Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!

by Andrew Breitbart

  It wasn’t enough for me. This isn’t it, I told myself. This isn’t going to define me—that I created a news aggregator, a generic media portal.

  The stage was set for the true Frankenstein monster to be unleashed.

  My ultimate goal became to take the news aggregation-plus-group-blog model, build it up, and then implement my decade of New Media experience to make it explode into a genuine alternative news source. To turn the New Media into the media.

  And I knew how to do it. I knew the flaw with sites like the Huffington Post that my own sites could avoid. HuffPo’s structural weakness was that it was built upon people who were writing on any subject under the sun, often repetitiously. Mostly, that constituted, “Bush bad, Bush Hitler, Iraq War bad, blah blah blah.” Under the amorphous banner of the Huffington Post, people wrote about whatever they wanted. Sure it sounds egalitarian and democratic and all that—but mostly it’s just boring. There were even kids of Arianna’s friends writing about the Dodgers. It hit me early on that the site lacked focus, that it was self-indulgent and repeated the media narrative.

  And personally, I didn’t want to end up like Arianna Huffington herself—a powerful but reactive person who went wherever the news cycle went, the person who would be able to answer any policy question because I’d studied the Hotline in the morning and the Hill in the evening, and stuck doggedly to that day’s Democratic talking points. In fact, I didn’t want to react to the news at all. I wanted to drive the news cycle.

  So how is that different from what’s gone before?

  Allow me an analogy.

  My overarching analysis of the political gridiron is that mostly (not always), the Democrats are on the offense and the Republicans play a prevent defense. Sometimes Republicans win, but usually because Rush Limbaugh or some other defensive stud picks up a fumble or intercepts a pass at the two-yard line and runs it back ninety-eight yards for a touchdown. And the only reason defense has the chance to win at all on this playing field is because we are a center-right nation.

  But we can no longer afford to hope defense wins us a ball game or two.

  The Democrats have the Big Three Networks and major news dailies as their offensive line, and a starting backfield of Hollywood celebrities and academia.

  Fortunately, however, the New Media comes with rules that level the playing field. The virtual newsroom at my Big websites, which you’ll read about shortly, is an exercise in no-huddle offense, where citizen journalists can call audibles and get in the game. And it has forced the Democrat-Media Complex to finally play some defense. They’ve been caught off guard, and in the case of ACORN and elsewhere, the underdogs were able to upset the reigning Super Bowl champs.

  What we need is more heady quarterbacks and risk-taking coaches to take on the powerhouses of the left. We need the revealing stories, the gutsy whistle-blowers, the unfiltered-by-the-Complex journalism. We need you. There is no reason not to play smashmouth ball, day in and day out, on both the political and the cultural fronts. Because, don’t fool yourselves, that’s exactly what they do.

  It’s the only way to break down the sclerotic news cycle they control—to get as many of us in the game as possible. On our side, to date, it’s self-funded. While the Huffington Post has tens of millions of dollars to hire the best journalists in the world and to house itself in beautiful offices, we started the Bigs out of my basement for pennies. The right still has massive systemic handicaps in its media battles with the left. I’ve dedicated my entire business model—my entire life, really—to creating a way to combat those systemic deficiencies.

  Over the next few years, the Bigs will expand beyond Hollywood (television, film, music), Journalism (media criticism), Government, and Peace (national security). We will take on Education, Tolerance (political correctness), and expand into Jerusalem (Middle East), EU (Old and New Europe), and beyond. The Big picture goes beyond America because the world is also under attack by the same anti–free market, anti–individual liberty forces. It is not just a political war, it is a cultural war, and our audacious goal is to change the big narrative.

  Please, tell me it cannot be done!

  Yes, we’re targeting the left. But we’re targeting the right, too—and they know it. With the launch of each new Big site, the conservative establishment is learning that this model works, that there’s stature to be gained from associating with the Bigs. Conservative intellectuals are seeing that it’s worth being plugged into the New Media, that they can either sit in an office at a think tank and write white papers that may be read by a few hundred people and shape policy slightly, or they can drop bombs from a much higher elevation with much larger impact. And they can use the same skill set to do it. Sure, we need the maverick citizen journalists—the James O’Keefes and Patrick Courrielches and the tech-savvy kids—but we also need the Old Guard in the business suits to get out here on the front lines with us.

  And you can be a part of it. Grab your digital recorder. Grab your BlackBerry or your iPhone. It’s time to join the fight.

  Because the Complex is in Big trouble.

  EPILOGUE

  Looking Ahead

  In early October 2010, I flew to Houston to speak at a Tea Party. This one took place at a well-to-do planned community called the Woodlands. While there were about five thousand people in attendance—there was no media coverage. If the media couldn’t say something mean about the Tea Party, they wouldn’t say anything at all about it. But by this time, the Tea Party had successfully defended the attacks by the media and the Democratic Party, and it would become the machine that would radically alter the American political landscape on Election Day 2010.

  What had started exclusively as an anti-intrusive, limited-government, political movement had naturally evolved into something more all-encompassing and cultural. With Tea Partiers stealing from the left-wing playbook (though it’s tragic that it took us so long to figure out it was all Alinsky), conservatives had begun to learn the value of showing up, being vocal, and acting local. The American bourgeoisie was finally having its 1960s counterrevolution—and with a month left before the midterm election, people were starting to have fun.

  I gave my maiden speech to the Tea Party on the off-off-main-stage event at the nationwide Tax Day 2009 Tea Partypalooza in Orange County, California, which is forty traffic-laden miles from my home. Not getting the choice Santa Monica Pier Tea Party gig—a mere five traffic-free miles from my home—turned out to be a blessing. Getting away from my comfort zone (and my zip code) set me on a course to see firsthand how the American spirit was still alive.

  In Santa Ana, as I previously mentioned, I witnessed Ian Mitchell passionately wail his top hit, “Saturday Night,” and also sing America’s best patriotic songs with the passion of a newly minted citizen. From the beginning, the Tea Party was certainly not anti-immigrant! (In fact, at many subsequent Southern California Tea Parties, I would often run into some of my biggest fans—the Orozco family, who have a family coffee bean and espresso company and have indulged me with some of their finest beans!) My father-in-law, the formerly blacklisted actor Orson Bean, and another Big Hollywood contributor, thespian Gary Graham (Alien Nation, Star Trek: Enterprise), joined me onstage that day. The burgeoning conservative Hollywood movement, whose passion led to the creation of Big Hollywood, was taking its first baby steps out of the closet. I can tell you that the Tea Party has served as an inspiration to many in Hollywood who long for a saner American political future. Soon, I pray, America will see these patriots come out of the closet when the Complex implodes.

  My antimainstream-media rants probably were not what the Republican National Committee would have ordered, but these off-the-cuff, pointed, stream-of-consciousness speeches resonated with Tea Party crowds state to state. (If I don’t say so myself!) I used to worry a lot about speaking publicly. But speaking to Tea Parties was like speaking to friends and family, and I rarely left an event without new friends and culture warriors.

  Tea Partiers
, already steeped in the biased nature of American journalism, began to see their local and national media as clear impediments to achieving their political goals. And since I was screaming this tune, nearly savantlike, I was asked to be a keynote speaker at the first ever Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where I also had the privilege of introducing Sarah Palin.

  Meeting her for the first time backstage, I told her how much I admired her refusal to cave in the face of repeated attempts by the media to assassinate her character, and that by her refusing to accept that they were shooting real bullets, she was teaching fellow patriots, and many gun-shy Hollywood conservative friends, that they could withstand similar predictable attacks. Regardless of what Palin represents to the political future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement, her cultural impact has been extraordinary.

  It was such an honor to speak at so many Tea Party events. But it was perhaps the Houston Tea Party, a year and a half into it all, that made me finally realize that I was more than simply a defender of the Tea Party—I was truly a believer. These were my people. I walked through the crowd and I spoke to many of the speakers, to a group of veterans congregated together and enthusiastically cheering, to housewives, to African-Americans, to Hispanics—all sorts of people, all of whom had the same sense that the American people had finally awakened.

  For the longest time, the left used activism and media to create the perception that they were a larger subsection of the American experience than they actually are. It was a smoke-and-mirrors game that the right allowed to stand unchallenged for way too long. By standing up for the Tea Party, by refusing to back down, by becoming one with them, I made it my mission to show the country that the Tea Party was a worthy grassroots conservative movement, and that the left was a corrupt political amalgam dominated by astroturfing organizations dedicated to the destruction of the country as we know it.

  That mission made me a target.

  The organized left, my stated enemy, saw me as a threat that needed to be destroyed—not just because I helped to take ACORN down, but because I started to recognize that we now had the tools to expose the left for what it is: a tightly connected group of unions and special-interest groups backed by George Soros and PR flacks paid for by Soros, like Media Matters and Organizing for America, and motivated media allies like the Huffington Post (quite a Frankenstein I created there, eh?) and, well, the entire mainstream media generally. In order to take down the organized left, I needed to shine a light on the organized left. And that was exactly what we did consistently throughout 2009 and 2010.

  Which was one of the reasons why the Tea Party won.

  The election of 2010 and, to a lesser degree, the off-year elections of 2009 acted as a confirmation that our message was getting through and that it wasn’t just me alone, and the Big bloggers alone, that started to get the message and disseminate it. New and Social Media were the tools that the Tea Party would use to fight back and circumvent its well-funded “mainstream media” detractors.

  The handheld video camera became the star of the New Media and the biggest weapon against the once-protected left’s tactics of intimidation. Even though the networks mostly ignored the video footage that we collected—footage of the soon-to-be defeated congressman Bob Etheridge (D-NC) attacking a citizen; footage of an Organizing for America member and Democratic Party official calling me gay at an Organizing for America–sponsored “Stop the Hate Rally”; footage of ralliers at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee/Organizing for America/former Pelosi staffer–created event portraying Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Adam Kinzinger as Nazis—we took the moral high ground and took away the left’s tactics that had for so long been indulged and protected by the mainstream media. Our success forced a wedge between the mainstream media and the organized left, making it so they could no longer, without consequence, protect the Progressive political alliance.

  In less than two years I felt more allied to the Tea Party than to the GOP. That sentiment is clearly shared by millions, and it now serves as a warning to the Republican establishment that the people are back in charge and on high alert.

  Lessons from the Election

  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.