Transcript begins below (lightly edited for clarity; may contain minor errors).
STEVE BANNON (HOST): “But when it gets down to it, if you’re in a race and essentially an arms race, because I’m hearing over and over again, they’re trying to get, they’re in back of us where they’re trying to catch us. It’s very simple. You cut them off a capital, right? So their cost of capital is higher and they got a scrounge. You cut them off from access to markets. You cut them off from, this is the Chinese Communist Party. You cut them off from all training and education because we’re training our enemies right now.
You cut them out of all the company. Get the Chinese nationals out of here. And look, we’re the pro-Lao Bai Xing organization. And I’m the head of three or four organizations that represent the Lao Bai Xing and trying to get their country back. But these kids that come over here don’t have a choice. You’ve got to sign that document once you get over here, once you come here, that you’ve got to be basically an intelligence asset. You’ve got to feed back to them.
And more importantly, it’s taking space up from American citizens. So you cut them off of every possibility. If you’re in an arms race on a technology, it’s supposed to be the defining technology of the 21st century and it has such major defense and national security and war-making capability, why would we ever, in a billion years, give them access to anything? So you can’t play both parts. You can’t play both sides. We’ve got to now shut it down.
Or start to shame people like David Sacks and like Jensen Huang who are essentially agents of influence for the Chinese Communist Party of trying to get China access to chips, access to education, access to training, access to technical expertise. How about this, nothing. It’s like the scene in The Godfather. How about this, you pay for the senator, you pay for the gaming license.
This is what you have to do. You have to play hardball and you have to play smash mouth. And if our college system, I don’t know what Lutnik, who completely botched the HB1 visa explanation to the President of the United States, I don’t understand what he or the Department of Education is explained to the President of the United States and showing you the math about the college system here.
Yes, the foreign students pay more, but if that’s just to pay a bunch of tenured professors in these woke universities because they’re all woke except for a handful to pay their tenured salaries in retirement, no thanks. And if half the system would collapse, number one, let’s open it up. Look at the acceptance rates. Let’s open it up to American students. Let’s open it up to African-Americans, Hispanics, Whites, all of it. If you’re a U.S. citizen, boom, your kid’s going to get a shot. Guess what, they’re just as intelligent, just as hardworking. Just give them a shot. I rather give them a shot than someone from overseas. Hey, full stop. Does that make me a nativist? Does that make me a xenophobe? If that makes me anything, I don’t give a tinker’s damn. I care about American citizens. I care about the kids of American citizens. I don’t care about the Chinese Communist Party. I don’t care about the elites of Europe’s and their kids. I just don’t. Once every kid, once every one of those bills, it’s like the HB-1s. They can’t show any, any technical expertise the foreigners have. They don’t. It’s all a scam to suppress and destroy American workers. And whoever given is President Trump, I’d like to see the business model that they’ve given President Trump, the financial model of the university system. And hey, if 10% of the universities and colleges in country are not going to make it because you’re not taking foreign students then it’s either time to rethink your model or let capitalism work.”
