2/7/25: Steve Bannon WH Correspondent On Elon, Trump, GOP Infighting!!
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As somebody who is generally supportive of MAGA, in there pressing the White House press secretary, you have an opportunity to do it. How are you thinking about that? We are forthright in our support for President Trump. And I'm aware that maybe that's hard to square with the idea of like being a journalist. I don't want to be a Trump cheerleader for four years. I don't really find any intellectual merit in doing that either. If you can tell, like, I love journalism.

digging into documents. I don't like standing there and being like, "Oh my gosh, we took over Gaza." - I look at what Elon Musk is doing, getting rid of USAID, amazing, cathartic, beautiful, a masterpiece. At the same time, you now have like a genuine oligarch running loose in the government. - Yeah, I don't think it's great to have unelected billionaires running any government agency, but spare me mainstream media, the performative outrage

that you guys either A, care about the Constitution or B, that you care about unelected bureaucrats or billionaires running government. So it's the framing of it I sort of reject.

Over here at CounterPoints, you know that we like to have long-form conversations with people in the journalism industry, find out where they came from, where they're going. Independent journalist industry. Independent journalist. It's a corporate apparatus. We had Ezra Klein, New York Times, loves to call itself independent. That's true. Which it technically is. Technically. Like they own themselves. That's right. Fair enough.

We had my drop site colleague Jeremy Scahill, we had Matt Taibbi on, that was a fun one. Today we've got another fun one. We're joined by Natalie Winters, who is the White House correspondent for the War Room podcast. Hi, thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. And I just want to say, I think one blind spot in D.C., especially among Republicans, and maybe you've run into this, Natalie, I'm curious, this might be a good place to start, is

They don't realize how powerful War Room is. If you look at the podcast charts, War Room is routinely near the very, very top. It is an extremely powerful outlet. What can you tell us about the numbers? Sure, sure. With an internal look. Because it does seem like... Because when you guys ask your posse or whatever... The posse, the power of the posse. When you ask the posse to do stuff, the phone lines melt down. So the numbers have got to be big. Can you put some...

What are your highest numbers? What are your average numbers? Sure, sure. I feel like it was a dark moment when you just called me a journalist. To me, it's still like a slur. No, the independent media. Welcome to the club. I'll take it. I know, right? I guess I got to accept it. Look, I think our audience is so powerful for two reasons, quality and quantity. What do I mean by that? We're first and foremost a TV show. We're on Real America's Voice, which is in, I think, 9 million plus homes. I think our average viewership average is...

at least around 700,000, plus or minus probably a few hundred thousand, but that's just people who are watching on a traditional TV. That excludes all streaming, all Rumble, all Twitter live streaming. 700,000 watching live? Just on a TV. Yeah. But that's not including, like I said, Rumble, which is another 60,000 or so, Twitter, the clips that go viral after, everything like that. So it's just a massive audience. But to the question,

and I don't mean that our viewers are better than yours, I just mean in terms of engagement and grassroots activism, there really has never been, I think, a more impactful or powerful audience. I would say just ask Kevin McCarthy. But any time that Steve Bannon, who I always feel like when I call him my co-host, I am demeaning him. It's Stephen K. Bannon's war room. But they will do it. I

I've literally met audience members who take days off of work to make phone calls, to call the Senate, to call members of Congress. And in some ways, I think it's interesting, actually, just last night they had Ezra Levin of Indivisible on Rachel Maddow talking about their sort of resistance tactics, right? And they want to be burning down the phone lines. They want to be writing op-eds in the local papers. They have a very systematic sort of characterization of how to push back through their manuals.

And I think War Room has sort of culturally appropriated a lot of the left's tactics, which I guess it goes back to sort of McConnell in the early 2000s, right? So you can have a debate over whose tactics they were. But I think Steve Bannon has really capitalized on the art of the phone call and I'm

I'm friends with a lot of members. They're always texting us saying, thank you for giving us the cover to stand in the breach, to hold the line, particularly against CRs, the kind of omnibus spending bills. So our audience really, really does have power. I'm honored to even be able to speak to them. But I think people really underestimate CRs.

the power of our audience. But like I said, I just asked Kevin McCarthy about the power of our audience. No, it's real. No, no, no, not about it. It seemed like the audience got steamrolled a bit by Musk in the... So let's talk, let's start... Well, actually, let's start with the Daily Mail attack on you because I think that's what a lot of people are going to be curious about. Put up this... You can put up this first element and then we'll get to some more serious stuff. So...

if you're just listening to this on the podcast, this is a Daily Mail headline. You're not a hostess at Hooters. You work at the White House. Kennedy's maternal warning to the scantily clad correspondent moaning about her fashion critics. So walk us through what happened here. So this goes back to the new White House opens up

It's press briefing room to non-traditional folks. Breitbart got a little seat along the side there. Other people, they said, go ahead and apply. I applied for one. I used to

I had just permanent ish badge under Obama then Biden for a while then they took away a bunch of badges. - 400 of them. - Yeah, so now I've, I wonder if mine was one of those. They're like everybody has to reapply and I was like I'm not reapplying because KJP is like not answering any questions. I'm just gonna go to the State Department. Like stop wasting my time. So I didn't even reapply but I have applied to this new one. So they're letting in new people

So then they let you in and then there's this social media meltdown over how you look. Walk us through what happened. Let me also ask, because it was a lot deeper than how you look. How you look and maybe you can weigh in on this. It was even just the fact of you being there was controversial to the old guard who really is uncomfortable. And in the old guard's defense, as you just said yourself...

You're brand new in thinking of yourself even as a journalist. Yeah. Sure. So you can imagine other journalists are like, wait a minute, what's wrong with me?

And then look, I think the way you framed it is the right way, right? The buried lead, the significant angle of the story is that new media is in there in a press briefing room that for so long has sort of been inactive or really, I think, just sort of propaganda-esque in terms of not answering real questions, kicking out journalists that they disagree with. And now President Trump and Caroline Leavitt are taking historic steps to put in

new media voices. And I think the story should have been, wow, Steve Bannon's war room is in the White House. Yeah, it's a controversial 23-year-old girl who's maybe said some edgy things, which I all stand by. But that should have been the story. So I sort of viewed it when it really started to, I think, snowball and become a bigger and bigger thing. It was like article after article after article. And the Kennedy piece, which I think is ridiculous,

to say that I was dressed like a hostess at Hooters. I don't think a cashmere sweater with like... Wasn't that like Alice and Olivia? I was going to say, I think like all of Fox has that Alice and Olivia sweater. Everyone has it. It's like the most basic, like I'm very basic. It's the most basic sweater that exists. I think that was obviously outlandish, but...

More precisely, I just think it's sort of what rather going back to the original story. They had said that I was being slammed on Instagram when comments were saying that I was dressed inappropriately. I've gone through my comments. The typical haters who will always comment on anything I wear or anything I do. Sure, they said what they said. But overwhelmingly, it was an outpouring of support from our audience and from people who are really, truly excited to have War Room in the press

briefing room. Like I said, our audience played a critical role in President Trump's victory. So they saw, I was like, wow, this is amazing. So

So I know that's what the Daily Mail does. That's their business model, the rage bait, the clickbait headlines. But it wasn't like I was being slammed for what I was wearing. So when I saw the stories continue to pile up and then the Kennedy article, which was just so offensive, and if you read it, she refers to herself as like a fellow hot person and saying that I showed up to the White House trying to look like Barbie, just all these really bizarre attacks. I was like, this feels like more to impugn my character, our show, and

And make us seem unserious and mock this sort of whole new media operation and take away sort of reframe the story as opposed to, wow, let's give the Trump White House credit for putting in alternative media voices. Instead, it's like, oh, they're putting in, you know, just some good looking chick because, you know, whatever. And it's an annoying story, too, to, I think, engage with.

I mean, for starters, I think our show has been deplatformed, desensored, demonetized, like everything. They only threw my boss in what prison for four months? So we're used to the attacks. So, you know, a Daily Mail criticism on my outfit kind of pales in comparison. But I just think more broadly it sort of represents –

really an effort to just delegitimize us. And now I feel every time that I walk into the press briefing room, it's like just a loaded situation. And I mean, the first time that I opened the door and walked in, everyone looked at me was like,

"What the heck are you doing here? Who are you?" And I get it, it's an institution and I respect that. But I do think that my presence being there, what we were just talking about in terms of War Room's viewership, it sort of holds a mirror to their face and I think it raises more broadly the question, which is something we always dive into at War Room, which is sort of the idea of credentialism or the idea of what even is the mainstream media and why they're referred to as the mainstream media because

We trounce them in viewership. And if you look at the trajectory of viewership, I would take our trend line over theirs because they're essentially perpendicular. And we trounce them in impact, too, in terms of our audience calling phone lines. So I'm just curious by what metric and what standard, right, that they would think that they're more deserving to be there.

But it's just annoying because I think to respond to these accusations, I then become like the trope of what they want me to become where I'm sitting here saying like, sorry, I wore a sweater. Like, sorry, I'm blonde. And I'm like, that's so – and it cracks me up too. And I know I'm rambling, but it's the first. No, no.

It really cracks me up because, for your audience who's not familiar with me, my background was in investigative reporting. I was the person who had no social life. All I did was stay up and go through like, Farrah filings and the Federal Register and USAspending.gov and reading Brookings Institution reports. I have never traded off being a young girl in media.

I love, I always refer to myself as like an autistic incel. Like I love researching. And it was just funny to be portrayed as something that I so don't view myself as, but then like deciding how to push back against it was my first time ever really being smeared as something that I just felt so disparate from. - Let's hear some more background, like where you came from. - Sure, sure.

So where did you grow up and how did you become political for the first time? Sure. So I was born and raised in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica. And my parents were conservative but more run-of-the-mill, kind of like apolitically conservative, like just default. Like, oh, I just don't really want to pay taxes, like the classic trope. But I was fortunate enough to go to a very— Are they Democrats now? Or are they still— No, no, they're still—my mom is like a Mike Lindell super fan.

She's watched too much War Room. My dad's maybe not so much on the MyPillow trade, no. But I was very blessed to have gone to probably one of the most prestigious high schools, certainly in California, but in the country, Harvard-Westlake.

Is that where Alex Marlowe went? Yes. Okay. And Julia Hahn. I was going to say, this is not uncommon in Bannon world that you come from- The defects from elite institutions. Is that a private school? Public school? It's private, right? Yeah. Yeah. And the year that I was applying to college was the year that Operation Varsity Blues, if you remember the girls pretending to be all the rowers. Yeah.

Actually, one of my best friends from elementary school was the daughter of the individual who sort of, I guess, like ratted to the feds or leaked on the whole thing. So that was an interesting just sort of like class system understanding where I was like, oh, and for me, getting into college at Harvard Westlake was like the apex. It was why you existed, the paragon of existence. Right. And.

seeing a sort of admission system where it was like you either had to be a first-gen LGBTQ, you know, whatever to get in or you had to be some like old guard, old money, super blue bloody type donating, you know, $10 million to a fake sports program. I was like, oh, that's an interesting way to conceive of American society, which I think is very Bannon-esque, right? It's not Republican versus Democrat. I was never really into that, but it was very like, oh, the elites,

and their sort of woke pet projects, and then everyone else. And concurrently on that timeline, it was also, or the years prior, it had been 2016. So I graduated high school in 2019, and, sorry, I'm 23, and I was in 10th grade during President Trump's 2016 election cycle. And I was not like the cringe person in the MAGA hat, like trying to just cause conflict for the sake of causing conflict.

I remember at first I had an English teacher who was so radical. I mean, the short dyed hair, she ultimately became a they/them and encouraged other kids in our class to transition. The whole, literally the meme that you hear on Fox News, it was that kind of teacher. And I remember one day I had lied to her 'cause it was the election day and I was like, oh, 'cause we were going around, she wanted us to all tell stories of how politically and civically engaged you were.

And I was like, oh, I saw like a young family voting and they all had like Hillary wear on and it made me feel like really empowered. And it was like the worst feeling that I ever had because I was like, I don't ever want to lie to people and I don't want to live a truth that is not my own. And very shortly after, I was like, I'm never doing that again. Got into a very long form, like controversial debate because they were having a gender pay gap bake sale event.

And I was like, the gender pay gap doesn't exist. Rattled off to like quintessential peak 2016 culture war. Like, Prager, you talking points. Yeah.

And from then on, I think got sort of typecast, at least in high school, as like the MAGA turning point girl, which was so not me. I always pride myself like I love my job, but I have a whole life outside of it, too. And I think that there's sort of this weird urge to like typecast all conservatives on campus as sort of like zoo animal. That's your only personality. And I did a podcast.

because they had started a show called Right on Point. And I was under the impression that it was like, oh, we can say what we want. And I had been sort of pushing the administration to bring conservative speakers. They had literally had a member of the Communist Party USA come and speak. And they had sort of abdicated their role, I would argue, of admissions. And they kind of weaponized that whole process just to accept essentially like, you know, minorities, the whole DEI trope. But...

I was very disheartened sort of seeing all this happen around me. So I tried to push back, not in like a hair on fire kind of way, but just like raising points. You guys say you care about diversity. What about diversity of thought?

And apparently what I said on the podcast was really controversial. They had to call an emergency meeting with like the Gay-Straight Alliance, the Feminist Club, like the Black Kids Club. What did you say? I just said I wasn't a feminist. I was like, you know, I kind of explained why I like Trump, particularly on immigration. It wasn't that. We're radical now, probably. You've since, in fact, when Ryan announced you were coming on the show, you've since referred to like Trump.

and gone further along those lines, which I think is probably an arc that a lot of people in your generation have gone down in the last several years, too. Yes, I think for sure. I mean, also, too, just from my perspective, before Steve went to prison...

I was doing more investigative reporting, particularly on Chinese Communist Party infiltration, which I guess is where I was getting to with my story. And I'm very proud of the work that I did. You know, members of Congress, the Republican Study Commission cited it, the National Association of Scholars. I broke a lot of stories about the origins of COVID, stories from Hunter Biden's

hard drive that led to the removal of, you know, Peter Doshak from the COVID Origins investigative team. Doing, like I said, the exclusives, listening to the audio tapes from Hunter Biden's hard drive is, I think, an extremely cool career accomplishment. I was, you know, 19 or 20 at the time. So I always focused on that. And my approach to doing media was like, I never want to be an opinion commentator because I was very cognizant of my age. And

I think being a woman, too, I was just like, I don't ever want to come off like my opinion matters because it doesn't. Like, I don't have experience. Like, I was very cognizant of that. So I always abstained from doing opinion commentary. And then when Steve went to prison and I joined his show about two years ago as a co-host—

I couldn't just rattle off my deep dive researching for an hour while hosting a show, right? It's a different gig. So I always joke that the worst thing they did was send Steve to prison because it helped me kind of find my broadcasting voice.

and go on the rants, which I know we were talking about. But that sort of forced me, pushed me into that role. But to my core, deep down, I'm like an oppo researcher. And I wish I had the time and the chance to do that more. But I also think people like the rants. They like the kind of inflammatory content. Not that I'm trying to be like the Daily Mail and go for clickbait. But if you're doing these long-form investigative pieces and no one's reading them, it's kind of like, what's the point?

It was a moment that should have broken me, but just because of how I was raised and my bullishness and arrogance to want to be great hardened me. It gave me a platform to be so singularly focused on greatness. We all have moments like this. Something happens that's supposed to break us. But it's in these moments that we discover what we're really made of.

I promise you, if anyone knows this, it's me. I'm Ashlyn Harris, two-time Women's World Cup champion and goalkeeper for the U.S. Women's National Team. In my new podcast, Wide Open, I'll sit down with trailblazers from sports, music, fashion, entertainment, and politics to explore their toughest moments and the incredible comebacks that followed.

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And so you really have to think about what is it I want to display? You don't plant a garden and then just walk away and expect it to thrive. You are in there pulling out the weeds. You're pruning it. You're watering it. It's the same thing with your network. You should always be in there actively managing your network. If you don't feel confident to say a number, even admitting that to a recruiter is going to be far better than saying, well, what is your budget for the role? A lot is in the follow-up, right? Don't wait to follow up.

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EX2 here. These House Republicans, they love to focus on the culture war so much, right? The limited hangout, the trannies in the bathrooms, right? Well, Speaker Johnson and most of your colleagues, maybe there are a few good ones, the ones we have on this show. But I would humbly suggest that before you start screaming about transgender surgeries, that you focus on yourself, because last time I checked, you don't even have any balls, right?

And I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that. I'm actually just quoting you, Speaker Johnson. Let's introduce you to a version of yourself just a few months ago who pledged that we were not going to have a Christmastime omnibus, but oops, here we are. Denver, let's roll it. Oh, it goes on from there. So obviously from the left, people don't use phrases like trannies. But one piece of that I wanted to pick up on is

Is what is an inherently left-wing analysis in there, which is that elites use culture war drama to distract from material analysis?

And I was telling you before you came on the show that oftentimes I'll listen to your rants and I'll be like nodding along. He's a very regular listener. I'll be like nodding along for all. Yep. Yep. Yep. Check, check, check, check. And then it'll veer off. I'm like, whoa, OK. This is where I get off. And you head over here. I wonder and I'm looking forward to following your career because I wonder if and same with you. Like, I feel like there's more space on the left for you guys. If you if you can recognize like fully that.

that this culture war stuff is genuinely what you're, what you were saying it was in that clip, that it is, it is a, an elite distraction from, intended to divide the working class so that the elites can go ahead and then accomplish their agenda. In this show, we're always in, you know, left-wing populism and right-wing populism are always in tension. And my, my argument consistently is that they're, whatever the kind of

motivations of good right-wing populists, actual right-wing populism in practice winds up being co-opted by Elon Musk. The Elon Musks. Like the Ken Martin, who became the DNC chair recently,

rightly has gotten pilloried for this hilarious clip of him where he says, we're not going to take money from bad billionaires. Only the good ones. But there are good billionaires. And good. He should be pilloried for that because that's completely absurd. Right-wing populism often falls into that same trap. And that's why sometimes it falls into conspiracism too and anti-Semitism because

The left has a structural analysis. It's the 1%. Those are the bad ones. And there's no division within the 1%. They're all bad. They're all capitalists. They're all ripping off the workers. For the right, when they say it's these cosmopolitan elites

that are the bad ones and there's some good ones like Musk or others. Sometimes what that analysis needs is antisemitism to say it's actually the Jews who are doing it. I'm not saying that the war room does that, but I think that's why you get the strain of antisemitism and right-wing populism. - And left-wing populism as well. Far left-wing populism has the same problem.

Well, it shouldn't because it can say that all bankers are bad. It doesn't have to say that Jewish bankers are bad. Yes, but they will say that all of the bankers are Jewish bankers. Sorry, Natalie. And you say, I'm part of her show for saying tranny. No, I'm kidding. And if they do, they should be run out. But anyway, so there's this tension between the different wings of populism. And so...

And I often hear you talking about, you and Steve Bannon as well, talking about the way that they're trying to divide people. Bannon recently in that New York Times column was saying, yeah, the Democrats screwed up because they beat Bernie Sanders. Like if...

And I've spoken to him over the years, and I know he's being, he's said this in real time. Genuine. He thinks Ro Khanna has a good analysis. He thinks Elizabeth Warren had a good populist, economic populist analysis. And that if Democrats had effectively been able to render that, then they would have had more purchase with regular people than with whatever this Ken Martin-style DNC stuff is. So, yeah, so...

How did your politics wind up kind of where they are? - Well, I too am an avid consumer of MSNBC. We're the same kindred spirits and I'm trying to understand why I like watching it so much. I think I like hate watching. My conclusion I've come to is it's like a slot machine. It's very dopamogenic 'cause you never know when they're gonna say something crazy, right? So you're very hooked in. But I think that clip is sort of, I think, very, I would say,

representative of the distinction between war room and traditional conservative media, because that night, probably, you know, Fox News's main story was the transgender bathroom bill and the whole like Nancy Mace debacle. And we're like, okay, yes, that's an important issue. But it's sort of a shiny toy. It's a distraction. And I think that that's how Washington has operated for a very long time. I know, when Steve was in prison, we were

really staunchly against the CR plus Save Act because we're like, you guys have done nothing for election integrity for the two years you've been here. Don't tell us now, like a month before the election, that you suddenly care about, you know, securing elections. So that's why we need to get behind omnibus spending like you guys have done for what, like 16 times in the past few years. So that is...

is, I think, you know, the tranny reference aside, an interesting, I think, sort of clip that shows you the difference where our show, I think, sort of excels in terms of actually taking on these issues. But I think it's interesting, and this is something too that Steve and I have sort of talked about on the show a lot, which is how Democrats will triage their 2024 loss, because whatever they choose to identify as being the variable will obviously sort of dictate

how they then progress forward. And I think in the beginning, you saw a lot of meltdown over like misinformation and disinformation, and we need our own Joe Rogan. And, you know, then that's sort of a different position that they would take of like, okay, well, we got to double down on the censorship, we need to like fund independent media, though, I think the way they use the

Sure, independent media is a little cagey. But I think the civil war that's brewing, that I think, frankly, if it pans out the way that you're probably more inclined for it to, if it does pan out that way, it's bad for Republicans. It's bad for, like, my side, the populist right, is that...

the sort of more, I think, non-establishment wing in the Democratic Party wants to take us on, and I think probably has more similarities with us on protecting workers' rights. You're against the H-1B visa stuff. And that's what most Americans, I think, support, right? It's sort of the reorientation of the political system outside of Republican versus Democrat, but like American workers and the ruling class, like Steve always says. And I think what you're seeing now is, even with Ken Martin, like,

the democratic establishment in the same way that they sabotaged Bernie Sanders, just a refusal to hand it over to the sort of more activist wing of their party, which they like to decry and I think sort of villainizes like a bunch of Hamas cosplayer protester types, which is part of your party, I'm sorry to report. But I also think that there are a lot of like, you know, the more disaffected Democrat coalition. And I think if you guys were to take those issues like immigration, like workers' rights, even Bernie Sanders was on the war room side of the H-1B visa debate, right?

That's a lot more politically salient. I do think, however, that the version of left-wing populism here in the United States is, I think, sort of weighed down by the identity politics in terms of you guys can't support deportations or ICE raids or strengthening the border or the idea of sovereignty because I think you guys—I'm not saying you in particular—

have really bought into some really radical propositions about starting off the DNC with the stolen land declaration and just the idea that deportations are racist and that if you talk about a great replacement theory, that's totally not happening, that's a conspiracy. It's like, well, that's not a racialized sentiment. It's a replacement theory, and it's happening, of American workers. They're importing our replacement and they're making Americans train their replacements. So

So I think that the refusal for the populist left to sort of engage with that issue, please keep doing it because it helps us. But if you guys were to really embrace that, like Kamala Harris said, I guess for the first time ever in her history, the word sovereignty down while she was talking at the Arizona border during the campaign trail.

or the patriotic flags inside the DNC, it sort of took everyone for a shock. They're like, what the heck? This is so new. But I don't think that the Democratic elites will allow that to happen. And even that senator, I forget who, did a whole tweet thread where they basically said that, like, it's bad for our donors if we embrace populism.

I missed that one. But yeah, it certainly is in tension with the donors. Well, and this is obviously a huge conversation about the ideological overlap. We have a question from one person in our audience, Nathan Feinberg. Yeah, we asked readers to...

or viewers to send stuff in. And Nathan asks, what would it take for the populist left and the populist right to agree to disagree on culture and unite against the techno-feudalists and transhumanists? Otherwise, I don't see how we humans win. And this is a really interesting question because of kind of the H-1B visa dust up that we were talking about earlier in that

Elon Musk, super pro H-1B visas, behind Neuralink and a lot of AI software. He's a complicated person, but that's the bucket that he's in. And for a lot of people on the populist right, this is really offensive and is sort of exactly what the fight against the left was positioned as. Who was that? Let's give him credit. Nathan Feinberg was positioned as for a really long time. So I'm curious what you make of Nathan's question, Natalie, from your vantage point. Like,

Can everyone agree to disagree on culture? Or is this actually part and parcel of the culture war in and of itself? Well, I think that H-1B, all of you, there's so many visa categories. It's insane. That debate, it's wild. Yeah.

that sort of represented that sort of reorientation, like the political fracturing. I think you saw it most acutely on the Republican side of things. I will say, I think it was really just kind of war room from like a media perspective who, and Steve, who held the line. Most people, right, really kind of jumped on the Elon Musk bandwagon. And I don't know, I mean, I think for starters, I love the idea of a big tent, right? I love the idea of bringing people in and it's maybe great to see the tech bros liking us, but-

I also think, too, you have to preserve some of the reasons that those people didn't like us in the beginning, and that was because—

We weren't like, I would argue, the Obama White House that was just like, hey, here's free unlimited money. We're not going to regulate you. Just like, please support us. And Musk didn't like Trump in the beginning. And Musk took a lot of money from Obama to start Tesla when it was not start, but to reinvigorate Tesla. Exactly. And we've even more broadly, I think, have been very critical of the tech bro, like newfound mag of conversion. I think it's

Very performative. I think they have tried to do a kind of limited hangout version of what they did to the MAGA movement where they're like, oh, sorry, we accidentally censored you. I'm like, no, no, you algorithmically manipulated, blacklisted, censored, debanked, deplatformed, spent, what, a billion dollars to mess with the 2020 election. So we're not going to let you get away with that on a two-page letter, Mark Zuckerberg.

But I think that to me the H-1B visa debate was something that was very eye-opening because I have done War Room Wet for four-ish years now, which makes me feel very old. It's like your entire adult life, really. Since I did it, I did the show for the first time when I was 19. Fun fact, I had no Wi-Fi connection at my house, so I had to do it in a friend's kitchen and I was standing up. So we've come a long way. I'm sitting down in a studio. But...

I have never received such an outpouring of support

from our audience, 'cause we took a really hard line. I did an hour-long episode with Steve where I sort of dug into the myth that is A, we need to be importing a bunch of foreign workers, and B, that the people who we are therefore importing are the best and the brightest. And it wasn't, I think, talking points that anyone had really heard. I stayed up literally all night and I just read every government testimony, every government report, read a book. I was just like, the data is truly astounding. You never hear about it. This was all based on a lie.

And of every issue I've ever covered, I never received so many messages from people, not just saying like,

yes, you're on it, you're on the right side. But more importantly, people being like, this is my lived reality. Like I was replaced. I had to train a replacement. My wife did this. My son can't get a tech job. And that was when I really had a realization. I was like, wow, this really is a politically significant and palpable issue. Like talk about the bathrooms. Okay, whatever. That's the crux of it. And frankly, I think the sort of irony or paradox of the whole like,

Vivek situation was that I think the H-1B, H-2B, all the visa categories, I think that's something that just sort of gets swept under the rug. Like people don't really know about it. Like they do know about it, like, you know, vaguely. It's like a nebulous thing. It's like, yeah, we're certainly like importing a bunch of workers. It's kind of symbolic. Yeah, but it's not like, oh my gosh, when you actually get the numbers and you see who's overstaying, you're like, wow, this is a really, really, really deep problem. And I think that they...

sort of unintentionally expose themselves by like forcing a conversation. Because now, you know, when the H-1B, H-2B, whatever visa sort of regulation or legislation comes through Congress or President Trump speaks on it, it's now such a hot button issue where I think we're on the right side of it. But are you destined to...

divorce with Musk? I mean, he gets a seat at the table. And you know what I mean? I think he recognized what was going on in Pennsylvania. I think they were smart to not put all their money into just like

stupid TV ads, but it was like boots on the ground, door knocking, grassroots. Like we have an affinity there. But he gets a seat at the table. He doesn't get like a commandeering presence to co-opt the entire MAGA movement. And I think that War Room has really been instrumental in pushing back against him. Like imagine a world in which Steve Bannon wasn't there from within the MAGA tent to be pushing back against some of the stuff that Elon does. And I also think too, like there's a very

strong mindset to make everything very black and white. Like, it's gray. Like, some of the stuff Elon does is good, and some of it is probably not good. And maybe MSNBC's criticisms of him are accurate, and maybe they're not. But I think it shows...

Why, frankly, I think they don't want a sort of, shall we say, rogue kind of war room-esque outlet, right? Because we call it, we call the balls and strikes. Like, we are not afraid. We don't cater or kowtow to anyone. I would argue we're actually independent. We're not beholden to anyone in matter.

world or the other side. But you're planning to ask tough questions then of Caroline Leavitt, which if people don't listen to War Room, very critical of Musk, very critical of certain moves when you get on the wrong side. So I think that's actually very... If people want mass deportations, and we need them, and if we are not meeting that benchmark, then I'm going to be asking you.

about it. If we're not meeting the benchmark on certain policy proposals or campaign promises that our audience worked so hard to get them elected, I'll be asking about that, which I think is really funny, the idea that I'm there as some lackey to just make the Trump admin look great. I think they've been doing wonderful stuff so far, for the most part. But

My job there is to sort of speak for our audience. And we've been very forthright in criticizing when criticism is necessary. We shouldn't be stapling green cards to diplomas. And we criticize that. And I think the trope of us as Trump sycophants or something is very off base. And this you too, like you were saying, so many people don't actually watch War Room. And some of the most interesting, funny conversations I've ever had is when people start totally apolitical, ask like,

like, so what do you do? And I'm always like, I work in media. And they're like, you know, finally, it's like the eighth question. I'm like, okay, I'll just tell you what I do. Oh, you work for Steve Bannon? I thought he hates women and he's like a Nazi and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, actually, no, Steve is for like taxing the billionaires as much as possible. He's against concentrated wealth. He's for breaking this up. And, you know, he's all about the American work. And they're like, oh my gosh, that's so not what I thought he was, which I think sort of speaks to the way they've sort of defamed

the right-wing populist movement because it is such a politically powerful force. It was a moment that should have broken me, but just because of how I was raised and my bullishness and arrogance to want to be great hardened me. It gave me a platform to be so singularly focused on greatness. We all have moments like this. Something happens that's supposed to break us. But it's in these moments that we discover what we're really made of.

I promise you, if anyone knows this, it's me. I'm Ashlyn Harris, two-time Women's World Cup champion and goalkeeper for the U.S. Women's National Team. In my new podcast, Wide Open, I'll sit down with trailblazers from sports, music, fashion, entertainment, and politics to explore their toughest moments and the incredible comebacks that followed.

Listen to Wide Open with Ashlyn Harris, an iHeart Women's Sports production on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. I'm Tisha Allen, former golf professional and the host of Welcome to the Party, your newest obsession about the wonderful world that is women's golf.

Featuring interviews with top players on tour, like LPGA superstar Angel Yen. I really just sat myself down at the end of 2022 and I was like, look, either we make it or we quit. Expert tips to help improve your swing. And the craziest stories to come out of your friendly neighborhood country club. The drinks were flowing, twerking all over the place, vaping, they're shotgunning. Women's golf is a wild ride, full of big personalities, remarkable athleticism.

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Did you know that companies hire the most in the first two months of the year or that nearly half of workers are worried about being left behind? I am Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's editor at large for jobs and career development. And my show, Get Hired, brings you all the information you need to, well, get hired. People are forming opinions of you even before you log into the Zoom or walk into the

And so you really have to think about what is it I want to display? You don't plant a garden and then just walk away and expect it to thrive. You are in there pulling out the weeds. You're pruning it. You're watering it. It's the same thing with your network. You should always be in there actively managing your network. If you don't feel confident to say a number, even admitting that to a recruiter is going to be far better than saying, well, what is your budget for the role? A lot is in the follow up, right? Don't wait to follow up.

Whether you're a new grad, an established professional, or contemplating a career change, Get Hired is for you. Listen to Get Hired with Andrew Seaman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And so compared to Musk, there are a lot of people on the left that would prefer, at Bannon, when it comes to those pieces that you laid out, not necessarily the mass deportations, but the other parts, that he beat Musk. And so we have a question here from Bannon.

David flag he says what can liberals do to support Bannon over Musk? So well, you know, what would you what would you tell? Let's see I gotta put myself in the mind of both liberals and Stephen K Bannon. Um, not really because I

So pretend the liberals are going to do what you tell them to do. I think their question is because they don't really understand the right-wing ecosystem and they don't know what levers to pull and what would help and what wouldn't help. Sometimes what they do would backfire. If they support something, then it might lead someone on the right to be like, well, if Bernie and AOC are for that, it must be bad. I think what I would say is...

I think the media has a playbook with how they are covering the Trump administration. And to sort of back into this, they don't have any levers of governmental or institutional power right now to necessarily push back, right? They've lost everything. And I think if you read or just listen to MSNBC, but sort of historically their playbook, and I'm inclined to bring up sort of like the Norm Eisens of the world, the Brookings Institution, their democracy playbook, how they've sort of

pushed for regime change in foreign countries. It's been through the idea of civil society in an opposition to what they call democratic backsliding. And I have always viewed the depiction of President Trump as a dictator, as an autocrat, as an authoritarian, as part of a sort of narrative game to sort of stick us in the mindset of like,

oh, we're having democratic backsliding going on. Therefore, even though we don't have the constitutional or electoral authority to impeach Trump or push back against him, we're justified because we're defending democracy. And I think the Elon Musk coverage...

Oftentimes when it gets reduced into like Elon is acting like an autocrat and it's a hostile takeover of the United States government, it's not really all that hostile. I think Elon played a pretty visible role in the campaign trail. I think Doge was probably one of the most visible campaign promises of President Trump's 2024 campaign.

I just would sort of reject that framing. So if you want to criticize Elon Musk, I don't think it's a very powerful tactic to decry him as like unelected dictator, shadow president, evil man. I think it's more powerful when he messes up on issues like the H-1B visa to just call it out more plainly for what it is and I think remind Trump—

Right. The people elected you for the right wing populism stuff, the ban on worldview stuff. I would attack it more from the angle of like put American workers first, not, oh, we have to get rid of Elon Musk and defend USAID because Elon's being an autocrat and he wasn't elected. I'm sorry, the whole agency is run by unelected bureaucrats or billionaires from the Democratic Party. So I think.

those attacks are a lot more powerful than buying into the paradigm that it's dictator Elon and dictator Trump. So from the perspective of a conservative populist, I look at Elon Musk and sort of like what Ryan Gerduski, I don't know, did you see his post about Musk? He said, "Let's just say there was a billionaire who's made most of their money from businesses whose success was based on government contracts and subsidies. The way you go from being a billionaire to being a trillionaire is getting a hold of government data and using it for your next business."

I thought that was pretty interesting because, again, like as another conservative populist, I look at what Elon Musk is doing, getting rid of USAID, amazing, cathartic, beautiful, a masterpiece. But at the same time, you now have like a genuine oligarch running loose in the government. And I can see easily how it would be a way to enrich democracy.

He could use it as a way to enrich himself. And I feel like people who were against the concentration of power in the hands of people like Elon Musk on principled ideological reasons, I worry that we're sort of getting numb to having him run loose in the government. And I'm curious what you make of just like from the principle of Elon Musk coming in and cleaning house.

potentially in a way that could enrich himself. What is that? Do you have similar sort of like principled ideological aversions to the idea of, as you said, well, okay, under Biden, it was unelected bureaucrats in the pockets of billionaires. But then do we end up with like replacing those unelected bureaucrats in the pockets of billionaires with other unelected bureaucrats in the pockets of billionaires? Our bureaucrats are better than their billionaires. Yeah.

I think there's so many verticals that they're kind of carrying out this, what I'm sure Steve would call like deconstruction of the administrative state. And I think you just have to take kind of each agency, each department through its own paradigm. And what do I mean by that? Like what's going on with DOJ and FBI? I think that's more like a legal battle, like unitary executive theory. Like is President Trump the chief magistrate? Like does the president have authority over DOJ?

Not as the mainstream media makes it like, oh, he wants to control over all three branches. But no, of the entire executive branch, does he have the right to hire and fire? And I think that's what you're seeing go down right now with like the FBI purge, right? The lawsuits that they're putting out, getting rid of January 6th agents. Like that's the paradigm to view that through. The USAID thing, yeah, I don't think it's great to have unelected billionaires running any government agency. Of course, that's bad, but...

Spare me, mainstream media, the performative outrage that you guys either A, care about the Constitution, or B, that you care about unelected bureaucrats or billionaires running government. So it's the framing of it I sort of reject. But I think you just have to take it, I mean, day by day. I mean—

I also think, too, I'm also sort of inclined, and maybe this is a little less ideological, but I remember when President Trump, what did he say in 2016 when he was talking to African Americans? He was like, what do you guys have to lose? And I sort of feel like that's the approach of the Trump administration now in a more broad sort of whole of government, whole of society approach. What do I mean by that?

It's like we're so fiscally insolvent. Fiscally, it's so bad. Like, what do we have to lose by maybe taking a chance on another way of running the government? And yes, I'm sure you would give me a whole litany of what we have to lose. But on the other hand, what we're doing is not working. And what we've been doing at USAID—

is not working. And I think that there's this desire to sort of whitewash and euphemize, particularly in the context of USAID, is like, oh, we're helping Bangladeshi refugees eat. And it's like, well, maybe. I mean, what is it, like 12 cents to the dollar actually makes it over to whatever country it actually is.

But a lot of those USAID programs not only are a really concerning and have to do with like funding biological weapons in China and collaborating with DARPA and stuff where you're like, what is going on here? But as someone who frequents the USA spending database website a lot, there also is no oversight. And I think that that lack of oversight is almost equally bad as maybe lack of oversight on Elon Musk, for example. Yeah.

There are a ton of government grants and they all curiously popped up starting around 2016 combating misinformation, disinformation. I'm talking like thousands in foreign countries, in, I mean, Pakistan and India and the UK, like everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Right. And you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if you read the grants, it's literally just like

To empower journalists and combat misinformation in Uzbekistan. And you're like, well, what the heck does that mean? And then I've gone a step further. If you look on Google Maps, like you look up the addresses to the places that these sizable sums of money are going to, there's shacks on the side of the road. Like they're not real. It's fine. People should go and do it. It's wild. Okay. It's insane. And that's where I'm like,

I think if you look, I think why they're melting down about USAID. I think sometimes it's because these are basically almost spy programs and they're trying to, they're covering the real identity. But I also think it's how this town has gotten rich. I think through USAID, I think they've laundered money. And I use that in the truest sense, in the name of democracy, through a bunch of NGOs that you're like,

What are you even doing? And two, I think why they're melting down about the USAID stuff, and I do think it is interesting watching the mainstream media sort of decide what to take the bait on, because I think that was the lesson that they learned from the Trump administration, the first iteration. They're like, we can't melt down, we can't become apoplectic over everything. But I think their resistance strategy this time around, or what they now are terming the opposition strategy,

since they can't impeach him, since they can't really do anything. I know they were standing on the steps of USAID saying, you know, shut down the Senate. I'm like, all right, recess appointments, why not me? No. But...

Their plan, and I think you see it in the groups that they've been setting up, like, for example, Democracy Forward, which is the consortium of a bunch of resistance-type orgs. They've started a group called Civil Service Strong, which was outlining and coaching civil servants how to be whistleblowers, how to sue if they're feeling put upon or whatever. And I think that the crux, the sort of cornerstone of their resistance tactics—

was going to be whistleblowing and leaking and doing their kind of typical sabotage from inside of these agencies. And now that they can't do that, I think they're panicking, right? Because they're like, how do we go after the Trump administration now? And more to that, moreover to that point,

Maybe this is where we get a little more conspiratorial. But as someone who has read a lot of the texts coming out of these resistance type organizations, there's always a sort of undercurrent of, well, maybe we need to partner with international organizations. We need to like go global, which they have done, I would argue, with a lot of the censorship stuff when they couldn't totally do it here. They outsourced the infringement of the First Amendment to international groups. I think the UK has been a hotbed for it.

But I think, too, another reason, kind of a compounding factor as to why they're so nervous about USAID being shut down is that I think, again, maybe they weren't planning to launder the money. I'll be a little nicer. I'll be more charitable. They were just planning to send the money. But I think they really wanted to kind of bankroll the resistance internationally and sort of use that as a roundabout way to come after President Trump because they

they can't really do that much. They can call the Senate, you know what I mean? And War Room's great at that, but

They don't really have the ability to push back in a meaningful way. That's why they're groveling on the steps of USAID looking rather cringe, I would add. Like Jamie Raskin's gone from what, impeaching President Trump twice and like running circles around us from a lawfare perspective to now groveling outside of USAID with like a bunch of freaks, you know? So I'm like, you know how I guess times are tough for Democrats. Yeah, it does have them in a bind because they're trying to figure out how to defend Trump.

USAID and you know initially they were defending it as you know foreign aid is important and Pointing to if you shut down PEPFAR you shut down this protection for you know spending around infants in Sudan and people like people are gonna die and people literally are gonna die if you do that it's a clever insurance policy and But then Rubio can counter and say well, we're gonna keep those programs going Yeah, and so now you've started to see I think it was Chris Murphy who was like

The reason we're funding USAID in Africa is to counter China and so that we can extract the resources from Africa. I saw that and I was like, okay, like now we're talking about what's actually happening. Like it's out in the open. Like that is, it's always bothering me. Foreign aid, I hate foreign aid. It's so wasteful foreign spending. Yeah, he said USAID spends money to make sure that we're countering Chinese influence inside of Africa.

And make sure we don't lose minerals. To make sure that we don't lose access to critical mineral supplies. And that we're fighting against Hezbollah. Like, I hate this idea that the U.S. is some charitable organization that is just so benevolent and wasting people's money because we're so soft-hearted that we're out here helping people. No, we're like a ruthless empire that is trying to extract resources from Africa. And USAID is the soft power way that we go in and do that.

China's got its Belt and Road and there's other efforts that it it uses to try to get resources. It's a competition for resources So finally at least we're talking about it openly. Mm-hmm, and then you can debate it like do we want to use this and clearly what the MAGA folks are saying is we don't actually believe that it's for American soft power we think you're gonna use it as your own partisan weapon in this intra

Civil War fight, which to me, if that helps to bring down the American empire,

Good. Well, and I was just going to say, speaking of the American Empire, we have a question from Kevin McGonigal, who says... I was going to ask this one, too. I like this one. Will there be a right populist pushback for American troops being, as he puts it, cannon fodder for Israel? I mean, securing Gaza. It's been a whirlwind of the last 12 hours, Natalie, but as... I know, before we were booked to do the show, apparently now we are taking over Gaza. Seriously, yeah. So we're taping this within, like, 12 hours of all of that happening, and...

You're sort of in a position, hearing from your listeners, who I'm sure are probably more in the Josh Hawley camp of saying, "I don't know that this is the right use of US resources." A similar argument that's made against USAID, in fact. So how are you, how's the War Room audience kind of grappling with this massive, dramatic new Trump plan through the lens of everything you've talked about, imperialism, USAID, and all of that? - Sure, well, I think to sort of conjoin what both of you said,

I think the issue first and foremost derives from the lack of transparency. And I think one way to view what President Trump is trying to do or doge or anything

they view it as like, oh, they're stealing the contracts and they're doing this and they're shutting it all down. And they, you know, I think are maybe a little harsh in their sort of depiction of it. But I think the more maybe euphemistic way of describing it is they also just want radical transparency for the American people. And I do think that that transparency maybe is a little concerning if you try to really understand what exactly has been going on at these agencies. I'm inclined to bring up the final months of the Biden regime. We call it a regime. I sound like a reflexive.

I can't call him an administration. As long as we can call it the Trump regime, we're good. Sounds cool. It sounds better that way. That is an extremely... That moment is extremely, I think, instructive. Yeah, there you go. That's the clip.

But when the American people, when the support was cratering for Ukraine aid, there was, I think it was October of last year, or maybe it was 2023. But there's a whole Politico story where they had sort of leaked. They were like, okay, the White House knows that Americans are kind of like cagey on supporting Ukraine. So our new effort or our new sort of like propaganda campaign to get Americans to support Ukraine aid is going to be the messaging, which they were pumping out through local papers and local media, was the idea that,

Ukraine aid is actually good for our industrial base and that it's good for our economy and that it creates American jobs. And we don't have to have that debate now. We're just getting rid of these surplus weapons anyway so we can make new ones. Yeah. And that was such an interesting moment for me because I was like, no, no, no. If you want the American people to support giving aid to Ukraine...

the number one thing that you should do would be an audit and show us that our money is A, actually making it there, which what Zelensky said just yesterday, he's like, I only got $77 billion. What about the outstanding $170 billion or whatever? And it was that moment where I was like, oh, they will not audit it because they can't because if we were to know where that money is actually going, it's not good for anyone. And to answer your question, I think, look, I think the Gaza thing is,

A little absurd. It just kind of happened, right? But I also think, too, the way that I've sort of been observing it is more just watching if the media takes the bait on it, which I think they have. I was watching MSNBC this morning, and they seem a little more upset over the FBI lawsuits. They're kind of focusing on that. No surprise to Ryan. But you see it as bait. Well, because I think their whole paradigm is like,

cover what Trump does, not what he says. And I think it'll be interesting. So generally smart, probably. Yeah, but I also think that I personally sort of view this

kind of bold proclamation, which I would also love to know, like, behind the scenes, if this was something that he had talked about with Netanyahu. Because if you look at the, like, facial reactions, it sort of seems like... It was like news to Netanyahu. Trump just said it. Which, I mean, for Trump to be telling in what, a matter of, like, 24 hours, Israel, China, Mexico, and Canada, like, actually, we're the top dog. We're going to choose what's going on here, I think, is something we haven't seen in a while. But to that point, I think, I mean, it's not a cliche or, you know, novel take, but...

The thing itself is sometimes not the actual thing itself. It's not actually about gauze. It's, for lack of a better word, it's the art of the deal in the same way that the tariffs... Was it actually about putting those tariffs in? Who knows? It was about extracting concessions. I will say this is sort of a narrative paradigm-shifting idea where it maybe almost brings it. Whatever we want, we don't want that. But I don't know. I think our audience...

Obviously, the Israel issue, I always call it a lose-lose. No matter what you say, you're going to get harassed by everyone. But the way that I've always approached it, and I think our audience, too, is just from the America First perspective. I think there's sort of a mere Scheimer-esque kind of quality to it where it's just like, are we super invested in it? What, you know, the offshore bound, like, what exactly is our investment in the region? How does it benefit us to either have...

you know, a more or less terrorist state that absolutely hates us and is trying to attack us. But it's also not our job to prop up the opposition to said state. And I think our audience, when it's come to anything related to Israel, Palestine, Gaza, whatever, is first and foremost, we don't want any refugees from Gaza entering the United States. Like that is sort of where I think we really toe the line. And I think we will definitely push hard on that. But

I think, you know, if we were recording this episode tomorrow, right, like it'd be a different news cycle. And I don't really think that it's about taking over Gaza. I think it's, it's, I hate to use the words 4D chess because I'm not one of those people, but there is an element to it. It was a moment that should have broken me, but just because of how I was raised and my bullishness and arrogance to want to be great hardened me. It gave me a platform to be so singularly focused on greatness.

We all have moments like this. Something happens that's supposed to break us. But it's in these moments that we discover what we're really made of.

I promise you, if anyone knows this, it's me. I'm Ashlyn Harris, two-time Women's World Cup champion and goalkeeper for the U.S. Women's National Team. In my new podcast, Wide Open, I'll sit down with trailblazers from sports, music, fashion, entertainment, and politics to explore their toughest moments and the incredible comebacks that followed.

Listen to Wide Open with Ashlyn Harris, an iHeart Women's Sports production on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.

I'm Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer. If you're just as curious as I am about the way things are built, the insights behind what it takes to create a world-renowned product, then tune in to my podcast, Building One. There's so much to learn, like how Patagonia innovates with its supply chain. We had to go out to farmers and convince them...

It was really damn hard. Or the way Adobe thinks about the first interaction somebody has with Photoshop. I was always so fascinated by how people navigate and find their way. Ever wanted to know how Nike builds emotion into the Jordan brand? You have to be obsessed with the current state of the human condition. And it doesn't stop there. What about how Gleam reinvented knowledge search with AI? You can learn about how a Michelin star chef is redesigning seeds for flavor and how Pixar is nurturing a creative culture.

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You described Israel's issue for you guys as lose-lose. I'm curious where your audience comes down on the question because...

From an obvious internal logic perspective, America first and isolationism would include Israel. It would call into question our reflexive, unapologetic, endless support for what they're doing. Yet there's so much cross pressure to make an America first exception to Israel and also apparently to South Africa because Elon Musk is upset about the law that they're passing in South Africa.

coincidentally to Israel. So on the one hand, I'm curious where they are on that. And then separately, oftentimes on the war room, you'll have people like Frank Gaffney and others who will give this like really vulgar like history of like Islam and talk about how like

Actually, they're all polygamists and war-mongers. And if you look at the Koran, they're just violent people. It's really about the culture. And oftentimes,

Bannon himself, I haven't heard you on with those types of folks. Often Bannon himself will say, just as a caveat, we're not referring to the law-abiding Muslim citizens of the United States. So you can sort of see his wheels turning, like, hmm, that's a little bit aggressive in how it's being phrased there. Yet those types of people keep coming on and making the case. Just last night, one of those guys was on talking about

the history of Gaza and making the case that the Palestinians are just kind of irredeemably violent or something. So how do you blend and think about that, I guess you guys don't like the phrase Islamophobic strain, but a fairly vulgar thinking about a billion people or two billion people, how many Muslims are on the planet, compared to thinking about

America first populism, which says if you're a citizen of the United States, like you have, you're entitled to equal dignity and respect and it doesn't matter what your race, religion or anything else is. - I think it's sort of the Steve paradigm of wanting allies and not protectorates. And I think that

where our audience sometimes maybe gets a little tripped up or is sort of anti-Aid to Israel, I think it's just because the sheer magnitude of the funds that are going to them. And I don't think that it's ever really been clearly articulated to the American people, like what exactly we're getting in return for that. And I think too,

I mean, you know, as someone who's covered foreign influence, right, and foreign lobbying, you know, the idea of any foreign country having a strong lobbying presence in D.C. is something that I take aversion to. And I think that, you know, whether it's AIPAC or whatever entity it may be, I think that that is sort of hard to square. Conversely, it's like, well...

I also don't want, and I think if you go back to the infamous Steve Whiteboard pick, what was it, designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization? From the White House. Yes. He always says that his biggest regret was never doing that. And for Steve Bannon, who's had a lot of lives and a lot of cool things, for that to be his biggest regret, I think, tells you something. And I think the way that our show sort of conceives of Islam is probably a little more on the...

It's not Islamophobic scale, but I think we would maybe reject the framing that it's a phobia because I do think some of the fears are rational in the sense that I think if you look at, well, it's funny. I sort of feel like the Chinese Communist Party threat, and even if you look at the trajectory of someone like Frank Gaffney, sort of superseded the idea that it was the Muslim Brotherhood who was coming to overtake the global hegemony of the United States with the caliphate, and then suddenly the Chinese Communist Party became the new threat.

And I'm always cagey of that kind of stuff because I do think it can very quickly turn into like reductive neocon warmongering, right? Where it's like, well, I'm a really bad, squishy Republican senator, but I'm really tough on China, right? But I'm really anti-Islam. Or I really hate Muslims. Yeah, I really think we need to – so I'm aware it can become performative very quickly in the same way like the transgender bathroom stuff, right? It sort of becomes –

cultural thing which Muslims were like holding hands with. And that's where it all sort of comes back. Which goes to my earlier point that right-wing populism often needs to because it won't go after the 1% it often needs like oh, it's the Muslim Brotherhood. I also think that that's a function too of right-wing media in terms of like I think our show and it's funny I'm even sort of struggling like you played one of my rants and

I much prefer having something to rant about as opposed to something to celebrate about from just a broadcasting perspective. And I think we thrive on like having an enemy. And I do think sometimes the MSNBC critique of us is like we do better in opposition than actually ruling is sort of an interesting critique if you look at it through the lens of –

Right wing media, in other words, like we were all united right during the campaign because we had a clear and defined enemy and a clear and defined goal. But then very soon after, you sort of started to see the fracturing of the base, the H-1B stuff happened, the sort of like. Yeah, it was fast. Right. It happened very quickly. And that's why in some ways, and this may be a hot take, I almost think that it would have been.

better for Republicans, not actually, but had Democrats taken the House or something, because then we would have had something

to really push back against as opposed to be infighting because it'd be like, oh, we're all concerned that they're going to impeach President Trump. Like, we're very good. I would maybe push back on the framing of conspiratorial. I think, is it conspiratorial? Is it coincidental? But just sort of the, like, linking of a bunch of stories. I think it's pattern recognition is maybe how I would describe it. And I think that now we're sort of, like, not struggling, but the resistance is very weak, right?

And I if I had to host the show this evening, like I could have, you know, two months ago done a whole rant about every way that in our view they were trying to sort of, you know, fool around with election stuff. And they were trying to lie or smear President Trump. And now like the best.

that I can do is dig into the attorney who's representing the nine anonymous FBI agents who in 2022 was tweeting up a storm about how, quote, all of MAGA needs to be fired from the United States government. So it's just a shift. And I'm just like, I want to like, I'm like, give me a chance to rant. And so this brings me at least to my last question because I could keep doing this forever. Um,

This is from M&N. This is a viewer who says, what ethical considerations should be top of mind for War Room and other new media outlets as they report on the White House with their newfound access? We talked about this a little bit earlier and how you feel like from the America First perspective, you're calling balls and strikes. So as somebody who is generally supportive of MAGA,

in there pressing the White House press secretary, you have an opportunity to do it. How are you thinking about that to the point that MNN is making? Is this like a, is it a priority to push the White House? Is it a priority to use your time in a way that advances maybe concerns

How are you thinking about this as somebody who's a journalist but also sort of in the camp of the White House? Well, I would say my first and foremost ethical consideration is what I wear. Sweaters, top of the list. The skirts are not going anywhere. You know, it's funny. They were mad at me for wearing sneakers, which I was like, I

everyone does when they're not on camera and I was like look I was actually that in the cat friendly and I walked to the White House from Capitol Hill so I was like I love walking it's my favorite thing to do I was like I was trying to reduce my carbon footprint and then I got ratioed for it but not ratioed we ratioed the Daily Mail and they had to take the journalists name off the story it's another war room win the power of the war audience um

But no, I think that's an interesting question, and I think that it's something that I've kind of internally struggled with. I've always said, despite my rather bombastic rhetoric, I spend a lot of my free time actually

Trying to deduce how to be a responsible steward of this platform that I have not stumbled into, but just, you know, at 23, put yourself in my shoes. You're speaking to hundreds of thousands, millions of people, the most powerful political, like it's a lot to conceive of. And.

not to sound cliche, but I've always just sort of let the truth guide me. That's why I've always stuck to sort of like primary source based reporting. Also made writing copy easier because I could just sort of copy and paste from what the documents or the grants were saying. But I also think too, like it's an interesting question because we are forthright in our support for President Trump. And I'm aware that maybe that's hard to square with the idea of like being a journalist, but

I'm sorry, every time I walk into that press briefing room and everyone's sitting there who has their superiority complex and I guess really a chip on their shoulder, but the idea that we're a clownish operation by being there, it's like you guys are probably more partisan than we are. And that's sort of what I find to be the most cognitively dissonant or just gaslighting experience of that press briefing room.

Where I'm like, I have to sit here and pretend like what you guys are doing is telling the truth. Like they act so professional and so serious. And I'm like...

you're a bunch of liars and you're advancing a certain talking point or certain narrative. So I, just to keep our audience kind of ahead of the curve, because I don't want to be a Trump cheerleader for four years. I don't really find any intellectual merit in doing that either. If you can tell, like, I love digging into documents. I don't like standing there and being like, oh my gosh, we took over Gaza. And how I've sort of come to

really, I think, square that is focusing on the resistance because it gives me something to latch onto because I guess maybe I needed an enemy or something to cover. So I really want to focus on that angle. But I also think, too, like, I want to cover the media. Like, there's enough people who are going to be trying to ask questions. I...

learned the hard way, like, this is where I stand, this is where I sit. I'm like, okay, sir, I'm not trying to come for your seat. I'm new, like, I got it. And I think covering the media is more interesting. And sure, it's funny, the people in the briefing room in the masks and when someone asks a question, they're like rolling their eyes because it's, you know, a different outlet than what they're used to. But I think to wrap up my answer,

What we were talking about in terms of the resistance stuff, like civil society and the media is the crux, is the cornerstone of their ability to push back on President Trump right now. It's all they have. And being in that press briefing room, therefore, sure, it gives me access to the White House, the president, but it also gives me access to.

to sort of ground zero of the resistance. And that is what I want to cover and sort of use that as like primary source reporting to supplement the reporting that I've been doing kind of independently on tracking the resistance stuff. So that's how I view it, which is, you know, maybe not the traditional ethics-based journal, but I think we live in a post-

Journalism ethics world and I think I'm the first to admit it though if they want to admit otherwise I would just point them to their viewership I mean to support your point and this probably happened when you were in elementary school Back when Time magazine was a big deal in Washington Time magazine's White House correspondent Transitioned to become Obama's spokesperson. So it went and went from the seat to the podium. Um, I

Caroline Levitt's been on War Room a ton. Which, no, I would humbly suggest that the resistance is boring and that you should take your talents and focus them on Musk, corporate America trying to co-opt the MAGA movement, and the intelligence community. That element of the resistance, I think, is very interesting. And that brings me to this very interesting question that I'm curious about, too.

GBRU says, "Is Donald Trump aware of the statements Steve Bannon has been making about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen and their intellectual guru Curtis Yarvin? Has War Room, Bannon, you or any other MAGA affiliated person or organization brought these concerns about techno-feudalism to President Trump? Is it breaking through?"

I think that person asked on that would be Steve, right? I don't wanna speak about their conversations. But I mean, I don't even think it's just like a, you know, Steve, President Trump conversation. I think that you can't like turn

turn on a TV or the media without being inundated with, like, this is the thing itself, right? This is the story right now. You know, Steve and President Trump talk, obviously he's not shy about that. But, you know, Elon obviously has a seat at the table too. But I do think, I mean, also too, the sheer power of our audience, like I said, that's a very powerful grassroots force. So I don't think they're going to want to alienate us

But like I said, it's all about having a seat at the table and we can debate it out. And when you have full transparency, like we will win. I have full faith in Stephen K. Bannon and myself and our kind of approach to the issue. I mean, you see Mark Zuckerberg and all these people, they're getting like totally ratioed and trolled. No one believes their conversion. So I think...

I think it's just sort of a time will tell thing. And maybe this could be the last one. There's a ton of interest from our lefty audience here. I was scared they were going to be mean to me. Well, they did want. Oh, they are? A bunch of them said they wanted to ask you about the correspondence typo, which I don't know what that means. Do you know what that means?

I know this whole interview, I'm like, I'm so smart. I'm so good at my job. I'm 23. I'm like the youngest White House correspondent ever. I'm so intelligent. No. When I tweeted out the now infamous picture, I spelled correspondent with one R. And it was because I was getting ready to like go on air. And you don't understand. Love Real America's voice. But I put them in the category of like tech startup. So it's very like ratchet. Ratchet.

And I'm like getting pulled in this direction. I have like my AirPods in, my phone's not connecting. Like every journalist that like we've ever attacked, I think Steve, the second before he came to me, they were like,

we need to send these people to prison. And I'm like, well, Stephen, you just called three of the people that I just saw walk by that they should go to jail. So I'm standing there, and I wanted to tweet out the picture because I was like, this is a cool picture. It's like, you know, we'll make some people jealous. That's in the West Wing, yeah, yeah. Right? And so I know that when I had typed out correspondent, which is sort of like a difficult word to spell, I was like, the first, right, okay, it's the West Wing.

It's a little complicated. I'm very honest. And I just kind of, you know, like when you just want to use autocorrect, so you just kind of like get the gist of the word out there and then you let it do its thing. Trust the machine. So I guess for some reason autocorrect thinks that I am like, you know, correspondent with one R means like,

the affair partner is named in a divorce. Oh, I did not know that. Oh, I did not know that. I'm not. Wow, you learn something new every day. But that went super viral. I don't know though. I guess I'm doxing myself. No, I'm not. But yeah, so that was kind of annoying and then they all piled in. But I will defend my honor and as a true opposition researcher, the lady who first quote tweeted me that,

led to like it's like 40 or 50 million impressions I was like oh my gosh this is so embarrassing um

She spelled correspondent wrong, too. I went through Rachel Bitterkofer. I went through her Twitter and twice in February. It was February 7th and February 8th of 2019. She was tweeting about the Virginia Correspondents Association. They were having their big annual dinner and she spelled it with one R. And she did it twice. So if that's reflective of your intelligence, I am smarter than her. Aside from that, there does seem to be a lot of lefty hope that

your faction is going to beat the techno-feudalist authoritarian faction. And one of these... I'll make this the last one.

is related to, I think, asking you to look at some of the left-wing stuff that was done and evaluated in a fair way. So they say, "What are your thoughts on the Inflation Reduction Act, which promotes reshoring American jobs combined with imposing tariffs on imports to boost the U.S. energy manufacturing sector?" Which is an accurate description of the IRA.

Well, I will say, I think they did an absolutely horrific job on messaging on some of their wins. Like I said, we call balls and strikes. But from a more, I think, meta kind of bird's eye view perspective, you can't really tell me they did a good job with reducing inflation. And I think if you look at their economic track record, whether it's the revisions of the jobs reports, I think what was like 12 out of 13 times downward, or the fact that so many of the new jobs that they created-

I think it was at the end of it, like a net loss for Americans and the net gain was happening among non-citizens or like immigrant workers. So I always find, and I'm the first to admit it, the like economic data really confusing and overwhelming because there's so many layers to it. And they're like, well, consumer confidence or the price index is really high. And I'm like, well, what is that based on? Americans' lived experience is absolutely horrific. So I don't, I mean, I think if they want to...

hang on to what they did with the economy as being something really strong, I would highly advise against that. I also think, too, it's a broader, I think, issue in terms of I don't think any president who oversaw an invasion of 15 million illegal aliens, the most oppressive force on American workers' wages, you can't say that that was good for reducing inflation or helping American workers. Separate it from Biden and partisanship, the idea of the Inflation Reduction Act, where you are subsidizing

American jobs and a transition to a clean energy economy, which China is killing us in. Like in general, directionally, if you separate it from Democrats, is that something that fits into a Bannon style like industrial policy? I think the supporting American manufacturing base, of course, I think President Trump

kind of went a different way of trying to do that more like tariff, kind of that sort of approach. But yeah, I think Peter Navarro, who obviously helped co-host the show while Steve was in prison, is close friends with all of us. We work very closely with him, is very supportive of that too. We're very for reshoring. I mean, if it were up to Steve, we would like kick out all Chinese companies and maybe the big tech ones too while we're at it. He did say break up the big tech companies.

Yeah, but he said they should have left the econ in place. But I just think it's sort of performative and not just a Democrat thing, not to skirt your question, but like the idea that they're actually genuinely trying to reshore manufacturing jobs. They're still out. So, you know what I mean? Like it's it. I don't think it had the impact that they intended, not because the legislation was bad or ideologically unprincipled. But this city is just terrible.

And big business, big donors, corporate interests, they want to outsource. And that's the fundamental issue. Like they just hate American workers. So I think you have to negotiate with them much more intensely, like carrot stick. I think tariffs are more of the stick. I think stuff like that is a little more carrot based. And they're not going to take the carrot. Like you have to smash them. Yeah. Yeah.

smash the rich fascinating yeah natalie thank you for joining us thank you so much i'm so glad i wore that that skirt otherwise i don't know no i mean listen like the media infiltration of the white house press room is long overdue like new media infiltration of the white house briefing room i'm sure i'll see you in there yes that's right uh but thank you so much

Thanks for being on and taking the time. We appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Awesome. Well, we'll be back with more CounterPoints next week, so stay tuned for that. Appreciate it. See you soon. You are cordially invited to...

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