Steve Bannon, former Breitbart chief and Donald Trump‘s pick for White House chief strategist, rarely gives interviews. But The Hollywood Reporter managed to score one, and it dropped this afternoon.

And just to give you some idea of the tone he sets, this is an actual quote Bannon gave Michael Wolff:

“Darkness is good,” says Bannon… “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they—“ I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster “—get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

Bannon offers some reaction to the media uproar over Trump choosing him to be in the White House––phrases like “anti-Semite” and “white nationalist” most prominently come to mind––and he emphatically says, “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist. The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over.”

Democrats en masse have raised hell over Bannon due to his past comments about Breitbart being the “platform for the alt-right,” coupled with some of the more controversial (to put it mildly) things that have been run on Breitbart. Many on the left are demanding Trump rescind the Bannon appointment.

Bannon thinks the Democrats “lost sight of what the world is about” in this past election and their reaction to him only proves it, not to mention the way the media operates these days:

“The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” he continues. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”

In talking about the media Bannon says of Fox News, “They got it more wrong than anybody. Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they’ll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly.”

Bannon talks with great excitement about creating a new populist movement in the United States and calls Trump “probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don’t speak to their audience.”

You can read the full profile here.

[image via screengrab]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac