The War Room is back with a brand new cold open and a special guest from Daily Wire's Peter Berardelli. President Trump speaks about Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and much, much more!
00:01:24.380Right from the Oval Office, the President of the United States, two press briefings today, tons of news the President's making about the war, about our allies, et cetera.
00:01:48.400some great guests and we're absolutely packed for the next i don't know one hour and 55 minutes
00:01:54.800let's go ahead and let it rip in the cold i'll be back with you in a couple of minutes iran is a
00:02:00.080deeply polarized society it's not polarized 50 50 i would say it's probably polarized 20 80 i don't
00:02:06.360think the regime has more than 20 popular support but for dictatorships to survive you don't worry
00:02:12.320about the breadth of your support. You need the ruthless devotion of a small minority.
00:02:18.780And this regime's, the ruthless devotion of the minority in Iran has been reawakened by this. And
00:02:25.400as they say, there's no factions and foxholes. It's a regime fighting for its survival. It showed
00:02:31.680last January it's willing to kill tens of thousands of people to stay in power. And I think they're
00:02:36.440going to continue to have their fingers on the trigger for the foreseeable future.
00:02:39.740Now that you've announced that the U.S. has destroyed all of Iran's mine-laying ships, why can't the U.S. just immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz?
00:02:50.340Well, we could, but it takes two to tango. We have to get people to take their billion-dollar ship and drive it up.
00:03:00.160have when when pepe has his big sugar ships coming around and they cost a billion dollars
00:03:09.440and we say i think it's okay now pepe take your ship drive it through the strainer for him as he
00:03:14.760may say let me wait a little while because it takes it takes uh ship owners and the you know
00:03:23.680these ships are very expensive they can cost up to two billion dollars so they don't want to take
00:03:30.340a chance that gee i think i think you'll be okay they got to know it so they don't have to set you
00:03:36.860know we don't know if they even set any minds but the thought that they may have is enough to keep
00:03:43.540people from saying we don't need it now we are pounding that area that coast as you know left
00:03:51.800side we're pounding it like really pounding it hard and uh again they may have no mindset
00:04:01.520we hit every one of their mind droppers they call it the mind layers right the ships they're pretty
00:04:07.020sophisticated ships every one of them is gone but it only takes one so it's it's a little unfair
00:04:14.820you know you you win a war but they they have no right to be doing what they're doing but we're
00:04:20.460hitting them very hard. And today is a big day where we're pounding a certain area that
00:04:25.200has very much to do with the strait. And I think we'll get it going very soon. In addition,
00:04:32.760we do have other nations coming in. You need people to watch and people to see. We have other
00:04:38.180nations coming in. Look, look what happened in the last two weeks. They weren't supposed to go
00:04:44.040after all these other countries in the Middle East. Those missiles were set to go after them.
00:04:50.040So they hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait. Nobody expected that. We were shocked.
00:05:00.520Some are very enthusiastic and some are less than enthusiastic. And I assume some will not do it.
00:05:07.900I think we have one or two that will not do it that we've been protecting for about 40 years
00:05:12.240at, you know, tens of billions of dollars, Mr. Speaker.
00:05:16.840So I'll I'll be reporting that to you in the House and the Senate.
00:05:20.900And I'll say, why are we protecting countries that don't protect us?
00:05:24.520And I've always felt that was a weakness of NATO.
00:11:36.040it's this has been kind of controversial i think the cia has had uh a unit uh i don't know if the
00:11:44.680department of war but i thought it was somehow associated either with the weapons lab or the
00:11:48.360pentagon in some way haven't haven't we had this as kind of a start they were going to put up
00:11:52.360startup or angel round cash into uh nascent deals yeah the cia has had a venture firm which you know
00:11:59.860about which we don't know that much for obvious reasons but you know for a long time and and by
00:12:04.040way like people on wall street have gone into government for years of both parties um this one
00:12:09.320for whatever reason in the moment that it's landing into the kinds of deals that it's going
00:12:13.580to be doing and ultimately who its client is going to be which is the president of the united states
00:12:18.420feels a little more like interestingly coded i think um you know certainly we had a lot of people
00:12:24.740on wall street were in doge right you know tapped pretty heavily from particularly silicon valley
00:12:28.920venture tech bankers out in California. You know, but Gary Cohn went into the first Trump
00:12:35.540administration. You know, there are people who you'll remember from your days at Goldman,
00:12:38.940you know, for whom it was like a real act of public service. And this is being pitched really
00:12:44.020as kind of a once in a career opportunity. You know, the documents that I'd seen dangle,
00:12:49.020you know, correctly that this is it's $200 billion over the remainder of President Trump's
00:12:55.140term and they kind of say this is this exactly this is more money than you will deploy in your
00:12:59.720entire career which is which is correct um it's not totally obvious to me where the money is
00:13:04.880coming from this may be from the ndaa from the military um you know budget process the trump
00:13:11.680administration also mostly in the commerce department and some other places thinks it's
00:13:17.540going to get a couple hundred billion dollars maybe a trillion dollars through these foreign
00:13:20.860trade deals to invest. And I think if you squint at it and kind of put the pieces together,
00:13:26.800it looks a little bit like the sovereign wealth fund that the president has said that he wants.
00:13:32.880Is this, we want to hold you through the break, but we got 60 seconds for sure. Is this the
00:13:38.060beginning of really an official industrial policy? Because people say, hey, funding the Pentagon
00:13:42.200with over a trillion dollars is really the industrial policy of the United States. Is
00:13:45.700Is this just a fund that accelerates that?
00:13:49.840I mean, look, we've had real industrial policy, you know, for five or six years now, going back to the CHIPS Act, the Biden administration.
00:13:55.120And it has become a bipartisan thing, this idea, as unpopular as the government picking winners and losers may be.
00:14:01.100And, you know, we could all go back and remember what an albatross Solyndra was for the Obama administration.
00:14:05.560It's become kind of bipartisan policy that we should be more thoughtful about how we're investing.
00:17:46.380You know, take, for example, the investment in Intel, right?
00:17:49.440When that popped, I remember thinking, like, oh, guys, like, I don't know.
00:17:54.660But it did kind of what it was supposed to do, I think, which is, you know, private money came in behind it.
00:18:00.560It sort of put a floor under the price.
00:18:02.340It was a vote of confidence in the CEO who was in a tough spot.
00:18:05.420And a lot of private money followed and stocks done well.
00:18:08.640Still real questions over their ability to manufacture really important chips domestically.
00:18:15.220um the question is like what are they doing right if they're giving money to things that
00:18:22.100that the private markets couldn't otherwise finance like okay the government is is an
00:18:27.640is typically a lender of last resort or how you think of it it could be an investor of last resort
00:18:31.740but then you worry like okay is this just adverse selection or the if these are deals that are good
00:18:36.340or promising technologies the market would do that there's a lot of money floating around out there
00:18:40.560So then it's like, OK, is it trying to get a return for the taxpayer? Right. If we're going to be funding all of these things to the budget process, is it you know, we're going to give a lot of money to Intel through the CHIPS Act and the Trump administration.
00:18:53.060So actually, we want some stock in exchange for that. OK, I don't think as a taxpayer I'm going to get my cut of that in any way, but that's that's an alternative.
00:19:01.980But then the real question is, are they trying to influence day to day operations?
00:19:05.000And I think, you know, the Trump administration between the Department of Defense and Department of Commerce probably stakes in like 12 or 15 companies now.
00:19:13.360And my understanding is they haven't really meddled that much.
00:19:16.700They've done a little meddling at U.S. Steel where they have that kind of actually no economic interest, but this golden share, this kind of vote in the boardroom.
00:19:25.560And that is, you know, it's a union issue.
00:19:28.220It's a labor issue that they feel strongly about.
00:19:30.220Okay. Is it going to be telling Intel what chips to make? If it's buying, you know, you could imagine it's going to buy some whatever industrial coolant from Blackstone that turns out is like really critical because it's really efficient at cooling data centers, which is obviously a thing in AI that the Trump administration cares a lot about.
00:19:47.260Okay. Is it just providing a long-term purchase agreement for that company that can now go out and finance itself in the market? That's just like pretty fine and basic.
00:19:54.440Is it going to say you have to make this thing here and here?
00:19:57.100He's talked a lot about invoking the Defense Production Act in other situations.
00:20:01.180And really, by the way, unrelated, has massively lit a fire under defense contractors, right?
00:20:08.300So what happens if the way that they're running their business doesn't pass muster?
00:20:16.180That was the come around they had with the – the six CEOs came in the White House, I think, Friday or Friday a week and got a come around.
00:20:23.800And I think they were implied, hey, here's the defensive production.
00:20:26.760Either you guys step up or we're going to have to put Peter Navarro in charge.
00:20:43.820The center of gravity of the war in Iran is not Tehran, but it's really the Persian Gulf with our allies.
00:20:49.440oil the straits are the straighter her moves was when the navy is going to be able to keep it open
00:20:56.040our allied navy is going to help us but in asymmetric warfare is about economics you got
00:21:00.980all the cash sitting in dubai in the banks you've got cash they're monetizing the oil through the
00:21:05.960chinese i mean there's so many things you can do do you see this as really a cover to get some of
00:21:10.940the smartest best and the brightest like the cia did after world war ii and get them into the
00:21:16.020Department of War as a economic warfare unit? I've never been as squeamish about the revolving
00:21:23.680door as some other people. And it's important to remember that it revolves both ways, right?
00:21:27.560If you're going to care about what people do when they leave government, then the flip side of that
00:21:33.240is sometimes there's really smart people in the private sector and we should get the benefit of
00:21:36.700their expertise in the public sector. And one way to do that is to incentivize them to spend. And
00:21:42.400by the way, this pitch is like, it was pitched explicitly, this is not a career change. This
00:21:45.440Just come for two or three years, serve your country, do a lot of interesting stuff, make a lot of connections that you can then go monetize when you leave.
00:21:52.860Look, the U.S. government, the U.S. is obviously very good at fighting kinetic wars.
00:21:59.320But it is just the deepest and most liquid capital markets in the world.
00:22:03.760And, you know, the kind of fracturing of the global order over the last couple of years has balkanized the global economy, but has made the U.S. more central.
00:22:14.360I mean, the capital markets here are just incredibly, incredibly powerful. And, you know, if you're looking around for ways to press your advantage, like that's an obvious one. The flip side of that is we're really, you know, reliant on global energy flows. And there's been a lot of talk about, well, we are energy independent in the U.S. Why is gas more expensive, you know, if we're not importing? And the answer is that it's a global market. That is one place that just cannot be bullied.
00:22:38.680And so we're going to have to deal with the consequences of that.
00:22:42.580But, you know, we have a lot of money to invest.
00:22:45.500The U.S. relative to other economies actually invests it relatively efficiently.
00:22:50.660We get a fair amount of GDP boost for our investment dollars.
00:22:54.900And, you know, that exuberance on Wall Street, exactly the companies whose clients, you know, the Pentagon now wants, you know, the bankers to hire, their exuberance, their willingness to take risks.
00:23:05.720It gets us in trouble, but it is also the reason that, for example, we bounce back faster from 2008 and from COVID than Europe did because they rely on these banks that are sort of commercial banks, very stodgy.
00:23:18.320They don't have a lot of that capital markets investment DNA.
00:23:22.120And, you know, it helps us pull our way out of recessions faster.
00:23:25.700It is obviously a competitive advantage globally.
00:23:28.160Yeah. And those banks are all either have been state-owned or just recently went public or have a history of being economic bureaucrats instead of capital markets.
00:23:38.180And they're very parochial and they stop at borders and it's a problem.
00:23:42.000Exactly. Liz, where do people follow your – where do they follow your reporting, social media, and how do they get to compound interest?
00:23:50.980You can sign up for compound interest wherever you get your podcasts. Actually, our episode dropping this week is right on this topic.
00:23:56.560We spoke to the head of the American Dynamism Fund inside Andreessen Horowitz, the sort of America-first defense investment fund.
00:24:03.500It's a super interesting conversation.
00:29:46.460america's number one preparedness company my patriots apply with over three million satisfied
00:29:53.760customers make sure you're one of them war room here's your host stephen k man
00:30:00.480we've got good news in georgia i'm gonna get to in a second on the 2020 election fight in courts
00:30:07.560i want to go to chip roy running for the attorney general in uh in texas what explain to the
00:30:12.560audience, you know, we had your competitor on, Mays was on here a couple of days ago,
00:30:17.080and we asked him the same question. Just walk us through, why are you doing this? What do you
00:30:21.300think the biggest issues are? What do you think is confronting the folks in the state of Texas,
00:30:25.960and what are you going to do about it? Yeah, Steve, I could have stayed in Congress and
00:30:31.460continued to fight affairs 1 435th of one half of one third of the federal government, but there's
00:30:36.580a limit to what you can do. As an executive in the state of Texas, you can lead. And frankly,
00:30:41.080right now, Texas needs leadership to carry us forward. We're under attack. We're under assault
00:30:45.760by radical leftists, Marxists, by the Wren Collective, by all of the radical leftists
00:30:50.480and the Soros funding that are putting criminals on our streets. But most importantly of all,
00:30:53.980the advance of Islam in the state of Texas. With all due respect to Mays, I have no idea what he
00:30:57.820said on your show. I wouldn't have seen it. But he's never been a lawyer. He's never practiced.
00:31:02.620He's never prosecuted a bad guy. He's never been in court. He's never stood before a judge.
00:31:06.180He's never done a damn thing, Steve. Literally nothing except to use his granddaddy's money to
00:31:10.140buy power, to buy a seat, to pay to become a state rep, to pay to become a state senator.
00:31:15.900And frankly, I've devoted my entire life to the cause of freedom, whether it was as Ted Cruz's
00:31:20.140chief of staff, as a lawyer for Rick Perry, as the first assistant attorney general where I was
00:31:24.720filing important matters in court, as a federal prosecutor, where I was putting bad guys in jail,
00:31:31.000and now in Congress where I've been leading the fight on every single issue. And you know it,
00:31:35.040right, with respect to the SAVE Act, spending, dealing with the border issue, HR2, leading the
00:31:41.060fight on every single front. Mays takes his granddaddy's money, goes on TV and spreads lies,
00:31:46.480says that I'm saddling up the transgender lobby because I dared to try to improve a bill to try
00:31:50.740to figure out how to get it through the Senate and the logjam that it is so that we could actually
00:31:54.300get something done to stop these ridiculous and horrific transgender procedures. The bottom line
00:32:00.160is we need an actual proven fighter who will stand up and fight. And by the way, somebody who's
00:32:04.120independently minded, somebody who will stand up and do the right thing. And I think I've proven
00:32:08.700that over and over again. And if we do not win the battle of Islam, if we don't have a smart
00:32:13.620constitutional lawyer who can stand up and explain how this is a political ideology,
00:32:17.600that this is not a religion, this is not something that can hide behind the First Amendment.
00:32:21.700This is the Muslim Brotherhood laying out a precise plan to attack our state and our country,
00:32:27.020and they're doing it. And we're not doing anything about it. And by the way, where the hell has
00:32:31.100Mays Middleton been? As a state senator and state rep, what has he done in Austin to do anything
00:32:36.700to stop the continuation and the advancement of all of this? The fact is I've been throwing my
00:32:42.120body in front of the train in Washington last year in the big, beautiful bill trying to stop
00:32:45.600expansion of the SIV Afghani program, trying to stop the increase of legal immigration while also
00:32:52.360trying to halt illegal immigration. And we need a proven fighter who can stand up for attorney
00:32:56.740general, get into court, defend Texas, go on offense. And if we're in the minority in the
00:33:01.980House and the Senate after this fall, and if, God forbid, we have a Democrat in the White House in
00:33:06.80029, Texas will lead the defense of Western civilization. And you've got to have somebody
00:33:13.340with a proven pedigree to do it, not somebody who needs on-the-job training.
00:33:18.920You've seen this being a member of the Freedom Caucus. You've seen this over and over again
00:33:22.160in washington trying to move things about the established order the financial and business
00:33:27.260interests the business community chamber congress things like that you know and i would submit that
00:33:32.720in ken paxton's reign as attorney general he was fighting the business community and the vested
00:33:38.160interests as much as he was fighting radical democrats and he was fighting radical democrats
00:33:42.620in the biden regime every day um as i as we went down i kind of shifted the show down to texas i am
00:33:50.160stunned at how advanced this this islamic invasion of texas and that's why i'm so proud of the prop 10
00:33:56.660it is so much farther advanced we've had pito mackalvaney come in from london
00:34:00.880a couple times he said hey in the same time frame of how they came to london it's much more
00:34:06.760advanced in texas and one of the reasons is people are making a lot of money on whether
00:34:11.320it's halal food or whether it's real estate deals that they're paying a premium as attorney general
00:34:16.520I mean, it's just not terrorist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and CARE, which obviously you and the governor are going to have to figure out how to really implement them being terrorist organizations, what you're going to do.
00:34:30.040It's also now a business community that's making an awful lot of money and sees this as a whole new segment for the economy.
00:34:38.900If you really want to stop this invasion and then reverse it, you're going to have to do that.
00:34:42.720So as attorney general, you'll be the lead sled dog.
00:34:45.880what's your what are your thoughts on that yeah first of all you get out publicly and you say it
00:34:50.940I've done that and I've done it many times over in fact CARE has been protesting my office because
00:34:54.760I've led legislation to take away their tax status I've led legislation to vet people for
00:34:59.620Sharia law but you got to be willing to stand up and say it and I did that on the house floor two
00:35:04.220years ago and farther back than that in fact the last substantive conversation I have with Charlie
00:35:08.480Kirk was on this very topic but the biggest thing you can do as attorney general besides use the
00:35:13.540bully pulpit to make sure everybody's aware of it, is to use your power to open the books of
00:35:18.580these nonprofits and go look at the, I believe, 600 organizations operating in Texas. Amy Meck,
00:35:25.460our good friend who runs Rare. Amy is a warrior for freedom, a patriot out there calling out
00:35:31.340all of the advancement of the Islamification of Texas and Sharia law and everything that's
00:35:36.220happening to undermine Western civilization. Amy's brilliant. I had one of her great folks
00:35:40.680testifying in my committee that I chair, the subcommittee of the constitution that I held a
00:35:45.260month ago on Sharia law. I've been leaving on this issue for a long time, but you got to have
00:35:50.620somebody willing to do it and somebody willing to go open up the books, follow the money, figure
00:35:55.220out where you can cut the head of the snake off because the Muslim Brotherhood and CARE, those
00:36:00.160are just two very notorious examples. There are hundreds of examples of organizations funding
00:36:06.160this purposeful invasion. In fact, if you go look at the memo from 1991 of the Muslim Brotherhood,
00:36:12.300they literally talk about how it is basically a quiet jihad, that they're saying that this
00:36:18.440takeover of North America, of America, of Texas, that that is a quiet jihad that they're called to
00:36:24.300do. They are waging war with our way of life, and we're letting them hide behind the First Amendment.
00:36:30.200This isn't about your belief system. This is about a political ideology designed to uproot,
00:36:35.320upend and destroy everything that we hold dear, our Judeo-Christian values, our laws,
00:36:42.140our constitution, our declaration to be supplanted with Sharia, Islamic law, and the advancement of
00:36:49.700Islam in the West. We must stand to thwart it and stop it. And if your goal is to undermine America,
00:36:55.100then you're my enemy and you need to be removed. And the attorney general of Texas needs to be
00:36:59.280willing to say it, needs to have a track record of having done it, and then needs to do it.
00:37:05.320People talk about Epic City, but as we've been up in, you know, north of the Dallas-Fort Worth of Metroplex, you have a half a dozen things like this, maybe not the scale.
00:37:51.860And let's go back to the corporate interest problem.
00:37:54.560Like, honestly, this is what really galls me, is the state of Texas now, for the better part of two decades, post 9-11, you know, our country has allowed some 5 million people to come into the United States from majority Muslim countries.
00:38:09.260That is a federal issue from an immigration standpoint for sure.
00:38:12.460But let's not ignore the fact that Texas, Texas corporations, Texas government, Texas leaders
00:38:19.220generally, that Texas was saying, hey, bring all these people in for labor. We need folks to come
00:38:24.900in and then do H-1Bs, diversity visas, chain migration. And all of that was purposeful,
00:38:31.100and it was designed to appease the corporate interests. That's one of the fundamental problems.
00:38:37.240Texas has too much corporate interest coming in trying to buy up our state.
00:38:42.000They're buying up our land, they're buying up our ranches, they're buying up our cattle,
00:38:45.820they're buying up our meat processing, they're buying up a lot of our businesses,
00:38:48.840but they're also trading with, you know, bringing people in who aren't Texans.
00:38:54.140And importantly, go back to my opponent for a second, they're trying to buy elections.
00:38:58.540Like my opponent spent $15 million of his own money against me running negative ads,
00:39:04.740saying that I'm the devil and that I'm not nearly strong enough for the state of Texas.
00:39:08.780I raised every dollar that I've ever run on.
00:39:11.000And, you know, my opponent's been doing this for years, buying the seat.
00:43:25.240I mean, and again, where are they in the legislature?
00:43:28.180We need more of that standing up and announcing this to the people of Texas.
00:43:32.820And as attorney general, I would do that, follow the law, defend the Constitution, but stand up and say that Islam is not compatible with the West.
00:43:53.520Fellow patriots, the Federal Reserve has betrayed America for over a century, printing fiat, inflating away your savings, serving globalist masters.