Steve Kamb joins me in the War Room to talk about the economic mess that President Trump has inherited from his predecessor, Janet Yellen. We talk about how to deal with it, how to fix it, and what to do about it.
00:00:00.000Where do we really stand with what President Trump inherited as you see the economic battlefield in front of us?
00:00:07.240It feels like less a battlefield than a minefield, frankly, what President Trump has inherited.
00:00:13.340I mean, it is difficult, Steve, to I think to get across to people just how bad the economy is,
00:00:20.380because what the economy actually looks like today and what people's lived experiences is just simply not matching up with with what the data say.
00:00:28.260There's just too many problems, again, with the data.
00:00:30.760Going back to what we were just talking about, right, there are things wrong with the data themselves.
00:00:36.520And this, I think, is why President Trump won such a great victory in November, right, where you had him winning the popular vote.
00:00:45.720Every swing state, a huge electoral majority.
00:00:49.280It's because the media was not successful in telling people, don't believe your lying eyes and don't believe your empty wallets.
00:00:56.800So we are staring down the barrel of more inflation, courtesy of the Fed's interest rate cuts last year and relatively loose monetary policy.
00:01:05.440Let's not forget the monthly – if we look at the monthly inflation reports, the annual inflation rate that comes in every month,
00:01:12.360that has gotten worse each month since the Fed started cutting interest rates.
00:01:17.020So clearly we have more inflation coming down the pike that the president will have to deal with.
00:01:21.600We have all of the messes internationally that the president is already dealing with, especially in places like the Ukraine.
00:01:28.840We have a banking crisis, which still really hasn't gone away.
00:01:32.900The Fed just papered over it with things like emergency lending programs, but that is still very real.
00:01:38.680We have a commercial real estate sector that is in absolute turmoil.
00:02:22.300It's the worst start ever to a fiscal year in terms of that deficit.
00:02:26.720Started in October, ran through January.
00:02:29.360The worst four-month start ever to a fiscal year.
00:02:33.200And at the same time, you have a Treasury secretary in Scott Besson, who is a master of sovereign debt markets.
00:02:40.080And he's going to need, I think, every ounce of his mastery and expertise to really unwind the disaster and the mess that he was left by Janet Yellen
00:02:49.360in terms of rebalancing the Treasury's portfolio, in terms of trying to get the yield down on the 10-year Treasury note,
00:02:56.740trying to get the interest payments down on the debt.
00:02:58.920Those interest payments are already over $1.2 trillion a year.
00:03:02.740I mean, Steve, if you give me an hour, I could fill it, I'm sure, with all of the negative aspects of this economy
00:03:09.320that President Trump has inherited and that he's going to have to deal with.
00:03:16.500And on top, the only one you missed, we had a record trade deficit in the month of December.
00:03:21.800This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:03:29.380Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
00:03:34.620Here's the reason I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
00:03:38.880The people have had a belly full of it.
00:08:16.040The agreement is based upon our shared interests, shared histories, shared collective outlooks, and that we have mutual security interests.
00:08:26.200And so when Dr. Navarro talks about, hey, we may have to kick Canada out of the Five Eyes, people should sit up and take notice.
00:08:36.280We had similar discussions about New Zealand back 20, 30 years ago when the New Zealand government said they wouldn't allow U.S. nuclear ships, anything, nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapon ships, into New Zealand.
00:08:49.500There was a lot of people in America that talked about kicking the Kiwis out.
00:08:53.760Now we're talking about Canada, and it's largely because of issues of trust with the Canadian government that's in leadership right now, Justin Trudeau's leadership,
00:09:03.820and the fact that they had open borders and the fact that they are taking a kind of almost a hostile attitude towards the United States when it comes to our relationship,
00:09:13.080and the fact that the Chinese have so much influence there, as we saw with the Huawei CEO case in the last couple of years.
00:09:21.320So I don't think we're going to actually do that, but I think the issue is that serious for us that we're trying to get a signal across to Ottawa and to the Canadians that, hey, you need to wake up here.
00:09:31.380We're not going to just allow you to put our national security interests at risk, and we're going to use every tool in the kit bag, if you will, to get reciprocity and to make sure that our interest and our national security is guaranteed.
00:09:45.900Captain, when there are many people, including guys on the right, the Tucker Carlson's and others that are questioning a lot of this about the intelligence community today,
00:09:57.400and as we work these efforts to break the deep state here in the United States, is the Five Eyes lead to kind of a formation of a deep state where these intelligence services become more powerful than the government?
00:10:10.660The governments are democratically elected, quote-unquote.
00:10:25.080He may be tossed out, so you're going to have conservatives or people closer to our part of the spectrum, although not populist nationalists.
00:10:31.840But that you have this permanent bureaucracy, a permanent administration of intelligence, and particularly the most secret of all, the signal intelligence and the ability to work in unison.
00:10:44.300And we see this from the Russia situation in a crossfire hurricane, that that was done between direct contact of the intelligence services, MI6 and the CIA, MI6, and guys like Brennan, Hayden, all of them.
00:11:02.620Is this Five Eyes, although an agreement for mutual protection, lead to something creating a monster that can't be controlled by any one government in any one nation, sir?
00:11:15.140I don't think Five Eyes in itself is the problem.
00:11:19.060The problem is the politicization of the intelligence community across these various governments.
00:11:24.480And so to that extent, an arrangement like Five Eyes leads to that ability to do these things.
00:11:31.380And so I think we have to have a really serious look at the new director of national intelligence and director of CIA.
00:11:38.360They have to come in, and they have to come in with a hose, and they have to sweep out what's going on inside the IC.
00:11:44.660I mean, the politicization of intelligence was anathema when I was in my 29 years in the service.
00:11:52.060That was not allowed, and no one did that.
00:11:54.200It was impossible that these things were being abused like this.
00:11:59.700And you never, no one talked about politics by the time that I retired in January of 2015.
00:12:08.040It was starting to lean that way during the Obama years in the last couple of years, but it was something that was just not done.
00:12:14.080And it was a huge, huge red line that people didn't cross.
00:12:19.300And the people that were in leadership you trusted.
00:12:22.040The collection capabilities were sank.
00:12:27.580We were not spying on Americans, and we were not providing that information.
00:12:30.880And in the last 10 years, it appears that it has really gone out of control.
00:12:35.880And so this cannot be allowed to continue.
00:12:38.500And this current event that happened here this last couple of days with the public announcements about the illegal chat rooms at the National Security Agency on Intel Link,
00:12:50.340which is basically an intelligence-sharing community chat room, but it's called Intel Link, and it's on behind the door.
00:13:00.380It's supposed to be for the discussion of very serious classified information.
00:13:04.080I had Intel Link when I was in the Navy, and we shared information about what was going on in current operations or current collection issues about our adversaries.
00:13:13.360And now we find out from this release from Chris Ruffo and the City Journal that this information is now delving into some really weird stuff that would never have been allowed or even conceived of.
00:13:25.620And what I'm really concerned of is that this – what we've just discovered is the tip of an iceberg, and the right cancer has gone so much farther than anybody could have imagined.
00:13:39.000Before I get back into that, because that's one of the reasons I want to have you on today, but when you talk about polarization, you left in 2015.
00:13:46.560You were in naval intelligence, although you were in the Pacific Command.
00:13:50.800Did you ever work in joint – on joint intelligence that you would actually see the politicization?
00:13:57.740Because some people will say 2015, wow, it was already embedded at that time because that's when they're starting to cook up.
00:14:04.800It was in early 16 that they started a crossfire hurricane, so it had to be going there.
00:14:09.500Was that because you were siloed in the Navy, you didn't see it, or you really can make the case it really wasn't that bad then?
00:14:16.280I was in – well, just throughout my whole career, I was in a joint intelligence center Pacific early in my career, the intelligence center Pacific back in the late 80s, which is the first joint intelligence center in the Pacific Command.
00:14:31.100And then throughout my tours at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., where I was part of the groups that followed China amongst all the major IC partners.
00:14:41.900So I was linked up with every person at the highest levels of intelligence regarding what was going on with China, from the CIA to DIA to every individual intelligence agency.
00:14:53.400And there was plenty of sharing there, and in my time in the Pacific Fleet, in my last assignment as the director of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, I was directly involved with operations and activities that involved the joint world, the IC back in D.C.,
00:15:10.400what was going on with our embassies, and inside the IC intelligence community, even though it's not its own organization, the various representatives of the IC are linked up and share a lot of information on a daily, minute-by-minute basis.
00:15:29.120At each one of my command opportunities with Pacific Fleet, with 7th Fleet, with CTF 70 on board the Kitty Hawk, where we had watch floors that were connected to the national intelligence community at the highest levels, directly back to, you know, the fort at Fort Me, the National Security Agency, and other agencies.
00:15:49.880So I'm confident to say that that was not existing like that by the time I retired.
00:15:59.360And what's happened over the last 10 years has really been a dramatic transformation.
00:16:04.720And this idea that—and I think the Rufo report that came out today, it said it started about 10 years ago.
00:16:11.240Employee resource groups were meeting to talk about pride and other things, and they would meet here and there almost like a potluck, a culture, food, and speech.
00:16:21.960Instead of just one day a month, it was one week a month, and then it was a whole month.
00:16:26.100You could be hired as a mathematician, a staff officer, or a systems engineer, but you would spend your time going to these events and having meetings all day about your individual peer group.
00:16:35.880They got themselves into positions to help craft policy, started pushing the idea that if you want to get promoted, you have to participate in these events.
00:16:45.180You would go to a training session, and it would be about privilege and how to be a better ally.
00:16:50.120And then someone would give a class on how to talk gender-neutral to people.
00:16:54.220You always had analysts—you had analysts that didn't want to report what they were supposed to be doing because they were going to have to report on somebody's dead name.
00:17:03.280They were having this crisis of conscience about reporting on the adversary's actual name because they thought it would dead name them, and they didn't want to go to disrespect that person.
00:17:14.520This was like a cult that was hell-bent on pushing gender ideology.
00:17:17.840That's insane, what I read there, and that that's happening.
00:17:24.980You have a job when you're in the service, when you're in the IC, and you swear an oath to the Constitution to defend this nation.
00:17:32.580And if your job is to report out signals intelligence or imagery intelligence or electronic intelligence or whatever it is, if you're a collector, you cannot allow your personal beliefs to come in and influence your responsibility.
00:17:47.880And that appears to what has happened by the revelation of these chat logs.
00:17:52.360And so I'm very concerned that the system is out of control, running out of control.
00:17:57.340And what I'm even more concerned about is in the last two days, I'm talking with my colleagues in the community, and a lot of people are very upset that this has come out.
00:18:07.800And they're more concerned that the chat logs were released to a reporter than they are about the actual content of what's happening.
00:18:15.620And sure, we need to make sure that how this was revealed was done through appropriate procedures, but that's not the real problem.
00:18:25.360So shooting the messenger because he revealed corruption and cancer inside the system is not more important than the fact of what's actually going on.
00:18:34.260And that we had, clearly, these weren't just low-level analysts doing this on their own.
00:18:38.960There were supervisors up and down the chain that somehow approved of what was going on, approved for these days off, approved for people not coming to work but could be in these chat rooms to talk about these things instead of doing what they were supposed to do,
00:18:55.220which is to tell and report on what our adversaries are doing so that policymakers and decision makers in the field and back in D.C. could make decisions on how to defend this nation.
00:19:04.820I want to make sure because we've talked about the depravity and degeneracy of what was in these chat rooms.
00:19:13.540We've had a number of people on that have, in fact, when Terry Schilling came on, it was almost uncomfortable for the audience when they read what was being talked about.
00:19:22.000But you're saying the Rufo now and yourself are actually asserting that there was almost a cult that took over either part of or was trying to take over the intelligence community and make sure that everything was seen through the prism of LGBTQ, sir?
00:19:39.580Well, I think the latter part. Yeah, I think there's an ideological worldview that these folks had to call it a cult like some religious cult.
00:19:50.740I don't know if it was that organized. Maybe it was. I don't know that much about it.
00:19:53.920But from what I've seen, it's very clear that people that had an opposing worldview to the traditional view that, hey, we're Americans and we serve as Americans inside the military, inside the IC.
00:20:06.000And we don't take our personal religious views, sexual views, any of that stuff, and let it influence our mission and our job.
00:20:16.780That changed. Something changed in the last decade where people were now saying, that's my most important aspect of what I do.
00:20:24.420And it influenced their ability to actually function in their job.
00:20:27.840And the fact that it was allowed to go on and that, you know, if nobody saw it, I find that hard to believe.
00:20:34.920But let's just say, if those people that were in supervisory positions didn't know about this, then what does that say about our system of not knowing what their personnel are doing?
00:20:44.020That's not good. If they did know about it and they promoted it, then you have to ask yourself, why were they promoting that?
00:20:50.440What was the reason? And that is, to me, the evidence to the politicization of the IC, that we allowed people to put this in and divide us and create these little cliques.
00:21:02.140Then we gave these cliques space to communicate to each other.
00:21:06.320And then the cliques took over and then they took over policy and they then started addressing promotions and control the system.
00:21:14.180And anybody that didn't conform or comply with that, they were the bad ones.
00:21:18.460They were the racists. They were the homophobes. They were whatever the labels they put on them.
00:21:23.180So we went, we flipped the system upside down.
00:21:28.640How is it? You're totally doubted. I know you're in a bunch of groups.
00:29:50.560And let me remind you, this service is 24-7 monitoring, urgent alerts of any changes, and if fraud does happen, their U.S.-based restoration team will spend up to $1 million to fix the fraud and restore your title.
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00:34:56.940I mean, when we're in it, especially in the early 2000s, even up to like 2010, 2012, I didn't – I didn't personally realize that.
00:35:06.600I didn't understand the politics and all that stuff.
00:35:11.020I think Benghazi woke me up and then I started opening up my mind to be able to understand this stuff.
00:35:16.580But I was actually – this morning I was talking to another enlisted SEAL that I used to work with and he's been in and out of the combat zones forever.
00:35:45.580But this day and age, I think with all this stuff coming out, especially now with all this stuff with Dojin, it's hard not to see the writing on the wall.
00:35:54.500These wars are literally just moneymakers and they're just revenue machines.
00:36:02.760That's why – look, we just wrapped up Afghanistan with this terrible pullout where we left like losers.
00:36:09.920And then immediately they sparked up Ukraine and that's just for money.
00:36:14.040They're all money-making operations because we've offshored all our industrial to China and everywhere else.
00:36:22.760It's definitely the consensus among my friends and my old teammates is that these wars were forever wars and that they're – we're not allowed to win them.
00:36:33.320I mean, look, the last time we're actually able to do an unconditional surrender was Germany, World War II.
00:36:40.800Vietnam, we didn't – I think that's when the military-industrial complex figured out that this is a big money-making operation.
00:39:43.820Yeah, no, I'm so proud of this because I'm a coffee aficionado, and it's just been so – the time and care you did for do the dark roast is amazing.
00:39:55.020But everybody knows just they absolutely love it.
00:39:56.820One more time, where do they go right now to read the reviews and see the great product offering you got, sir?
00:40:41.380For the insights into the forever war as President Trump tries to wrap them up.
00:40:46.440Of everything President Trump's doing, the verticals, we had Ube Shandahar, who is Rick Grinnell's right hand on the Kennedy Center, in the show last night, on the show in studio with us.
00:40:55.860I spent a lot of time with Ambassador Grinnell talking about the Kennedy Center.
00:40:59.380At CPAC, spent a lot of time with Grinnell, particularly the night that we had the international dinner, which he was the focus speaker, hosted by the War Room.
00:41:08.020Roger, why is – of everything President Trump's doing, why is this one of the most important things, to take active charge of the Kennedy Center, sir?
00:41:17.620Well, I think that the Kennedy Center has been taken over by the left.
00:42:12.400Before the war and even in the 1950s, the conservative – and it seemed like the conservative movement and people that were – I was a kid growing up.
00:42:20.040One, it seemed like it was apolitical.
00:42:21.540But two, it seemed like the conservatives had as much involvement, particularly high culture, particularly theater.
00:42:43.880Well, if I could indulge in a brief moment of self-advertisement, a lot of the story is told in my book, The Long March, how the cultural revolution of the 1960s changed America.
00:42:58.740I don't talk about the Kennedy Center, as I recall, but I do talk about the way in which our culture writ large was taken over by the passions of this – I hesitate to use the word utopian because some people think of the word utopian as a good thing.
00:43:18.620But utopian can mean both the good place and no place, and for the kind of passions that stood behind the utopian movements of, for example, the French Revolution or the Communist Revolution or the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, utopianism was a very bad thing.
00:43:56.620You see it in our schools, primary schools.
00:44:01.280You see it in our cultural institutions like museums, symphony orchestras, and so on, where the toxin of what we now call DEI used to be called affirmative action.
00:44:15.240It's the same kind of thing, but it undercuts and undermines a commitment to merit, to the idea that some things are nobler than others, some things are deeper than others, some things are better than others.
00:44:34.740And the attack on merit, on quality, on excellence has been remorseless.
00:44:41.780And just to shift gears a teeny bit, I think you and I were corresponding about a government – a quasi-government entity, or at least a government-funded entity called the National Endowment for Democracy.
00:45:00.360I want to pivot to this, but I want to use the pivot is that one of the groups or institutions on the right, the National Review, used to be at the forefront of defending the culture and high culture.
00:45:12.080And now – they kind of lost that fight, but now they've kind of flipped this article the other day.
00:45:19.000In the National Review, which used to be the conservatives, I think, one of the biggest journal before New Criterion and others that you started, at the forefront of these cultural wars, they came out the other day.
00:45:29.480America's enemies are rooting for the death of the National Endowment for Democracy.
00:45:33.440And this – probably this article is the most anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, anti-populist nationalist article I've seen in a long time.
00:45:42.280Can you take – we've got about five minutes.
00:45:51.560And I'm sure that whoever wrote this article – I doubt that it was really Peter Roskam, who's the chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy.
00:46:01.060But it was a very disingenuous article of a piece with the article that was written for The Wall Street Journal a couple of months ago by William Galston, a left-wing progressive Democrat who worked for Bill Clinton and Al Gore and so on.
00:46:16.080And also attempting to defend the National Endowment for Democracy, which, remember, was started by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, 83, I think.
00:46:26.060It was supposed to project soft power of the United States and help, you know, promote democracy and freedom and so on.
00:46:50.080I was honored to be chosen as the chairman of NED.
00:46:52.980Now, that suggests to me that Trump had something to do with his appointment, which is completely untrue.
00:46:59.900He says, oh, well, our enemies abroad, China and Russia and so on, they applaud the fact that funding has been cut off for this agency.
00:47:09.600But it's not just people abroad, it's also, he says, the people who – people here at home who question the value of Americans supporting those who seek freedom, which is completely disingenuous.
00:47:25.800He also says that – he insinuates that the NED is somehow advancing President Trump's America First agenda, which is completely wrong.
00:47:35.880The National Endowment for Democracy on their board are people like Victoria Nuland, her husband Bob Kagan is part of that, Michael McFaul at the Hoover Institution, Ann Applebaum, and it goes on and on and on.
00:47:53.200These are – this is the war party, the forever war party.
00:47:56.940And while the National Endowment for Democracy did some good in the 1980s when the enemy was the Soviet Union, it has been completely inverted like so many things in our culture, and it's now been weaponized against us, against ordinary Americans.
00:48:17.980It's part of the global censorship network that J.D. Vance talked about in his splendid speech in Munich.
00:48:28.740You know, they funded – they give thousands of grants every year, and you can't tell what they've given the money to.
00:48:36.680It will say things like Russia and its neighbors for democracy development.
00:48:44.880We know some of the things they've –
00:48:48.360Hey, we had Tej Gill on here who's a warrior front line.
00:48:51.900I saw what he and his list of guys say, forever wars, and we lost all of them, and they just –
00:48:57.680Most people think that's a guy just screaming over his lunchbox.
00:49:01.380Do you think what you've seen in the National Endowment for Democracies and all of this, that there's something there and that actually some of the institutions in the United States funded by taxpayers?
00:49:45.760A million people or more have died in that war.
00:49:50.580What he wants – what President Trump wants to do is bring that to an end.
00:49:54.520And that can be brought to an end by a negotiation.
00:49:59.580This has been – this is something that people have been talking about at least since 2014 when the first – this first start – I mean, it has a prehistory, of course, but it really got going in its current incarnation, you might say, in 2014.
00:50:17.040And the people who want to keep it going are, in many instances, the same people who are profiting from this war, this forever war.
00:50:33.640Where do people get your writings, New Criterion, all the journals and magazines you're back of, and particularly to your writings like The Long March?
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