Interview: Bill Mitchell says "Donald Trump was a shock to the system – to break it out of the pattern that it’s been in"

Editor's note: This article was originally published on January 31, 2017.

This is the second part of my discussion with Bill Mitchell. The first segment can be read here. Quoted text below appeared in yesterday's article, offering background on our conversation.

Story by Joseph Ford Cotto

There are a great many talk radio hosts, and all of them are clamoring to be heard. Just how many, though, really offer something which deserves your time and consideration?

While the number is far too small for my liking, Bill Mitchell certainly makes the cut.

He has not been a force in the chattering class for long. Before Donald Trump's candidacy took off, Mitchell could best be described as a talent recruiter for various businesses who just happened to dabble in politics via the Internet. Today, he is a bona fide on-line celebrity. Last year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named him the foremost average fellow impacting election season.

Among all those influencing the race -- including Barack Obama, CNN, and Harry Reid -- Mitchell came up twenty-sixth. He beat Paul Ryan, The Associated Press, and Michael Moore, to mention a few.

What makes Mitchell so popular is not strategic positioning in FM markets -- his program is Internet-only -- or access to the most powerful names on the District of Columbia-New York City-Boston/Los Angeles-San Francisco-Seattle culture corridors -- he lives in Charlotte. Rather, Mitchell knows how to handle Twitter, focus on pertinent data, and explain complex, contentious matters in a down-to-earth yet coherent fashion.

Despite being in his late fifties, Mitchell is one of American conservatism's rising stars. His star is powered at a time when 'conservatism' is in rapid flux; changing from its family values, pro-free trade, immigration-friendly Reagan-Bush incarnation to a model built around national sovereignty, economic protectionism, and cultural cohesion. 

Essentially, 'American' conservatism is becoming Europeanized. 

Mitchell and I had a candid discussion regarding right-leaning politics and their relation to American life. Some if it is included below.

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Joseph Ford Cotto: More than anything else, why have principles such as immigration restriction and cultural cohesion managed to evade scrutiny from 'respectable' politicos on both sides and secure starring roles in the future of American conservatism?



Bill Mitchell: I think that the immigration thing was an economic issue mainly and lots of big corporations wanted open borders and cheap labor coming into America. A lot of these big corporations were dependent upon cheap labor, and cheap foreign labor, and this illegal labor, and what would happen is they would bring this labor in, pay low wages, with the idea that the government would pay laborers the rest with welfare to support them so they could survive.

So big corporations were profiting literally off of the largess of the government supporting illegals.  

What’s happening now is that is being taken away from those corporations, and one of the things that was guiding government was the fact that these big corporations were donating a lot of money to the Republican Party, and to the Democrat Party, to make sure this kept happening, and that’s why you never had anybody that had the force of will and the force of character to stand up to these guys and say “No more!” because they know that they would be cutting off a tap where all the money flowed. 

Then you had Donald Trump who came along, and he’s got $10 billion, and doesn't care. He’s like, “I don’t need their money, and this is wrong, this is bad for America!”

So that, I think, is what you really needed to create a new paradigm; you need a shock to the system, and Donald Trump was a shock to the system – to break it out of the pattern that it’s been in. What’s going to happen now is, these corporations that had all this money and were like the puppet masters pulling all the strings of these government leaders like Paul Ryan and so on and so forth, they have much less power now because Trump is going to show these people that they can’t do what they've been doing anymore.

You’re not going to have this cheap labor anymore. You’re going to have to change the way you think because Trump is making this an economy based on American workers, not cheap foreign workers, and you already see this happening where Ford was going to build a $1.3 billion plant in Mexico and they just came back and said they were going to build a $700 billion plant in America. You see U.S. Steel hiring. You see all these major corporations saying they’re going to expand.

So, Trump has changed the whole paradigm and you needed a shocking, dramatic candidate like him to make that happen. We were “slouching toward Gomorrah,” as the expression says. As America, the frog was slowly being boiled and we were just becoming less and less of a sovereign nation all the time because nobody would stand up to this – everybody kept kicking the can down the road.

Trump finally stood up to this, and I think that history will look back at this election as the moment in time where America literally stepped back from the brink. I think that if Hillary Clinton had been elected, within ten years we would not even recognize America as the nation we knew.

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