zeros."e c span 3 a look at the cold including the special forces in berlin. a 1962 field "the road to the wall." american history tv. 8:00 eastern. [ ♪ ] week on qanda will hilton. about his feature story entitled bright baht >> i saw a piece in april of

2015 that said the idea of skipping college might be outlandish to some, but not to you. what is that about? wil: i got out of college about and bye -- the age of 12 the time i was 15 and in the public high school system in baltimore, there was an -- programprogress that you could apply for. i don't know who submitted my name. i didn't apply for that. i had just been named the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. somebody signed me up for the " baltimore sun" to do this work study program and within three

months of getting there -- the job was really just to get coffee and do things on the side, but there was a buyout in suddenly there was a situation where was that in turn, can you write so i was publishing and to as a 15-year-old the end of the year -- up by may of 1992i had a reasonably fit portfolio of feature articles, some on the front page of the feature section and callout boxes on the front page of the newspaper in this was sufficient to go to other newspapers around the country and get either internships or paying jobs. i also during that. leveraged the baltimore sun writing work to obtain a page in a weekly paper in baltimore, called the baltimore times, one of the two a black papers in town.

paper and opinion edited other news at related to youth in baltimore. youth events, the kinds of movies kids wanted to pay attention to in those days and it just clicked in a way that i hoped it would when i was even younger. and i did a couple of, you know, colleges here and there, always was working for the local papers. finally i was back in baltimore at whatng some classes was thousand state university. i was working at baltimore magazine. i got a full-time job. andarted getting benefits all of that. and it seemed like, you know, i have the job i want. i'm not going to continue with sort of halfhearted attempt at university.

i have kids and i'm not sure i would recommend to them the same approach. i go around telling other people what to do for their masters theses when i don't have an undergrad myself. i don't feel entirely like a hypocrite there. a lot of people have trained and -- that's not how i did it. i made all the mistakes myself and continue to do so. with that as an introduction. we have a cover story of "new york times magazine" that we asked you to talk about. it came out at an interesting time. -- "called white part breitbart goes to the white house" and i think it is when steve bannon was at the white

house? wil: yes. a couple days before her resigned. it is a more difficult question then it may seem at first. it is a complicated question. over the last six years where i i haveributor on the -- this permanent relationship or long-term relationship with them. the terms of which are that i will write maybe four cover stories a year, something like that. that is a full workload. sometimes you can't even get four done in a year. and the framework or the 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 started going on the "times"

press pass into the white house briefing room. i was absolutely bill will -- bewildered by what i found there. first of all, the room itself is a marvelous concoction. it's built on top of a swimming pool. i am sure you have spent time there. it's sort of dingy and mildew we -- 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 was true on every level. there is a certain performative quality that stings and it's ok, -- just 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 briefings, i'm going to say it as at least doubled. if you look at photos taken from photos taken of 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. it was wall-to-wall people. i was fascinated by how those people work. i started to try to go around -- first i was informally

interviewing cameramen. they are the folks there year after year. a lot of them have been there 30 years. and so, they have 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 able to get into the white house briefings. from what i could tell, he has never published anything that you would consider a professional publication. yet he managed to get in there. there is a guy who has left the organization at the time, but he 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. one of the things that really caught my eye is the main white house correspondent for breitbart news is in his early 30's. host: is that who's on the cover? that's who's on the cover. host: 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 at the white house without having to go through a lot of hoops. and i think what ended up happening was a photographer went in with a white house press pass for the day and charlie went in with his, and on the way in, they kind of pause and 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. i think that was done fairly quickly. i don't know if he was told to lift the phone up quickly and make it look performed or look like an action shot or if he was taking a call. charlie is an interesting guy. he has been a white house correspondent for breitbart since before the trump presidency but under this , administration, breitbart is stepping up its white house credential he. they had a battle with the white house correspondents association about whether they qualify and should be able to have passes. and in the meantime, what they have been doing is getting temporary credentials for four reporters to go in. so i watched charlie training people, training breitbart people on how to navigate the

artifice and internal politics of the white house briefing room. and i thought, maybe this story is about the briefing room and correspondents association, but it is told through the lens of this interloper who has enormous power. at that i thought of breitbart point as having this quality of being on both sides of the white house podium. insofar as steve bannon, other breitbart former staffers, had moved into the west wing as employees. now there were going to be host: let mes -- pause for a second and show some video, now deceased, but the man up the breitbart publication was named after. >> i have a website, breitbart.com, which is a news aggregation source.

brand myself.o i didn't want to do it in my name, but my father-in-law and my neighbor said i was crazy not to do it in my name. but i do not regret it. but what i wanted to do was create a news organization from the bottom up. host: 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. discreet meaning specific rather than -- there was nothing discreet in terms of being shy or muted, but they were individual sites that linked to each other's stories but not under one umbrella banner. they were big hollywood, government, media. he decided in 2012 to merge that all into breitbart.com. you know, sort of center hub.

all the news would then become verticals rather than standalone sites. then he died, right before it came to pass. host in his early 40's. :wil: yeah, he just dropped dead. conspiracy theorists think it andbecause of his politics making enemies. but now it seems he just died of a heart attack and left a great merger into a single website that had already gained traction. with major purveyors of information. the drudge report linked to breitbart for many years before that happened. there was a time -- i can remember back in 2005-2006 going on the drudge report and seeing breitbart:dlines such and such. it was stuff that he put on the website. drudge considered to be the

closest to the world view that he wanted to represent. host: you mentioned that the original financial man behind this, but he 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. we had indirect communications, but no formal interviews. host: who was a? wil: he was andrew's best friend going up. when andrew graduated from tulane university, not only larry but larry's parents came to the graduation ceremony. i mean, this is as close of a friend he can really had. larry -- from anything i have been able to gather about him a , particularly ideological figure. this is one of the interesting things about andrew breitbart is he did not necessarily surround himself with acolytes. or fellow travelers. he had a broad ranging personality. he was sharpening himself against the whetstone of others.

for example he was very good , friends with arianna thefington and helped start " huffington post." host: how friendly was he with the drudge report? wil: while he worked with them for a time. host: let me show you some video of alex marlowe, the editor in chief of the breitbart site. here he was on our call in show. >> people in american life right now have a huge distain for washington. this is a liberal and conservative thing. people do not like the -- permanent political class in washington. breitbart does not identify with a party. we hold republicans just as accountable as democrats. host: that was march 5, 2016. how much time did you spend around alex?

wil: tons of time. i still talk to him regularly. i spoke to him late last night. he is a fascinating guy. he is very young. he was brought into the world of media and politics. he was interested in high school, but right out of college he and andrew breitbart met. breitbart put him to work doing things like moderate to rating -- moderating the 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. name joel pollak was the official editor in chief, but alex was doing more of the work in holding the place gather. the following year, it was made official, in 2013. host: if somebody is listening right now and says i don't care

about breitbart, i have ""the new york times" to read, why should anybody 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. and as i looked at his work and went to cambridge to meet with him at the law school, it became clear that my impression of breitbart as having an outside influence on the 2016 election was an extreme understatement. in fact, according to research, breitbart was the driving force on the right side of the political spectrum. host: what does he know? wil: 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 sucked -- 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. linked by other articles, linked -- "the post" and and 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. and so people self describe as , left or centerleft and go to these more mainstream sites. 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. and i mean host: let me show you a graphic. columbia journalist did this, you didn't have it in your article. here's what it looks like. what does the red mean? wil: the size of each of the

bubbles represents the influence . you can get far into the calculus out they calculate that. it has on the conversation. how much it is being talked about, and by whom. host: let me show some video. you say an the article you had some 10 professors at harvard involved in the research? yep, sort of a fuzzy, because some people were only working on a part-time, but 10 or 12 were involved. host: let me show you. >> they will have a series of stories basically saying the state leaks for this first time or something or other. 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

tied to someone sitting in the white house. host: a journalism question on your article, and 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. what you hear so often from journalists themselves and scholars of journalism are truisms like "do not bury the lead." i find that in long formed 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 steer into the uncertainty at first and 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 believe? what do they want? where did they come from? what is their strategy going forward? i wanted the questions to hover in the air. i wanted a lot of 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. both in the reporting process and the way you lay the story out that it doesn't feel didactic. i don't think readers will stick with you if you are hammering out conclusions rather than honestly seeking the answers.

i'm reading your article and i come across the dry state effect. i had never heard of that. when you decided to use that kind of thing, where did you get that from? wil: i have a fixation on recursive imagery. 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 the book and it continues on and senate lee. those kinds of phenomenon are strangely apparent in every day life. and little remarked upon. i do make an effort to identify them where i see them. host: how many words were you asked to write? wil: i was asked to write i believe 7500. the way it works with the times magazine is they commission

something for the centerpiece feature. that's because you never want to promise the subject that they will be on the cover. so they intend for the story to be of this long, exploratory quality. but it may or may not be the actual cover image. for example, if news breaks it has nothing to do with, you may remain in the issue, but a shorter piece might be on the cover that is closer to the news cycle. and so, there is a process that unfolds after the assignment period where you ask, will this ?ake sense to be the cover and if so, can we raise the size of a little bit. host: when did you finish the piece? wil: it was in the august issue, but it hit online on a wednesday, i think was the 17th or something like that. i finished it late at night the

friday before that. my math skills are bad. but maybe the 12th. two: we are talking about different things, this piece and journalism. here is another person i want you to explain. this is only 13 seconds, a guy named milo. tell us how he fits into all of this. >> conservatives have accomplished absolutely nothing to win the culture wars in the last 13 years. they have managed to scramble into office, but once there, they do nothing with it. host: 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 normal journalistic categories and is closer to the form of an i feel comfortable saying

, he is a somewhat odious figure. he is a person whose stock in trade is trying to offend others. and 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 -- so he's a foreigner in some sense. that did not stop him from being xena phobic and really all of the other a good trees you can imagine. racist stereotypes. it got to a point where breitbart could not stomach it anymore. the 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 and out there in an overt form of bigotry to alienate breitbart. but finally they cut ties with milo. what i found interesting about it was this reflected a moderate impulse at breitbart. which was really alex who you showed a minute ago that came to his own at the departure of -- in august of last year, trump made steve bannon his executive chairman of the campaign and invited him to the white house in january when he took office. and that meant that breitbart was no longer asserting authority over alex at breitbart news. host: who was in charge then? wil: it is difficult to pinpoint exactly who was in charge. alex was the editor in chief before then, 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 -- i don't want it to be what it was. i don't want to be offensive, 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. host: how many days did you go to the press room? wil: not tweeting many, maybe half a dozen. host: here is a white house correspondent. how old is he? wil: i guess he is 34. host: is he still there reporting? wil: he is indeed. host: here he is at a roundtable discussion about journalism. >> the president made a lot of promises to our readers, conservatives in general. 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. host: where is he from? wil: wyoming. this is a great american story. this kid discovered that he was interested in politics while driving a tractor. he would drive the tractor on the family farm and after a while he got a walkman and started listening to the radio. he was very into two things, npr and rush limbaugh. he realized he was more of a rush limbaugh guy then an npr guy. host: is this a picture of him in a double spread? wil: that's alex. host: what did this do for him when this came out? wil: it's interesting. i don't know if i can take blame

or credit, but since the story came out and try to figure out who they are and what they are doing, they spent a lot more time in mainstream media. for example, a guy named rahim kassam, the breitbart london editor has found himself eating invited on cnn all the time to give interviews. and joel pollack was the editor-in-chief after andrew breitbart's death, joel is on nbc all the time now. for better or worse i would expect a fair amount of cynicism or normalizing breitbart, which has written offensive things and installed a president that half the country is upset about. not everyone would consider this a good thing, but i think it is true that putting breitbart in the magazine and looking closely at it has changed a little bit the place it occupies in the

ecosystem. read correctly you went to london. wil: i did. host: and this was the guy you went to see. there are eight people on their bureau? wil: nine. in west london into a muslim family. i am now proud to say that i am a conservative. i am englishman and a robust americaphile. [end video clip] brian: what did you find when you met him? wil: the first thing i would say is he is not kidding about being an americaphile. i spent several days with him, but the day that jumps out most clearly was election day. when they had their special election, basically a referendum

on brexit. and 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 pin and absolutely adores this country. he was raised by tanzanian immigrants in the u.k. who were and remain practicing muslims. he himself attended mosque for a brief period of time. maybe about nine months he was attending every day. some of that was social, just going because his friends were there. but then he went to the university of westminster where he became involved in some of the muslim student organizations. and he -- 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. he thinks religion is abysmal. he thinks that islam is especially troubled right now. it is an amazing thing to hear from somebody like cam 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: that i think -- of all the bigotries they do sort of tease and taunt and flirt with, and those are i think numerous, i think that is the one that is flatly false. -- it wouldinating make a great case study if they chose to investigate how it became the case that, for example, when there was all this vandalism, taking over gravestones at jewish cemeteries, 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.

and it is simply not the case. if you read the website, there is not anti-semitic bias. host: what was andrew breitbart's religion? wil: 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. when is the principal latin america immigration correspondent. she is extraordinarily knowledgeable about latin america. these are some of the things so bewildering to me by breitbart. you have these clowns running around saying reprehensible things, and then you also have concurrently, this other thing that looks like a conservative website.

and it is in some cases 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 basically 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 lee backyard and talk about pi -- ing or putting on r

roofa 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. and yet all of the opinions today 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 miloow enough list -- yannoplis. 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 heterodox set of views. 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. in addition to 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. and i think that's why, that 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. we would go out and walk his dogs, take them to a dog park. all sorts 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 larry elder? 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 whether the poem attached to 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 as a teenager, as a 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. and i think there is a lot of this, i think, among young conservatives.

they start out kind of rebelling against the general leftward thrust of youth and positioning themselves to the right as a way of kind of thumbing their nose at their peers. brian: before i forget to ask you, 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. even among journalists -- it is not a trope, it is not a myth on the right when they say the mainstream media leans left. you know it is true. , at least in my experience, everywhere i have worked. it is true at "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. host: really? wil: 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, that's not true show me proof. , 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 -- received internally into this , much longer arc of journalistic history which i spent a lot of time thinking about. and i think that the construct of objectivity has really caused or forced journalists to accept -- to embrace a certain line

about the cross -- 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 butchery, 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 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. and then 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. well you may own them, but they , are occupied by 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: right. his connection to the site is huge. immediately after breitbart's death, larry was not going to be giving speeches at tea party rallies. larry 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 had already positioned himself as a very andrew breitbart like person. he and andrew breitbart had bonded on that basis, he had given andrew breitbart office space early in the site's career in california to host the website. and so by the time the website merged 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. and so the mercer family, robert and rebecca mercer, have put $10 million into breitbart. brian: father and daughter. wil: exactly.

they are the koch brothers of the even further right. host: who are they? where did the money come from? wil: i don't really know. they are billionaires, 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, behind the scenes. host: what is that? wil: 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: i'm going to say about 40 or 50 people. brian: how much does it cost them to operate? wil: they will never tell anyone. it is all under lock and key. brian: does it make money? 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. but 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 responses through indirect channels, but he does not want to speak to anyone. does not want to be seen or heard from. put -- haseep and in bannon put his money into right part? 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. wil: and of those the work i had been most familiar before -- i am not a great 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 i 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. >> 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 populace and 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. brian: "special providence." wil: "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 auto it seems to me to be 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 thinks of his -- 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. great -- anch into a lengthy and perhaps dull exposition about all of that, because i think they misunderstand jackson.

brian: we have one last video clip. i want you to put it into perspective. 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. many people have noticed this pattern. the country as a society seems to encounter crises about every 80 or 90 years. this is a cycle of american history. the era we are in right now, the 1990's resembles the 1820'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 specific to american history.

is it about -- it is about society's shift and change. when i talk about the 80 to 90 year cycle 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 tendencies and 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 heard peopleays talk about 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 metamorphose 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

overtly political directions, pro trump directions. and immediately by 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 start 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. brian: we are out of time, but what happened to the numbers? wil: so, according to breitbart, and this is a private company so they do not have to release this publicly, what they said to me and what alexa can record, is that the number of readers has

stayed fairly constant. however, the number of advertisers has plummeted. brian: this is what has started this discussion, this magazine "the new york times magazine," august 20. there's a lot we didn't cover, 9000 words. wil hylton lives in baltimore and has two kids. he does not have a college degree, as we talked about, but writes four cover stories for "the new york times magazine" each year. is there a place they can find you? wil: if you search my name, you will find my website. and i put new articles at the top of the website. brian: thanks for being here. wil: thank you for having me. ♪ [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] ♪

>> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. q&a programs are also available as c-span podcasts. ♪ >> i've been attacked by everybody. i've been attacked the right wing, the russians, the trump campaign, the sanders campaign, and now i can add to that list, the clinton campaign. a sunday on c-span's q and donna brazil about her life in politics and her memoir "hacks." >> i was not far from here. hillary was excited. she met this young state senator who was running.

she had roots in illinois. she told my friend, we were on the third floor and she said -- she knew barack obama. i didn't know barack obama. -- a lot of people people in chicago policy six, but i never heard of barack obama. we met him that spring of 2003 and let me just say this, the rest is history. >> ♪ announcer: c-span's washington withal live every day policy issues that impact you. american university law professor talks about criminal justice. a discussion about politics and the media with the washington examiner.

be sure to watch c-span's washington journal, live at 7:00 eastern wednesday morning. join the discussion. coming up tonight on c-span, new york city mayor lazio on the progressive movement. after that, closing andres on american food culture. later, a discussion on the future of syria. mayor bill de blasio was the speaker at an event hosted by the political activist group, progress island. the changing political landscape and what he called the beginning of a progressive era. it was part of the holiday party in des moines. it is 35 minutes. [applause]