Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!

by Andrew Breitbart

  That was why Clinton was there. It was a sign that Obama was facing a potential Lewinsky scandal. He understood that things were spiraling out of control. He needed a strategy—and that was where Clinton came in. Perhaps I’m being a bit hubristic, but I’m convinced that this was the meeting in which Obama and Clinton decided to put John Podesta in charge of the ACORN response team. The truth is that Obama didn’t have much choice. The Tea Parties were gaining credence and weight, the main topic of the Tea Parties was ACORN, and the dam was about to burst.

  That night, it finally did. Both Katie Couric and Jon Stewart broke the mainstream media embargo on the story. Stewart’s story was particularly huge, because if you’re ACORN and you’ve lost Jon Stewart, you’ve lost everything. When I saw that Stewart had bashed ACORN, I said to Hannah and James, “You know how I’ve been fretting and worrying at every stage? I think you guys are out of harm’s way now.”

  The Obama team began to respond in earnest the next day with tried-and-true Clintonian tactics. ACORN announced its “independent” investigation panel. The members? Podesta himself, SEIU president Andy Stern, and former Housing and Urban Development secretary Henry Cisneros (investigated plenty of times in his own right). Heading up the team: former Massachusetts attorney general Scott Harshbarger, who had pushed the false prosecution of Gerald Amirault back during his district attorney days.* It was a team designed to obfuscate, not investigate. There was no way I was going to cooperate with these hacks.

  As the whitewash began, we showed we weren’t done, either. On Wednesday, we released the San Diego videos, which again showed an ACORN employee helping James and Hannah set up an underage brothel at taxpayer expense.

  But we had a problem on Thursday. We didn’t know what to do next. The Plan had gone so well, it had run its course faster than expected. Now what? I thought. Should we keep releasing videos? We still had several more—in fact, as of this writing, we still do—but we didn’t want to run out.

  That was when Baltimore’s ACORN told us they were going to sue us.

  I still can’t believe they filed a complaint just then. It served our ends perfectly, because I wanted to create the perception that there were unlimited videos, but we were running out. Now, I’ve been in a lawsuit before. It’s not a pleasant experience. But this one put a smile on my face, because the idea that I would get into discovery with ACORN—and the knowledge that I was in the legally and morally righteous position—was awesome. I would hire the best Federalist Society lawyers in the world to dig through ACORN’s muck. When they sued me, I actually responded out loud: “It’s Christmas.” All their lawsuit did was intertwine me in the mythology of ACORN. All my dreams and aspirations for getting into high-level intrigue were starting to materialize. I was enjoying it so much that it felt like I was simultaneously on every single class-A narcotic that has ever been banned. I felt that I shouldn’t be allowed to drive, I was so giddy with what was happening.

  Meanwhile, I merrily tweaked with the media’s heads. They had been coming to me throughout the entire rollout. I knew that the media were a natural conduit to the other side, sort of like discovery for ACORN in a high-stakes lawsuit. ACORN and the Obama administration and their media allies weren’t going to be giving us information about their strategy, I knew, so why should I give them the information they could use to attempt to outplay us? We knew that the press was there to play defense for Obama, and we knew that in many cases, reporters and publishers were attempting to grill me for information so that they could craft their revised playbook.

  So we screwed around with them. And I told them we were playing with them. When Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post asked me how many videos there were, I told her I wouldn’t tell her. She asked why, and I told her: “I’m screwing with you.”

  It was an entertaining and illuminating interview, to say the least. She asked me what I felt when I saw the videos. “When I saw the first one,” I replied, “I thought it was an anomaly. When I saw the second one, I thought it was a coincidence. When I saw the third one, I knew it was a trend. When I saw these videos, I couldn’t help thinking, ‘This is the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society.’ ”

  That got her goat. She got viscerally upset. She told me she was part of the Washington Post team that had won awards for its coverage of Abu Ghraib.

  “Do you really want to have an argument over this?” I asked her. “That was one National Guard unit that the press used to hang as an albatross around the Bush administration, to make it a symbol of its wartime policy, to extrapolate that its waterboarding policy and interrogation policy were tied to a widespread anti-Muslim humiliation campaign. The National Guard unit was sufficiently punished and there was a straightforward investigation. There was no attempt to cover it up. It was a clean bust and it was a clean cleanup, but it was hardly representative of a massive trend.”

  She told me why she thought I was wrong, and why this wasn’t anything like Abu Ghraib. “You just caught a bunch of dummies on video!” she said.

  The irony was both painful and delicious. “That’s what Bush called the ‘soft bigotry of lowered expectations,’ ” I noted. “Those people were smart enough to rig the system to defraud taxpayers.” That much was obvious, after all. So while Leonnig saw a bunch of low-income, mostly minority community organizers as dummies, duped by predatory Repugnicans, to everyone who actually watched the videos it was clear these were well-trained and well-informed operators, committed to navigating an intricate web of government and private services in order to suckle at the government teat.

  The conversation summed up everything that was wrong with the mainstream media. They think it’s their obligation to take down right-of-center organizations; they feel it’s their raison d’être to attack conservative institutions mercilessly. But if I did the same with a liberal institution, I was victimizing an isolated “bunch of dummies.”

  ACORN proved that we didn’t have to live with their old standards anymore. We could take down the Complex on our own, and we could use the media—could shame the media—into helping. As Jon Stewart, as dependable a media foot soldier as the Dems have, put it after airing the videos on his show: “Are you fucking kidding me?! Investigative media… you’re telling me that two kids from the cast of High School Musical 3 can break this story with a video camera and their grandmother’s chinchilla coat, and you got nothing?”

  The next six months played out absurdly by plan. It’s one thing to have theories about the Complex, but it’s quite another to put those theories into practice, to see the components falling into place based upon your understanding of the other side. We knew they’d ignore and deny, so we planted the videos one at a time. We knew that as time went on, the media would have to pick it up, expediting ACORN’s downfall. And we knew that they could malign James, Hannah, and me as much as they wanted—and that it wouldn’t work, because seeing was believing.

  Only five months later could the Podesta team try their typical tactic of going after irrelevant details of the story—“Was O’Keefe wearing the outlandish pimp costume?” But by then, it was far too late to try shifting the focus to such ancillary details. ACORN was done. The game was over.

  The biggest key to the success of the ACORN story was the structure we had created. I am a single organism who can act swiftly and make decisions on the fly. The Complex is a leviathan, an entity that moves slowly, that has natural momentum and can’t stop on a dime. The Democratic Party, Barack Obama, the Progressive movement, John Podesta, and George Soros—all these entities have to coordinate their counterstrategy, create a game plan. I don’t have that problem. I can stick and move. And I know them down to their core. I understand their Alinsky mind-set, their Clinton mind-set, their Podesta mind-set, their Media Matters mind-set. They are entirely predictable. People who grant me expertise in media tactics don’t seem to recognize how ordinary the Complex’s reactions were. Every step of the way I predicted how they were going to behave, and every step of the way they came
through.

  Even now, it continues. John Podesta and Media Matters keep making the same mistakes, which seem to be granting me benefits that weren’t originally taken into account at the beginning. The more they come after us—and they do, with every challenging story we publish—the bigger we get. And the bigger we get, the more opportunities we’re getting to do other stories, to work with other people who work with us. As they try to destroy us, they are Palin-izing us, making us larger and stronger.

  ACORN could have stopped this at the very beginning. They could have acknowledged systemic failure, hired somebody who would have done an honest and thorough investigation and come up with harsh conclusions. They could have engaged in a Nixonian “modified limited hangout.”* But I was betting that they were so unused to being challenged, so inherently arrogant, that they wouldn’t. They were so sure that their media allies would help them that they fought us every step of the way, and every step of the way emboldened us.

  On February 22, 2010, Politico.com reported that ACORN had “dissolved as a national structure.” On March 23, 2010, Reuters reported that ACORN would be formally disbanding due to monetary problems.

  On April 1, 2010, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s ranking member, Darrell Issa (R-CA), released a report finding that ACORN “is attempting to rebrand itself without instituting real reforms or removing senior leadership figures that need to be held accountable for wrongdoing. These newly renamed organizations are like career criminals who adopt aliases without changing their criminal lifestyles.”5

  It’s not over yet. We remain vigilant to expose the corruption. Because we proved it. We—you and I—can beat them.

  CHAPTER 9

  Tea Party Protector

  On April 15, 2009, I was invited to my first Tea Party in Santa Ana, California. I dragged along my friend, actor Gary Graham, and my father-in-law, Orson Bean. We met Ian Mitchell, the newly naturalized American citizen from the ’70s Scottish music sensation the Bay City Rollers (yes, that Bay City Rollers). We met hundreds of the nicest, most congenial, most pro-America people you’d ever want to meet. Blacks and Hispanics and whites, and a labradoodle dressed in a red, white, and blue sweater.

  Everyone talked about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, about conservative principles. It was like the Claremont Institute, but with everyday working people. And labradoodles.

  I was slated to speak at the event. At first, I walked around the arena’s perimeter, observing, taking it all in. But enough people had seen me on TV and the web by now that many approached me to chat. It was a great experience, exciting and affirming. It’s actually fun to be around people who like you (I’m not used to that in my neighborhood these days). I suspect, however, that for many Tea Partiers, I was a bit of a broken record. Because I was by now fixated on a single topic: what was about to happen to them.

  While everyone else talked about what the Tea Party stood for—limited government, lower taxes, less spending—I was compelled to talk about what it would take to protect this movement. I told everyone I could that they had started an uprising, and that the Obama administration and the media wouldn’t stand for it. I said that they’d be labeled racists and hatemongers and violent criminals, that they’d be depicted as the dregs of society, people to be excluded from dinner parties because of their made-up closet KKK status. They were about to be targeted, and I knew it. I had to warn them.

  I was right, of course. It took the Complex awhile to catch on, but once they did…

  After ACORN, the bull’s-eye on the Tea Party movement had only seemed to grow. The Tea Partiers were attuned to the ACORN scandal from the get-go—anti-ACORN placards were immediately a fixture at the movement’s gatherings following the videos’ releases. ACORN was a perfect foil for a movement founded on rejecting covert and overt government corruption and the lack of oversight on federal money distribution. There was no way that could be tolerated for long.

  At the same time, however, and despite the media’s best efforts, ACORN had grown to embody a hell of a lot more than ACORN itself. The scandal started to expose the political Complex in a dramatic way, the same way we were hoping to expose the cultural Complex with Big Hollywood. Suddenly, people began to see where all the leftist parts fit together: Andy Stern and the SEIU; Obama and Rahm Emanuel and the other White House thugs; ACORN and its on-the-ground fraud; Media Matters and its consistent attempts to keep the media in line, doing the bidding of one side while attempting to shut down the other. Like 1950s America gradually waking up to the existence of the mafia, more and more people were beginning to see the Complex. And this further fed the Tea Party movement, vindicated them, let them know that they weren’t seeing phantoms or descending into paranoia. They truly were getting screwed.

  And ACORN showed them they could fight back.

  Because of my self-adopted role of becoming the Tea Party’s protector from the media, I started to become a fixture, the guy who would playbook the offense/defense scheme we needed to counter the inevitable Complex crackdown. “This is the media, and this is what they’re going to do to you,” I told them every chance I got. “You’re focusing on what the country needs to do, and I’m telling you that you need to focus on the key to the whole ball game—the media.” Because more than anyone, I knew what these people—little old ladies and retired veterans and young libertarians who hadn’t even known they were libertarians until Obama—I knew what they were up against. And it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  It got ugly fast enough. The Tea Party had been shortchanged for over a year already, with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow labeling them “tea baggers” and claiming that they were holdover refugees from Birth of a Nation. Even for me, it was stunning how the press was willing to attack head-on hundreds of thousands of people exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of association. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) picked up on the cue and demonstrated true statesmanship by himself using the egregious term “tea baggers.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) went pure Alinsky and told the media that protesters were carrying “swastikas and symbols like that.”1 The Hollywood contingent wouldn’t be outdone, of course, with Janeane Garofalo calling Tea Partiers “racist rednecks who hate blacks,” while Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that they were driven by “cultural and racial fear.”

  Then, a new low. In August 2009, MSNBC took a photo of a man carrying a gun at a rally, but cut off his head and hands in the photo, as Contessa Brewer intoned, “There are questions about whether this has racial overtones… white people showing up with guns.” Dylan Ratigan and Toure agreed with her. There was only one problem: the guy carrying the gun was black. MSNBC had deliberately cropped the picture to try to avoid the inconvenient fact that it contradicted their (false) narrative. They were making it up, using Photoshop to propagate a lie. Where was Media Matters now?

  At the same time, SEIU gangsters in St. Louis were beating up a black man, Kenneth Gladney, and calling him the N word for handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags at a town hall meeting for Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO). In Thousand Oaks, California, a liberal activist confronted a Tea Party guy and bit his finger off. Yet the media ignored these incidents and instead tried to find the smoking gun of racism that just had to be hidden in the Tea Party DNA.

  But they couldn’t find anything.

  So they manufactured it. As the health-care debate drew to a close, the Democratic Party turned to its new primary concern: destroying the uprising.

  The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the Congressional Black Caucus to walk through the peaceful Tea Party demonstrators on their way to vote for the health-care bill on March 20, 2010. There was no reason for these elected officials to walk aboveground through the media circus. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol.
By crafting a walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction. They didn’t get it. So they lied about it.

  They claimed immediately, without any proof, that black congressmen had been spit at and slurred with the N word fifteen times (as Indiana representative André Carson stated and the press dutifully reported). Soon thereafter Nancy Pelosi walked through this alleged hate-fest with a gavel in hand and that marionette grin affixed to her face. Had the incidents reported by the Congressional Black Caucus actually occurred, the Capitol Police would never have allowed the least popular person in Congress (to that crowd, anyway) to walk right into harm’s way.

  To reiterate: there was no proof that the N word was used, or that anyone was purposefully spit upon. That Tea Party crowd was a sea of New Media equipment. Not only were hundreds of people armed with Handycams, BlackBerrys, and iPods, so were the mainstream media, which had come in expectation of a display of violence and backwardness by the Neanderthal Tea Partiers. They were there, covering every inch of the event. Does anyone really think that somehow they just missed it?

  But never mind producing proof themselves. Let’s ask another question. Why didn’t a single mainstream media outlet even suggest that a video should exist to prove these events occurred? This was the same press that was still telling me that we hadn’t proved that ACORN was aiding and abetting illegal activity, that our videos were somehow faulty or edited or falsified. “Truth to power,” indeed.

  The strategy adopted by Nancy Pelosi on health care soon made it clear why it was so important that these charges go unchallenged: race would be the centerpiece of her strategy to destroy the Tea Party movement. She quickly linked the health-care bill to the Civil Rights Act, and her media followers parroted her. The implication: if you were against health care, you hated black people—specifically, President Obama. Throw in the manufactured “N word” strategy and you have a devious scheme designed to take down the Tea Party.