"I'm not in between. I definitely love history. I'm not formally trained or educated in history, but you could say I did go back to college in 2008 to do Untold History of the United States. That took five years. Co-author Peter Kuznick has been teaching history for something like 35 years, at American University and other places. His group of researchers brought me into contact with a lot of books. Very few people know that there is a whole school of historians that have existed in the United States from the 1940s and the early '50s that were revisionists. They were attacking the whole basis of the history of the Cold War. People like D.F. Fleming, William Appleman Williams in '59 ... (...) This is a whole school, an academic branch that exists in this country at the top universities who are teaching graduate students progressive history. You can't get that in any high school. (...) But what I found is this whole strain of history, this whole school has been denied by the media. It's not like I'm nuts. You might think I have a crackpot history. No. What Peter and I did is very much accepted by progressive historians. But you don't get any mention of it in the establishment media—which, to me, is the right-wing media. It is a bizarre blindness, because we are such an intelligent country. It's bizarre that we can't get our own history straight."
"On the Republican side, they only talk about how much stronger we have to get. And we're the strongest empire ever, with the largest military. We spend ten times what the Russians do. (...) Clinton has been for every war we fought. She was for the bombing of Belgrade and the Iraq War, she was all for it, during all the lives lost. It cost her the 2008 nomination. She was happy when Libya fell, which was a mess. You know, these were secular regimes in Syria and in Libya, where the excesses were nothing compared to what's happened to that region since her policies were implemented. She was happy when Gaddafi was buggered and killed. She was happy and joking about it. It's brought us disaster, including, for her, the Benghazi shit. Kagan [...] said the neocons couldn't get a better president than Hillary Clinton, who would enforce the neocon foreign policy. No one's questioned it."
"It is huge. I mean, cyber-warfare is obviously the future. It's a real concern, but we lie so much about what we do that it's hard to know what's going on unless you really follow it. You know the Pentagon formed a new division? A new branch of the armed forces—Army, Navy, Air Force (...) Cyber Command. And, of course, the next war will be electronic."
"I think Kennedy was the last great hope. And that's why I dwell on that subject. He was someone who could stand up to the militarist element in our society."
"I think I was always controversial, provocative. But I can't help it. I have to go there. It's my nature. It's my father's nature, too, to probe, to want to know the truth of a situation. And that's not to say I'm right, but I have to ask some questions. I mean, I never made a movie for the money."
"It just goes to show you that movies are addicting. People see a form of behavior, and they go for it. It's dangerous. (...) And after JFK, the CIA got more interested in coming out to Hollywood. There is a book about their involvement here by James DiEugenio. It's called Reclaiming Parkland, a wonderful book. There's a section about how, after the movie came out, the CIA opened an office here. And the military did, too. They really influenced the television and film business. Homeland and 24? Those are CIA propaganda shows where they do such a great job to stop terrorism. And the military got very involved in promoting its services, providing aircraft carriers and this and that. They wanted to do that with Platoon, but I said no, because they wanted to change the script."