Steve Bannon spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, on Friday.

STEVE BANNON: Over the last couple of days, there’s been a real debate here about many of the topics and issues. I may come in a little hot on a couple of three, so let’s remember we’re all on the same side. I want to start with this because they asked me today to speak about how you make America First… America First. Front page of the Financial Times of London: she hails China’s unstoppable power in a show of solidarity with Putin and Kim. President Trump called this a conspiracy. He said, If these guys are going to conspire against us, they’re going to have to answer for this. He was pretty blunt. That’s more than conspiracy. I would tell the president that’s a flex. Mitch McConnell is interviewed in, I think, the leading paper in Lexington, Kentucky. Now, it was a couple of days before this event. And remember what this event was: to clothe the Chinese Communist Party and shroud them with the patina of being a victor in World War II, in which they did virtually nothing except fight the Nationalists-very little engagement with the Japanese-because their plan was always, after the shooting stopped with the Japanese, to take over and fight and take over the country. Which, in the civil war in 1949, as Joe McCarthy tells us, General Marshall and other communists in the State Department essentially turned the country over to the Chinese Communist Party. Mitch McConnell came out and said in this interview that we’re in as dangerous a period as the 1930s-the 1930s-and he blamed it on Trump’s tariffs. On Trump’s tariffs, Trump’s America First policies, and particularly regarding Ukraine. Nothing could be farther from the truth. America First is what’s going to save this country. It’s saving it right now. That flex-they had Putin on stage. They had Kim on stage. They had the mullahs there, the Persians, all their buddies. They’re there to send a message that the First and Second World Wars are about the Eurasian landmass; the Third World War is about the Eurasian landmass. And we’re already in the Third World War. And Mitch McConnell and the neoliberal neocons are what got us here-30 years of rot. What happened in 1989? Within six months in Tiananmen and in Berlin, you had the Lady Goddess of Liberty and the massive protest in Tiananmen Square. Six months later, the Berlin Wall comes down. That’s all from post-war-post–World War II. The Russian people, the people in captive nations in Eastern Europe, and the [laobaixing] of China had had a belly full of it. A belly full of it. They wanted out. So how are we here today? That’s not Trump’s tariffs. That’s not America First national security policy that says, No, we’re not going to get involved in Ukraine, which we’ve been fighting against from the eve of the war-where we said, and everything we said on the show, and every guest we had on the show talking about it nonstop, has proved to be true. There’s 1.8 million-we know from a hack of the Ukrainians-dead and wounded. Six hundred twenty-five thousand this year. This is why the people in Ukraine, the parents, demanded that 18- to 24-year-olds finally be able to leave the country and not serve in the military. They’re taking 60-year-olds. The tragedy there is worse-this is worse than the start of the Second World War. If you go from Poland in 1939-which we commemorated the 86th anniversary of on Monday-I might add also, I believe War Room is the only media company that commemorated the 80th commemoration of the signing of the surrender instrument on the Missouri. And we intercut it with the Shanghai conference where they’re all sitting there saying, We’re the new rising power. America and our allies are finished. There have been 1.8 million Ukrainians [casualties], a million Russians-2.8 million-from 1939, the invasion of Poland, till June of 1941, when the Wehrmacht turned on their partners and Operation Barbarossa started. That’s two or three times more killed than North Africa, the fall of France, the Blitz in England-add it all up. We are in the Third World War today. And you add what’s happening in the Middle East to it-we’re in the kinetic part of the Third World War. That is not Donald Trump. No war on Donald Trump’s watch. This is the rot of the neoliberal neocons. What has Mitch McConnell done? He shoveled $ 350 billion, when you count it all up according to President Trump, into Ukraine. And now our great partner-they had a conference call today-this fiasco. President Trump had them, and I think he had them to show the world what clowns they are. Zelensky came to the White House, what, three weeks ago, two weeks ago, and they’re talking big, and they’re going to do this, and they’re going to have security guarantees. It’s all a lie. They have no troops. They have no money. They have no arms. And more importantly, they have no political will. Why? They’ve allowed the Middle East and North Africa to invade their countries. Today on the capital markets-not Steve Bannon saying this-England, France, and Germany can’t sell 30-year bonds. The 30-year bond market is saying, We don’t even know what government’s going to be. We’re not so sure you’re going to be around. England is heading to a civil war as we speak, and Nigel Farage-you know, the rise of the populist party, the Reform Party-is not going to stop it. You see them putting these English flags up-the Cross of St. George-that just occurred out of nowhere. It’s heading there. Why? They have a problem with radical Islam that they have not dealt with, and it’s metastasizing and getting worse. Same in France. France-Macron’s leading this conference call and the paper headline today in the afternoon: they want to know what Trump’s commitment is. They want to know his commitment on air assets, on funding, on intelligence. What’s America going to do? Here’s what America should do: wash their hands of it. This is the EU. The EU did this. 1.8 million Ukrainians-we said this at the time. These people are very brave, very courageous. It’s not about that. It’s about the bloodlands. It’s about that part of the world where every general in the West, every strategist in the West, says we have to stay out of. Look what’s happened. Look at the tragedy. And look at McConnell and these guys always put on-there’s a $ 58 billion bill. We’re going to go broke at midnight on the 30th; the government has no money. We’re going to have this huge fiasco over the next couple weeks on funding the government. They’ve got a $ 58 billion bill sitting in the Senate that they want to jam through here-$ 58 billion-when you’re closing rural hospitals. You talk about America First-you’ve got to start putting American citizens first. They missed that. But President Trump is trying to accommodate. And think of the record: from Tiananmen, Bush sent General Scowcroft over to see Deng Xiaoping and said, You brothers have a problem, and we’re here to help, because we’re going to work out a business relationship. And that’s what happened. We saved the Chinese Communist Party twice. We saved the Chinese Communist Party twice in 50 years when the people had had a belly full of them and had tens of thousands of casualties, not just in Tiananmen-all over the country. The business, corporate, political, and Wall Street elites bailed them out. And what did we do? Most Favored Nation, World Trade Organization, on and on and on to accommodate. Never enforced any trade deals. Let them gut the middle-the middle… We’re a great industrial power-let them gut that. For what? Did it help the American people? Did it help the American people? No. It helped Wall Street. It helped the tech bros. It helped corporations. When I took the campaign over in ’16, President of the Board and all that, we said, No, we’ve got an opportunity in the blue wall. We have an opportunity in Michigan. We have an opportunity in Wisconsin. We have an opportunity in Pennsylvania. And there, you can speak in shorthand: Wall Street came and shipped all the jobs and the factories to China. These people don’t need MBAs from Harvard. I go to Wall Street, talk to my colleagues at Goldman Sachs-you have to take an hour to explain it to them. No, they’re not a pure competitor. They’re actually an enemy. And you’re funding an enemy. President Trump has tried to work it out. In 2019, he had a deal-two years of Lighthizer and Navarro, two years to work out the deal that took care of the original seven sins. It took care of the issue of overcapacity, state-owned industries-all of it. And after two years, you know what they did? After they had their One Belt, One Road meeting and they had Putin there and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization-you’ve heard of this-they spit in our face and tore it up. Two years of negotiation-Not going to do that. He declared to the People’s War, also in the tech side. He says, Hey, we have to get off Western technology. We have to build our own champions. And this talks about the Faustian pact progressives made with the tech oligarchs. This was all Obama and then Biden. All the Democrats-their creation of these people. They’re all progressive Democrats. Do you think any of those are true MAGA? They became MAGA at 10:00 at night on the 4th of November of 2024, when Pennsylvania and Michigan went. All of a sudden: I think I’m MAGA. I like this guy Trump. Where do I send a check for the inauguration? They were created. This is why I’m a big fan of Lina Khan. They had no antitrust. I’m a Neo-Brandeisian. I believe that the concentration of private power with government power is what China’s model is. They’re not communists. They’re state-owned capitalists-where they get the vigor, not the people. It’s obvious: they made a Faustian pact. And Google and Facebook-they have no competition. You’ve got, I don’t know, 200 electric vehicle companies-you have one Google. Oh, by the way, finally, after years of having Google in court and about to break them up, a judge rules-an Obama judge rules. Google ruling shows limits of U.S. antitrust enforcement. We have to break up the oligarchs. We have to break it up today. It’s anti-populist. It’s anti-American. And then TikTok. They made a Faustian pact: You keep technology and keep us on the commanding heights because we’re the American empire. And, by the way, keep the social media thing-you’ve got to dominate. What do we find out? DeepSeek comes up. They have a totally different philosophy. They don’t need to put up nuclear reactors and take all the power from around the world-because you don’t hear climate change anymore, right? You don’t hear it because Silicon Valley needs like 50 times more energy, and they’ll burn anything-wood, coal, grass-you give it, they’ll burn it. They will. They’re total hypocrites. You don’t hear anything about decarbonization anymore. We’ve got to get those data centers up, right? They’re in your face about it. And TikTok-which is a Chinese Communist Party PLA instrument-look at kids that use it. The Chinese are smart; they don’t allow it on their children. So TikTok’s more advanced than social media. DeepSeek is worlds faster than our AI-than Grok and all this other stuff. And what do they want? They want a Marshall Plan bailout because they want to socialize the cost and give themselves unlimited upside. That’s what this is about. And we can’t allow it to happen. If we allow it to happen, you’re not going to have a country. What has President Trump done? He’s the only person in modern history to stand up to it and say, We’re not going to do it this way. This is why I say: when you have Washington-General Washington at the founding; Lincoln at the rebirth of the nation; and President Trump as the transformation, the reform, bringing the country back to make America great again, to her greatness-it’s the three greatest. He stood up to these guys. Is it perfect? No, it’s not perfect. It’s not going to be perfect. He has so many pressures on him. But he’s taking on the administrative state. He’s taking on the deep state. He’s trying to get our sovereignty back. You want to get our sovereignty back against the Chinese Communist Party because they’re everywhere. I’ve got a couple of recommendations to the president, who has gone out of his way to try to deal with them as a great power. Number one: if you’re going to hit India with tariffs on the oil, on the energy taken from Russia-what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Hit China. Oh, by the way, I’ve got a solution for the problem in Tehran. And it’s not a decapitation raid, and it’s not sending IDF troops in. It’s not sending commandos. It’s not sending American troops. I have a solution: cut off the oil coming from-I mean, there are already sanctions; stop the oil in the black market that supplies the Chinese Communist Party with 80% of their energy needs. You cut the mullahs off. You cut the mullahs off of their cash, the Persian people will come to the conclusion: Hey, maybe this 50-year run has not been that great. Maybe it’s time for a change. Maybe we should stop being at war and have proxies everywhere. Maybe we should take care of business here. Maybe we should find people that are legitimate people to sell our oil to. That’s the way to do it. And it’s sitting there right in front of us. Also, President Trump, if we cut off-they are nothing without our capital, without our technology, and without our training. All those companies I talked about-the tech companies, the social media companies-all of them are trained here in the United States. Tomorrow morning-and President Trump’s trying to be so accommodating: Hey, we’re trying to work out a deal-boom. 350,000-send them all home tomorrow. And Howard Lutnick-look, you’re doing a great job as Commerce Secretary, but don’t come in and try to sell me that we want 600,000 Chinese Communist Party nationals here because we’ve got to worry about the bottom 10 or 15% of the colleges, right? That the American kids all go to Harvard? Let’s take that bet. Let them go to Harvard. Let them go to MIT. Let American citizens in there. And while we’re on the tech bros and this whole thing with Palantir and all this security and what we’re doing and the artificial intelligence from DeepSeek-you know what they want now? They want control of the national weapons labs, and they want a $ 500 billion bailout. They want AI amnesty. They want AI amnesty-it’s like 230 on steroids. They want amnesty and no guardrails, and they’re going to try to slip it into an NDAA. We beat it before. The oligarchs in Silicon Valley have to understand something from the American people: yes, artificial intelligence could be tremendous and could have tremendous upside, but you’re looking into a bottomless pit of downside that nobody understands and nobody can articulate. And the last thing I want is a bunch of folks on the spectrum in Silicon Valley-who I’m not sure are even that dedicated to the United States of America because they’ve got these weird people talking about network systems and we’re a network and not really a country-I don’t want them making decisions for the American people. America First means American citizens first. It means putting the interests of American citizens first. And let me talk about what some of you may perceive to be an unpleasant topic, but it is the path forward. The greatest threat to Israel right now is-well, first off, remember Seven Pillars of Wisdom-T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. When Lawrence goes to British military intelligence in Cairo, and the general there-he’s making a pitch for the Arab Revolt-he says, Look, the Western Front is where the war is. This is a sideshow, and the Arab Revolt’s a sideshow to a sideshow. Right now, with the geopolitics of this and what’s happening in Europe, as our former allies collapse in front of us and crater in front of us because of radical Islamic jihad takeovers-and that’s what it is-a Jewish person today can’t go to London, can’t go to Paris, and can’t go to Brussels. And it was Frank Gaffney and Raheem Kassam and Trevor Loudon and others who talked about this Red–Green alliance of these Marxists and these radical jihadists, and they were laughing. Gaffney was banned at Fox. Raheem was laughed out of England. Trevor Loudon looked at as a nutcase. The biggest threat to Israel-well, first off, right now, the Middle East, CENTCOM in the Middle East-which, CENTCOM is one of the most powerful institutions in the imperial capital: the Federal Reserve, the CIA, and CENTCOM-we have to do a pivot to Asia. We have to do a pivot to Asia, and we have to confront. And I realize I’m supposedly from the non-interventionist side. I’m a non–American-empire interventionist. But when we’ve got to do it, we have to do it. And we’ve got to start economically and technologically to cut them off. We must decouple-and hard decouple starting tomorrow morning. The Middle East, though, is not the main event. This is the main event. It’s a sideshow. In Israel, the greater expansion project is a sideshow to a sideshow. The defense of Israel is different. And right now-I would argue, as being one of the biggest defenders of Israel and the Jewish people-to argue very simply: the threat, the existential threat to Israel and the Jewish people is not in Tehran. It’s going to take them decades to turn that thing around-and if we cut off the oil, it’ll happen quicker. The threat is right in New York City. Sadiq-what has happened to London in the last 10 years? Are people asleep? What has happened to Paris? What has happened to Brussels? What has happened to every country except for Hungary and Poland-the ones that said, No, we’re not going to do this. We’re going to keep our culture. Look at Germany. It’s all the same source. Right now in New York City-and he’s going to win running away because he’s got the Working Families Party, he’s got the DSA, and they are a massive ground game; they’ve got 10–20,000 people canvassing every day-it’s the grassroots equivalent of what President Trump has built through the precinct strategy. Mamdani is a Marxist and a jihadist. Let me be blunt. He’s a Marxist and a jihadist. He’s got happy TikToks and he’s a pleasant guy; he can run around. It’s nothing. He’s a better-programmed version than Barack Hussein Obama. It’s coming. He’s going to win in November. He’s going to control the government of the most important city in the world. And you aren’t getting it back-any conservative. George Will says, It’s socialism and we ought to take a crack. Do you think Sadiq Khan’s giving back London? Are these guys giving back Paris? Are they giving back Brussels? The English people know this. What do you think they’re putting the flags up for? England is heading to a very dark place. You know why? You’re going to have to head to a dark place to get your country back. Thank God in heaven for Donald Trump. If we didn’t have Trump-if Trump had not come on the scene-if Clinton had won in ’16, followed by the rest of this crowd, you know where this country would be right now? This is the 20 million illegal alien invaders we have just on Biden’s watch. They have to be mass-deported. This is the cartels. This is the sanctuary cities. Hell, I came from Richmond, Virginia-I know a neo-Confederate when I see it. The neo-Confederates run the state of California. They run Los Angeles. They run Chicago. They run New York City. And it’s time to take the federal government and the National Guard-militarize it-and send it to these cities. You’re going to have to send it when Mamdani is running. New York City, in less than 10 years-because this guy is more lethal than Sadiq Khan-it will be a no-go zone for Jewish people. You wait. You wait. And right now, I think the polls show 57% or 60% of young Jewish voters under 30 years old are going to support him. That’s how sophisticated this is. They have literally generated a generation of almost terrorists from the schools in New York City. These people are programmed. Watch it. And they’re giving all this happy talk now, and all the business community starting to genuflect, and the entire donor class could not come up with a plan to get a couple of people out of a race and give this guy a real run for the money. The problem we have in the world is the Chinese Communist Party and what’s happening here. And we don’t need to send armies all over the world. We don’t need to send-President Trump, the expeditionary force he sent to end the 12-day war, which he did, in total obliteration-total obliteration-of the nuclear enrichment program. And you should know I’m a skeptic about the entire thing because I kind of know the process that things go through, and I’m not buying it. I can be convinced otherwise, and there’ll be plenty of time to do that. But when President Trump-who has, at any level, been the biggest defender of Israel and the biggest defender of the Jewish people-when he puts out a Truth Social that says, Hey, this thing in Gaza-you’ve got to get it done. We’re getting to the second year, and you’re losing the PR war. And this is a guy that’s a master of information warfare. And, by the way, the Jewish lobby used to be so strong-it’s not strong. You should take that as a paper bull. He has your back like no one’s ever had your back. And if you don’t take that warning… What we don’t need-and I used some rough language, some profanity-when Bibi said, If you’re not pro-Israel, you’re not MAGA. You can be pro-Israel-as pro-Israel as anybody can be. You can be totally pro-Israel. You can be anti-Israel. As long as you’re America First, you’re welcome. You’re welcome in the MAGA movement. Folks, we are in the kinetic part of the Third World War. We have to get focused. We can’t let the Mitch McConnells and all these people that brought us here with policies that have led us to disaster-that have allowed China to actually do a flex-think about that. Everything the United States of America did in a war they never wanted to get involved in-everything we did-all the blood, all the sacrifice, all the resources, all the toughness, the firebombing of Japan, the bombing of Germany, the submarine warfare, the landings in North Africa, Normandy-all of it. The guys that fought in China, of which President Trump said, Hey, wouldn’t you just give us a little thank you for that, for all the sacrifice? They choose the 80th anniversary to get in your grill and convince the world that was our victory and the Americans are nothing. So we’re in it, and we don’t have a choice. We have to shut them down now. They’re an existential threat to the [laobaixing], the folks in China. They’re a threat to East Asia. They’re a threat to all our allies. And they’re a threat to the people of the United States-what they’ve done in this country to co-opt Wall Street, to co-opt the tech oligarchs. And that’s what America First is: putting our citizens, our sovereignty, our country first. If we do that, we’re going to win-there’s no doubt we’re going to win. But if we flinch on that at any time, we could lose this-because an individual like Donald Trump comes along maybe once in a country’s history. We’ve had three: Washington, Lincoln, and Trump-with all his imperfection. In fact, his rising above his imperfections is his true greatness. Thank you. Make America great again.

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