LOS ANGELES — Andrew Breitbart, the pugnacious conservative Internet entrepreneur who took on the left and what he called the “media bully cabal” with a series of exposes that were explosive and sometimes flawed, died early Thursday after collapsing near his home in Westwood. He was 43.
According to his father-in-law, actor Orson Bean, Breitbart, a father of four, was out for a walk shortly after midnight when he apparently had a heart attack. Paramedics took Breitbart to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Bean said, but he could not be revived.
Breitbart could be harsh at times, but he also had a magnetic personality that even many of his adversaries found appealing. He was a hero to conservatives, especially those who embraced the tea-party movement, whom he passionately defended against charges of racism. To liberals, he was a reckless provocateur, blinkered by his late-blooming hatred of the left.
His biggest coup came last May, when he revealed that U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., had been sending salacious photographs to women online. Weiner first claimed his Twitter account had been hacked, then later admitted his misbehavior and apologized to Breitbart.
Just before Weiner faced the press, Breitbart — who coincidentally was in New York — commandeered the microphones. “I’m here for some vindication,” said Breitbart, whose bestselling 2011 memoir was titled “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World.”
Breitbart recognized the power of the Internet early. Schooled at the feet of two other Los Angeles-based Internet sensations, Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington, he applied lessons gleaned while toiling in the background for them when he launched Breitbart.com.
The site evolved into several topical sub-sites focused on journalism, government and Hollywood, all aimed at promoting Breitbart’s war on the liberal agenda.
“In the first decade of the Drudge Report, Andrew Breitbart was a constant source of energy, passion and commitment,” Drudge wrote in a note to readers. “We shared a love of headlines, a love of the news. … I still see him in my mind’s eye in Venice Beach, the sunny day I met him.”
Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, recalled Breitbart’s “passion, his exuberance, his fearlessness.”
Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich all paid tribute on Twitter. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said on Facebook that Breitbart was “a warrior who stood on the side of what was right.”
Eric Boehlert, senior fellow at the liberal Media Matters for America, was a frequent Breitbart antagonist.
“Breitbart was one of the first on the conservative side that really did understand what the Internet could do for the conservative movement and was certainly able to harness that,” Boehlert said. “He was a charismatic figure, there’s no question about that. There was a star presence about him.”
Breitbart launched his site in 2005. Four years later, he posted a series of undercover videos by a young conservative activist, James O’Keefe III.
The videos targeted the community group ACORN and showed O’Keefe and a female partner asking ACORN workers for financial advice for a business with underage prostitutes. What they did was hailed by conservatives for exposing wasteful taxpayer spending and ripped by liberals as entrapment. Congress later de-funded ACORN.
Breitbart stumbled in the summer of 2010, when he posted a deceptively edited video purporting to show racist statements by an obscure African-American government official named Shirley Sherrod. Sherrod, whose story actually illustrated how she overcame feelings of racism to help a white farmer save his land, was fired. Embarrassed, the Agriculture Department offered her a new job. She sued Breitbart for defamation.
Breitbart was born Feb. 1, 1969, and grew up in Brentwood with secular Jewish parents who adopted him and his younger sister, Tracy. He attended two exclusive private schools, Carlthorp and Brentwood. His father, Gerald, owned a landmark Santa Monica restaurant, Fox and Hounds. His mother, Arlene, was a bank executive.
He attended Tulane University and became a passionate consumer of what he called “girly drinks” and 1980s British alt-rock. “The music sort of meshed with my philosophical angst,” Breitbart told The Times in 2010. “I would say I was a shallow nihilist.”
As a young adult, he said, he had three epiphanies that turned him from a “rollerblading, gallivanting, jocular goofball” into a conservative.
He was appalled in the late 1980s when his childhood best friend and business partner, Larry Solov, told him that Stanford University had a voluntarily segregated black dormitory; he was furious at the 1991 grilling of Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court nomination hearings; and he was annoyed that some in the media had anointed Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain as the “spokesman” of Breitbart’ s generation.
“I just started to have the awkwardly pedestrian revelation that my parents were right,” he said.
Breitbart relished living as the enemy in the liberal bastions of Los Angeles and Hollywood, where he was supremely at ease, having married into a Hollywood family, and spent many hours at Huffington’s famous salon with the industry’s bright lights.
He loved to shock conservatives, too.
In January, he was a guest of commentator Tucker Carlson’s at a Chicago fundraising dinner hosted by former Weather Underground radicals Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn.
Breitbart told Fox News that Ayres was a wonderful host and cook.
“This is one of the ways they’re able to indoctrinate young impressionable people,” Breitbart said. “They’re so charming, so good at throwing the best possible party. At the end of the day, it’s no wonder they’re able to get kids to say, ‘Hey, let’s do bombs against the Pentagon.’ “
In addition to his parents and sister, Breitbart is survived by his wife, Susannah, and their four children: Samson, 12; Mia, 10; Charlie, 6; and William, 4. The family has not announced memorial arrangements.
Not all that broken up…This story has yet to play out anyway.
Fearless.
He will not be missed.
I was sad to hear of Andrew Breitbart’s passing, as he was a young, vital human being.
But the lie he used to destroy the life of Shirley Sherrod make him akin to Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and I don’t think I will miss his media distortions and lies. BASICALLY, HE WAS A LIAR, one inclined to purposeful distortion and self promotion.
There was no lie.
Her life was not destroyed.
But perhaps you should look a little more deeply into this case, before making such allegations. It was very puzzling at the time , why she was fired so quickly by the Dept of Agriculture, when even the slightest investigation into her speech at the NAACP would show that she was being very open and reasonable.
But I guess Breitbart was really curious as to why she would be fired so quickly. So he dug deeper, and deeper, and discovered the “Pigford” scandal, which has been mostly ignored by the main-stream media. And I think he decided that she was fired so quickly so that no one would find out about Pigford, because she was very heavily involved in that one.
So, go ahead, do some research, look it up, inform yourself. And also do a little research on Ms Sherrod, and you will discover her life was not “destroyed”.
Thanks for the information. Have a great day. Rog.
I went to FACT CHECK DOT ORG http://www.factcheck.org and found this info. I posted the last quarter of it that dealt with Sherrod, but if you go to the link below, you’ll see a lot more info.
Truly, as a Vietnam Veteran, who saw G.W. Bush and B. Obama act, in our Iraq and Afghan Wars, exactly like Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard M. Nixon did in Vietnam, makes me think that human politics is one, complicated affair.
Obama and the ‘Pigford’ Cases
http://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/obama-and-the-pigford-cases/
Q: Did then-Sen. Barack Obama get a law “passed in dead silence” that allowed black farmers to file “unlawful” discrimination claims against the USDA totaling $1.25 billion?
A: No. Obama supported the 2008 bill, but did not sponsor it or vote on it. It was not “passed in dead silence”; there were six floor votes. All claims are pending judicial review and approval.
Shirley Sherrod & Pigford
Finally, the e-mail makes two erroneous claims about Shirley Sherrod, a former USDA official who was fired for remarks she made about race that turned out to be misrepresented by a conservative blogger. (Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the White House later apologized to Sherrod.)
The e-mail states that the “woman responsible for spearheading the case was an obscure USDA official,” referring to Sherrod. But she was not a USDA official when Congress passed the 2008 farm bill, which allowed black farmers to file late claims and have their cases heard on the merits. She was the USDA’s Georgia state director of rural development for only one year, from July 2009 until July 2010.
It’s true that Sherrod, who is black and a former farmer, was active in the Pigford case prior to working at the USDA. She, along with others at the Rural Development Leadership Network, helped organize black farmers to file claims in the original Pigford suit. But she was fighting the USDA from outside the agency, not influencing it from within. She told CNN: “I was deeply involved in all of that work and in the settlement, and in helping farmers to file their claims. So I was having to fight USDA just for the services, for the loans for farmers, for some of the programs that should have been automatic, that others were getting.”
The e-mail also erroneously states that Sherrod’s “family received the highest single payout (approximately $13 million) from that action.” The $13 million — which the Rural Development Leadership Network called the “largest award so far” in 2009 — did not go to her “family.” Rather, the money was awarded to New Communities, a farming collective founded in 1969 in rural Georgia by Sherrod and her husband, Charles. At its height, New Communities was 5,700 acres — the largest tract of black-owned land in the country — and had about a dozen families living on and working the land full time before it went out of business in 1985, according to a 2001 article by the Associated Press. In addition to their share of the New Communities settlement, Sherrod and her husband were awarded $150,000 each for pain and suffering.
This is a case of conspiracy theorists twisting the facts to build a false narrative about Obama and Sherrod.
–Eugene Kiely and Alex Eisenhower
Sources
Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008. Pub. L. 110-234. 22 May 2008.
White House. “Farm Bill Veto Message.” 21 May 2008.
“Department of Justice and USDA Announce Historic Settlement in Lawsuit by Black Farmers Claiming Discrimination by USDA.” Press release. Department of Justice. 18 Feb 2010.
Office of the Monitor. “National Statistics Regarding Pigford v. Vilsack Track A Implementation as of April 7, 2011.” Dated 7 Apr 2011, accessed 27 Apr 2011.
Cowan, Tadlock and Jody Feder. “The Pigford Cases: USDA Settlement of Discrimination Suits by Black Farmers.” Congressional Research Service. 10 Dec 2010.
Office of the Monitor. “Monitor Update: Understanding Who Is Part of the Pigford Case.” 27 Nov 2002.
“Status of the Implementation of the Pigford v. Glickman Settlement.” Transcript. Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House Judiciary Committee. 28 Sep 2008.
U.S. House. “H.R. 5575, A Bill to Provide a Mechanism for the Determination on the Merits of the Claims of Claimants who Met the Class Criteria in a Civil Action Relating to Racial Discrimination by the Department of Agriculture …” (as introduced 9 Jun 2006.)
U.S. House. “H.R. 3073, A Bill to Provide a Mechanism for the Determination on the Merits of the Claims of Claimants who Met the Class Criteria in a Civil Action Relating to Racial Discrimination by the Department of Agriculture …” (as introduced 18 Jul 2007.)
U.S. Senate. “S. 3976, A Bill to Provide a Mechanism for the Determination on the Merits of the Claims of Claimants who Met the Class Criteria in a Civil Action Relating to Racial Discrimination by the Department of Agriculture …” (as introduced 28 Sep 2006.)
U.S. Senate. “S. 515, A Bill to Provide a Mechanism for the Determination on the Merits of the Claims of Claimants who Met the Class Criteria in a Civil Action Relating to Racial Discrimination by the Department of Agriculture …” (as introduced 7 Feb 2007.)
U.S. Senate. “S. 1989, A Bill to Provide a Mechanism for the Determination on the Merits of the Claims of Claimants who Met the Class Criteria in a Civil Action Relating to Racial Discrimination by the Department of Agriculture …” (as introduced 3 Aug 2007.)
U.S. Senate. H.R. 2419, roll call vote #434. 14 Dec 2007.
U.S. Senate. H.R. 2419, roll call vote #130. 15 May 2008.
U.S. Senate. H.R. 2419, roll call vote #140. 22 May 2008.
Claims Resolution Act of 2009. Pub. L. 111-291. 8 Dec 2010.
“Statement by the President on House Passage of the Claims Settlement Act of 2010.” Press release. White House. 30 Nov 2010.
“Claims Resolution Act of 2010.” Press release. Sen. Jeff Bingaman. 19 Nov 2010.
U.S. House. H.R. 4783, roll call vote #584. 30 Nov 2010.
Informational Website for In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation. “What Comes Next?” Undated, accessed 28 Apr 2011.
In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation. No. 08-mc-0511. Case management order No. 1. 15 Dec 2008.
Novak, Viveca. “Shirley Sherrod’s Contextual Nightmare.” FactCheck.org. 21 Jul 2010.
CNN Wire Staff. “Vilsack, White House apologize to former USDA official.” CNN. 21 Jul 2010.
“Obama administration continues naming state directors for rural development.” Press release. Department of Agriculture. 30 Jul 2009.
Montopoli, Brian. “Vilsack: I Will Have to Live With Shirley Sherrod Mistake.” CBS News. 21 Jul 2010.
Kavanagh, Jim. “Sherrod’s steadfast motto: Let’s work together.” CNN. 21 Jul 2010.
Breed, Allen G. “Black Farmers’ lawsuit revives a dream.” Associated Press. 6 Dec 2001.
Posted by Eugene Kiely on Friday, April 29, 2011 at 3:44 pm Filed under Ask FactCheck. tagged with Barack Obama, Pigford, racial discrimination, shirley sherrod.
Into the dust of history.
Ah yes, the “dust-bin of history” Where have I heard that phrase before?…..
A totally fearless warrior. I salute you Mr. Breitbart.