Alex Marlow: How to Stay Ahead in the Digital Media Game | DSH #1494

It's sleep.

It's all the things that get you to the next level.

All that time.

All that extra time.

When I was your age, I was grinding on a computer all day, just non-stop.

I was consuming the news like it was a video game.

Like I thought I could read the whole internet, synthesize it, curate it, write the best headlines, do the best assignments to my team in my newsroom.

And I could do all that.

Nothing was in my way.

All right, guys, we got Alex Marlowe here.

We are at Student Action Summit, and you're speaking today, or did you already speak?

I did speak, yeah, I speak earlier, yeah, it was good.

What was the message you were trying to get out there?

You know, the message is mostly about unity.

I was one of the original people that were part of the MAGA movement before it was MAGA.

So, at Breitbart News, where I'm the editor-in-chief, the America-first values, we've been talking about them for a couple of years before Trump came down that escalator and kind of became the face and the voice of the movement.

And so we've really been at the forefront of a lot of this.

And there's a lot of conversation in the base of the conservative movement right now that's maybe not 100% satisfied with where things are, maybe nitpicking here and there.

And I really wanted to bring a positive upbeat message because Where we are is unthinkable relative to where we were 12, 13 years ago when every idea we have was just framed as racist, we were being canceled.

It's reasonable stuff.

I come from LA.

I know the language of the left.

I grew up with those people.

I went to Berkeley.

I was part of,

I grew up within the institutional left.

Our ideas were normal ideas, ideas that are popular.

And the fact that we are where we are, I don't want to see too much whining and complaining.

I think people should be pretty satisfied.

Yeah, yeah, Breitbar, I always associate you guys with being way ahead of your time.

You were like the first cancel case, right, on the right.

Absolutely, yeah, especially with advertisers, is they did a big, this was across governments, not just the U.S.

government, but world governments were getting together to figure out how do they cut off funds to to us because we were earning audiences that were rivaling the New York Times, Huffington Post, the biggest outlets in the world at the time.

We were beating them on social media flat out.

And just in terms of web traffic, I mean, we were so much more fun and interesting and we were bringing people in.

And that was giving a voice to all these ideas they didn't want out there.

And so we've always been target number one.

And it's a point of pride for us.

If you're not getting canceled these days, it means you're not.

Are you even relevant?

Now it's a batch of honor, right?

Yeah, it always was.

Always was.

But you guys were in the peak cancel culture where, you know, law affair was being used, all these types of tactics.

It was constant.

It was non-stop.

If we could outrun one tactic, like they'd shadow ban or they would turn down the dials on social media to the stuff that we were sharing, then if we got through that, then they would say, well, let's go after the advertisers and make sure the advertising

isn't coming in.

But we would just get lean and mean and fight through it and incredibly accurate.

That's the one thing that...

People act like we were fake news.

The term fake news was Hillary Clinton trying to take us out.

Donald Trump co-opted it right away, but it started with her trying to act like our stuff wasn't true.

Our stuff was completely true.

You know how I know?

Because they got the fact checkers, they got the sensors.

If I make a mistake, New York Times covers it.

It would be the lead on another major left-wing website.

They try to make fun of us.

They try to dunk on us.

So I've got to be as accurate as anyone in all of media.

And thus, what they do at Orwellian, they brand it fake news, but it's not, it's real news.

Yeah, well, I owe you some thanks because you paved the way for guys like me to come up and like see everything that happened and move smart.

That means a lot to me.

I honestly think of myself as this self-aggrandizing, but I think of myself as a pioneer in new media and what you guys in the digital space and the YouTube space are taking things beyond anything I could have pictured.

But I really was there when you needed a filter of the establishment media to get any ideas out into the public.

And we were fighting through that online with blogs.

It was a, that word is, people in your audience don't even know that word.

It was web log, like logging.

I heard of it.

Yeah, it just, and that's where we were.

It wasn't long ago.

It was, I'm in my 30s.

I'm not an old guy.

It's the, but it feels like it was another era.

Yeah.

But that's where we started.

And now we're here where we've got a much more level playing field.

Now you got big players like Rumble really advocating for free speech.

It's great to see, right?

I've got a podcast on Rumble.

We love these very aggressive defenses of free speech.

It can't just be a passive defense.

We can't just say, we like the idea of free speech.

No, you got to go to bat for it.

You got to live it.

And I feel like that's happening.

Yeah, and it's both sides, too.

It is both sides.

It is both sides.

People don't, I was talking to Charlie Kirk earlier about this.

Whenever someone tells him you can't have this idea aired to this conference, he said, well, now I'm just going to double and triple down.

Like, that's the whole mindset.

Don't tell me I can't have this person speak or this idea represented because what if I don't agree with them?

So it doesn't matter.

I'm going to double and triple down anyway because don't tell me what to say.

Right.

That was what Trump was like.

That's what we were like at Breitbart.

It's what Steve Bannon was like when he was leaving Breitbart.

It's what Andrew Breitbart was like, of course.

It was, don't tell us what to say.

Let's have a fun.

All right, guys, Sean Kelly here, host of the Digital Social Hour podcast.

Just filmed 33 amazing episodes at Student Action Summit.

Shout out to Code Health, you know, sponsor these episodes, but also I took them before filming each day.

Felt amazing.

Just filmed 20 episodes straight and I'm not even tired, honestly.

Much like this, where it's just based off, you know, the code, the codes that are in the saline solution.

Code Health has been awesome.

Feel the drop and then go code yourself.

Fair debate and stop telling us we're racist, we're sexist, we're bigots, homophobe, xenophobe, Islamophobe.

Stop it.

Just take the idea, debate it, or don't, or just leave us alone.

But don't tell me you can't say something.

And that's why I have massive respect for Charlie because, you know, Tucker last night, he was going off on Israel.

That might upset his donors, but Charlie's willing to stand his ground.

He's having a debate tomorrow with Dave Smith and Josh Hammer.

Yeah.

And I don't even know where Charlie stands on it personally.

I just know that he's got a lot of pro-Jewish speakers, pro-Israel speakers.

I know he's got some others who are getting increasingly more skeptical.

And he's not telling them what to say.

And that's the right.

It's the only approach.

There's no other way because you're going to get crushed no matter what.

If you go left, right, or center, whatever it is, there's someone who's going to tell you you're not doing it right.

So all you can do is be true to yourself, be authentic, and have free speech.

And you don't see that on the left, you know?

I find that they have more of a totalitarian streak.

I've always seen this from my Berkeley days, that there was, when I would do an event on campus as a conservative, And I knew I was a conservative when I was there, and I tried to cause some problems.

I did.

But when I would have an event, they would shout us down.

They would try to get it banned.

They would get security fees that were so high that maybe we couldn't have the event because you couldn't afford, not the speaker, whoever, but the security that it would take to host the speaker.

All that is anti-free speech.

And it's the, I know free speech is for the government, it's in the Constitution, but the spirit of it is on every coin you've got says the word liberty.

Is that liberty that if someone throws an event and you just try to get it canceled before you even hear what people have to say?

That's not liberty.

And I think younger people, that resonates.

And that's more embodied by the right now, which is crazy to say, but it really is.

I saw you wanted the pregnant man emoji removed.

Yes, yeah, yeah, that was the,

I said that if you're going to,

but it's a troll.

Like it's the, no, it's fine.

But it's the, if you're going to start trying to cancel my stuff, then I'm going to try to cancel your pregnant man emoji.

But it's always a troll.

I do a lot of tongue-in-cheek stuff because it's,

I like to use their tactics.

So they point out something they think is outrageous.

So I'll point out something else and just say, okay, well, you're you're doing this, though.

So let's cancel that then.

Let's trade.

Yeah.

Is that something you learned from Trump?

He learned it from me.

No.

I like

how he

does use their playbook.

And I think that's something that I've always come from the premise of the left knows what they're doing.

Because they've made, I think, really bad ideas and not interesting people popular and bad ideas popular.

So to me, that's interesting because I think, well, how are they doing that?

How is the, do we really think that the podium for a women track event should only have men on it?

That sounds like a terrible idea.

But they convinced us all of that for a while, for like nine months.

It was like, oh yeah, of course, we want only men on the podium.

That's a terrible idea.

How did they do that?

How did they sell us that?

And what tactics are they using?

And I try to figure out what they are and can I use those honestly?

Then I will.

I'm a journalist, but I'm also part of the conservative movement, which that's one thing I'll tell you.

You get the editor of the New York Times.

They won't tell you they've got a perspective, even though it is a corporatist globalist paper.

But they won't tell you that.

I'll share with you exactly where I'm coming from on every issue.

New York Times, speaking to them, I just had a guest on last week, huge hit piece on New York Times on this lady.

She told me they haven't lost a lawsuit since the 70s.

I'm not surprised.

Isn't that crazy?

They're so well capitalized.

They've got great lawyers.

And they're more careful than most, believe it or not.

They like to walk a line because they have legal vetting that is,

they can be very careful in the sense that they can walk up to a line without crossing it.

Go through their Russian collusion story stories.

They're all fake.

There was not any truth in it, but they would caveat it the way they wrote it in such a way to keep them free from

legal attacks, but even attacks on their journalism.

They could on technicalities justify all the stuff they were reporting, which was contributing to the conversation in a very negative way because it was dishonest.

But technically, they could beat you on whether or not this is really wrong or can you do this?

Technically, they could, I guess.

Yeah, that's scary, man.

They haven't lost a defamation case in that long.

Yeah, well, we have three speeches in this country, and I'm always mixed when I see a defamation case.

It's the, because I know that the next one will be for me, but I'm up for the challenge.

We've have not lost one ever, and it's because I'm careful.

And it's the, I want my audience to know, I want you, if someone sends you Breitbart's story and you want to talk about your show, that you don't have to go through it, find youth comb, that you know, oh, it's Breitbart, it's good.

So I have that approach with everything I'm i'm doing i hope you guys are enjoying the show please don't forget to like and subscribe it helps the show a lot with the algorithm thank you

they got the same approach so you can win that game that's a winnable game yeah what do you think the so your book comes out in three weeks right breaking the law breaking the law is coming into the book do you think law fair is still a really big threat right now it's a huge threat so as long as the left is very well capitalized which they are So they've got all of these,

it'll be a lot of the usual characters that we've heard about.

George Soros, Reed Hoffman, these dark money groups that funnel money from left-wing billionaires into what I call the superstructure, which is the apparatus from the law schools all the way up to the Joe Biden White House when it was there, that

it is an oligarchic control over the left-wing legal establishment.

So that's still present because these people are not going to be determined because they're not going to be deterred because they lost one election.

That's number one.

But number two, they have, thanks to Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer, the left has cherry-picked a lot of liberal judges, and they've scattered them throughout courts, throughout the country, and they maintain a lot of power, and there's not much we can do about them other than continue to win elections and to make sure conservatives are picking the next crop of judges.

So they're going to be there, and they're going to be figuring out new ways to block portions.

of the Trump agenda.

We saw that with these injunctions and these temporary restraining orders over the last six months.

When I started the book, I had no idea they were going to come up with that stuff.

But in retrospect, of course, they're always looking for, they are fighters.

The left is fighters.

And that's something we need to understand that we can't be fat and happy because we won last time.

We needed to take as much territory as we can.

We need to be as strong as we can because they're always looking for a new attack vector.

And right now it's lawfare.

That's their most powerful one.

Their politicians aren't very good.

They're not charismatic.

We laugh at them.

They're not convincing people.

But they've got this lawfare apparatus and it can't stop Trump, but it can really slow him down.

It definitely did, right?

He's facing so many at-whats.

And he still is.

There's stuff in the book that's crazy.

He's still got

a bond up in New York.

He's still got

a gag order in one of these court cases.

He's from the United States.

Crazy.

No one's aware of this stuff.

These courts

are asserting huge levels of power over Trump, who's the president.

And maybe it's on a pause now because he's currently serving as president.

We don't even know because not all of it gets challenged right away.

They have so many aces up their sleeve and we need to be very diligent about it and vigilant.

Yeah, what do you think the fix for this is is there even one possible for love fair?

Long, long answer, a couple chapters in the book dedicated, but for a show like this, I would say my number one is non-stop energy, action, win every election.

It is the, I know you speak to a wide variety of people in your audience and not just conservatives, but if you are conservative, we need to win every election.

We do, because when the left wins, they get so much done so quickly to dismantle stuff we've built that we need to be prepared to build as much as we can while we can because we're not going to win every election.

It's impossible.

So we need to understand that we've got to do as much as we can when we have power every single day.

We cannot waste a day.

And then when the next election comes around, we can't get turned off by one issue that we weren't happy about or offended because maybe only 80% of the stuff we wanted happened.

No, we got to get up and fight every day.

And that is the main message is that we cannot take anything for granted.

It's scary, man.

It's something I've started to dabble in.

I've got hit with two pretty big lawsuits and one of them wrecked me.

So it's something I am, you know, dealing with.

It's a nightmare.

Because what happens is even if you win, it's energy.

It's time.

It's money.

It's stress.

It's sleep.

It's all the things that get you to the next level.

All that time.

All that extra time.

When I was your age, I was grinding on a computer all day, just non-stop.

I was consuming the news like it was a video game.

Like, I thought I could read the whole internet, synthesize it, curate it, write the best headlines, do the best assignments to my team, my newsroom.

And I could could do all that.

Nothing was in my way.

If I was dealing with lawsuits, if I was dealing with, I got to raise money, so I've got to recruit a law firm to represent me pro-bone, I don't want any of those headaches.

And that's going to stop progress.

So they know that.

And they're aware of that.

And that's why they're going to sue all of us that are a voice that could potentially do damage to them.

And also, if you don't have the money to get the best lawyers, you don't have an even playing field.

Of course not.

And they have billions.

And this is something Trump has been good at is he's trying to put pressure on some of these law firms that are really well-funded, these white shoe law firms they call them, to try to find common ground.

And if they can't find common ground to work on things together, then they're going to lose access, they're going to lose security clearances, and it's going to be much harder for them to do business.

And he's cognizant of this, he's aware of this, but this is a new battlefield for us.

This is a battlefield that was not there when I started in this business 15 years ago.

If you could arrest one person for anti-Trump law fare, who would it be out of all of them?

It's a great question.

So I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know who deserves the arrest per se.

The Tri-Light from Therasage is no joke.

Medical grade red and near-infrared light with three frequencies per light, deep healing, real results, and totally portable.

It's legit.

Photo biomodulation tech in a flexible on-body panel.

This is the Tri-Light from Therasage and it's next level red light therapy.

It's got 118 high-powered polychromatic lights, each delivering three healing frequencies, red and near-infrared, from 580 to 980 nanometers.

It's sleek, portable, and honestly, I don't go anywhere without it.

But I'll tell you one thing that I do is I trace the coordination between various branches of the government.

And I'll tell you one thing that is illegal is the coordination that clearly took place between Joe Biden's White House and the various courts that were suing Trump.

And there were players that came from the Department of Justice and took lesser jobs in lower courts, like the District Court of New York, to try to pursue Trump.

That's almost certainly illegal.

We'll let the lawyers decide, but it's blatantly corrupt, and very few people were aware of it.

Though I will say, off the top of my head, I mean, Kiss James, conspiracy against rights, against Donald Trump, clearly conspiring to try to take away his rights to freedom.

And that is, I think, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Any lawyer worth his salt could prove that.

Yeah, that's the one answer I hear from every lawyer I ask that question to.

The stuff she was doing was so over the top.

I don't need to be as careful with that because it just, I don't see how the stuff she was doing was legal in any sense of the word.

Yeah.

What are your plans after this book gets released?

You know, I'm podcasting, so I'm on YouTube Rumble.

I just started that journey, and it's a good one.

It's a fun one, right?

It's a fun one, but it keeps you engaged, keeps you sharp.

And at Breitbart.com, we are one of the biggest on all of social media.

We're dominant on the meta platform.

We're top five or six on X.

It is an exciting time to be in the news business.

And I'm really excited to see that MAGA, the America First Values, we're making headway in almost every demographic.

Latinos, younger people, black people.

It's the, we're opening the minds of people who, this would have been unthinkable when I got into this business.

And that's exciting to me to talk to people who wouldn't have been open-minded to the stuff that we were talking about 15 years ago.

They're open-minded now.

So I love having those conversations.

MACA 2.0, right?

That's what it is.

And it's fun.

We're hip now.

We talked about the culture wars and that, what an advantage.

I grew up in Hollywood.

The advantage the left had, that everything they did was so much cooler than the stuff we were doing.

We're so much cooler than them now.

And that said, we got a cheat code, which is Donald Trump.

He's the coolest guy in the world.

And he's not always going to be there.

And we need to be prepared for what's next and not lose that playing field, lose that battleground that we won thus far.

So, but, and we could if we mess it up.

But a lot of the cool kid podcast, YouTube culture that is the dominant social force right now, and it's a dominant political force.

We got to keep that culture, I think.

So, that's a big thing.

Yeah, Alex, thanks for your time, man.

That was awesome.

We'll link your upcoming book in the description.

Really kind of you, and I appreciate all the work you're doing.

Yep, check them out, guys.

Check out the book.

See you next time.