In this episode of the War Room, Steve and his guest, Michael Peaden, discuss the current economic and political crisis facing the United States and the world, and how we can fix it. They also discuss the need for a new economic policy that focuses on family formation, and what it means to have a family.
00:00:28.820I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:34.700Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:38.480If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:44.860War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:00:50.180It's Saturday, 18 July, Year of Our Lord, 2026.
00:00:53.100Terry Schilling, I got Michael Pack on deck.
00:00:55.920We're going to get to Michael in just a moment, the great filmmaker.
00:00:57.800Terri, before I let you go, we spent the first part of the show talking about $300 trillion of global debt, from sovereign debt all the way to what you owe on your credit cards globally, and that we're heading towards a margin call, which is going to be catastrophic and lead us to a crisis.
00:01:18.980Here in the United States, we are, you know, what, 40 trillion of debt.
00:01:23.360The first nine months of this year, $1.4 trillion deficit spending.
00:01:47.040But when you're in a jam, you're in a jam. And he gets some phone calls from the Saudis and you say, well, we can't afford that. And the next thing you know, that's off.0.92
00:01:57.100One of the ways to turn this around, one of the basic building blocks is to get more stability is family formation.
00:02:04.340Right now, family formation, you say, is in the late 30s. First time homebuyers are in the 40s.
00:02:08.820that post-World War II and really throughout American history has been the backbone of the
00:02:14.360country. Family formation, particularly in your young 20s, has been a backbone, has been a backbone
00:02:20.260of the American economy. And now it's getting later and later. And the reason it's getting
00:02:26.280later and later, let's face it, women are sitting there looking at guys. You have 12 million STEM1.00
00:02:31.020workers. They're not in the labor force because you have all these foreign workers here on H-1B1.00
00:02:36.660visas, working class blacks and Hispanics. You've got you flooded the zone with Bovino says 1001.00
00:02:43.800million illegal aliens. At least we know there's 20 million here from the Biden regime that they
00:02:51.200look and the women are making a rational thing. Hey, can this guy, you know, as much as I love0.96
00:02:56.060him or as much as I think we have chemistry, can he step up to the plate and really provide
00:03:01.520economically to support a family with a couple of kids. This gets later and later and later.
00:03:07.760That's a big a ticking time bomb as the hitting 100 percent of GDP to debt. On top of that,
00:03:16.500you have artificial intelligence. And I say, as bad as our finances are in the country in the
00:03:20.840balance sheet, we are making a virtually a suicidal economic bet, a highly leveraged bet
00:03:26.780on artificial intelligence to deliver massive productivity increases
00:04:17.640What's that going to be like when we make robots to replace us, when we make robots to do all of our jobs, when we take away purpose and meaning from people?
00:04:24.360And, Steve, if you look at the DEI, everyone focuses on DEI as a cultural phenomenon.
00:04:32.360They're blocking out young men out of the entry-level jobs, out of college degrees, out of medical schools, out of law schools because of the color of their skin.0.64
00:04:42.220And so now you have a whole situation where a bunch of young white men who are very capable, very smart, they scored higher, they don't have any jobs.0.62
00:05:07.240It was not just 10 years ago where you wouldn't smell weed everywhere.
00:05:10.480But young men are withdrawing from society, and that's going to have a reverberating effect on young women as well.
00:05:16.020And so the more we go without getting young people married again where there's an economy that doesn't make sense for young people to get married,
00:05:22.340the more miserable we're all going to be the more we're going to be in therapy the more we're going
00:05:26.220to be on anti-psychotic medication the more our economy is going to actually be cheap steve the
00:05:30.980economy's fake you used to have be able to support a family off of one income you'd have a vacation
00:05:35.480home you have a second car you'd have anything you wanted and now two incomes doesn't do that
00:05:40.880two income two lawyers don't do that a plumber doesn't do that anymore it's it's atrocious and
00:05:46.240we need to get serious about fixing our economy and reorient it towards the family and towards
00:05:50.960the trades, frankly. I think we've sent way too many kids to college. Steve, I don't ever use my
00:05:55.060college degree. I could have read all these books myself. We paid all this money for it, and it's
00:05:59.840worthless. And you'll find that, actually, if you sit down with the American, we're doing focus
00:06:04.200groups right now in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, and what keeps coming up is everyone
00:06:08.580says their college degree was a scam. They don't use it. It was way too much money, and it's
00:06:13.340completely unnecessary. Someone who didn't go to college, Charlie Kirk, turned out pretty
00:06:19.400successful uh terry where they go and get uh more information about this because this is a
00:06:25.240it is a fight that we need people informed on you you need to get your arms around what it means to
00:06:32.260be uh and i'll get you back we're kind of out of time between the natalist and the pro family which
00:06:37.460is profound but i'll hopefully get you back this week to talk about that um where do people go to
00:06:42.040get all this information where they start getting smart about the family as the core building block
00:06:46.900The American family is a core building block to the country itself, and particularly the economy, sir.
00:06:53.900Well, just go to AmericanPrinciplesProject.org, sign up to get all of our news and email updates, and check me out on Twitter or on X.
00:07:04.120It's just Schilling, S-C-H-I-L-L-I-N-G, 1776, Schilling, 1776.
00:07:09.920We're going to have a new report coming out, Steve, in the coming weeks about how we reform and rejigger the economy to be about reviving the American family.
00:07:17.580I'm very excited to share it with everyone.
00:07:19.840Wow, that's coming out late July, early August?
00:07:33.820Yeah. American president, by the way, the leading the guy that really went all in early on in transgender was amazing.
00:07:41.560Michael Pack joins me. Michael, I want to get to the films you're doing, and particularly this one, particularly I want people to see, get a taste of it and where they can go to see all of it.
00:07:50.560But I got to ask you, and this is because the confirmation hearings this week, the president and his powers to pick.
00:07:57.200So we have 4,000 people that any administration, whether it's Obama or Biden or the president, get 4,000.
00:08:04.5803,000 of those, you basically get a security clearance or some sort of rudimentary security clearance.
00:08:10.600You can show up for work on the afternoon of 20 January of any, you know, the first day of the administration, you can show up.
00:08:18.600So 1,000, and these are the more senior members of the government and people that really have massive decision-making responsibility, have to get confirmed by the United States Senate.
00:08:30.040They wanted to make sure that the legislative branch had some check over the president for just putting in whoever he wanted at any time he wanted.
00:08:39.080And so I've always called the Senate is really the human resources department of the government.
00:08:43.780Now, what used to be a process of advice and consent, because that's what it's supposed to be, has turned into a partisan warfare. You were the most celebrated, I would say, as being a conservative filmmaker at the time of the conservative filmmakers.
00:08:58.840You were kind of the guy that made the films that could play on PBS or go into theaters, right, just under your skill set and not be more tense towards more, I don't know, of a propagandist as yours truly, Stephen K. Bannon was.
00:09:13.980Now, you were nominated to run the most important element of kind of the global communications for the United States government, a revered position.
00:09:24.320And we controlled the Senate at the time.
00:09:28.080Mitch McConnell, I want you to talk to me about how long after you were nominated by the president, did you kind of sit in limbo so that the left-wing media could destroy you, your professional life, and your family, sir?
00:09:45.640Well, as you know, the president asked me to serve in March after he was elected, you know, two months after he was sworn in.
00:09:53.700And it took three years and three months before I actually walked through the door of the US Agency for Global Media. And I served for only eight months to the end of that term. You know, they succeeded in blocking me. My main opponent was Senator Menendez. And he was very skillful at that.
00:10:39.380And it did not stop, as you just pointed out, after I did walk through the door and was confirmed by the Senate.
00:10:45.700You know, my agency and I personally were sued endlessly in the District of Columbia, a great place for Democrats to sue Republicans.
00:10:53.900And it went on, on even beyond the end of the Trump administration into the Biden administration, because as you often point out, they are relentless.
00:11:03.560You know, one kind of victory is not enough.
00:11:06.660They really want to, you know, burn their enemies to the ground.
00:11:09.120Now, you were nominated in March of 2017, right?
00:11:16.220You actually walked through the door, was it in March or April of 2020, sir?
00:11:23.540When did you actually go through the door?
00:11:25.800It was, I think it was May or June of 2020.
00:11:29.440So three years and three months later.
00:11:32.860Yeah, I mean, by the time I was serving, they were already into the next presidential campaign.
00:11:39.120And I tried very hard to get the Voice of America and the other agencies under the USAGM banner to at least portray that presidential campaign fairly.
00:11:49.080And that was a battle and not an easy, not a battle.
00:11:58.080Most, well, first off, we're going to go to break here in a second.
00:12:02.720Why did they throw down so hard on you?
00:12:04.900They did for a lot of people who just quit, but why did they single you out to say, we have to go to general quarters to keep this guy from getting his hands on Voice of America and the rest of, you know, Radio Free Europe, Radio Asia, all of it?
00:12:20.420Why did they pick, why did they say Michael Pact is a guy that we have to burn it down before he let him take over?
00:12:30.880Well, before I came there, this was like a really sleepy agency.
00:12:34.160I mean, it spun off from the USIA in the Clinton administration, and it had really been run essentially by Democrats through the intervening, you know, 20 plus years.
00:12:45.640And, you know, I assured my wife and family that my own nomination and service would be uncontroversial.
00:12:53.280And like many of my opinions, that turned out to be wrong.
00:12:56.180I think what it comes down to, Steve, is not me personally.
00:13:00.320But I think that they recognize that this is a huge media enterprise.
00:13:05.320I mean, on one hand, you could say it's just a mid-level government agency, but it's also, it was at the time, had a budget of almost a billion dollars a year.
00:13:13.720There were 4,000 people in the agency, mostly journalists.
00:13:16.780It was one of the biggest media enterprises in the world, if you combine the five broadcasters, Voice of America, Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio for Asia, Middle East Broadcasting, and Cuba Broadcasting.
00:13:30.760And the left sees the media as something that they have to control.
00:13:35.560And this was something they wanted to control, both for its own, just to control the messages that went out to hundreds of millions of people all over the world, but also to put their own journalists in and, you know, put them in, bring them out.
00:13:50.020It's a place to house journalists and credential journalists, and they controlled it, and they did not want to give it up.
00:13:56.280I mean, my only goal was to bring it back to its actual legal mission, which is to be fair and balanced and present a fair picture of America and to sort of support Americans' foreign policy goals and represent them along with criticism all over the world.
00:14:13.700And I simply wanted the thing to be covered equally.
00:14:16.660But as I often say, if you control 100 percent of the message and someone says you're going down to 50 percent, you see that as a 50 percent loss.
00:18:55.220And their willingness to do anything was astounding.
00:18:58.240I mean, you talk about the media coverage.
00:19:00.860I mean, the media, when I was growing up, used to be what I call biased, where they present both sides and they would more favorably present the sides they agreed with.
00:19:11.800But by this time, it's well beyond bias.
00:19:14.680Only one side is presented in those 40 pieces.
00:19:17.940They never interviewed anybody who agreed with me or anybody who could explain what I was doing about visas, about the firewall, about editorial independence, about anything.
00:19:28.760They interviewed only one side and they were willing to lie.
00:19:33.160I had a comms director who would try to correct their lies all the time.
00:19:36.660After a month or two, he had to be transferred somewhere else.
00:19:59.440Hard won knowledge. You know, you had the situation that if you went if if the Senate, which is, you know, President Trump's now a year and a half into his second term.
00:20:07.660So it's been five and a half years in the Senate has never been on a day of recess.
00:20:12.940Why the Republicans are in charge and they've been in charge during President Trump's time.
00:20:19.920Why is that? Why is the Senate not take an official recess and then President Trump can get in some recess appointments?
00:20:26.120you would have been a very logical choice in the first year.
00:20:29.540And there's some limitations on recess appointments.
00:20:31.660They only go for so long, or I guess they haven't been court challenged about that.
00:20:36.220But why is the Senate decided, and there's been no other president this has happened to,
00:20:42.240why has the Senate, controlled by Republicans, made a decision that Donald Trump is not worthy of taking a recess
00:20:50.020and letting him think through maybe he should have a couple, three recess appointments?
00:20:53.980And maybe that's even a guy like Michael Pact.
00:21:21.400I just want to make sure the audience understands this.
00:21:23.740He was they he did not head the committee. The committee was headed by Republicans.
00:21:28.100He's the ranking member. But they turned over because obviously Mitch McConnell did not want you in there.
00:21:34.560They determined let Menendez do the dirty work here.
00:21:38.260And he was more than glad to do the dirty work because the Democrats hated you to your core being because you were Trump's minion.
00:21:44.760Right. But that's my point. Why why would why would they let the committee we control?
00:21:49.960because this audience has rang enough doorbells and given enough $10 contributions to make sure
00:21:56.380they're in power, why would they turn that power over to the Democrats? Well, part of it,
00:22:02.140a partial explanation in this case is that Menendez really wanted to block me, and he was
00:22:08.740willing to trade things to the majority to do that. I mean, they were willing to, you know,
00:22:13.540he's willing to say, well, I'll confirm all these ambassadors. And ambassadors don't make
00:22:18.760much difference, period. I mean, you know, the president can call foreign leaders. He doesn't
00:22:23.780need ambassadors to sort of go into their presence. And Senator Menendez and the Democrats
00:22:30.900saw this as important and willing to trade off their chits to stop me, because they saw the
00:22:36.880control of the media as important, and Republicans did not. Beyond that, I don't know. I mean,
00:22:43.140the workings of the Senate and of Congress in general are an eternal mystery to me.
00:22:51.300I mean, one of the things that struck me in my eight months there is how many Republican
00:22:56.860members are controlled by their staff. And a lot of their staffs are weak, whereas the Democrats
00:23:03.200had way better staffs and way more experienced staffs, and they operated more as a machine.
00:23:10.660I mean, you know that very well, Steve, and I think there are historic reasons for that, but it's not a good thing for Republicans.
00:23:18.520Let's pivot now to you've been making films. You're making films and playing over the Wall Street Journal.
00:23:22.680We're going to play this after the break, but talk to me about your overall filmmaking with the Journal and what this film, particularly why this struck your interest.
00:23:30.160Because I've always said PACT has a great nose for what is important and kind of what's downrange.
00:23:37.820What are the films you're making over there and why did you choose this subject?
00:23:40.660well as you know we make the long form documentaries and now we are doing these
00:23:46.420short documentaries with the wall street journal and we have an incubator program to train the next
00:23:51.320generation of sort of right of center or at least fair-minded documentary filmmakers but the project
00:23:57.100with the wall street journal is a series of short films 30-minute films that look at issues and
00:24:02.500events from the recent past that have been misreported underreported or memory hold and
00:24:09.060And the first – and they're free, not behind the Wall Street Journal paywall.
00:24:13.340They're all at wsj.com slash opinion docs, or you can just search – or you can go to palladiumpictures.com, my company, and find them.
00:25:52.580And I think things like the declining work ethic in America comes from this COVID period and even a lot of people's trust in government, that the government will solve all their problems.
00:26:06.360This rise of socialism comes from the habits formed during COVID.
00:26:09.760And I think it's important to tell the story in the Wall Street Journal opinion people agreed.
00:27:41.920Open your eyes, no time to be blind, open your mind to see, we're in a modern day, holy war, coming after your mind to find your soul, oh, oh, it's true, modern day.
00:28:05.740Everyone's focused on how the conflict in the Middle East is raising oil prices,
00:28:09.500but there's another grim reality to this contention.
00:28:13.960Oil isn't the only resource being constrained.
00:28:16.360About one-third of global fertilizer trade happens through this region.
00:28:21.260And with spring planting season on top of us, American farmers are sounding the alarm,
00:28:26.020with some saying they can't afford to plant their fields.
00:28:29.100When one piece of the supply chain gets hit this hard, you know what comes next.
00:28:33.480higher food prices, reduced availability, maybe even panic buying. That's why having an emergency
00:28:39.900food supply at home makes so much sense. And that's where our friends at MyPatriotSupply come
00:28:46.620in right now at preparewithbannon.com. That is preparewithbannon.com. We've set up an entire
00:28:53.640just site for the war room posse. You go to preparewithbannon.com. That's all one word,
00:29:01.000preparewithbannon.com. You get a three-month emergency food supply. They'll include a free
00:29:07.140mega protein upgrade, an incredible $200 bonus you don't want to miss. It's a simple way to
00:29:14.280protect your family from whatever comes next. Go to preparewithbannon.com. That is preparewithbannon.com
00:29:22.940to get your emergency food supply today. That's preparewithbannon.com. Do it today. Go check it out.
00:31:49.420I'm not sure whether I'm going to say it was the government or scientists in the government.
00:31:57.260But I do know that Collins and Fauci were trying to suppress it.
00:32:01.100I do know the scientific community was trying to suppress it.
00:32:04.120I knew the scientific journals were trying to suppress it.
00:32:07.020I knew the scientific media was trying to suppress it.
00:32:11.100And ultimately, you got social media to suppress it.
00:32:15.100but because they were pressured to do that by, I would argue, the government scientists.
00:32:24.600Okay. So, Pac, this is what this is going to do. And I realized for the Wall Street Journal,
00:32:28.380and I'm so proud of the fact that the Warren Posse is 10 times farther ahead than the traditional
00:32:33.420Wall Street Journal. And I tell this to all my young nephews that think the Wall Street Journal
00:32:37.860is the gospel truth. The question of this audience is going to be, yes, we know this,
00:32:43.220of course, seeing it again, just, it's like having a flashback. Why, given your reporting,
00:32:51.500why is Tony Fauci a free man? Why is he walking around doing what he does and not in a federal
00:32:58.400prison somewhere, sir? Well, first of all, I have to defend my partners, the Wall Street Journal
00:33:04.340opinion section. On this very topic, they were way ahead. They published Jay Bhattacharya and
00:33:11.300Scott Atlas in March, right? The pandemic came in December. No, no. In fact, they give the devil
00:33:17.160story. They actually did the Barrington decree or the Barrington, the thing that kicked it off
00:33:21.260was actually in the pages. Barrington declaration was actually the opinion section of the Wall
00:33:27.580Street Journal. They were ahead of the curve on this. There's no doubt. Okay. I don't know about
00:33:33.280Dr. Fauci. I mean, lots of people still love him. I think that, you know, in our bubble,
00:33:39.680You can think everybody knows that he, you know, supported gain-of-function research, but even so, I mean, the stuff that Scott Atlas and Jay Bhattacharya talk about in our film are stuff that was on the surface even then.
00:33:52.460He ignored data and he stuck with a restrictive lockdowns that had horrible consequences.
00:34:00.100I mean, millions and millions of dollars in people's lives, children who lost years of schooling needlessly and businesses that were shuttered never to reopen, people who just lost track of their lives or couldn't see their loved ones.
00:35:14.000First off, what percentage of your neighbors would sit through the film before they left to discuss? And at the end, would they be shocked that you had come up with this propaganda against Dr. Fauci?
00:35:27.480I think what would happen in my neighborhood, and I think this will happen to viewers who go to the WSJ.com website and look for lockdown dissonance.
00:35:37.000I think a whole bunch of my neighbors will walk out.
00:35:40.280But I think there are some that are just apolitical, you know, that are teachers or therapists.
00:35:47.380There are a lot of those in the neighborhood.
00:35:48.580I think that they might actually have their minds changed.
00:35:52.840Whereas the ones that are already very political, we have a lot of people in the neighborhood that work at the World Bank, for instance, and the IMF and all those people, you know, they already, they met up their minds and they will walk out.
00:36:06.300But I think some people would be convinced.
00:36:08.780The film, I think you're planning maybe to show the whole film at some point.
00:36:47.720I'm not sure I'm going to – my wife is willing to do that test case, Steve, but that's my prediction.
00:36:52.460No, I would strongly recommend it gets.
00:36:55.440Can you give us a hint of anything else you're working on?
00:36:58.560And if we go to the site, what other films can people see that you've done for the journal?
00:37:03.640Well, if I go to wsj.com slash opinion docs, the two earlier ones are there.
00:37:08.360One of them is about the worst anti-Semitic riot in American history at Crown Heights in 1991.
00:37:14.320And it's really a study of the origins of sort of left-wing, democratic-oriented anti-Semitism, which is so prevalent today.
00:37:23.300And the other one is called The Prime Minister vs. The Blob.
00:37:26.460And it's about Liz Truss's prime ministership and her efforts to fight their version of the administrative state, which they more colorfully call The Blob.0.81
00:37:38.540And we are now working on one that'll come out at the end of August on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which I think it'll be the fifth anniversary.
00:37:46.480And I think it'll really tell a story that people maybe haven't quite heard.
00:37:52.380And if they go to platinumpictures.com, they can find a gateway to the 15 other documentaries we've done, most of which have been nationally broadcast on PBS, including the two I worked on with you.
00:52:20.520I want to thank our sponsor for the Saturday show, Birch Gold.
00:52:24.480Time to talk to Philip Patrick's team.
00:52:26.220Also time to think you got some time over the weekend.
00:52:28.340Maybe it's time to delve into end of the dollar empire and share it with somebody.
00:52:33.100You start to understand your world a lot better, particularly the highly leveraged bet we are making as a nation, the highly leveraged bet on artificial intelligence and productivity increases that don't have concomitant mass layoffs.
00:52:51.140I'm taking the I'm taking the under, let's say, not buying it.
00:52:57.740See you over the weekend on Getter and back here Monday morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
00:53:03.080Most Americans are forced to spend too much money on health care and getting too little in return.
00:53:08.620If you're one of the millions frustrated by traditional health insurance, I want to tell you about America's health share.
00:53:21.960Now, that's a mouthful. Freedom for health dot org. That's freedom for health dot org slash Bannon and discover why tens of thousands of patriots are joining America's health share.
00:53:36.380America's health share reduces your health care costs by an average of 60 percent.
00:53:41.420And it's accepted everywhere. In other words, say goodbye to out of network limitations.
00:53:46.600They make health care affordable, transparent, and aligned with your values, free from surprise bills or skyrocketing premiums.
00:53:55.580For as low as $68 a month, an individual can get great health care coverage minus the complications and price gouging from health care providers.
00:54:04.860You can completely scrap your current insurance or use America's HealthSphere to supplement your existing policy, even with Medicare.