC anymore, just to kind of know what the idiots are saying, because that's true, because there's no credibility what they say.
00:37:15.800But to address blaming Trump, Obama, they quit doing wildfire clearings.
00:37:21.060I posted links to all all documented sources because I want everything I say to be to be truthful and to be unimpeachable.
00:37:28.720They the Biden administration quit doing the clearing because they were afraid a fire would happen and they would get blamed, even though they knew there was a bigger risk of a fire happening.
00:37:36.580But then they could say, well, it's not our fault, which is what Democrats do.
00:37:39.640Don't don't do anything that somehow might lead to a very low risk of a bad outcome because you might get blamed.
00:37:46.440Just let the druggies burn this stuff.
00:37:48.640Most of the Bernie's already talked about climate change, even if people believe in that, which I hope nobody watching this thinks is manmade.
00:39:19.620Biden, I guess, is still president, although his press conference got cut off show today.
00:39:23.120So there's no there's no logical way to blame Trump because Trump himself was saying in 2019 people found his old posts, then called tweets.
00:40:24.640And war room posse, you want to talk about a little bit of live producing.
00:40:29.180It's not every day that you're hosting a show where your brother, who, by the way, is tried to actually be a firefighter, but I believe he was turned down.
00:40:49.220Hey, the house just got the mandatory evacuation.
00:40:52.400Do you think I should call someone to get the documents out?
00:40:55.080So thank you, Joe Biden, and thank you, Gavin Newsom, and thank you, Karen Bass.
00:41:01.540For allowing me to have a moment where I have to question if the house that I grew up in is still going to be standing.
00:41:10.220And if all the documents, the pictures, my parents' wedding, me growing up, it's going to be okay.
00:41:17.200So I really hope, Gavin Newsom, that it was worth letting a ton of illegal aliens pour into California, wasting money on God knows what corruption that you profited off of, you and your disgusting wife.
00:41:31.560All you Hollywood execs who voted for Democrats just because they were Democrats, because you didn't have the moral courage to stand up and vote for people who are going to save this country and put damn water in frickin' fire hydrants.
00:41:48.340Sorry if that's me being high maintenance.
00:41:52.840I like my countries and my cities and my towns where the fire hydrants actually have water in them.
00:41:59.380I don't live in the third world, and I don't want to import the third world, and I don't want my tax dollars to go fund stupid wars in Ukraine so my house might catch on fire and burn down.
00:42:11.560So what? We can all pat ourselves on the back and say, we're a multicultural, eco-friendly, climate change-friendly country.
00:42:27.080From the bottom of my heart, I'm so glad that you became, as you announced in your press conference, a great-grandfather today.
00:42:33.180Because a bunch of Americans are about to lose their homes, and let's not even get into the Americans who've lost their damn lives under your role as president.
00:42:45.360I'm not just talking about Afghanistan.
00:42:47.160Yeah, you know, I'm sure Lake and Riley's parents would love to have had the ability to become great-grandparents, but you took that away from them.
00:42:55.720I hope you sleep well at night, and I hope you sleep well at night in a prison cell, because that's where you belong.
00:49:42.440I think a man was just arrested for wielding a machete at the United States Capitol and a few knives for good measure, I guess, when they say diversity is your strength.
00:49:49.680They were talking about the type of weapons that people use to commit attacks with.
00:52:36.800I want to warn you of a huge change that could be coming to our money and our bank accounts.
00:52:42.120First, think back to 9-11, shortly after the government pushed through the Patriot Act.
00:52:46.120This gave the government power to spy on innocent Americans by monitoring our phone and email and tracking our movement across the Internet.
00:52:54.980Now, Jim Rickards, editor of the independent financial newsletter Strategic Intelligence and New York Times bestselling author,
00:53:01.640is warning about a coming event that could elevate this governmental surveillance to a terrifying new level.
00:53:07.820In fact, some of the guests I've had on The War Room believe that the government will soon expand their powers to track our every move.
00:53:15.700If we say the wrong things on social media, donate to the wrong causes, buy firearms, or even vote MAGA,
00:53:22.700the government may be able to shut us out of our bank accounts.
00:53:25.940I can't say for sure if this will happen, but it's an interesting and dire warning.
00:53:32.120Fortunately, Jim Rickards, an American patriot and friend of mine,
00:53:35.140has made it his mission to educate us on what he believes is coming
00:53:38.880and how to protect yourself from the possibility of programmable money.
00:53:44.620Watch Jim's warning video now before it's censored like I've been in the past.