Free speech advocates struck a critical blow in the war against Big Tech and global elites’ censorship of conservative voices, including Breitbart News, Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow explained on Real Talk with Marissa Streit.
Marlow and Streit, CEO of Prager University, broke down how Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) of the House Judiciary Committee took down the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) and revealed how corporate entities like those behind GARM continue working to silence conservatives such as Breitbart and PragerU.
Although this is just one battle in a larger war, conservatives should revel in the victory, if for no other reason than the takedown of GARM brought to light the shadow warfare that bad actors fight against Breitbart and other conservative voices.
“We got a win,” Marlow told Streit. “It’s not gonna be the biggest win ever, but it’s a really important win, I think, because the world is starting to understand that a lot of these self-appointed hall monitors, policemen of the internet, are actually frauds who are trying to bankrupt companies like yours and mine.”
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Marlow also described upcoming fights in the ongoing war against censorship.
“They’re trying to kill us with warfare,” Marlow said. “This is economic warfare, and they will not rest just because we won this round.”
HOW JIM JORDAN TOOK DOWN GARM
As Breitbart has reported, GARM used its immense influence to participate in activities far more serious and outside the scope of its stated aim of promoting “brand safety,” even veering into content moderation of television, social media, and the internet.
Yet without the work of Jordan and his team over the past year and a half, GARM’s egregious abuses may never have been brought to light.
Marlow laid out how GARM flexed its monopolistic muscle in the shadows to punish conservatives.
GARM “is one of these Orwellian names that sounds like — oh, who wouldn’t like a Global Alliance for Responsible Media? That sounds incredible,” Marlow explained.
Despite the benign name, GARM was designed specifically to attack conservative viewpoints, made clear by evidence uncovered by Jordan.
“It’s really part of this group called the World Federation of Advertisers, which basically is the biggest advertising conglomerate in the world — about 90% of ads that you’ll see online will go through this company. So this is a true monopoly in every sense of the word.”
“From our history keeping at Breitbart, this was designed specifically to bankrupt conservative media, and thanks to Jim Jordan and his team that have been investigating them for the last year and a half, that we know that’s fundamentally true,” he added.
Marlow credits Jordan and his staff for acquiring “smoking gun evidence that part of what [GARM is] doing, if not the main thing that they’re doing, is trying to put pressure on advertisers to not buy advertising real estate on conservative outlets.”
GARM’s fascinating but pernicious structure hid its operation and motives, Marlow explained thoroughly, noting “the biggest companies on earth” propped the organization, including — Group M (“the world’s biggest advertising buying, media buying agency, period”), Unilever, Orsted, Diagio, Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, and Adidas.
“Group M, for example, they basically wanted to hunt down Breitbart and to get us boycotted. And we do have smoking gun evidence of this,” Marlow told Streit.
Marlow quoted a communication obtained by Jordan from GroupM executive John Montgomery unequivocally stating that he wanted to attack Breitbart:
[Montgomery] said, “before Breitbart crossed the line, started spouting blatant misinformation, we had long discussions about whether we should include them on an exclusion list.” So, boycott list — they wanted to boycott Breitbart for getting advertising and for getting media buys. So he says, “as much as we hated their ideology and B.S.” — he did not use the letters — “we couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion.” So he admits he looks into it. We haven’t done anything wrong, but then he says “we watched them very carefully, and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.” Now, what are we doing to cross the line? We don’t know. That’s not in the report. No one knows what we did, but he basically put a target on our back and went for a witch hunt to try to get us boycotted.
Other companies behind GARM, besides GroupM, wanted to harm Breitbart.
“Orsted wanted to specifically organize a group boycott. This is all written out,” Marlow said. “They gave smoking guns for Jordan’s people to go uncover.”
The organization’s articulated “goal was to separate their advertising dollars from conservative media to starve us,” Marlow said. “It is economic warfare that was going on.”
Jordan’s work exposing GARM was used by Elon Musk in a lawsuit against GARM.
“What Musk did, which I think was very clever, is that he actually tried to play nice at first,” Marlow explained to Streit, describing how Musk, after acquiring Twitter (now X), spurred the company to rejoin GARM after having been a member before Musk’s ownership.
“He gets in and immediately realizes what’s going on,” Marlow said, detailing how Musk and Linda Yaccarino, X’s CEO, quickly learned that GARM was “going after us because of our views.” Marlow continued:
It’s not about misinformation. It’s not about being a responsible media. It’s about “he has a lot of pro-Trump, pro-conservative, pro-family values content now on that platform,” and that’s what they don’t like. They want this globalist, leftist philosophy to dominate, not just in terms of media outlets and platforms, but the advertising dollars needed to go to those companies to feed them, because they’re struggling now, and they need all that money, and they want to starve us out.
Streit pointed out that those activities seem to represent an antitrust violation. “Jim Jordan’s office clearly thought that was the case,” Marlow replied. “I think Elon Musk’s people agreed,” he said, asserting that Jordan’s work, amplified by Musk’s lawsuit, put “the writing was on the wall” for GARM, which voluntarily disbanded under the pressure.
MORE CENSORSHIP BATTLES AHEAD
Unfortunately, GARM’s takedown is no silver bullet to end censorship of conservatives.
“The WFA still exists, and I don’t doubt that they’re trying to spin up a different way to boycott,” Marlow said, noting that NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index are among those “who have the same exact mission that they’re trying to make sure that there’s no flow of cash into businesses like mine.”
“It’s been going on for half a decade,” Marlow added. “At this point, we’re used to it. It’s just nice to see that we’re getting we’re gaining these allies, people like Musk, people like Jim Jordan’s office.”
Congress will continue looking into these corporate entities, despite their effort to sidestep investigations by disbanding GARM. Marlow said justifiably “there’s a lot of high-fiving going on” in Jordan’s office after playing such a critical role in taking out GARM “but [Jordan] still wants to hear from a lot of these entities.”
Unfortunately, Breitbart and many others negatively impacted by censorship don’t have the resources to fight every front in the war against censorship, which is why Jordan’s work has been so crucial.
“These are the biggest companies in the world,” Marlow said. “Musk has the deepest pockets in the world, and so I think that that’s where – he does deserve some pretty epic credit in this regard – he files a suit. He’s citing Jordan’s report in the suit, so he’s reading the right stuff, he’s getting the right details. And they put the suit out, and they know that he’s not suing for fun. He means business.”
Marlow tied GARM’s legal strategy with the lawfare being used against Donald Trump.
“I don’t have those types of resources, we don’t at Breitbart, to fight every war of attrition legally, and they know that – that’s lawfare,” he said. “That’s the stuff Trump complains about. That’s weaponization of the legal system, another variation of it.”
“WE HAVE TO DEFEAT THEM.”
Streit described similar censorship attacks PragerU has fought against NewsGuard and Sleeping Giants – which have also come for Breitbart – describing the Whac-A-Mole-style challenge of fighting an enemy with so many evolving faces.
Marlow had the “perfect analogy” to describe the fight, channeling Dennis Prager:
You don’t go to war with a person. You go to war with an ideology. So we need to go against the Left, not against Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, etc. And I think that’s resonant here, because the war is not with GARM [but with] this group of censorship, globalist-type of superstate, international people from typically the establishment of the Republican Party, Democrats, left wingers, etc., that have been working together to try to make sure upstart, grassroots conservative entities do not thrive and cannot get our information out.
Marlow shared a quote from a report written by Jordan’s Judiciary Committee about GARM cofounder Rob Rakowitz — who Breitbart previously reported repeatedly “provided … inaccurate information” and contradicted documented evidence obtained by Jordan’s committee — stating that he “is critical of an extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution, and he’s criticized the constitution for being written by white men exclusively.”
“So you’ve got a white man complaining about white men whitesplaining to the world,” Marlow said, asserting “that’s what we’re dealing with, is people who see our Constitution as flawed because white guys wrote it.
“How do we get through to those people? We can’t. We have to defeat them,” he explained.
CENSORSHIP BATTLEFIELD EVOLVES, BIG TECH SHIFTS STRATEGY
Marlow described another tactic used by censors, citing Breitbart’s experience with Sleeping Giants — “the OGs of online cancel culture censorship” — and how that battle reshaped media advertising. He argued that by introducing new methods initially intended to silence conservatives, censors created an atmosphere that ultimately damaged establishment newsrooms by “resetting advertisers’ thinking about the news industry and where their advertisers should appear.”
Ultimately, advertisers made it even harder to thrive in the news business while creating a new ecosystem where battle-hardened conservatives could flourish.
“Their next target after Breitbart was Tucker Carlson,” Marlow said. “So how’s Tucker doing right now? He’s been doing pretty well. He’s kind of all over the place. He’s doing world tours, selling out stadiums — independent, and so they couldn’t take him out.”
He said, “Whenever you’re seeing these cuts to newsrooms, that they’re doing these mass layoffs, you should be reminded that the left were the ones who did this, because they recentered the advertising market.”
Marlow and Streit discussed NewsGuard, another censorship entity, which Marlow said held Breitbart in good standing “until September of 2020 – you might know when that might be, a little bit before a pretty big event,” referring to the November 2020 presidential elections.
But censors have even greater ambitions in pushing their political agenda.
“They want to do next ElectionGuard, so they want to have a spin off that’s going to be involved in policing elections,” Marlow said. “And all of this is working together to set an agenda, which is this, pro-establishment, pro-left wing, pro-globalist agenda worldwide. That’s their explicit goal. And they’re fighting wars of attrition with deep, deep pockets.”
Marlow said an antitrust suit Google recently lost has limited benefit for Breitbart, but “I love the idea that people are pushing back in any way they can Google is a huge, huge behemoth.”
He continued, “I was talking to President Trump earlier this week, and all of the Silicon Valley tech giants seem to be kissing the ring a little bit to him. I don’t think they’ve gone far enough, but almost all of them are coming up to him after the assassination attempt, and the big shots are at least saying, ‘hey, we saw what you did. That was pretty cool.'”
The exception is Google, which Marlow said “doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Marlow believes Google feels “like they’re god-like. They control so much because they’re not just dominant in search, they’re not just dominant other sorts of computing, but our Pentagon’s dependent on them in a lot of ways.”
Google has made clear how they intend to use their power.
“Remember, they vowed never to let someone Trump-type person after 2016 win again, they said that,” Marlow exclaimed. “They said that they were going to make populism, nationalism, a blip or a hiccup in history.”
WASHINGTON IS GROUND ZERO IN CENSORSHIP WAR
The partnerships between corporate entities and the censorship organizations they’ve spawned and governments insulate censors.
“No one’s really looked under the hood, because Google is, again, they’re essentially a part of the US government in a lot of ways,” Marlow countered. “So the government would have to investigate themselves.”
Google and other Big Tech companies use cash and contracts to build power.
“Google is one of the biggest lobbyists in all of Washington, DC,” Marlow explained. “They are handing out money. Think they’re handing it out to people with our politics? Of course not. They’re handing it out to people who they know they can buy off with another hot gig.”
Marlow cited a prominent example – Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
“He basically has a company called WestExec, where he matches government contracts with Big Tech entities – specifically Google, one of his biggest clients,” Marlow said, calling Blinken “a go-between between government money and Big Tech jobs.”
“Do you think that his State Department is going to be hostile to anything Google is doing? Of course not,” Marlow said.
Marlow, who lived for eight years in Washington, elaborated on the web of self-interests driving government action – and inaction.
“There really is a complex of people who want to see the expansion of the war industry,” he said. “They want to see the expansion of bureaucracies, because it helps them get jobs, even though – they don’t necessarily want us all to go to war and die, that’s not what they’re thinking about. But they’re thinking about, how can we grow the Defense Department? How can we grow the State Department? How can we grow the judicial branch?”
“That’s what’s really disappointing,” he lamented, “and that’s where a lot of our money is going. And it’s not making the country better.”
Marlow named another person complicit in Big Tech’s censorship.
“The person who was in charge of this stuff, really, in California for a long time, is Kamala Harris,” he said. “She’s the one who was the was essentially supposed to be responsible for looking after Google, looking after Facebook, as the Attorney General in the state. In the meantime, they’re stroking huge checks in her direction.”
FIRST AMENDMENT MUST BE PROTECTED
As censors double down in their fight against conservatives, First Amendment advocates must fight ever harder, Marlow and Streit argued.
Freedom of speech is “one thing that really makes America unique” Streit said, asserting that power-seeking entities like those powering GARM and Google are attacking freedom of speech in recognition of the power it provides to the American people.
“If they control our speech, if they censor information, if they censor education and news, they control everything,” she said. “They control the borders, they control education, they control the military. They control everything, because we don’t get to hear about what they’re doing.”
Marlow challenged conservatives to ask themselves what they are trying to conserve, arguing that the First Amendment protects so much of what conservatives value.
“First Amendment [has] got to be high on the list, because that is what gives us a fighting chance against all of those different groups — well-funded, well-lawyered groups that want to see us destroyed,” he said. “Our only hope is with the First Amendment and our ability to speak freely. And thank God that there’s a few people out there who see that.”
The full interview with much more can be seen here.
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
