Adam Curtis graciously declines to acknowledge that the least articulate interviewer he ever met was Tim Heidecker. Curtis (≈30:52):
The thing that… makes me shocked is the way that liberals in America are constantly insulting the people who voted for Donald Trump. They call them stupid and ignorant. They’re not stupid and ignorant! They’re frightened, lonely, isolated people who felt that the political system had completely ignored them and gave them no sense of any future. Then someone came along… and gave them a button, and that button simply said on it FUCK OFF, and they pressed that button….
And to turn ’round to those people and just say they’re stupid and ignorant makes it worse. That’s the reason why they voted for Donald Trump – because you say they’re stupid. They know you don’t respect them. And if you ever want to challenge Donald Trump’s power, you’ve got to go and reconnect with those people.
And they may be racist. But so what? Politics is about making all kinds of allowances, not necessarily with people who you believe are good, but actually who you think you can help and change and transform with really good ideas. At the moment… you just despise those people. And when people despise other people, it’s always out of fear. And I think the liberals are frightened of those people. […]
If people have voted for someone you really don’t like, go and find out why they did. Don’t make presumptions. Just go and find out…. Because if you’re ever going to change the world, you’ve got to ally with those people. […]
Maybe [they were “misinformed”]. But so what? I mean, why are they more “misinformed” than the people who thought that Hillary Clinton was bound to win? I mean, I would have thought the most gross piece of misinformation was the endless assumption from op-ed commentators, from economists, from political thinktanks, and from the pollsters, which led the very opposite of [the people I was just talking about] to believe that Hillary Clinton was going to win. Wasn’t that gross misinformation, gross stupidity? […]
What you have to do is have a generosity of imagination and find out what other people feel, and that includes going to talk to people who are racist and understanding where their racism comes from.