Transcript of Steve Bannon’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

If we don’t do that, we don’t have a country. And you just see right now they’re doubling triple down. This is actually potentially a real civil war in our biggest cities. And President Trump has to have our backing.

And this came out of nowhere. I mean, the trade deals you saw, he put, he put together Liberation Day. But they’ve been thinking about it a long time. I mean, Trump’s been talking about this since Lou Dobbs back in the 90s. He lays that out there. It’s very sophisticated. He’s got Scott Besant running around with Lutnick. They’re trying to make these deals. He sealed the border already in the first 60 days. Now we’re really going down and actually having the deportation. See the fight. And then out of nowhere comes a war with Persia. It’s like a shooting war with Persia, a massive shooting war with Persia. It’s like, how did this happen?

And that’s why I’ve been up as a defender of Israel and someone who’s very pro Israel. I’ve been saying, hey, this is going to be the end of Israel because of the way these decisions have been made. And you have, I think, shockingly today, early when we had you on the show, you bring up a point that we have to address, which I think is the thing itself. What is it about this apparatus when you have a coalition that’s like 1932 that’s coming together? Like Roosevelt had Harvard professors and crackers and Democrats and ranchers out west and big city bosses and the Irish and the Italians and you put it all together and they juggled it and they.

TUCKER CARLSON: Brooklyn Butte, Montana, Birmingham, Alabama, and they’re all on the same side. How did that happen?

The Deep State Apparatus

STEVE BANNON: And they govern literally almost all the way to Trump. Reagan took out part of it. Newt Gingrich took out part of it. But it was 50, 60, 70 years. We have the same ability. We have hardscrabble Hispanics on the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. We have tech Bros. We have, you know, economic nationalists, we have economic populists. We have people that want to stop their forever wars. There’s three planks and right at the beginning of it, you know, and it’s on the 10th anniversary of coming down the golden escalator. That was 10 years ago Sunday.

And I tell people as many triumphs and tragedies, victories and defeats, good days and horrible days. We, when we’re winning and sometimes we’re losing, those 10 years of everything that’s gone on is just the preamble for where we are today on the convergence of these crises. And now all of a sudden a shooting war where they’re taking the Nimitz battle group out of the South China Sea and sending three carrier battle groups now to the North Arabian Sea, Red Sea, plus Arleigh Burke destroyers and a whole fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. We’re prepping for a major shooting war.

And how did it happen? I think what’s most shocking is what you said. Hey, it was like Iraq. You’re inexorably just drawn and decisions kind of just happen. It’s like, what’s happened over the last 72 hours? How do we even get to this point? How did this actually happen? Who made these decisions? When we had the intel out there that this was not like a thing, this was something that was going to happen a year or two from now. Bibi admitted to Brett Baer on Sunday night.

And so the question before us is not simply the Israel Persia situation is what the fuck is going on in this city that just drives this City, whether you’re Barack Obama or Donald Trump. And if we don’t sort it out now, and I mean right now, that’s what we have to have a throwdown. We have to name names, we have to expose it. If we don’t throw it out now, throw down now, in the summer of 2025, we’re not going to have a country. You know, forget the midterms, forget the next luxury.

Still, we have to have this what the CIA, what happened in Ukraine, what the CIA has done, what DNI is doing, what the Justice Department, what the FBI, what DIA, and the Pentagon. Because right now we only have a tenuous grip on those. We have two people at FBI, Cash and Bongino. We got a handful of people over at the Justice Department in a massive 30 some person or 15,000, 20,000 person operation. We have three or four people at DNI with 17 agencies. We’re putting a couple of people in there. And at the Pentagon, we got Pete and a handful of guys.

And every time a guy steps up or the team steps up to say they want to stop the forever wars, they’re turfed out. He’s lost 10 people since we’ve even got there. And every time Bridge Colby tries to do something, you know, Bridge Colby’s on the front page of that. He’s an appeaser. So my point is that we now we’re getting down to it with all these converging crises. We have a apparatus that reports to Wall street, to foreign investors, to Silicon Valley, in business with the Chinese Communist Party that’s running the deal.

And now’s the time we got. If we don’t lance the bull over this, this country, you’re not going to, if you can’t turn around with Trump, the Trump team, he has people like you, myself, and they’re blessed to have these apparatuses. If we can’t do this now, it’s not going to get done. And so that’s why to me, it’s gone. Of everything we’re doing, stopping the forever wars, redoing the commercial relationship with China to bring jobs back, and sealing the border and sending home the 10, deporting 10 million, which is going to be massive, almost like a civil war in these big cities. Of all of those, and I’ve always said the deportation is the most to get our sovereignty back. The war we have to have now, the throwdown we have to have now is with the deep state. And we can’t. I think we’ve looked away too often. We just kind of kicking the can down the road. And if we can’t do it now with Trump, it’s not going to get done.

Media’s Role in War Propaganda

TUCKER CARLSON: It does feel like Fox News is playing, and I never criticize Fox because they were so kind to me, but they are playing a, like a central role in the propaganda operation here.

STEVE BANNON: It feels like it’s, it’s the what? Let’s go back to the Iraq war. I mean, you were there. You saw it. Look at the Iraq war I promoted when. No, because of the information you were giving, knowingly what they did. If you go back and look at Iraq, it’s not like these things are successful. They’re not successful. They’re unsuccessful. They can’t be successful because as Lincoln told us, what you need is popular opinion to have your back. And we don’t do enough about educating the American people on what reality is. In fact, they give them the exact opposite. That’s why. That’s all. That’s. This is. The rise of Trump is from two things. The rise of Trump is from the failed Iraq war and from the 2008 financial collapse.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

The Pattern of Failed Wars

STEVE BANNON: You had Buchanan before that. We had Perot before that. We had even Reagan from some populism, nationalism. You had these sprouts. You could see people were trying to get there, but they couldn’t. It was those two cataclysmic events, right? An epic failed war. Right. That we were lied to about everything. The reason we went in, because, remember, at first the American people supported it, given the information they were given. Then later they realized that, hey, not just with the initial predicate for this a lie. All the updates were kind of a lie, Right? All the updates were a lie. We really weren’t winning. Right. Until we send General Kelly to the Anbar province to be the toughest tribe. It was. It took forever. And what, 8,000 dead, 50,000 wounded, 9 trillion, 2 trillion in or 7 trillion in Iraq and 2 trillion in Afghanistan. You’re just lied about the entire time.

That’s what’s happening here. We’re not being dealt with straight. And I’m just saying on the information that’s put out, the Israeli position on this has changed three or four times. First it was the nuclear bomb, the processing. There was going to be something like last weekend you had to go. Now you had to go on Thursday night. It had to happen right? Then we find out it’s a year away at earliest, and then it’s a decapitation strike. They’re trying to have regime change. That just kind of came up over the weekend. And saying, oh, since they’re there, we’re there, we have to do it.

Understand, they said this is unilateral, we’re doing our own. But understanding that they needed American air assets on the defense to protect themselves. And this is why the Arleigh Burke were rushed in. And this is why American air defense assets have been used nonstop. Now they’re talking about, oh, by the way, we really can’t take out Fedora, we can’t take out the hidden mountainous second part of this. We need American combat sorties, we need American tankers to refuel us, we need the bunker busting bombs and we need assets. This thing changes all the time when Tulsi Gabbard’s still out there. As the last thing publicly said by a senior intelligence official. She said it in March. They don’t have a program. They haven’t had a program. And Bret Baier asked. That’s what Bret Baier asked Bibi on Sunday night. And Beebe said, well, we have new information, new intelligence. Well, hold it. We were told that we gave you exquisite intelligence. You weren’t giving us intelligence.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

The Constitutional Crisis

STEVE BANNON: We have to have a total vetting. And by the way, we need to get a vetting on Ukraine. We need to get a vetting on. Was American intelligence involved? Because it’s a zero probability that without our satellites, without targeting information, without fire control information, there’s no chance that the Ukrainians, as courageous as they are, as much valor as they have, could have pulled out something so complicated.

And so this is right now, the fight. The fight has to be. We have to take on the deep state, we have to name names and we have to basically take these organizations and take them apart. And that’s. Then you’re going to unmask everybody in D.C. that’s not really on your side. You’re going to unmask all those people that say they’re conservative and say they’re Republicans. When they start protecting this, you’re going to say, well, hang on for a second. This doesn’t mean we’re a constitutional republic. Trump’s commander in chief. This is what a constitutional republic’s about. I don’t care if AOC is the president later on or Bernie Sanders or JD Vance, another right winger. Right now we have a system that’s like the Praetorian Guard. It just, it’s got its own national security policy, it’s got its own reason for existence, and it doesn’t care who, whether it’s progressive like Barack Obama or a economic populist nationalist. Like Donald Trump. And so that is the fight we have to take on today.

The Deep State’s War Against Trump’s Peace Agenda

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s this mad scramble in Washington on the right to invoke Trump’s name and to make the case that, no, no, I represent Trump, he’s on my side, I’m true MAGA. And you wind up with these kind of hallucinogenic scenes where you have people who hated Trump, who were never Trump. Mark Levin, you know, hates Trump, which is fine, but he’s like the standard bearer for Trump. But what makes it even more perverse is that these same people are allied with a deep state that is subverting Trump’s stated agenda, which is negotiation toward peace, both in Ukraine.

STEVE BANNON: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: And in the Middle East. Trump has said, we want to get to an agreement with a lasting peace so we can all be richer, safer and happier. And in both places, his so called allies who secretly hate him have destroyed that.

We’re Already in World War III

STEVE BANNON: And most of those guys are almost all of them to a person, for the Ukraine war. People in your audience should understand one principle thing. We are farther down the pike in a kinetic part of a third world war than how World War II started. If you go back from September 1939, the invasion, the start of the European war, not the Asian. But if you start with the invasion of Poland by the Germans, and you go to June of 1941, the invasion of Russia by the Wehrmacht, and you look at that time, which really they called the phony war, you look at the casualties from the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the fall of France, you look at what happened in North Africa early on, Finland throwing 300,000. Finland, you add it all up. It’s not half of what’s happened between Ukraine and Gaza today. And now in Persia, we are much bloodier. This is a much. We’re in a shooting part of the Third World War. The Third World is not about to start. It has started.

And that’s what Trump is saying. What he wants to do is have everybody lay their guns down. Let’s get to the table and figure out a tenuous, at least certain, you know, subtle piece that we then use capital and trade and commerce and try to rebuild these countries and let’s get people back to work and maybe tamp this thing down. Whereas the apparatus is doing is exacerbating the conflict part of it. That’s where we are right now in the summer of 2025, and that’s this thing is going to be in the next 200 days. The next 200 days are some of the most perilous times for the American republic in its history. Because if we don’t get this sorted, we’re going to be drawn in totally into a conflict as a combatant, as not a supplier of logistics, or as an actual combatant, a participant in the situation in Ukraine, what they did in Russia and the situation of what Israel is right now doing to the mullahs, as bad as they are and as evil as they are, right, we’re going to get sucked into a shooting war of which it’ll be 10 years, and the casualties will dwarf anything you saw in World War II.

The Historical Pattern of Wartime Persecution

TUCKER CARLSON: One of the lessons that we never talk about from World War II, since you evoke the comparison, is that the second, the shooting war started in Great Britain and the United States, opponents of war went to jail and Winston Churchill’s entire political opposition went to jail with their wives. With their wives for the duration of the war. And some of them died. That’s been completely just a fact. And you can call those people whatever you want. And they may have been terrible people, whatever, but they were his political opponents and he put them in jail. And Roosevelt did sic the Federal government on opponents of the war, flat out.

STEVE BANNON: So if Lincoln did the same thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Lincoln did the same. That’s exactly right.

STEVE BANNON: And in areas that we control in the Revolutionary War, which is not a lot, the same thing happened. That’s called war. This is what happens.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. And opponents of war are invariably described as allies of the enemy and they’re persecuted. Do you worry about that happening to you? You just said on camera, I don’t want this war, but we’re moving toward a third world war.

STEVE BANNON: Well, I saw a.

TUCKER CARLSON: Look. Are you worried about going back to jail?

Standing Against Illegitimate Authority

STEVE BANNON: I went to prison on a misdemeanor, but it was kind of one of the same things. I wouldn’t testify. I wouldn’t turn, because I said this committee is not legitimate. Doesn’t have a ranking member, doesn’t have a minority. Council, is totally legitimate. Plus he’s got executive privilege. That’s good enough for me. And if I have to fight this, and I think it’s going to go to the Supreme Court, although I’ve served my prison sentence, I’m taking it up to the Supreme Court because I had a pretty good ruling. Not terrible. From the. From the. From the appeals court. A couple of the judges are making arguments about why I should take it further.

It’s definitely going to happen. Look what’s happening to you. I mean, I’ve known you for a long time. And I sit there and I look at what’s the same about Tucker. I said, what is Tucker saying so, so bad? He’s kind of laying out these arguments that ought to be debated right now in the hall. Very moderate Tom Cotton’s coming out and saying all these influencer podcasters are, well, let’s have a debate. When we had a debate about the Ukraine, about the funding of Ukraine in the Senate, we beat him. This is why Mitch McConnell had to resign. Because why? Because the podcasters and influencers are much closer to the MAGA base and can deliver the heat into the House and the Senate. And they know that. I’m all for having a War Powers act debate right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. I agree.

Trump’s Dealmaking vs. Endless War

STEVE BANNON: Let’s have the American people weigh in, because you’re going to see the American people are 90% against forever wars. And even people that support Israel are saying exactly what we’re doing here. We thought we had this thing in Gaza. You had to clean up with the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamas. Next thing you know, we’re dropping, we’re bombing. We’re bombing Tehran, and you’re taking incoming. What’s happened in Tel Aviv over the last 24 hours is pretty shocking because you’re taking these ballistic missiles. What Trump’s been saying, everybody calm down, let’s get back to the table. I can get actual thing. He said, I can get it. We can take it apart, we can blow it up if we want to, but I can cut a deal.

And Wyckoff and Trump, if you got to talk about two dealmakers that don’t, are not like diplomats, but guys actually going to get stuff done. I feel more confidence with Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump trying to work something out than continue on the shooting war, where, trust me, with a carrier battle group heading over there and all these tankers heading over to the Middle east, we are prepping right now to come in on the offensive side of combat sorties. And that’s a game changer. As bad as it is now that we’re combatant, because we are combatant, which I say, if they’re unilateral, why do we get sucked in here? Where is that decision where you said, hey, Steve, decisions just get made. You never know how they get made.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re organic. There’s never a moment where we stop and we say, do we want to be involved in another Middle Eastern war? You just wind up there. Just like everything in life. You’re just like, how did I get here?

STEVE BANNON: But I think that’s why they’re attacking you, because you’re saying, hang over a second, let’s have a national discussion on this right now before we get in. And they don’t want that.

Why This Topic Evokes Such Viciousness

TUCKER CARLSON: But why the viciousness? Not toward me. I mean, I’m kind of punched out of society. But, like, why is it this topic evokes a cruelty and a dishonesty that no other topic does?

STEVE BANNON: Never been questioned like this. There’s never been question out in the open. We’ve never had this debate that you’ve kind of led for the last couple of months, and now we’re actually having this debate. They’ve never had people in government like Tulsi Gabbard, like Bridge Colby, like others. And look, I don’t think Bridge is hard enough in the Chinese Communist Party, but his book was amazing and he’s got the pivot to Asia, which we have to get to if people want to see how the institutions and apparatuses work. And this is why the Democrats are all institutionalists now, right? We’re the anti institutional guys because we see how corrupt they are.

You need not look further than centcom. One of the problems we have is that Obama tried it. Obama put his Whole presidency on the national security side, we’re going to pivot out of Asia. We’re going to pivot out of Middle east to Asia. The pivot to Asia put Joe Biden in charge after eight years. He had one combat brigade of Marines forward deployed to Brisbane or Darwin, Australia. That was it. No other changes? No other changes.

The Failed Pivot to Asia

TUCKER CARLSON: Hey, on our, in our buzz I supported that. That was like the. I despise Obama. I think he wrecked the country, but I don’t think that’s a crazy. That was not a crazy idea to pivot.

STEVE BANNON: We’re having this debate. I had Flynn on today. After you. The same. We’re having the same debate today. Remember the carrier battle group that’s over protecting Taiwan in the South China Sea is now en route to the Malacca Straits. The Nimitz battle group is going to the North Arabian.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re a former naval officer. Give us a sense of the decision making process that leads to a move.

The Iran Crisis and Naval Deployment

STEVE BANNON: Well, here’s what. On November 5th of 79. I’m a destroyer officer, navigator on a destroyer in a carrier battle group. We’re doing the changeover from San Diego from the Third Fleet to the seventh Fleet. All takes place in Hawaii. The Hawaiian operator. You do like three or four days of workup because they have a certain different lingo and different tempo. So you got to get to how they do it. We get called in in the middle of night in the red phone. Everybody line up single file and head into Pearl harbor. Where Pearl harbor as a sea detail is almost impossible to do because it’s so narrow. Right.

And Honolulu is up there. So it’s not like World War II. It’s very dangerous. We go in there, we hear the hostages have been taken. Taken. And now all of our assets in Korea, in the South China Sea and in Japan are heading towards the North Arabian Sea, which the United States Navy had never been at. We had a couple of white painted destroyers in Bahrain, but we were not. We were not used to that. So they go, we follow a carrier all the way to Korea because you had to be. We were gas turbine. We’re the only ones could keep over the carrier 35 knots for like two weeks.

TUCKER CARLSON: Damn.

STEVE BANNON: We destroyed the ship, we destroyed the sonar dome. Because you go through a typhoon, you go through some heavy weather. Because we had a treaty at the time with Korea, we would keep a carrier battle group within a 24 hour strike of North Korea. So we have to get there. Once we get there, they peel us off. Us and our squadron of ships, the famous Destroyer Squadron 23, Arleigh Burke’s little Beavers. We go to the North Arabian Sea. Why they’re working up for. And that is like a Hassan. I tell people, if you haven’t been off the coast of Iran or Persia as I call it, it’s like the landscape of the moon. This is the most inhospitable place on Earth.

I’ve been, you’ve been the Straits of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, the North Arabian Sea. And our carry battle group stayed. We rotated out after about four months. People stayed and eventually a couple months later actually did the failed rescue. We practice every day. You could see every day. They had the head lift capacity. The helicopters were practicing going in. We were actually going to do plane guard against potential Russian fighters in the Persian Gulf. Put the radars up because nobody knew what was going to happen. It was a failed effort. But I tell people. And it turns out the Nimitz is now about to be decommissioned. This may be their last cruise. They were there 50 years ago is the first time they really got commissioned. Their first assignment was in Ganzo. And Camel station in the North Arabian Sea.

So these are big decisions the Pentagon makes when they, particularly today, when they decide to take a carrier battle group strike group away from the South China Sea in the defense of Taiwan, given how on pins and needles we are there because the Chinese Communist Party are not doing exercises, they’re doing rehearsals for an invasion. To take that out and to take it to the North Arabian Sea is signaling the world that we’re about to do something. And that’s what’s so scary right now. And when you get to your theory that these decisions, you’re just getting inexorably drawn in. Now we have all of our basically air assets that are ready to launch combat sorties on Tehran, and whatever else happens, they’re in place. So it just takes. It’s not like you make a decision. Well, it takes us a week to get there. They’re in place. The tankers are over there. We could do in tank refueling.

So I think in the next 24 to 48 hours, a decision could be made. And that’s why I’m getting more and more vocal, not less vocal, that we need to go full stop right now. We need to find out exactly because there’s too many moving pieces and moving pieces about exactly what’s going on. What’s the risk? We haven’t had a full debate about this, and I would like to see some voices come forward. I’d like to see Tulsi Gabbard come forward and tell us, has anything changed in DNI, which is 17 agencies, including the CIA, for this? Has anything changed from what you told the public at a hearing in March? Is it? If it’s changed, let’s just hear it. I would like to have John Ratcliffe go to the sticks. And I think Ratcliffe’s a good man. John Ratcliffe should go to the stakes and say two things. Number one, we had no involvement at all in the Ukraine assault under Russia. Just say, because he’s kind of been in hiding in that, and then he ought to be open to court.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s never criticized. No one ever criticizes John Ratcliffe.

STEVE BANNON: Well, the reason I think they’re not ever. I think the reason they’re not criticizing John Ratcliffe. And John Ratcliffe’s a good man, but you have to remember John Ratcliffe was a mayor of a small town in Texas that went to Congress, did a great job. People. President Trump likes him a lot. He’s. He’s got Mike Ellis over there, but they’re two guys, right? We don’t have 10 political appointees which we should have. We got two guys running that building.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the way the agency is structured. There’s no civilian control of the.

STEVE BANNON: Well, you know better than anybody. But it runs the way it’s going to run. I mean, we sent Pompeo over there.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s an army, it’s a business. It’s a government agency.

STEVE BANNON: It’s a country venture capital firm.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s literally a venture capital firm. And its budget is unknown. Its reach is. And, you know, and we have no.

STEVE BANNON: Idea what they’re doing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, because the majority of things that they do are not, you know, U.S. government employees doing even the door kickers. No, it’s. They’re working through some exile group they’ve been funding for 30 years. Right.

STEVE BANNON: They will also look you right in the eye.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.

STEVE BANNON: And lie to you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh.

STEVE BANNON: As that’s the wilderness. The wilderness of mirrors. Right. Look, look.

The CIA’s Control of Government

TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re smart. Somebody said to me the other day, someone knowledgeable said the problem with the US Government’s like, why can’t we do this or that, and like, if you wanted light rail, you know, we couldn’t do it. And this person said, because all the smartest people in government are at CIA.

STEVE BANNON: Yeah. They also with the interagency process. They control the entire process. This is why downsizing NSC was so important. When you have this, we had these detailees that come from all the different departments because NSC should have 30 people, but it had 250. There are 60 political appointees. Yeah, right. And there’s 280 come from different agencies to do all the different paperwork. They have the interagency process. The CIA controls that process. They control the process at the Pentagon. They control the DHS. They control over the Justice Department. They are embedded deep because they’ve been around, you know, they’ve been around so long, and they know how to embed deep.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

STEVE BANNON: With the smartest people out there. And so if you don’t get control of that, you’re not going to get control. They’re like a Praetorian guard. Right now. We have to lance it. This is like the Roman late stage of the Roman Empire, when the Praetorian Guard kind of ran the deal and they would put forward every Legionary captain that they thought was going to be good for a time. And they are planning right now to thwart President Trump’s second term, make sure they wait him out, and they’re going to have a hand selected person for the third term. And I don’t say this as a Conspiracy theory guy. This is just basic facts, totally true.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re that if you criticize them, they will leak to people that you work for them. I happen to know, which is kind of brilliant. Like if, if you’re an effective critic of CIA. Joe Kent, I’ve lived this personally, but also Joe Kent, who’s a wonderful man, a totally sincere man, Great man, great man, former CIA contractor, lost his wife in Syria in Obama’s Syria war and became an opponent of the way things are running. And they CIA played in his primary. And the way they did it was by convincing Republican primary voters that Joe Kent, who’s the single most effective critic of CIA in the United States, was actually working for CIA. I mean, like, wow, I tip my non existent hat in deference to the brilliance of that.

STEVE BANNON: This is how brilliant they are. You notice from President Trump the arc that he went through on Friday. You know, something’s up. When David Ignatius at the Washington Post, which we call the Langley Bugle, he’s ahead of the comms.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’m aware.

STEVE BANNON: When Ignatius comes out on Morning Joe and says, Trump is doing such a really magnificent job here, he’s acting like the commander in chief. That should be the red flare that goes up and goes, what the fuck? No. So, I mean, it’s two friends. Why don’t have a tv?

TUCKER CARLSON: Because it’s too frustrating to watch. Like, I don’t know a single person who doesn’t like David Ignatius personally, and that would include me. And he’s just such a courtly man. He’s like the Murdochs. He’s just, you can’t dislike him. He’s just got elaborate, wonderful manners. He’s very nice. But like, he is the spokesman for CIA.

STEVE BANNON: And you wonder Washington Post is the language the Langley bugle.

TUCKER CARLSON: When Louis Jolyon West, who was one of the last visitors to Jack Ruby in his cell before he went insane, was a CIA physician and, you know, deeply involved in a lot of really dark, some of the darkest things we’ve ever done. When he died, I went and looked up the Walter Pincus obit from the Washington Post. Walter Pincus was the CIA. I think Walter Pincus wrote it. And there was no mention in the Washington Post obit that Jolly West worked for CIA. Oh, my God. Like, but you wonder, like, do people watching Morning Joe have any idea who these people are?

STEVE BANNON: No, that’s the whole.

TUCKER CARLSON: That freaks me out.

The Church Committee and James Angleton

STEVE BANNON: You know, there’s a great story. You talked about the Kennedy thing today. There’s a great story in, in the book the guy just came out about the, the Kennedy assassination and, and the, the, the House and Senate committee. It’s a Church committee. The biography of the Church committee came out about a year or two years ago. He talks about when his first forum, Frank Church, was going to be one thing, but they got Gary Hart in there who’d just been elected.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

STEVE BANNON: Mike Mansfield, the old head of the, you know, really guy knew how to run things, right. Mansfield from Montana, pick both of them Church to head the committee. But Gary Hart was going to be assigned to the CIA to find out what went on. So Hart’s seeing Colby and seeing some of the former directors and they, and they tell him, say, hey, the guy, you really got to sleep. All of them tell him, says, nice to have dinner. You got to see Angleton. Angleton. Angleton runs the deal now.

TUCKER CARLSON: He was the counterterrorism counter intel.

STEVE BANNON: Yeah. A legendary guy there forever.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

STEVE BANNON: And he goes to, I think the Metropolitan Club, of course, for dinner. And Angleton would take a drink. And Gary Hart’s sitting there kind of working him. And so towards the end of the evening, he can’t get up enough courage to ask, like the question. So finally he says, you know, it’s about over. I got to do this. Says, Look, Mr. Angleton, I just got a question from the committee. We need to know, did the CIA have anything to do with the Kennedy assassination?

TUCKER CARLSON: He asked Angleton that.

The Church Committee Investigation and Its Aftermath

STEVE BANNON: Yes. Angleton it’s in the bar. Call it Angleton. Taped another drink, puts it down and goes, senator Hart, you were. You were a theology major, were you not? And he goes, yeah, as a matter of fact, I was theology. So you know the New and Old Testament pretty well. He goes, well enough. He goes, in my father’s house, there are many mansions. Gary Hart goes, what the fuck? Didn’t ask another question. Went back to church in Mansfield. Mansfield goes, okay, shut it down. He goes, this is why they came out, the CIA. Remember, they had tried to kill guys in the Congo. They even had the cigar and Castro, nothing about the domestic stuff at all. That all got shut down immediately. And they figured, oh, there’s a Lumumba in Patrice Lumumba.

TUCKER CARLSON: In Congo.

STEVE BANNON: In Congo. And they had tried to kill or killed three or four other guys, maybe Dag Hammerschar, who knows? But they definitely got into all these things that the American people are interested in. Why are you killing foreign leaders? But they didn’t get to the heart of many mansions. Gary Hart goes out. I’m not going any farther on this one, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: And within 10 years, Frank Church is dead of galloping cancer. And Gary Hart is totally destroyed. 1988, through the.

STEVE BANNON: The leading presidential candidate at the time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, yeah. On with a picture, lured onto the monkey business.

STEVE BANNON: And then they. And then in his house, the first time they ever surrounded his house. Remember?

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’ll never for forget it at all. And boy, in the Washington Post led the chart. Not for Gary Hart or whatever, but he, by today’s standards, awesome though.

STEVE BANNON: You’re going to. You’re going to pay. This is going to be payback.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s literally unbelievable. But you can’t. How do you have a real country in the middle of that? Like, I don’t understand.

The War Against the Deep State

STEVE BANNON: Well, you can’t. This. I think you make the point. Since 1963, it’s. We’ve devolved and that’s what. I’m not kidding. As Elon was the special government employee to do doge to try to get waste, fraud and abuse. I think because we’re at war now and the war we’re at is an internal war. It’s an internal war with this apparatus that we finally have a leader that will have the back of people that will go in because he wants it taken down. I think he’s getting terrible advice around that someone like you not to organize it, but who knows the history of these institutions and quite frankly, where the bodies are buried. Have to come in as a special government employee to help get the people on they’re going to organize. We have to go to war against the deep state. Now. If we don’t go to war with the deep state immediately and have a couple of wins that we can point to and some momentum and put them on their back leg, their back foot in the next 200 days, nothing in America is going to change.

Tom Cotton and the Kennedy Files

TUCKER CARLSON: And we should be clear about who’s serving its interest. Tom Cotton, who’s the chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, was one of the primary drivers of secrecy around the Kennedy files. So Tom Cotton, I think, was born in the 80s. And I like Tom Cotton a lot. I know him, know his wife who worked at CIA. Nice, super nice people. But when it came down to it, when Trump gets elected and gets inaugurated in January, Tom Cotton’s, he’s denied this, but he’s lying because it’s true. I know for a fact Tom Cotton’s running around being like, well, whatever we do, we can’t put people in place. We’re going to declassify all the Kennedy assassination files. 62 years later. I think Tom Cotton was born in the 80s. Why would he care?

STEVE BANNON: It’s not a sources and methods thing anymore.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is that? Why would Tom Cotton be so concerned about releasing the Kennedy documents that he’s trying to prevent people from getting jobs on the basis of his belief that they might reveal those documents? Like, what is that? Because that’s, it’s disqualifying. He shouldn’t be in the Senate.

STEVE BANNON: Of course, he knows that that is the key that can pick the lock, that Something happened in 1963. We had a coup d’état.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep. Yes.

The Warren Commission Cover-Up

STEVE BANNON: The country’s never faced up to it. No, the country understands that like 80% something’s dead wrong. They understood at the time the Warren Commission was gun decked. You go back and read this new book, even by a New York Times writer, you see how, what a joke it was, how the FBI stepped in immediately. Jerry Ford was their guy. It was a complete joke.

TUCKER CARLSON: He was made president without an election.

STEVE BANNON: Made president without election. I’m just saying there are no coincidences.

TUCKER CARLSON: Jerry Ford of the Warren Commission becomes President without an election. And you’re like the, if you go.

STEVE BANNON: I’ve read the testimony of the Warren Commission justice in the Warren Commission in the sixth floor in the Depository where the gunman sat right next to him. The guy, I think his name was Willie Davis. He was a worker of the black guys were up on the top deck pointing afterwards when the shot took place. He was going to go join those guys. He actually sat there and had his lunch right next to where the assassin was. Now, you know, assassins and CIA and Navy seals, I mean, their hearts beating out of their chests before that happens, because they understand it may be the last time they take a breath on earth is when they fire.

So they are really ready to meet their maker and they’re highly focused. The last thing you’re going to do on Earth is get that target. That is just. Is just these cartons just suppressing by a few feet. This guy’s giving testimony. And it’s unbelievable. They go, well, you were there. Yes. What were you doing? He says, I was eating a chicken sandwich, a bag of Fritos and a Coke. And they’re going, you’re right next to him and everything’s going. And you’re hanging on the edge of it. And then all of a sudden, Jerry Ford steps in and goes, excuse me, I have a question. Do you have a criminal record? And the guy goes, excuse me. He goes, do you have a criminal record? And the guy goes, well, I was picked up. No, no, no, you’re a felon. Right.

And the whole conversation drops. I go, oh, my God. We’re literally at the moment, literally 10 minutes before the shot takes place. We have a witness that’s there, and you got to ask him, did you hear anything? Did you see anything? And Jerry Ford told us, and as you mentioned with Angleton and the guys a few years later, out of nowhere, on a, on a. On Watergate. Another operation they were deeply involved in. Right. He’s made Vice President of the United States.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Because the President’s most popular president in American history is undone by a naval intel officer posing as a journalist.

STEVE BANNON: Exactly.

Graham and Pompeo’s Ukraine Activities

TUCKER CARLSON: Just on the Washington Post. You probably have a lot going on in your life. So you wonder, like a lot of this is taking place in private. And it’s one of the great frustrations as an American is you don’t know what your government’s doing and you have no way to find out. Even when it’s done 60 years ago, you don’t know. But some of it’s taking place totally in public. The Tom Cotton stuff. And it grieves me to say this because I like Tom and I think he’s smart, really smart, actually, and a good guy in a lot of ways. But he’s acting on behalf of CIA, not on behalf of the people of Arkansas, obviously. But then there’s Lindsey Graham who’s like, florid out in public, like there’s no kind of hiding who Lindsey Graham is. And how does. What is that?

STEVE BANNON: The whole Ukraine thing, He and Pompeo, how the weekend before the drone assault takes place, he’s in Ukraine saying something’s going to happen. He’s in France. I mean, if you talk to people over there, it’s like he had inside baseball. He was all jacked up that good things are going to happen. Pompeo’s in, like Odessa giving a talk. I mean, what is Mike Pompeo? There’s a middle of a war over there. We’re trying to extract ourselves.

What is Mike Pompeo in Odessa? Given some, you know, a rally speech, essentially pumped these guys up and he’s talking about certain things that could happen or certain positive things to hang in on this war. Exactly what President Trump’s counter to President Trump is trying to have everybody lay down their guns and let’s. Cause right now, the British papers report, is a million Russians dead or wounded. There’s 750,000 Ukrainians dead or wounded. I mean, this has been devastating, like World War I type of casualties. President Trump is sitting there going, we need to put the guns down. I need to get people at the table. We need to talk. We’ll even buy your dirt. We’ll buy your rare earths. We’ll put money in which we oppose.

But if President Trump thinks he needs that for a peace deal, we’ll support him. What is Mike Pompeo and Odessa jacking these people up? What is Lindsey Graham over there jacking people up about? These questions have to be asked. We have to ask what part of our government is going against the Commander in chief and what the commander in chief is trying to do.

The Logan Act Question

TUCKER CARLSON: Is it legal for Lindsey to do that?

STEVE BANNON: Well, this Logan act, you know, I called for his arrest. Good, right, Absolutely. Or cancel his passport. Do two things. Either don’t lean back in the country or arrest him. And I’m adamant about this in Pompeo also because I think there are arguments around the Logan act, that they’re over there countering what the Commander in Chief’s trying to do. And I think.

TUCKER CARLSON: And they have security clearances, too, which I don’t have and you don’t have, I assume, a security clearance. Not anymore. Right, but why.

STEVE BANNON: I don’t want one. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I don’t either.

STEVE BANNON: But you said they’re going, hey, don’t blame me. I didn’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why does Lindsey Graham and why does Mike Pompeo have a security clearance?

Financial Disclosure and Motivations

STEVE BANNON: Well, I think. Yeah, it’s my. Because I’m very disappointed in him. I. I knew him for years. The guy I know today, the guy see, today is not the guy I knew. And I think, I think people have to. I think they ought to come on when they come on TV is they ought to have the, like NASCAR drivers. Like, who’s on the. Whose payroll? They are.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly right.

STEVE BANNON: We, the American people are at least ought to be in a chiron. Who they’re taking money from.

TUCKER CARLSON: But who, what. What’s the deal with Lynn? Let me just say I’ve known Lindsay for 25 years and it’s impossible not to like Lindsey Graham. He’s one of the most charming, funny. He’s just a wonderful person to travel with. He’s the most charming person in the world. I’ll just say that because it’s just true. I like him. He was here. I would be having fun with Lindsey Graham. But his effect on the United States is so destructive. I don’t understand what that is. What is his motive? You know him well, of Course, because you’re.

The Pentagon and Defense Spending

STEVE BANNON: Well, I know. Look, I think, number one, he’s very involved in the Pentagon on Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon. The building runs like the buildings. I mean, it’s a trillion dollar. Why, when President Trump says, we’re going to go to a hemispheric defense from Greenland to block the Russian submarines to Alaska, maybe Canada for the Arctic, because that’s the new great game of the 21st century, to the Panama Canal, because they’re going to block the Chinese and they’re going to get the Chinese out of the Caribbean. We’ll deal with Venezuela, we’ll have the Central Pacific, which has always been kind of our strategic pivot, the three island chains and America’s hermetically sealed. You add a golden dome or some sort of ballistic missile. America can live in peace and we can do greatest. And we can do expeditionary, not that we’re not engaged in the world. You can do expeditionary forces anywhere you want in the world.

TUCKER CARLSON: You can’t put Chinese infrastructure in St. Croix, which they have a lot of in St. Croix, which we control.

STEVE BANNON: Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you can’t let the Chinese control your hemisphere. That seems reasonable. And they’ll say to us, okay, get out of Japan, at which point you say, okay, this, I mean, that seems like logical.

Corporate Power Concentration

STEVE BANNON: This budget is not a trillion dollars going up. Right. Because right now it’s over a trillion dollars. If you add the supplement that’s coming in the reconciliation bill with the NDAA, you’re over a trillion dollars and it’s only going to keep increasing. This is the way the defense contractors make money. They embed it over there. They kind of run the building right now. You don’t see any pushback by armed services. In fact, every district’s got huge plants. As you know, our industrial policy that we do have is really around arms manufacturing. Right. And it’s a high margin business and we want to sell weapons to the entire world. It’s that system that’s running the country.

Remember the difference between President Trump’s first term and his second term is what happened under Biden is a massive concentration of power because they didn’t back Lina Khan or the antitrust people like we have now in President Trump’s administration, like Gail Slater, and what’s happening to the FTC under Andrew Ferguson, taking big tech to court and trying to break them up. Right now, you have Wall Street, you have big tech, you have big agriculture, you have big pharma, you have the big health care industry, you have the defense contractors, you have the concentration of these massive industries that have every lobbyist, every communications expert, all the big law firms on their payroll. If you and I wanted to start today and say, hey, guess what, we want to take on one of the industries, let’s take on big aggressive. You literally can’t get a great law firm to represent you or great lobbyists because they’re all, they’re all hired by these guys that concentrate and they’ll set.

TUCKER CARLSON: Up regulatory hurdles that are insurmountable.

STEVE BANNON: This is the regulatory cap.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m living that in something that we’re doing on the side and you just find out that it’s like crazy, that concentration of power. Oh my God.

The Chinese Model in America

STEVE BANNON: Regulatory capture and really regulatory merger. It’s. We said when we gave China everything after Tiananmen Square, when gave most favored nation status and WTO and access, that the more they get prosperous, because they were a backward agricultural country at the time, the more prosperous they get, the more they’ll become like a liberal democracy, like the United States. I remember that we actually have copied the model of the Chinese Communist Party. They have a handful of state owned industries, very powerful, merged in with the central government, an authoritarian government. That’s what we have and that’s what President Trump, the promise of President Trump is to break that. The American people don’t want it. They hate it now. They need the tools to do it.

And that’s why I think this next couple hundred days coming after the 10th anniversary of really President Trump, because what happened at the top of the escalator, Trump was in seventh place because people didn’t know if he was serious about running or not. No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

STEVE BANNON: He had just gone to CPAC, I think 90 days before. And in the 2015 CPAC, Trump finished seventh in the poll at three and a half percent.

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember behind all these guys at.

STEVE BANNON: The top of the escalator, he’s in seventh. That night they do a flash poll, I think on CNN. He’s first why that talk was in a nomenclature and a vernacular. The American people weren’t. Hadn’t heard from a politician about the border, about deportations, about China, about bringing jobs back, about ending the forever wars. And remember as the campaign went on, he goes to South Carolina, I’ll never forget it. And in South Carolina, he literally blew up the entire, not just Bush apparatus. Kind of Fox and kind of everybody on the right that had been in there. And when he said it, you could hear the audience gasp. And so many commentators came on and said, well, that’s the end of him.

The South Carolina Moment

TUCKER CARLSON: Because they all said that except me, because I was the only one in Fox News who I knew. I was like, yes, thank you for telling the truth, finally.

STEVE BANNON: But everybody around you was that he’s finished.

TUCKER CARLSON: They hated me for agreeing with them. They hated me personally.

STEVE BANNON: And he won in a landslide.

TUCKER CARLSON: Karl Rove never, who was my neighbor and always got along with him. Again, perfectly charming guy, sort of very. Not a good person at all, but. But smart and, you know, Carl. But after that, that’s. That was the moment I realized it was in that Greenville, South Carolina debate that all that mattered to them was the projection of force abroad. That’s it. Everything else was just because they were.

STEVE BANNON: So shocked he said it and united the fact that he can’t win.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s when Bill Kristol turned against him, was that night. And if you look, you could look it up, check his Twitter feed. The day before, Kristol was like, you know, Trump’s kind of a pig, but he’s our pig. And actually we can kind of use him. And maybe we should make peace with Trump. Bill Kristol said that, who I used to work for for many years. The day after that Greenville debate, he took the position that he has now, which is, you know, we’ll destroy the country to prevent Trump from exercising power like he was a sworn enemy of Donald Trump’s after that, when he came out against the Iraq war.

How weird. Why? If you hit some. If you killed a child in a DUI, okay, you’re drunk. You accidentally run over a child. There’s no possibility you could meaningfully advance in American life because people would say, we’ve forgiven you, Steve, but you did something totally irresponsible. It’s just horrible. It was a mistake. Yeah, it was a mistake, but it was horrible. We allowed the architects of the Iraq war, who gravely injured the United States, got all these people killed, Americans killed, to continue to advance. They were never held to account for what they did, ever at all. They became the head of the World Bank. How did we do that?

The Iraq War Playbook Returns

STEVE BANNON: The specter of that is what we faced over the last 72 hours. This is exactly the same pitch as the Iraq war. Weapons of mass destruction.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.

STEVE BANNON: You have to get it so they. They understand one thing. They think the playbook works. This is why we have to stop it now. If we don’t stop it now, it’s going to work all the time. They think that playbook of lulling the American people to sleep and tell them there’s these evil people that have to be taken down, or if they’re taken down, everything’s going to be fine after that. And that we face an apocalypse that that doesn’t happen. They’re running the Iraq war playbook over again with almost some of the same players, or at least the proteges right in the verticals of who those players were.

TUCKER CARLSON: But why does institutional conservatism allow it? If Mike Pompeo shows up at the, you know, Republican county of dinner in some state, like, he’s treated as. I was in a restaurant with him recently. Everyone’s like, oh, Mike Pompeo, he’s treated as like a legitimate person. No one has ever. The right does not hold its own people accountable on the most basic level.

Republican Party as Controlled Opposition

STEVE BANNON: Well, we say the right. The Republican Party is controlled opposition. Okay? They’ve. Because they’ve never really put a fight. Let’s go back to the three central tenets of Trumpism. You know, immigration, border and sovereignty, trade and ending forever wars. The official apparatus of the Republican Party hates all three of them and doesn’t agree with. And they agree with it still.

TUCKER CARLSON: True.

STEVE BANNON: It’s 100%. This is. Look, look what happened here in the last 24 hours on the immigration side. All of a sudden there was a. They promulgated that because of big agriculture’s needs that we can no longer have raids on farms, raids in hotels, all of it. That that had to be counted by President Trump saying, hey, there’s 20 million illegal aliens. I’m going to get them all out of here. And then today or this morning, he came out with, we’re going to triple down the raids in sanctuary cities. Right? I’m going to get all these guys out of here. No, this huge institutional fight led by Fox News, right, Their biggest is the forever wars.

But if you look at the Wall Street Journal and if you look at Fox News on the trade and bringing jobs back from China, they’re very ambivalent about that. They’re talking about the cost of living. I mean, they’re putting up that, you know, because they’re all free traders, which is the way the country got in the first place. They’re also quite ambivalent on the immigration and mass deportation. Remember, mass deportation is just not the criminals you have to get. President Trump said they. 20 million. I say it’s 10. Came in on Biden’s watch. They all have to leave. But you’re seeing a lot of ambivalence of that, particularly Republican Party. They’re saying the Wall Street Journal says, well, no, they add 2%, one and a half to 2% to GDP, right. Because they buy so much stuff. Number two, they’ve driven down wages among particularly low skilled black and Hispanics. I say this is why we put the coalition together. This is why 39% of black men are voting for us. This is why South Texas is now MAGA territory, because they understand their wages to be driven down.

So I think the Republican Party hates the basic tenets of President Trump’s platform, particularly the one they most hate is ending the forever wars. That’s tied to both Wall Street, it’s tied to the defense industry. It’s also tied to this mentality that we have an American empire. Remember you and I saying, hey, we are actually a republic. We want to go back to being a republic like the founders are a country. When they set the Constitution, they looked to Republican Rome. That was their source of think not the Roman Empire, what we’ve done. In fact, they said, I think it was General Washington, don’t go over seas looking for monsters to slay. Right? We have enough to do here, let’s do this. And I think that that’s what we’ve gotten so far off track. And we have an American empire. That empire has to be taken apart brick by brick because all is done is to basically destroy the inner workings of the United States and particularly destroy the very people who are the cannon fodder in these wars. Right?

The Empire Destroys the Nation

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s why destroyed the nation. Drive around, drive around the country. Just get in your vehicle and drive. And I don’t see how anybody could say things are better now than they were 15 or 20 years ago or 40 years ago. It’s a disaster. And so the empire destroys the country.

STEVE BANNON: And you add on top of it the national debt and the trillion dollars every month. And the, the discussions, we have a discussion. DOGE goes to a bunch of different places, but they never go to the Pentagon. They’re not really allowed to go to the Pentagon. We have a budget that we’re talking about. How do we make these cuts? How do you cut Medicaid, how do you cut the food stamp program? Which all have to be looked at and done, but it’s sacrosanct. We can’t even talk about defense. We have a trillion dollar defense budget.

And I keep saying Trump’s laid out a strategy of hemispheric defense. It’s very different than post war where we were everywhere. The American empire really around the ring of the Eurasian landmass, right. And I said, he’s talking about a hemispheric defense. The budget is totally misaligned with the Hemispheric defense, both in the allocation to the Navy taking down big army. But hey baby, the defense budget is going to go and you’re not going to cut a penny out of it because like you, you’re raising your voice as someone that likes Israel and agrees with Israeli national. You’re saying that you raise your voice and all of a sudden you’re being eviscerated that you’re an enemy of the Jewish people, that you’re an anti Semite. Not just that you’re an appeaser. And he said Tucker’s a pacifist. Right? Appeaser and a pacifist because they understand.

The Spiritual Darkness of Washington D.C.

TUCKER CARLSON: Show up at my house and find out how far my pacifism extends. No. I mean, no. It’s all slander and it bothers me simply because it does convince people whose opinions I care about and who I care about personally. And it fractures relationships and it also comes from people I know really well. And that Ari Fleischer, who I’ve never respected, but I always liked him and he wrote something. Somebody sent me this thing yesterday and I’m just a carnival barker and I’m pretending to have my views. And I texted him and I was like, come on, this is not. You know, I may be totally wrong. You of course disagree with me, that’s fine. But you know that I’m sincere. I’m totally sincere. Why else would I do this? Of course he didn’t respond to me, but it’s painful.

STEVE BANNON: Ari, who every day went to the podium and told it another day away from finding weapons of mass destruction. How do they sit there in line nation. Now I am quite serious, given. Because you’re a product of Washington D.C. yeah, there’s no one better. In an emergency, we have an emergency. We have a break the glass emergency. To actually be an advisor to the President. Right. In a temporary thing. Than you who know the whole, you know, the canvas. Not that you were Oregon. But you could sit there in the NSC, in the tank or the tanks of the Pentagon, but down within the Kennedy Room and actually walk through. This is the apparatus. This is what we have to do. This is what we have to do with the FBI. This is what we have to do with the CIA. This we have to do with DNI, the Pentagon, and then we have people execute that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I never survived that. But I mean, I don’t come back. I had breakfast alone in the dining room of the Metropolitan Club this morning. A place I love. It’s the only person there. It’s Me and the waiters who I know well and love. And the second I walk outside that building, I’m like, whoa, the vibe in the city is bad.

STEVE BANNON: It’s bad.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you feel that?

STEVE BANNON: Feel it? Ever since, ever since President Trump left in January 2021 because it was an armed camp then we had around, I’d.

TUCKER CARLSON: Left by then, I was like, I’m out.

The Imperial Capital’s Dark Specter

STEVE BANNON: You came to the war room. We had 100 National Guard troops with two humvees, barbed wire everywhere. It took from the guys at Fox and One America to come up to the war room. It’s only a five minute walk up the hill, 45 minutes to get there. You had to go through checkpoints. Ever since that time, and I hate to say, with all the positive energy President Trump has brought, it’s still a dark specter. This imperial capital is probably, and I tell you why, they understand there’s an internal civil war here, that one side’s going to win and one side is going to lose. Their belief is they’re going to wait us out. That for all the Tucker Carlson’s and Steve Bannon’s and other people around, President Trump are sitting there going, the Bobby Kennedys, right?

And other people that know how this apparatus works at every level and are sitting there going, we have to do this now. They believe that they will weigh President Trump out. And I don’t put a possibility of an assassin. If President Trump is to go too far into this and bring you into that, do not think they would not think of an assassination attempt. They have no intention of turning over control and power of the most powerful empire in man’s history. It has to be taken from them. And I tell people, we either do it now, if we don’t do it now, this wave of kind of people that have come together, we’re not going to be able to do it. And if we don’t do it, I’m not sure we win another election.

Because I think people, they’re going to force us into doing either. Not deporting the 10 million. Right. And not securing the border, not forcing China and not really cutting tough deals to start to bring real high value added manufacturing jobs back. Because Wall street doesn’t want that. They think our labor cost is too high. They think the environmental costs are too high. They love the slave labor of Lao Beijing. And most importantly, they’re not going to stop the war machine. They’re not going to stop. And I’m not a pacifist. I spent eight years of my life as a naval officer. My daughter went to West Point. She fought in Iraq in 2010 under Obama. Right. It’s not that we’re pacifists. We see what we see. And what we see now is there’s a very evil specter over this imperial capital. And one side is going to win. The President Trump kind of rebels or revolutionaries versus this Praetorian Guard apparatus. And that’s why this fight to me is going to happen the next two or 300 days. We’re going to know what side this is going. We’re going to know if there’s enough momentum on our side to actually watch.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, there’s a you get to spiritual thing and you can. I texted my wife this morning, second this administration’s gone, I’m never coming back here. And I’m going to spent got here in 1985. And it’s really shocking.

STEVE BANNON: You see, you feel that though, when you hear.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh yeah, it’s just dark. It’s super dark. And where I live normally is very, you know, it’s not thriving at all. It’s poor and there are lots of problems and people die of drug ODs and all that. But you don’t feel. A lot of people die of Darwin’s. But you do not feel this kind of. When we sold our house five years ago, my wife sold it over the phone and next thing I know, there is a. It was a great, beautiful house, super pretty house, not huge, but beautiful, in the District of Columbia. And she sells it to a CIA officer who pays cash. And the next thing you know, there’s a Ukraine flag flying from my flagpole. And I’m not making this up.

And my neighbor sent it to me. He’s like, oh, look what happened to your house. A house I really loved. And I was like, wow, that’s just a metaphor. But okay. So let me ask you. You’ve made a couple of allusions. I almost don’t want to ask you because it’s upsetting. But to the country coming apart to conflict here, clearly there’s been a rise in violence. This weird Minnesota story, which I’m not even going to ask you about because I don’t understand it at all. You know, clearly anybody does. But I want to ask you about what’s happening in California. It does seem like resisting federal authority on immigration is an act of sedition more profound than anything they did at Fort Sumter in 1861. And this is not resolved. Like, I don’t. What are we watching right now in California with Gavin Newsom.

California’s Neo-Confederate Resistance

STEVE BANNON: You’re from D.C. I’m from Richmond. I’m raised in Richmond and I keep telling people, I thought we settled this about federal law and states rights and succession. In the mid-1860s. We had a civil war to determine the outcome of this. We’ve had that discussion. We’ve had that argument. It’s been settled. I said this to President Trump in the first term, that this whole thing of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states is actually a neo confederate, you know, mentality that you can have. Gavin Newsom. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Have you said that on War Room?

STEVE BANNON: Yes, I’ve said that.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s neo confederate. So smart.

STEVE BANNON: It’s a neo confederate.

TUCKER CARLSON: It is. That’s exactly what it is.

STEVE BANNON: Jackson.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m stealing that, by the way.

STEVE BANNON: No, no, because.

TUCKER CARLSON: So good.

STEVE BANNON: Jackson. Look, he had this thing before the Civil War with, with Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

STEVE BANNON: On tariffs, where they remember, the landed aristocracy in South Carolina were some of the richest people. I think Charleston had more. What would be equivalent to billionaires.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

STEVE BANNON: At the start of the Civil War than any place on earth.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it shows in the Battery down magnificence.

The Battle for America’s Streets

STEVE BANNON: It is a. John C. Calhoun, as his vice president, was going to stop and go down and defend South Carolina, said, we’re not going to do these tariffs. And Jackson said, I’m going to call the army down there, and if Calhoun’s defying me, I’m going to hang him from the first lamppost. I mean, Jackson was a guy who was going to take immediate action. What’s happening in California is kind of the equivalent. You’ve had the sanctuary citizens. And if President Trump had not sent the troops in and federalized the National Guard, what would happen in LA was what we see in all these cities, it would explode.

Have been the summer of love of 2025, where there was a lot more rhetoric than actually action. One of the reasons President Trump had Bill Barr and Esper and all these people that wouldn’t execute what he wanted, now he’s got a team, and that’s why I’m so glad he came out last night and says, I’m doubling and tripling down the rates. My recommendation on the show the day after this stuff happened over that weekend was President Trump ought to triple the ICE raids and he ought to go to, you know, he ought to go to schools. Hey, they got to go, right? They have to go, and it’s not pleasant. We got to be very humane about it. But you have to have a show of force. And if you need to send in the army, if you need to send it in federalized National Guard. We have to do it. California is the railhead of this.

That’s why you have to break it there. It’s going to obviously pop up in Chicago and New York, but you have to take. And Stephen Miller said this. I’ve known Stephen a long time ago. Andrew and Stephen Miller and Ben Shapiro, Alex Martin, they all came out of kind of west LA, right? Ben might have been the Valley, but they’re all West LA guys. Stephen Miller has been saying since the time I knew him, the war for America is going to be won or lost on the streets of Los Angeles. He said this now for almost 20 years. And this is what this fight and this is what’s so disturbing about the timing. We’re totally focused on that, and President Trump actually implementing the deportations of mass deportations. And all of a sudden this thing breaks out in Persia in the Middle east, and now the whole country is just focused on that. It’s almost like a time diversion to get our attention.

Does it feel that way because Bibi gave it up. There was no. It didn’t have to happen on Thursday night. We were told what was leaks. Oh, there’s a bomb and they’re going to have it. And, you know, this is something they have to have immediately, immediately, immediately. He comes on Bret Baer and says, well, it’s 12 or 13 months. We’ve heard the 12 or 13 months for 20 years. Maybe it is 12 or 13 months, but that doesn’t mean you have to act on Friday. Why is it Thursday and Friday when we’re in the middle of. Actually, the most important part of this Third World war is the 10 main invaders we’ve had in this country, or 20 million, according to President Trump. They all have to go. You understand that there’s many bad actors that came in on this, right, that are now sleeper cells in this country. Everybody’s got to go and we have to do it. That is the set.

When I talk about Third World War. The central battlefront for the United States of America is internal to the United States of America. This is why we have to focus on this in the timing, because there’s no coincidences of how all of a sudden we’re asked to do bombing runs in Iran a half a world away, and it sucks up all the media attention that you don’t even. There’s not even a discussion on this. And that’s why President Trump coming out, doubling down, and Homan and Stephen Miller. There ought to be three more raids tomorrow, and we got to get the focus back on that.

Federal Authority vs. State Defiance

TUCKER CARLSON: So how should you deal with. I mean, when Orval Faubus, who was the governor of Arkansas in 1956, presides over the state that refuses to desegregate after the Supreme Court says, you have to desegregate in Brown vs Board, and Dwight Eisenhower was not a liberal, says, you can’t ignore federal authority on a federal issue. This is a Supreme Court decision. And he sends the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, to Central High School and says, sorry, you’re going to desegregate. Now, whatever you think of that, it’s kind of disgusting in certain ways, but it’s also essential to preserving the Union. I mean, I don’t understand, like, how can you have your big estate being like, no to the federal government? Like, what.

STEVE BANNON: On a central issue.

TUCKER CARLSON: On a central issue, who lives here?

STEVE BANNON: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who takes federal benefits?

STEVE BANNON: You know, who’s actually a citizen who has allegiance to this country, who gets.

TUCKER CARLSON: To choose our leadership.

STEVE BANNON: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: In a. In a Democratic.

The Fight for America’s Future

STEVE BANNON: This is why this radical neo Marxist Democratic Party will fight. This is the Hill they will die on. So.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I don’t understand how you can put up with that. How can you put up with that? That’s like, maybe a little more important than whether Iran gets a bomb.

STEVE BANNON: Well, you can’t. And by the way, the American people. The American people don’t. I think it’s like 60, 40 where they agree with President Trump on these mass deportations. Remember, one of the reasons we’re winning the African American vote is President Trump does not believe, like the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris in mass incarcerations. He believes in mass deportation. When I was in prison, the only thing I put up from Danbury was like, on the 26th of August, I said, hey, victory’s at hand. I can tell from the prisoners in Danbury, the young Hispanics and blacks who hate the Democratic Party, and they particularly hated Kamala Harris, because I said, look, the Democratic Party is for mass incarceration, is to break our families and to make us dependent upon the government.

I mean, these guys were smarter than guys going to Yale and the political science department because it’s a lived experience of them. And they support mass deportations because in a place like Danbury, 10% of the prison is bad hombres from these other countries that are the most dangerous criminals, convicts you have in these prisons. People at the street level have our back on this. This is this new coalition. But we have to. We have to succeed in this. We have to succeed in the deportations and getting wages to rise. In fact, I think there was just something in the Wall Street Journal. They said wages for low skilled workers are coming up. Right? Because guess what?

You have less non citizens here competing as a people in their own country shouldn’t have to compete against a non citizen for a job. This is President Trump’s the centerpiece of the entire Make America Great Again movement. And that’s why it has to succeed. And everybody now in the official political apparatus is trying to thwart him in this. And this is why it’s so important for him to go in the deep state is also remember, one of the reasons that DHS is burning through money and there’s not as many deportations. You talk to the guys at the White House, you talk to the guys at DHS, they’re still playing by the old playbook. In other words, they have to have a deportation order from a court. They go to a guy’s house and make sure there’s no kids around.

They take like 20 agents a week to go serve on two people and get them out of here. Well, obviously that doesn’t. That’s the old playbook. You have to get much more aggressive on your deportations. I think Miller and Homan are trying to change the culture over there to actually do it. But even there, the apparatus, the administrative state’s got its own mind how they’re going to do things. I think this is one of President Trump’s big battles.

The Nationalism Debate

TUCKER CARLSON: My last question has to do with, like, the first principle from which these positions flow, which is there’s a certain segment of our population, I think the majority who think the US Government’s job is to help American citizens in America. But there is another very powerful segment, which is most of the US Government, that believes the opposite. Ten years ago, I’m on an Amtrak train to New York from Washington for work at Fox, and I get a call from a neocon writer called Julia Ioffe, who I think is Russian born, ready for the new republic. And she says to me, and at this point I’m like, she thinks I’m a neocon or something, but she’s calling me for like, what do I make of Trump?

And she goes, Trump’s calling himself a nationalist. She was like, way offended. And it was just prima facie, like nationalism bad. And I said, well, I’m a nationalist. And she goes, she’s not stupid. And she goes, you’re a nationalist. I said, well, I don’t know. I think I am. I mean, I like America. I think the US Government should work for America. She was like horrified. And I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to her again. Why does that idea, which is non threatening, it’s not a Nazi idea, it’s like a basic idea, it was the founder’s idea that the US government should act on behalf of Americans. Why is that offensive? So offensive to some people. What is that?

STEVE BANNON: I’m going to tell my Mark Levin story because I like Mark a lot, although. And I think he’s one of the smartest guys in the Constitution. Although I will say I think we’re opposed on every big topic dealing with MAGA, President Trump, just saying, because Mark is a neoliberal, neocon. And that’s what Fox is. Right. Which is different than populism, nationalism.

TUCKER CARLSON: Totally different.

STEVE BANNON: They’re two different. Totally.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I’ve always gotten along with Mark.

STEVE BANNON: Yeah. And this is why neoliberals, this is why neoliberal, neocons, the whole Fox apparatus, this is what the Murdochs are. They’re much. There’s just a difference. You know, Gore Vidal said it’s just two sides of kind of the same coin that run the American empire, because American empires run on neoliberal principles and neocon principles. So Mark, when I kept saying nationalism and populism and nationalism, he calls me up and as you know, Mark goes, Bannon, he goes, you got to drop nationalism. And I go, this is 10 years ago, 12 years, when I first doing it at Breitbart. And I go, why? He says, it’s Americanism.

And I go, no, Mark, it’s actually nationalism, right? And I tried walking through. He goes, no, no, no, no, it’s Americanism. And then he puts out a book later, I think Americanism, which talks about certain tenets of nationalism, but they don’t want to use that phrase, I think because of connotations that came from Europe in the 19th century and then obviously in the 20th century, I said, this is completely different. It is populist nationalism. It is a populist movement that puts America first and American citizens first. That’s the big part. That nationalism, they never get to. That is what unites us.

TUCKER CARLSON: But how could they see that as bad? Honestly, 10 years in, I’m baffled by it. Like, what’s bad about that?

STEVE BANNON: If you mention, if you mention that word, they just, they get lit up. I have still many people today, people accuse me, oh, in fact, Ben. And Ben Shapiro is one of the smartest guys in the country. Ben said when I was running Breitbart, when he left, whether he left Arizona Corridor or fired him is still a matter of debate. Still a matter of debate. Ben goes, I turned Breitbart into Trump Pravda. Right. But the populist nationalism and away from Andrew’s conservatism. So listen, that is an ideological fight about nomenclature, which is very important and us going forward. But the tenets of it and what we’re trying to do, I think is what you’re seeing President Trump do. We have a government apparatus of these people that when institutions carry on year after year after year and pass the baton and they control. And you know, many of these people, most of them come from middle class backgrounds and they’re not coming just from elite.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, they’re not Rockefellers.

STEVE BANNON: Not Rockefeller. There are some Rockefellers and there’s some, some nepo.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re irrelevant.

STEVE BANNON: Yeah, mainly just middle class people, strivers. But they’re in control of the greatest, most powerful apparatus on earth. And you mentioned earlier today the thought of going into war and actually killing people, that’s something that turns certain people on, the power of it right now. And that’s why I tell people when you come to Washington, you can really feel it’s a spiritual war. Yes. Because of the dark specter that hangs over this town. Now, that spiritual war manifests itself in money and power.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

STEVE BANNON: And you see so many people I’ve seen coming in Congress and people I’ve known that come here and they get corrupted and they get corrupted because that basic human nature of being attracted to money and power is very tough. And we’re in a situation now that people we admire, people we like, people we’ve known, we have to go to war with them. This war against this apparatus is going to be as brutal as the war we’re fighting in the streets of Los Angeles today to make sure that actually Los Angeles is part of this American republic. Because right now California is not. But the major cities in this country, led by Los Angeles, San Francisco, are definitely not. They’re a totally different entity.

The Battle Within

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sad that you say that because the last thing I want to do is spend my day arguing with Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin. I mean, I agree with those guys on a lot and I know them, of course, I’m not mad at them personally. Even now I don’t want to fight with them. You know what I mean? I want to fight with George Soros or something, or Gavin Newsom. But I feel like they are making it impossible. This is my read, probably self serving, but I feel like they’re making it impossible to sit back in silence as they wreck the country.

STEVE BANNON: And that fight, as important as that is to me, is a secondary tertiary fight right now than the fight that we need you on. And the fight we need you on. You have a unique historical understanding of the institutions of this town. And the smarts. We need a handful of smart people around President Trump. They’re saying, this is the look, we put Cash and Bongino into FBI. We’ve put Ellis and Ratcliffe’s the CIA. We put a handful of great people at DOJ, we put Pete a handful of great people at Defense, we put Tulsi and Joe Kent a handful of people at DNI. It’s not enough. The apparatus still runs the deal. We are hanging on in a very tenuous shape. We need to go to war like they want to go to war in Persia. We need to go to war with them. And I mean, take the sword out of the scab and throw away the scabbard. We have to do that now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Sam, if I got anywhere near any kind of institutional power, which I’ve never sought and I don’t seek now, but if I ever did, you know, I think the Tom Cottons and the donors and people like that, I mean, I think they’d. I mean, I think that would be really hard. I think they put kiddie porn on my computer. I’d get pancreatic cancer. I don’t know, man.

STEVE BANNON: I think first off, just the announcement of that, the intention of that would unmask. We need. Part of this is going through an unmasking who’s on our side and who’s not on our side. Because a lot of people that are pretending to be on our side are on the opposite side. And we can go through a great.

TUCKER CARLSON: Unmasking here is sincerity. Because I’m hardly the smartest person in DC. Well, not in DC, but I’m hardly the smartest person in this conversation at all. And I don’t think I’m like, you know, have like brilliant cohesive philosophical ideas or anything like that. I’m just sort of a bumbling middle aged, you know, hopefully try to be Christian person. But I’m totally sincere. And that’s why they hated MTG.

STEVE BANNON: Who’s also, you know, marginal. Just.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, we probably got the same SAT score. You know what I mean?

STEVE BANNON: It’s like.

TUCKER CARLSON: But she’s not kidding. She’s total.

STEVE BANNON: In that kind of what you see.

TUCKER CARLSON: In that chick way where they get mad and they just like start telling the truth.

STEVE BANNON: What you see is what you get.

TUCKER CARLSON: Only women do that.

STEVE BANNON: Yeah. No, she looks. She’s central to men. I mean. What do you mean?

TUCKER CARLSON: She’s been and written out today by Mark Levin.

STEVE BANNON: I know she and I don’t always agree on everything, but she’s 100% MAGA. It’s not a good question. That shows you the level they’re prepared to go to. No, what you have is. Which is tough in this town to get, is actually historical understanding of these institutions. The only other person. And this would be great if you did it. The only other person I know that has that is Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy has that understanding, obviously what his family’s gone through, but he. At a very deep level, he knows the interconnections.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good friend of mine, seeing him tomorrow morning, Steve Bannon. Thank you for taking the time to do this. I am grateful and Godspeed in this city.

STEVE BANNON: Thanks, Tucker. It’s amazing. I can’t wait till you get your appointment. Be the first interview on War Room after he gets it. I’m not kidding. When I get. Hey, I’ve had longer odds on things than this, so stand by.

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