Joel Pollak
Subject: The Future of Conservative Media
Bio: Senior Editor at Large for Breitbart
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and journalism. Today’s topic is The Conservative Media Backlash.
Our speaker is Joel Pollak who is the Senior Editor at Large for the website Breitbart. I want to learn from Joel about the future of conservative media.
This podcast was taped at a conference that I hosted in Washington DC. So, you are going to hear questions asked by me as well as by my friends.
Joel, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Joel Pollak:
My name is Joel Pollak. I’m the Senior Editor-at-Large and In-house Counsel at Breitbart News. I’ve been there for 15 years, almost since it started. I spoke to you in 2017. I had just written How Trump Won about my experience on the campaign trail and talked about the strategies that Trump used from political technique to broad media and data strategies. I’ve written many other books since then. I wrote a book about the 2020 campaign. I focused on the Democrats, it was called Red November, about the most radical Democratic primary in American history.
I wrote was an eBook, called Neither Free nor Fair about the 2020 Presidential Election. It was the first book to come out about the election, and I said, I’m not going to deal with questions of fraud, which was a hot topic and remains a hot topic on the right. I used the international standard for measuring fairness and freedom of elections such as equal access to the media, political violence, the rules by which voting happens, and censorship. It was about what went wrong in the election without having to dive into the rabbit hole of voting machines and recounts.
I’m now living in Washington DC and that’s new. I’ve only been here since August and my wife is a senior official in the Department of Labor, and she was before that the Chief Economist at ZipRecruiter, which is a big online jobs company and she’s now helping shape labor policy in the Trump administration.
The other reason I’m in Washington DC is that my neighborhood burnt down in the Pacific Palisades. My home survived the most expensive natural disaster in American history on January 7th, 2025. A lot of it was government mismanagement and topics that I’d been writing about at Breitbart suddenly became very relevant and personal. The failure to clear brush, the lack of investment in emergency services. We had a 117-million-gallon reservoir on top of the hill almost empty on the day of the fire.
What I found was that my neighbors who knew that I was a conservative Republican and had steered clear of me for that reason, were suddenly very interested in talking to me because Donald Trump was then the president elect and nobody in town knew any Republicans, so they couldn’t get access to anybody who could help.
I was suddenly forging relationships with people in my neighborhood, many of whom were liberal Democrats. We threw everything political and partisan aside. And that has continued over the last nine months as we have tried to rebuild our community.
I am much more focused on the practical solutions. I was at a round table when President Trump came to the Pacific Palisades just a few days after he took the oath of office and they let all the congressmen go first and the mayor and the Democrats were talking about all the wonderful government programs that were available to fire survivors. And Republicans were talking about all the big policy changes that had to happen.
I interrupted and I said, Mr. President, everyone’s talking about 2030 solutions. Let me tell you the basic stuff we didn’t get right. We didn’t have water in the reservoir; we didn’t have firefighters pre-deployed before the fire. We didn’t have police to direct the traffic in the evacuation and there’s no excuse for it. And I said to him, you have to watch how California spends any money you send to the state. I encouraged him to create an Office of the Special Master like the 9/11 Victim’s Compensation Fund, so they could watch how the money was being spent.
Gavin Newsom, our Governor in California is complaining he hasn’t received any of the $40 billion he requested from the Trump administration. And that is entirely because he has been on the war path since Trump took office. Very different approach than Newsom took during the Coronavirus pandemic when he was always at great pains to show how he was working very well with Trump.
But now he wants to run for president and there’s a race to the bottom among the potential Democratic candidates to show who can be nastier to Trump. That seems to be how they’re angling for a spot in the primary.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about Breitbart’s place in the conservative media.
Joel Pollak:
The conservative media world used to be small. You had Fox News, which blew cable news wide open by departing from the norm of center/left mainstream coverage. You had Rush Limbaugh who took advantage of the deregulation of radio to become a sensation on the AM airwaves. You had the emergence of new media with Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart, the founder of our company, and little blogs like Red State. National Review Magazine had an online presence which was conservative print magazines that would publish their articles online.
When Trump became a candidate, much of that conservative infrastructure rejected him. Not so much Rush Limbaugh, Fox News liked him, but the rest of the conservative media decided he wasn’t a true conservative, and they tried to stop him from winning. There was a whole National Review issue cover story against Trump.
Breitbart was one of the only friendly to Trump websites. And we were then under the leadership Steve Bannon, who later joined the Trump campaign and Trump White House. Now he’s on his own. He has not been involved with Breitbart for seven years, but Steve had a particular vision of what he called a nationalist populist movement.
There was a meeting of the minds there between Steve and Trump. Steve essentially used Breitbart and his radio show on SiriusXM Patriot 125, the conservative XM channel to create an audience for issues Trump was talking about. And so when I talked to you in 2017, that was how things were. And Breitbart had a lot of influence because Steve Bannon was in the White House.
Now it’s different. One is that there are so many more websites, networks and YouTube channels and media. You can just be an individual with an Instagram account and be an absolute sensation in social media. The second factor is the aftermath of the Biden administration’s effort to censor social media.
Cancel culture started under Obama. It was a problem then, but it accelerated under Trump and not because of Trump but as a reaction to him. What you have now is a social media environment which is colored by a permanent anti-establishment churn in conservative media. Even though Breitbart was an outlier into the early years of the Trump administration, we were well-connected outlier. Now we’re the conservative mainstream. Candidates for office and members of the cabinet want to come to us for interviews because we put a stamp of authenticity on ideas and campaigns that tells our audience that you are a legitimate conservative, you can be trusted.
We avoid clickbait that has gotten conservative media into trouble, not just with cancel culture and censorship, but we did not follow the mob that chased ballots in 2020. We didn’t talk about Dominion voting machines, and we didn’t get sued. We stick to the facts because there’s no tolerance for Breitbart. We get a lot of our traffic from Facebook and we had no room for error. If we made mistakes, we could be very easily kicked off those platforms. We were threatened a couple of times when we made minor editorial mistakes. We had to be more accurate than our conservative competitors who found out the hard way that there was no room for error.
Larry Bernstein:
What is the future of conservative media?
Joel Pollak:
I’m obsessed right now about the conservative future. In every election there’s a new medium that emerges. So with Barack Obama, it was Facebook and the early era of social networking, and he was able to organize from the ground up using Facebook technology.
When Trump came to the fore in 2016, he was using Twitter leapfrogging the gatekeepers of traditional media. 2020 the new technology was suppressing media, keeping news out of the headlines, the Hunter Biden laptop being censored and people losing access to social media.
In 2024 It was Truth Social and the creation of new companies, new platforms and the rise of influencers on Instagram. People with individual accounts, not even a webpage. If we have to look for a new medium that’s going to define the next election, the obvious technology would be artificial intelligence. And it’s something that regulators are struggling with right now.
In California, a law just got struck down that tried to outlaw deep fakes in campaign ads. You can no longer ban fake politicians that appear to be saying certain things for the purposes of parody. The judge in the case made the astute observation that if you had to attach a disclaimer, which you had to do under this California law, that the ad you are about to see is parody. It would’ve taken the fun out of the joke. And so, the First Amendment doesn’t exist to regulate humor, but there’s going to be a tension.
I spoke yesterday to someone who’s target is the clearing houses of information like Wikipedia, other websites that gather facts or do fact checking because those are the trusted websites from which the AI algorithms are drawing their information. So the battle ironically is going to be on more traditional turf. It’s going to be a battle over Wikipedia and news sites credible enough to be included in algorithms. That is where the battle is going to be fought.
Larry Bernstein:
When you were with us in 2017, you spoke about your Trump book, and one of the key arguments that you distinguished the Trump from Hillary Clinton’s campaign was that the Trump campaign was like a party. Trump would test new ideas, the crowd would respond, he would double down depending on the situation. And then you contrasted it with the Hillary campaign where even her staffers were falling asleep during her key foreign policy discussions. Eight years later, what have we learned from that phenomenon of a party versus boredom as predictor of salience of ideas?
Joel Pollak:
Trump still retains the ability to entertain. He comes from a media savvy background. He had his own highly rated show. He’s part of the entertainment world. I was listening to Trump speak in Egypt to the Peace in the Middle East conference. And it’s just so funny sometimes to hear the things he says just because they’re so ridiculous that you have to laugh. Norway was at this conference. And so Trump is going through the list of countries. Saudi Arabia, nice to see you, Pakistan, great, nice to see you. Norway, Norway, Norway, why did you do that to me Norway? Because Norway decides the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t get it. Where are you Norway? You must be hiding somewhere, making fun of Norway.
Leaders don’t do that. He did it. You listen to hear what he’s going to say next. And it’s funny and sometimes it doesn’t go the way you think it will.
Listening to his speech in the Israeli Knesset, he spoke about the Israeli opposition leader, Yair Lapid who is no fan of Trump. He’s been nasty. He’s worked very closely with Democrats in opposing Trump.
The funny part was that Netanyahu spoke and then Trump got up to speak as if it were his turn. But then someone whispered in Trump’s ear, according to protocol, you must let the opposition speak first, and then you can speak.
Trump goes, “opposition, opposition, get up here.” So Yair Lapid gets up and makes a speech very complimentary of Trump. And then in the middle of his speech, Trump turns to Netanyahu who’s now seated among the parliamentarians, and he says to Netanyahu, your opposition leader’s a really nice guy. You’re not at war anymore. Bibi maybe be nicer to him. And the whole place just erupts in laughter.
What he’s going to say next. And yes, he does repeat lines and jokes from one thing to the other. And for the audience, that’s part of the fun, the rallies, the front row Joes as they call them.
Gavin Newsom, who obviously has his designs for 2028, is trying something similar. He’s trying to entertain his audience. And what he’s decided is that if you can’t beat him, join them. And he’s basically turned his official press office account on X into a parody of Trump. And he’s trying to entertain people and he’s putting dirty jokes up there. I don’t think the humor works, but his audience loves it. They think it’s great. Newsom’s awesome, they’re having fun.
He’s the front runner, partly because he is giving Democratic primary voters a more entertaining time than simply showing up and frowning and looking all sad about our society’s problems. He needs some better humor writers, but I’m not the audience. His intended audience is enjoying it and even enjoying the nasty elements of it, which Trump’s audience does as well.
Alex Graham:
Speaking about 2028, I’m interested in going back to when the conservative media decided that Trump was acceptable. Trump loves chaos. He also loves influence, and 2028 is not that far away.
When Hillary was running for the nomination, she resigned as Secretary of State and had a good long period where she could put some distance between her and Obama. I read the reason that Trump went to Hegseth’s fitness instruction for the admirals and the generals, you can’t let Hegseth have that good a platform to position himself for 2028. So, when does the warfare break out among the various camps in trying to succeed Trump?
Joel Pollak:
The way Trump maintains influence is by keeping them all even. If you had asked a conservative political analyst six months ago, Rubio would’ve been the odds on favorite for the 2028 nomination. But JD Vance would now be considered the favorite. Trump was talking up Rubio. Rubio hasn’t really been front and center in these peace negotiations. He’s been involved. but Trump made it seem like it was Rubio’s involvement that was important.
You’ve noticed, and this disturbs me a lot, a rise of anti-Israel criticism creeping in from the right. And it was a problem on the left that grew and grew and grew over the years then exploded after October 7th, but the last six months or so, since Trump’s been in office, you’ve seen it filter through. And it’s not because Trump’s in office, but it’s because it’s about the next contest.
Israel is seen as a cause that is beloved by the GOP establishment. There was a Harvard poll that came out, 75% of Americans support Israel. It really is a popular cause, but it is perceived as something that the establishment takes particularly seriously.
It is being used by candidates who have an anti-establishment bent to try to make their way into 2028. Watch the Breitbart interview with JD Vance. We do a number of these live interviews with Matt Boyle, who is our political editor in DC and he’s going to interview JD Vance, and he is going to ask him about this Israel issue. JD Vance is thought of as being the most skeptical of pro-Israel politicians, even though he gave a speech at the Isolationist Quincy Institute last year talking about why America should stand with Israel.
JD Vance is viewed as the most skeptical of foreign involvement. He’s emerged as the candidate of that wing, even though I don’t think he’s indulging in the rhetoric that they’re using. And then Rubio is seen as the pro-Israel candidate. So it’s starting already.
Conservative media consumers are still in it partly for entertainment purposes. The argument about competence is going to be very important in 2028. That might just be wishful thinking on my part, but people are going to want solutions that work.
Trump can say already that he’s had great achievements. At the same time, the major issue that you can argue drove his campaign is the high cost of living, housing is so expensive, the American dream is out of reach for many people. It really is. I interviewed Charles Murray who wrote that book a few years ago, Losing Ground about the growing inequality in America. And he’s optimistic that Americans are going to regain that ground. But, if Americans still feel like the basics of a middle-class life are too far out of reach. It’s not that people think Mamdani has the answers, but they’re attracted to the fact that he’s talking about those issues.
Competence in dealing with economic issues and basic governance, that’s going to be important. Hopefully that’s the terrain on which this battle is fought. Not on social media fluff, but people are what they are and that’s the industry I’m in. There’ll be the entertainment part of it too.
Zachary Schur:
I vote Democratic and most people my age, I’m 28, don’t like the news. They don’t consume much news in general whether it’s reading a site like Breitbart. Breitbart is one of the leading producers of us versus them content that creates more of a divide in this country as opposed to an understanding between parties. So is Breitbart’s main goal to fuel the political fire?
Joel Pollak:
That’s a very astute observation. Let me just take it back to the origins of Breitbart. When Andrew Breitbart founded his own publishing empire after starting out with The Drudge Report, the very first website he produced was called Big Hollywood. And for Andrew, culture was much more important than politics. Culture set the stage for everything that happened in the news, and Andrew held a mirror up to Hollywood, which was very effective at blunting the political crusading that was going on in Hollywood. Nowadays, woke films and TV try to hit you over the head with their political message, they just don’t do well. But at the time Andrew started, Michael Moore was at the Oscars blasting President Bush, and Al Gore was winning Oscars for An Inconvenient Truth, and now you can’t really get away with it anymore.
Breitbart’s fundamental concern is culture. Obviously, we are political news website, but our DNA is cultural issues. Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to do interviews with me, but the most effective questions are about culture. Much of his party has taken a losing position electorally on transgenderism. 77% of Californians want parents to be involved when a child expresses a desire to change gender at school. But Newsom signed legislation that bans schools from informing parents. You don’t win elections if you’re opposing 77% of your own electorate in a liberal deep blue state.
As to the question about us versus them, our social media traffic is driven by shares and people promoting things on their own Facebook and Twitter pages. And there we see ourselves as providing ammunition for our audience to fight back.
I’m not a bomb thrower. I see myself as a counterpuncher. We see ourselves as victims of the predominant mainstream media, Hollywood, which tends to be liberal, attacking ordinary Americans and forcing their ideas down our throats.
Breitbart provides the ammunition to fight back. Yes, that does mean that you are adding fuel to a clash.
That is a morally complicated position to be in if you don’t think there should be a clash. But what I’ve learned the hard way is that that is what drives public interest in news. People aren’t interested until it becomes combative. And unfortunately, sometimes the loudest voices and the most well-known people are the people who say the most outrageous things. They’re good at drawing attention to issues sometimes that need to be noticed, but sometimes very bad at having any conversation about facts and mutual understanding.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the challenges as editor is how do I drive traffic to it each day, each week, each hour, what’s going to be of interest broadly to this audience. I’m surprised the red meat that you’re offering. As I’m listening to you now, culture plays a much larger role than I expected. I can’t imagine taxes, trade policy or competence in government is going to drive traffic. It’s going to be something impulsive that relates to some value judgment that is important. Take us through how you decide what’s going to be on the site.
Joel Pollak:
I used to be editor-in-chief until 2013. Now I’m editor-at-large, which is twice the fun and half the responsibility.
Larry Bernstein:
What does that mean?
Joel Pollak:
I cover whatever I want to, which lately is foreign policy and California. I describe myself in football terms, as a free safety. I picked up what everyone else has missed. I advise editorial policy and what to cover and how to cover things. But I’m not responsible for the overall content of the website, but I am involved in those discussions.
What we care most about as conservatives is not necessarily what drives traffic. For example, I did a piece about the substance of Netanyahu’s speech. The most impressive speech to me in terms of substance was the Speaker of the Israeli Parliament who gave an incredible speech about how Trump had shown that America First wasn’t America alone. It was quite an incisive foreign policy argument that he made that got little traffic. What did get comments and traffic were images of the hostages coming home. So these human interest stories tend to drive a lot of traffic. So we try to keep both. We’re not just a clickbait site, but we do have a clickbait component.
We do follow social media trends. We have an entire team devoted to pre-viral content, which is looking at trends. What are people clicking on? What are people searching for? And if there’s one thing you remember from this lecture, this will probably be it. The most popular story almost every day on the internet in terms of people sharing, clicking and reading is cause of death. Whenever the cause of death for a famous person is determined, the internet goes crazy. That’s especially so since the COVID-19 pandemic because vaccine skeptics on the left and right wanted to show that the vaccines were killing everybody. So if somebody died at age 32, people would rush to see what they died of. And if it had anything to do with cardiovascular, they said, “oh, did they get the jab?” It’s slightly political in that way, but people are fascinated by other people’s deaths. And so, we make sure we cover all the cause of death reveals.
We’re not the only ones. Fox News often pops up cause of rock and rolls star death revealed. Oh, everybody wants to see first of all, which rock and roll star.
Howard Shainker:
Bari Weiss what has she done editorially that’s been so different and successful?
Joel Pollak:
I’ve known Bari for about 15 years. She is incredibly talented. She went to the Wall Street Journal as the Deputy Editorial Page Editor. She moved with Bret Stephens to the New York Times. She had that whole falling out at the NY Times where she was canceled out of the paper. She started The Free Press and became very successful.
We disagreed over Trump in 2016. She was very anti-Trump, and I was pro-Trump. She has since broadened her view of the Trump phenomenon. Once you have been canceled and treated like a Trump supporter, even if you’re not one, you suddenly understand what he’s up against. She had a paradigm shift on that. Not that she’s a big Trump supporter, but she understands him now differently.
Bari to her great credit is trying to repair the mainstream liberal institutions with a lowercase L. Bari is on the board of the new University of Austin in Texas that’s trying to restore the old model of a liberal arts education as opposed to what Hillsdale College, the self-described conservative Christian college is doing in Michigan, which is to be a self-consciously conservative college. What Bari is doing is basically building better liberalism.
My debate with her was I don’t think it gets to the core of the problem that liberal institutions are still excluding conservative ideas and values which are deeply rooted like family, tradition, land, and culture that aren’t necessarily amenable to reasoned arguments, things we come into the world, but aren’t necessarily things we can easily change.
Liberalism is about choice and change. The secret that she’s appealing to people who love the academy, who loved the New York Times before they felt excluded by it. There’s a large audience that wants to invest in what she’s doing because they don’t want to see those institutions destroyed.
Whereas Breitbart’s model is Trumpier, we are happy to break apart some institutions that we feel no longer serve the basic values of society.
I’m more establishment than typical MAGA people. I am not anti-elitist. I do believe an elite has a role. I like Hillsdale College, for example, not no college. Bari Weiss found her way back into the mainstream now as Editor in Chief of CBS news, and deservedly, she had to follow an outside path to get there. But what she’s saying is, let’s take these mainstream liberal institutions and restore them to their original purpose. And my view of it is that some of these have to go, they’re just not working anymore. And that’s where we differ. Her model thus far has been financially successful for her and she’s doing great things.
Natan Milgram:
Two questions. The first one is to what extent was the media traditionally there to pick the messaging from the candidate that they like and amplify that? And is that different now to where the candidates are having to chase after the influencers and the media?
The second question is where you mentioned considering yourself a MAGA person. During the war between Israel and Iran, there was some exchange like Tucker Carlson who were vocally opposing opposed it, some supported it and Trump had to say, I’m MAGA. So is the term MAGA and the identity of the Republican party being redefined by these influencers?
Joel Pollak:
I felt like the 2016 Republican primary was like Game of Thrones when it came to media. You could see the different billionaires behind each media company. When you got your news, I saw the information that somebody wanted me to get. I saw it from the inside as all these interests started aligning for Trump or against Trump. And it was a grudge match of the powerful.
Wealthy people began taking sides. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, and now you’ve got Patrick Soon-Shiong buying the LA Times. And there’s a joke, I’m adapting it from the wine industry, but the joke is, you can make a small fortune in media if you start with a large fortune. They’re buying these media properties that are losing money. Why are they buying them? They’re buying them because they want to have a voice. So increasingly when you’re consuming media, you are consuming what the investors in that media want you to see, read and hear.
There is still that element of it, but the influencers have broken it up because the influencers can be small people who just rise to the fore. And yes, politicians are chasing influencers. What we’re also seeing is that influencers are becoming politicians and politicians are trying to be influencers.
Many politicians have their own podcasts. Gavin Newsom has a podcast, we’ve got a lot going on in California, but he’s making a podcast. To his credit, he had Charlie Kirk on his podcast earlier in the year. He may have regretted doing so because Charlie Kirk managed to get Newsom to backtrack on some of the transgender policies that he had embraced, which didn’t impress the LGBTQ+ community.
People are smarter consumers of media than they ever were before. To the point of Zachary Schur, people don’t find news interesting because people are skeptical of their news sources. The skepticism of the Iran war is part of that. There were influencers who decided that they were going to stand their ground against any American involvement in wars overseas. I struggled to understand it because it sounds to me like you and I share the same surprise that there was this backlash on the right against the Trump administration’s support for Israel’s war effort in Iran.
A lot of the influencers today were not conservative as they emerged politically. Even people who worked for Breitbart came from the left. And in the millennial generation it certainly emerged during a time when anti-war messages were very salient where John Stewart on the Daily Show was the most common source of news for young people at that time. He was making fun of Fox News and CNN for taking the Iraq war seriously. There’s a generational issue here where people feel that foreign wars are bad for America, and the Iran War was a foreign war that fit into that category. And I debated people and I said, listen, this is not going to be like the Iraq War. Iran is not the same as Iraq. The issues aren’t the same. There’s no appetite for regime change. We’d like to see the regime change, but there’s nobody in America wants to take over Iran. And besides which it wouldn’t work anyway, Iran’s a different civilization, different country. People weren’t analyzing it at that level. They just saw a foreign war as bad. They also believed that the establishment in Washington that had always opposed Trump were going to pull Trump into the war. And that feeling was a holdover in away from the first administration where Trump came into office, wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan and prolonged the American presence in Afghanistan. Many people felt that he did that under influence from establishment types in Washington DC, people in the swamp, the military industrial complex, whatever it is. And so, Israel has become an establishment issue to some of the influencers in the MAGA movement.
Trump called out Tucker Carlson and says, I’m the MAGA guy, don’t mess with me. He called Tucker Carlson kooky, and Tucker called him and apologized for some of the things he had said. I can’t prove this, but I think Trump called Charlie Kirk because Charlie Kirk, even though pro-Israel, started opposing American involvement in Iran, and suddenly his social media posts changed to I’m supporting what our president does. I trust his judgment. What he decides on Iran is fine. I felt like it was too obvious a flip. But yes, that did happen. As Trump fades, which is inevitable with second term presidents, you’ll see some of these fights come out in the open.
Look for who’s investing in media, and some of the investment is going to be foreign. Qataris are notorious for spending money on media properties, not just on the right, but on the left. They bought Al Gore’s Current TV, which was worthless for a $100 million. AI is the next battlefield, and especially the stores of information from which the algorithms draw their conclusions.
Larry Bernstein:
How does Charlie Kirk’s legacy affect the conservative movement?
Joel Pollak:
Charlie Kirk wrote to me when he was in high school, and we published him at Breitbart because of that email exchange. Charlie Kirk wrote me in April, 2012, and he said, I’m at high school in suburban Illinois, and I don’t like my economics class. My high school teacher keeps telling us that Ronald Reagan was terrible. And I started this conservative club at my school and we all disagree. And I said, “Why don’t you write about this experience you’ve had in class?”
He sent me this essay and we published it, and he got a huge response. He said, “my next essay is about the national debt and why my generation shouldn’t have to pay it off.” And we did one essay after another, and then he got onto Fox News, and then he got noticed by people like Foster Friess, who then invested in what became Turning Point USA. And that’s how it started.
A million people are involved in the success of one individual, but that is where it started. Charlie became something phenomenal, and it was so emblematic and important that he in a sense gave his life for freedom of speech that he was debating someone who disagreed with him when he was assassinated.
That’s not the legacy of Charlie Kirk. I was in a state of horrible dismay after he was killed, and I went to the vigil here in DC and the vigil was a political funeral. I realized that something other than grief was going on, and maybe that’s appropriate for a political figure. If you have an organization to run after the founder dies and you have a movement, you push it in a certain direction. But the direction they’re taking the movement in is not about libertarian ideas of freedom of speech. They’re taking it in a religious direction. They’re focusing on the message that Charlie promoted in the last few years of his public life, which was about Christian faith, family and tradition.
I happen to think that’s good. We have a collapsing birth rate in this country that can only be revived through a return to religion, community, earlier marriages, and traditional families. I support those things. However, it’s going to be something that limits the reach of Charlie Kirk’s more universal ideals. The funeral service was very evangelical. And a couple of friends of mine who were Lutherans came up to me and said, we know you’re Jewish. We’re just as lost as you are in this whole thing.
There is a danger about the anti-Israel stuff. We are overdue for a religious revival. The United States of America, even from the colonial era, was always ecumenical, that you had a Massachusetts, but you also had a Maryland, you had Protestant dissenters in one colony, and you had Catholic dissenters in another. And that is essential to the American idea of religious tradition. When people are young and don’t have a historical memory, they tend to believe they have all the answers.
I think that limits the growth of a movement and starts to generate opposition. And if there’s any room culturally for an opposition to arise on the left, and this is where an area where Gavin Newsom does very well. It will be a pushback against the people who tell you that they know better than you do what’s good for your life.
I disagreed with Charlie’s approach to social issues. He posted on X, put up a video of greeting his children and the caption he put was something like, young man, it’s time to stop partying and get serious, get married and have kids. And it was very stern. I replied, “I would rather tell young men that marriage is when the party starts.”
I don’t want to lecture anybody about how to live. Why not tell them that it’s more fun, that it’s better now? Maybe some people needed to hear Charlie’s message the way he delivered it. I see how appealing it was to some people who come into college with no direction whatsoever. But the didactic approach that is taken by his movement on social issues is going to turn people off. And so that legacy is also going to have some complicated elements.
Alan Scholnick:
Is there any way in this new media era with new technology that you can do something to measure your impact on the competency of your readers?
Joel Pollak:
Today nobody can agree about the facts on anything. You can look at the number of illegal border crossings that have dropped almost to zero and say, okay, well Trump’s doing a better job on the border than his predecessor did. Breitbart highlighted that this was an issue, and the mainstream media did not. They would occasionally talk about problems at the border, but they steered away from the idea that this was a very serious problem. It took Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard to get people to wake up to the idea that this was a problem.
In conservative media, we’re missing the impact of the tariffs. On the one hand, the tariffs aren’t as destructive as people predicted they’d be. And I come from a more free trade orientation. I was surprised at how successful tariffs were diplomatically, at least in the first administration and getting other countries to do non-economic things you wanted them to do.
Tariffs are hurting two Trump core constituencies: small business and farmers. I don’t think conservative media is in touch with its own audience about the impact of tariffs on these conservative constituencies because highlighting those as news stories means confronting the Trump administration with it.
The Trump administration knows; they’re not in denial about it, but conservative media like the liberal media doesn’t want to fight with Obama, Hillary and Biden. Conservative media certainly does not want to pick a fight with Trump.
In terms of measuring competency, the way to do it is not getting an issue right or wrong, but are you focused on the issues that Americans care about? We were focused on the border at Breitbart for more than 10 years. We’re still focused. We have a whole border coverage section, and we were telling the rest of the political media that Americans care about this issue.
Where you want to judge the competence of media outlets. It’s very hard to know what the facts are about what policies work and what ones don’t, but if you’re missing something that’s hurting your own audience, then I think you’re not doing a good job.
We tried to cover the latest case of the Supreme Court. Learning resources case. It’s a toy company in Illinois that’s suing the Trump administration. It has 500 employees in the United States. They import components from China, and their tax bill went from $2 million to a $100 million or something like that. So those issues are salient, and that’s what I mean when I say if Trump doesn’t address those cost issues that are still plaguing American consumers, even if inflation is steady, it has to be doing a lot better than steady. It has to be dropping. People need to feel like their prospects are improving and people can’t lose jobs because of these tariffs. So that’s where our focus needs to be. Thank you very much.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Joel for joining us. If you missed the last podcast, the topic was The Once and Future Saudi King.
Our speaker was Karen Elliott House who is the former Managing Editor at the Wall Street Journal, and the author of The Man Who Would Be King: Mohammed bin Salman and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia. Karen previously won the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting in the Middle East.
I want to make a plug for our next podcast with Howard Husock who is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a new book entitled The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website
whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, The Once and Future Saudi King here.
