Former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was a guest on the special Thanksgiving holiday edition of Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.

Palin said the 2016 election was vindication for “me and millions of other Americans who, for years and years, have been saying smaller, smarter government is the answer, and we need someone who is politically incorrect enough to say what needs to be said, and do what needs to be doin’, to fix the problems that we’re in in our nation.”

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Marlow said he thought Trump’s campaign theme of “draining the swamp” in DC was “channeling Sarah Palin.”

She countered that the concept was “pretty universal, when people understand what our Constitution actually means, and that it is to restrain federal government, and not incentivize growth of the federal government – more control, more shackles over the people.”

“So draining the swamp is so necessary on the local government level, the state government level, and of course the federal government level. We need to not allow the will of the people to be ignored, and the only way to do that is, presently the status quo is so far from wanting to drain the swamp that we knew ‘the status quo has got to go.’ I’ve kinda been preaching that for a few decades now, ever since the little local city council seats that I was elected to, but I’m not the only one who believes that, obviously,” Palin said.

“People have faith in their own decision-making abilities for their families, for their businesses. They don’t want some far-off politicians and bureaucrats making decisions for them. The only way to do that, to allow that independence and our priorities to be met, is to get rid of the people who want to control We the People,” she contended.

Marlow suggested Palin’s nomination for Vice-President marked the beginning of the anti-establishment movement that culminated in the election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. She modestly insisted that she didn’t see herself that way, because she “wonderfully, naively” believed it was common sense to understand that the Constitution limits government and elevates the individual.

“I do think a lot of the Trump movement started in the Tea Party days, when enough people were saying ‘enough,’” Palin said. “But see, the Establishment wouldn’t listen, and they got worse since the Tea Party days. They got worse with shocking betrayals, and they literally doubled down on debt. They divided Americans. People started seeing, since the Tea Party days, how corruption in our government affects their lives. So they got worse, and they got cocky, but they also got caught, and we got stronger. ‘Bigly,’ as Trump would say — bigly stronger in these years since, and our grumbles, they grew into rumbles as we didn’t divert our eyes from seeing the Naked Emperor. Now, during the Trump movement, enough people said ‘enough.’”

Palin saw Trump’s Rust Belt victory as important because those states represent “so much of America’s heart, and our work ethic, and the unpretentious blue collar, pro-family, pro-God and guns and Constitution…”

“So many Americans, like the people in the Rust Belt still, no matter where we live – in big cities, in tiny little villages – it’s such a common theme. I think that’s within all of our DNA,” she said. “Like I said, we can make our own decisions. Politicians, quit it. Quit making decisions for us.”

She recalled being surprised and “ticked off” back in 2008 when the McCain campaign didn’t make a serious effort in Michigan.

“I said, ‘What do you mean, we’re not going to Michigan? Every vote counts!’” she remembered, and was stunned to learn the campaign had “essentially given up on the Rust Belt.”

“The people who build America, we’re going to give up on them? That’s what it told me,” she said. “We tried to get to Michigan anyway, but the McCain campaign, the people running that, they were a bunch of yahoos, to tell you the truth. I mean, they’ve said enough bad things about me that I can finally be candid about who they are.”

Palin proudly recalled being “politically incorrect” in 2008, as she “spoke candidly about where America was headed – with our debt, with our ignoring the will of the people, in the Rust Belt and elsewhere.”

“The media was absolutely out of control with that herd mentality of corporate media, where one person jumped on a bandwagon of ‘Oh, my goodness, she’s so politically incorrect, we just don’t understand her,’” she said. “So many of them jumped on that, and you know, it wasn’t pleasant.”

Palin said the message of “Enough!” from the heartland was directed at corporate media, as well as government. “We knew we needed a revolution to change things, and we found our revolutionary, Donald Trump. He’s our messenger,” she said. “Donald Trump heard the voice of the people, and allowed the people to expose what needed exposing, and he spoke it for us. That included a biased media. And we told corporate media over these years, ‘Stop it, just stop it, or we will shut you down.’ They were on trial, essentially – and they lost. And now this corporate media, and their exaggerations and their lies, and their politics of personal destruction, thank God they are irrelevant.”

Palin added that “exposure of the political machines on both sides of the aisle” helped push Middle America to the point of saying, “We’re not going to take it any more.”

“We’re going to take a stand for justice, for righteousness in our government. We’re not going to take this corruption any more,” she said. “I think the enormous betrayals that Americans have gone through in these eight years, where we worked really hard to send reinforcements of commonsense Constitutional conservatives to Congress to clean things up, and quit raising the debt ceiling, and quit quantitative easing, allowing money to be printed out of nowhere, and devaluing our dollar, all these crazy things that were going on.”

“We worked hard to send those to the Senate, and to the House, to rein in an Administration that’s obviously been out of control – and yet, too many of those politicians betrayed us. And after a couple of elections of being betrayed, people opened their eyes and they said, we don’t have to take it any more,” Palin declared.

She said that if Trump had not “eked out” a win in 2016, we would find ourselves “in the throes of the fundamental transformation of America that candidate Barack Obama had promised that he was going to do to America, and it would be transformed into something that we don’t recognize.”

“We would have seen, as you pointed out, no borders, and you don’t have a nation if you have no borders,” she told Marlow. “You would have seen that quashing of our freedom of speech. And even in the cultural aspect of what they were able to influence for too long, is that political correctness. If you were politically incorrect – according to their subjective, arbitrary double standards – you would be vilified, you would be ridiculed. Most people, they don’t want to be vilified, they don’t want to be ridiculed, so they start shutting down. They don’t express their opinion any more.”

“Talk about Rules for Radicals and Alinskyisms, Orwellian stuff, this is what happens when people start shutting down and not feeling free to express their diverse opinions in the cultural aspect,” she continued. “Well then, even legislatively, it becomes easier to start legislating against freedom of speech. And that’s where they want to go. It’s control of the people again. So thank God we won, and we’re going to have eight years to shore up the knowledge of the significance of our First Amendment rights and the Bill of Rights. I tell ya, we have to be so extremely thankful, because we knew America was at a crossroads. We knew we were going to go one way or the other.”

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

Listen to the complete audio of Palin’s interview above.