00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, Steve Bannon from the War Room Pandemic Podcast, one of the biggest podcasts in the country, joins our show advertiser-free.
00:00:08.000So if you guys like this conversation with no advertisers and you want to support us, you could do it at charliekirk.com slash support.
00:00:16.000Doreen from Ridge, New York, God bless you.
00:00:20.000CharlieKirk.com slash support is where you guys can get behind the work we are doing at our show to try to reach millions of young people every single month.
00:00:31.000I want to thank Christine from North Carolina, where she says, love your show with Dr. Merritt.
00:01:34.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:42.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:26.000And so August, October 22nd of 2019, we started.
00:03:30.000And then two hours and an hour in the afternoon.
00:03:33.000And then in January, because I'm pretty dialed into China, I knew that there was this pandemic happening.
00:03:40.000So we bifurcated the show one hour to the impeachment, one hour to pandemic.
00:03:43.000And then when the impeachment fell apart a couple of weeks later, this is in mid-January.
00:03:48.000And the funny thing, Charlie, is when I started war in pandemic, I had all the mainstream media from DC and New York guys I knew said the impeachment show is pretty intense because you get all these experts in, but why are you doing this pandemic?
00:03:59.000It's like it's a bird flu from central China.
00:04:08.000And I think, you know, just like you, people are looking for sources of information.
00:04:14.000They can come every day, build a community, and actually get information they can use in their personal lives and information that they can actually apply to their political or their, you know, their social lives.
00:04:25.000One of the things we pride ourselves on is that we're an activist.
00:04:28.000Our audience, the Warren Posse, is an activist community.
00:04:30.000I mean, you can see today when somebody like you are on, they'll be taking the clips and pushing them out and acting as a force multiplier.
00:04:50.000It's not really traditional talk radio, which I love.
00:04:52.000Don't get me wrong, but Rush Limba and these guys have such a great model.
00:04:57.000And that's just not, it's not what we do.
00:04:59.000And that's why a guy like you come on, you're the kind of guest that really we try to book and try to get on because it's action, action, action.
00:05:07.000And, you know, there was just a story, I think, in the Washington Post or somewhere that blamed you for the fact that people are taking precinct committee positions seriously.
00:05:16.000We were mentioned like halfway through because we've been trying to do that through our political arm turning point action.
00:05:21.000And it's kind of refreshing to finally see a community that wants to do something and want to take back the Republican Party and take back the country.
00:05:30.000And I want to explore that with you, Steve, because you've been one of the leaders on kind of this idea of populist conservatism.
00:05:38.000And I don't think you get the credit always for being able to articulate the philosophical foundations for that.
00:05:44.000Can you just kind of riff on that for a second here of why, what do we believe?
00:05:50.000Yeah, I think it's, and by the way, it gets back to the precinct committee man, which came out of a guy in Arizona actually has been doing it for years.
00:05:56.000It was ProPublica, the kind of left-wing investigative guys who I thought did a very good job of trying to find out what we're doing.
00:06:03.000Look, populism really came from the financial crisis collapse of 2008, where I noticed that all the working class people were the guys left holding the bag, right?
00:06:12.000And particularly, Obama came in most progressive president.
00:06:14.000They just blew up the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve.
00:06:17.000You had the greatest concentration of wealth ever.
00:06:19.000And kind of the hardworking folks like my dad at the time, you know, was like, I think 80, almost 90 years old.
00:06:26.000All the stock dropped to be of no value.
00:06:28.000These are guys that totally buy into the system.
00:06:31.000And so populism, I started looking at it, you know, we've won as Republicans, we've won more elections than we've lost since 19 since Nixon won in 1968.
00:06:39.000If you look at Senate and House and state legislatures and governorships, and I tell people, hey, we won all these elections, but we lost the country.
00:06:47.000And you could look at that right after the 2020, you know, this fiasco in 2020 and after the Biden administration came in and today with the mandates, that you just can't go on an old model, an old model that really is a corporatist.
00:07:01.000And I think you said it so well on our show today, a corporatist model that just plays to these kind of tax cuts and deregulations for these giant corporations.
00:07:09.000And that's been, and that's what the controlled opposition that the Democrats want.
00:07:13.000We need something that engages citizens and particularly people.
00:07:57.000And American citizens have to come first, whether it's the sovereignty of our country, the southern border, how we deploy our troops, all of it.
00:08:05.000It's not that we can't be in multinational organizations or treaties or things like that, but America's interests have to come first, just like other nations.
00:08:13.000It's kind of the Treaty of Westphalia, which was 300 years ago that made the nation state the centerpiece.
00:08:18.000That's still the way for us to get the most ability of freedom.
00:08:21.000So, populism is really pushing decision-making down to the people and having policies that really benefit the people.
00:08:30.000You know, for years and years and years, we've had tax cuts for giant corporations, deregulation for giant corporations, which in and of itself is not bad if you look at the overall aspect of it.
00:08:41.000What we've allowed these multinational corporations, and I always tell the Republicans, they're the most progressive institutions in the world now, these woke companies, all these guys you gave tax cuts to and deregulation have now turned on conservatives, turned on traditionalists with a vengeance to deplatform them, debank them, all of it.
00:08:59.000We have to have a model that focuses on bringing job, high-value-added manufacturing jobs back here, that looks at economics.
00:09:07.000That we've put too much of the returns to capital that now needs to be pushed back.
00:09:11.000Some of that's going to be pushed back to labor.
00:09:13.000We have to have tax policy like that, investment policy like that, et cetera.
00:09:17.000Because listen, it's on the shoulders of the deployable rest.
00:09:20.000All the tax revenues essentially come from them, or the great bulk of it, since we know the wealthy pay very little in taxes.
00:09:26.000And the pension funds are really the private equity and the venture capital that drive the Zuckerbergs of the world and the Jack Dorsey's of the world.
00:09:35.000In addition, it has been the driving engine of shipping all the jobs over to China.
00:09:39.000So, to me, this country is about 65% popular.
00:09:43.000I think the policies of President Trump, who kind of personified this, right, as a real estate billionaire from Queens, then go to Manhattan on the global stage.
00:09:52.000He understands and connects, as you've seen a million times, Charlie, he can connect to the common man and he understands their fears and particularly what they want out of governance, right?
00:10:05.000What they basically want to do is protect the family, make sure they get a fair share, and they will pay their taxes, they'll work hard, they'll send their sons and daughters to defend the nation.
00:10:16.000And I think that it's now we can, and the key, I keep telling people, I say, hey, look, we're winning.
00:10:22.000And if you look at like in the 2020 election, look at the Rio Grande Valley, look at these, as Steve Cortez says, we are winning working class Hispanics like never before, right?
00:10:32.000We're winning African-American males like we've never won before.
00:10:35.000And those are because of basic Trump policies of populism and nationalism.
00:10:38.000And so I think with the work that you're doing with the youth, which is still to me our most tenuous because I don't think we get that message out, I see a coalition here that could govern for 100 years.
00:10:48.000And so that's what the war room every day tries to emphasize: the populist nationalist aspect of the Trump movement.
00:10:55.000And an idea of populism is also in some ways non-ideological.
00:10:59.000It's supposed to be prudent in its approach to reject kind of like bumper sticker conservatism of saying, oh, yeah, you can never do tariffs.
00:11:07.000Like, why can't we have some tariffs if it actually helps your workers, right?
00:11:11.000And so, Steve, can you let's go a level deeper about this, about how Republicans are kind of stuck in this muscle memory of a party and a movement that, quite honestly, I grew up in in 2012 and 13 and 2014, you know, where I used to go to these gatherings, Steve, and there used to be like charts and graphs about, you know, GDP growth or, you know, and again, I'm not discounting that.
00:11:46.000They're talking about things that I think are far more important than GDP graphs.
00:11:49.000Can you talk about that, about either where we went wrong and how we're correcting that?
00:11:54.000I think that because elections and what the consultants told people, because remember, the consultants are really marketing experts that are focused on television and they were trying to make 30-second spots.
00:12:05.000And so they came up with, it's the economy stupid.
00:12:08.000And it got to be that we're just focused on the economy and GDP growth and tax cuts and deregulation.
00:12:13.000And what people forgot is we're a country with an economy, not an economy that has a country bolted onto it.
00:12:19.000And I think that's been one of the big powers in populism.
00:12:22.000And populism, you can see the personified manifestation of populism right now.
00:12:27.000People say, well, it's still too esoteric.
00:12:31.000Look at moms and dads, particularly moms there, arguing about masks, arguing now about vaccines, but particularly look about CRT.
00:12:39.000I know so many moms who, let's say this, weren't political science majors when they were in college that now sit there and can tell you about Herbert Marcuse and Cloward Piven.
00:12:51.000Michelle Foucault and Jacques Derrida and all of them.
00:13:43.000They hate the fact they're seeing in Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and Florida, and particularly Arizona.
00:13:49.000They're seeing grassroots organizations that really are getting engaged.
00:13:53.000Remember, if you look at our political history, the two big reactions, one to the Clinton presidency in 92, was the Newt Gingers revolt in 94, which is kind of one of the beginnings of it.
00:14:02.000And then the Tea Party revolt, right when you were coming on the scene, Charlie, in 2010, which was the kind of revolt against the Obama-failed policies in his first year, right?
00:14:25.000Now, we kind of lost the plot because we really didn't have the policies to go along with that.
00:14:29.000People, you know, once again, once again, Mitch McConnell and the establishment are pretty good about steering it back to what the Cokes want.
00:14:37.000And that's the power of the Trump movement.
00:14:40.000Today, I mean, you came out, and the reason we had you on the show today, you came out as a firebrand yesterday.
00:14:46.000Say, hey, look, I've got a company over 100 people.
00:14:53.000You know, JD Vance said, hey, I want mass civil justice media.
00:14:57.000You had firebrands coming out from the leadership in the Republican Party.
00:15:01.000It's been kind of crickets, just like it has been on the Heartbeat Bill.
00:15:04.000The populace, whether it's in Texas with the right to life movement, whether it's whether it's right now with people at the school board level taking back for CRT, whether people are fighting these vaccine mandates, the leadership is still not there.
00:15:20.000And I think that that is, we're living in an age right now because of organizations like yourselves, shows like this, and social media.
00:15:28.000Even though we've been deplatformed all over, the words getting out and people are sitting there going, I just don't want to sit there and listen to talk radio anymore.
00:15:35.000I just want to sit there and watch talk.
00:16:16.000And I'm talking about the establishment of the Republican Party, not the left.
00:16:20.000But what they really fear most is the populist movement and the nationalist movement underneath Trump.
00:16:26.000And you can see that from that ProPublica article where they literally freak out about people going to be election officials, people, this democracy personified, people going to be committeemen, election officials, school boards, that grassroots populism that is so powerful to give people a voice, they're in full meltdown.
00:16:43.000Well, and the part that you highlighted, Steve, that I think is super interesting is how intelligent our grassroots activists have become over the last 10 years.
00:16:52.000And I've seen this year after year, and I see it in our listeners on our podcast.
00:16:57.000And they're emailing me about not just Marcuse and Foucault and Derrida, but they want to know about Machiavelli and they want to know about Descartes and Hume and Aquinas.
00:17:08.000And they want to know about the ancient Greeks.
00:17:10.000And I ask them, I say, like, what are you, a professor?
00:17:13.000Like, no, I'm a plumber and I'm homeschooling my kids.
00:17:15.000And Steve, that is, that's an even more profound point of why the elites are truly getting scared because an informed and active grassroots base, then all of a sudden they'll be able to call BS the next time some sort of technocratic politician does what Kelly Loffler does, who's a nice person, right?
00:19:30.000And that's something, he's a non-ideological figure, which a lot of people, that's an unknown commodity.
00:19:35.000And so, so, Steve, are you starting to see, though, at the highest levels of the Republican Party and in Senate leadership or House leadership, are they starting to get the clue?
00:20:10.000But we have to do it with the right people and we have to do it with the right policies.
00:20:13.000These have to be populist, nationalist policies, and they have to be the right people.
00:20:18.000And you're going to see a lot of bait and switch.
00:20:21.000And you brought up a perfect one, Kelly Loeffler down in, you know, first off, I think there's two one when we get to the bottom of Georgia.
00:20:28.000You're going to see that we had two Republican senators.
00:20:36.000There's $405 or $500 million spent by the Republicans in that 45 days.
00:20:42.000I don't think a lot of that flowed through the Charlie Kirk show or came to the war room.
00:20:47.000And they were, I'm sitting there and instead of focusing on November 3rd and what's important and getting all the Trump voters out and jacked up, they're talking about capitalism versus socialism.
00:20:56.000It's kind of this esoteric of view that, you know, people are going to say, hey, tell me how capitalism's work for me when I'm one paycheck away from complete desolation.
00:21:10.000So it's the messaging, they're going to try to message this.
00:21:13.000And what they're going to try to do is draft off.
00:21:15.000They want the muscle and the energy and the dynamism of the Trump movement, the populist movement, but they want to continue with their same policies.
00:21:23.000And we're going to have, that's going to be a fight.
00:21:24.000I think a lot of these primaries, particularly, we could win, I think, 50 to 60 seats in the House if we tee this up like 2010.
00:21:33.000Particularly, remember, Biden is in a complete free fall.
00:21:36.000He's in complete free fall in the suburbs.
00:21:38.000The economist poll the other day said the economist now, not the Charlie Kirk show or turning point or war room.
00:21:45.000The economist poll had 42% of independent voters believe he's illegitimate.
00:21:51.000Okay, that should go off like a firebell in the night.
00:21:54.000The other poll they had, I think it was the morning council poll had, oh, no, no, no labels, which is a moderate group, had only 39% of suburban voters, which is their strength, believe they should do this $6 trillion in spending.
00:23:49.000Do you think the mandates, and I think you brought it up today about it's going to take some time for them to even write the EOs and to get OSHA involved before it's going to take a while for OSHA to knock on Turning Point USA's door, right?
00:24:02.000I think it's a little bit of a misdirection play to demonize the remember 47% of the country is not vaccinated yet, but to demonize that minority into majority.
00:24:13.000The reason is the next four weeks is going to be the fulcrum of American politics.
00:24:17.000So we have two events coming up, and Biden needs to spend money.
00:24:22.000He needs to buy off the working class and the middle class with these massive $6 trillion, the 1.25 phony infrastructure bill, which 19 collaborators in the Republican Party agreed to, and then the 3.5 trillion just radical expansion of the social safety net.
00:24:39.000And he needs to do that with two big structural problems.
00:24:42.000On the 30th of September, if you don't have a budget, the fiscal year ends and the government shuts down.
00:24:48.000Number one, we also know, more importantly, the debt ceiling.
00:24:53.000We've topped out now to the debt ceiling, so they just can't print money.
00:24:57.000The ways you finance this whole debacle, you either one, sell bonds to the Chinese or the Japanese or the Gulf Emirates, government bonds.
00:25:05.000You two, you either through growth, you get more tax revenues or you raise taxes.
00:25:10.000And there's not enough juice there in the lemon to do that because there's no growth.
00:25:14.000Number three, you just print money because we're the prime reserve currency.
00:25:49.000And so the question gets to be is that, and they need to do that.
00:25:53.000If he does not get this money and pay off and buy off the working class and buy off the middle class with essentially an expanded set of goodies, right?
00:26:02.000And also buys off all the corporate clients.
00:26:04.000One of the reasons you don't hear a peep here, the lobbyists in the Republican Party are quite comfortable with what's happening because their clients are going to get huge paydays, contracts, more revenue.
00:26:15.000And that's why you almost hear no peep about it.
00:26:17.000So to stop, it all gets back to money, money and power.
00:26:21.000Right now, we have the leverage points.
00:26:23.000If you don't allow a continuing resolution and any of these funny games, you know, they did it with President Trump all the time, kick the can down the road a couple of months, stick all kinds of things in the CR.
00:26:33.000And for the continuing resolution that would get them past the 30th the other day, Charlie, they had the Hill newspaper said, oh, gosh, look what they're including in there.
00:26:42.000One is 65,000 Afghani refugees in the United States.
00:26:47.000It's the first time they ever mentioned the amount and where they were coming and why they needed money to pay for it.
00:26:53.000And that's where they put it in there.
00:26:54.000So for the audience, the mandates are huge.
00:26:59.000Part of that, I think, is to get people's eye off the ball, the spending, but we're now into it.
00:27:03.000You see, it's the, and if they get this spending done, I will tell the turning point audience: America's economy is never coming back like we like the country that was bequeathed to me and I was able to grow up in.
00:27:15.000It's going to be a radically different.
00:27:17.000This is going to be not just big government.
00:27:19.000This is going to be government into everything, right?
00:27:21.000This is, and AOC and these guys knew this with the Green New Deal that gets you into the middle of everything.
00:27:26.000We're going to have very quickly $35, $40 trillion, a face amount of debt.
00:27:31.000When you're at zero interest rates, what the Fed can keep right now, it's fine.
00:27:35.000But when that comes off, we're going to be like Japan.
00:27:37.000You're going to have multiple lost decades.
00:27:39.000You know, your team members there, the people in their 20s, you can assume the time that you reach middle age, right?
00:27:47.000Almost retirement, this economy is never going to come back.
00:27:50.000It's going to be like 2% growth, 1% growth, no opportunities, and particularly no opportunities on a mass scale.
00:28:19.000But when I talk to most senators, I don't feel that kind of sense of urgency, Steve.
00:28:23.000And obviously, I wish that we still had state legislatures that appointed senators.
00:28:28.000I think that was one of the worst things.
00:28:30.000And even as a populist, I say that, Steve, I think that it's actually more populous to have the state legislatures to control it.
00:28:36.000It's the opposite of what people would think.
00:28:39.000But I don't feel that sense of urgency from the ruling class because they've been able to insulate themselves from any of the damage that their decisions actually have when they make them.
00:28:51.000Here's the thing, and this is why your show and turning point, what you guys are doing and other groups are doing, they want you to kind of drift by in ignorance and focus on the shiny new tool.
00:29:01.000That's why all these things pop up and they're out, but there's an outrage du jour.
00:29:44.000You've got a handful of really great guys over there.
00:29:45.000Don't get me wrong, men and women, but it's not enough.
00:29:48.000We have to change that, start changing that this cycle.
00:29:51.000And I think, particularly in the House, in the House, we have to really get fire-breathing populists in there that are prepared to really, you know, and as you know, Charlie, you can't back off.
00:30:01.000You just got to attack, attack, attack.
00:30:20.000It's probably the most conservative state in the country.
00:30:22.000If you just look at kind of how they vote, yet they're kind of just kind of governed by a bunch of moderates.
00:30:28.000And I want to try to get the states to empower them to not just challenge the federal government, but to create the country that they want to live in.
00:30:36.000And the trend is actually getting away from the international organizations and even DC.
00:30:41.000The trend is getting more local and local.
00:30:45.000How the momentum is actually towards self-rule?
00:30:48.000I want to remember it's in the Catholic Church, the concept was from Thomas Brown, I think, subsidiarity, that man lives best when decision-making is made at the lowest level.
00:30:58.000That's kind of what nationalism is based upon, because you can actually control it from the grassroots level.
00:31:03.000And that's why I think at the states and at the school boards, right, at the precinct committees, this is the new populism.
00:31:10.000And absolutely, the states can be laboratories.
00:31:14.000Everything that's come out of three November.
00:31:16.000Every policy we've got that's kind of a fighting policy has come from the states, has come from, hey, the railhead of the Patriot movement right now is Arizona.
00:31:25.000Arizona, those patriots that were in what I call the new Concord Bridge of the Convention Center for those months in hot conditions, counting every day, doing the detailed work.
00:31:36.000Now we know that people are out canvassing.
00:31:38.000And this is why the Justice Department freaked out, right?
00:31:41.000They wanted to charge them with criminal violations for voter intimidation.
00:31:46.000That all came from, you know, basically nameless populist patriots in Arizona.
00:32:04.000I want to make sure that we have informed consent on both masks, the social distancing, whether they're in school or not, and particularly on vaccines.
00:32:12.000People, I think, are feeling more empowered.
00:32:16.000The more you have this, and I think, Charlie, actually, at the state level, I think you're going to have such a flood of candidates coming in.
00:32:23.000Because right now, we have a lot of candidates jumping into these house races.
00:32:26.000I think the next wave is in state legislation, House of Delegates.
00:32:30.000You're going to see a flood of populists come in there to say, Hey, look, let me get into these state legislatures.
00:32:37.000Because we know from the election of 2020, all power resides in the state legislatures to really beam who the certified electors.
00:32:45.000That's going to become a massive story towards the end of this year.
00:32:48.000And in early next year, the certification process of these, of these, of this election, as it becomes, you know, in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and particularly Arizona and Georgia, is it becomes evident that something was untoward and they go through a decertification process.
00:33:04.000That's going to raise up the power that the founders wanted into these state legislatures.
00:33:10.000A massive mistake we made in an anti-populist in hindsight was to take the power away from the state legislature to actually elect the senators.
00:33:18.000So, in closing, Steve, I want to ask you about Trump running in 2024.
00:33:25.000What's your own personal opinion on that?
00:33:27.000Because my fear is that a technocrat tries to inherit the populist movement and it doesn't take.
00:33:35.000And all of a sudden, we kind of have the thing that we've been seeing in the Senate Republican world, which is they'll show up to the Trump rally and get the endorsement and then turn around and do the exact opposite.
00:34:13.000He should not run for office, but I think he should become Speaker of the House for 100 days to impeach Biden, step down, and then say, I'm starting my campaign in 2024.
00:34:24.000We need, look, President Trump's kind of like an Andrew Breitbart type guy.
00:34:27.000These guys come along once and very rarely in American history, right?
00:34:32.000The chapters of Trump's political career and his impact on the nation are far from over.
00:34:38.000That's the candidate we've got in 2024.
00:34:46.000That's where we really take the country back and we get fire breathers in there for investigations, for being tough, for shutting down this White House and anything they want to do because we have the purse strings, they have the ability to investigate, right?
00:34:58.000And the ability to actually lay out a tax code that's fair, all appropriations, and most importantly, the investigations in this administration, particularly God bless Rand Paul and Tom Cotton, Tony Fauci, and others, right?
00:36:15.000Let's get our put our shoulder to the world 24.
00:36:16.000And I think it's pretty, I think it's pretty straightforward.
00:36:18.000And every time I say a turning point conference, you guys are on fire.
00:36:23.000So I know we're going to have enough young people.
00:36:25.000The numbers are increasing like we've never seen before, Steve.
00:36:28.000And, you know, I tell people a lot that students and young people, they are, they're growing envious because they actually want to start to live in the country they've been told exists for their whole life.
00:36:39.000You know, they've been told that, yeah, you could go buy a home and start a family.
00:36:54.000We kind of talked about precinct committee and all this.
00:36:56.000What are the action items for people to do?
00:36:59.000You know, just get as specific as you can.
00:37:01.000The action item, number one, get engaged.
00:37:04.000When I mean engaged, whether it's turning point, whether it's precinct committee men, whether it's a school board, the first thing you can do is be a force multiplier.
00:39:17.000You'll be higher than the Warroom, okay?
00:39:19.000I don't know about that, but it does give me hope because out of the top 10 podcasts, War Room, Ours, and Bongino, three are a populist conservatives.