Bernie Sanders unveiled a new plan to provide every American with Bill O’Reilly–free television on Thursday night.
“Let me say something about Bill O’Reilly, and this is a reason that people might want to vote for me,” Sanders told Stephen Colbert on last night’s Late Show. “Bill said that if I won the presidency, he would move to Ireland. So electing me president is a twofer: You get Sanders, and you get Bill to go to Ireland.”
Sanders’s chief rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton, has yet to release a plan for combating the threat of O’Reilly. But sources indicate that Clinton views Sanders’s self-deportation plan as overly ambitious. The former secretary of State is said to favor a continuation of Barack Obama’s incremental approach — allowing the Fox News host’s audience to gradually die off.
Later in the interview, Colbert questioned the feasibility of Sanders’s broader platform, which relies on redistributing large sums of money from high-income households into an expansion of the welfare state.
“The top one percent has a lot of influence in government, and they’re not just going to give it up, ya know? They’re gonna fight you tooth and nail. And I’ll tell you how I know,” Colbert said, and then lowered his voice to a whisper. “I am in the top one percent.”
Sanders argued that Americans’ have become so outraged by their declining living standards, they could be roused into mass action for a fairer society. Defending the feasibility of achieving single-payer health care, Sanders said, “I believe that when people are aroused, when they’re organized, when they’re prepared to stand up and fight back, yes, we can take on the drug companies and the insurance companies.”
Sanders is still a ways away from implementing most of his reforms. But on Thursday night, the democratic socialist did enact his agenda on revolutionizing the late-night format: Sanders interrupted Colbert early in his opening monologue, suggesting that the host follow his heart and skip directly to the desk bits that he really cares about. Colbert insisted that he had to do the show in regular order.
“That’s what the elites want you to think. You’ve got to go your own way, follow your own heart, the revolution is possible,” Sanders replied. “And this time, the revolution will be televised.”
