Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (27 page)

I knew a few key things going into the 2010 congressional midterms.

I knew that the Tea Party wasn’t just a political movement—it had become an existential and a cultural movement. It had moved beyond politics and into the realm of everyday life for Americans who weren’t separating their political viewpoints from their viewpoints on life anymore. Freedom wasn’t just freedom to vote—it was freedom to live, and that need for freedom crossed all cultural, racial, and political boundaries.

After doing so many Tea Parties, it became obvious that strong-willed and educated women were leading the charge. In very few cases did I see men running things. This narrative—virtually untold by the media—is nevertheless self-evident when one sees how Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann are tops in Tea Party popularity. It’s the “mama grizzly” factor. And the more award-winning, feminist-neutral, objective, supermedia woman Katie Couric sneers at them, the more powerful they become.

While the media expended billions of dollars trying to label the Tea Party as racist, Lt. Col. Allen West and Tim Scott made history as Tea Party–endorsed congressional victors, both from the South.
Perhaps their leadership skills and public stature will undo the negative branding of conservatives as racists. As I stated to the Uni-Tea rally in Philadelphia, this country and its Founders’ ideals will not survive until
all
culturally Marxist subgroupings (race, gender, sexual orientation) embrace
E Pluribus Unum
—“one from many.”

Significantly, when the impact of the Tea Party on the election was discussed on election night and thereafter, the “racism” meme had all but vanished. The fight against the N-word lie was dirty and ugly, but in the end we won and protected the reputation of the Tea Party. A huge victory.

I also understood, despite the media’s getting it predictably oh-so-wrong, that the Tea Party wasn’t merely a tool of the Republican Party. Many of the people I knew in the Republican Party—people who were longtime allies—reacted with fear and defensiveness with the rise of the movement that would, ironically, grant conservatism relevance and put it on offense where it always belonged. Many of those friends should heed the lessons of the 2010 midterms.

At its core, the Republican Party suffers from whipped-dog syndrome. Its every word and policy is shaped by a defensiveness against its master—and its master is less Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi than it is the mainstream media. Case in point: the last standard-bearer of the Republican Party was the defeated presidential candidate John McCain. McCain spent an entire political career cozying up to the media power structure in Washington, New York, and Hollywood. Then when he finally ran, expecting that he would be treated with dignity and respect for capitulating on core conservative principles, the media treated him like a mutt.

The Tea Party no longer wants to associate itself with this self-hating branch of the Republican Party. The GOP better know now not to trot out Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to placate their media masters.

Second, I knew that November 2 was a less important day for the movement than November 3 was.

The question was whether this once-in-a-lifetime awakening of conservatism would sustain itself. It’s an open question. That’s why I’m committed over the next two years to doing everything to keep that movement alive and trying to focus it on the right targets.

And the most important target? You guessed it: the mainstream media.

And it is going down, slowly but most surely. Its decline is evidenced by George Soros’s last-minute, preelection cash infusion into NPR ($1.8 million) and Media Matters ($1 million). The MSM is so weak that its existing infrastructure needs to be buffered by a destructive, anti-American individual in order to ensure that even more ground isn’t lost. To his credit, Soros understands that controlling the narrative is key, and media do that much better than the politicians—especially in the twenty-first century, a hypermedia age.

If the Tea Party made life miserable for individual congressmen simply by asking them basic questions like “Will you read the bill?” or “Do you support Obama’s agenda?” and causing so much dismay and turmoil and consternation, what results can be wrought if the Tea Party brings its energy and tactics to bear on the media, which are even more vulnerable and corrupt and hypocritical than the Democratic Party they serve?

The year 2011 is the perfect time for the Tea Party to begin focusing on both local and national media and show that they can act as a check and balance against the media’s natural tilt to the left. The Tea Party can show the mainstream media that if they don’t clean up their act, they’ll go the same way as the House Democrats in 2010. If you thought Democratic politicians were ham-fisted in responding to their constituents’ concerns, imagine blow-dried reporters and Ivy League newsroom know-it-alls exposed to the YouTube light of day.

My third thought going into the election was a personal one related to my place in the media and political order. I noticed that in many pieces by the “objective” mainstream media, I was described as “ultraconservative” or “überconservative.” But I bet these people can’t even tell you what my position is on most political issues. Were they intentionally marginalizing me by calling me über-and ultraconservative without any clue that I voted for Proposition 19, which was an attempt to legalize marijuana in California? Were they labeling me in order to discredit me without even finding out that my agnostic sensibilities cause me to waver on the tectonic issue of gay marriage?

And then I realized that it didn’t matter how they labeled me. At the end of the day, I know I’m not an aspiring political pundit, that I don’t consider my voice any greater than my neighbor’s voice, that my opinion on gay marriage is no more important than that of someone who is gay and is in a committed relationship, and that my thoughts on marijuana legalization are no more important than those of an orthodox Jew who has a deep problem with illegal drugs. I understood that if anybody thinks that my mission is to become another person you see on TV or hear on radio pontificating “It’s my way or the highway” on such matters, they’ve completely missed my point.

I intentionally co-created the Huffington Post in order to grant the hard left a place in the blogosphere to express itself. I knew that in the future I wanted to provide a similar platform for citizen journalists who relate more to my way of thinking on the center right, on the side of individual freedoms and individual liberties and individual rights over group rights, group thinking, and categorizing people into racial, gender, and sexual-orientation categories only to then pit them against one another.

I co-created the Huffington Post and the Big sites as part of a grander strategy to knock down the false edifice that is the mainstream media, that is built upon the false proposition of “objective” journalism and
the grotesque anti-American proposition of political correctness. My mission isn’t to quash debate—it’s to show that the mainstream media aren’t mainstream, that their feigned objectivity isn’t objective, and that open, rigorous debate is a positive good in our society.

Man, how I long for the days of Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Abbie Hoffman, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce. Today, the only people upholding their free-speech legacies are conservatives like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. And it’s weird that most liberals, who seek to ban them from media appearances and NFL-team ownership, can’t see that.

It’s that mission to have a rigorous, no-holds-barred debate that made me a central part of this election cycle. Whether people read the Huffington Post on the left or my Big sites on the right, everyone is now disillusioned about the media. Nobody is fooled into believing that most reporters are objective, straight-down-the-middle truth-seekers. That means there’s a greater transparency in the media. It doesn’t mean that it’s a calmer media—it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of tumult and chaos out there—but I don’t think our Founding Fathers would have considered a political-Prozac-addicted electorate to be the ideal.

I find it ironic that the same mainstream media that in 1992 lamented that my Generation X was not sufficiently engaged in politics are now upset that we are and have created New Media and Social Media, transforming them into a highly aggressive, deeply democratic, and rough-and-tumble environment that is now putting those former critics and overlords in the mainstream media into the unemployment line.

When I was asked by ABC News to appear as a participant in its election night coverage, I at first considered the invitation a tacit
acknowledgment that even a bastion of the mainstream media had heeded our message. With Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch in ABC’s New York studio with George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer, and me set to appear via satellite from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in Arizona before an audience of students, I thought,
Hmmm, maybe there is some progress.
The invitation had been in many ways righteously ironic. My primary critics had to recognize that the Tea Party they had denigrated consistently for two years had paved the way for massive political change, and the Tea Party’s primary journalistic defender and the publisher of some of the biggest stories of that election cycle had to realize the benefit of asking me to be part of their election night coverage.

So, perhaps naïvely, I accepted the invitation and considered it to be a done deal.

It wasn’t.

After accepting the invitation from ABC News, we posted an innocuous article at Big Journalism promoting the ABC News coverage that would feature Dana and me. In essence, we were simply asking our millions of readers to watch ABC. Some would call that free advertising.

Within hours, the organized left went after me (and ABC) with a meat cleaver. I found myself under the same level of organized attack that I had faced when the Shirley Sherrod incident occurred. (Speaking of which, you may have noticed that I don’t discuss the Sherrod incident in this book. You probably know that Sherrod has threatened in the media to sue me. I can say this: there’s a hell of a lot more to the Sherrod story than you’ve heard to this point. Stay tuned.)

Both the organized left’s reaction to the Sherrod incident and their reaction to the ABC News story were retribution for my role in taking down ACORN and other sacred cows of the left. I had warned James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles that we would forever
be marked targets. But knowing you’re going to be hit doesn’t take away from the sensation of being clobbered with a sucker punch.

Less than two days after the invitation, and less than twelve hours after the post announcing my participation in the broadcast, the organized left, led by my pals at Media Matters,
ColorofChange.org
(Van Jones!), CREDO (a Progressive phone company that sends a portion of one’s bill to left-wing causes), Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and my beautiful red-headed Frankenstein, the Huffington Post, assaulted ABC with at least 125,000 signatures and over 2,000 phone calls. By the time I woke up the next morning (a Saturday), there was already a hit piece in the
Washington Post
with an inside, unnamed source at ABC claiming that there was outrage inside the network’s newsroom over the producer’s picking me in the first place. “This blindsided a good portion of the team here,” the source reportedly told Greg Sargent of the
Post
. “And not in a good way.”
¹

The second insult-to-injury capitulation to the organized left was a concurrent statement by ABC News’s David Ford, a PR flack, to Media Matters. Ford stated, “[Breitbart] will be one of many voices on our air, including Bill Adair of Politifact. If Andrew Breitbart says something that is incorrect, we have other voices to call him on it.”
²
Upon reading it, I thought,
How naïve that I accepted this invitation. How naïve that I thought that ABC News would stand by its invitation and that the producer responsible for that invitation would act like a man and defend his pick.

It got worse. Andrew Morse, the producer of the event for ABC, without even reaching out to me, issued a statement from ABC News that was described by the UK
Guardian
in accurate terms: “Breitbart claims he’ll be appearing as an analyst, but a statement from ABC distances the network from him with comical vigour.” Morse’s statement explained that I was “not an ABC News consultant… not, in any way, affiliated with ABC News… not being paid by ABC News.
He has not been asked to analyze the results of the election for ABC News. Mr. Breitbart will not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage…. He has been invited as one of several guests.”
³

Never mind that I never said anything to the contrary. But obviously, Morse had his job to preserve.

It was a line-by-line distancing and diminishing of my role in the event as a means to placate the left’s desire for blood. I saw that my fate was sealed by looking to, of all people, former Clinton hit-job artist turned “objective” anchor, George Stephanopoulos, who tweeted, “Breitbart NOT on ABC network broadcast.”

Ironically, my first memory of Stephanopoulos in conjunction with ABC News was in June 1996, when, while working in the Clinton White House, he threatened punitive action against the network that would later employ him to unbook as a guest a former FBI agent named Gary Aldrich, who reported wrongdoing at the Clinton White House. It still boggles the mind that Clinton’s media hatchet man was soon thereafter rewarded with an anchor job and the mainstream media seal of objectivity.

But the saga wasn’t done yet. I knew the ABC News brass had calculated that if they threw me under the bus completely, they risked the political right and Tea Party attacking ABC News for capitulating to the totalitarian left. So ABC News created an artificial wall—a digital Elba, if you will—where I would be exiled. They now said I would be participating only in an online forum—and, most egregiously, they lied that that had been the understanding from the very beginning. Jeffrey Schneider, a high-level ABC News PR flak, issued this statement: “Mr. Breitbart exaggerated the role he would play on his blog…. We immediately made it clear that was never the role he was supposed to play. He had been invited to be part of our digital town hall, and that is still the role.”
⁴