Megyn Kelly’s pointed attacks on Trump continued throughout the debate - at one point she suggested that the presidential hopeful was not even a Republican.

Trump took notice. “I don’t think they like me very much,” was his response.

Her questions were aimed at the long shot’s jugular, and Megyn Kelly drew blood. The counterpuncher-in-chief was undoubtedly looking to return the favor.

“The following day,” remembers Bret, “I think actually Trump was on CNN and he said something about 'oh and she was so mad at me and she was bleeding through her eyes, and her ears and her wherever'.”

Trump’s appearance was on the show of Megyn Kelly’s timeslot competitor, Don Lemon. In the moment, Mr. Lemon didn’t protest the remarks. In fact, he didn’t even flinch. But within hours of the interview the then-editor-in-chief of RedState.com, Erick Erickson, disinvited Donald Trump to an influential GOP leaders conference he was hosting the following day. The #NeverTrump movement was born – and it gave license to the media to wage an unprecedented attack on the Manhattan real estate mogul.

The Sunday Edition of the New York Times – by far its widest circulation day – ran a front page, above-the-fold Maggie Haberman hit piece entitled “A Word Too Far? ‘Blood’ Remark Tests The G.O.P. Fallout From Suggestion That Moderator Was Menstruating.”

When he grabbed the paper, Bret couldn’t believe what he was reading.

“The New York Times made that the headline of their paper. I thought, what is that? Why is that the headline? That's a dumb thing Donald Trump said, I'm sure if you, yes, gross - perhaps juvenile making a glancing joke about Megyn Kelly's menstrual blood. I thought, you know, whatever. But the Times took it seriously and they thought it was something that they could use, I suppose, to derail his candidacy.”

Bret began to watch as the news sources that he had so respected throughout his life digressed into a fake news orgy.

“I began to see how Trump was being covered,” he recalls, “and it was very interesting because it wasn't the way any candidate had ever been covered in my lifetime and certainly not by institutions like CNN and the New York Times, which I had followed all my life and who I had watched and read religiously. And I started to see this thing happening that, oh, the press is involved in an election and not reporting on it -they're part of the story and they want to determine its outcome. And it became, as it went on into 2016, maddening. Frightening … and that's how I got interested in the election itself, something I have never been particularly interested in in my lifetime.”

Over the years that followed his awakening, Bret has become a critic of the Trump Derangement Syndrome infecting the media, the political correctness plaguing Hollywood, and the corporate takeover of free speech that has ensued all along the way. But for Bret, this was really nothing new. Since the 80s, he’s laid bare the excesses of elites through his fiction, films and movie criticism – in a way that lessor Hollywood insiders would not dare. In his first outing Less Than Zero, he exposed the consequence-free debauchery of Hollywood’s youth. In American Psycho – he painted a hollow, bloodthirsty picture of Wall Street types. This natural inclination to expose the rich and powerful has been a long-running theme in his work and has lent him a kind of punk rock persona amongst his peers. Hollywood is a town where creatives are king, and Bret is a giant among creative giants … which is why the top of the Tinseltown food chain has paraded through his podcast.

But the environment today is different than when Bret first entered the scene. In this day and age, not hating on the orange man hard enough can get you cancelled from culture.

Which is all the more reason to marvel at Bret’s new book White. It’s a page-turner that addresses hot button issues usually forbidden in a city dominated by what can easily be categorized as a liberal cult. Bret’s even-keeled, yet biting cultural commentary is often in stark contrast to the belligerent, anti-Trump tirades spewed by his colleagues, and it’s even more striking coming from a revered writer, with so much to lose – a man born and raised in a company town that tends to quietly punish those that don’t bend the knee to its groupthink.

The Tinseltown apostasy conveyed in Bret’s White should not be interpreted as a political screed though – it’s something subtler and far more important. It’s a voice of reason in a town whose shelves are all stocked with crazy … a community that went from Mueller is a god, to Mueller is a dog in less than a news cycle.

Bret witnessed this shift in his millennial socialist boyfriend Todd. Following the release of the Mueller report summary, his boyfriend was very quiet. Not saying much, with his nose buried in his smartphone. Bret stayed quiet on the subject for most of the time. This went on for two days until finally, something happened.

“He said, ‘Well I don't believe it. I don't believe the Mueller report. I don't believe Mueller.’” Bret was surprised. “And Mueller was his granddaddy for two years. The man he loved. Mueller was going to sort it all out for us and get rid of the big orange potato chip in the White House … and that is why I have no problem using the term Trump Derangement Syndrome at all.”

Bret has seen ample signs of this affliction during the promotion of his new book. A recent interview with a hostile anti-Trump reporter from The New Yorker prompted Bret to make a 2020 prediction.

In the exchange with the reporter, Bret expressed a seemingly common sense perspective.

“I don't know necessarily if, for example, real sexual assault is the same as Trump on a bus bragging that he grabs them by the pussy,” he contemplated. The reporter snapped back, “The New Yorker writer said it definitely was the same. That's why Trump's reelected in 2020. That's not just the same.”

But with all this talk about politics … Bret is really an apolitical guy.

Over the past decade, I’ve spent a lot of time around political animals – the crips and bloods of policy debates – that judge everything based on an ideological litmus test. From all that I’ve seen of Bret Easton Ellis, the only political discussion that triggers him is the political correctness ravaging the arts and the newsroom. Right and Left isn’t his thing. Censorship is his fighting word. If there was a single issue animating his vote, it would likely be ending the outrage culture engulfing Hollywood that looks to score points by canceling people over their speech. And it’s a sentiment he claims others in Tinseltown share.

“I have to say this … my friends on the left, my liberal friends hate this as much as anyone does,” says Bret. “My liberal friends hate canceling people.”

I’m sure he’s had a lot of those conversations, mixed in with the ones in which he’s talking someone off the ledge after another Rachel Maddow hoax falls embarrassingly short of delivering. That’s what you get from White – straight talk and candor that will no doubt delight those of us that aren’t so easily triggered by the era of Trump. But White also tells the story of a man who’s found himself as the lone tour guide coaxing Hollywood back to sanity – a man who believes some will follow … a man who is willing to take the personal risk to find out.

Which brings me back to that thought I had when driving to Bret’s apartment. When is it time to abandon the mentally ill of Hollywood? It’s easy to see that the legendary writer from Sherman Oaks has an odd love affair with Movie City. I think for Bret, he won’t abandon this place until his last sane liberal friend, the final one that still hasn’t lost his marbles, throws up his hands and gives in, reluctantly joining the outrage mob. But even then, if that moment ever comes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Bret kept speaking hard truths in hopes that his hometown will eventually come to its senses. Let’s hope he succeeds.

White by Bret Easton Ellis is out now.

Patrick Courrielche is a contributor to Breitbart News and the co-host of the storytelling podcast Red Pilled America. You can follow him on Twitter at @Courrielche.