Breitbart, the adopted son of a wealthy West Los Angeles restauranteur, used his privilege to immiserate the most marginalized, impoverished, widely demonized groups of Americans. He was a faithful errand boy for rich, Scrooge McDuck tycoons like Peter Thiel, Foster Friess, and the Koch Brothers, wielding smear journalism against anyone or any interest that threatened their power — usually African-Americans or groups like ACORN, serving impoverished, neglected inner city communities. There was nothing innovative or new about Breitbart’s smear operation. Indeed, he walked a trail blazed by the now-forgotten snitches and smear artists of the McCarthy era - quasi-eccentric figures like Matt Cvetic and Henry Matusow. Cvetic drank himself to death a few years after McCarthy’s fall; while Matusow recanted, was jailed for perjury, and spent the last decades of his life begging for money and working as a clown for children’s parties. Breitbart, for his part, collapsed on a sidewalk outside his home in Brentwood at the tender age of 43.
Long-time WWJD readers remember that I had something of a minor online snit with the late Andrew Breitbart less than two months before he died on March 1, 2012. I’ll always remember that what he intended as an insult- “Life in the upper echelon. The cerebral 1%. Must be nice.”- fell far short of the mark. I wear that “insult” as a badge of pride. More than that, though, is what it says about Breitbart, his “journalism,” and his legacy. He may be gone, but he’s definitely not been forgotten, and his website, Breitbart.com, has picked up the torch and is carrying it without missing a beat.
Breitbart never met a left-wing cause, belief, or person he wouldn’t smear- truth be damned. His journalistic style could have been summed up a la Dorothy Parker- “If you can’t say anything nice, you must be Andrew Breitbart.” Though they’d been the not-infrequent targets of Breitbart’s smears, the mainstream media eulogized him as if he’d been the Second Coming of Edgar R. Murrow. The man was to journalism what Jeffrey Dahmer was to vegetarianism. You could be forgiven for believing that they really should have known better, but “honesty,” “insight,” and “journalism” are rarely found in the same sentence these days.
Breitbart’s sad legacy is that he gave birth to a generation of intellectual and moral midgets with no concern for the truth and even less for ethics and integrity. “News” to these “journalists” is inseparable from ideology, meaning it can and should be used to destroy those with whom you disagree. It’s despicable, and its one of the things that have contributed to the current polarization of public discourse.
We (and the mainstream media) should remember Andrew Breitbart for what he was- a miserable excuse for a human being whose outsized ego and epic hubris contributed to the destruction of good people. That’s not something to be eulogized; that’s something that ought to be roundly condemned. “Don’t speak ill of the dead” is not a license to whitewash evil, especially when you consider what he did and what he’s left behind.
I don’t care that Andrew Breitbart was a Conservative; I care that he was a miserable human being with a sick, twisted agenda that he passed off as “journalism.” This world is far better off without him.
