Here is the full transcript of political strategist Stephen K. Bannon’s lecture titled “MAGA And The Fight For America”, which was given on April 24, 2025, during a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Kansas City, Missouri.
Listen to the audio version here:
The Stakes of Our Time
STEPHEN K. BANNON: Thank you very much. I’m going to do this a little differently because of what Larry Arnn just said. When a guy like Larry Arnn tells you this is 1860, pay attention, right? Last weekend was the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Lexington and Concord. There’s a lot of water between now and next July 4, right?
And July 4 is not totally and completely, I think, celebrated right here in The United States. We do the barbecues, cooks, it’s the birthday of the country. Remember on the day it was actually signed before they promulgated it, the British landed in Staten Island. The largest expeditionary force in the history of man landed. And by August, it was a total and complete throwdown.
We had the American Thermopylae in Brooklyn. A couple of weeks later, the American Dunkirk right there at Brooklyn Heights to get the army, save the army, get them to Manhattan. One retreat after another all the way back on the other side of the Delaware where they dug in and waited Christmas night. We celebrate the July 4. It was a document that was a declaration of war of men who knew they were putting it all on the line and would be hung as traitors if we lost. When Larry Arnn says it’s 1860, he’s not kidding.
I want you to think about that for a second. What happened in 1860? And how were we inexorably drawn to a civil war? The only thing I disagree with Larry on is that we’re not kind of in a war. We’re in a war.
And everyone you hear, just like Trump and Navarro, Bennett and many others, Tom Barrack, better be ready to go to prison and ready to be bankrupt and ready to be debanked. It is very uncertain what the outcome of this is.
Divine Providence and Trump’s Journey
Divine providence has been with us in ’16. I was there at a ringside seat. We had a man, we had a plane, we had no money, no organization, self-organized.
One time he was 10 to 12 points down to Hillary Clinton in August, mid-August. Then later, we closed it up and he got down another six or so on the Billy Bush weekend, and we pulled it off because of his tenacity in reaching Americans who would never vote for a Republican in their entire life because they saw something in Trump. Right? And then remember that administration attacked every day by the deep state and the administrative state? Every day.
I had sixty hours in front of the Mueller Commission and the House Intelligence Committee, which Schiff and Swalwell were running. Why were they running it? Because Paul Ryan, a Republican, punched out and turned it over to the Democrats in the House Intelligence Committee. And I’ve got legal bills to prove it as other people do too. Why?
For hours and hours and hours, they want to get you in a perjury trap so you flip on Trump. I was there in ’20 when Donald John Trump won his second term. Hell, yes. Won it? There’s no question he won it.
But divine providence works in mysterious ways. Right? Think about if the second term had been then. We weren’t ready. We weren’t ready the first time.
Larry knows this. He helped us in the transition the first time. We didn’t have the policies. We didn’t have the bench. We didn’t have the depth.
The Courageous Decision to Return
But think about when President Trump was forced back and went to Mar-a-Lago on the afternoon of January 2021. Remember how dark that was? Right? Remember the folks watching the War Room? Boris is sitting there on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, and there was not a lot of official DC there.
Remember that? And what was it when Trump got there? He’s like a lion in winter. Correct? He knew he had won and he knew they had stolen it.
Right then, in those first couple of days, he made one of the most courageous and morally focused clarity decisions in American history. You can read Jack Kennedy’s or Ted Sorensen’s Profiles in Courage to the tenth power, all of them, wrap it up. Trump understood if he played the game and took a big book deal and started buying more golf courses and getting the Open Road over in The United Kingdom and getting to the PGA Road here. Life would be fine, right? He had a great family, beautiful wife, young.
He’s still young and vibrant. He made a decision to return. Just like Cincinnatus, back from the plow to save his country. Nobody in American history has ever made that decision understanding he knew they were going to bankrupt him. He knew they were going to try to put him in prison.
He knew they were going to try to destroy him and his family. And he made the decision, I’m coming back. And remember how many people abandoned him. Think about it. And let me start with Fox News and the Murdochs.
For two years, he wasn’t live on TV as they put up every Republican, standard Republican. Good people, fine people. They’re not going to be president of The United States, and they’re certainly not going to be president of The United States when the nation has a crisis. And think about that, coming all the way back, remember those dark years of ’21 and ’22, how tough it was, how we had to grind? But divine providence was there because we saw that these are not typical Democrats.
The True Nature of the Opposition
These are radical Marxists. It was like the Stasi. Remember the billboards?
Remember the speeches that Biden would give at Independence Hall as a sacrilege to the most sacred places we have in this country? There’s no depth of what they would do. As we now find out, Tulsi Gabbard puts out their plan that we talked about for years, what they did in COVID, what they did with the vaccines, what they did with the mandates over and over and over again, that’s a Marxist. This is cultural Marxism with the heavy hand of totalitarian control and state capitalism. It’s the Chinese Communist Party model. And we grinded through it.
Building the MAGA Movement
And what happened in that time? Two important things, the precinct strategy. People started getting engaged because you know why? It’s about human agency. If Lexington and Concord shows us anything, it’s that.
There’s nothing foreordained. It’s all about you in that defining moment on Lexington Common hiding Sam Adams and John Hancock, at Concord Bridge when you know they’re coming. That was you. On the precinct strategy to give him a political infrastructure, finally organize people and take over the Republican Party from the precinct level to the county level, to the state level, as MAGA Republicans. And at the same time, and this is what’s so important, public intellectuals and heroes like Brooke Rollins and the people at America First Party Institute to start a think tank, Stephen Miller at America First Law to start something legally to think through these issues.
Russ Vogt and that team of Mark Paoletta, Jeff Clark, all of them are with CRA. And the project that has no name, Project 2025, right? A coordination effort. These are people who put it on the line, they would never be hired by anybody else in doing this. These were MAGA policies to make sure that in the certainty that everybody had, they were going to win, but we have to be ready this time.
We have to have policies. We have one hundred days. We have to understand this. We have to have teams and cadres that have worked together. Of the 3,000 or 4,000 people that we never filled those billets in the first term because we didn’t have the bench.
You have it now, I think Sergio told me the other day, it’s three thousand people. That’s how you have Days of Thunder. I gave that PBS interview years ago. Said, if we had one or two things, that’d be flooding the zone. This is flooding the zone where you have 10.
As Larry said, you read it every day. You got five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 things in every different vertical. Well thought through, tight executive orders, executive actions, presidential memorandums. This is what’s driving it. It’s that combination of a political apparatus that’s grassroots and people are using their agency.
They’re getting off the sofa and say, I’m in for this. That’s how Trump won. People went door to door in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, in Arizona and Georgia. Why? Because the Trump voter, those voters, a lot of low information, low propensity voters, doesn’t mean they’re stupid or don’t have college education.
They’re not interested in politics. But they will come out if you go get them. And we won. Think about that. We won.
The Mother of All Battles
But Larry Arnn says we’re in 1860, and Larry Arnn is right. When we won on that night, you guys watching the War Room broadcast, I said, get ready. We’re about to have the mother of all battles. And then the inauguration came, and all the tech bros are there and all the crypto guys, and they’re running around. They’re all in tuxedos, all big party.
I said, fine. Party. It’s great. Enjoy yourself. We have to do that. It’s part of it, historically part of it. But I said then, before we get to one hundred days, we’re going to be in a gunfight. And I want to know who the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots are, who’s with us in one hundred days, because Trump ain’t backing off. He did not risk three hundred years in prison. And remember, they wanted to send him to prison to die in prison.
If you don’t understand that, you do not understand the man’s sacrifice. They wanted to send him to prison to die in prison. And if they steal 2028, they will send Trump to prison. We’re in it now. We have now the convergence because our political class and the sociopathic overlords on Wall Street and the corporatists and the oligarchs in Silicon Valley, and we haven’t made these tough choices when we had decisions to had chances to make them.
The Converging Crises
We’re in now the convergence of multiple crises that’s going to lead to late in the year of 1860 and into 1861. We have the three verticals, as I talk about on the show, and I’m going to add the administrative state in a second, three verticals.
One, we’re in the kinetic part of the Third World War. We’re not kind of in a—you know, before this is World War III. If you look at World War II from September 1939 in Poland to the Wehrmacht going after the Russians in June of 1941 of Operation Barbarossa, all that time, the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, North Africa, throwing Finland and some other and fall of France, a couple hundred thousand people.
Bad. There’s a million and a half people dead or wounded in Ukraine. It looks like Dresden in 1945. Look at Gaza. We’ve got two carrier battle groups off the southern tip of Saudi Arabia.
You read the paper today, they’re running sorties every day. We’re in the kinetic part of the third world war, and President Trump’s trying to stop that war. Stop the shooting part of it, at least. Figure out some rapprochement with the Russians and maybe pull them out of the Chinese Communist Party sphere on the Eurasian landmass.
The other is the deportations of 10 million illegal alien invaders that came here on Biden’s watch, totally coordinated. Not chaos, highly thought through. Just look at the numbers. The number in the reconciliation bill is $170 billion to recreate and rebuild what ICE needs to get them out of here.
Look at the Supreme Court. Part of the converging crisis is a constitutional crisis, folks, that’s going to be front and center in June or July of this year when they step in front of the unified executive theory, or as Mike Davis refers to it, Article II, powers of the president, to, number one, be the chief executive and make decisions about who works in the government and who doesn’t and how many and about budgets, about impounding budgets that the appropriations bill is one thing, but he can impound because he’s chief executive, so says the constitution.
Number two, he’s the commander in chief of the armed forces. And no judge on earth can come between him as commander in chief and what he thinks is an action should be taken. And the third, it’s not an independent DOJ. He’s the chief magistrate and the chief law enforcement officer of this government. They don’t believe that.
They don’t believe any of it. They have 170 lawsuits right now to stop him because to delay is to deny, and they know that. And the only thing they’ve got working is these radicals on the court. And right now they’re forcing—they’re going to force Boesburg up to the Supreme Court, a confrontation on a human trafficker. Understand who they’re embracing.
A human trafficker. Because here’s why. It’s quite simple. They want to make it so tough to get the criminals out, so tough to get the gangs out that you just give up on the 10 million. All 10 million illegal alien invaders must leave the country or we don’t have a republic.
All of them. Remember Lankford? Remember the huge debates we had over the border bill and how much they threw it? Trump says Trump’s terrible. This bill is going to cause hundreds of billions of dollars, take ten years to implement.
Trump secured the border in sixty days. Sixty days. Everything they tell you in Washington, DC is a bald faced lie. Sixty days. And you haven’t even started building the wall yet, which has to be built.
The Financial Crisis
But then you get to the main event, this unsustainable financial model we have and business model we have, this is insanity. It’s insanity. It’s not going to affect future generations. It’s here and now. The deficit for the first six months is $1.3 trillion. We’re going to have a $2.5 trillion deficit this year.
The big, great, beautiful bill they’re working on, $5 trillion debt ceiling relief. Think it’s two years. It doesn’t work. It’s not going to work. And who on Capitol Hill is going to have the courage to do what needs to be done?
MAGA And The Fight For America (continued)
STEPHEN K. BANNON:
We have to cut no ten year plan. Don’t want a ten year plan. This is a bankruptcy, and I deal with it like I dealt with bankruptcy at Goldman Sachs and my own firm. This is a restructuring. I care about this year and I care about next year.
And I care about cash in and I care about cash out. I don’t want hear any happy talk of some ten years and you’re not going to give me conservative wins. And $1.2 trillion and $3 trillion over ten years, I don’t care about year four. I don’t care about year five. They don’t exist.
You know why? You pulled that scam for years and years and years. And here’s where we are. I care about this year and I care about next year. And we have to look, I’ve got differences with Elon, but I fully support Doge.
I want to find out and see actually where that cash saving is. We need to see that. One reason we need to see it, we can’t let the political class off the hook of thinking that some fairy godmother is going to come in here and wave a magic wand. Every easy decision is a long time ago. We only have tough decisions now, and only hard and tough people can make it and stick to it. Because we’re converging.
These crises are converging. You’re going to have to cut defense, and you’re going to have to cut Medicaid, and you’re going to have to cut social programs. And all these cuts are not going to be easy. But the question I have and I spent eight years as a naval officer, 3.54 at sea and 3.54 at the Pentagon in Reagan’s first years. I’m a Hawk.
My daughter’s a West Point grad, 101st in Iraq. So we’re not we got skin in the game. But I say this out of love and respect for the military. You can’t spend $1 trillion folks. Not going to happen.
America’s Military Burden
Think about this. Think of the absurdity of this. The EU says tonight, as we walk in here, they’re not going to decouple. These deals that Scott Bessent is putting out there that they’re working on has a basically a part of it that says in the trading because you’re just going to get the architecture. You’re to get the overall framework.
But in there, you’re kind of with us, and we’re going to work at these non tariff barriers and the tariffs, and we’re going to figure it out, but you’re kind of in our camp. And you’re certainly not in the CCP’s camp. The EU informed us tonight, well, they’re not going to decouple. They’re not going to allow that. And I go, isn’t that interesting?
We have two carrier battle groups. That’s about, I don’t know, 20,000 sailors, young men and women. You know what a battle group is? A carrier with carrier wing, right, that you get over the decks, American power projection with cruisers and destroyers and frigates. As a young man, I was on one of those destroyers in the North Arabian Sea for the Iranian hostage crisis, that fiasco.
So I know what it is to steam over there. Know what those young people are going through. We have two guarding the Red Sea. Why? To keep the Suez Canal open so NATO and the EU can get oil from the Straits Of Hormuz and goods from China.
Three Percent of that traffic goes to the Suez Canal of The United States. I realize there’s military activity there with the Houthis. I also am not a supporter of that. Two carrier battle groups. The entire EU has a Royal Navy destroyer, a French frigate and an Italian corvette.
To the EU, screw you. Start picking up your own tab. We’ve turned our military I go to this conference yesterday tell him, well, Steve, you know, some days, you know, Trump says stuff and the stock market goes up. And I said, I don’t give a damn what the stock market does every day. It’s a casino.
That’s not investors. That’s computers trading with each other. These young kids, I don’t care about that. That’s a casino in a casino’s mentality. And what they’ve turned our beloved military into is basically rent a cops for the casino.
That must stop. President Trump’s genius of the hemispheric defense from Greenland to the Panama Canal is a naval strategy to block the Russians, the Russian submarines up in Murmansk and Archangels. They come through, we got them. And no Chinese Navy through the Panama Canal and not turning the Caribbean into a Chinese lake. Right?
And use the vast Pacific. The vast, vast Pacific is our heartland for strategy. This is McKinder for us with the three island chain where Pete Hagstadt won it first. Now I respectfully submit, we don’t need a trillion dollars for that. Right?
The Casino Economy vs. MAGA
It’s time we stop paying for the casino. We stop paying. This casino already destroyed the heartland of this country and working class people in this country and the middle class of this country. Why do you think they love Trump? Trump is the first and only person, even Reagan, as great as he was, that they said, Hey, not in the room, not in the deal. And that guy’s put me in the room. He’s put me at the head of the table. People know nothing about politics, nothing about Republican orthodoxy. Support Trump. That coalition’s a 1932 type coalition.
But we got to go through some choppy water. Larry Arnn says we’re in 1860, and you know what? He’s right. These crises are conversion. Think about this for a second.
You got to cut the defense budget by $200 billion now, not in ten years, now. You then have to Medicaid. But Medicaid, you got to be smart about it because there’s a lot of MAGA on Medicaid. You know why? There’s no good paying manufacturing jobs in this country.
You can tell. Do you think MAGA, they don’t want a handout? They don’t want government assistance? You think those people, as proud and tough as they are, they want that? Hell no.
They have to have it. 9 million of them have two jobs. There’s what? 20% of the $1.4 trillion credit card debt is nonperforming right now? What percentage of that is MAGA?
What percentage of that is working class Americans that need that credit card to gap their expenses? These people are the same people that were in the eighth Air Force over Germany. The same people at Normandy, the same people at Tarawa and Peleliu, the same, the same exact people. They’ve been abandoned by a political class and a commercial class that has abandoned them and abandoned their interests and put interests of other nations and other people and other countries and money and power ahead of their interest. And Trump’s the first one to come and say, no.
We’re going to make America great again. Right? And they’ve responded to it. And Larry Arnn is right. And this is what I say, and he drives Morning Joe and this crowd up a tree, their heads blow up.
Trump’s Historic Role
We’ve had we’ve had many great men and women in this country and great political leaders and people like President Reagan and others. But we’ve had three that countries don’t get in a lifetime. General Washington at the birth of this nation, the birth of the republic, both on the battlefield and then as president because of the respect he had, and people had respect for him. President Lincoln. And President Lincoln, if you studied it, kind of ran the deal as a warlord, right?
One particularly, you know, pretty if he had to shred the Constitution on certain things, or as he and Seward would say, the inherent powers of the executive, is the way he would describe it, he would do it because he realized this country is being torn apart. It was going to be two countries. And they had a vision of what this country would be. So the rebirth of the nation. And Trump is here at the rejuvenation and the regeneration of that nation.
And we’ve got one shot. One shot. And it’s going to be determined very simply who doesn’t quit. Right? They got more money and more power in the media and the universities.
They got it all. They got every institution in this country. But we’re finding out, number one, our institutions are pretty good. Right? I went to Harvard, and I would take Hillsdale any day of the week.
Because he’s got the guts to tell the federal government whether Trump I don’t want your money. I don’t need your money because with your money comes control. And that’s the problem at Harvard. Hey, you can do anything you want. You can have any group of people you want, but you don’t take any taxpayer money.
Institutional Reform
Cut the money off. Cut it all off. And don’t put all the burden on the Jewish students and the Jewish people. It’s far deeper than that. They ought to purge.
Number one, there’ll be 200 of these Marxists in the faculty have to go and 200 in the administration. And I’m a big believer you go to the public Ivies, and the first two I would start with is Ann Arbor, Michigan and Madison, Wisconsin, right? You go there and say, guess what? The $4 billion stops tomorrow, and here’s a list of 200 professors and 200 administrators. When they’re gone, the money starts coming back, and not a second beforehand.
Cut them off. Larry Arnn brought up the law firms. What has Trump’s fight shown us? These are the the law firms are now with the private equity and how they’ve interacted with the private equity are the most powerful institutions because of the connective tissue that are interlocking to the capital markets and to the corporatists. And these are powerful.
And they picked the most powerful, not the biggest, but Paul Weiss, the most powerful in CART, the most powerful organizing all this demonic activity. He broke them in twenty four hours. How did he break them? How does he break in Harvard? It’s federal money.
The whole system sucks off the federal tit. You cut off the money in the you know how you know why Paul Wise surrendered? They put a line in there, you know, no security clearances, no government contracts. Oh, by the way, any clients you have, no government work. Paul Weiss had all their buddies at other law firms getting on like jackals getting on their clients.
And the partners came and said, Surrender. SCAD and ARPS, the most prominent law firm in mergers and acquisitions, I mean, the white shoe of the white shoe firms, twenty four hours and $100 million for the good of the order. Because that money is all spent on these radical NGOs that are suing the government all the time with top quality lawyers. No more. And you know what lesson we learned?
How many partners at law firms are those law firms that quit? Here’s how many. None. They’re gutless cowards. They’re big talkers and big deal when they’re in the shadows.
You put them in the light, not one partner at any of these law firms acquitted. A couple of associates acquitted. And God bless you. You had your values and you stood up for them. The legal profession should be ashamed of itself.
The finest law firms this is the problem with the country. Why do you think the working class and middle class, then they got stiffed? These are the most prominent institutions in the country. And guess what? All the universities are going to crater too, including Harvard.
They’re addicted to that federal money. And Trump’s going to break them. As these crises converge, we’re going to have years. Look at the Civil War. The Civil War wasn’t the three point five years of combat.
The Fight Ahead
It’s much longer than that, right? It was Reconstruction and everything that happened there. These wars take a long time. These divisions in countries, they can’t be negotiated out, can’t be debated out. This is not a debate.
This is not a debating society. This is one side’s going to win and one side’s going to lose. And the side that doesn’t quit is going to win. Now, there are going to be days that you feel like quitting. There are going to be days that it’s overcast and dark and nothing’s going right.
In fact, there may be years like that. But here’s why I feel good. I’ve seen two of those years in ‘twenty one and ‘twenty two, right? And we didn’t flinch. And we had his back.
And we came to victory. And now it’s to execute on that victory. But the convergence of deporting 10 million illegal alien invaders and making significant cuts along with the Defense Department in social programs. How do you think that’s going to play on TV? Where do you think that hey, yeah.
Even the discussion at OMB a couple of months ago about where just the money was and putting a freeze on it, sent them in meltdown. A human trafficker and criminals sends them into meltdown. We haven’t seen the hard part yet. The hard part’s to come. Let me be very blunt about this.
If you falter, we’re not going to make it. That puts tremendous responsibility. It can’t be on Trump’s shoulders. It can’t be on the people around Trump’s shoulders. It has to be on our shoulders.
We know we have working class people in the precinct strategy and other places that are prepared if they have leadership and courage and be relentless and stick to itiveness and grit, they will follow. They will be there, but they need leaders. So that’s why tonight, later, you ask yourself, why has divine providence that saw Trump to victory in ‘sixteen, saw Trump sent to Mar A Lago in ‘twenty, and saw Trump come back? Divine providence, the hand of God is working here. But the hand of God works through human instrumentality, just like Lexington and Concord.
Think about it if they hadn’t stood up. It’s the shot heard around the world for a reason. They took on the most powerful empire in the world with virtually nothing. That’s you. And ask yourself, why am I here?
What is my task and what is my purpose? What’s my fate? What’s my destiny? Why I’ve been given this that I’m here supporting this great institution, knowing these people, networking and having the interest to do it and the focus of doing the love of American history. This republic is in the balance, a constitutional republic.
The Defining Moment
STEPHEN K. BANNON: We’re either going to have it or we’re going to lose it. And history is going to judge and weigh and measure us, particularly those of a certain age, the boomers. We haven’t had a great track record. We just haven’t. And now is the defining moment.
And I’m going tell you, Larry Arnn and Steve Bannon and Donald Trump and many of the people in this room, we’re not going to be here for the final victory because it’s not coming next year or the year after or the year after that. It took this country, I don’t know, fifty years, sixty years longer to get into this. And people went along with it as controlled opposition, thinking you were doing the right thing. And now you understand after the steal of 2020 of how radical and dangerous these people were and what they were prepared to do to this country and the citizens of this country? So it’s your gut check.
And if you will use your agency and commit it all, and I mean all, not partially all, we’re going to win this. But if we falter, we’re going to lose. And we’re going to be judged on that in the afterlife, but we’re going to be weighed and measured and judged by the history of this country. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Normally, I drop the mic and walk off, but I’ve committed to do some Q and A, so we’ll do some Q and A. Thank you all.
Q&A Session
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Thank you, Mr. Bannon. We now have time for Q and A. If you have a question, please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to be brought to you.
STEPHEN K. BANNON: Well, hold on. I’ve got a question. Can we take a microphone to Larry Arnn? No, I want to ask a question. Can we get a microphone?
Can you share with us? Give us a minute. Why is this moment like 1860? Because you are 1000% correct, but people need to understand this and understand the depth of the problem we have.
Larry Arnn: Well, I’m a political philosophy nerd. Things are defined by four causes, and the two most important are the final causes and the formal causes. And the final cause of The United States is in the Declaration of Independence and we’re going to dispute about what that means. There are two opposite readings of it.
And the formal cause is the Constitution and it doesn’t work the way it used to. We don’t make our laws in the Congress. The President is not in charge of the executive branch. The judges muck around with both legislation and execution. And so those two big things that give America its form and purpose are altered now, and they’re entrenched.
And so it’s hard to fix. Then add the timing of the American Revolution. The American Revolution began in 1760. That’s when the British decided after the Seven Years’ War known as the French and Indian War in our country, that’s when they decided to start mucking around in the New World and governing it. One of the first things they did was they said that there’s to be no whispered movement beyond the Appalachians, and that’s people who had moved here to get some land. And people made their living off the land in those at that time.
That is the timing. In other words, there was a difference of opinion between London and America about who’s sovereign. It came to a head starting in 1763 because of those things. And the war came when it couldn’t go on anymore. The Civil War is just the same.
In 1854, the point is people want to move west. And slavery, you can’t just decide to take your slave with you and go to Kansas or Nebraska because you have to have a system of law to enforce slavery. Because although the pro slavery people said the slaves really liked their servitude, they kept trying to get away. And so you need laws in the Alabama Slave Code, which is in our constitution reader, every free white male, slaveholder or no, had to ride posse one night a month looking for runaways. So they tried to kick the can down the road, and war broke out in Kansas and Nebraska.
So now something’s got to be done, right? And so now what Steve just said, we can’t go on like this. If we had 37 trillion dollars more, we’d be broke. And we’re not broke. We actually probably have 350 trillion dollars in assets.
But to take 10% of that and move that 10% further into the public sector, which is how you’d have to pay the debt, if you keep consuming at the rate you’re going, and then you’ll be in a spiral. So the point is, it can’t go on. And that’s why it’s like 1860. Something has to be done for good or ill.
Immigration and Incarceration
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Mister Bannon, thank you so much for being here. Cali Holiday, Orange County, California. Would you comment on your incarceration time, what you dealt with there? And full disclosure, I have maids and gardeners in Orange County who I’ve had for twenty years. I didn’t know they were not legal, but they have been family members to me. What do you propose to handle those illegal immigrants? What do we do with them?
STEPHEN K. BANNON: Let me take the second part first. All right. 10 million. Benzamin and other people have done this calculation. Roughly 10 million have come in since the high noon on January 21 until high noon of January 2025, okay? 10 million. Right now, they’re getting the, I don’t know, 50,000 criminals, 100,000 criminals. Let’s deal with that first.
It’s not that we have to deal with that first because they have no intention of letting us get those folks out of here. You understand that, right? We’re going to have the biggest fight in this country’s history to do that. Right now, they’ve got us jammed up and they want due process and hearings for everybody. President Trump said yesterday, it’s two hundred years. No, they got to go now.
And we don’t have everybody on our side of the football. Trust me, you’re going to have Wall Street saying, oh, they add one or 2% to the GDP. The corporations are going to say, hey, they cut costs because low skilled workers, they’ve driven costs down, right? They’ve impoverished African Americans, Hispanics families and crushed the health care system and the education system and legal so let’s deal with the ten million dead here. Now anybody that came here on Biden’s watch got to go.
We don’t have a republic. We’re not we don’t have the rule of law. So that has to happen. Let’s do that, and then we can address your gardener and your maid. It’s not perfect, but it’s got if we don’t do this, we’re just kidding ourselves.
And all these people talk about Amnesty. We don’t need that. We need to get these folks out of here. We need to get them now. The second, I don’t want to let me just tell you, because you guys got to understand something, and I am not kidding.
These people are vicious. They wanted to send Trump to prison for that goofy stuff for twenty or thirty years. You add it all up, it’s like three hundred years. They wanted to see him die in a federal prison. Understand that.
I went there in a misdemeanor and so did Peter. Although Peter went to a camp, not a prison. Pretty rough camp, though. I did it because separation of powers. I said, this committee is not formed right. There’s no ranking member. There’s no minority council. That’s why it didn’t have any tension. Cheney’s people broke basic rules of the House and also the executive privilege of the President. And I’m not going to roll on the President.
If you give me executive privilege, that’s the way it’s going to be. But remember, the people that sent us to prison and the people that sent over the criminal charges to Jack Smith to send Trump to prison for hundreds of years crawled on their belly to the White House to get blanket preemptive pardons, and all of them took it and their staffs. They know the crimes they committed. They know their criminality. These people, Nancy Pelosi, all of them, they’re demonic and they’re evil.
This is not we’re not in a hey, in 1860, they had argued this thing for a long time, and it got past the parts of argument. Now they say, Oh, we’re anti democratic. We’re going to autocratic breakthrough. Hey, last time I looked, we just kicked your ass in a national election, right? And we have a coalition of African American men and Hispanics and Asians and white working class and middle class and traditional Republicans.
It’s like 1932 if we deliver. Why do you think they’re trying to chop block us every day to delay us to deny to make sure they get to the midterms? So Hakim Jeffries can raise 2 billion dollars for a handful of seats and impeach President Trump early in January of twenty twenty seven. Their playbook’s quite obvious. So here’s what prison is like.
It’s hard and it’s dangerous, and you folks better get ready because a lot of this audience will be going to prison if they win. They won’t stop. Of course, they’re going to come after you. They’re going to try to bankrupt you, debank you. The reason they did it before, they didn’t think we were coming back.
They know next time they’re going to put the leadership. But I said, have a talk with yourself tonight, check into your soul tonight, I mean check into it. What do you think? You don’t think the patriots in 1775 knew what was stake? You don’t think they knew when they said sacred honor, Their lives and their fortunes, they understood it.
That’s the DNA that built this country. That’s what it’s going to take. This is not going to be easy. This is to be very hard, not just at the scale of this is so much bigger and the institutions are so much bigger. And Trump’s not going to be here forever, although he did put on his merch site today, Trump28. I’m all in. A man like that comes along once a century, trust me, right? Thank you for the questions.
Economic Inequality and Revolution
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hello, Mr. Bannon. You had me at War Room Impeachment. Remember that? I have a question for you because You’re an original gangster. I’m original gangster. That’s what you told me. Yay. I got a question because my brother is like he’s a MAGA guy in Silicon Valley. His wife is a high up executive for one of the tech firms. She goes to Davos every year, okay? That’s what we’re dealing with here.
So on our family group text, I was told the other day that the only people who would ever vote for Trump the reason why they don’t care about the way the stock market goes is because they have no money, and that’s why they don’t care because they have no money in the market. But his question to you is, what do how do we respond to things like that? Because we know it’s not true. I mean, I’m a MAGA person. I got a heck of a lot of money in the market. What’s the response to that?
STEPHEN K. BANNON: It’s hundred percent true. Yeah. It’s 100% true. Wall Street Journal, when we walked in here, the top 19 families in this country made a trillion dollars in the last, what, since January, a trillion dollars, 19 families. This is what what do you think they fought for in Lexington and Concord?
You had basically a worthless aristocracy that corrupted Commons. They didn’t see Commons as an out because Commons was bought and paid for. And monopolistic power, the British East India Company given by the Crown. It’s the kind of the same system you got today. It shouldn’t be lost on you that Sam Adams and John Hancock and a couple of three of the patriots, our sacred founding fathers and revolutionary generation and good and tough men were smugglers, right?
They were a little outside the system. They didn’t like monopolistic power of the British East India Company. This is the system you have today. I think it’s 70% of the people in this country, seven-zero, 70% of your fellow countrymen own no real assets and no financial assets. Your sister-in-law is correct, and you tell her that’s the reason Donald Trump’s President of The United States.
And that’s the reason the apartheid state she works in is going to get taken apart. We have a you got to understand something. We have a capitalist system with no capitalist, right? It’s all state capitalism or oligarchs. I talked to that World Economic Conference, and I ended the thing that went viral is the way I ended.
I said, Look, we’re at a fork in the road, not Elon’s. I mean a real fork in the road. We’re going to go down two paths. One path is Luigi what is it, Manjoni? He waited he laid in wait, stepped out, and shot a man at point blank range in the back. Not too American, is it? And he’s a hero to a big part of the population. A big part. And he killed, murdered in cold blood, a working class guy to work his way up, okay? I’m not defending the health care system or the payment systems. I’m not. But he’s a huge hero for a big part of the population.
And you’ve got our economic populism, economic nationalism. And there’s going to be some changes. Number one, we have to make capitalists out of the other 70%. We’re going to have to figure that out. That ain’t going to be easy, right? Not going to be easy for some of you in this room. Just not. But it’s got to happen.
We don’t have a country. Because we’re going to do two paths, either the American Revolution, right, that fought for liberty and freedom and folks to have a shot. Are you going to have the French Revolution? And sure is the turning of the earth. That’s coming. If we don’t make these changes, that’s coming. Look at these riots in the street. Look at the Tesla situation. Look at the viciousness. Look at these protests they’re having.
You don’t think in a second, if they got in charge, they wouldn’t be dragging the guillotines out? Don’t fool yourself. Look at how they worship Luigi Manjoni. Look at it. That’s who they hold up as an idol.
MAGA And The Fight For America (continued)
STEPHEN K. BANNON: And so I told this conference, you may not like a lot of what the Populist Nationals Movement stands for, but you’ll learn to live with it, which is a big difference in the alternative. And that’s the fork in the road we’re coming to. Do I have a microphone down there? We have time for one more question over here.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Good evening. I’m Ted Stein. I’m from Southeastern Iowa. Driving here today, we were talking in the car a little bit about the arithmetic of the 10 million. And if you think about it, 1,000 judges working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, hearing two cases a day would take about fourteen years to resolve all the cases that the socialists left want to put in front of the courts. If you were to deport 300 illegals in 20 flights a day every day of the year, it would take you about five years. I’m seriously behind our constitutional rights, but I wonder if you would please comment on some of the writings that I’ve seen online about the possible suspension of habeas corpus during what I think and I suspect you do too is true national emergency.
Constitutional Crisis and Historical Precedent
STEPHEN K. BANNON: 100%. I think you need to think through a lot of different alternatives. I told the story today, I’ll tell it briefly, that President Lincoln, as he and Stuart sat there and they had some smart lawyers, they kept calling it the inherent powers of the constitution because those two guys realized that they were a little edgy there in running this thing.
There’s an apocryphal story that when Lincoln was elected and came down for the inauguration, right? When he got to Baltimore, Pinkerton, the head of the detectives, was bodyguards said, “Look, you got all these plug uglies and Baltimore is a Southern city like Washington is a Southern city.” So they snuck him in and garb. In the dead of night, the train got to the Willard Hotel, six o’clock in the morning gets there. And he kind of regretted that later, but that’s how bad Baltimore was.
A little bit later, when the war actually starts, they need they call for, I think, 50,000, 75,000 troops, militia, troops from the various states that come down. It’s one of the reasons other Southern states said, “Okay, you’re going to do that, we’re going to find out who’s tougher.” They couldn’t get past Baltimore. And so Lincoln went up and arrested the city council and the mayor of Baltimore and put him in jail. And the Supreme Court—the Chief Justice Roberts at the time, Taney, who had written the Dred Scott decision, so he was kind of on a roll.
He sent a note over and said, “Hey, I’m hearing that you’ve put the city council and the mayor in jail.” And Lincoln turned to his young secretary, John Hay, who later became Secretary of State, one of the great men of the nineteenth century, just a young guy, 19, 20 years old, very young. He said, “Take a message—don’t write this down, but just go over to Judge Taney.” Because Judge Taney says, “If they’re not released in twenty-four hours and troops have started coming through. If they’re not released in twenty-four hours, I’m going to release them.”
And he said, “Go tell Taney. You release them, and I’ll throw you in jail.” Okay?
The Coming Constitutional Crisis
We’re going to have a constitutional crisis, understand what’s going to happen. They’re going to go to the Supreme Court, and Roberts and ACB are not going to be with us, okay?
In June or July, you’re going to have a—you’re going to be back to Andrew Jackson times and Abraham Lincoln times because they’re going to sit there and you’re going to have a judge, which we never had judicial supremacy, that’s not in the Constitution. The whole thing is one phrase I think about the Supreme Court, the whole thing was worked out in what, the Election Act of 1800, the Judicial Act 1801.
You’re going to have a constitutional crisis that they’re forcing because they know they control the courts. And they’re going to get between Trump and his ability as commander in chief to protect this country, something he took an oath to heaven for, right? And we are going to have a decision because I don’t think Donald John Trump is going to back off, and I don’t care what the Supreme Court of the United States says about it.
Okay? Remember, it’s going to be a firestorm because I think he’s going to say, “I hear you,” just like Jackson did. “Now you implement it,” and we’re going to be in it right then. These converging crisis is going to be one after the other, after the other.
The Fight Ahead
A lot of people in closing, a lot of people are going to get tired. A lot of people are going say, “I can’t do this anymore. It’s too much. I got to go on a sailboat. I got to quit. I cannot do this.”
That’s the only way we lose. It’s a revolution. We just waited them out and fought to the end. And finally, said, “We can’t do this, these guys. They’re too crazy. We’ve got to give it up.” It’s what you have to do.
It’s kind of the Union Army situation in the North. Remember, Lincoln did not run the second time as a Republican. He fired his VP, Hannibal, and got a Democrat from Tennessee to run as VP, a National Union Party was it called?
And until Atlanta fell, remember Lincoln gave that memo to his cabinet. They think Trump gave some memos to his cabinet. He gave a memo, what, in August of 1864 that kind of said, “Hey, we got into this and I’m going to see it through.” Kind of open ended about what he was going to turn over in time of a defeat in March because they had so much running on. Now, Atlanta fell and the Union Army came and he won a landslide against his own General, McClellan.
The two times in this country’s history, the revolution and the founding and the Civil War and Reconstruction. And then you had the Great Depression and World War II. This is the fourth. And this is the worst because all the forces of the world are opposed to us, opposed to us as patriots, opposed to us. They don’t want America as a constitutional republic with a vibrant, strong working class and middle class that decide their matters here in The United States and put American citizens first and the country first.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. And if you quit, we lose. If you do not quit, we will win this. And all of us may not be here at the victory, it may be decades away. And that is as it should be.
So think about that tonight. If you make the commitment and you’ve got the grit and determination, I know you have because we’ve seen it in ’21 and ’22, two of the greatest years in American history, when the lion and winner was in Mar-A-Lago but would not quit and like Cincinnatus came back to save his country. Let’s do this.
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