00:00:29.000I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:34.780Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:38.520If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:44.880War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:00:50.740It's Saturday, 15 August, Year of Our Lord, 2026.
00:00:54.720We're going to have a lot of moving targets today.
00:00:56.760um we've got uh james o'keefe's going to join us a while but the situation going on down in
00:01:02.780or up in uh minnesota about uh muslims and voting uh we've got um um
00:01:09.640captain finnell and mccabe are going to join us here momentarily about the uh about the
00:01:15.640situation in the persian gulf do we have james fishback we're trying to get james fishback
00:01:19.520up and ready we got him uh brother fishback uh this is the closing weekend to make your closing
00:01:25.840argument in this very, what can I say, heated contest in the Republican primary for the
00:01:34.940governorship of Florida to be nominated to run for governor. What's your thoughts on this weekend?
00:01:39.960I know you're doing 50 events, I think, in the next couple of days.
00:01:44.320Yes, 50 events, Steve. The only heat I fear is the heat here in Jacksonville Beach. We got a
00:01:49.660crowd of over 150 people here ready to vote Fishback to win this election, to win, to put
00:01:56.080America first, to fight for that vision for our country. And so, Steve, 16 events today. The first
00:02:03.140one was at 7 a.m. The last one, Steve, begins. It begins at 1 a.m., and it's going to be historic.
00:02:11.480We are going to win this thing. I got my running mate, Sean Lozano here, the great people of
00:02:15.480Jacksonville Beach. If you're in Florida, early voting is open in every county. Go to
00:02:20.120votemyflorida.org, show up, vote Fishback, and let's take Florida back.
00:02:27.700James, tell us why is your campaign gotten so much traction? You're running as a total outsider.
00:02:35.040It seems like the Republican establishment has done a pretty good job in Florida. What is your
00:02:40.140beef what what is the principal uh proposal you're running on and why has it gotten traction
00:02:45.560particularly with young people well the beef is pretty simple our generation is struggling to buy
00:02:52.260a home to get a job to keep a job to to raise a family and our parents and grandparents are not
00:02:58.620being able to pass down the country that they enjoyed i'm fighting for every single floridian
00:03:02.980who calls our state home for them to get a job get married start a family live out the full arc of
00:03:08.880the american dream we do not worship globalism or corporatism it's two words from here on out steve
00:03:15.100and that is america first do you believe do you believe the business interest has had too much
00:03:23.120say so in the in the governance of florida and that's one of the reasons it looks like you may
00:03:27.760be losing the old florida that people absolutely loved and and and and and kind of cherished and
00:03:33.920you're getting a bunch of i don't want to say yankees but people coming from the north and
00:03:37.100other sections of the country with corporate interests that are taking that dream away from
00:03:41.740average working class and middle class Floridians? That's right. And look, Floridians, we don't want
00:03:49.700a data center, guys. We don't want another solar farm. We don't need another Dollar Tree next to
00:03:54.060a Dollar General next to a whatever the heck a five below is. We don't want that, Steve. We want
00:03:59.460great jobs. We want to enjoy the outdoors. We got the election just a few blocks from here.
00:04:04.120This is the state that we want. We're not a construction site. We're not a balance sheet.
00:04:09.020Florida is our home, and that is what this campaign is fighting for. We are on the cusp
00:04:13.640of a historic victory, the likes of which rivals Donald Trump in 2016, Ronald Reagan in 1980,
00:04:20.420and our founding fathers in 1776. We got young and old, black and white, rich and poor,
00:04:25.960from Jacksonville down to Miami, lined up to vote for this campaign. And we are on the precipice
00:04:32.460of greatness. James, why has this message, your message particularly resonated with young people?
00:04:39.700Many of those people have been outside the political system. We would call them low0.99
00:04:43.800propensity voters. Why has your message resonated with those folks?
00:04:49.340Well, the political pundits call them low propensity voters. I call them my friends and
00:04:53.620family. My friend recently from Florida State University who got a 4.0 GPA applied to 100
00:04:59.080different positions at Amazon only to be told that they're not hiring Americans right now,0.97
00:05:04.240only H-1Bs. Jeff Bozo needs a very clear message from me that if you are going to hire H-1Bs and0.98
00:05:11.940refuse to hire qualified Americans, you're going to get slapped with massive fines because we are
00:05:16.520going to put Florida workers first again. Talk to me about, okay, H-1Bs and data centers. Those0.90
00:05:24.300are two of the hottest issues that you've really driven to the forefront. Let's go back to H-1Bs.1.00
00:05:28.560As governor, given it's a federal program, and you're right, I think Amazon has something like 75,000 or 85,000 foreign engineers alone and tech specialists.
00:05:41.340What are you, as Governor Fishback in Florida, going to do about H-1B visas?
00:05:47.880It started as a federal issue, but we can end it at the state level.
00:05:53.040Companies that fire a local from Jacksonville, who went to UNF or JU, who was making 80 grand
00:05:58.720a year only to hire an H-1B and pay him 60 grand a year.
00:06:01.920That difference, that cost savings that motivated that firing of $20,000, we're going to slap
00:06:06.960a $20,000 annual fine on any company that tries to arbitrage our workforce.0.72
00:06:13.200You do that and the H-1 scam disappears overnight.
00:06:16.880And our workers have a fighting chance again in this economy.
00:06:21.040James, uh, birthright citizenship as governor of Florida, will you continue to issue birth
00:06:27.880certificates to, uh, to anchor babies? No, I will not. The federal government has punted on this
00:06:34.920issue. The Supreme court has punted on this issue as governor. I will not punt on this issue. If you
00:06:41.140come over here from China on vacation with the express purpose of having a bunch of babies to1.00
00:06:46.340give them American citizenship so you can engage in chain migration, we are not going to give you0.89
00:06:51.860a birth certificate because birthright citizenship is not for illegal aliens in the United States.
00:07:00.160James, talk to us about your policy about data centers. Does it concern you, if you're as
00:07:06.800anti-data centers as you seem to be, that you're going to hurt the growth of Florida,
00:07:11.080particularly with big tech, sir? No, we want good growth here in Florida.
00:07:16.100I'm pro-AI, I'm pro-innovation, but we don't want a data center two miles up the road from a small community that's going to raise their electric bills, threaten their water supply, and tank their property values.
00:07:25.640You know who's not clamoring to build a data center in Florida?
00:11:29.880Look, the polling shows, Byron Donald's had a pretty significant lead during this entire thing.
00:11:36.380But I think most of the polling shows under 50%.
00:11:39.260So we're going to find out how this thing rolls on Tuesday.
00:11:43.660We've had Paul Renner, the former surface warfare officer, was with us yesterday for the second time.
00:11:51.280the lieutenant governor was with us thursday we're trying to get byron back up uh we're trying
00:11:55.640to get um rodriguez back up and try to do it all by tuesday that governor's race has got a lot of
00:12:01.940interest uh from around the country um want to go we got a lot to do about the united states
00:12:07.960navy this morning captain for now just got a couple of minutes uh here uh give me your
00:12:13.440assessment i'm gonna save the stuff for the carrier battle group and everything uh uh after
00:12:18.980we have a cold open for you and McCabe and Neil is at the White House right now. Your sense of
00:12:25.680how this is going, the president has claimed that a strait of Hormuz, he's going to designate it
00:12:30.460as American territory. That's different from the MOU that basically invited Oman in as a partner
00:12:37.040to kind of negotiate with the Persians. What's your sense right now of where we stand with this,
00:12:42.360sir? Well, I think we're still trying to pressurize Iran to open up the strait. And so0.96
00:12:49.660the president is trying every possible vector of influence that he can bring to bear. And so
00:12:58.220making a statement like this will cause, you know, kerfuffles in Tehran and in D.C., and it'll cause
00:13:05.500people to say, what about this and what about that? But it brings attention to the situation,
00:13:10.800And it highlights, again, the importance of why we need naval power and why we're, you know, in a situation where we haven't been able to reopen the strait like we have done in the previous years.
00:13:22.740captain we're gonna go to break here in a moment the washington post has an exclusive this morning
00:13:29.580that the president's very involved in the design of the expanded fleet uh that he wants and he's
00:13:36.220going to fight congress to make sure we get the funding for including going back on certain
00:13:39.680designs to be closer to world war ii types of designs for aircraft carriers also to put in
00:13:45.320steam catapults he's been obsessed with this since i've known him even before he won the presidency
00:13:49.840to get rid of the electronic catapults and the steam catapults.
00:13:54.820I tell you what, I'm going to leave that with you.
00:13:56.380We're going to go to a short break here.
00:32:22.700There's no question about it, Steve. When you're in combat like that, even normal peacetime steaming in that area is a full-time job 24-7.
00:32:33.820And when you're in combat and somebody's lobbing drones at you or missiles or RPGs from fast attack boats, you've got to be on your toes 24-7.
00:32:44.340So, yeah, it's a high-stress environment. It was higher, I'd say, probably during the actual Epic Fury combat operations, and we've had a break there, and then now we've resumed again and had six, seven, eight weeks of it, and then there's a gap.
00:32:57.740So there's ebbs and flows, but it's very intense. And this is the third carrier. We had the Ford, we've had the Bush, and we've had the Lincoln. And the Lincoln was on deployment out in the Western Pacific before she got out there. So she's been, you know, working very, very hard. That team is working very hard.
00:33:15.800So I think the response from the White House and the Defense Department is, I think, really the key, which is to say those people that are responsible in the chain of command for making sure that they have fresh food and vegetables, they have munitions, they have fuel, they have security, they even have Internet, the sailors have.
00:33:37.780That's coming from the chain of command.
00:33:39.540And as Neil correctly pointed out, CNN was on board with Lincoln just a few weeks ago and everything is fine.
00:33:45.800Yeah. And just the, you know, my kid brother's on the Reasoner as a helicopter pilot. I'd been on the Foster as a destroyer officer earlier. We, I think, spent 100 days. The Reasoner was 76, 77 at sea. You're going to run out. And when you're in the North Arabian Sea, hey, you're at sea that long, you're going to run out of vegetables. You're going to run out of fruit.
00:34:08.080It's just just the logistics itself. So when you have six thousand people and the master chief petty officer always has a coordinating group of the of the of a lot of the chiefs wise, but the wives to make sure particularly young sailors and their families know that they're going to be taken care of.
00:34:26.920you always have on any deployment issues that come up right there's issues come up right away
00:34:33.280they're not getting the paycheck you know all a thousand things and that's you know the normal
00:34:37.280course of business it's sorted out uh this is obviously a uh kind of a historic to one degree
00:34:44.180a little bit of historic deployment uh also the 250 days at sea with no port calls people
00:34:50.580should also understand when young people sign up for the navy one of the trade-offs hey if i'm in
00:34:55.700the atlantic fleet i'm gonna go to the med there's some great ports of call there that you'll you'll
00:35:00.440go into if you're a pacific fleet sailor and this is one of the reasons so many people want to be in
00:35:04.760the pacific fleet you're going to go to hong kong you're going to go to the philippines you're going
00:35:09.160to go to some of these singapore you're going to go to some of these great ports and see the world
00:35:12.420in this type of intense operations you're not getting that you could take you can have a 10
00:35:18.800month or one year deployment and you know you're not going to make a port of call and that works
00:35:23.760on young sailors. Jim, your experience in all that. Oh, definitely. Port calls are huge for
00:35:30.300sailors. And that's why, you know, when I joined, that was go, you know, join the Navy, see the
00:35:34.300world. We wanted to see the world. People wanted to experience that foreign port. So it's a natural
00:35:39.040thing. And so when you get on a deployment that happens to time up with events that are going on
00:35:44.060in Iran, you know, you're unfortunately, you may not get those. Or I had a port call once on the
00:35:50.220Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf. And we were not allowed to go out into any other ports. And we
00:35:55.600had to stay Pearside at Jebel Ali, you know, so you could get off the boat, but you couldn't go
00:36:00.340anywhere. It happens. And so these are force protection measures sometimes, or you're in
00:36:04.900combat. And sailors at the time, they may not like it, but when they get back and they finish
00:36:10.560that deployment, it's a badge of honor. It says, hey, I served and I contributed to our nation's
00:36:15.860national security, and I gave everything that I could, and I was part of a bigger team.
00:36:20.520And as you mentioned, there are what they call ombudsmen that represent the sailors at the unit
00:36:27.940level. So every squadron has an ombudsman. The ship's company has several levels of ombudsman
00:36:34.000that are back at the home port so that family members, wives, children, parents can contact
00:36:41.080that person if there's some kind of issue. If you're at home and if you're on deployment
00:36:44.960and your wife has a flood in the kitchen and there's something going wrong,
00:36:48.960the ombudsman can step in and help get Navy Marine relief monies and things of that nature to you.
00:36:55.080So there's all kinds of support mechanisms.
00:37:41.940And we've been doing it for a long time, 100 years of carrier aviation.
00:37:46.480And this idea that we're leaving our people and we're not taking care of them or the president doesn't care about our people is just pure hogwash for political theater.
00:37:55.180And what we need to get to is where are these Democrats, where are these other people when we came up and said, hey, we need to pass the budget right now so that we can have funding for the sailors that are at sea.
00:38:06.580because there's a whole lot of people uh in one party that aren't voting to fund that and guess
00:38:11.840what when that funding doesn't come that means there's going to be perturbations to the resupply
00:38:16.720system if if if this was and this is why cnn and you can tell the shift to manager doesn't matter
00:38:24.080we monitor this these things 24 hours a day the trump derangement syndrome and is president trump
00:38:30.420perfect no he's not he knows this he's a very imperfect instrument he also happens to be
00:38:36.320uh one of the top three presidents if you didn't have trump you wouldn't have a country right now
00:38:40.580for all his faults cnn and they were just they were just on the lincoln right and and everything
00:38:48.160was fine and look when you say everything's fine with cnn's on remember a lot of sailors are not
00:38:52.480you know they're gonna you know take one for the team even if some conditions are tough and
00:38:57.280conditions are tough the navy's tough you go on an aircraft carrier and you're out for 10 months
00:39:03.22012 months a year you get 250 days straight at sea and no ports of call uh it's hard and you're
00:39:09.680in up-tempo air ops in the most dangerous you know territory on earth is that flight deck
00:39:15.900during uh during launch and recovery uh those kids and those pilots you got to be on it and
00:39:21.760it wears on you day in and day out that's what combat is that's how we won in the pacific of
00:39:26.560world war ii these sailors and that ship is the exact lineage of the pacific of the seventh fleet
00:39:34.260in in world war ii and that's why it's been so terrific and i said hey if one person's fallen
00:39:39.040off or jumped off or whatever that's terrible but haven't done enough plane guard in back of
00:39:44.180back of carriers back they're they're losing people i'm not saying all the time but it's so
00:39:49.780difficult you get blown off the deck you have people fall off it's these are dangerous dangerous
00:39:54.800dangerous places and i think the the uh the crew and the officers to be complimented let's play i
00:40:00.880want to say pete hexa because i think the pentagon finally got engaged so let's play pete and i want
00:40:05.460to bring a kneeling about how we got involved in this because there is a logistics issue and it
00:40:10.740centers in wait for it the persian gulf in bahrain let's hear pete hexa secretary of war
00:40:15.440completely misrepresented listen we make sure that every ship every crew every captain has
00:40:23.740everything we can provide them at every single moment. Some deployments are longer than others
00:40:27.960and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody. What they do in those high
00:40:36.580seas and those austere conditions with less port calls, it's incredible. Americans don't understand
00:40:42.200what it's like to do that. So as someone who's not been on a ship like that but been on long0.98
00:40:48.600deployments, I feel it. I want them home as soon as everybody else do. I want folks rotated as
00:40:53.580quickly as possible. I want the best for them. My commanders know that. Our service secretaries
00:40:58.800know that. The president expects that. And so to that crew and to all those crews, we're going to
00:41:04.000do everything we can for you. And we are so grateful for their dedication of that crew and
00:41:09.200others. They've held the line for the country and they've done a fantastic job. CNN and MSNBC,
00:41:16.480let me be blunt, brutally frank, they're trying to stir up a mutiny. You can see by the angle of
00:41:22.660attacker they're reporting they're not there to help the sailors they're trying to weaponize
00:41:26.200the enlisted men and women on that carrier not simply against the officers but about the entire
00:41:32.300chain of command including the commander-in-chief full stop it's obvious if you watch it and you
00:41:37.260know the reality and i'm not saying that everything's peaches and cream on the lincoln
00:41:42.440guess what it's not going to be you're in a deployment in air operations 24 7 neil mccabe
00:41:49.220your thoughts on this issue we're going to go to break here in about 90 seconds your thoughts
00:41:53.360yeah CNN and MSNBC they're like Lord Ha Ha or Tokyo Rose but yeah what they're trying to do
00:42:01.180is they're trying to figure out how do we keep these ships resupplied there's like two dozen
00:42:06.940warships out there there's a handful of military sea lift command ships trying to do these resupplies
00:42:13.720Bahrain has the top facilities and the warehouses, but Bahrain was hit in March.
00:42:20.340They've tried to set up these sort of ancillary and secondary depots, but again, they're all
00:42:40.760neil uh should they have planned around bahrain as the logistics center the fifth fleet's
00:42:48.860logistics center should people have thought about that through i mean they didn't i want
00:42:53.900you to answer this after we come back from break uh was there enough thought put into thought put
00:42:59.880into strato hermuz persian gulf and particularly the logistics center of the fifth fleet in bahrain
00:43:06.020because one might argue you know if any any uh replenishment issues i could have been taken care
00:43:12.460of it maybe some more planning went into it anyway we're getting to that natalie warner's
00:43:15.680going to join us i want jim finnell to stick around natalie's reporting this past week has
00:43:20.220been brutal on certain flag officers in regards to their uh seditious and treasonous behavior
00:43:28.000with the existential threat of the chinese communist party we're gonna take a short
00:43:33.120commercial break. We're returning to the war room in just a moment.0.97
00:43:42.240October 15th, or as we say in the war room, 15 October. As we head towards that date,
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00:46:42.820They could care less really about the sailors.
00:46:45.020If they cared about the sailors at sea,
00:46:48.080then they wouldn't be pushing back and not voting for the budget for National Defense Authorization
00:46:54.660Act for 2027. And they'd get the money now and they'd act and then make their reforms or changes
00:47:01.580other ways. But they don't really care. And as you said, they're making political statements
00:47:06.100they know will get out to the families of that carrier and out to sea because they have access
00:47:12.940to the internet when you're underway today. You get emails, you get access, and they're fomenting
00:47:17.420this and it's disgraceful. They should be ashamed of themselves. And for those that have been in the
00:47:23.500military and retired, they're still under the UCMJ and they should be very cautious about what they
00:47:28.920say. And I'm just really disappointed because if you cared about the sailors, then you'd say to
00:47:34.400yourself, why has the Navy been in decline for 35 years? Why have we gutted the U.S. Navy for 35
00:47:42.500years. Where are the people of principle when it's something of substance? And it's only
00:47:49.040during these little crisis times before elections that we see this kind of charade,
00:47:53.860the circus game that we get from the politicians. It's disgusting.0.97
00:47:59.020Should we have prosecuted Captain Mark Kelly when he made that video, sir?
00:48:07.120Well, they went through the process on that and he's been, you know, not convicted of anything.
00:48:11.920So I guess, you know, I'm not a jag and I'm not an attorney, but I think that he had been held to account, at least in some semblance, by the court of public opinion for what he did.
00:48:22.220We've got to get serious about our national security and how we play these games.
00:48:28.420We can't have people going out and piping up on these kind of things just because they want to take a political shot when it comes at the expense of people that are at sea.
00:48:36.880You know, there hasn't been any ramp strikes on board the USS Abraham Lincoln.
00:48:41.920When I was on my first carriers at sea and Airwing 11, not my first, and when I was in the lieutenant commander and I lived with the operations officer and he told me when he joined in the mid 80s that, you know, the mortality rate for naval aviators was up around 25 percent.
00:48:58.820We don't have that today. We're constantly making our improvements to the safety and security of our sailors. But we're not right now because we have people that are trying to politicize it. And we're not getting to the causes of why. Why is it that the Lincoln's out there for seven months? Why was it that the Ford was out there for 11 months? It's not just because this is a new issue. It's because we're the United States of America. We have global interests. We have global alliances.
00:49:26.960We have global partnerships and we have to be in these places.
00:49:31.040And when things happen, when perturbations happen, when crises happen, you have to be
00:49:37.000And this idea of just in time, you know, maintenance, this just in time, we'll just build
00:49:42.420enough of a minimum amount of this ship or that ship doesn't understand or has forgotten
00:49:48.200the reality of combat and war and dealing with these kind of issues.0.81
00:49:53.580And even today, it's even worse in some sense because a country like Iran can lob off some ballistic missiles and some drones and really cause an uproar.0.95
00:50:04.340And it makes it difficult for us to get things under control.0.98
00:50:07.440But if we had had a 600-ship Navy, things would be a lot different than they are right now.
00:50:14.280And those decisions have to be made at a higher level, and that's what we should have a national debate about.
00:50:21.560I'm a huge believer in this hemispheric defense, use the Central Pacific as your strategic pivot, the three island chain, the Navy will play a much bigger role in that.
00:50:30.640I will tell you, the defense bill, their passing still has us spread all over hell's half acre.
00:50:40.000So you can't hold the crews, the uptempo and the synchronicity of tempo as you're trying to do, you're trying to play the old game with virtually no resources.
00:50:49.720And this is why you have a problem. Hangover, Captain. I'm going to hand you. I want you to hang around.
00:50:55.440Natalie's going to join us and we'll talk about her investigation of these flag officers.
00:50:59.880McCabe, while we got a minute. And by the way, I want to thank Birch Gold. Birch Gold is obviously our sponsor.
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00:51:18.880you'll learn about the history of fiat currency in the United States in the economy. And you
00:51:24.020talked to Philip Patrick and team, do it today. McCabe, we got about 90 seconds. Bahrain,
00:51:29.400why are we still, why is Bahrain so important to making sure the fleet can actually fight in the
00:51:34.900North Arabian Sea when that is captured in the Persian Gulf, sir? Bahrain, the naval supply
00:51:43.180facilities and port facilities. That should have been moved five years ago. The United States Army
00:51:48.880had three bases in Qatar. They moved all three of them five and six years ago because of the
00:51:55.620Iranian threat. And it's more than just hooking up shore ties, Steve. You need cranes, right?0.97
00:52:01.500You need a deep port because these ships have a draft. It's like Bahrain is the port with the
00:52:10.640port facilities and the warehouses and everything's centralized there. Perhaps it's because,
00:52:16.840you know, Qatar used to be a colony of Bahrain. Now Bahrain is sort of a cat's paw of Saudi0.88
00:52:22.460Arabia. It could be that geopolitically the Navy or the Biden administration didn't want to upset
00:52:28.520the Saudis. But the fact of the matter is they need to go somewhere else. You can't have your0.50
00:52:34.220supply hub in the middle of a combat zone.