Fighting Fake News with Alex Marlow | A Bee Interview
Alex Marlow is the Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart News and hosts the Breitbart News Daily Podcast. Marlow faces Adam Yenser's Real or Fake Headlines challenge and reminisces about Joe Biden's most memorable speeches. Marlow recently published a book called Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media's Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption, which is available now. This episode is brought to you by Private Internet Access. This episode is also brought to you by Faithful Counseling. Get help today from people who share you faith and values.
There is no normal B-Weekly podcast for this week.
Please enjoy this interview with Alex Marlowe, editor-in-chief of Breitbart News.
Welcome, everyone, to the Babylon Bee Podcast.
Today we're going to have a standalone interview for you.
Usually we pack these into the weekly podcast, but this one was so interesting and it took up a good chunk of time.
So we're just going to spin it off to its own show.
We talked to Alex Marlow, who is the editor-in-chief of Breitbart and the host of the Breitbart News Daily podcast.
Yeah.
And he wrote a whole book about the sort of media's narratives and how it's exposing the establishment media's hidden deals and secret corruption.
So you can check out his book.
It's called Breaking the News.
And you can check him out, of course, on Breitbart or wherever you get your far-right misinformation.
And so we're going to talk to Marlowe now.
It was a fascinating conversation.
Yeah, he was really fun to talk to.
And let's dive in.
We go.
Well, what the heck man.
How's it going?
It's going really well.
Really appreciate being here.
It's a you guys are so clandestine.
And where you're located, we're clandestine at Breitbart, meaning that I just scatter everyone all over the country and I don't let them go into an office ever.
You guys don't even have an office?
May or may not.
You're not at liberty to say.
Who's to say?
But certainly.
You can just guess what the address is and you'll wink if.
Absolutely.
I'll do the side notes tap.
No.
Is there an eight in it?
Just guess the address slowly.
Yeah, so you can go backwards and eventually figure it out.
No, but it's the thing is you can track anyone's phone and find people anyway, but I still appreciate the effort.
Yeah.
I do make an effort to be out here.
I got a weird package from a fan once to my house.
I think you can just Google my name.
And it comes up.
This has caused me a lot of personal strife because I try not to put my name on my house because Antifa does publish it.
Antifa did that to me once.
Did they really?
Yeah, on Facebook.
And I was living just outside D.C. at the time.
And actually, law enforcement was aware of it before I was, which was the first time, maybe the only time I was impressed with the federal law enforcement.
Oh, wow.
They got a scoop before you did for once.
Absolutely.
Did that address have an eight in it?
It did.
Absolutely.
It had an eight, but I don't live there anymore.
Did you experience any backlash or anything after they published it?
No.
No, because I lived in Virginia, and that's a place where no one has any idea how many guns you have.
So it could be zero.
Antifa doesn't have a big presence in Virginia, I don't think.
No, and I don't live near any strip malls or any places that are good to loot afterwards when they're done harassing, considering journalists.
They're not a big box of Nikes in your home or anything.
If I do, then they're long gone.
I actually boycotted Nike just flat out.
Everything was, it was the only company I think I actually went to my closet and threw stuff out.
Oh, really?
These are Italian.
These are nice.
He's trying to call you out on it right away.
He's checking.
These are authentic.
No, I think Nike was.
There's a lot of companies I try not to buy from, but Nike was one where I definitely went into my closet, took the Nikes, and put them in the garbage can.
What are some others that you try not to buy?
Well, you know what I do?
I go on Instagram.
I'm going to buy from a new company and I see if they put up the black square during.
Then you buy from them if they see.
And if they put up the black square.
Yeah, it was double my order.
Exactly.
No, no, then I then I.
But you use Mark Zuckerberg's platform to find out which companies you should boycott.
That's exactly right.
It's been so useful.
And this is what you guys do.
And again, you guys have the hardest job in all of media now, like trying to satirize the Biden lab.
I don't know.
Daily Wire is making razors.
That's probably pretty difficult.
Did you buy Harry's razors?
I was unaware of this until this morning.
I think everyone was.
I think everyone all of a sudden wants to be in the Razor business all of a sudden.
I think I had four other people pitching me razors today.
That's going to be the new.
I remember when David Hogg wanted to have his own pillow just because he doesn't like it.
Oh, that's right.
And then it didn't work out.
It just strikes me as similar.
It didn't work out.
Yeah, but you know, he passed it on to like his business partner friend and he's still trying to do it.
Like he's still tweeting about it.
The other guy, David Hogg's partner, but he bailed.
They're still trying to make hogs pillows or whatever they want.
Didn't they backfire on him though?
I think politically, like people thought he was exploiting his, like he was, you know, standing on the graves of dead people, dead children.
But he was selling pillows.
Now no one takes him seriously like how they take Mike Lindell seriously.
No one is taking us seriously as Lindell.
Hey, that's a look like Geese of Cotton.
Yeah.
You can't beat it.
You can't beat it.
So just kind of as an icebreaker, we're going to list some things and we want you to say one positive thing about each of them.
Okay.
CNN.
The positive thing about CNN now is I guess Jeff Zucker is gone.
He was the cancer.
Amen.
Absolutely.
And that is something that it was a running joke in the Breitbart newsroom that it's so hard to cover CNN because there's only one story.
We only wrote one story over and over again about CNN.
And now maybe there'll be a new one.
Not anytime soon, but that's it.
They got rid of Zucker.
And Zucker's one of these guys who just failed his way up through the entertainment industry.
So that's the key to life.
For real, he's just like, he mismanages everything he's ever done and he just getting higher position.
This is the key to life.
And one of my key worldviews is that this is the method now is to just be willing to fail publicly at a colossal level.
And you're guaranteed to get a new job.
And it's across industries, but media for sure is the one that's most clearly on display.
So I'm going to try to get canceled during this interview at some point because I know then I'll be seeing a big raise coming up soon.
A new gig.
Well, I wonder if you're trying to get canceled.
So we just got kicked off of Twitter or suspended because we wrote a satire headline honoring Rachel Levine as man of the year.
Sure.
Now, you as a legitimate news platform, could you just write a news story, Rachel Levine is a man, and present as a news headline as a fact?
And would you get suspended for that?
This will not shock you, but we had to discuss your, of course, we covered the story.
Yeah.
But we had to discuss it from a news perspective because we, of course, put up Rachel Levine headlines all the time, who is a man, and we always refer to Rachel Levine as a man.
And it is, I like the Unleashing the Admiral.
Who had that joke last time?
Oh, I did that on the podcast.
I said Rachel Levine learned about the honor from the newspaper they place above the urinal.
So this is where we have a real decision because Twitter will kick us off eventually, it seems like.
It seems like they've decided they're going to draw their line in the sand on this issue.
They're using it to fight a cultural war.
It's weird.
And Charlie Kirk got kicked off just since I was driving in.
And it just seems like they're deciding this is going to be a moment.
We're going to use this.
We're going to run with it.
You guys are first.
And the thing is, what are you supposed to do?
We've been in this position in the past.
And basically, they just do a war of attrition with us and they ride it out until we acknowledge we're kind of playing on their turf.
And we have to delete the tweet.
And we all feel a little bit weaker and a little bit sadder and a little bit sorrier.
And the country gets a little bit less free.
And then they laugh all the way to the bank because their business model at Twitter is not keeping folks like us happy, obviously.
Their business model is keeping their woke employees happy.
And this does it.
So it's a real big issue because we will slip up in this regard.
There's no way to be perfect in terms of calling that dude a girl.
It's not going to happen every time.
With us, it'll never happen once.
But it's a, for most people, they're still going to make a mistake.
Yeah.
Andrew Cuomo.
Okay.
Something nice about Andrew Cuomo.
Oh, yeah.
The virus came from Europe.
It came from Europe.
It was one of the greatest lines of all time.
Only surpassed by the fact that he pled Italian when he was under fire.
Like that was a talk about how do you satire satirize that?
My whole family on my wife's side is Italian.
Her dad was native Italian.
She was the number one Italian student at a major university in the state we're currently in right now.
And she reveres the Italian culture.
It's a my kids of Italian names, master and master.
That's actually not their names, but that's how I refer to them publicly.
But that he blamed that he pled that he was an Italian person and Italians need to kiss and hug and fondle and compliment the breasts of people in order to relate to them.
This is absolutely absurd.
I know a billion Italians.
They're in my family.
None of them do any of those things.
That's not part of their culture at every family get together.
No, your breath.
You're buxom.
You're bucks him.
You're buxom.
Good to see you.
You're bucksum.
Like, what is this?
And that was so unbelievably great.
And I'm grateful for him.
He also killed all those people, which was bad.
That's right.
Yeah.
I feel like you're just saying it's weird because it's weird because, you know, when he did have to leave office, it was like good, but it wasn't the reason.
He should have been kicked out of office for the way he handled the whole nursing home thing and all the people that died from that.
Yeah.
So he is a gift to you.
I mean, you guys must have had a blast with him.
That's how he satirized it.
Cuomo condemns America's history of prejudice against Italian grandma killing sex.
Yeah, it's true.
The country is really hostile to Italians that execute a bunch of the elderly, like a genocide against the elderly.
If you're Italian and you do that, you better watch out.
You might not keep your job too much longer.
Yeah.
Here's one of my favorite subjects.
Say something positive about Don Lemon.
Oh, the playing with his name.
It's so fun.
Tucker calls him Don Lamon.
And I refer to him as Don Lamon on, and just not acknowledging that his name is Lemon, even if it is.
We're all confused now.
I know this because I interviewed Victor Davis Hansen recently, one of the most thoughtful and scholarly Americans, period.
Forget someone who shares our politics.
I mean, he's just one of the deepest thinkers walking the face of the earth at the moment.
And he refers to him as Don Lamont.
I don't think he knows.
That's not really his name.
And so it's worked.
Like, we don't know what his name is anymore.
And he's another one, just that the sniveling with the juicy smoille.
Yeah.
This pays my bills.
This pays for my lifestyle is enabled at Breitbart by this low-hanging.
Italian, non-Nike shoe.
These are, yes, my non-Nike shoes.
I can afford to buy Italian where the virus came from.
The sex predator shoes.
What about Joe Biden?
Well, something positive about Joe Biden.
I'll give a serious one.
The serious one is we are not in war right now on behalf of Ukraine, which I think is positive.
And I'm a supportive Ukraine.
I'm a hater of Putin.
And I think that I'm a big admirer of what Zelensky is doing.
But we do not have the credibility as a culture and as a society at the moment to go to war on behalf of the Ukraine-Russia border.
It is not a good move.
And he somehow kept us out of it, even though there are warmonger caucuses that are throughout Washington, left, right, and center.
The media loves war.
The military-industrial complex is very real.
During my time in Washington, that became very clear to me.
They all want us in war.
He's kept us out so far.
So I'll give him a like positive note on that.
And then, of course, the greatest soundbite of all time, the corn pop video.
Corn pop was a bad dude.
And he ran a bunch of bad boys.
And I did, yeah.
And back in those days, shot, things have changed.
I will thank him endlessly for that.
Have you heard my butts been wiped?
No.
Oh, there's one that may compete with Corn Pop.
That's probably my favorite bite in the world.
You need to send me that one because I have to, and it's still, I was thinking about this on the drive in.
I was thinking, we still don't know for sure if he crapped his pants in front of the Pope.
Yes.
Still don't know for sure.
That is one of the greatest.
I don't know if it happened or not, but just the fact that we don't know that it became a story.
I want you to analyze this clip and tell me what you think Joe Biden is saying.
Let's try to find the original.
I gotta find the original.
It makes me laugh over and over.
It's pretty clear at least.
Is this it there?
I mean, but everything I've got.
Eric is always unedited.
I will say, though, that the corn pop clip is still superior because with the corn pop clip, you pick out more nuances, like returning your favorite cup of coffee or a glass of high-end, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, you pick up more the more you have it.
Yeah, yeah, you realize there were tasting notes to the corn pop video.
And when you think about like how the implication is that his dad counseled him in the video that the two guys making out at the public pool in Wilmington, Delaware in the 60s, that they just loved each other.
And his dad was so progressive.
He was explaining to little Joey that this is great behavior.
In fact, he should go and congratulate them and offer to marry them in some sort of a story.
I don't remember this part of this.
Oh, yeah.
It's a long, like 14-minute video.
He goes on and on, right?
He goes on and on.
And just the jokes about the rain barrel where you'd hide the knife in the rain barrel.
And then those days you used to remember the straight race.
You used to bang them on the curb, get them rusty, put them in the rain barrel, get them rusty.
I got to rewatch that.
I don't remember all these.
I don't remember all these details.
This must be the Snyder cut.
I've only see of my favorite Joe Biden hits.
I've watched My Butts Been Rick a lot and I've watched Cockroaches and the Hairy Legs a lot.
The hairy legs.
Scott Lana, I got hairy legs.
And the kids used to come up and reach into the pool and rub my leg down.
The hairy legs one, the fact that people created this pop art around it online, it just, it donned a billion memes and video memes of people cartooning Joe Biden with the kids rubbing down his legs and his legs standing up.
And then they turn blonde in the sun.
It's just, and his suggestion to the public that if you eat ice cream and you wear aviators, you are cool.
Yeah.
Just what a bold play.
I mean, that is real style in a society where we've all lost our style.
Like he's, that is hardcore right there.
Aviators and ice cream.
That's going to be my vibe.
I'm going to roll with it every time.
I kind of respect it.
Yeah, it's real.
There's even worse things that presidents have been known for.
Yeah.
Well, Biden's been known for much worse.
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Now, you're now the editor-in-chief of Breitbart, but we heard you were Andrew Breitbrett's first employee.
Yes.
What was it like you're getting started there and what was he like to work with when you started out?
Andrew is a truly amazing person, and he just passed away just 10 years ago.
And a lot of people have been kind of reflecting on his life and his legacy and just how prescient he was in terms of tactics, which I think you guys are a huge part of this.
And I know I'm flattering you guys a little bit.
Don't associate us with it.
Yeah, it's a, it's a for advertising purposes.
Yeah, sure.
No, but he didn't want to just be a journalist, a sonographer of what the culture war is.
He wanted to be in the culture.
And this is something that is really fun at Breitbart.
So often over the years, I'll be watching a television show and we'll get mentioned, or we'll see a website that's obviously supposed to be Breitbart in the background.
Or there'll be a startup media outlet that there's a plot line around it, and that's Breitbart.
That stuff makes me as proud as any of our big scoops because I think Andrew would have loved that.
And that's what you guys are doing.
You guys aren't just tracking the culture.
You're culture.
You are culture.
And it's not enough just for us to fight the culture war by complaining about lips.
Like that's, we should complain about lips, of course, but that's not enough.
And Andrew really saw that and I think was the first guy using the media to really dive in and say, we're going to do this.
We're going to have our own counterculture that will impose its will on the establishment.
But as a guy, he was so hilarious.
You guys would have gotten such a kick out of him because his main goal in life wasn't to fight the left.
It was actually to make everyone laugh.
He was a close second fighting the left, a very close second.
He hated the left, but he was equal parts jocularity and righteous indignation.
And that was just so charismatic.
And it was something that I got on board with right away because he had this A-plus world-class news nose, but he also had this sense of how to fight the next iteration of the culture war.
And so I met him when I was in college and I signed on right away.
I had not of a glamorous job.
I was running errands.
I was called associate editor, but I edited like five minutes a day and the rest was taking care of things around the office.
But I was able to learn so much from him because he was really a giant and he's so, so, so missed.
Can you give us like a list, say your top five or bottom five, however you want to look at it?
Top five worst purveyors of fake news.
Am I only limited to CNN or can I go and be yeah, I would say like five different stations or outlets or websites.
You know, it's interesting because I was just going through the, I was just going through the Hunter Biden laptop story because Emma Joe Morrison.
That's not true, though, right?
I heard that's fake news, right?
No, it's true now.
Oh, it is, okay.
It wasn't true before November 2020.
Yeah, yeah, after November 2020.
I see.
It becomes true.
It's interesting because for me, I'll probably give fairly obvious answers after this.
But it was interesting to look back on the Hunter Biden laptop story, which we just did at Breitbart because Emma Joe Morris, who broke all the stories at the New York Post, she's now our political editor at Breitbart.
And she was called a Russian asset.
She's a Canadian who moved to America and is a very nice person and just reports on things that the establishment doesn't like and was working for News Corp at the time.
Not exactly, you know, not household name.
Has she owned those little nesting dolls?
See, this is where we've never been in the same room together because of the virtual newsroom.
So for all I know, she's got a whole array behind her on a wall.
It's just all Russian stuff when you walk into her office.
It is, she did have this really kind of funny wool hat in one of her photos.
And it was the dead of summer.
So it's very odd.
But she said by far the worst outlet was NPR.
And this is one where whoever's an ex-Republican president, day one, you have to defund NPR.
You have to defund PBS.
And I know that they get so much of their money from donations and stuff like that.
But make the statement.
Make the statement.
We're not going to government fund fake news like we're some sort of third world country.
The fact that they were the worst on that story is very telling.
But my answers are fairly.
We were the worst on the laptop.
We should sell bumper stickers that say defund the PBS.
Defund Big Burden.
Yeah.
But that's how the media will frame it.
They'll frame it as we don't like Elmo.
I actually like Elmo.
I think Elmo gets ruined by the CNNification of Elmo.
Remember when Elmo's dad, like when on CNN, explained gayness to him, I think.
I think that really happened.
You might have made that up.
Really?
But you wouldn't know.
Yeah, you wouldn't.
We have our vaccinate melma.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
How many jabs has he got, though?
Because it's debated.
Is he on ivermectin?
No, he doesn't like ivermectin.
He starts shaking.
He lives in a part of the world where there's not a lot of risk of worms.
So he's good because he's here.
Yeah.
They're safe out here.
What makes you say NPR was the worst at the left of this?
We just went through it.
They were the most clearly stating this is Russian disinfo most often.
Just saying definitively, like this is fake.
But in terms of who are the worst purveyors of fake news, I think that what's happening right now is there's sort of two subsets.
There is the China subset, which is companies that are part of multinational conglomerates.
This is one of the biggest revelations in the book that we shall not name.
That's sitting right here.
We could talk about your book.
We want to talk about it.
It's breaking the news.
Yeah.
And in the book, I go through how China specifically has its hands in American media via these multinational conglomerates.
Take Disney.
Is Disney just Disney or is Disney part of ABC Disney with ABC News?
So you've got ABC News has a parent company that has theme parks and resorts in China.
So do you think China, which gives permission for all these theme parks to exist, do you think they're going to be very kind to ABC if ABC's really investigating the origin of the pandemic?
Of course not.
How about NBC News?
NBC's got NBC Comcast Universal.
That's not just theme parks, but it's also there, you know, they do the distribution of the James Bond and Fast and Furious movies.
So if they want to sell the Fast and Furious movies to China, then the NBC Newsroom is not going to go in and start figuring out what's going on with Xi Jinping in the pandemic.
So that's the main vector.
It'd be like you need a bulletin board with some yarn connecting it to explain all this.
I had a feeling it wouldn't work, though.
I had a feeling this would be, it would backfire in some way, but it crossed my mind.
The global dominant, the most dominant force in financial news globally is Bloomberg.
And Bloomberg has the most access.
It's almost a monopoly.
And Michael Bloomberg owns like 80% of Bloomberg LLP.
And they have unprecedented access to China.
No one has anywhere close.
When I was researching the book, they were the most willing to go to China, kiss the ring of the literal Ministry of Propaganda.
They go about every two years and they get their contracts renewed so they can continue to get financial news from China.
And then Bloomberg ran for president as a Democrat and he tried to buy the election.
He failed.
But if he won, we literally have a guy who makes billions of dollars from China and he'd be in charge of our China policy.
So that's kind of the main vector of fake news is the corporate media establishment that has vested interests that infect almost every topic they cover at this point because everything's political and they're all backed by Democrats and they all fund Democrats and they're mostly pro-China and that's very scary.
And the other vector, of course, is big tech, which they're either in China, they want to be in China, or now with TikTok, they are China, which I'm 100% convinced is Chinese mind control.
It's not just destroying.
I'm with you there.
I can't wait for TikTok to go away.
It's eating people's brains.
But it's so addictive to say it will.
It is, yeah.
And people who are younger than us were, they can't get off it.
They literally cannot put it down.
It's strange, yeah.
And how many books are not going to be written or read, or how many great ideas are not going to happen?
Because we're just like fumbling.
Here's a six-second video with heart emojis on.
Oh, there's the Barf emoji.
That's funny.
Like, how much do we have to do that?
A billion times?
There's one with the Barf emoji.
How do I install that?
I didn't see that one.
The pregnant man emoji.
Yeah.
The pregnant man.
It is funny.
And then he barfs from the morning sickness.
My wife can, like, look at her phone and respond to everything that's going on in the house, and she always hears it all.
But when she's on TikTok, she doesn't hear anything I'm saying.
And so she actually uninstalled it because she was like, she's like, I'm on there and I have no idea what's going on.
This is where the barf emoji kicks in.
That's the power of it when it floats up just like that.
I'm surprised you mentioned, well, you asked first if they had to be other than CNN.
I always think of CNN as kind of the main purveyor of like the sort of leftist narrative.
Now, you mentioned Jeff Zucker.
It's interesting.
I feel like CNN was always somewhat left-leaning.
But I feel like MSNBC used to be worse like 10 or 15 years ago.
And then there was a point where CNN just became all narrative.
And we all in on it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's Jeff Zucker lined up specifically Jeff Zucker.
I have a theory that Jeff Zucker was trying to make CNN like Breitbart.
One problem is with Breitbart is we're truth first and narrative second.
We're open about narrative.
I'll tell you all the narratives.
Yes.
We're pushing.
But we don't get stuff wrong because first of all, it's wrong to try to get stuff wrong.
And second of all, we'd be out of business because every time we get something wrong, it becomes a lead story on whatever media, Soros-funded website that is trying to throw us all off the internet.
And then they go to our advertisers and say, look, you're finding fake news, which is death.
We wouldn't be alive.
Yeah.
Behave that way.
Not to say we would anyway.
But they have it reversed.
They were narrative first.
And hopefully they could come up with some facts that would support their narrative.
And so often it backfired.
The Russian collusion hoax obsession is insane how long and how long that went on and how big that became.
And how many people still are convinced after it's been disproven so many times?
If it's less than a third of the country, I'd be that still doesn't believe that all that's false.
And I think it lines up 100% with Jeff Zucker.
And it wasn't really that good for ratings.
The only thing that helped them with ratings was Donald Trump.
But CNN and the New York Times are really, if you want to isolate two, they're the worst.
I mean, the 1619 project in and of itself is still unbelievable.
It's still coming up today.
The lady who is up for the Supreme Court justice position, Kentaji Brown Jackson, is a supporter of the 1619 project.
She's supposed to go and defend the Constitution from the Supreme Court for the rest of her life.
And she digs this document that takes a deuce on top of our founding principles and documents.
And she backs that.
And she's going to be in the Supreme Court forever.
And that's a big cultural thing.
And you can't underestimate it.
And it was forced with willpower by CNN and the New York Times and the Pulitzer Board and all these establishment media outlets.
Do the fact-checking websites, quote-unquote, like PolitoFact and Snopes, do they go after your guys' stuff often?
Constantly.
And the worst is one called NewsGuard, which have you guys come up.
I don't know if we check that one.
Snopes is the one that they'll call out our satire articles like this absurd, bizarre thing didn't actually happen.
Thank you, Snopes, if you're watching for that, because that was great Breitbart content.
They censor your satire article.
Yeah.
That's perfect for us.
I get Snopes a lot and the new kid on the block is USA Today because they're Facebook's fact-checking partner now.
So we get a lot of bizarre fact-checks from USA Today.
Yeah, the ones where you can't step out of line at all are anything on climate and anything on coronavirus.
We have definitely carved our own course in terms of our coronavirus coverage.
I'm very lucky to have a lot of sources in the medical world.
So I felt like we were incredibly sharp on the truth about the virus itself.
I think we were the first American outlet to report what was a mystery pneumonia coming out of China very early in 2020 and to take it seriously.
And then also to take the overreaction seriously and to try to track what's working, where the vaccines were effective, where they weren't effective, and whether the lockdowns and the masks were working.
The masks were never working and stuff like that.
But anything that's the least bit off narrative, fact checkers are on us.
And anything on climate change, fact checkers are on us.
But I do think that everyone should know about NewsGuard, which is funded by the entire Washington establishment, but also Microsoft backs them.
And what they do, if you they brand an entire website or they brand an entire news outlet, either fake news or real news.
So the New York Times will always be real news.
So a totally false story about Hunter Bind's laptop will get a green check mark because the New York Times reported it.
And at Breitbart, we always get a red check mark, even if we got that story completely right because they deem us fake news.
So an accurate story.
Yeah, totally.
Is red check, inaccurate New York Times is green check, it doesn't matter.
And they have on their board guys like Michael Hayden, who was a CIA and NSA guy under, I think it was Bush and Obama, who pushed the Russian PP dossier hoax more than anyone, who pushed the Hunter Bind laptop as Russian disinfo.
He's on their advisory board of this fact-checking organization, and they're perfectly cool with it.
The best example, though, we syndicate the Associated Press.
We put up an Associated Press headline.
We get a red check.
The New York Times or USA Today puts up the exact same article verbatim, green check.
They say, that is, if that's not peak fake news, fact-check satire.
I mean, you couldn't come up with something so idiotic.
And it's got corporate support.
Well, even the ones where Snopes is just fact-checking a particular article, it's ridiculous the way they can just twist something to get a false label or a true article on it.
They'll find some little detail on that whole thing's.
I saw, I think it was PolitiFact.
They had one where it was during the, remember the Jacob Blake thing where they said he was unarmed at first and then it turned out he was holding a knife.
There was an article and it said he brandished a knife and they fact-checked it as no because brandishing means you go like this and he was just holding it.
That's still the narrative was that he was unarmed and he did have a knife.
And these are the technicalities that, you know, NewsGuard reached out because we wrote up that Michael Hayden item I just mentioned.
Yeah.
And we had said he was on their board.
And NewsGuard was upset because they thought we were implying he was on his corporate board, but he was merely on their advisory board.
Yeah.
So they wanted us to amend the story to note that it was an advisory board, as if him advising on fake news, the Russian PP dossier hoaxer, as if that's a better look for them than being on their corporate board, which I'm happy to do because I want to be accurate.
That's where their head is at.
They're there to police minutiae that folks like us get wrong and not on the biggest narrative issues of the day.
And I think what's also diabolical that the fact-checking organizations do is there's certainly in journalism as more facts come out, there's groups on both sides that you may get some details wrong.
They choose to fact check conservative sites and conservative sources and any story that supports a conservative narrative way more than anything that supports a left-leaning site.
Like there'll be articles.
They'll be fake elections.
There'll be fake articles from the left and they won't rule on it one way or the other.
They'll just ignore it and then post all these fact checks of right-leaning sites.
There's a word for what you're describing, and it's called harassment.
And if we were in eighth-grade vocabulary.
CNN knows a lot about harassment.
If you're in eighth grade vocabulary, it's the same kind of thing.
We'd probably call it harassment for some reason.
Only in that context that you pronounce it differently.
But that's what they're here to do.
They're here to make our lives difficult.
They're not here to actually bring integrity to the American news landscape.
They start with the premise, find a way that Breitbart is wrong.
Find a way that the Babylon Bee can be have their day, have a brick thrown through your window so that you waste your time.
That's their goal.
If they cared about fake news, they would have got at least one of the stories that I cover in the book from Kavanaugh to Juicy Smoille to the Covington Kids, every major story of the day ignored and botched by the establishment press without a single exception.
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Well, let's talk about some of those stories.
Yeah, you ended up there.
Talk about what the media did to him.
You guys broke the devil's triangle detail, right?
Which one's the...
That was the thing that someone wrote in his yearbook and then they said, oh, it's a sex thing.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's two dudes.
And yeah, yeah, I got it.
That's a not.
It was not my, not my cup of tea.
And I'm really happy I didn't recognize that one.
Yeah.
Wasn't there a reference to like farting or something in it?
And he had to explain in front of the like carrier.
I forget what the wording was, but there was some reference to it.
That was the Devil's Triangle.
There was another passage in there and they were like, what does this mean?
And he's like, it's flatulence.
It was a juvenile reference topic.
It's the fact that he, with his career, and he literally would scoop soup in soup kitchens to volunteer when he wasn't coaching girls basketball and being a brilliant judge was he was.
He had to go and give that uh speech where he had to say I like beer.
It's like, it's just unbelievable that he was forced to go through that.
It'll never happen.
Anyone on the left, it was such a meltdown um, but I, I got to look up the devil's triangle detail, because that one is not ringing a bell okay at all, but I could say something nice about Christine Blasey for it.
I'll tell you it was boof was the word.
It was boof and they tried to say it was some like sex, like shady sexual charity.
He's like no, it's like passing.
Yeah yeah, I love me to demonstrate.
Yeah no, but I will.
I will say that that story, in terms of fake news, will be indelible in the hippocampus forever.
Some people will know the reference.
That was force.
Yeah, the uproarious laughter like on the show.
Yeah, uproarious laughter.
Was he the most borked nominee of all time?
Oh, for sure yeah, and I, I don't know if they'll be able to run that playbook again um, soon.
They'll try to run it, but that was just so unbelievable.
They were just making throwing Stuff out there.
That was just so ridiculous.
Well, even with Amy Coney Barrett, it was a little less.
I mean, I know she's a woman, but it was a little less intense even then.
Even then, yeah.
And I agree.
But this is where the media gets a mind of its own.
And you will stick out if you're an establishmentarian in the media to go against the narrative that he wasn't some sort of a sex pest.
Even though, you know, as far as we know, there's zero evidence to this day, none that he was any of those things that he was accused of.
And Christine Plasi, fourthly, do you remember the fly lie?
This is one of the greatest.
It's one of my favorite.
Oh, she wouldn't get on an airplane or something.
Oh, yeah.
She wouldn't get on an airplane.
She needed to get up the gumption, thanks to friends, to fly across the country to give a deposition to take out the guy who, you know, was the rapist who ruined her life and made her go through 30 years of therapy or whatever.
But she flies to French Polynesia and Costa Rica to surf.
No one in the media went, okay, this is over.
It's a joke.
It's a hoax.
We're getting hoax.
Can we stop, please?
No, they keep going because why?
It's ratings and there's no punishment for being right.
If you're wrong with the right narrative, if you're wrong with the correct narrative, there's no punishment for you.
There's a promotion and maybe a peel through.
If you're wrong, if you're correct with the wrong narrative, then you get your advertisers boycotted.
Well, what I think always irritated me the most, I think is most damaging about a lot of these hoaxes that the left has like latched onto in the media is even when the truth eventually comes out, whether it's sooner or later, it's not something where you can just issue a correction and say, hey, we got this wrong, because they all turn out like weeks and months of a narrative where there's opinion pieces being written.
This is how Trump caused this.
This is how the Trump administration, it's an era of hate, it's an era of anti-Semitism and it's an era of all this bad stuff happening.
And then it comes out later that wasn't true.
And you can't take back all that narrative that was put into people's heads.
And it's an admission of failure.
And this is where they don't like to do this because they never admit they're wrong.
Ironically, we're in an era where no one admits they're wrong.
Everyone's wrong all the time.
And you can look up most stuff right away when you're wrong.
But no one admits they're wrong.
Think of it in the context of war.
So we've got the Ukraine-Russia situation now.
Putin obviously screwed up.
He didn't know it was going to be this tough for him.
And he probably is thinking, how do I get out of here and say face?
His main problem is he can't save face.
He can always leave, but he can't say face now because he looks so bad.
So of course he's thinking, well, I got to keep ratcheting it up because in the current situation, I'm going to look very bad if I leave.
That is Jeff Zucker.
That is Dean Baquette of the New York Times.
That is whichever left-wing clown is running MSNBC.
I think it's Joy Reed, by the way.
I think she's actually running the newsroom at NBC News.
They never back down because it is an admission of failure, which they'll never do.
They just will move on.
As more of these hoaxes and fake narratives have sort of blown up in their faces, the left seems to be digging in more and more with their fact checks and with continuing this narrative.
Are you hopeful, though, that more of the public is becoming savvy to the fact that they're doing this?
Or do you think with how polarized things are, there's a big part of the country that's just going to keep believing these media narratives?
I think that there's, it's both.
But unfortunately, I think there's a third option, which is I think people are going to punch out and they're going to remove themselves from sort of public civic engagement.
And this is one thing that I'm very vocal about that I think that people need to be engaged, even if the only thing you can do is to share one of your stories or one of my stories.
Like just you got to do something because we cannot let the overwhelming fake news quantity make us just think, I'm just going to focus on other stuff that's more interesting to me.
I'm just going to watch television and look at TikTok because that's a trap and we're going to lose a republic if we do that.
So I do think that the media, the opinion of the media has never been worse.
The opinion of the establishment media has never been worse.
But they don't need to succeed because, as I previously mentioned, they're backed by these multinational conglomerates that all they need them to do is hold the line narrative-wise, and they will keep funding them.
They can lose all the money.
They could be a lost leader.
But so long as their businesses are protected in China, the multinational conglomerate continues to make money overall, there's not going to be a penalty for people leading their audience down the wrong road.
So long as the wrong road is not a threat to the corporate business model.
So it's a very scary time, but luckily, there's still some freedom, not on Twitter, but there's some freedom to create your own stuff.
And that's what, you know, we both did this.
And there should be a billion others like us.
I don't know if it's just the circles I run in, but I see a little hope just in with them trying to push this war narrative.
You know, they're being in the wardrooms, and you see a lot of people on both sides really pushing back when I, you know, 20 years ago, obviously, with the Iraq war, that was not the case.
Yeah, no, you're right on this.
And it would have been, we would have been without the establishment media being as big as it is, which should be bigger, but without it, we would be in war for sure in Ukraine right now.
And then places like Florida wouldn't exist where all these people are protesting with their feet by going to Tennessee and Texas and Florida and a couple other places that are free.
And it is, I'll tell you, the content that it gets shared at Breitbart, I mean, it's so often the hottest stories are here something positive in Florida or Texas or a free part of the country.
People love it.
They're hot for it.
Unfortunately, so many of our metropolitan centers are where so much industry is done, and we still can't fully pull back from that.
But there are a lot of bright spots in the country at the moment.
It just, the media is just so much bad news.
Pun sort of intended, I guess.
Well, should we quiz you?
So we wrote up some stories here.
We're going to see how good you are at picking out real and fake news stories.
Oh, my God.
We're going to have you and Kyle play.
Some of these are real news stories.
They're not, not many of them are political.
They're just sort of absurd.
Yeah, I want you guys to both play.
And we'll see.
Some of them are real stories.
Some of them are ones we made up.
They're not Babylon B headlines.
They're just fake stories we made up.
Okay, fine.
All right.
A woman in California was shocked to find that a stranger had listed her home on Airbnb without her knowledge.
I'll say that's true.
That has to be real.
That is real.
Okay.
Did you do any tricky ones here where you just know ones where I just switched like a location or there's no trick?
Completely made up.
Yeah, completely true.
Saudi Arabia's first gay marriage quote was accidentally notarized due to a clerical error, and now the two men who have never met are seeking a divorce.
This doesn't sound real to me.
I'm going to go false also.
That's false.
Okay.
That's the first one I think both people got correct.
It was false.
Due to the popularity of Vladimir Zelensky, there's been an increase in comedians running for political offices in Europe.
Wow.
See, that one definitely.
I'm going to say false.
That one definitely could be true.
is just so fresh, I'm only going false because of the timetable.
I think that will be true at some point.
I don't think it's true yet.
So I would go false.
That one is false, but yes, could become true.
The Idaho Potato Commission is releasing a new perfume that smells like French fries.
What the heck?
I'll say true.
It's a good troll.
Yeah, that's a clever troll.
I'll go.
True.
You're doing better at this than any guest I think that we've had on.
See, you know your stuff.
See, now everyone will know why I get paid the medium buck.
Exactly.
A Florida man was arrested for stealing a crossbow from a store by stuffing it down his pants.
If this is false, it's happened a million times.
I'm going to say true.
It's got to be true.
That one is true.
So you missed the AirAsia.
Are you going to do that one?
What?
You missed the AirAsia one.
Oh, yeah.
An Air Asia flight was diverted after passengers spotted a snake on the plane.
I'll say false.
I'm going to say true.
First time we're disagreeing.
That one is true.
Oh, it takes a little bit.
All the thousands of flights.
There's got to be one.
Handlers at an animal, another snake story.
Handlers at an animal park in Alabama recaptured two out of three escaped venomous snakes, then called off the search because the third quote will probably be fine.
I'm going to say false.
I love how it's framed from the perspective of the snake.
They're not worried about the town where the snake is going to be hiding a bunch of trees.
Exactly.
They're not worried about the snake, which is, can you give it to me one more time?
Handlers at an animal park in Alabama recaptured two out of three escaped venomous snakes, then called off the search because the third, according to them, quote, will probably be fine.
I would almost say true, but because of where I'm sitting, it seems like it just sews something you guys would have written.
So I'm going to go.
It is false.
He's 100% so far.
I missed one.
I missed one.
A giant Noah's Ark replica is stranded in the UK because British authorities don't believe it's seaworthy.
Again, this is another great one for here because you guys think in those, that's exactly what you guys think.
It still seems that one does seem true to me.
That one is true.
Kid Rock claims that President Trump once asked his advice on handling ISIS and North Korea.
That's true.
Okay, so if this, if this one is false, then there's a lot of fact checks being done because this was reported widely.
I'm going to go with true.
It is true.
Yeah, it's a version of what he said in a Tucker Carlson interview.
A women's college swimmer expressed concern that she could get pregnant.
Come on, though.
Would you guys not swap out Tony Blinken for Kid Rock right now for Secretary of State?
Oh, yeah.
That'd be fun.
That's the thing we're missing from the Trump era, the entertainment value.
Yeah, exactly.
It was always like he's holding meetings with Omar Osa and Kanye West today.
You don't get stuff like that anymore.
Secretary of Homeland Security, Mr. Rock, what is your plan to tackle the increasing flow of migrants to Nicaragua in Honduras at this time?
A women's college swimmer expressed concern that she could get pregnant from swimming in the same pool as Leah Thomas.
I'm going to say false.
I'm going to say false on that.
That one's false.
I only know because you pitched that as a headlight.
If you had said hot tub, I would have thought about it.
A Japanese company is developing a wearable device that would let you feel real pain in the metaverse.
That's true.
That's got to be true.
That is true.
Yeah.
The world's first human composting facility has opened in Washington, which turns dead people's bodies into soil.
For sure, true.
False.
True.
He's still 100%.
You know why it's true?
It's Washington.
If you had done a sane part of the country.
See, but he gets mad when I just switched the.
If I just said that, that story is all true, but if I said it happened in like, you know, Iowa or something.
So you can blame yourself for that.
I don't like the little, yeah, right.
Yeah.
A stripper in St. Louis has filed a discrimination lawsuit after being fired for exposing that she is transgender during a strip tease live in front of paying customers.
Oh, this is brilliant.
I'm just trying to get inside your head.
That's the problem.
I'm trying to like, would it be?
I'm trying to figure out which ones are just stories I would like and which that are real, but I like, and which stories are ones I made up.
I'm going true and kudos to you if it's brilliant.
I'm going to go false.
I got you on this one.
It's false.
It was going to happen.
It's going to happen.
I read the room with that one.
It's got to happen, though, one of those times.
Like, that's why it's such a good headline.
It feels like it's going to happen.
It's a prophecy that will happen.
You get up and leave you're a bigot.
We did a story at Breitbart recently, which was a kind of, we mishandled it and cut into my weekend a little bit.
But the first draft, the live draft was great.
But we found a story of how Oregon has literal documentation on how to tuck your male genitals underneath your body to hide that you're a man when you're at school.
I figured that out on my own.
Yeah, it's a live.
So I know it's not that long.
Anyone who's seen that scene is the it's and and we I asked we'd written it up and we had listed when the when it came out and we dug into it.
This is from 2020.
Like this has been going on for a long time.
Literally coaching children how to tuck their admiral.
Yes.
We got two left here.
The rapper who wrote McDonald's I'm Loving It Jingle is mad that they didn't pay him more and has teamed up with Arby's to release a disc a diss track about fish sandwiches.
That is false.
It's false, in my opinion, as well.
That is true.
Really?
Yes.
I'll tell you, Arby's does the gorilla marketing pretty good, which was a good, that's why it could have been that.
But it's just like, why is that in the news?
I'm loving Dan found that story.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
I think it's just because it's like, what was that when the Verizon guy like switched over to T-Mobile or something?
Yeah.
It's like he used to be the McDonald's jingle guy.
Now he's writing a diss track for the family.
Well, the negative or positive about fish sandwiches because Arby's has the meats.
Yeah, I imagine that it's probably negative about McDonald's fish sandwich, but I don't know for sure.
And finally, is this real or fake?
Rachel Levine is a man.
I'm going to say that is true.
Well, I don't want to get you guys thrown off of Twitter.
I think I'm two ahead.
So am I one ahead?
That is now.
I'm only one ahead.
So I have to say Rachel Levine is a man.
That is true.
That is true, and it will always be true.
Well, you did great, man.
Yes.
That was the best.
I think you only got one or two wrong that whole thing.
Yeah.
When we had Don Lemon on, he just didn't get his own name.
And he got two tries.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
We conclude every interview with the same 10 questions.
That I will inevitably turn the interview back on you guys.
Don't get the Carmen thing.
You get to add one book to the Bible.
What is it?
What is the most embarrassing thing that's happened to you?
And I was just laughing maniacally because, oh, this is unbelievable.
This is the coolest thing that ever happened.
So it was still hugely humiliating.
You get to go to one concert, any band in history.
Who do you go see?
Michael Jackson, it is.
Okay.
Yeah.
This has been another edition of the Bee Weekly from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon Bee, reminding you that fake news of the people, by the people,