Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow reflected on Andrew Breitbart’s legacy in an interview on the America First radio show hosted by former Deputy Assistant to the President and Breitbart News alumnus Sebastian Gorka.
Marlow’s talk with Gorka aired on February 11’s edition of America First.
“Actually, as we’re recording this, this would’ve been his 50th birthday,” said Marlow. “It’s kind of amazing, because he’s been gone almost seven years, but his legacy is indelible.”
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Marlow said Breitbart identified how “culture [is] upstream from politics,” and how conservatives must “take back the media,” including the “entertainment world and academia.”
Marlow recalled a lesson learned from Breitbart: “You’re not supposed to have cocktails with the folks in the establishment media. You’re not supposed to share a milkshake with two straws with them. You’re supposed to be at war with them.”
After attending what he described as a “decidedly left-wing [preparatory] school,” Marlow recalled his political genesis as a listener of conservative talk radio. He then recalled his “first gig” with talk radio host Larry Elder.
Breitbart spoke of the primacy of culture in shaping politics at a 2007 Young America’s Foundation (YAF) event in Santa Barbara, CA, where he first met Marlow:
Andrew grew up as a default factory setting liberal in Los Angeles. [Andrew Breitbart] was saying, ‘I’m pretty sure Hollywood is controlling everything, right now.’ He kind of predicted Barack Obama. He kind of saw that the Hollywood crowd was going to anoint someone. A made-for-TV presidency. Does that ring a bell for any Trump fans, out there? Andrew said it’s going to be a made-for-TV presidency, and Obama’s rising, and Andrew explained to me, ‘No, it’s not just the Democratic Party. It’s David Geffen. It’s Jeffrey Katzenberg. It’s the executives in Hollywood who are actually the ones calling the shots, here.’
Gorka invited Marlow’s description of Breitbart’s character.
GORKA: Tell us a little bit about the true Andrew Breitbart, who you worked for as employee number one.
MARLOW: You couldn’t have designed someone who was a better model for a fighter at the moment that Andrew was needed.GORKA: Because he didn’t care what the cost was.
MARLOW: Absolutely. In fact, he kind of liked it. He kind of got a surge off the hatred. I know it’s all commonplace, now. If you’re at all in public life now … there’s so much hatred that’s out there, and everyone’s trying to cut you down.
…
There are folks who kind of tune it out. There are folks who really hate it. And then there are folks who actually get a little adrenaline off of it. And Andrew was that. Andrew absorbed the hate so everyone could get accustomed to the new media landscape.
GORKA: But he actually used it in a kind of jiu-jitsu sense. He used it against those people who were so evil in what they said about him and the conservatives, and it starts with Clarence Thomas.
MARLOW: It does. In fact, his book’s dedicated to Clarence Thomas, because he tuned into the Clarence Thomas hearings — he was a budding news junkie but not on the right — and he was expecting Clarence Thomas to get exposed as some sort of a pervert and horrible person, and instead it really embarrassed Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, because they did the high-tech lynching, as Clarence Thomas described it.
Conservative talk radio figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Dennis Prager helped shape Breitbart’s political views, explained Marlow.
“It’s an incredible evolution from Andrew from liberal Hollywood type to right-wing superstar,” stated Marlow. “He had the full genetic makeup. He was hilarious,. He was so energetic. He knew the media from the inside. He knew the culture from the inside.”
GORKA: He looked to me as a man whose brain was wired differently.
MARLOW: Completely. He was so quick and funny and relentless.
GORKA: He just had a feel for what resonated in the media, didn’t he?
MARLOW: It was pure feel. He referred to it, I think, as weaponized ADD, or something like that. He was able to use his obsession that he could get into these modes where he was so singularly focused on a topic and for awhile it was just trying to destroy the left and fight back against media bias.
The jiu-jitsu you referred to was kind of amazing. He used to retweet the hate on Twitter. He would retweet everyone, which I think was sort of riffing off of Dennis Prager’s preferring clarity to agreement, which is that, ‘Look, this is what the other side is saying.’
GORKA: Have a look.
MARLOW: ‘They’re saying these horrible things about me, my wife, and my children.’ This is the left for you. And the left tries to use that on us, on the right, and it turns out they have to invent hoaxes all the time, now, because we’re not that uncivil.
He had a unique set of gifts that I think made him uniquely qualified to fight the fight he was fighting, and not to mention just a dynamite news sense in general, having worked next to Matt Drudge for so many years at the Drudge Report
Gorka recalled Breitbart’s analysis of expanding neo-Marxist influence in academia via the Frankfurt School:
Andrew, in a very digestible manner, maps out where these people came from, what their intent was, and how they took control of education, media, and the culture/ If you read just one chapter of Andrew’s book “Righteous Indignation,” it must be that chapter that maps out what the left did to eventually bring us to a president who … comes to office saying his mission is to fundamentally transfom the nation he wants to be president of.
Gorka praised Breitbart’s analysis of the Frankfurt School’s spread across academia as “the most important thing I have read on politics in the Western World in the 20th century since I’ve started studies.”
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