Stephen K. Vann is joined by Ambassador Rick Grinnell, Roma Dharavi, Taylor Strand, and Rick Lockrey at the Kennedy Center Honours to honor the late actor-comedian Kelsey Grammer.
00:16:41.220Here we are inside the now infamous Butterworths on Capitol Hill for the very special Boxing Day edition of The War Room.
00:16:52.220I'm joined now by my business partner at this dear place and our executive chef and our sommelier and the guy who, when push comes to shove, scrubs everything in here from top to bottom and fixes everything.
00:17:51.220But let's, before we get into the craziness, let's talk a little bit about how this came together because you're kind of not the sort of person that we would have thought would put together a place that has become known as a quote unquote MAGA hangout.
00:18:20.220But you were one of those people once upon a time at least staring through the windows of this place, window licking, some might say, when it was something else.
00:19:15.220And if you look around the capitals right down the street.
00:19:18.220And mainly what they have to eat or have to go to lunch meetings or have to go out after a long day is like a hamburger place and like a taco place.
00:19:27.220And I sort of found that just incredibly embarrassing.
00:19:30.220Because like when you think about a country that has its own culture and has its own people, one of the first things you have to figure out how to do is eat.
00:19:40.220And you see this in like in some of the sort of great countries of the world.
00:19:45.220Like France has an incredible eating culture.
00:19:47.220Japan has an incredible eating culture.
00:19:57.220And so when you're forming a nation, like have you figured out how to eat?
00:20:02.220And it was incredibly embarrassing to me that the people who sort of quote unquote run this country had no idea how to eat and ate so poorly.
00:20:08.220And so the idea of building this like beautiful dining room in this place where people could gather right here on the hill was so obvious when you looked at the building.
00:21:24.220I don't have the temperament of a hospitality person, which is funny because my father was, this is probably why, my father was in hospitality for so long that I've kind of shunned it as a concept.
00:22:11.220I mean, like the the the the the politics of America are changing rapidly.
00:22:15.220And so part of the part of the comfort to me of doing this thing that this that we get protested for and certain members of the media really hate us for and whatever it may be,
00:22:25.220is that the the the dining establishment from the Roman Empire till now is a is a sort of populist thing.
00:22:46.220I remember very distinctly in 2016, right after Trump took office the first time, I remember reading a tax plan by Steve.
00:22:55.220And I was a Democrat at the time and I took it to my then girlfriend.
00:22:59.220And I sort of was like, have you read this?
00:23:01.220Because we this huge chunks of this are copy and pasted from the Bernie campaign that we had just worked on.
00:23:06.220And so this idea that there's there's these like sort of this rich establishment that is that is hellbent on ruining our lives affects you whether you're a Democrat, whether a Republican really doesn't matter.
00:23:16.220These oligarchs are here to take our money regardless.
00:23:19.220And so and your agency and your agency and your freedom and your and your and your way of life, to be perfectly honest.
00:23:26.220And they want to replace it with things that make them money.
00:23:28.220And so and so the the interesting thing about this place, I have a very distinct memory early on of you and one of Bernie's former campaign staffers holding court at the end of the bar for almost an hour.
00:23:42.220And and if you and if you didn't know who you were, you didn't know who she was, you guys agreed on almost everything.
00:23:47.220I mean, it was very obvious that like there were there were there was a certain a certain populist bent to the whole thing.
00:23:53.220And so this place has always had some of that. Right.
00:23:56.220Like as long as as long as you can hold a conversation about those things, like you're you're welcome here and you're more than happy to be here because that's where that's where politics are headed.
00:24:05.220The left right thing is getting destroyed.
00:24:07.220It really is like, are you part of this ruling class or are you not?
00:24:11.220And we're all going to find ourselves together and we're all going to hang together, so to speak, if we don't win.
00:24:16.220And so and so that's been amazing. Steve was an earlier supporter.
00:24:34.220And I want to move on to that a little bit if I can.
00:24:37.220I think for the audience who kind of lament me playing a Steve role here and interrupting.
00:24:43.220I keep trying to convince Bart that we need to have our own podcast out of this building and talk about not just like who comes in here and the conversations that happen here and all that fun stuff as well.
00:24:54.220But it's about what you're talking about.
00:25:25.220And don't be afraid to talk about how brilliant British food is.
00:25:29.220Well, this this is going to be a long winded way of getting there.
00:25:32.220But sometime after World War Two, the sort of ruling powers that that be decided they could replace our food with with with fake food with with food that has no nutrients, no calories whatsoever.
00:25:46.220And what we did was we decimated the American farm.
00:25:48.220We decimated the American farmer and we replaced it with a global supply chain where we get shrimp from China and we get beef from Argentina and we get corn from Brazil and we get all these things and they're shipped to us.
00:25:58.220And in that shipment process, they die.
00:26:00.220And they're number one, they lose all nutrients and they lose everything that's good for you and eating food.
00:26:05.220But more importantly to me, because I'm not the healthiest guy in the world, they lose flavor.
00:26:10.220They just don't taste as good, period.
00:26:11.220There's no way to ship something hundreds of thousands of miles.
00:26:14.220And they and they did this to make an extra 50 cents on whatever it was that they were doing.
00:26:18.220And they did it in some regards to strip us of our way of life.
00:26:21.220And so part of how we design a menu here is we work with local farmers who are within 200 miles of this place.
00:26:26.220Like if something has to get on an airplane, we're not selling it.
00:26:29.220What I prefer is on Monday mornings when we work with these Amish farmers up in Pennsylvania, when they drop off the vegetables, if you're here early enough, you'll see a guy with the hat and the beard.
00:26:39.220And he drove in on a truck that's 30 years old and he drops off the vegetables that he grew himself.
00:26:44.220And number one, those things are better for you.
00:26:46.220But number two, they taste significantly better because they're not dead and they're not sitting in a thing.
00:26:50.220And number three for me personally, I get to know that like his family is going to take the money that I give them and they're going to spend it to have more kids and keep their farms and do whatever it may be.
00:27:18.220You have to sort of like retrain your palate around those things.
00:27:21.220But it's one of the ways that we have to sort of take back our agency in these regards is like you retrain your palate because those things do taste better.
00:27:27.220They might taste better the first time you try it because we're not used to it anymore because for 70 years now we've been fed junk.
00:27:34.220But sort of that's the way we make dishes.
00:27:37.220You have things on the menu that scare a lot of people.
00:28:58.220Sign up for free and be part of the movement.
00:29:01.220It's, you know, it is one of those things where it's, I know that it's better.
00:29:06.220So whether they know what it is or whether they've tried it, I know once they do try it, they're going to be way happier than whatever it is they're usually eating.
00:29:13.220And these things are not, they're new to us, but they're not new to the country and they're not new.
00:29:19.220Like our grandparents would be really happy with this menu.
00:29:23.220So like the oyster thing, for example, like, you know, in New York in the Bay, it was full of oysters during the sort of Ellis Island import of new Americans.
00:29:34.220And so one of the things you would do if you were an Irishman or an Italian coming over during that time is you knew that if you got to New York, like this, this had spread back to the old country.
00:29:42.220You knew that if you got to New York, you could survive off of just grabbing oysters out of the Bay because there's so much protein and so many nutrients long enough to get a job and to sort of become an American and to become part of this.
00:29:51.220And so those, those, those, those things that we eat, the bone marrow, that's, that's a way of not wasting cows, right?
00:29:57.220Like we were once one of the greatest cattle countries in the world and hopefully we'll return.
00:30:01.220And we got there by not throwing away the bones of the cow.
00:30:08.220And so, and so I know if I can get people to eat these things, number one, they're going to enjoy them because they're, they are delicious.
00:30:23.220In fact, you have rave reviews from the New York Times Magazine, from Tom Sietzema at the Washington Post, from virtually from the New York Times Magazine.
00:30:30.220From virtually from the Wall Street, I mean the Wall Street Journal front page.
00:30:46.220And it, it sort of just became that, right?
00:30:48.220A lot of it because of, you know, who I am and, and, and bringing Steve in and Steve hosting so many parties here and then it just sort of snowballs, right?
00:31:00.220Um, so you've been sort of thrown in at the deep end because, you know, I don't think, I think most people in MAGA, maybe MAHA is different.
00:31:36.220This is part of the, this is, this part of the thing that I was talking about earlier, which is we like the, the, the canola oils and the, and the seed oils that, that we usually cook with or most restaurants usually cook with, they're not made in America.
00:32:08.220Um, but it's been interesting to watch the politics develop around this because people are all of a sudden are interested in this sort of nationalism that says like, no, no, no.
00:32:16.220The things we make are just as good as every other country in the entire world.
00:32:19.220Um, and so we, we, we grow amazing cows.
00:32:40.220Why would we be, why would we not be making our French fries in, in the fat that comes from these cows instead of importing seed oils from China?
00:33:29.220I mean, the, the food critics would come in and they would, they, they would read about how it's a MAGA hangout before they would have the food.
00:33:58.220I mean, the, the, the French are renowned for their good food.
00:33:59.220Um, and they're, they're wrong about a lot of things and they, and they, they've got some strange things going on, but they've never imported food ever.
00:34:07.220And they're like, this like sort of far right country by any stretch of the imagination.
00:34:10.220But you will not find a Frenchman eating a steak from Spain to save your life because they make cows in France and their cows are better because they're proud of their country.
00:34:17.220And, and they're allowed to be in a way that Americans really never have.
00:34:26.220And I saw this clip of, in the first season, um, they get asked to go to a, a Spanish place and the, the very snobby French professor says, sure.
00:36:39.740He actually does seem to have a sense of humor.
00:36:42.140At one point, I think they decided they were too white and they demanded one of their black friends come down.
00:36:46.140So here he is with the American flag and immediately gets in trouble because he's getting in people's way and harassing them.
00:36:50.920They were all doing that all night, by the way.
00:36:54.220But you'll see in a second that when somebody tries to counter-protest them, the police don't allow them the same free speech that they allow these far-left paid protesters.
00:37:04.920So here I am outside the pub, dinner and a show for me.
00:37:10.340And I sat there with this cacophony of noise for three whole hours just to show them they don't bother us.
00:40:58.660I think it is imperative that in addition to dominating the politics, that MAGA learned to dominate the culture too.
00:41:08.480And, you know, in a lot of ways, it doesn't just mean imposing our will or our view onto the rest of the city or indeed the rest of the nation through those things.
00:41:18.760The same can be said, by the way, for the Smithsonian institutions.
00:41:23.160And I think you'll hear a lot more about that stuff in the year to come.
00:41:27.760There's a lot of things that, you know, I can't tell you that I know is coming in the next year.
00:41:32.560Because it would give the opponents of these things a little bit too much of a heads up.
00:41:39.000But there is so much coming down the pipeline that the president is working on, that Ambassador Grinnell is working on, that Secretary Hegseth is working on, that the MAGA crowd is working on.
00:41:54.540And that, indeed, Stephen K. Bannon, the War Room, and myself, we've all got big plans for 2026.