It was the kind of news that shocks in the most abrupt way possible — crashing into the daily routine without warning, hovering for a while just beyond the reach of satisfactory explanation, then leaving behind a void that cannot be filled any time soon. Thus came the word of the passing yesterday of media provocateur Andrew Breitbart, reportedly while savoring one of the rare quiet moments in his tumultuous life, walking near his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He was 43, married and the father of four young children.
Breitbart was unusual among political animals, a committed man of the Right who thrived at the edge of radical upheaval and technological change. He was born into one of the most fashionably liberal enclaves in American political culture, the west side of Los Angeles. But as a student at Tulane University and then in the early years of his career, Breitbart steadily became disillusioned by what he saw as a suffocating liberalism metastasizing across the country from within America’s most elite entertainment, media, journalism and academic institutions. He grew irrevocably determined to excise that liberalism and, when he discovered the Internet in the mid-1990s, he found exactly the tool he needed to wage such a campaign.
For many years thereafter, he worked in the background with Matt Drudge in growing what had begun as an obscure Hollywood gossip sheet into the Drudge Report, the first and to this day still most influential Internet news aggregation site in the political world. He saw years before others on the right the paradigm-shifting power of the Internet to get the conservative message directly to the American people without it first being corrupted or sidetracked by liberal reporting and analysis.
In 2005, Breitbart debuted his own insurgent websites — BreitbartTV, Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Hollywood, and others — and used them to break big, often controversial stories that shocked and angered his liberal targets. These included a series of videos that exposed real and apparent wrongdoing within ACORN and led to its being defunded by Congress. He also broke the story of former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s infamous erotic Twitter adventures, and aided Peter Schweizer’s expose of insider trading on Capitol Hill. Earlier this month, Breitbart promised the Conservative Political Action Conference that he would soon release incriminating videos from President Obama’s past.
Breitbart’s most recent book title perhaps best captured him — “Righteous Indignation: Excuse me while I save the world.” He was, according to his friend Jonah Goldberg, “one of the most fearless people I’ve ever known.” Drawing blood and scorn from the liberals he was forever mercilessly skewering was “his Wheaties,” Goldberg told Fox News shortly after learning of Breitbart’s death.
Ever impassioned, tireless and intense, Breitbart was at his passing the Right’s master Internet activist, entrepreneur and agitator. That is why Samuel Adams — the indefatigable founder of the Committees of Correspondence, organizer and spokesman for the Boston Tea Party, and signer of the Declaration of Independence — likely would have recognized a kindred soul in Breitbart. Adams lived to a ripe old age and veneration by his countrymen. Breitbart, sadly, has been taken before his time.
