MAG: Breitbart’s Alex Marlow ‘Most Consequential Countercultural Figure to Come Out of UC Berkeley Since Free Speech Movement’

The following highlights come from a long-read profile of Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alexander Marlow, a graduate of University of California, Berkeley. The article, written by Scott Lucas, appears in the February issue of San Francisco magazine:

He is the most consequential countercultural figure to come out of UC Berkeley since the Free Speech Movement. And he just helped get Donald Trump elected.

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Having recently assumed a position of almost unimaginable power in American journalism, Marlow could afford to smell the roses. Perhaps more than any other person working in media today, he has a direct line into the head of the 45th president of the United States. His most recent boss and constant adviser, Steve Bannon, stepped down as executive chairman of Breitbart in August to run Trump’s campaign and has been named senior counselor in the White House—one of the two or three closest advisers to the most powerful man on earth. Throughout the race to become president, and in the surreal and improvised weeks after the election, Trump tweeted links to Breitbart News more often than to any other source.

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Marlow ran [Breitbart.com] all [election] day from his laptop in “the fishbowl,” a large, glass-encased studio used for special events with seating for a small audience, until 3 a.m., when he returned to his room at the Park Lane Hotel, across from Central Park, and managed two hours of sleep before returning to the studio at 6 a.m. On the morning of November 9, he proclaimed a victory that he’d seen coming a year and a half before it happened. “You’re going to see incredible amounts of hot takes trying to make sense of the election in the coming weeks,” he said on his radio show a few hours before Hillary Clinton conceded. “They could have listened to Breitbart radio.”

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[Marlow is] every bit the culture-jammer, throw-your-body-on-the-gears, power-to-the-people agitator that ’60s free speech icon Mario Savio was. Even if the world he’s busy tearing down is the one that Savio and his comrades helped to build, you could argue that Berkeley had a large hand in building Alex Marlow as well.

Read the rest here.