Steve Bannon interview transcript from YouTube. Some highlights and interesting parts emphasized. The interview was conducted on March 17, 2019 during the making of the two-part January 2020 documentary series “America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump.” as part of Transparency Project of PBS|Frontline.
“… every financial crisis, I think, in at least modern history is always followed by some sort of populist—right? Now sometimes that devolves into fascism and other things.
We live in neofeudalism. This is not capitalism. This is where you have an underclass, right, a Lumpenproletariat almost that’s taken care of by the state; you have the very wealthy; and you have this kind of neofeudalist working class and middle class in the middle that pays for everything, and the guys at the top who we’ve socialized the risk
The transcript
So let’s just start with the back story, the Steve Bannon kid, the brawler, your brother said. In what way?
Well, I mean, it’s a—our neighborhood became, it was kind of, you know, white, working class, lower middle class, old, internal suburb of an old city, Richmond [Virginia]. So I was inside the city limits, very close to downtown, and it became predominantly black in the ’60s. And my parents, you know, wouldn’t leave; that was our neighborhood. So it was a pretty—you know, it was a fairly tough—the north side of Richmond is a fairly tough section of town, and you just kind of, you know, you just—I was raised in a working-class, Irish Catholic family, went to a military prep school, and I was just kind of a, you know, just—just raised to not back down. If you believe in something, you believe in something. And you can’t—if you show any weakness in a neighborhood—it’s quite Darwinian as a young person, right? If you show weakness, you’re going to just get picked on and bullied and all that. So you’ve got to—you’ve just got to—you just learn from the playgrounds, and you learn from the schools and the sports. You know, there’s no big, organized Little League or anything like that; everything was kind of inner-city baseball leagues or basketball leagues, etc. You just learn you’ve got to stand up for yourself, and you’ve got to fight. And if you fight, people give you some space. And if you don’t fight, it’s just… you know, it’s not a great life. So it was just—and it was—and it wasn’t any big deal. It was kind of like breathing air.
So I remember the story about your dad that you told that almost felt like one switch gets turned on, and young Steve Bannon—you’re a grownup by then, but it goes to this idea of trust, trust in the government, trust in your company, trust that your dad had in his retirement accounts.
Well, look, we’re Irish Catholic. The Catholic Church, the Bell— my grandfather and father I think are the only two guys in the history of the Bell System to be both 50-year employees. My grandfather worked there 50 years as a lineman and a PBX [Private Branch Exchange] guy, and my dad was 50 years, started in the sewer pulling cable and worked for 50 years. So as a father and son worked 50 years for the phone company. You had these big institutions. I was fortunate enough to be raised in a great time in America, right, the ’50s and ’60s. But you believed in these big institutions: the Catholic Church, the phone company. And these were, you know, permanent fixtures in your life, and it was kind of that stability. I came from a neighborhood that was a little bit tough, but it was not like—it was a very solid, great background. As I go throughout the world and meet these very wealthy people I deal with all the time and see their kids, the greatest thing you can give a kid is that kind of basic, core, loving family that’s there and rock-solid. So the family, the church, the community, the phone company, these are institutions. And so institutions are everything. It’s a very institutional life when you think about it, and quite hierarchical. But it gives you a set framework that you can grow and be— you know, get to be an adult, and there’s a real sense of, you know, something that’s solid there, something that’s real. I think that’s what broke down the financial crisis. I mean, my father would rather— he would tell me stories back in the Depression about one of the things about his father working at the phone company is that they never laid anybody off during the Great Depression. My dad was born in 1921, and as a very young person, he remembers all the neighborhood fathers got let go. His dad still had a job; the phone company didn’t let anybody go. He also told stories about the, you know, borrowing against—they had like one or two shares of stock, which was everything, and they would borrow against the stock to like buy the house and buy— I think the house cost like 2,500 bucks or something in the ’30s to build. They borrowed against their AT&T stock. AT&T, the Bell System, incentivized working-class people to put X amount of their income away and actually become a shareholder. And being a shareholder in the phone company, that’s where my dad’s entire net worth was. And so, when, after the collapse, a couple days after the collapse, when Cramer went on TV, Jim Cramer went on TV on CNBC and that morning just goes, “Hey, if you need cash in like, the next five years of your life”—I mean, he’s in a full panic. If you watch the video it’s quite shocking. It’s shocking CNBC actually let him on. But he’s sitting there going, “If you need cash in the next five years, you’ve just to sell everything and go to cash, because we don’t know where the bottom of this is.” And two days later—I remember, I’d been at Goldman Sachs, and my dad asked me my opinion. A couple days later he sold all of his AT&T. He would have sold his stock in the Catholic Church before he sold his stock in AT&T. And he sold his stock. And that—that struck me as that this is a crisis of the institutions of our country, right? This is a—this is a massive—we now have an institutional crisis. When guys like Marty Bannon, who the country’s—kind of this Steady Eddie guy who the whole thing is to raise a family, to be there for the family, to be there for his community, he’s the kind of—these are the kind of building blocks that society, civic society’s built upon. When guys like that are questioning the system and dumping their ownership in the system, the system can’t go on like that. You’re now in a real crisis.
It felt to me when we were watching—we made a number of films about it, and one of the— one of the things that happened in the cascade, because we make political films, we were thinking about— let’s talk about Sarah Palin, for example, somebody who could identify in some way what that was, what that fear and that anger was, probably in your dad and lots of dads and moms all over the country. …
That’s one of the reasons I came back. You know, I was actually living in Shanghai at the time. I was living in the French Concession, spending most of my time there. I had a—I had a massive multiplayer video game company that had a big Asian presence in Hong Kong, Kowloon, South Korea and in China…. So I was living there. Came back because I thought there were some financial problems. I was going to sell real estate. But then my sister pointed me to this woman, Sarah Palin, who’d just been named—was going to be the vice president. I actually went to the Republican convention as— just with a filmmaking guy, the guy who produced The Passion of the Christ, Steve McEveety, and went to the—and saw something unique in Palin and saw her go round. People forget. When the financial crisis, when Lehman was put into bankruptcy, which was put into bankruptcy, I think, on the morning of Sept. 15 in London, right, and then it cascaded down, the smartest guys in the room didn’t realize that the commercial paper market, the global commercial paper market, which is the way that every company in the world gets its working capital to kind of, you know, make payroll and to pay for the lights going on and for the janitors and for everything that’s pay— you know, GE, the biggest companies of the world, the commercial paper market, every day you’re selling commercial paper to provide working capital. When that froze up on the morning of the 15th, the whole system froze up. On that date, Sarah Palin and John McCain, I think, were up one point in the Gallup Poll on Barack Obama; that people forget, Palin came with such force out of that thing for the first two weeks before she started to be kind of destroyed, they were on fire. It was, in that sequence of events that week, I think talks about the corruption of our institutions, and I think it talks about how the elites are comfortable with decline. Remember, on that Thursday morning—Monday, it goes into bankruptcy. By Thursday, there’s a crisis that nobody knows what’s going on in this commercial paper market. The whole way that the whole entire global system is financed is now frozen up. And that’s when you have [Chair of the Federal Reserve Ben] Bernanke and [Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson, who are not alarmists, particularly not Bernanke, and he’s an expert— remember, he’s an expert in the Great Depression. That’s his claim to fame; that’s what his Ph.D. is in. They go to the Oval Office to go see Bush, and they have a meeting, and they tell him, hey— and we know all of this by congressional testimony later. So these are the facts. They go to him and say: “Hey, by 5:00 today, we need a trillion dollars of cash infusion into the system, or the American financial system will collapse in 72 hours. The world financial system will collapse 48 hours after that, and we will have global anarchy and chaos.” And Bush goes: “That’s interesting, but we’ve kind of— the White House counsel said we’ve kind of checked the Constitution. I don’t really have authority to do that. You’ve got to go over to Capitol Hill. It’s kind of their problem.” And so they go up to Capitol Hill. They go to Nancy Pelosi’s office in the afternoon, and they had the same meeting. In fact, they’ve got to keep their—they’ve got to keep their Blackberries outside it’s so confidential. And they talk in there about they need this cash infusion. That’s when, you know, Hank Paulson gets on his knees to Nancy Pelosi and makes some sort of pitch to her. … The country’s in literally—what the Germans and the Japanese military and the Soviets, what nobody could ever do to us, Osama bin Laden, nobody, we’ve now done to ourselves. We have literally caused a financial crisis that will bring down the entire system in 72 hours. The biggest revolutionaries that have gone after the United States could never dream of what we had done to ourselves. And so that began a cascade of—and here’s the thing. Nobody, nobody’s ever been held accountable for it. Nobody’s ever taken responsibility for it. And it just kind of—that’s why, you know, we have never recovered. We’ve never recovered from that catastrophe.
Somebody’s been held accountable, which is probably why we have Donald Trump sitting in the White House now. It’s conceivable to me—and you and I can talk about it— what happens politically among the group that become the “deplorables” to Hillary Clinton, the “forgotten” to Donald Trump— …
The bang that went off on Nov. 9 of 2016 at 2:30 in the morning was lit in the Oval Office on Sept. 18 of 2008. It was lit right in that room.
Why?
It was lit, that fuse, that long fuse that has this populist explosion exploded. But every financial crisis, I think, in at least modern history is always followed by some sort of populist—right? Now sometimes that devolves into fascism and other things. But every time there’s a financial collapse—and remember, this is the biggest financial collapse in the country’s history. This is bigger than—this is bigger than the Great Depression. This is bigger than the one in the 1870s that caused such a big problem. This is bigger than the one that caused the Federal Reserve [sic] in the early 20th century. This is the biggest financial collapse in American history. And this was one that was not done just by simple Ponzi schemes. This was done by an organized, thought-through effort of the financial and corporate elites that— remember, the scams pulled off here are absolutely outrageous. … And so that’s why you had this immense collapse. You had so many of the elites making so much money. Then when it collapsed, they wanted the taxpayers—the whole thing of the trillion dollars. … The Federal Reserve didn’t call all the financial institutions together and corporations and say: “Hey, boys, we’ve got a problem, right? This is a problem, and we need to pass the hat. You’ve got to cough up some cash.” That trillion dollars was from Marty Bannon.
They hit “print,” right?
They hit “print,” hit “print,” but the guy’s who’s going to pay for it is the little guy. … We live in neofeudalism. This is not capitalism. This is where you have an underclass, right, a Lumpenproletariat almost that’s taken care of by the state; you have the very wealthy; and you have this kind of neofeudalist working class and middle class in the middle that pays for everything, and the guys at the top who we’ve socialized the risk, that trillion dollars of infusion, right? Remember, the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve on the morning of Sept. 18, 2008, when they’re in the Oval Office talking, is $880 billion. The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve on Jan. 17, or Jan. 20 of 2017, when Donald Trump raises his hand, is $4.5 trillion. The most progressive president in the history of our country, President Obama, saved the wealthy, and here’s how they did it. [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner, they just turned on the taps of liquidity. We call it—the technical term is “quantitative easing.” The not-technical term is called bailing out the people who are guilty, OK? Essentially, if you owned anything, you had the greatest 10-year run in history.
Wait, wait, wait. … Let’s move to the TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] vote and whether you think— so now all of that is happening.
You have to do TARP, the first one you have to do. You know why? Your fiduciary—when a guy like Bernanke walks in and says, “I need a trillion dollars,” right, you don’t have time to debate. History’s going to look at you. When he says, “The American financial system’s going to collapse in 72 hours and the world financial system two days after that, and you’re going to have global anarchy,” there’s not a person on earth—I don’t want to hear these libertarians and all these, you know, free mar—“Oh, let capitalism take place.” No. When they come in and ask for the first trillion in an emergency, I believe you have to say: “OK, we’ve got to do it. I don’t know what went on here, but if you tell me this is going to save me and at least get down the road, I’ll do it.” But remember, that’s the first trillion. We kept on for another $3.5 trillion. $3.5 trillion. This is just bailing out the people that caused the problems. Got to think about it for a second. You know, Goldman Sachs didn’t lose any equity. None of the partners really missed any bonus payments. GE’s still in business, AIG. It all still exists, all the donors, OK? The reverse side of this, remember, there is a corollary to this that’s quite powerful. And we know from the notes of the Federal Reserve, a guy named Richard Fisher, the governor— the president of the Federal Reserve of Dallas, argued this in the room constantly. He said by doing this quantitative easing, which you’re just flooding the zone with liquidity, we will save the institutions, and we will save anybody that’s a big real estate holder or hedge fund or bank. But he said, there’s a huge reverse here. Number one, savings accounts are going to go to zero-interest rates. Savings accounts are going to go to zero. So 5,000 years of the Western tradition—back to the Marty Bannons— which is be a good householder, get a wife, get a mortgage, get some kids, and you save your money. Well, now, if you save money, you’re a sucker, because it’s broken the trust. That’s the trust that’s broken. If you save money, you’re a jerk because you’re not going to get any interest paid. In fact, the bank’s going to charge you. So there’s been no—you can’t—you can’t put money away to save into the system. Number two, the pension funds. The pensions funds are going to be destroyed. Today we have a $9.5 trillion gap between the obligations of the pension funds and what we’ve earned off the pension funds. Why? Because it went to zero-interest rates, and the bonds they can buy have no juice in them. right? The other thing is public schools and all this. Even communities that are not leveraged can’t issue bonds because there’s no juice in the bonds, because of negative interest rates, 1.5%. We’ve essentially put the burden of the bailout on the working class and middle class. That’s why nobody owns anything. But the millennials today are nothing but 19th-century Russian serfs. They’re better fed; they’re better clothed; they’re in better shape; they have more information than anybody in the world at any point in time, but they don’t own anything. They’re not going to own anything, OK? And they’re 20%—if you mark in time against their parents, they’re 20% behind in their income, and there’s no pension plan in the future. They’re all gig economy. We’ve literally destroyed the middle class in this country. OK— And both political parties, by the way, this is not about Republicans and Democrats. This is the way the system works, and this is the way the system comes together to protect itself and to move itself forward, OK? Because nobody understands even the rudimentaries of finance, right? And they keep the public kind of economically illiterate, right? This allows to go on. And now we’re in that crisis, that crisis, what Trump understood—
Wait, don’t go to Trump yet. So we’ve created this world of unhappy people. The middle class is shrinking and destroyed in lots of ways. We’re going to catch back up with it in a minute. But now let’s go to you, Breitbart, coming here, coming out of—out of Los Angeles, coming to Washington with what kind of a plan, what kind of an idea? What was Breitbart in Los Angeles, and what does Breitbart become in Washington?
Andrew was, had been Matt Drudge editor. He’d been one of the launch editors for Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post. He always had a vision of what a news site could be. At the time, he was a blog, right? People kind of posted stuff; there were citizen journalists. Andrew had this big vision of what a real news site could be. We were the blog kind of for the Tea Party. This Tea Party energy, you know, right after the financial collapse, in the spring of the next year, in fact, Rick Santelli had this rant, this very famous rant, that took place when the first TARP thing was being talked about. And he was basically saying, “Hey, all the working-class people are paying for this, right?” That rant initiated these group of kind of disparate people to have a meeting and basically have people come out on April 15, on Tax Day, April 15 at 2009. That was the beginning of the Tea Party. And Andrew saw very quickly, as I saw, that there was this real populist power in this; that this was something totally different. This wasn’t—this was not standard Republican Party. This was a whole new deal. And so we started covering that, and Breitbart kind of became the blog site for that. Andrew wanted to do a news site. We were able to raise some money. And in 2011, we closed on the money, and we decided that the center of gravity of our political coverage had to be in Washington, D.C. And we leased this house right in back of the Supreme Court, and we called it the “Breitbart Embassy.” And the reason was, we were an embassy in a foreign capital, right, because everybody told us— I mean, we were lectured by guys saying: “You’re not going to have any access. You’re going to have to play the game to get access.” And we kind of said: “Hey, we’re just going to kick down doors. How about this? We’re going to be totally different.” And so we called this place the Embassy for the simple reason that, you know, we thought we were in an embassy in a foreign capital; that this was owned and run by the permanent political class. And so a handful of people, like Peter Schweizer and others, Matt Boyle and Andrew, we started this news site. Now, unfortunately, Andrew died, tragically, you know, four days before the site was to be launched. He was working 20 hours a day to build the site, to perfect it. He had these—he was quite a visionary when it came to new media and how people accessed information. And so the whole site you see today was really his creation. He created every component piece of it, including how news … flowed through the system, how we promoted things, etc. And so that was this kind of rowdy—and remember, one thing, decision we made very fundamentally— and I kind of was, I think, a big influence on Andrew on this—I said, “Look, attacking [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, we’re so far removed from having any influence over that,” because at this time we were a very small site. I said: “We’re the populist, you know, kind of economic nationalist part of this. Let’s attack the real enemy. And the real enemy’s the Republican establishment. What we’re going to do is just go after the House leadership. We’re going to go after the [Sen.] Mitch McConnells; we’re going to go after the donors. We’re just going to go hard at kind of this kind of [Rep.] Paul Ryan philosophy.
Why did you think [Speaker of the House John] Boehner and [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor were vulnerable?
Because they were vulnerable, because of the huge disconnect. Remember, the one thing the Democrats, they have lined up— they have actually, at least till here recently, donors and their base kind of line up. The Republican Party’s totally dysfunctional. It’s essentially a working-class party. The votes all come from working-class or lower-middle-class people predominantly, right? And it doesn’t represent their interests. There’s a book written by a guy called What’s the Matter with Kansas?, where he kind of walks through how the— the donor class, the Singers and the Kochs, these kind of libertarians, have this entirely different concept, this kind of Austrian school of economics concept, that the political apparatchiks— remember, the consultant class, the political class around it and the donors all line up perfectly. Unfortunately, you’ve got a working-class party that—for instance, trade. You know, mass illegal immigration, which the chamber of commerce pushes all the time, and more legal immigration and trade are just two sides of the same coin, right? The two sides of the same coin, it’s suppression of workers’ wages, OK? Mass illegal immigration is to flood the zone against predominantly black and Hispanic working class so that you’ve got unlimited, you know, unlimited labor pool, and you can keep wages down for higher margins. Immigration and the H-1B visas are the same thing in the tech area, that you don’t have to hire American citizens; I can do it with these visas to increase margins. Trade is the same thing. Trade is just you’re competing against foreign labor and foreign countries unfairly. And so all of it is to suppress workers’ wages and to have higher margins; therefore, higher stock prices; therefore, more wealth, of which the workers don’t own any piece of. And so our thesis was not just the cultural stuff but the economic stuff. You have an ability to re-form this Republican Party and make it a true populist entity.
But they weren’t going to let that happen. They were going to resist that in almost—
They did, and we took them down. We took down Cantor. Remember, we took down Cantor with Dave Brat. The first time in the history of the republic that a sitting majority leader had ever been beaten. Remember, he was beaten in a primary that— Cantor was up here in D.C. on the day of the primary and schlepped down there the last night. Fox News, when they came on last [sic] night, didn’t even know Dave Brat’s name. This was an unknown. And we had worked it with Laura Ingraham. I mean, we had been—Breitbart had been all over this. We had Dave Brat on our radio show, I think, every week for the 10 weeks’ run-up to the election. We saw real vulnerability.
Did you know it was coming?
You definitely knew it was coming. That was—also happened to be my home district, but I could feel it. I knew that that a guy like Brat—they were very weak; they were very weak. They didn’t have a grasp, and this Tea Party revolt was picking up. You had the—you had the—you had the huge Tea Party revolt in 2010, which we won 62 seats. The Republican Party didn’t see that coming. That was all grassroots-oriented, which played out over time. Remember, today, the 2000—really, Obama’s ’08 and particularly the primaries in 2010 I think changed American politics pretty fundamentally, because the concept got to be mobilization versus persuasion. I don’t believe we live in an era of persuasion anymore. People are so saturated with this all day long, they kind of know where they come out. You’ve just got to motivate them to get out there and vote. You’ve go to motivate them to go door to door. So the ’08 Obama primary that completely caught Clinton by surprise was all about mobilization. The 2010 Tea Party, particularly the House part of it, that was absolutely, you know, the biggest in the history, I think, since the Great Depression, 1932, was about mobilization. That’s why Romney didn’t want to have anything to do with it in ’12, right? He washed his hands of it. And that’s why in this very room in January of 2013, they had this huge— this huge controversy between—the Republican Party did the “autopsy.” They said, “Oh, the reason that—the reason that Romney lost was because we didn’t reach out to the Hispanic community; we didn’t talk about DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals]; we didn’t talk about, you know, open borders, immigration policy.” And a young guy named Stephen Miller, who’s on the staff, he’d been with [Rep.] Michele Bachmann for the Tea Party revolt, we were very close to. Stephen Miller and [Sen.] Jeff Sessions and myself had a dinner in this very room basically the same week that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes had this dinner with [Sen. Chuck] Schumer and [Sen. Marco] Rubio in New York to talk about the Gang of Eight bill. And we just came down and looked at this. There was a lawyer at Hunton & Williams in Richmond, that wrote a three-part piece, I believe it was, for RealClearPolitics. His name is Sean Trende. He looked at the same analysis coming out of 2012, which remember, all the donors thought Romney was going to win in a landslide. He looked at the same thing and said, “The inability of the Republican Party to connect with working-class voters is the single biggest reason that they’re not winning.” And that’s where Sessions and I talked about, we’re going to take trade from number 100, right? It’s not an issue. The whole Republican Party’s got this fetish on free trade—they’re like automatons, “Oh, free trade, free trade, free trade”—which is a radical idea, particularly when you’re against a mercantilist opponent like China. So we’re make trade from number 100 to number two, and we’re going to take immigration number three to number one. The one and two issues will be immigration and trade. And that will be focused on workers, right? And we’re going to remake the Republican Party. In fact, I’d—
Wait a minute. That’s like the anti-autopsy result.
180%. Autopsy—and I told Reince [Priebus] later, to his face, it was a total joke and another donor-driven lie, OK? No statistics in the victory in 2016 showed that. And by the way, all the guys in the verticals, the Jeb Bushes and the Marco Rubios and all these other guys, Chris Christie, all the geniuses and their staffs all bought into the autopsy, remember. They thought we were crazy. You know, we had Palin in ’08 and hoped that she’d run in ’12, and she just—she—it just didn’t work out. I actually worked with Lou Dobbs and tried to get Lou Dobbs to run in ’12 as a populist, because it was Lou Dobbs’ economic ideas on his TV show all the time, particularly China and immigration and trade, and Lou Dobbs, for a host of reasons, didn’t do it. And here I actually tried to talk Sessions into doing it. I told Sessions, just like I told Palin: “You’re not going to be president of the United States. But remember, if we win the primary—and you will win the primary—you control the Republican apparatus; you take over the RNC [Republican National Committee] for the whole next cycle. You can turn the RNC; you can turn the Republican Party into a worker-based party. The goal is to get control of the party. You’re not going to win the presidency against this. That will take time.” And Sessions goes—I remember, he said—it was about five hours. We walked down to his front steps, and he said—he turns to me and goes, “It’s not me; I’m not going to do it,” he says. “But our guy will come along. We’ll find our guy.” And that guy a couple years later turned out to be Donald Trump.
So you go hunting for a guy? And you’re banging them hard. You’re banging Boehner and everybody else hard on the front page of Breitbart. Constantly. So help me with the understanding of the growth of Breitbart through those two years while you’re—
I think when Andrew—I think when Andrew passed away, the night we opened the site, I think if you go back and check, I think we were at 10 million—I think we were at 10 million uniques—excuse me, we were 10 million page views a month. I think we were a million and a half uniques. I think the total time on site, total time was 90 seconds, and 70% of our traffic was coming from Drudge, OK? At the height of the game. I think later in August, when I left in August of 2016, I think we were, you know, 300 million page views a month, 40 million uniques, people staying on site five minutes. It was a whole different deal.
Why?
Combination of—combination of we were—number one, we were—Andrew’s site, it was news, not opinion. We didn’t put any—our opinion was in the news.
Yeah.
Well, look, it’s like the editorial page of The New York Times is on the front page. If The New York Times didn’t publish, CNN would be a test pattern every day, OK? That’s the—look, it’s all partisan. It all comes from what I call an angle of attack. We’re partisans, you know? And we put—and we put it right into our news. And people read it and know it. The facts are the facts. You can dispute the facts, but the angle of attack is right in there. So it was going to be hard-hitting, populist, nationalist. We were going to have—we’re going to have heroes and enemies.
Who’s reading it? Who’s reading that then?
… We caught on with this kind of working-class, middle-class audience. We made the stuff very intelligent. We had these radio shows that were listener-based. We just—we got people engaged. The comments section, which is not for the uninitiated, I took off almost virtually all controls on the thing. We had monitors to stop the really bad guys, but I got lit up more. The reason that all the conservative media had gotten away from comments is that most of the comments are attacking the writers and the editors. And, you know, we took it off and said, hey, we’ll build a community here. And it was the comments section that started to build some of the power of Breitbart, coupled with we were just smarter. We had amazing search-engine optimization. It was a merger of technology and content. Search-engine optimization. And particularly I had an entire team that did nothing but deconstruct the algorithms of Facebook. Without Facebook, Breitbart could have never gotten to the size it got. … You saw the Harvard study where we were the most powerful news organization in 2016. That was all by design. We’d literally focused on being able to deliver a punch, OK? And we did it, just like the guys at Harvard said. We did it by understanding Facebook, understanding search-engine optimization, maximizing the technology part of it, and also comments to build community, have people have ownership in this, right?
Well, and also understanding that there was a division in America, and half the division didn’t have a voice.
This whole thing on division, too, this is—it’s the taproot of democracy. What you want is engagement, OK? The left was doing it with Talking Points Memo and everything. You want engagement. We just had in ’18 a midterm election, 113 million people voted. Democracy in America has never been more robust. And one of the reasons it’s robust is you’ve got these sites like Breitbart, and on the left you’ve got Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post, that have people engaged; they have people buying in; they have people passionate about this, OK? Now it’s permeated not just political culture, because of Trump and now people like AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], etc.; it’s permeated popular culture. We now have the most engaged political—the country is all about politics. Every dinner party you go to, every conversation you have, Saturday Night Live, all the late-night comics. If you look back at Johnny Carson’s era and you look back at the Tonight Show and all this, he’d have maybe a few jokes about Reagan and stuff at the beginning, but now the heart of the nightly setup of [Jimmy] Kimmel and all the Tonight Show and all that, is politics. And why is that? You now have people that are engaged. They’ve bought in. And it’s aspirational. It’s part of their—it’s part of their lifestyle. It’s like you wear a certain brand of shirt, you have a certain brand of politics. And this is what I mean by mobilization. We’re not in an era of persuasion anymore. Everybody—there’s so many—since the social media had disintermediated the traditional media aspects— and that’s one of the things Andrew understood—is that now it’s part of your life. It’s an aspirational lifestyle brand that you’re either a progressive Democrat, a reactionary Republican, a Trump guy wearing a red hat, or somebody that believes in AOC and thinks Trump’s a devil. That’s all fine. You’ve bought into that, and that’s where you go. So people say it’s divided. Yes, the country’s been divided before, and people have got to come at this and make their own decision. But it’s very divided. And the media has definitely added to that by reinforcing and also presenting to people the news in a certain way.
Fantastic, so thank you. That section’s done.