First time I saw it was at Harvard Business School.
It just blew me away.
When he goes out to that runway
and then you see the bombers coming in.
I think it's got a lot of good life lessons in it.
It sets up very clearly this kind of two types of leadership.
One being the touchy-feely guy
and Gregory Peck, who is clearly a hard-ass.
But he's not a hard-ass.
Smoke, Ernie?
Thank you, sir.
Think about the scene where he's coming to take command.
The staff car pulls up to the gate,
and he's riding shotgun with the driver.
And I think he even calls him by his first name.
He gets out, he smokes a cigarette,
he gives a cigarette to the sergeant,
then he throws the cigarette away,
gets in the back seat of the staff car,
and he's a general.
All right, Sergeant.
He understands his dharma.
He understands what he has to do.
He understands that for the betterment of those guys,
for them to fulfill their task, he has to do it.
Attention!
Dharma is the combination of duty, fate, and destiny.
For me to fulfill my dharma, I have to fulfill my duty.
Rest.
I've been sent down here
to take over what has come to be known as "a hard-luck group."
Well, I don't believe in hard luck.
So we're going to find out what the trouble is.
We're going back to fundamentals.
And I can tell you now, one reason
I think you've been having hard luck--
I saw it in your faces last night.
I can see it there now.
You've been looking at a lot of air lately.
You think you ought to have a rest.
In short, you're sorry for yourselves.
Now I don't have a lot of patience with this,
"What are we fighting for?" stuff.
We're in a war, a shooting war.
We've got to fight.
And some of us have got to die.
I'm not trying to tell you not to be afraid.
Fear is normal.
But stop worrying about it-- and about yourselves.
Stop making plans. Forget about going home.
Consider yourselves already dead.
Attention!
I think it's a very simple film
with a very simple powerful message that...
modernity is based around emotionalism,
what you think is helping everybody,
but in fact is not allowing them to fulfill their destiny,
to fulfill their fate.
Even though that fate and that destiny
may be their own personal destruction.
A lot of your ideas are about tearing things down,
war, and destruction.
I believe that you need some fairly radical restructuring
of this, and rethinking of this.
The permanent political class that controls our country
is going to stay exactly like it is,
until you have true disruption.
It can't be a pillow fight.
You need some killers.
You get some killers, you're going to see some change
We all know what the problems are.
"Do you have the guts to do it?"
Trump had it, and that's why
he's President of the United States.
Can I bring up one last thing?
just Twelve O'Clock High, one thing I thought of is that
in the motivation of the men
to focus on the mission, and not themselves,
he was prepared to not be loved,
in fact to be hated.
If you want to effect change the important thing is to--
Effect change, yeah.
I used to tell the guys at Breitbart,
Napoleon's saying to his Marshals of France,
"When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna."
I had gone to Telluride on and off for years.
I don't even think I knew at time
that you were going to have an interview
with McNamara afterwards.
I was just there to see the film.
I wanted to at least start to produce these myself,
and start to make films like this.
Seeing "The Fog of War" at Telluride was the inspiration.
It's all of you to blame.
Yeah, why not?
If you go back to Twelve O'Clock High,
to this Quonset hut where those pilots were,
that's kind of the populist side.
The working men of America.
But then you see your film and you understand
the precision daylight bombing and flying in a fortress
and all that...
was conceived and thought of by guys like McNamara.
What worked against Germany and Imperial Japan
clearly was the exact wrong thing
for how you fight a war against people
trying to get their independence and their freedom.
You can see in McNamara
the personification of globalization.
It's that scientific, engineering, managerial elite,
that everything's a set of math to them.
This is all out of Harvard Business School.
It's all out of Harvard Business School.
They had this concept, I think it's become a radical concept,
about the maximization of shareholder value--
the whole beginning of the shipping of jobs.
Everything could have a mathematical base to it,
or have a logical, or a reason base to it.
I look at The Fog of Waras a very despairing film,
where McNamara very near the end, says,
"Rationality will not save us."
I took it a different way.
It's a Greek tragedy, I took it as hopeful, and here's why:
What's hopeful about Greek tragedy?
Because you learn the lessons of it, right?
His rationality can't save us, didn't save us,
actually buried us into Vietnam much, much deeper.
What makes us omniscient?
Have we a record of omniscience?
We are the strongest nation in the world today.
I do not believe we should ever
apply that economic, political, or military power unilaterally.
If we had followed that rule in Vietnam,
we wouldn't have been there.
We were a hardcore Democratic family.
I went to a Catholic military prep school.
Vietnam tore that community apart.
We had a football coach, Mr. Monaghan.
His boy got killed in Vietnam.
Some of these families, they never recovered from that.
I'm a paperboy at the time,
and delivering the papers every day
and you see 200,000 troops and 250,000 troops,
and 300,000 troops,
and you're a patriot so you still believe in it,
but you see the families destroyed.
So I'm at West Point.
My daughter's sophomore year, it's 2008, I think it is.
It's a tough story to tell.
The West Point girls' volleyball team
was going to get new uniforms,
and they bring the uniforms in in boxes off to the side,
and the girls are practicin' in this huge old dirigible hangar,
where the volleyball team plays-- from the 1920s.
Looking at this, and looking at the West Point girls,
and I look over at the boxes.
I just kind of go over and look at the new uniforms.
They're sealed.
"Made in Vietnam."
I lost it.
"Made in Vietnam."
Fifty thousand dead, you know,
a hundred thousand wounded, families torn apart,
the whole of Southeast Asia, what,
10, 20, 30 million people murdered?
Right?
What was it all for?
What was Monaghan's kid, what was that for?
"Made in Vietnam."
With all the jobs lost to globalization.
It was an incredibly clarifying moment for me.
In the 20th century, we decided,
that these individual nation- states at war with each other
would produce disaster,
and that some solution had to be contrived.
And when you say we, what do you mean, "we"?
We didn't decide that at all.
I completely and totally disagree with that.
-I know you do. -No, but--
It wasn't the common man that got us into World War I,
and in World War II, and in Vietnam,
and all the other wars that have been fought.
It's Monaghan's son that's always the recipient of all the crap.
When you say, these "nation states,"
it's the elites that got us into that mess,
and then they came up with some sort of supranational apparatus
that's gonna take care of it.
No, no, no, no, no. I disagree 100 percent.
They are the ones that drove the destruction
of the 20th century.
The reason I'm a populist,
I've gone to the elite institutions.
I was in the United States Navy as an officer,
went to Harvard Business School,
went to Georgetown and got a Master's in Foreign Affairs,
was in all the board rooms,
went to Hollywood...
and here's the one thing I can tell you:
If you gave me the choice
between being governed
by the first 100 people that show up in red ball caps
at a Trump rally...
versus the first hundred guys that walk into Davos
with their tickets,
I'll take the working class people,
because they have more humanity and they understand the world,
and they understand and have grit and determination,
and they've had to deal...
with all the world dumps on them.
But what good does it do to throw
all of the DACA people out of America?
What good does it do to allow
corporations to pollute the environment?
Is this populism?
Or is this something much uglier?
Uglier being what?
Serving big business and the rich.
It's anti-populism.
That's what bothers me.
That's what makes me think you're crazy.
And why?
Why? Because I think there's an inherent contradiction
in the views that you hold?
Do you just want to destroy everything?
You may hate my guts,
and you may hate what I stand for,
but if we don't allow some way for the system
to spread the wealth,
we're going to have a revolution in this country.
It is coming...
as night follows day.
Do movies provide an alternative reality,
something that is more powerful than the real world?
In the Reagan film, I take a lot of time in talking about
how our idealized version of America
was done by those great filmmakers
in the '20s and '30s, '40s and '50s.
"When the legend becomes more powerful, print the legend."
Do you think maybe there's a chance we still might find her?
Injun will chase a thing 'til he thinks he's chased it enough.
Then he quits. Same way when he runs.
Seems like he never learns there's such a thing
as a critter who'll just keep coming on.
So we'll find them in the end, I promise you.
We'll find them, just as sure as the turning of the Earth.
Who do you see yourself as in these movies?
Gregory Peck? John Wayne?
I've never actually sat there and go,
"Oh, I'm the Gregory Peck character."
But clearly in the films that I love
and I watch over and over again,
there's a certain type of individual.
Remember, the John Wayne character in The Searchers
is kind of an outcast.
It's hard to believe they're white.
They ain't white... anymore.
They're Comanch...
Where are your casualties?
I'm clearly drawn to those characters,
and the way they comport themselves--
also the way they never give up.
You know, the honey badger nature of, "just don't quit."
That famous video, he doesn't care and he doesn't quit.
He's got all these terrible habits.
He's relentless. He will not give up.
And I think the thing went out
and had, like, a hundred million views.
We used to watch it at Breitbart.
"Honey badger doesn't give a shit, right?
because he doesn't give a shit.
You just gotta do what you gotta do.
We didn't care
if we played by the rules,
or particularly against the Republican establishment
that was so straitlaced at the time.
When did you realize that you could
turn it into politics?
Was there an epiphany?
Was it at Breitbart?
2008, the financial crisis in the fall,
and then President Obama coming in in January,
and the reaction to that,
the bailouts and everything like that.
I saw in the Tea Party
really what would become this populist movement.
It would need a platform that could get its stories out,
and in Breitbart and Andrew, you had a real firebrand,
a firebrand who knew culture.
One of his themes was that culture
is upriver from politics.
Just like in Twelve O'Clock High,
he'd made it a central part of our mission.
Anthony Weiner at that time was as much a cultural figure
as a political figure.
One of the most promising young politicians in the country.
They were talking about Anthony Weiner as being
a legitimate candidate for President of the United States.
We see it in the United States Senate every single day,
where members say, "We want amendments. We want debate.
We want amendments, but we're still a no."
And then we stand up and say,
"Oh, if only we had a different process, we'd vote yes."
You vote yes if you believe yes.
You vote in favor of something if you believe
it's the right thing.
If you believe it's the wrong thing, you vote no.
We are following a procedure.
I will not yield to the gentleman,
and the gentleman will observe regular order.
The gentleman will observe regular order.
I was down in Richmond with my dad
at eleven o'clock on a Friday night,
watching the Nightly News,
and we get a phone call, you know,
can we get on the bridge line?
Right away? There's something that's happened with Weiner.
He's at home watching the Washington Capitals game
and he tweets out--
He had thought he was direct messaging her,
but he had hit the wrong thing on Twitter,
and put it out on his entire Twitter feed.
But only up for a nanosecond.
He took it down immediately.
In fact, nobody ever asked later,
how did we actually capture that?
Because you just couldn't possibly capture it...
unless you had somebody,
basically on watch, and they did.
Some people approached Andrew
that were kind of volunteers and were following this,
really put him on 24-hour watch.
Andrew immediately went out publicly.
It got to be a firestorm, but Weiner immediately came back
and said, "I'd been hacked."
This would be the deathblow for the company.
If we had gone out and done this
and actually made it up or it was not true,
Breitbart's over.
It was I think on that Monday or Tuesday
that other people started coming forward.
In fact, someone approached us, a guy had approached us
with the pictures...
There was a classic Andrew Breitbart,
drop one, let him respond.
Drop the other, let him deny it.
We got down to the fourth picture,
the money shot so to say.
-The dick pic. -His johnson, right.
He basically called surrender.
Andrew was in the hotel right next door, complete coincidence.
Weiner's backstage, I think, or what I heard,
trying to talk his wife into coming up on stage with him.
Andrew comes in the back.
All the national media turns to Andrew Breitbart.
They're asking him questions, the guys have their microphones,
"Hey, we can't hear your answer. Go up on stage."
And Andrew Breitbart walks up.
I'm here coincidentally, I just arrived at LaGuardia
because of media requests.
And as I got into my hotel...
I'm Andrew Breitbart, by the way.
It is news, my friend, it is news.
And I know of countless other websites and news organizations
that would put this out there.
If you wrote a script and pitched that in Hollywood,
they would laugh you out of the room.
I mean, here you're watching on national TV
and Andrew Breitbart walks up
to the Anthony Weiner press conference
with global media there-- and literally takes it over
and has a command performance.
And you would have no way of knowing where this would lead.
No, if you said at the time that, in 2016,
in the final two months that Anthony Weiner,
Huma Abedin, the Breitbart operation,
the guy that followed Andrew after he died...
It's like I said, if you wrote that script,
people would throw you out of the room.
It would be ridiculous.
I really didn't know Trump.
He knew me as the head of Breitbart.
The Mercers just went to Trump, and said,
"You're going to lose by 15 or 20 points..
if he kept going down this path.
After I had met with him, I went to the campaign headquarters
for the first time...
'Cause I'd never been in a campaign headquarters in my life!
So I get there at like, 7:00 at night in Trump Tower,
the 14th floor.
And so I expected young people to be walking around
with polling data, and all these smart guys
looking at targets of where we're going to go to.
I'm thinking I'm going to walk into some Robert Redford
The Candidatemovie.
When I get up there, it's totally dark.
Nobody there. It's like, it's 7:00 at night.
And there's one guy. And I said, "Where is everybody?"
And he goes, "Well, it's Sunday."
And I go, "Yeah, I got that, but where are they?"
And he says, "Well, they'll all be back tomorrow.
They don't really work weekends."
When I take over he's somewhere between 12 and 16 points down,
double digits down in most of the battleground states.
Hillary Clinton's really not even campaigning anymore,
just raising money.
Then when I'm announced, it's like the Trump campaign's
so out of business--
This is just Trump getting vengeance
by getting this mad bomber
who's just going to wreak vengeance on all his enemies.
-The mad bomber being you. -Yes.
And it's the exact opposite. All we did is said,
"Hey, we've got to be maniacally focused.
Simplify everything."
Make her the spokesman and the guardian
of a corrupt and incompetent status quo--
an elite--
and you make Trump the agent of change
that President Obama wasn't.
We could see his message was resonating,
and all you had to do was channel that in the right way.
And yes, we will build a wall.
Have to.
We have to.
Build that wall! Build that wall!
Remember, we had a great canary in the mineshaft. We had Brexit.
Nigel Farage says,
"Brexit would not have happened
if there was not Breitbart London."
I could see Brexit and 2016
are inextricably linked, they're inextricably linked.
It's just going to be three verticals
we're going to focus on.
Number one, we've got to stop mass illegal immigration
and limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back
and protect our workers.
Number two, we have to bring manufacturing jobs back,
basically from Asia.
And number three, we have to get out of
these pointless foreign wars.
So, her thing, when she came out,
was, "Breitbart's racist, Bannon's a white supremacist."
I walked in, it was like the fifth day,
I go into the war room with all these TV sets
and she's in Reno giving her first speech.
And she's giving a speech on the alt-right,
and Breitbart and Steve Bannon.
And I'm going,
"She's running for President of the United States."
I said, "She's walked into the trap."
This is not conservatism as we have known it.
This is not republicanism as we have known it.
These are racist ideas, race-baiting ideas,
anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women,
all key tenets making up
the emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right.
A fringe element
that has effectively taken over the Republican party.
If she's going to preach identity politics,
and we preach populism and jobs
and bringing manufacturing jobs back, we got it.
For all their brilliance and all their money
and all their professionalism,
they don't have an understanding of what this election's about,
and that's when I knew we had her.
Operator, operator.
You have to have faith in your plan.
That's one of the lessons of Twelve O'Clock High.
So this is war.
It's absolutely war.
At that level of politics, it's war.
You're fighting for control
of the greatest country in the world.
It's war.
War is three phases. Step one, take the high moral ground,
so you can motivate people to fight. Number two...
leave a smoking hole of where your enemy is,
and number three, fill said hole with your stuff and your values.
We're doing debate prep.
The Washington Post calls Hope Hicks,
gives her a transcript of some audio that's going to come out.
I talked to the, I think the writer's editor,
"Get us the audio and let us check it,
and we'll get back to you sometime next week."
And this guy said, "Hey, look, it's going up in five minutes."
"The authentication process should be very quick."
As soon as it went up I knew it was going to be a huge issue.
The Republican establishment,
they were going to cut Trump loose
to focus on the House and the Senate.
We were going to do some sort of video or something that night,
which we didn't get out until like midnight.
People say it was the hostage video.
I've never said I'm a perfect person,
nor pretended to be someone that I'm not.
I've said and done things I regret,
and the words released today on this than a decade-old video
are one of them.
There's a big difference between the words and actions
of other people.
We will discuss this more in the coming days.
See you at the debate on Sunday.
On Saturday,
we had called an all-hands high command meeting
to be in Trump Tower, in the penthouse.
We kind of went around. Christy and Rudy
give a traditional politician's response:
"Let's call 60 Minutes,
have Melania on one side and Ivanka on the other,
and you'll be in the middle, and you'll beg forgiveness."
I was sitting there just thinking that if he does that it's over.
I said, "They don't care about anything in Billy Bush.
What they care about is they're losing their country
and they're losing their jobs,
and they're losing their way of life.
And if they see you as the instrument
to reverse that,
we're going to win and we're going to win big.
You have a 100 percent metaphysical certitude to win.
What we ought to do is have a rally.
Let's go to the Hilton Hotel
and get a thousand people red hats,
double down, triple down, and let's just do it."
This is not Steve Bannon pushing him.
His natural thing was to fight.
The compromise was that we were gonna go on ABC and David Muir
and we were going to do a live interview,
have a middle ground between sitting on the sofa
and apologizing and having a rally where he basically said,
"I don't care. I want to talk about build a wall."
And...
as he got down to the conference room,
tried to practice, he said,
"I can't do this. And I'm not going to do this."
Downstairs, there were thousands of people in the streets.
Many of them anti-Trump.
But there were a lot of Deplorables down there
in the red caps.
He told the Secret Service right there in the room, he goes,
"I'm going down and seeing my people."
He just, he's going to go out and hold a rally right there.
Donald Trump! Donald Trump!
Are you staying in, Mr. Trump?
-Are you staying in the race? -100%.
Governor Christie pulled me aside and we had
a little tête-à-tête.
He blamed me for being the enabler.
What he had argued up there was that
this is not about the campaign.
The campaign's over.
If you go down this path of what this crazy guy's saying,
you're going to not just lose this campaign
and lose it by a historic number but you're going to,
you're going to destroy your brand.
And it will have massive impact afterwards.
And so Christie and I got into it, and I basically told him,
"The plane leaves at 11:00 tomorrow.
"If you're on the plane, you're on the team.
You're not on the plane, you're not on the team."
In that moment,
I had people who would come as first person testifiers
of the actions of Bill Clinton and her actions as an enabler,
so I had personal witnesses.
Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey and others.
At about 4:00 on Friday,
I called up and made sure that the women
that were being filmed would be actually in St. Louis on Sunday.
So it was your idea to bring the women to the debate.
Yeah, 100 percent, yes.
Went up to candidate Trump. "Here's the plan.
We're going to open the door
and let the pack of jackals opposition party media come in,
thinking they were seeing the end of the debate prep,
and these women would just hit 'em with a fuselage
at one time of, "Bill Clinton raped me."
And he goes, "I love it."
He took his seat in the middle.
We open the door to the media.
They'd walked right into the traps.
You could tell, it gave him confidence.
Mr. Trump--
Mr. Trump, you touched a woman without her consent.
Mr. Trump.
Why'd you say you touch women without consent, Mr. Trump?
We're talking Bill Clinton now.
Why don't you all go ask Bill Clinton that?
Go ahead, ask Hillary as well.
The debate before, they had allowed
Mark Cuban to come down and sit in his line of sight
to glare at him the entire time.
I said, "Just go get him, and put him back
"in the seat in darkness. It's 10 rows back.
It's simple, aisle seat, 10 rows."
No, completely blown off.
So this time,
we're gonna walk out the four women,
and put them in the VIP seats
and make Bill Clinton, on national TV, walk past 'em.
And so we just told the guys, "Hey, we got different VIPs."
And they go, "Oh no, it's impossible. You can't do that."
"Dude, two weeks ago, you gave me this speech
about you don't have control over security."
"What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
They're going to sit in those seats, and when he comes by,
they're gonna say whatever they're gonna say
and you're gonna live with it."
And it got to be show time.
We've already rattled them enough.
We did jujutsu, and we turned the Billy Bush thing around.
It comes down to one or two,
maybe three moments the entire time,
and you're gonna make a decision under pressure in the moment
and that decision is either
gonna lead to victory or defeat.
And if you pick the wrong path,
you'll look back in hindsight and see
how your defeat came about.
It wasn't a perfect campaign.
There is no such thing.
But I was on the way to winning
until a combination of Jim Comey's letter on October 28
and Russian Wikileaks
raised doubts in the minds of people
who were inclined to vote for me, but got scared off.
Ask yourself this.
Within an hour or two
of the Hollywood Access tape being made public,
the Russian theft of John Podesta's e-mail hit Wikileaks.
The reason why I believe we lost
were the intervening events in the last ten days.
This just came out. This just came out.
Wikileaks! I love Wikileaks.
Hillary had no defense for her secret speeches to Wall Street,
at international banks
that she hid from the public and which were exposed by Wikileaks!
The FBI...
has just sent a letter to Congress...
informing them
that they have discovered new e-mails
pertaining to the former Secretary of State,
Hillary Clinton's investigation.
Lock her up! Lock her up!
Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock!
What's interesting to me about this whole election,
the moment that her emails became connected
with Anthony Weiner's dick pics, she was done for.
And you ran an ad, it's basically,
I guess you'd call it from the Roy Cohn playbook.
You call me a pervert, I'm not a pervert, you're a pervert!
Decades of lies, cover-ups and scandal
have finally caught up with Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton is under FBI investigation again,
after her emails were found on pervert Anthony Weiner's laptop.
Think about that.
America's most sensitive secrets, unlawfully sent,
received, and exposed by Hillary Clinton,
her staff, and Anthony Weiner?
Hillary cannot lead a nation
while crippled by a criminal investigation.
Hillary Clinton, unfit to serve.
The 16 candidates the Republicans had,
whether you're a libertarian,
whether you're a limited government conservative,
whether you're a Heritage guy,
Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio,
all of them combined,
could not have beaten Hillary Clinton.
It took a blunt force instrument.
He understands that the modern world,
particularly the modern political world,
has become media.
The medium is the message, and he understands that.
That's why he can speak in a very plainspoken vernacular,
not in political speak.
He's an armor-piercing shell.
From the first day he came on the campaign in June of 2015
until today, the news cycle's Trump.
He has taken over people's brains.
That he has.
You could not be politically correct
and defeat the Clinton apparatus or the Clinton junta.
You need to be a blunt force instrument.
Do you really think that she is more corrupt
than say, President Trump?
I don't think Trump's corrupt. I don't think he's corrupt.
Now he's certainly-- I don't think he's corrupt.
He comes from outside the government.
He's a real estate guy.
You can be corrupt outside the government.
Has he been in lawsuits and had bankruptcies?
That's the real estate business.
One of the keys to the campaign was, giving people
permission to vote for him?
Right? At the end, I think there was up to, like, 15 to 18%,
some huge number, that had come to the conclusion
they didn't like either candidate.
That broke, I think, something like two-thirds to Trump.
These are people that voted that didn't like either candidate,
but picked the lesser of two evils,
or the agent of change.
What our job is, as a people,
is to tell the establishment,
the big money interests, the wealthy campaign contributors,
the Congress, is the status quo is not working
for working Americans, and we demand change.
If you had been Bernie Sanders' campaign director,
would he have won?
He would have definitely been taking on Donald Trump
as the Democratic nominee, there's no doubt about that.
Look at the crowds he was drawing.
It wasn't that he didn't have the enthusiasm.
Look what he did with the Millennials.
I can't tell you how annoyed my son is with me
for voting for Hillary in the primaries.
My God, you just crushed me. How did you do that?
How did you possibly vote for Hillary Clinton?
I'm kind of shocked now.
How could you possibly make Fog of War,
and how could you make, what, Known Unknowns,
how could you make this and then vote for Hillary Clinton?
-Because I was-- -We are...
You're asking me. It's a question!
We got to swap places now.
Yeah, because I was afraid of you guys.
I still am.
I thought that she was the best hope
of defeating Trump.
And Bannon.
I did it out of fear.
I don't know how better to describe it.
We're at the very beginning stages
of a very brutal and bloody conflict,
of which if the people in this room
and the people in the church do not bind together
and really for what I feel
is an aspect of the Church Militant,
to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs
but to fight for our beliefs
against this new barbarity that's starting,
that we will literally eradicate everything
that we've been bequeathed over the last 2,000 to 2,500 years.
But we are in an outright war
against jihadist Islam, Islamic fascism.
What I'd like to do is retrace how you became involved
in all of this,
from I guess the beginnings.
You're a filmmaker.
Then you're the executive chairman of Breitbart.
Then you're the head of the Trump campaign,
and then you're a central advisor
to the President of the United States.
It's quite a trajectory.
So let's go back to the beginning. How did this start?
You tell the story of the current war you're in
by talking about previous wars.
And I'll use Reagan as the insurance.
And I'll tell the story
about how we have to confront radical Islamic terrorism.
I said, "This is a real enemy.
It's a real enemy that can inspire,
just like in Twelve O'Clock High.
And so I made In the Face of Evilin 2004.
Ronald Reagan was the product
of the Hollywood studio system.
A system that took the story
of the immigrants and pioneers' efforts
to forge a country from a vast wilderness,
and turned it into a heroic struggle.
Order versus chaos, good versus evil,
translating western civilizations' legends
into simple stories that embodied the reluctant hero.
These stories defined what it meant to be a man,
what it took to be a hero.
That freedom is a fragile thing.
That evil is powerless if the good are unafraid.
When the film was shown
at this conservative Hollywood film festival,
it got like a 10-minute standing ovation
at the end, and some huge bear of a guy
comes barreling out of the audience and embraces me.
He says, "We've got to take the culture back
and culture's upriver from politics."
And I said, "Who is this guy?
This guy is like a giant of a man and full of life.
It was Andrew Breitbart.
For five years I didn't make a film,
and then I saw the financial crisis.
I came up with the idea of telling the story
to Generation Z.
We're going to make an avant-garde film
for right-wingers.
Now, history teaches
that usually third turnings finally issue
into a fourth turning.
And a fourth turning is the crisis.
And history shows that if an event
doesn't trigger a fourth turning,
a fourth turning leader will actually
encourage one to happen.
Or one will simply hit us
because of all the deferred public decisions
that weren't made during the recent third turning.
This comes to a head in the fourth turning.
I wanted to show it to conservative thought leaders
before we released it,
and so I went to see Andrew Breitbart.
He had started this blog site called Breitbart.
He said, "We're really trying to turn it into a business,
and I know you're an investment banker..."
And I said, "Look, if you ever need any help
putting together a business plan,
or just thinking about financing, let's talk."
He said, "I'd love to. I'd love to have somebody do that."
And so he said, "How about tomorrow?"
And I said, "Sure. Where are you guys headquartered?"
And he goes, "In my basement."
And we're sitting in the main room,
I hadn't seen a lot of activity.
It was an old blog site.
It was just kind of a rudimentary site,
that put up, you know, stories.
We were going to build an entire new site
that Andrew had thought through from scratch.
As often happens in life, we were late.
Andrew had a lot of changes. We needed 90 more days.
Now, the year before
Andrew had called in the middle of the night
and he said, "I feel like I got a Volkswagen on my chest."
He had genetic problems with his heart,
and he was in for four days and given
a whole regimen of things to do.
Of course, Andrew didn't do any of it.
Ho-ho! CPAC has got to go. Hey, hey!
Behave yourself!
-You are freaks and animals. -Chill!
You're freaks and animals! Behave yourself!
Behave yourself? Learn to behave yourself first.
Stop raping people! Stop raping! Stop raping!
Stop raping people!
Stop raping the people!
You freaks! You filthy freaks!
You filthy, filthy, filthy,
raping, murdering freaks!
We had this old warehouse.
He would work every night there until like 10 or 11 o'clock,
and there was a restaurant that was open until midnight
and he would go to the bar and have a quick bite to eat
before going home.
Sat next to a guy and has dinner,
paid his bill, shook this guy's hand,
walked outside to get his car
and dropped dead right on the street
in front of the restaurant.
Dead by the time he hit the pavement.
Talked to his widow Susie.
She said, "Hey, he's dedicated his life to this site.
On Sunday night at 8:00, make sure the curtain comes up."
And that was the beginning of the weaponized platform
that was the backbone of the populist media.
You have someone who comes along once in a generation.
He knew new media.
He had this strong sense of how people come to the news
in a different way.
And he really had this extraordinary vision
of what he wanted to do with Breitbart.
You also had some deeper understanding
of the Internet.
-Can we talk about IGE? -Yeah.
In the early 2000s,
Wall Street was already thinking through
this whole concept of alternative currencies
coming out of massively multiplayer video games.
World of Warcraft was one of them.
Gold is generated, or things are generated in that game,
and there's a massive aftermarket for it.
And so investment banks, sophisticated investment banks
like Goldman Sachs,
were always on the lookout for
what were alternative currencies?
We bought like 35 exchanges.
Thirty-five exchanges, what does that mean?
People need weapons, they need spells,
so the gold is an alternative currency.
The aftermarket trading of that is tens of billions of dollars.
If you went to Kowloon, if you went to Hong Kong
in the early days, you'd walk out,
it was a trading floor.
Of the 250 employees, 245 were young men.
They're in games, generating gold.
I became the interim CEO.
We were generating a tremendous amount of cash per month
and then all of a sudden
several million accounts were wiped off
by the game manufacturer.
The game manufacturer basically, said,
"If you show up with a social security number
or a country ID to show that you're a real person,
you get your gold back."
Well, that wipe off was,
let's say in the neighborhood of 90 million dollars.
This was just not an alternative currency,
it was a currency currency.
And so Stephen K. Bannon, you got us into this,
and now help sort it out.
And the one thing that struck me is...
because I'm not a video game person,
I've never played a video game in my life,
never played a video game.
And I said, "Wow,
people spend an awful lot of time in these video games.
35, 40, 45, 50 hours a week,
people with incomes of 75, 80, $100,000 with wives and kids."
Now I don't know that this happened or not,
but there's a guy, Dave,
in the accounts payable department.
He weighs 250 pounds.
He drops dead of a heart attack in his cubicle.
He's got a wife and two kids who don't really know him.
Some preacher from a church
or some guy from the funeral home that has never met him
does a ten minute eulogy, says a few prayers,
and they've got one of these perpetual cemeteries,
and Dave's urn goes down there.
And that's Dave.
Dave in the game, he's Ajax.
And Ajax is like the man.
When it comes to burying Ajax,
they're going to put him on a caisson,
and they're going to take it up for a funeral pyre,
and they're going to burn the digital Ajax.
There's literally thousands of people there.
Their rival group, that hates these guys,
attacks the funeral thing.
People are home playing the game,
and guys are not going to work
and women are not going to work, because it's Ajax.
Now who's more real,
Dave, in accounting, that's in the urn,
his analog self, or is it Ajax?
People take on these digital selves
that are a more perfected version of themselves
and where they can control things
in a digital way that they can't in the analog world.
Remember John Ford,
My Darling Clementine?
That's an idealized version of the American West.
That's what these digital communities provide to people.
That's what it provided to Ajax and not Dave.
Singing, "Shall We Gather at the River."
That eventually became my idea
for the comments section of Breitbart,
which built the Breitbart community,
and is not for the faint of heart.
This became more of a community than the city they live in,
or the town they live in, that the old bowling league,
the old Kiwanis Club, the old softball team
to a large extent was being replaced by this.
You brought the old bowling league to Breitbart?
It's like sedimentary rock.
The key to these sites was the comments section.
This could be weaponized at some point in time.
The angry voices
properly directed
have latent political power.
Caught the Republican Party completely unaware
and drove much of the momentum of Trump
and also added to the traffic of Breitbart
and to Breitbart's prominence and power.
He's very superstitious.
There was no concession speech written,
and there was no victory speech written.
Wouldn't do it.
I look very much...
forward to being your President.
And I can only say that while the campaign is over,
our work on this movement is now really just beginning.
Remember, at five o'clock in the evening.
we're told we're going to lose in a historic landslide.
I think on those exit polls
she wins something like 400 electoral votes
and the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court
and life is changed in perpetuity.
That's eight hours before.
Every newsroom is getting ready and they're all high-fiving
and Megyn Kelly's got that big smirk on her face,
like, "Oh, this is going to be over at eight o'clock."
You know, Miller and Bannon and the others at 2:30,
we're not sitting there saying, "Let's have a group hug."
Saying you know
We just did it, and now we're gonna march on the Capitol.
Throw out all of them,
I mean drop the hammer. That's how we won.
That's what people voted for.
And it was Donald Trump that said,
"I think what we ought to try to tonight
"is bring people together.
Let's de-escalate."
Couple days later,
the resistance is in the streets.
The signs and people are so upset about this thing.
He actually said, "I thought it'd be different.
I thought the New York Times
would be wishing me well and everything like that."
And I said, "You do understand they hate you.
They literally detest you.
Everything you ran on, everything you stand for...
everything you won on.
And the people that support you they detest.
This is gonna be trench warfare every day."
And by the way, I'm the enabler and I take great pride in it,
that just, "Here's what we ran on,
"here's what we said we're gonna do.
"Let's just do it. You're not a politician.
"You're a leader. Don't act like a politician.
"Just do it.
"Build the wall.
"Eradicate ISIS, right?
"Get manufacturing jobs back here.
"Confront China.
"Get us out of Afghanistan.
"Get us out of Iraq.
Just do what you said you're gonna do."
The inaugural address...
"American carnage," did you write that?
The President wrote that.
Come on.
It's President Trump's speech.
The only thing I told Miller
is we should have the podium turned around.
Trump should address it
to all the elites in Washington D.C. sitting in back of him.
If you look at the inner cities in this country,
if you look at the industrial heartland of this country,
there has been carnage.
Globalization has brought carnage with it.
And it's got to be called that.
The people that are most offended about that
is the mainstream media and the globalists.
Bush hated the speech.
He said later, "That thing's crazy" or something.
He made some really derogatory comment.
Everyone is listening to you now.
You came by the tens of millions,
to become part of a historic movement,
the likes of which the world has never seen before.
At the center of this movement
is a crucial conviction
that a nation exists to serve its citizens.
Americans want great schools for their children,
safe neighborhoods for their families,
and good jobs for themselves.
These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people.
But for too many of our citizens,
a different reality exists.
Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.
Rusted-out factories
scattered like tombstones across the landscape.
An education system flush with cash,
but which leaves our young and beautiful students
deprived of all knowledge.
And the crime and the gangs and the drugs
that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country
of so much unrealized potential.
This American carnage stops right here
and stops right now.
Do you ever see yourself
just hastening the end of everything?
I don't think we've hastened enough.
We're either going to make some fundamental changes
or you're going to have a revolution.
People say I'm apocalyptic. I think I'm just a rationalist.
I foresaw someone like Trump coming along.
People say, "Oh, this was so unexpected."
No, this wasn't unexpected. It was clear as daylight.
Can't you be an apocalyptic rationalist?
I am an apocalyptic rationalist.
I'm not an apocalyptic emotionalist. I'm a rationalist.
I'm saying, if we don't make changes,
we're going to have an apocalypse.
Let's make some changes.
Do you know what will happen to me
if the bridge is not ready in time?
I haven't the foggiest.
I'll have to kill myself.
What would you do if you were me?
I suppose, if I were you,
I'd have to kill myself.
Cheers.
It gets back to the concept of dharma, right?
It's his, it's his duty, his destiny, his fate,
and his obligation,
he thinks, to get his men through this.
I will create
civilization in the middle of the horrors of a prison camp
hundreds of miles from civilization.
Walking on the bridge
on the evening before it's finished,
he talks about his life in India,
talks about his life as an officer,
"What is this all about?"
He's really talking about dharma,
did I accomplish anything,
did my life have any purpose, did my life have any meaning?
His swagger stick falls out of his hand
and falls into the River Kwai,
and he says, "Oh, these are the thoughts that cloud one's head."
That's why I find the movies you've picked so interesting.
In many of them,
the hero has some utter collapse.
In Twelve O'Clock High,
Gregory Peck just...
It breaks him.
-It breaks him. -Yeah.
This is different.
Alec Guinness, in his desire to adhere
to the code of officer conduct,
actually loses sight of why he's there in the first place.
He realizes that the whole thing of the properness
and the Britishness and the what officers did
and everything like that,
it was ultimately to defeat their enemy, the Japanese,
and that's why he says, "What have I done?"
What have I done?
And he falls,
and it's his body that hits the detonator
and blows the bridge up.
Could you imagine yourself being in a similar position?
I think anybody could.
You have to call into question
and hold yourself personally accountable,
or you could end up like Colonel Nicholson.
You could realize,
hey, maybe this populist-nationalist movement
is more destructive than beneficial.
You have decisions.
General Savage had decisions
and Nicholson has decisions.
In the Judeo-Christian West,
we're made in the image and likeness of God.
We're fallen.
I was reading about Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost,
and I have to say that Lucifer, for me,
had certain Bannon-esque qualities.
He's the interesting character in Paradise Lost.
"Rather reign in Hell"
"Than serve in Heaven." Love that line.
I use it all the time.
-You do? -Oh, yeah, all the time.
There's a lot of truth to that.
I think it was on the 28th or 29th of December,
President Obama put sanctions on the Russians,
including this fairly dramatic
send 35 people home to Russia,
in reaction to interference in the 2016 campaign.
I thought it was...
unusual.
So all I said was,
"Let's have Trump see exactly what Obama saw,
and let him be briefed by the same people,
in the exact same presentation.
No more, and no less."
You're the one who asked for it?
I demanded it.
You see, to be fair to Donald Trump,
let's talk about the establishment.
Leave how fucked up all these guys think he is.
He's going to be President of the United States,
whether you like it or not.
And you have a responsibility to this country
and to its people to make sure
that it's a smooth transition.
What was agreed to, there would be a presentation.
I got DNI here, I got CIA here, I got NSA here,
I got my official staff, right?
That's a good effect.
I said, "Come on down. Let's see that presentation."
-The way I read it-- -Hang on, hang on, hang on,
hang on, hang on, hang on. Now you've got me worked up.
Now, turns out that Comey, the head of the FBI,
had a sidebar package,
It kind of felt like either a raw file
or what's in the very early stages of a field report.
And that's what I get upset about.
How come it's not an appendix in the presentation?
You know why it's not an appendix?
Because they were all set to leak this to the media.
And surprise, surprise.
What was it, 24, 48 hours later,
Buzzfeed launched it and then everybody did a story
about the story, which is the easy way out, the cheat.
Remember, I ran Breitbart.
I know the game.
A site like Buzzfeed got a little looser standards
than the paper of record. So they put it up,
and then the New York Times does a story about the story
and links to the whole thing, and then it's a global story.
Is that the way the establishment is supposed to roll?
Is that the game you want to play?
You want to play that game?
You don't think our institutions are rotten at its core?
Comey said that when Trump was apprised of the Steele dossier,
he was just interested in damage control.
Right. I think why it's unfair for Comey to say that,
you're presenting a guy that he's paying prostitutes
in a foreign capital to do these kind of perverse sex acts,
so I don't know.
I was speaking to him and briefing him
about some salacious and unverified material.
It was in the context of that,
that he had a strong and defensive reaction
about that not being true.
And my reading of it was,
it was important for me to assure him
we were not personally investigating him.
I was very, very much about being in kind of a
kind of a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation.
I didn't want him thinking that I was briefing him on this,
to sort of hang it over him in some way.
I was briefing him on it because we had been told by the media
it was about to launch.
And what about the weirdness of Trump
saying why he fired Comey
was because of Comey's handling of Hillary's emails,
and then backtracking.
I wouldn't even call it backtracking,
because backtracking indicates that you know
that you're backtracking,
and then just saying,
"Now I'm going to fire him
because he's getting obsessed with Russia."
Did you ask for a recommendation?
What I did is, I was going to fire Comey.
My decision. It was not--
You had made the decision before they came in the room?
I was going to fire Comey.
There's no good time to do it, by the way.
-They-- -Because in your letter you said,
"I accepted their recommendation."
-Yeah, well they also-- -You had already made the decision.
I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.
When I decided to just do it, I said to myself,
I said, "You know,
this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.
It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.
In the White House, I'm another schmendrick.
I'm just an advisor.
I'm just another voice around the table.
I would give the President my opinion with the bark on.
I said, "Director Comey should stay.
Finish out his investigation."
Just from a practical point of view, I saw it decelerating.
I mean, you could tell the reporters were tired of it.
There was no more squeeze in the lemon.
It just didn't have the juice.
Firing Comey doesn't mean the investigation's gonna stop.
The FBI's got an investigation.
And I said, "If you fire him two things are going to happen,
as night follows day."
Within a week,
they're going to name a special counsel.
And the special counsel's gonna have a writ
that's going to be so broad--
You're just not going to fire the head of the FBI
doing an investigation,
and they're just going to sit there and go, "OK, that's fine."
The institution of the FBI is gonna bleed you out...
because they have to.
It calls into question...
the institutions in this country and the establishment.
There has been, from the beginning,
a nullification project on the 2016 election.
And if they can't nullify it, at least question his legitimacy
so much that he can't govern.
People say, "That's the deep state, it's deep state."
It's not the deep state. That's the in-your-face state.
It's not a deep state.
It's sitting right there on the surface.
Bannon was CEO of the Trump campaign.
Now is seen as one of the most powerful people in the White House.
The force behind many of Trump's early moves, a member of the National Security Council.
To be clear, this has never been done before.
One of the most mysterious players
in the President's inner circle.
The puppet master behind President Trump.
A reputation as an influential,
behind-the-scenes string-puller.
This executive order has made Bannon
much more of a target in Washington.
His controversial views on Islam.
Stirring racial hatred in the United States.
Doubling down on increasing people's fear and hatred.
He's a stone-cold racist.
And his extreme political agenda remains deeply troubling.
The most powerful person in the White House right now,
including the President.
Were you the principal author of the travel ban?
Stephen Miller was one of the chief architects
of many of the initial executive orders.
I thought the extreme vetting executive order,
which you call the travel ban,
it's a very pragmatic thing about extreme vetting.
Look, it bothered me,
because I felt that it was inherently racist.
And this is "The Protection of the Nation
from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States."
We all know what that means.
I think the media completely overplayed that.
Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown
of Muslims entering the United States,
until our country's representatives
can figure out what the hell is going on!
We have no choice.
We did want to hit on day one
and just start to really flood the zone with executive orders.
It now is the hour of action.
The media can only handle, like, one thing at the time.
If you've given them five things a day,
right, three of them you can kind of get through.
The idea is they go into sensory overload?
Exactly. They do.
But you had the chaos at the airports.
People who have a legitimate purpose in this country
being excluded.
There's a certain kind of meanness and racism
at the heart of this.
You think it's racist?
I believe that this whole thing about walls and immigration
isn't really about economic populism.
I think it is about racism.
Do people really think that this border wall
is going to suddenly provide jobs for them?
No, I think they don't like Mexicans
or they don't like Arabs
or they don't like Jews.
Well, let's go to a distasteful subject,
Charlottesville.
It was a weekend of street battles
and stark displays of racism,
exploding into a deadly act of domestic terror...
Hundreds of white nationalists from across the country
descended upon the University of Virginia's campus,
ahead of a planned demonstration
to protest the removal of the statue
of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
You will not replace us.
You will not replace us!
Jews will not replace us!
You will not replace us!
Jews will not replace us!
Look, reasonable people
can disagree about the Confederate monuments.
The original protests of, I think we ought to put shrouds
on the statues of General Lee or General Jackson
or remove them, versus people that say,
"No, this is part of southern heritage and southern culture.
It's not racist, and they should be honored."
And guess what, there are decent on both sides of that argument.
White lives matter! White lives matter!
White lives matter!
Get them off of us! Get them off of John!
They're beating the fuck out of us! Get them off!
You go down to the next guys, these neo-Nazis or whatever.
Those guys, they have no standing,
OK, and when they show up they should be shut down.
They're bad guys, OK,
and they're a creation of the opposition party media.
They're meaningless in this Trump movement.
They're meaningless in the populist movement.
They're totally, completely meaningless.
Go, go, go, go.
Did you guys just see that? A car just plowed through
hundreds of people, downtown Charlottesville.
Holy...
We need the ambulances.
It's not conservative media that's giving them a platform.
It's the left media. It's MSNBC
and Huffington Post, you've got the left--
There is something incredibly perverse
about saying that neo-Nazis
are a creation of the mainstream media.
No, because they're a creation of how big and important
and how... a place they have.
They don't have any place.
At Breitbart News, Steve Bannon provided a platform
for alt-right groups
who have links to white supremacists.
A man who proudly promoted right-wing nationalism
inside the White House and beyond.
Can you tell us how you're feeling
about your chief strategist Mr. Bannon?
I never spoke to Mr. Bannon about it.
Can you tell us broadly what y- Do you still have confidence?
Well, we'll see. Look, look.
I like Mr. Bannon. He's a friend of mine.
But Mr. Bannon came on very late. You know that.
I went through 17 senators, governors,
and I won all the primaries.
Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that.
And I like him. He's a good man.
He is not a racist, I can tell you that.
He's a good person. He actually gets a very unfair press
in that regard.
But we'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon.
God save thee, my sweet boy!
Have you your wits? Know you what 'tis you say?
My King! My Jove.
I speak to thee, my heart.
I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.
I have long dreamed of such a kind of man.
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane.
But being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Presume not that I am the thing I was.
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
that I have turned away my former self.
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been, approach me,
and thou shalt be as thou wast,
the tutor and the feeder of my riots.
'Til then, I banish thee on pain of death,
as I have done the rest of my misleaders,
not to come near our person by ten miles.
Falstaff is the very human element of Henry V.
He really shows him what it is to be a full person,
takes him through the transition to manhood.
He's saying, "I am now the King of England,
and it's just not going to work."
I guess the irony is that the Trump-Bannon relationship?
I could see that in watching it, you know,
"banished from the kingdom."
Do you think that Falstaff was betrayed?
Not at all. I think if you go back to Twelve O'Clock High,
it's his Dharma.
That's his duty.
He is now the King of England. He's not the young man
who was unformed when Falstaff met him.
He understands that Falstaff can have no role in that.
I didn't take it personally.
I think the look on Falstaff's face at the end
is projecting that Falstaff understands that too,
that this had to happen.
This is the logical order of things.
I would never have interpreted it that way.
-How would you interpret it? -I saw it as a betrayal.
Why a betrayal?
Because Falstaff gave him everything.
He did give him everything,
but remember, Sir John Falstaff knows the entire time
that this guy is going to be the King of England.
It is almost like he's training Henry V.
Clearly at the end he thinks he's going to get,
as he tells his buddy,
"I ran the campaign.
Now I'm gonna be senior strategist, right?
I got a special deal."
And you're told you're not.
To look at Falstaff at the end, at least to me,
he understands that it's not really a betrayal.
It's the natural order of things.
The film is based upon the beginnings of the mutiny,
when the French soldiers said,
"We're not going to do this anymore."
They couldn't take being treated like animals.
That's the Deplorables right there.
The officers and the politicians
are all in these chateaus. They're having balls--
It's the Deplorables that are in the trenches,
living like rats, with rats.
I'd like to have those guys in the trenches make decisions.
But that's the problem, it's the elites making the decisions.
Think of all the bad decisions that have been made on globalism
by this kind of scientific
engineering-managerial- financial elite.
Look at where the country is.
Look at where working class people are.
Look where the middle class is,
particularly from the financial crisis.
People have been getting fucked.
It's as obvious as the nose on your face.
We have a consolidation of power.
We have a consolidation of wealth.
You have to tell the establishment,
"Go fuck yourself."
You just have to.
I call him the Fuck You President,
because all of those people,
all they've wanted to do is to say to people,
"Hey, you, go fuck yourself. Fuck You."
He's the Fuck You President.
You want healthcare? Fuck you.
You want clean drinking water? Fuck you!
Please.
What the little guy wants is to fuck you to the establishment.
I'm on a mission to try to remake the Republican Party
into more of a workers' party.
And some days we have good days and more days we have bad days.
It's not easy, because the money and the power's on their side.
But why channel people's hatred of the Other?
Your assumption is that it's something of the Other.
It is not about the other.
Everything that we've been focused on
is about American citizens.
This is not about the Other.
This is about maximizing the value of your citizenship.
President Trump's "economic nationalism"
does not care about your race, your religion, your ethnicity,
or your gender.
It doesn't care about your sexual preference.
It cares about one thing.
Are you a citizen of the United States?
I can tell you one thing after going all over the world.
History is on our side.
The globalists have no answers to freedom.
Let them call you racist.
Let them call you xenophobes.
Let them call you nativist.
Wear it as a badge of honor.
When I walk in,
eighty or ninety percent of the audience spits on the floor.
Because here you have this racist, nativist,
really bad guy.
If not for him Donald Trump wouldn't be president.
I hit them with the exact same punchline,
which I did with Front National and in Zurich.
You may be better fed, better clothed,
in better shape than 18th century Russian serfs,
but you're nothing but serfs.
You're not gonna own anything.
They've got you in this consumer environment
where you're always paying off your credit cards.
They've destroyed thrifts, so you can't save anything.
Saving doesn't make any difference.
And then digitally they've taken all your rights,
they've taken all your personhood,
and they've written these algorithms that treat you like--
Like a hamster.
You're totally controlled, absolutely, totally controlled.
I harken back to Twelve O'Clock High.
You can't fulfill your destiny.
You can't fulfill your dharma. You can't do it.
You're nothing but a serf.
You voted for that,
You're a reflective, smart person.
You actually thought about it and made a conscious decision.
Why? "Oh, I fear you. I fear Trump. I fear--" It's bullshit.
Just to clarify, my fear is that Trump represented nothing.
There's going to be a revolution in this country.
It's coming.
We can't kick the can down the road like this. We can't.
We're gonna have another financial crisis,
that everybody that's smart sees is coming.
What would revolution mean?
What are we talking about here?
A complete rejection of the system.
It's gonna cut like a scythe through grass.
It is coming.