NewsBusters Interview: Andrew Breitbart, Author of ‘Righteous Indignation’
Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart has had his share of tussles with the media. He’s certainly known for that among liberal journalists who, in the words of the New York Times “hold their noses at the mere mention of his name.” That mistrust has been borne out in the media’s general lack of interest in the stories pushed out by such Breitbart franchises as Big Government or Big Hollywood and the completely absurd explanations Breitbart haters cooked up in their efforts to deny the story he most recently pushed, the exposure of the illicit online activities of New York Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. Lesser-known than his very public tussles with the media is Breitbart’s dissatisfaction with many within the conservative movement, many of whom he sees as unwilling to sufficiently stand up for their principles, largely because they’ve become infatuated with polling and trying to make nice with the media left—an effort that is as doomed to fail as it is craven. Reading through his book “ Righteous Indignation ,” one gets the distinct impression that these are the two main battles Andrew Breitbart sees himself fighting. I spent about an hour talking about these conflicts with him. We also talk about Breitbart's conversion to conservatism, his time working with former conservative Ariana Huffington, Breitbart's conflict regarding the gay conservative group GOProud, as well has his responses to various charges of being unfair in his journalism. See below for a transcript of the interview. MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Let’s just talk a little bit about where this book came from – the title and what inspired you to write it. ANDREW BREITBART: Well, the title took me longer to come up with than the actual writing of the book. I wanted the title to sing. The working title was “Thinking Big” because of the “Big” sites. People liked it, but I kept going to bed at night thinking that this isn’t right, this needs to speak, it needs to be guttural. “Righteous Indignation” speaks not just for me, but of the Tea Party that I was at first a defender of but ultimately felt myself as a non-joiner. I found myself slowly recognizing I am part of the Tea Party Nation and both titles reflect the plight of the Tea Party. “Righteous Indignation.” The Mainstream Media, as I call it, Democrat Media Complex throughout the book, the Matrix, was hellbent on destroying the Tea Party from the get-go and the way that it did so was trying to impugn its motives. All left-wing activists, whether it be WTO, anti-WTO, or anti-war are idealistic as framed by the Democratic Media Complex. Yet the Tea Party, which is pretty darn clear on its main focus, which is fiscal restraint, financial restraint, economic restraint, and return to Constitutional values and Founding Fathers’ principles, had been impugned as racist, violent, homophobic, and all their motivations have been impugned. At the end of the day, we have fought back, and I think we’ve been successful. I think that the 2009 to 2010 elections show that the country could see past the Alinsky tactics of the media to try to destroy it by impugning its motives. I am righteous and righteously indignant, the Tea Party is righteously indignant, and our goal is to not just save the country, but quite frankly, if America goes, so goes the world, so in our desire to save the country, we are trying to save the world. I’m sorry you leftists, you’re not the only people whose motives are pure. Does that make sense? SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I can see where you’re coming from. How long had you been thinking of writing this? BREITBART: You know, the first book that I wrote, I co-wrote with Mark Ebner in 2004, one of the great benefits of that book was that I ended up getting Joni Evans as my book agent, but I kind of told her at the time that I had no desire to write a follow-up piece because I have a theory you shouldn’t write a book unless you have something to say. And so it’s been seven years between “Hollywood, Interrupted” and this. At a certain point, there was too much bubbling inside of me that couldn’t be conveyed in 140-character Tweet or as a Facebook status update or in a blog post. At a certain point, one’s accumulated wealth of information in one’s head and the data points that I was collecting since the very beginning of being in the new media revolution, starting around 1995. At a certain point, I needed to tell the world what I’ve learned. I’ve been there at the warfront, something akin to a general, or a high-ranking serviceman in the pursuit of trying to upend the old media order. There are a lot of lessons that people can take from me, that they can start to apply because I don’t think that I can beat the Democrat Media Complex by myself. I don’t think that Rush, Hannity, Drudge, Ann Coulter, Fox News, and AM Radio can create enough of a balance to undo the distorted media that we get from the Democrat Media Complex. My goal is to try to weaponize the American people, try to weaponize the conservative movement, try to weaponize the underground conservative Hollywood movement, to weaponize as many people in the center-right country to try to rectify a generation-plus long problem that has been absolute media bias, absolute media used by the Democratic Party as a tool to defeat conservatives. SHEFFIELD: Talking about the media, that is definitely a very big portion of your book. For the listeners of this interview, why don’t you talk a little about how you think the American press sort of became so–not officially in league, but certainly privately and personally in league with the Democratic Party versus being straight down the middle which they supposedly say they are. BREITBART: It’s a process, and I would argue there is a conspiracy there, but the conspiracy has been implemented over time in such an organic fashion. There’s a chapter in the book, chapter six, called “Breakthrough,” and it’s about the Frankfurt School, and it’s about how in a country that was not as susceptible to Marxism and Communism while many other countries around the world were falling to it, these German and Italian social scientists from the Frankfurt School came to the United States, fleeing from Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, and came here and tried to deconstruct what it was about the American spirit, the American middle class, the American work ethic in E pluribus unum that caused us not to be susceptible to the arguments of the utopia. Why are these crazy people in America so happy in running around and buying products and having a happy middle class life? Don’t they realize the owner class and that their bosses have created a system that is against them? And they translated economic Marxist theory into cultural Marxist theory. It sounds esoteric, but at the end of the day, it’s basically political correctness and multiculturalism. It’s the stuff that you’re taught in your humanities courses that pits Americans not necessarily on the haves versus the have not economic Marxist arguments, though that’s certainly there, but it’s more on the oppressor versus the oppressed that pits blacks against whites, gays against straights, and that’s the cultural Marxism that they wanted to institute, and it’s how the Democratic Party is now currently organized. It’s organized into separate different groups. There’s the National Organization for Women feminist faction, there’s the NAACP liberal African-American faction, there’s the La Raza Hispanic faction. They’re pitted against each other and it runs so contrary to the E pluribus unum American middle class experience. Those people that created the cultural Marxist thoughts, one guy by the name of Antonio Gramsci, very important within the Frankfurt School, argued against the concept of Marxist Leninism, in which it was basically the revolutionary spirit wher e someone would say we need to rile up the lower classes and have a revolution and take over the factories. They realized that wasn’t going to happen in the United States, and so Gramsci came up with this term that you’ve probably heard — the long march through the institutions. The institutions that he was talking about were the cultural institutions, which includes Hollywood, which includes the mainstream media, and so it’s not coincidence that Columbia journalism school is right next to where Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School came to upon fleeing from Germany. It was there that they started to radically alter the humanities departments, the post-structuralism that changed humanities departments from English and history and just the basics to queer studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies, people started to become divided and the journalism that was incredibly affected because they were basically telling people the purpose of getting into journalism is to affect the status quo, to affect social change, to create economic justice and to create social justice. The people who were motivated into the journalism schools were academics who were thrust into a politically correct worldview. Journalism was no longer done by Irish drinking colorful characters like they did in the 30s and the 40s with a lot of character. It was now a professional study in which leftists professors were teaching people out of one side of their mouths that they need to affect social change and not out of the other side of their mouth that they needed to be neutral or objective. I think the reason why they came up with this was because for a center-right country to move to the left, if you’re telling people that we’re giving you something that’s neutral while at the same time we’re pushing a leftist agenda, nobody’s going to challenge it. For years, we just accepted the premise that the reporters from that J-school mentality of neutrality and objectivity were just laying out the facts. We just assumed that Walter Cronkite was unbiased. In hindsight, it is clear that Walter Cronkite was biased, and that he used feigned objectivity as the cudgel to change the American narrative from being a right of center one to being a left of center one. SHEFFIELD: In the course of your discussing this book and other things that you’ve been involved in, you’ve certainly provoked a lot of ire from media people–they who insist that they aren’t biased. Is it possible that they can be biased and not even know it? BREITBART: They 100% can be biased and not even know it, but that’s sort of the importance of media. Media is everything, and when you live in Los Angeles and you live in New York, it’s almost impossible to run into a conservative point of view because the conservatives that exist in Hollywood, where much of the media’s done, and the conservatives that live in New York where a lot of the media’s done are fearful of even expressing their conservative point of view. Liberals in blue states working in blue enclaves within blue cities that are producing the media, don’t even see that their positions fit on the spectrum as left of center. They just think that when they look in the mirror and say to themselves “I’m for the environment, I’m for the children, I’m for the gay people, I’m against war,” it pits automatically, and the oppressor/oppressed leftist mindset that anyone that would disagree with them isn’t conservative, they’re crazy. They’re Nazis, they’re facists, they’re evil. Who could be against the children? Who could be against black people? Who could be against gays? And they frame the narrative in such a way that they don’t even realize that they’re espousing a very specific political point of view. They just think that they are on the right side of history, and anybody that disagrees with them has to be a troglodyte or a neanderthal. SHEFFIELD: In your particular case, as in many conservatives’ cases, the worldview sort of permeated you in the beginning of your life, and you write in the book that you didn’t start off as a conservative. BREITBART: I’m like the ex-smoker. The apostate is a pretty potent pied piper for one side or the other. You see on the other side how David Brock has been cultivated into a fundraiser and effective tool against the right, and I understand why because he knows how the right thinks, he’s met with them, he knows what their alliances are, and the second that he moved over to the left, Sydney Blumenthal and many people on the left said okay, let’s start downloading all of your information and start engineering it against those people. As a turncoat, he’s made quite an exceptional living shooting back against his former allies. I think the collective of me, Dennis Miller, David Horowitz, David Mamet, the late Ron Silver, and countless other formerly avowed leftists, we’re able to communicate ideas to conservatives who just don’t understand how the liberal mind thinks. I think that sometimes conservatives are way too naive to understand the zeal that liberals have in trying to destroy using Alinsky tactics the very humanity of their conservative opponents. The viciousness, the lack of rules, is so absolute within the leftist framework that the ends justify the means, that my media is very much organized to try and go toe-to-toe with those people to say we know what your motivations are, we know how vicious you are, but we are not afraid of you. My media considers the left media to be the bullies on the playground. We may be smaller, we may be small in number, we may have a lot less money, but there are a growing number of people who are sick and tired of the campaigns to destroy decent people, such as George Bush, Sarah Palin, Clarence Thomas, Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh. The Alinsky tactics have gone on for too long without being met with a formidable challenge, and that is my number one value in this world. I’m a former lefty, I understand how vicious these people are, I understand that they feel they have the right to control the sandbox, and I am trying to orchestrate media that isn’t just out there to push the right-of-center Libertarian narrative, I’m out there to destroy the false order, the false control that the left has in controlling the mainstream media in this country. SHEFFIELD: What I find is interesting is given the utter lack of conservatives or libertarians in any real positions of authority at places like ABC, NBC, New York Times, etc. that many on the left seem to think that when they’re expressing themselves, that, in a phrase they love to say, they are “speaking truth to power.” How have they been able to keep up that obviously false impression that they are this little outpost in the wilderness when in fact they control the vast majority of American institutions? BREITBART: It’s interesting, I’ve said this over and over, and there are a lot of people that criticize me and say that this defines me as an extremist, that I call the left totalitarians, and that I call the left, especially in the realm of media, totalitarians. But wherever you go, whether it be a college campus or the New York Times or ABC News or Venezuela or Cuba or the former Soviet Union, it’s amazing how the speech codes and the trying to shut up dissent is a defining aspect of the left because they believe so firmly in their utopian ideals that anyone who would disagree with that utopia is an enemy of the state, and they treat them as such. In 1996 or 1997, out of nowhere, Fox News comes on and it’s on channel 360 on Direct TV, and out of 300 million Americans, on every single night, anywhere from 3 to 5 million watch it, we’re talking about at no more than 2 percent of the American public is watching Fox at any given moment. Yet, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the institutional left, CNN, MSNBC, the record companies, Hollywood, all seem to be committed towards aligning their minds and their money and their other resources to try to shut up Fox News. Or to try and shut up Andrew Breitbart, get him kicked off ABC, CBS, and NBC. Try to make it so there’s net neutrality, try to make it so there’s a fairness doctrine, this is what they want to do. They thought that media control was their birthright because they’ve controlled it without any effective longterm attempts to do a coup d’
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on June 14, 2011. Filed under