Raheem Kassam - Populism, MAGA, and Trump: Insights from Media and the Campaign trail

Hearts of Oak Podcast

Populism, MAGA, and Trump: Insights from Media and the Campaign Trail 🎙️

Welcome to the Spotlight Episode on Populism, MAGA, and Trump🎙️

In this electrifying episode, we dive deep into the heart of American populism, exploring the dynamics of the MAGA movement and the indomitable figure of Donald Trump as seen through the lens of media and the campaign trail.

Join us as we unpack:

• The Evolution of MAGA: From its inception to its current state, how has the MAGA movement influenced American politics, drawing parallels with historical populist movements like the Tea Party?
• Trump's Media Strategy: An analysis of how Trump has utilized media, both traditional and social, to shape public opinion and maintain a strong connection with his base, even as critics claim his rhetoric has grown darker and more divisive.
  
• The 2024 Campaign Landscape: With recent polls showing a tight race, what strategies are Trump and his camp deploying, and how does this impact the broader political discourse?
  
• Populism in the Media: A look at how media outlets, from conservative talk shows to liberal news networks, cover populism, and the role of figures like Steve Bannon in amplifying the MAGA message.
  
• Public Sentiment and the X Factor: Insights from real-time reactions on X, reflecting the pulse of the public on these pivotal issues.

Connect with Raheem

website: https://raheemkassam.com/
Substack: https://raheemkassam.substack.com/
Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@Raheem
𝕏: https://x.com/RaheemKassam
Interview recorded 19.10.24
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
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Transcript:

(Hearts of Oak)

And hello, Hearts of Oak. Thank you so much for joining us once again.

And it is wonderful to have a brand new guest, a name which certainly the War Room Posse will know absolutely very well.

And that's Raheem Kassam. Raheem, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

I woke up especially early for you as well on a Saturday morning of all things.

If anybody knows my Friday nights, it's quite difficult.

You don't look too worse for wear.

So all good.

But if obviously people aren't following you maybe on, might be some of the UK side but Raheem Kassam obviously is on Twitter X he is former editor-in-chief of National Pulse and we'll touch on some of those articles thenationalpulse.com former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News in London, former senior advisor to the one and only Nigel Farage and I think a good friend of his now and And together with Steve Bannon and Jason Miller, they co-hosted War Room back in the day.

So lots to talk about.

But Raheem, I mean, eight years ago, you were in the race to become UKIP leader.

And I remember your campaign launch in the Westminster Arms, that picture of you behind the bar pulling a pint.

And maybe just touch on that a little bit.

How you kind of got involved with UKIP with Nigel, the political scene there before over stateside.

Yeah, do you know what's funny? I find myself telling this story more and more, and I don't know if it's a sign of people having interest or just getting old and repetitive.

And I was actually telling it last night. I'll give you the brief version.

I mean, I was always fascinated by politics.

I remember watching the first Gulf War on television.

Obviously, we were all you know, aghast at 9-11.

And there were just these sort of major flashpoints in my life that I thought, you know, I kind of feel that I need to do something in that world. And especially.

Well, unfortunately, I found myself a little bit of a Blairite in the early Blair years.

I was a kid and I fell for the sort of the things can only get better mantra.

That was the prime Minister for the American audience from the late 90s, which was very much sort of a Clintonian figure, a third wave figure in British politics.

And I did get involved.

I got involved straight off to college, off to university, by shadowing my local member of parliament around and just kind of knocking on doors and understanding the issues and finding out at a kind of local level that most of good, worthwhile politics is actually local and not national.

And so naturally, I gravitated to the national, just being useless like that.

Started to work a little bit with Britain's Conservative Party and very, very quickly realized that it was no such thing as conservative.

And when the David Cameron Conservative Party in 2010 got into coalition government with Liberal Democrat Party and handed over so many things to the left, I just sort of threw my hands up and said, you know, I can't do this in good faith.

I can't be a part of that.

And I did something that they call defecting.

And I left.

And I say defecting not because I was, you know, an elected member or anything, but I was on the Conservative Party's youth board at the time, Conservative Future.

And so it caused a little bit of sort of internal physios.

I remember getting prodded in the chest quite angrily at Tory conference and told that, you know, I'd never work in politics again and so forth.

Little did they know.

Well, I showed them.

And then, I mean, I kept bumping into this jovial smoking chap outside lots of Westminster pubs, and we would often talk politics, and we would often talk about women, and we would talk about all sorts of things.

And that person turned out to be Nigel Farage.

So we made friends.

He asked me to come and work for him, and the rest, I suppose, is history.

And task is from I mean kind of from Hammersmith to the white house or from using the tube to using Trump force one it's certainly a change in gear.

How kind of how and when did you think you wanted to put your energy into the US and not the UK was there a specific moment or was that just a general drift there.

There are a lot of moments actually I mean I think 9-11 got me, you know, really, really first trying to understand the US, trying to understand why somebody would do that, trying to understand what the American reaction was.

I stayed up, I think, for three days straight, you know, just in my little box room in Uxbridge in West London.

And I had a 17-inch CRT Sanyo TV propped up on a coffee table and just stared at it, you know, and couldn't wrap my head around it, really.

And so, you know, I did a lot of reading and a lot of learning.

And, you know, this is a pre-YouTube world, so I'm going to the library and checking books out and trying to, you know, the old-fashioned way of figuring things out.

And my parents were never really particularly political, so it's not like I could sort of turn to them easily and go, 'oh you know this thing happened what what does it mean.'

I think a lot of the world felt that way at that point in time I certainly talking to a lot of my friends now in New York where I go you know probably for 10 days every month at the moment they certainly say that they felt like that at the time also just completely lost.

You know the the rules-based order right that the Bannon always talks about was just I mean in ash right it was in ash it was falling in ash from the sky with bodies littered around it.

And you know not to be to be too graphic about it but that's how it it jarred so much and I was still in school I was still in what they call high school over here at the time in secondary school and and for us, I mean, our teachers had no idea what to tell us or what to say about it.

And so that probably was a major flashpoint where I thought, hmm, you know, having knowledge of and being involved in U.S. Politics seems quite important from a global level.

I studied it at university, studied U.S. Politics in large part in my course at the University of Westminster.

And I never really planned to get involved in US politics or media until one day, I think this was 2013, my phone rings.

I'm actually sitting in the house of a friend who went on to be the Conservative Party's operations director.

We're sitting in his house. I think it's a Saturday night and we're just having a dinner.

And my phone rings, and I don't know the number, and I pick it up: I said: hello. And the voice down the other end of the phone goes hey you don't know who this is but my name is Stephen K. Bannon and I'm the executive chairman of the Breitbart News Network.

And I was like okay, I mean at first I thought this might be like a sales call. I was like okay I'm Mr. Bannon how can I help you.

He says well we're opening a London bureau for Breitbart do you know it?

I was like vaguely I don't, you know, read it all that much, but I know of it.

And he said, everybody tells me I should hire you to be my London editor.

Up here at the time, I was making about £65,000 a year blogging from my bedroom.

So I thought that was a great gig.

And I sort of said to him, you know, thanks, but I'm not that interested. He said, look, just meet me next week.

We'll chat.

We did. He offered me 35 000 a year to which I said: see you mate, I'm not doing that.

We spent sort of the next four months negotiating back and forth and I say negotiating back and forth.

It was more him going 45 and me going nah 55.

Nah.

He finally ended up on 65 plus a staff plus an office and I was like right fine, I'm in.

and that was the moment.

Steve can drive a hard bargain he's a businessman.

Yeah, but I think I in fairness to him I don't think he knew the lay of the land in the UK I think he thought he would sort of grab somebody just out of college who wasn't earning anything and whatever and and we had already kind of, you know, I'd already developed several news websites at the time and built a little brand and a little following, so he had to pay for it.

And that drew me in right.

That drew me into the US world because, of course, every morning then we would have a Breitbart News radio show and...

So for 10 a.m. my time, I would be on live with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people across America.

And so immediately your cadence changes, the words you use change, you start speaking in their language to try and get them to understand what's going on.

And you're trying to explain like concepts like Brexit, which at the time didn't even exist as a word.

You know, we didn't even call it Brexit back then.

We just called leaving it, leaving the EU or getting Britain out, or independence. Brexit was far later as a common term.

And then, of course, you would get invited to all this stuff in the US, and how it is, the scale of it is just all so...

It draws you in.

It really sucks you in.

And I would visit DC, and I would think to myself, oh, I'd love to live there one day.

And let me tell you something. I bloody hate it here.

I bloody hate it here.

But, you know, I was supposed to be here after 2016 because he called me up when he went to, still speaking of Bannon, called me up when he went into the Trump campaign and he said, where are you?

I said, I'm in DC. I'm on vacation.

I'm hanging out with some of my mates.

And he says, good, stay there.

I said, what do you mean stay there?

I've got to fly back tomorrow.

He goes, no, no, no, no, stay there.

I need you to do something for me.

I said, what is it?

He goes I can't tell you but you'll find out tomorrow on the front page of the New York times, so that sounds really really ominous is that, I mean you know what's funny at the time I suppose not that funny but what's what's interesting at the time I thought oh my goodness is he getting arrested or something.

Turns out he's going to work for the Trump campaign and he wanted me to take over the radio show.

So I took over the Breitbart news radio show, you know, got my visa and everything sorted out. Stayed, I thought I'd stay for about a year and then you know life draws you in.

You make friends and girlfriends and you know buy things and you know plant your roots by accident really and now it's been about nine years sitting here in this same room on capitol hill.

I mean, you have a unique perspective as a Brit who's there, really understanding the UK scene and the US scene.

I mean, obviously, Nigel crosses over, but he doesn't live in the US.

I mean, the only person that I kind of think who is such a deep understanding both sides is maybe Seb Gorka.

But tell us what that's like, because are you, you're no longer an outsider, are you?

You're, yeah how do you kind of fit in and your perspective is something fairly unique in the US media certainly?

Look I'm just a loud mouth, I always have been, and so when you ask me how I fit in?

Not well really anywhere.

I mean you can talk to some of our mutual friends like Jason Miller as an example or even Steve and they'll all tell you, yeah Rahim has a really sharp mind for politics, but he's bloody annoying.

And he rubs people up the wrong way.

And he doesn't really just, you know, I have no charm when it comes to what I believe in, right?

I couldn't run for anything.

I learned that a long time ago.

You made reference to the aborted UKIP leadership election campaign. I was two weeks into that campaign and I thought to myself, I hate this.

I will be terrible at it.

And I was like, you know what?

I'm out.

I don't want to do it you might.

You Have lasted less than Diane James, fewer days.

I think that you know the right way to do things in life is to not pretend right and I think if a lot of politicians, actually acted on their instincts, on their gut level instincts about what they do, they wouldn't do half the bad shit they do.

And so that was my moment where I thought to myself I can continue this on, I could probably win if I really pull the stops out, and I can be miserable for the rest of my life.

Or I can pull out, do something I like doing, and be miserable for the rest of my life.

So I chose the latter, and I don't regret that at all.

But yeah, no, I wouldn't say I fit in very well at all.

This doesn't, I hope this doesn't sound sad, but I sort of barely leave the house anymore.

You know, if I do leave the house, it's sort of to take a train or a plane somewhere for an event or a meeting or a speech, or if I get really antsy or bored or whatever, I like to take the train up.

I only live a few minutes here from, from union station in DC.

So, just get the train up to New York and I sit at a nice pub for the weekend or something see some friends very quiet sort of things, but it's not that thing anymore where you know you get all these major conferences and conventions and all of this stuff and a lot of people still find that useful and still find it, you know, helpful to run around and shake hands and exchange business cards.

I'm much more reclusive than ever.

I sit at home, I read a lot, I like to keep a very close-knit group of friends, because you know the old adage if you want a friend in DC get a dog.

It's really not a town where you do want to trust people and make and make you know long-lasting friendships or relationships that, you know, I've got a few luckily thankfully.

Steve being one of those Nigel being another it's that's a weird thing, that's a weird thing, when your best friends in the world are people like Steve Bannon and I don't say that as in like they're people I work with on a daily basis they're just my mates like we just call up and shoot the shit every so often.

You know I spent last Christmas at Steve's house with him because I couldn't make it back to England in time and I don't think politics came up more than once over like a week-long period.

It was football he hates soccer, I love soccer, it was him trying to show me American football. Can't stand it, there was a lot of food, you know, those sorts of things.

So, if anything I've sort of become more of a political socialite at this point.

But it's weird, yeah, if I ever have to watch another NFL game again, I don't know what I will do.

I'd lose the will to live.

But apologies to the posse. But when you met Steve and Nigel there, what comes across is they're authentic individuals.

They actually care about it.

They wear their hearts in the sleeve.

And, I mean, both of them, I probably actually know Steve better than I do. I do Nigel.

But both of them what you see is what you get and sometimes you see the public persona then you meet them in private they're just very different.

Actually there isn't much difference that they are who they are.

And that's possibly one of the reasons why they've been so successful and maybe makes them so dangerous and that's why they've both been targeted so much.

yeah, I think that's right. I mean there there are little things I think that people don't get to see with both of them.

Just sort of almost softer sides, you know, that they would both hate me telling the audience, but genuinely caring sides.

You know, you see the look in, I've seen the look in both of their eyes when I've disappointed them, you know, and it's not anger and it's not resentment.

It's that sort of fatherly disappointment. Why did you say that?

Sometimes live on air, I would say things that Steve would just look at me like, oh dear.

But it has gone the other way as well, believe me.

Yeah, they are extremely authentic characters.

And I think the same about myself sometimes as well.

It's like, why am I drawn to those people?

Because I do that too, right?

I wear my heart and my politics and everything on my sleeve.

I say whatever pops into my head and deal with the consequences later.

I certainly tweet whatever comes into my head and deal with the consequences later.

And I think at the end of the day as well, when you look at their private lives, they are people who have a genuine joie de vivre. They are actually life-loving people.

They cling on to every moment, and they want people around them to enjoy those moments too.

They're also people who want to impart the wisdom of the hard lessons they've learned.

Right when Steve first, when I first met Steve he said to me look you know this pub at four o'clock every afternoon thing is not going to work for you in the long term.

He says you need to knuckle down be a monk for three years, bury your head in books.

Learn, learn, learn, and then you get to you know express yourself in different ways and live life in different ways, but you know, put together that base of knowledge.

I completely ignored all of it of course and proceeded to go to the pub at four o'clock every day and and still do it, but it kind of,

I mean, I've got a stack of books now it's so weird actually now I think about it.

Behind the camera here I have a stack of books up against the wall and now when I think about it that is exactly how Steve's stack of books used to being his old Bryant park New York apartment.

It's just books some books stacked up against the wall no bookshelf just a mess and you know everything sort of half read dog-eared thrown aside, like this, don't like this, and those guys really taught me all of that.

Kind of just knuckle down as hard as you can learn as much and you know without them without their influence and things like that I would have never published the first book No Go Zones, which was a bestseller and you know I think really changed a lot of the conversation on migration in the Western world.

After that book came out, Angela Merkel started being honest about the concept of a no-go zone, of a no-go area, as she called it.

And, of course, now we all accept that these things are relatively commonplace.

But at the time, that was no-go zones were no-go zones.

I want to touch on that later.

And, of course, your other book on Enoch Powell is also The Greatest Prime Minister Britain ever had.

Okay, so U.S. election, 18 days out, as we currently record, I think, 16 days by the time this comes out on Monday.

And not just the most important day of most people's lifetimes in the US, but actually worldwide, because the impact on freedoms for all of us and where

America lead others, others follow.

And the last thing we want to be doing, what we have been doing is following a decrepit individual.

And now comrade Kamala could be the next option on that, and that should fill anyone with fear.

But what is your kind of what's your assessment?

Obviously you write about this in the national pulse and your finger is on the pulse In terms of understanding, but what's kind of your assessment generally and it will pick up me in some of them just two and a half weeks out?

Yeah, look so just so people understand my method when it comes to this stuff I just call and text everyone I know as much as possible right what's going on what are you hearing where are you going what's the reception what are the internal campaign numbers please.

No, you don't want to tell me, I'll go ask someone else.

They want to tell me, I'll go and ask someone else.

Basically, I'll just bug my way into amassing information.

I mean, that is the job of a journalist, really, is just to bother your way into knowledge. The reason that just to draw...

I'm doing the weave, by the way, here, like Trump does, the story weave.

Just to draw you away from the question for a second, the journalists that people loathe, which is, I understand most of them, the reason they are not good journalists is they don't do their jobs.

They make it up.

They have an opinion, and then they ascribe current events to fit whatever their opinion is.

The job of a good and real journalist, and there are some people like, in fact, I'll say something that might surprise people, but there are some Guardian reporters like Hugo Lowell, who I think are just excellent at their jobs.

Now, I'm really good at gatekeeping information that I don't want getting out there.

And someone like Hugo is really good at extracting it from people like me.

So, I get to really see how I come across to other people, because I'm always doing that and digging for info.

And that's how you get to understand a campaign. That's how you get to where I was in May, where I was saying something is going dreadfully wrong with the Trump campaign, there is no ground game.

Susie and Chris, who are at the head of the campaign, had sort of checked out for the summer, almost putting their feet up, thinking that they were going to run easy against Biden, win easy against Biden, and then of course made the cataclysmic campaign error of accepting that early debate and getting Biden out of the race.

Now, at first, it seemed a lot worse than it was.

But the more people have seen Kamala Harris, the less they like her.

And the more she gets out there, I think the more votes she loses, frankly.

The campaign turned at the end of August, I and others embarked upon a bit of a pressure campaign to bring other people in.

So they brought people in from the PAC, the political action committee that sort of runs parallel to the campaign.

For those who aren't sort of aware of how that works, it's like an outside group that does a lot of the campaigning.

But technically, legally speaking, the campaign of the PACs can't talk directly to each other.

So, instead of doing that, they shifted people from the PAC into the campaign, and then brought on, you know, old Margar Stalwarts like Corey Lewandowski.

And since then, you've seen a big uptick again, not just in, you know, Trump's polling numbers, but his own, you know, his own, I guess, vivaciousness about the campaign.

He's in two or three places every day at the moment. It's got that 2016 energy to it.

And I think, you know, to touch wood, I think we are on a winning course right now.

I will say Trump will win despite his campaign leadership, not because of his campaign leadership.

And it will also win because she has just become,

I mean, she's become almost as unpopular as Hillary Clinton.

And I say almost because America got to know Hillary Clinton really well for decades and decades.

If they got to know Kamala as well as they knew Hillary, she would be half as popular if that than Hillary Clinton.

You know, she is just a fundamentally unlikable person.

We see that play out this week where, you know, she was the subject of mockery at a large scale New York gala, right?

The Al Smith dinner.

His great speech by Trump.

The whole thing, I mean the host gets up at the beginning and it's like why is Kamala Harris not here?

And for for that to happen to her. I mean her team, this is the problem about having a team that is is mostly young and inexperienced.

Is that they think everything happens on TikTok.

They forget that actually most high propensity voters are getting their news in older fashioned ways.

And to age a lot of people here, one of the older fashioned ways now is still like Facebook, right?

But it's also broadcast TV and it's also local TV and it's also newspapers.

And yes, they are dwindling and falling and whatever, but the older, higher propensity voter still wants that element.

They still want the masthead, right?

They still want to see the logo of the news organization at the top of the thing they're reading.

They don't necessarily want that 15-second clip of some nose-ringed purple hair woman who thinks abortion is an alternative to having a personality.

So I think Trump nicks it.

If you want to go state by state, we can do that too. I'm not confident about Nevada, and I'm not confident about Wisconsin.

The rest, I'm pretty happy about.

One, just a sidestep, one of the dangers I've seen of the U.S. Political scene is the industry that kind of feeds on it.

I think when I talked to Terry Giles, who was very close to Ben Carson whenever he ran, and chatting about what the campaign was like for his involvement on that, and the amount of money that just disappears on consultants everywhere consulting on something.

And it is an industry in the light that Britain have no idea, ours is very different.

And is that one of the probably people will say whatever you want them to say there, you're right, there is kind of out of Uni and you go into job you get paid to consult on stuff that you actually have no world life experience and you'll say whatever has to be said and if you're candid losers hey you'll just find another one.

That seems to be one of the failures, I think, of the U.S. Political scene as someone from afar watching.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

I mean, if I were to be able to give one piece of advice to the American body politic writ large, it is repeal Citizens United. You know, repeal the idea that corporations are people in a political sense and that they can give of limitless amounts of money to politics, to PACs, and so on and so forth.

You know, a lot of politicians, and I think Matt Gaetz popularized it, I know a lot of people have said it.

Politicians should be made to wear the logos of their sponsors, like a race car, like a race car driver.

And you have to have patches that say Pfizer and Exxon and all of this stuff.

I actually think that if you're not going to get big money out of politics, then that's what you should do with it.

But we're not even at the point of having that conversation over here yet.

You're still talking about Nancy Pelosi making massive stock trades on a day-to-day basis, and everyone knows she's doing it.

Everybody knows it's insider trading and everybody in this town is just sort of an open joke.

You know and the but the part of the joke is not Nancy Pelosi the part of the joke is the American public that that Nancy is fleecing by pretending to be a representative of theirs in any way shape or form, but actually just enriching herself at it.

And I think if you get that corporate money out of politics and if you and if you police things like that a lot more you will get a far more representative form of government.

The real threat to democracy is not Donald Trump or anything like that it's corporate America and time and time again corporate money has corrupted.

It's corrupted movements, it's corrupted the tea party, it's corrupted it corrupted Brexit in a lot of ways and we saw what happened with Brexit after the people voted for a certain thing.

Britain's migration is still at record highs.

Why, because the corporate lobby continues to lobby for cheap migrant imported labour. And that was the point of Brexit.

There's no point in doing Brexit unless you actually control your own borders.

You can tell I get very frustrated by this, because I see the sorts of cash that flies around here.

And I don't want to get anybody in trouble or make it awkward for you at all.

But I get myself in trouble with this a lot because I call out people on our own side too about this stuff.

And about a year ago, I ran a story about how Matt Schlapp and the American Conservative Union were taking money from the New Venture Fund.

Well, the New Venture Fund is a Soros left-wing Democrat fund that push money around politics to fuel things like criminal justice reform and DEI policies and things like that. Listen, I'm a reporter.

I reported the news.

And of course, Matt gets angry at me and Steve gets angry at me and that's friendly fire.

Why are you doing that?

I say, why are they taking the money in the first instance?

So somehow I'm to blame for bringing it into light.

And I just, I don't have any allegiance to organizations, institutions, and people that I think are purchasable.

I find that to be the lowest form. Money is the lowest form of doing politics.

No, completely.

You mentioned the speech that Trump gave a couple of days ago at that Catholic event, and I saw the emcee pointing out that Kamala wasn't there.

And you watched Trump's speech, and I've seen him speak at CPAS, saw him at Pennsylvania rally, saw a North Carolina rally, and there's nothing like it.

I mean, if you come from UK politics and you come across this, you're just in awe of, the camera light action type of thing but I what I mean you watch trump speak and his energy his passion you, however many times they're trying to actually try and assassinate him and he's got this boundless energy and he's, they're a joy to watch speaking for an hour and a half.

And I mean is it it seems like he just gets better and better and there's no end to it he's never pushed back, never pushed down.

Tell me about your thoughts on that and the energy he has on that campaign trail.

Well, as George Galloway once said to Saddam Hussein, I salute his indefatigability.

And I suppose I'm George and Trump is Saddam in that analogy.

He is.

I mean, Look, I've travelled with him on his plane. I've interviewed him.

I've hung out socially at Mar-a-Lago probably two dozen times.

I've seen him at his best, but I've also seen him tired.

I think you hang around with him long enough, you see him tired.

They're the same tell-tale signs as well as any of us, really, but you see it in Bannon, you see it in Nigel, where a door will close.

If a car door, for instance, closes, and you're just sort of sitting next to Nigel and he'll just go, oh, and all the exhaustion you'll see just like wash over him.

And they all have the trick in that world. And this is why I would not be good at it.

The trick in that world is to hold it all in and just deal with it and just man up and plow through and plow through.

And then once you can get to wherever you are, private bedtime, whatever, you just let it all go.

I can't do that.

I need to work very hard and then rest very hard and then work very hard and then rest very hard.

These men, these locomotives of populism, right?

They just keep chugging.

They just keep going.

They just keep going. And what's their fuel, right?

Their fuel, especially for Donald Trump.

Are the people standing in front of him, right?

It gets to the point now at the rallies where he recognizes people in the crowd who he's seen years ago, perhaps, at an event.

He goes, oh, I know you. I saw you at this thing.

We took a picture together.

You know who was also very good at that? Enoch Powell.

Enoch Powell, I read several stories about him recognizing people from 18 years prior, and just picking up the conversation where they left off 18 years prior.

And it's like that moment in Butler, right, where Trump walks up onto the stage and he goes, as I was saying, and that was an important moment for several reasons because it wasn't just, you know, obviously making comedy out of tragedy there in that moment, very important, very important to bring people's spirits back up and to let them know that you're still there and you're still fighting and you're going to continue regardless.

But it was also to personalize that moment right you were all here with me you know four weeks ago whatever five weeks ago when when it happened, we're all here again today.

And you see the same thing I got to host the radio show with Steve so much back in the day that was a call-in radio show and the lines would light up, the board would light up, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Every single morning as soon as they knew Steve was hosting the show, because they all wanted to talk to him.

But more importantly, he wanted to talk to all of them.

He would make it very clear, I'm going to get to every single one of you callers. Don't hang up.

I know you might have to wait a little bit.

I want to talk to everyone and give everyone their time, their airtime, and treat them respectfully and listen to them.

The same thing as Nigel going out in public.

And we've seen the videos of the milkshakes getting thrown on him, and those are unfortunately the hazards of being a populist because you actually do want to go and hang out with ordinary people.

You want to go to the pub. You want to stand in the beer garden.

You want to have a smoke with them.

You want to give them proper time and attention.

That, without that, you cannot be a populist.

You cannot book read populism.

This is a major problem we have on our side at the moment is that much of the MAGA movement, much of the post-Brexit movement are these, are these academic types who have sort of come along and gone, yeah, it's very interesting.

And, but you know, you can't, you can't converse with them outside the pub.

They're not willing to understand the ordinary person.

They're certainly not going and walking the streets of Bradford and watching how demographic shift is occurring and how the mass rape of young white girls occurred in the UK under the police's nose in those communities.

They're not interested in doing these things.

And I think in as much as the left doesn't understand, the corporate left, the Marxist left in a lot of senses, there is a populist left.

But in as much as the establishment doesn't understand populism, we also have to be very watchful that our own side continues to understand populism.

We cannot hand it back to the academics who, you know, the Alan Skeds of the world who founded the original UK Independence Party, the academics who founded the Alternative for Deutschland Party.

You know, we're very grateful that those things happened and that those guys, you know, had their involvement to get those things off the ground.

But these cannot be turned into bookish movements.

They are you know for want of a better term they are street movements they are they are movements of ordinary people. Yeah, I like to rant.

The academics looking down at those with passion who actually believe and there's a confusion, they think they like that intellectually, but they're not sure where that passion...

Passion this is where the party's going wrong, right?

The conservative party in Britain wants to do pseudo-populism. It just wants to be able to sort of tweet images, of you know England's green and pleasant land and say we will bring down migration if re-elected in five years time.

And you go, well you were in office for the last 15 years and you doubled it and tripled it, and quadrupled it you know last year I think what was it 1.1 million new visas issued for for foreigners going into the united kingdom a population of about 60 odd million right there but but realistically far higher now likely and and these academic types the Tories that you meet at the tory conferences and things like that.

If you know with their wet little handshakes will come up to you and go well I certainly think we could we could bring down migration a smidgen um you know we could we could we could certainly shave one percent off the tax rate.

It's like, no, you don't understand.

You know, we tub thumping populists want to completely change the way the system works. I'm not interested in your little salami slicing incrementalism.

We are revolutionaries in a very real sense.

I know immigration being a huge issue across Europe and the US and one of the two, immigration and the economy, the two big issues for the U.S. Election. But you mentioned your book, which looked at those no-go areas, how Sharia law is impacting or is coming to a neighbourhood near you.

That's something the UK, that's something I know living in London, I'm sure when you look back, does America get that clash? They get the immigration, but one of the big problems of mass immigration is when Islam comes in and then wants to be dominant, wants that superiority, wants to impose itself, especially in the legal system, on the food system, financial system.

Is that part of the US understanding or they still think this is just a European issue that is far away for them?

It was certainly a much hotter conversation topic, you know, in a post 9-11 world.

It has definitely faded away in between.

And, you know, Americans sort of looked on at the, you know, this drip of terror attacks across Europe.

You know, somebody got macheted in Paris and Stockholm and Copenhagen and Berlin.

And, you know, a truck crashed into a Christmas festival.

And they sort of made it, I said it in that way, because they sort of made it like a mundane.

You know, this is the end of the news hour type story.

You know, three people were killed today as a man shouting Allahu Akbar drove into Berlin.

Anyway, next up, and it's like, you have normalized this, which something should never like that be normalized.

You know, people should not have to fear going to a Christmas market.

You should not have to erect these bollards up everywhere to stop cars running people over.

This is not the mark of a civilized society and it's not the mark of a civilized immigration system.

And I'm very upfront about it.

These people are barbarians and they should not be let into the Western world.

And we should be far more, I'll use a dirty word, discriminatory about who comes into the Western world.

And my parents did it the right way.

I was telling somebody last night, the difference was when we were growing up, they told us to integrate to assimilate we got sent to a Christian school.

We said Christian prayers growing up even though I was raised in a Muslim family, they were cool with it, because it meant that we would be a better part of British society.

And now of course you walk around places, I mean I'd use Bradford as an example, but yeah, I mean why not use why not use London as an example.

You know, if you start moving outside of Mayfair and Westminster you will find pockets where the the signage on the street is in Bengali and is in Urdu and you know Tower Hamlets is a great example, you know, look for ramen.

You know all the stories anyway, but but people who don't really need to go and look those things up.

Because you know I wrote, I actually have copies right by my feet here.

I actually wrote that in 2016 and 17, and I, the publisher and I kind of went back and forth on the cover jacket and the subtitle.

I didn't like how Sharia law is coming to a neighbourhood near you because Sharia is law.

And I wanted how Sharia is coming to a neighbourhood near you.

And they said, nobody knows what that is.

I said, well, they're about to find out.

Because in places like Hamtramck in Michigan, and of course, immediately after October 7th, and indeed on the anniversary of October 7th, they're now starting to see this back in their communities again.

And fearing it like they did post 9-11. It's actually, they're not like us.

They're not interested in being like us.

They are a ghettoized enclave of people who often will speak different languages.

I write in this book, one of the things I think doesn't stand out about this enough, and I wish I'd stressed it more, was when I was going around all of these neighbourhoods, from Europe to the US, I noticed one thing.

I don't know why I noticed it.

It just jumped out at me.

All of these all these apartment buildings that migrants are crammed into.

They all have huge satellite dishes on the balconies and I asked everybody in those neighbourhoods like what is going on here?

Yeah, well they don't speak English so they are trying to get foreign language tv so they all have these massive salad dishes.

And then when I went to Hamtramark and Dearborn same thing.

And I started to look it up and I was reading local forums internet forums of people and it was exactly the same thing.

People were discussing, oh, how do I get this Bengali TV station?

Well, you have to have this satellite and all that.

They're not interested in learning the language.

They're not interested in contributing in any reasonable way.

I've actually had conversations since after this book came out with people in those types of neighbourhoods, where they say, oh, I had a cab driver in New York about a month ago, and he was just railing about the Western world and all sorts of nasty things.

And I said, why are you even here?

He says, being here for me is like being on a building site.

I go to work, and at the end of the day, I'm going to go home.

And home for him was Egypt, I think, or something like that.

And I just think, what have we gotten ourselves into here where these people are in our midst and they hate us.

They don't just hate us a little bit, they really, really, really, hate us.

They hate the world around them, it's amazing.

I think when when I first got the tube one time to Mile End early when I came and thought I stood there for a couple minutes and thought where am I.

So, I think that's when it hit me.

Hey, I want us just two other things, we'll drop in, one is, so looking at those swing states and it seems as though the more rallies Kamala does the better it really is, because you kind of look at Trump you think he's got phenomenal speech writers, but I'm sure Kamala has good speech writers and it still doesn't work for her.

So, he brings he brings his personality you said calling people out and engaging, but what about those you wrote recently about Arizona about Trumping up there obviously there's a lot of work being done in Pennsylvania, a lot being done there.

What are your thoughts there? Because the more Kamala speaks, the more it must disappoint any potential Kamala voter.

Yeah.

Sorry. I didn't, I didn't really follow the question there.

I mean, yes. I mean, she's, she's repulsive.

She's repulsive to her own base.

It's, you know, their first instinct was right.

Their first instinct was to hide her away and not do interviews.

And we kind of goaded her into doing it. And did you see the Brett bear interview on Fox?

I've seen it. Yes.

I mean, so I've talked to some, some liberal friends about it and they say, well, it was the right thing to do and I think it showed she was brave.

I said: whoa whoa whoa, she tanked.

Yeah

It was a car crash like just say it.

If Trump has a bad debate or a bad night I say it.

You know, he didn't exactly, you know, light the room on fire in that debate with Kamala Harris.

He got through it, it was probably what I said at the time it's probably a score draw, but which is probably going to be the Man United match I'm going to watch in about 10 minutes, but so I'm used to it.

He, they have this inability to understand or rather to accept the situation that they're in.

You know, I'm a realist as often as I possibly can be.

You go to war with the army you have not the army you want, and this this was their problem right.

Actually you can make the case pretty well that Biden would have won Pennsylvania in this election.

That case can be quite easily made.

It comes down to union workers, you know, Scranton Joe, he's known him for a long time.

They've actually, it's their fault that they do this, but they trust him.

You know, a lot of them trust him.

They just don't feel that way about Kamala.

Sorry if I missed a question in this.

No, no, no, no.

I just want to get your thoughts. I mean, very last point on a recent article you've done.

I think it might have been yesterday as we're recording now this exclusive, Bannon prison statement, Biden, Harris are illegally holding me past my release date.

It was a really interesting piece, and I actually saw it whenever Mo had posted it.

It does, he is the one of the biggest threats because of the juggernaut he has built with War Room and being 100 America first in MAGA.

He obviously will get out at the end of the month, but just talk to me about that that piece about how he actually should be released early, and yet they refuse to because they must keep him away as long as possible.

Yeah.

By the way, he would want me to say this.

And I've talked to him almost every day that he's been in there.

And for those who are worried and concerned, he's doing fine.

He may even come out a little ripped.

He promised he wouldn't.

He promised he was just going to read.

Yeah, but the books are so big he's basically having to bench them.

He would want me to say this right, the juggernaut that you refer to is not is not the War Room apparatus it's the war room audience, right.

Like that's the juggernaut and here's the proof is in the pudding here's how you know, he's did the same thing at Breitbart, right.

It's audience led, it's people led ,it's grassroots.

He's just the guy who's kind of conducting the orchestra, the musicians are the ordinary American's out there and in a UK sense the ordinary Britons out there who are doing the heavy lifting in their communities every day.

You know, who are building these families and teaching their kids the right values.

Who who are maybe.

Maybe low information voters in the sense that they don't get to spend hours a day at their computer researching any given topic.

You know that's why I do what I do is to act as a kind of information service point for the MAGA movement.

For populist nationalists all around the world and he would want me to remind people that they are, they are functionally the juggernaut.

He was eligible for early release under the First Step Act, which was a bipartisan piece of legislation signed into law by Donald Trump in 2018.

And the First Step Act basically was a criminal justice reform type deal where if you're a nonviolent criminal, very low likely re-offender, that you could shave time off your sentence and you could do it by enrolling in certain programs, behaving certain ways, or just by the very nature of the supposed crime that you've committed, right?

If you're not perceived to be a violent threat in any way, halfway house, home detention, you can serve out the last sort of 30 days of your sentence that way.

And Steve is eligible for that.

He is actually kind of the ideal candidate for the first step act in this scenario, because A, there's no risk of him.

Committing contempt of Congress again, unless they, you know, put a phony committee together again in charge him with that.

And also, they know where he lives.

I mean, the whole world knows where he lives. He's right there.

And he's literally right next to the Supreme Court every single day without fail.

They can check up on him if they like, if he tries to abscond.

But they've said no. I shouldn't misreport it.

They haven't said no. They haven't said anything.

Right, they filed this thing 75 odd days ago this petition for him to be released early and so many different mechanisms by which that could take place and both the DC court and the board of prisons basically said yeah we'll get back to you.

And his lawyers really haven't heard all that much since.

It is incumbent upon every person who knows this story and is listening to this to send this to everyone possible and go, you know, those guys talk about weaponization of government.

Donald Trump's going to lock up his enemies, blah, blah, blah.

We all know the riposte to that, you know, Bannon and Navarro.

We hear it all the time. It goes further than that.

They are now breaking the law.

You know, this is an illegal detention at this point.

The First Step act is law, that they are breaking to keep this man detained unlawfully, right?

And nobody wants to talk about it. CNN won't cover this.

Politico won't cover this.

And I know because I sent it to all of them.

You know, yesterday when we broke the story, I was like, hey, you talk about norms.

You talk about weaponization.

You make this allegation about Trump all the time.

How about you report this, sorry, it's a Friday afternoon, there's nobody in the office, we'll talk to you on Monday.

It's the same thing as the Board of Prisons is doing, we'll get back to you.

It's so far beyond a disgrace that I pray to God, that when Trump gets back in the White House, that there isn't this 2016 mentality of, you know, we can reform some of these things.

If we just send some nice Bush era conservatives into these departments and get, you know, get these people on board, we can sell them.

This is like the civil service in the UK.

They're not interested in being reformed.

You have to just get rid of them.

You have to fire them and you have to take the licks of firing them.

You may have court cases, you may have lawsuits, you may have settlements, you may have retribution from their side.

You may have people running in front of television cameras and going, oh, I got treated badly and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, whatever.

You're bad at your job, you're a corrupt human being, you're out on your ear and you're never coming back.

We have to take that approach. Otherwise, Trump will just be a lame duck president from day one. You cannot put rhinos back in the administration.

And I think Steve will speak more about that when he gets out.

He's due for release at the end of October.

He should be released before that, quite frankly.

But I think one of his first concerns after getting Trump over the line, after helping get Trump over the line, will be, right, what does the admin actually look like?

Because that, I think, is even more concerning than November 5th itself.

And burn it to the ground and build as rebuilders America first.

Raheem, thank you so much for joining us, lead editor in Chief of the National Pulse.

Thanks for getting up so early and enjoy Man U getting their answers kicked.

Well, thank you.

Thanks for having me