Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the Alabama GOP Senate primary, where Bannon is campaigning on behalf of Judge Roy Moore alongside Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame and Nigel Farage.
Bannon said Monday night’s Faith and Family rally at the Oak Hollow Farm in Mobile would be a reunion for three of the “earliest all-in die-hard supporters of President Trump.”
“I was so honored to make the film Torchbearer that we were about to release in August when I jumped into the campaign,” Bannon said of Robertson. “In fact, I was teeing up, as we talked on the show on August 12, the last show I did in 2016, we were getting ready to release the picture that we had worked on for over a year, which was really a picture for the evangelical base to come out in September.”
A caller named Mary Ann, who said she was married to a retired military officer, told Bannon and Kassam that Sunday’s gestures of disrespect to the National Anthem were a “depressing” and “heartbreaking” spectacle that might have ended her lifelong football fandom. She agreed with Kassam that the game played in London was especially infuriating since some of the players knelt for the American anthem but stood for the “God Save the Queen.”
“What’s going through these people’s minds? What sort of philosophy does that tell you these guys have?” Kassam asked.
“A communist philosophy, a hatred for America,” Mary Ann replied.
“I’m going to stand by my people who died,” she declared. “Number One is our friend Chris Adams, who died in the Khobar Towers. He was one of 19 Americans that were killed in a terrible attack. I think, Steve, you know about that, and there’s plenty of literature on it to see what happened to them.”
“I have another friend, and it’ll be almost 25 years in November – it was a training mission, it wasn’t an attack, but he died in a two-141 collision over Montana. The two planes were out of McChord, they were on a training mission. He had just got reassigned, PCFed, I only think he was in Seattle for a couple of weeks,” Mary Ann continued.
“Giving your life in a training mission is giving your life for your country,” Bannon told Mary Ann. “You’ve just talked about why you shouldn’t be depressed. From every patriot grave, as Lincoln said, we’ve got this unbroken chain of patriotism, so I wouldn’t worry too much about this. This will pass.”
“It’s going to be a process,” he elaborated. “Clearly it’s a big, huge media story now. A thing you brought up yesterday is, what would people in the great Revolution – 1775, 1776, 1777, all the years it took us to fight the British – what would those guys be saying about guys who stood for ‘God Save the Queen’ and knelt for the National Anthem? I wonder what those patriots would have to say.”
Ted, a retired Air Force veteran who described himself as “100 percent Jewish,” called in to express his unwavering support for Bannon despite all the flack he’s taken from the mainstream media.
“The flack is because they don’t want to hear your voice,” said Bannon. “I’m just another schmendrick, as you would say. I’m just another guy. The reason they give me such a hard time is they don’t want to hear your voice. Your voice is the one they don’t want to hear. Trust me.”
“I want to thank you so much for not only standing up for the Jewish state, but you do stand for the Jewish people, and Breitbart has deep ties for supporting Israel, and standing behind and with Jews,” Ted said. “I’ve met Joel Pollak. He came to Atlanta. I’m from Mobile, by the way. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, right across the bay from where you’re at right now.”
Ted offered one further insight on the NFL kneeling controversy: “The left are a bunch of bullies, and they’re using this thing on the field – the owners are bullies, the media are bullies, the players that are taking a knee are bullies, and guess who they all answer to? They don’t answer to the owners. They don’t answer to Goodell, who’s another bully. They answer to the fans! All of them answer to the fans, and the taxpayers who are subsidizing their stadiums. It’s out of control.”
“There’s no site in the United States that’s more pro-Israel, or pro-the Jewish people,” Bannon said after Ted’s praise of Breitbart News, praising Kassam personally for “doing such an amazing job on the plight of the Jews in Europe.”
“It’s one of the reasons we set up Breitbart News London. You guys have done an extraordinary job. We set up with Aaron Klein and the team over there in Israel, Breitbart Jerusalem. We’re at the cutting edge of this whole anti-BDS thing, and also the plight of young Jewish kids on these college campuses, following the plight of Ben Shapiro and other guys,” Bannon said, referring to the former Breitbart News editor whose campus appearances have been attacked by left-wing agitators.
“All the people who are at Breitbart now have such a long tradition of doing this stuff, too,” Kassam noted. “In 2012, I was over there for Operation Pillar of Defense that was going on that the time. My appendix exploded when I was in Israel. They had to give me an open appendectomy in an Israeli hospital. They couldn’t believe it when they took my passport out to check my details and saw that my name is Raheem Kassam, because of course ‘Qassam’ are the name of the rockets Hamas fires over the border in Gaza. I had the mayor of Sderot, the closest town to Gaza, laughing at me. He showed me, up against his wall, these huge shells of Qassam rockets out there.”
“People in this company have the longest-standing traditions for this stuff,” he said. “This is why the criticism doesn’t stand, doesn’t make any sense.”
Caller George from Oklahoma City said that Kassam and Farage, as citizens of the United Kingdom, are “messengers of what awaits us, if this country does not make the right decisions.”
“The political oppression that you two have gone through, it reminds me – you guys pay homage to one of your greatest statesmen, Winston Churchill. Never, never, never give up,” said George.
“George, you’ve nailed it right there. In fact, it was right at the 2012 election, I started looking at what was going on in a deeper manner,” Bannon responded.
“This is a great thing about the callers, they always get it right, is that seeing what was going on in Europe, and particularly in the United Kingdom, it looked like it could be a canary in the mine shaft. I think I flew over in like mid-2013 and saw Raheem. Remember, we started talking about launching the site. We met Raheem and Delingpole, we met Nigel and everything like that,” he recalled.
“We’ve always said, the United Kingdom and Europe is a canary in the mine shaft for the United States,” Bannon stressed.
Kassam said the “elephant in the room” that needed addressing about Monday night’s rally with Bannon, Farage, and Robertson supporting Roy Moore would be held at the same time Vice President Mike Pence was campaigning for his opponent Luther Strange, who has been endorsed by President Trump.
“We said from Day One when I stepped out of the White House, and Breitbart has been pretty adamant, we’re anti-Establishment,” said Bannon. “We think the Establishment has done a terrible job of having the president’s back in his cause, in his first year. I think it’s incumbent upon everybody to support President Trump. President Trump is doing as good a job as anybody could possibly ask, but he needs support.”
“I’ve got to tell you, the Establishment is not supporting him. Led by Mitch McConnell, it’s an open secret on Capitol Hill. You can see how they’ve handled this campaign, which is unacceptable and unsatisfactory,” he said.
“Let’s talk about it for a second,” Bannon continued. “If you add up the first round and the second round, over $30 million of corporate money – this corporatist donor, consultant, lobbyist, politician cabal, this cartel that runs Washington, D.C. They’ve taken over $30 million, and what have they done? This hasn’t been a policy discussion down here, Raheem. It’s the politics of personal destruction. It’s what Andrew Breitbart absolutely hated.”
“This is the absolute core base of the Trump revolution, the folks that are supporting Judge Moore. Sarah Palin, Phil Robertson, Nigel Farage, the Breitbart crew, Hannity, Ingraham, Levin, Gorka, Michael Savage – this is the hardest core of the Trump base. Of course, we support the President of the United States, but we understand that to support the President of the United States, you have to stand up to the Establishment. They don’t have his back. If $32 million is coming in from the Washington clique, Luther Strange is bought and paid for by the Establishment, by the cartel,” he warned.
A caller who used a pseudonym due to her deep involvement with Alabama politics said she was originally content with Luther Strange as a candidate for the Senate, but grew disenchanted with him due to allegations of corruption.
“I’m proud of our Alabama Republicans, the fact that we ousted a Republican governor for his corruption and for his moral failings,” she said. “That’s what we should stand for. Republicans don’t put up with that kind of mess. It’s unfortunate that his name is sullied, and you know Mitch McConnell is not liked in Alabama at all. Now that Luther Strange has hitched his personal to the Mitch McConnell bandwagon, it’s just a lose for him.”
She added that it was “annoying” and a “bad decision” for President Trump and Vice President Pence to back Strange, a decision Bannon said was based on “bad information” and “misinterpretation of some basic information” fed to the White House.
The caller added that Roy Moore is a “flawed candidate” and “arrogant” in her view, although she agreed with most of his positions. She concluded that she would probably vote for Moore, and hoped his general election campaign would focus on humility and overcoming his media caricature while highlighting “just how bad the Democrat message is.”
Bannon credited the knowledge provided by insightful callers and commenters to Breitbart News with shaping President Trump’s successful 2016 campaign.
“The wisdom of the American people, the wisdom of American working people, the middle class, comes through every day on this show,” he said. “This is more sophisticated analysis than you get on CNN.”
In response to a Canadian caller mourning the dreadfulness of his country’s politics, Bannon spoke of plans to launch Breitbart Canada, promising major announcements in the near future.
“We’re working on a lot of plans – international expansion and more detailed expansion, other verticals here in the United States like finance, and other areas, but international expansion particularly to our brothers up in Canada, which has got a great conservative base up there,” he said.
Kassam mentioned a Canadian bill purportedly banning “Islamophobia,” which would likely have prevented the publication of his own latest work, No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You. Bannon praised the book as “one of the best books of the summer.”
“I don’t think it could even get published in the United Kingdom at this point without somebody bringing me to court over it,” Kassam lamented. “The book is so forthright about the problems that we’re facing. It sold a ton of copies, it went on the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list, I know all the opposition have read it. Why haven’t there been any hit pieces against me for it? Because it’s all true. They can’t pick any of these things apart.”
After another caller expressed her disgust with the NFL players who knelt during the National Anthem, Kassam reflected that President Trump’s spat with the NFL, and his strong speech to the U.N. General Assembly, could be seen as a return to the voting base that felt disappointed and betrayed by Trump’s evidently softened position on amnesty for DACA illegal aliens.
Bannon said Trump’s criticism of the NFL players was born not from political calculation, but from Trump’s sincere belief that the flag and anthem should be properly respected.
“Donald Trump is a very traditional guy in this regard,” Bannon said. “I don’t think he’s going out of his way to try to pick fights. We’ll have to see how this thing plays out. I think this is going to be another one that’s going to be another issue that dominates several news cycles.”
Bannon said the Alabama Senate race, with its outsiders vs. Establishment overtones, was another example of the “Hobbits standing up against the Machine” trend in both American and European politics over the past few years – a phrase cribbed from Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) notorious dismissal of Tea Party activists as Lord of the Rings “hobbits” in a Senate floor speech.
“This is a local election that has national implications,” he said. “It is the same fight everywhere throughout the world. Tonight you’re seeing it in Mobile, Alabama. Tomorrow you’ll see it in the entire state of Alabama as people go to the polls. It’s very symbolic, and I think, Raheem, it’s one of the reasons that we’ve gotten so involved in this thing. Once again, I’m very proud of Breitbart. This is one that six, eight weeks ago, we were telling the world that this is going to be very important, and now you see the top reporters from the Guardian, the Financial Times, NHK, BBC, CCTV – global media is here today.”
Bannon predicted that the fallout from the Alabama Senate race, where Moore is running well ahead of Strange in home-stretch polls, would include Senate Leadership Fund support for Moore in the general election, while big Establishment donors asking hard questions about how their money was spent in the primary.
“There’s going to be an uprising,” he said. “I think some of the large donors of Mitch McConnell are really questioning, if Mitch McConnell and Steven Law and that posse do not think they’re getting questioned, they’re getting questioned by their biggest donors. I happen to know this personally.”
“I think if you do what’s right in your heart, then you’re supporting Donald Trump,” Bannon advised Alabama voters considering a vote for Strange because of Trump’s endorsement. “You vote your heart, you do the right thing, and it’s going to turn out right.”
“This is a national race with global implications,” he said. “This is the little guy. There’s not one penny of donor money in the Roy Moore campaign. This is the little guy. This is corporate money versus grassroots muscle. We’re going to see how it plays out tomorrow. Some of the polls are trending, it looks quite good for Judge Moore, but you don’t know about these polls. I think it’s going to come down to turnout, and it’s going to come down to people being motivated.”
“One thing that’s going to change politics here is that this is all TV ads. Somebody told me yesterday that Luther Strange had very few live events throughout the weekend, but it was a barrage of commercials, unprecedented in Alabama,” he observed.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern
LISTEN:
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.