>> it's your radio station in the nation's capital the cover 6 million people. heavily automobile commute city and it will just extend our brand and give people involved in the process here at chance to listen to it. that's how it happened. it was that simple. >> c-span radio, marking 20 years of public affairs programming from the nation's capital. listen to "the washington journal" live each morning beginning at 7 a.m. eastern and here recaps of political events on "washington today." and get the latest from congress, the administration, and in organ events from across the nation. c-span radio app's available in washington, on 90.1 fm, on our website, c-span.org, or by downloading the free c-span radio app. hear historyre you unfold daily.

♪ announcer: this week, on "q&a," magazine"times contribute in writer wil hylton. , he talks about his featured story about breitbart news and the journalists who worked there. brian: wil hylton, i saw a piece in 2015 that said the idea of skipping college might seem outlandish to some, but not to wil hylton. what is that about? wil: i got into this business 26 years ago. it was a quite young introduction to the field. my interest began young. i knew that i wanted it to do

this for a living by the age of 12. by the time i was 16 and in the public high school system in baltimore, there was an internship program, a work-study program. i do not know who submitted my name for it, i did not apply. i was the editor of the high school newspaper, and i did not think you could do both. but someone applied for me. someone signed me up to go to the baltimore sun and and do this work-study program. within three months of getting there, the job is really to touch copy and pick things up on the side.

there was a bi-out. half of the stuff left. suddenly, there was a situation -- where is the intern? can he write? so i was publishing stories as a 16-year-old. by 1992, i had a thick portfolio of feature articles. that had appeared, some of that on the front page of the features section and even with call-out boxes on the front page of the newspaper the this was sufficient to go to other newspapers across the country and get internships or paying jobs. during the same time, i leveraged the baltimore sun writing to obtain a page in a weekly paper of the baltimore times. one of the two black papers in town. so, i wrote an opinion column the same year, 16 or 17 years old, and edited other news related to youth events in

baltimore. and, it just clicked in the way i hoped it would when i was even younger. i did a couple of colleges here and there, always was working for the local paper wherever i was taking classes. i was back in baltimore, working at baltimore magazine, contributing articles. news articles to a local paper and i got a full-time job, and it seems like, i have the job i want, i am not going to continue with this sort of halfhearted attempt of university. i am not sure i would recommend the same approach to my kids. in fact, i am on the board for an mfa program. i go around telling other people what to do for their masters theses when i don't even have an undergraduate degree. i think the best thing to do is to learn this trade from people who have done it before and made

mistakes. but i learned it by making all the mistakes myself. brian: we have a cover story in the new york times magazine back in august that we ask you to talk about. it came out at an interesting time. it is called "breitbart goes to the white house." if my numbers are right, it came out two days after steve bannon resigned from the white house. wil: i think it was a few days before he resigned, and a couple days after charlottesville. brian: what was your assignment on writing this piece? wil: it is a complicated question, because over the last six years at the new york times magazine, where i am a contributor, i have a long-term relationship with them, i will write may be four cover stories

per year. something like that. i mean, that is a full workload. these articles take months to put together. the framework and boundaries are extraordinarily vague and loose. often, when i am beginning a story, i do not even know what the story is about. when i began this story, i was just kind of interested in the way the media was behaving in the trump presidency. this was after the inauguration. i was bewildered by what i found in the white house briefing room. the room itself is marvelous. built on top of a swimming pool. i am sure you have spent your fair share of time there. it is kind of mildew and moldy-smelling. it is not at all the environment

one imagines from watching the briefing on television. the fox anchor, chris wallace, said, man this place stinks. it stinks in its own way, but it also literally has a malodorous quality. i was interested in how many people had started to come to this awful place. because since the trump presidency, the number of reporters attending the briefing at least double. if you go back, you can observe this just from looking at photos taken from the angle of the podium looking back at the crowd. during the obama years, you saw plenty of room.

even room for reporters to sit down. in the trump briefings, sean spicer was giving them when i was there, the room was so crowded that it is a good thing it is on federal property, because i do not think the d.c. fire code would have permitted it. i mean -- you get these sort of surges and the crowd and if you sit too close to the doors you get pushed outside onto the white house lawn.

it was wall-to-wall people. i was fascinated by how those people work. i started going around -- first i was informally interviewing cameramen. they are the folks who have been year after year after year. a lot of them had been there 30 years, they had seen everything. they were able to comment on the new tenor of the environment. they could also point out specific people. for example, there was a very serious young guy who was there who runs his own small website. he is sort of a blogger. he is able to get into the white house briefings. from what i could tell, he has never published anything that you would consider a professional, commercial, news publication. yet he managed to get in there. there was another guy who was with sputnik. it is a russian propaganda machine. he was there working for the russian government to report back what was going on in the

white house. it was a remarkable environment. but one of the things that really caught my eye was the main white house correspondent for breitbart news is in his early 30's. that who is on the cover. right, looking very sharp in his shades and talking on his cell phone outside the white house. brian: was that photograph taken -- did he pose for that? wil: i believe he did. we tried to drum up a scenario where we could get a picture of him in front of the white house without going through a whole lot of hoops. i think what ended up happening was a photographer went in with a white house press pass, and charlie went in with his, and on the way in they posed. in took the shot. it is quite a protocol to stage a photo shoot in front of the white house. it is much easier for someone with a camera to just take a picture of someone with a press

pass. so i think that was done fairly quickly. i do not know if he was told to let the phone of quickly and make it look like an action shot or if in fact he actually was taking a call. but charlie is an interesting guy. he has been a white house correspondent for breitbart since before the presidency. but under this administration, breitbart is stepping up. stepping up its white house credentialing. they had a battle with the white house correspondents association about whether they qualify and able to have passes. in the meantime, what they have been doing is getting temporary

credentials for four reporters to go in. and so i watched charlie training people, breitbart people, on how to kind of navigate the internal politics of the white house reefing room. so i thought, maybe this story is all about the white house briefing room and the correspondents association and things like that, but through this interloper who has this enormous power. at least at that point, i thought, if breitbart has this unique quality of being both sides of the white house podium, steve bannon and others. julia, sebastian, have moved into the west wing as employees at now there were going to be five reporters as their representatives. brian: we want to show some video of the man that started it. nnow deceased, but the fellow who started it first off. [video clip] >> i have a website, breitbart.com, which is a news aggregation source. i did not want to brand myself, but my father-in-law said i was crazy not to do it in my name. i do not regret it. but what i wanted to do was create a news organization from the bottom up. [end video clip] brian: his father-in-law was orson bean.

when did he die, and why did he start the publication? wil: he had started a series of discreet websites. they were individual sites that linked to each other's stories but not under one umbrella. they were big hollywood, government, media. he decided in 2012 to merge that all into breitbart.com. all the news would then become vertical rather than standalone sites. then he died, right before it came to pass. brian: in his early 40's. wil: yeah, just dropped dead. conspiracy theorists think it was because -- he left a great merger into a single website that had already gained traction.

he just died of a heart attack. i can remember back in 2005 going on the drudge report and seeing half of the headlines that drudge considered to be the closest to the world view that he wanted to represent. brian: you mentioned that the original financial man behind this would not talk to you. wil: he doesn't talk to anyone. i would be happy to talk to larry if he ever feels like it. there have been no formal interviews. he was andrew's best friend

growing up. when andrew graduated from tulane university, not only larry but larry's parents came to the graduation ceremony. i mean, this was the closest things to a friend larry could really have. larry -- from anything i have gathered -- a particularly not very ideological figure. one of the interesting things about andrew breitbart is he did not necessarily surround himself with acolytes. he had a broad ranging personality. he was sharpening himself against the whetstone of others. he was very good friends with

arianna huffington for some time. helped her start the huffington post. brian: let me show you some video of alex marlowe, the editor in chief of the breitbart site. here he was only a hour call-in show. [video clip] >> people in american life right now are having huge disdain for washington. this is a liberal and conservative thing. people do not like the -- breitbart does not identify with a party. we hold republicans just as accountable as democrats. [end video clip] brian: that was in 2016. how much time did you spend around alex? wil: tons of time. he is fascinating. he is very young. he was brought into the world of media and politics right out of college. he and andrew breitbart met.

breitbart put him to work doing things like monitoring comments on various websites. breitbart died and websites were merging, and this new title had to be staffed. alex became the de facto editor in chief. a guy named it jewel was officially the editor-it in-chief. but a guy named joel was really officially the editor-in-chief, but alex was doing more of the organizational work. the following year, it was made official, in 2013. brian: if someone says, i don't care about breitbart, i have the new york times, why should people care? as you are going along, when did you start to say, this is not the story i expected? wil: one thing that happened early on is i became aware of a

scholar at harvard who has been doing work studying breitbart's influence. i looked at his work and went to cambridge to meet with him. it became clear that my impression of breitbart as having an outside influence on the 2016 election was an extreme understatement. in fact, breitbart was the driving force on the right side of the political spectrum. he has created computer software called media cloud in collaboration with people at m.i.t. when harvard and m.i.t. agree there is a conclusion to be drawn from their data. they tracked every article about the election, they pulled in literally millions of articles from the web over the full cycle of the election season. they evaluated which stories

were being linked and discussed the most. they created an elaborate matrix analysis. if you look at the left side of the graph, you see predictable major media. c-span, cnn, the new york times. they are given a center left alignment. that is not to say the news organizations consider themselves centerleft, but who reads them. people self describe as centerleft. on the right, you see representatives fox news, radio programs like rush limbaugh,

people associated with the right. but they are all tiny. in the election season for 2016, the one that is represented as the biggest driver of the political conversation is breitbart. not by a small margin. brian: here is what it looks like. what does the red mean? wil: the size of each of the bubbles represents the influence it has on the conversation. how much it is being talked about, and by whom. brian: let me show some video. you said there were 10

professors at harvard involved in the research? wil: yes, 10 or 12 were involved. brian: let me show you. you say in the article there were some 10 professors involved in the research? will: yes, somewhere part-time but yes, 10 or 12 were involved. [video clip] >> it so they will have a series, basically saying deep space links. this will then be linked to a website, it will be amped up on conspiracy sites, it will be generated on tv and fox news. all of these network of propaganda sites are directly then tied to someone sitting in the white house. [end video clip] brian: people can go online and get the articles from august 20, 2017, new york times magazine. you do not get to him until the last part of your article. what was your decision on telling the story about

breitbart and then leading to the conclusion you found, instead of starting with him first? wil: it's a question that gets to the problem of craft. i suppose. i mean, what you hear so often from journalists and followers scholars of journalism are truisms like "do not bury the lead." i find it that in longform narrative nonfiction, you do want to kind of bury the lead. you want to give the reader a path to information. you want to give them information all along, but you want to allow stories to unfold. if i came right out at the beginning of the story with a heavy data driven analysis of breitbart's influence, i think you would lose a lot of the question that is most interesting to me, about what is this influential organization? what do they want?

what is their strategy going forward? i wanted the questions to hover in the air. it is the responsibility of nonfiction books or long magazine articles, the responsibility is to maintain a certain openness. it should not feel didactic. readers will not stick with you if you are hammering them with data. brian: i had never heard of that. i had to look it up at the time. when you decide to use that kind of thing, where did you get that from? wil: i have a fixation on recursive imagery. so whether it is oro boros, the snake eating its own tail or a photograph of someone looking at

a book, and in the book there is a photograph, and in the photograph there is a man reading a book. it goes on infinitely. those kinds of phenomena i feel are strangely apparent in every day life. and, little remarked upon. so, i do make an effort to identify them where i see them. brian: how many words were you asked to write? wil: 7500. the way it works with the times magazine is they commission something under the peculiar rubric of something like a centerpiece feature. you never want to promise the subject that they will be on the cover. so they tend for the story to be of this long, exploratory quality. but it may or may not be the actual cover image.

so for example, if newsbreaks they have nothing to do with, a shorter piece might be on the cover that is closer to the news cycle. so there is a process after the assignment period where you ask, what do we have, what else is happening this week, does it make sense for this to be the cover? and if that happens, maybe we can raise the size of little bit. brian: when did you finish the piece? will it was published on i think : wednesday, august 17th. i finished it late at night the friday before that. my math skills are failing me. maybe the 12th. brian: we are talking about this piece and how you do your work. but here is another person i want you to explain. this is only about 13 seconds. a guy named milo. tell us how he fits into all of

this. [video clip] >> conservatives have accomplished nothing to win in the last 13 years. they have managed to scramble into office, but once there, they do nothing with it. [end video clip] brian: who is he? wil: milo is the most notorious writer who has ever worked for breitbart. because the kind of work i do does not fit neatly into the regular categories, i feel comfortable saying he is a somewhat odious figure. his stock in trade is trying to offend others. he is quite successful at it. one of the things that happened in breitbart was as milo became more extreme, using stereotypes,

misogynistic, homophobic, he himself is gay but that did not stop him, xenophobia although he is from england, that did not stop him from being xenophobic, it got to a point where breitbart could not stomach it anymore. now, that thing you have to understand about breitbart is breitbart is by no means on the progressive end of the spectrum. tolerance is not their calling card. so you have to get pretty far out there in an overt form of bigotry to alienate breitbart. but finally, breitbart severed ties with milo. it reflected a moderate impulse at breitbart.

in august of last year, trump made steve bannon his executive chairman of the campaign and invited him to the white house in january. that meant breitbart was no longer asserting authority over alex at breitbart news. brian: who was in charge then? overall? wil: alex was the editor in chief before bannon left, but he really got the power to act more fully once bannon was gone. steve's departure allowed alex to say, i want breitbart to be what it was. not as provocative. much closer to a real news

organization. that is why when i was at the white house briefing room, i saw them training reporters to be at the daily press briefings. brian: how many days did you go to the press room? wil: maybe half a dozen. not too many. brian: here is a white house correspondent. charlie spearing. how old is he? wil: 34. he is still there reporting. brian: here he is at a roundtable discussion about journalism. [video clip] >> the president made a lot of promises to our readers. promises we at breitbart feel is important to hold him accountable. he talked about immigration, building a wall, helping our vets, he made a long list of promises. we are one of the conservative outlets that took him at his word. [end video clip] brian: where is he from? wil: wyoming. this is a great american story.

he discovered he was interested in politics while driving a tractor. he was driving the tractor on the family farm and after a while he got a walkman and started listening to the radio. he was into npr and rush limbaugh. over time, he realized he was more of a rush limbaugh guy then an npr guy. brian: is this him in the spread? wil: that is alex, the editor. when they come out and try to figure out who they are and what they are doing, they spent more time on mainstream media. brian: what did they do when this came out?

wil: i don't know if i can take blame or credit, but since the story came out and tried to figure out who they really are and what they're really doing, they have spent a lot more time in mainstream media. for example, a guy who is the breitbart london editor suddenly finds himself and find it on cnn to give interviews. the editor in chief of the site after andrew breitbart's death, is on nbc all the time. for better or worse, i would certainly expect a fair amount of criticism for normalizing by breitbart, which has done some very offensive things and helped elect a president half the country is very upset about. not everybody would consider this a good thing, but i think it is true that putting breitbart in the magazine and looking at closely seriously has changed a little bit of the place occupies an ecosystem. brian: you went to london. wil: i did. brian: this is the gentleman you went to see. they have eight people in their london bureau? wil: it is nine now. brian: let's see what he is about. [begin video clip] >> i was born in west london into a muslim family. i am proud to say i am a

conservative. [applause] >> i am a proud englishman and a robust americaphile. [end video clip] brian: what did you find when you met him? wil: first, he is not getting kidding about being an americaphile. so, i spent several days with him. the data jumps out most clearly was election day. and when they had their special election, basically a referendum on brexit. on that day, he was wearing a blue blazer with an inner lining of the american flag. i believe his socks were the stars and stripes or the union jack, i cannot remember. but this is a guy who -- he often wears an american flag lapel then an absolutely adores

this country. he was raised by immigrants in the u.k. who were and remain practicing muslims. tanzanian. he himself attended mosque for a brief period of time. some of that was social, just going because his friends were there. then he went to the university of westminster where he became involved in some of the muslim student organizations. things happened that turned him off. he lost faith, lost confidence in the religion, and over time has become an incredibly vociferous critic of i would say islam itself. not just islamic extremism. i think he is become someone who -- he also decries the other religions, so it is not just islam. he is a vocal atheist.

i think you have had christopher hitchens on this program a few times, he is sort of in that camp. i would put him in the camp of he thinks religion is abysmal. he thinks that islam is especially troubled right now. it is an amazing thing to hear from someone like this, who has come so far to get to that conclusion. i feel like it forces you to listen, forces me to listen and not be dismissive, this is islamophobia or veiled bigotry. brian: what about the charge that breitbart is anti-semitic? wil: of all the bigotries they do sort of tease and taunt and flirt with, and they are numerous, that is the one that is flatly false.

it would make a great case study if they chose to investigate how it became the case that, for example, when there was all this vandalism, people made a link to breitbart. a lot of the conversation was, this is not only connected to the trump presidency, in the presence of anti-semites within his coalition but by this report wing it and his presidency. by extension breitbart influence. it is simply not the case. if you read the website, there is not anti-semitic bias. andrew breitbart was jewish. alex marlowe is of jewish descent. he is now a practicing catholic. but i don't think there is an anti-semite bone in his body. brian: are there any black reporters? wil: there are a couple of black reporters at breitbart, there are some latino reporters. you have these people running around saying reprehensible

things come and then you also have concurrently, this other thing that looks like a conservative website. it is not guilty of the things that is been accused of, has a worldview that is more interesting at a minimum. brian: how may people did you ask, say around the new york times or anybody in the media world, if they had ever really read breitbart? wil: i started asking everybody. that was fascinating to me. it turned out, essentially no never read breitbart. brian: you're talking about the establishment. wil: i'm talking about everybody

i know. the people i work with at the times. people i have a beer with. i live in baltimore, in a neighborhood where many of my neighbors are in the construction trade. we will have bonfires and sit in the backyard and talk about pio setting or putting on groups are whatever. baltimore is a pretty liberal city. everybody was an obama fan. most of those folks strongly opposed president trump and they all blame breitbart in large measure for for the trump election. anecdotally if not through the office, they see breitbart is a key factor in donald trump's

election. whether we are talking about well-informed journalists or average folks sitting around having a beer, to a person i found they could not tell me one story breitbart had published in the last three months. did not know the name of any breitbart writers except for milo. they were placing this on a story that had emerged of what breitbart is that is not always in evidence a lot of the time on the website. brian: why did they let you hang around? wil: i don't know. brian: who did you call first? wil: charlie spearing at the white house. i started talking to him regularly. at some point he said, you know, i don't think alex is going to talk to you. but why don't you send him and email? there were things i was asking

charlie that he did not know about. management decisions and things like that. i had this long, maybe three week long email exchange with alex before he agreed to meet me. we met off the record at first and had a very long dinner. by then, alex is studious enough that he had read all of my stuff. he told me that he came to the conclusion that i had sort of a -- he did not see me as being politically predictable. i had written things that were sort of endorsements of nuclear power, i had written that paul wolfowitz was misunderstood. including a lot of things that fell on the left side of the spectrum. i think he felt that if we are ever going to try to explain ourselves publicly, this is the chance to do it.

i think that is what i but he never really quite articulated to me why he was going along with it. at that off-the-record dinner, i suggested we do the same thing on the record and he agreed. we continued to have all of these meetings, almost always in informal settings baird we would go out and walk his dogs, take them to a dog park. all sort of casual environment. i would have tape recorders running. brian: this is alex marlowe. where is he from originally? wil: california. brian: what is a story about him working for a conservative black talkshow host? wil: he worked for him right after stephen miller, who is in the white house now. in the west wing, young guy. we saw him in july tangling with jim acosta over the statue of liberty and if the text on the statue of liberty should be considered part of the statue of liberty and silly things like that. stephen miller had been on larry elder's program expanding on his

objection to immigration in california at high school student couple of years ahead of alex. and so as a teenager, alex, living in los angeles, was listening to this radio program and thinking this kid is on fire, he is hyped up about these things. there was part of alex, i think, in a way was just a rebellious kid. and like, he went to a fancy prep school. harvard westlake prepatory school. i think he has a sense that everybody agreed about everything, everybody was left of center, everybody wanted to recycle within an inch of their lives. there is a lot of this, i think, among young conservatives. they start out kind of rebelling against the general leftward thrust of use and positioning themselves to the right as a way of kind of thumbing their nose at their peers. brian: what was the reaction of your editor at the times magazine when he saw your finished piece? and how many words was it? wil: about nine.

brian: what was the reaction of journalists you know? wil: i got a very mixed reaction. i think a lot of people found it to open the conversation in a way it had not been before. it is not a trope, it is not a myth on the right when they say the mainstream media leans left. it is true. at least in my experience, everywhere i have worked. and it is true of the times. i could get in trouble for saying that, but that is the story. brian: why would you get in trouble? wil: i think at times they prefer to not see themselves that way. i can't imagine how they could convince themselves otherwise, but it seems like when you say things like this paper is to the left, or left of center, the editors will say, show me proof. that's not true. or "why do you say that?"

brian: why are they so afraid of that? wil: i don't know. i think that is one of the key things we have to confront, way outside of the breitbart piece or how it was deceived internally, into this much longer arc of journalistic history which i spent a lot of time thinking about. i think that the construct of objectivity has really caused or forced journalists to accept a certain lie about the craft. and it is not constructive. i mean, i think you can find examples in history where it has been destructive, the best examples probably from 1890's

when you had the new york times covering lynchings, and they would create a false equivalency between the horrific atrocity of someone being hung by a vigilante mob, and they would try to offset that by explaining what the person was accused of having done. right? and this kind of outrageous parity on the page has been documented thoroughly by journalistic historians. but at the time, the times was attacking people like ida b. wells, who was out reporting on lynchings in a more clearheaded way saying, this is vigilante, nihilistic a severed to, just murdering black people for the accusation of crimes they might not have committed. even if they had been committed, the vigilante justice was outrageous. and the times attacked her ruthlessly. i think you can trace some of these impulses back to that time period, the times was very

clearly positioning itself against pulitzer and hearst and the yellow press and trying to create a sense that we call balls and strikes. if a bunch of people murder a guy and hang him from a tree, we are going to explain their reasons in addition to the addition to the crimes they committed. brian: here is some video from 2013. steve bannon is the person we will look at for 20 seconds, in case someone does not know who he is. i want to ask you how he fits into all of this and what difference it makes now for alex

marlowe now that he is back at breitbart. here we go. [begin video clip] >> go to our site every day, we will have your back in this long fight. people have said today, you own these buildings, you may own them, but they are occupied i a permanent political class out for your destruction. we will be there every step of the way because of these people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. [end video clip] brian: the man worked for goldman sachs, worth millions of dollars, he was in the white house about eight months. what is his connection, and how important is he to the breitbart site? that was back in 2013. wil: his connection is huge. immediately after breitbart's death, larry was not going to be giving speeches at tea party rallies, he decided to approach his friend steve bannon and basically asked him to be the public face of breitbart. because bannon was already happy to be out giving public speeches and he and andrew breitbart had bonded on that basis, he had given andrew breitbart office space early in the site's career. and so by the time the website emerged and relaunched in 2012, steve bannon was perched atop the empire next to larry sotloff

as the executive chairman of breitbart. brian: does larry still control the finances of breitbart, and how did he make his money? wil: larry's personal finances are a mystery to me. he gets his money for the site from the mercer family. the mercer family, robert and rebecca mercer, have put $10 million into breitbart. and brian: father and daughter. wil: exactly. they are the koch brothers of the even further right. brian: where did their money come from? and who are they? wil: i don't really know. i don't understand exactly where. i mean, they are millionaires so they have tentacles and everything. it is actually kind of peanuts what they put into right-wing media.

they were also funding milo's new endeavor, it is going to be a website. they backed his book tour. "dangerous." we are talking about what maybe seems to us to be like a lot of money, but to them it is a small part of the portfolio. brian: how many people work at breitbart? wil: 40 or 50 people. brian: how much does it cost them to operate? wil: they will never tell anyone. brian: does it make money? visit a for profit? -- is it for profit? wil: they say it does. i don't know that i believe that. when they will not show you the books, you have to wonder. you have to wonder what is in the books. they say they make money, they say they do not dip into the $10 million trust fund by much but it gives them the freedom to operate a little bit closer to

the margins. brian: did you try to talk to the mercers? wil: no. brian: did you try to talk to larry -- wil: all the time. i got access through indirect channels, but he does not want to speak to anyone. does not want to be seen or heard from. steve bannon says he has a financial stake. he said that when he went into the white house. brian: let me ask you about another get you found in andrew breitbart's memoir about the

1930's german philosophers that came to the united states. why did that intrigue you and what does that mean, do you think? wil: it is this preposterous theory that andrew breitbart, it reads like a delusional manifesto, this part of his book. it is chapter six, the legendary chapter six of his book. "righteous indignation," in which he lays out his about where america went wrong. in reading chapter six, and i encourage every viewer to go read it for the amusement, it is the most preposterous theory about how a handful of philosophers from the frankfurt school migrated to sunny california in the 1930's and were temperamentally ill-suited to the joys of california. and so having despite escaped the ascendant nazis and being surrounded by sun and surf, they were grouchy and started complaining. they became the creators of a sort of philosophical framework that has now taken over academia in which all intellectual

credibility goes to the person with the most critical attitude toward american life, culture and history. brian: these names, i wrote them down. max horkheimer, eric fromme, others. those, the one whose work i was most familiar with before -- i am not a great will student of the frankfurt school or anything. but i knew one of them because i was interested in art. breitbart just gets him all wrong. apart from the laughable quality of blaming what he perceived as america's demise on six jewish german philosophers in the 1930's, he does not seem to have read those people very much himself. brian: at the end of the article, you started some intellectual discussion about

others, meaning one of the fellows and want to show you, walter russell mead, he had a book you can't get for less than $48 today called "special providence." here he is talking about some of the conclusions. >> [video clip] >> the jacksonian idea is you cannot trust other countries, you certainly cannot trust international institutions. big corporations maybe are ok, but they can be greedy and self-centered. really, it's populism. it's the american people. the government's job is to make the people rich, things like social security, giving away western land in the 19th century. and in foreign policy, you don't trust other countries. you don't start fights, but when somebody attacks you, you attack with everything you have got. you don't fight a limited war, you fight with everything you have got, to win. [end video clip] brian: that was 16 years ago. he is now associated with the hudson institute and i believe a professor at bard college. why did that intrigue you? where did you get that tip?

wil: of all of the political philosophy that steve bannon seems to have drawn his thinking from, i think that book may be the most significant. "special providence." by walter russell mead. if you want to understand how steve bannon explains his political views, maybe slightly different from how he actually forms them. some of this might be a veneer, that he enjoys the credibility bestowed by this book, but he certainly knows it backward and forward. it is an interesting book. it defines a sort of four general threads of thought woven through american history about america's relationship to the world, how americans perceive the relationship to the world. one of those it seemed to me, and mead's real purpose was what he was just speaking about, the

jacksonian point of view. certainly steve bannon identifies himself as part of that world view. he will tell you verbatim that his jacksonian ideals are in sync with walter russell mead. brian: is that how the portrait of andrew jackson got on the wall in the oval office? wil: i believe so, yes. i could lengthen to a lengthy and perhaps dull exposition about all of that, because i think they misunderstand jackson. brian: one last clip. this is an interview from 1998, almost 20 years ago. one of the gentlemen, bill strauss, is no longer alive, but the other fellow is still with us. here is the fourth turning.

>> the fourth turning, when we look at the cycle and rhythm of american history, we see an interesting pattern. the country as a society seems to encounter crises about every 80 or 90 years. this is a cycle of american history. the 1990's was a mostly 1850's and the 1760's, which means you better repair your roof because it will be an interesting time at the next 25 years. [end video clip] brian: where did you get that -- wil: it is interesting that in that interview he talks about the cycles of american history, because in the book it is not about american history. it is about society.

they actually break it into four components. each of the components takes 20 some odd years to complete. what they posit in the book is that america is entering this critical, one of the four components of the cycle, in which civil order and society's disposition is being rebuilt after a collapse. in this framework, the 2008 financial disaster is the crash, and since then we are rebuilding american politics. brian: quick questions. what happened to the breitbart website when steve bannon left the white house and went back? wil: i think this is really what gets to the disparity between how i always heard and continue to hear people talk about breitbart as this hysterical, shouting machine for creating offense, and a much more anodyne, quotidian organization

as it functions on a day-to-day basis. i think the reason those two understandings of breitbart can exist, one in the public mind and one in observable reality, is because breitbart actually did change. breitbart tried to metamorphosis in the wake of trump's election. when steve bannon left just over a year ago, it liberated alex marlowe to run the site as he saw fit without the political impulses of steve bannon sort of guiding and point him in different directions, very overt, pro trump directions. at the end of august last year, you started to see alex running stories that were much more skeptical of political figures that steve bannon had been allied with. you saw alex sort of try to purge the staff of the most

polarizing people like milo. he fired an editor finally after a series of offensive tweets. she had toned down her writing. she was not publishing things that were obnoxious, but she was known to be on twitter picking fights and being offensive to people, and he let her go. >> what happened to the numbers? >> this is a private company so they do not need to release that stuff publicly. that the said to me is number of readers has stayed fairly constant. however, the number of advertisers has plummeted. this is what started the discussion that the magazine covered. we did not cover 9000 words.

rights for cover stories. for the new york times magazine. is there a place for we can find your writing? >> if you search for my name you can see my website,. >> thank you very much for joining us. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] ♪ transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. programs are also available as c-span podcasts .

if you enjoyed this week's q&a interview, here are some other programs you might like. roger ailes talks about the state of journalism. brooke gladstone, cohost and editor of wnyc's on the media discussing her book, "the trouble with reality." mark cheetham talking about his jackson: southern." you can search our entire video library at c-span.org. viceashington post reports president mike pence is planning on campaigning saturday on behalf of ed gillespie, who is trailing the challenger rob northman -- ralph northman in the polls. the washington post describes

abington as friendly territory and southwest virginia, and economically depressed region that has suffered from the decline of coal. candidateshe themselves tonight on c-span. two governor races under way this year. new jersey governors for him at 8:00 p.m. and at nine, the final debate in the virginia race. later this week, testimony from michael: before the senate intelligence committee as part of the investigation into russia interference in the 2016 election . wednesday at 10:00 a.m. eastern c-span.org, and the c-span radio app. the future of housing in america 0 a.m. eastern also

like that c-span3. >> the c-span bus is traveling across the country on our 50 tour.ls we recently stopped in richmond, virginia asking folks what is the most important issue in their state. >> hello, i am a virginia resident at the university of richmond. i'm concerned about the department of environmental w uality -- quality. these will spread and our water, our people. is also an infrastructure of the past as we move forward to renewable energy. west virginia north carolina have come out against it, and virginia should too. >> my name is jonathan, and i am a fun -- millennial voter.

i'm focused right now on what the fair and 1447, equal housing act. thating this election there would be bipartisan approach to implement similar legislation here in virginia. this is prohibiting discrimination based on sexual and tory -- sexual orientation in regards to housing. i am hoping wondering from any of the candidates whether or not -- what the position is on hr 1447. >> voices from the states on c-span. >> on newsmakers, we are joined by linda sanchez, vice chair of the house democratic caucus. she also serves on the tax rate for many is the former