Killing Andrew Breitbart
This is not a confession.
I’m pretty sure that I didn’t kill Andrew Breitbart. But there was a time where I thought I might have. Now, I’m pretty sure such things are impossible. I don’t even think that someone like Andrew Breitbart can even die, even though he passed more than a decade ago.
It was February of 2012. Mitt Romney was trying to remind voters and himself that he had been born and raised in Michigan.
I’d only lived in Ann Arbor for just over two years. But I knew that George Romney, Mitt’s dad, existed in our state’s collective memory as a Post-it note reminder that not all Republicans are bad. As an Atlantic article from that summer neatly noted in the headline, George “Championed Civil Rights and Challenged His Church.” Those are two things Republicans generally did not do before Barack Obama became president and definitely did not do after Barack Obama became president, except when churches do really bad things like being somewhat accepting of gay people or letting migrants into a manger.
Mitt was running on being “severely conservative,” a condition he still mostly suffers from. He was also warning America that his health care plan, which Obama had mostly mostly swiped and nationalized, was about to destroy America. And he was losing.
At least, he was not winning the way he was supposed to, even after eagerly accepting the endorsement of the party’s leading birther clown, Donald Trump. He was facing a serious, late-breaking challenge from Rick Santorum, a man who had lost his US Senate seat after becoming human punchline on the left for his increasingly vivid warnings about the disasters gay marriage would lead to, such as “man on dog” matrimony.
Smelling blood or the formaldehyde that pumps through Mitt’s veins to keep him from aging, the entire lot of Republican presidential candidates were in Michigan, trying to keep Mitt from uniting the party. And they were all speaking at one event put together by the Koch front group Americans for Prosperity in Troy, Michigan, about 30 miles from my home.
Having discovered that tweeting was something one could do with most of one’s day and that anyone with an email address was qualified to be a political pundit, I traveled to Troy with Chris Savage of Eclectablog to eclectablog and tweet the event.
“It’s a diverse crowd, with white people in their 60s, 70s AND 80s,” I tweeted almost as soon as I had arrived and secured my press pass.
Three things pop out whenever I reminisce about this event, as I did during my interview with Pete Dominick on his kick-ass show Stand Up!, which you should listen to here.
- Rick Santorum understands the right-wing brain better than almost anyone.
When he called Barack Obama a “snob” for wanting everyone in America to have a chance to go to college, a word this graduate of an Ivy League school who went on to get an MBA and a law degree spat out with Guinness Book-levels of disdain, the crowd almost leapt through the ceiling. It was a good preview of the contempt for one’s own children and shameless name-calling that would soon define the GOP under Trump. - Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, spoke for him.
This signaled that Mitt recognized his path to the nomination was wives and wife guys. Santorum’s appeal to men was too strong. And Mitt actually seems to love and respect his wife, which always made him a bad fit for his party. It’s sweet, but as we saw when Casey DeSantis, who is far more comfortable in heels than her husband, took over Ron’s disaster of a campaign, it screams “loser.” - Michelle Malkin was the most popular person in the room.
Malkin was huge on Fox at the time for her bloodthirst Islamophobia and immigrant bashing that now can only be described as proto-MAGA. In fact, she was more MAGA then than Trump then. The two of them used to yell at each other on Twitter because, like many rom com protagonists, they just had too much in common. That beef, which she has abandoned as she recognized how sincere Trump is about hating brown people, led to losing her place in the Fox News Cinematic Universe. But at the time, white folks in their 60s, 70s and 80s lined up for the entire depth of the hall to buy one of her autographed books. The line for the other conservative media superstar in the room, Andrew Breitbart, was much shorter. And that freed him up for the event I once thought may have killed him.
I have to say that there was something about Andrew Breitbart that I envied. He had no qualifications for politics, other than a short stint working with Matt Drudge, but he had the audacity to make himself a national voice in his party. He also lived in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised, and this baffled me. This was before Stephen Miller and Ben Shapiro came to define the unabashedly whiny hater only Southern California is capable of producing. I didn’t think you could be racist in LA, because it would just be too time-consuming. I was that naive.
When I saw Breitbart near me, I knew I had an opportunity to challenge him about his latest screeches. He was trying to smear the entire Occupy movement with accusations of rape. This offended my naive sense of propriety. So as he chatted with white people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, I approached, exuding LA vibes. He welcomed me into the chat and when I had the chance, I asked him to name a single member of the Occupy movement that had even been charged with rape.
This is what I got.
Less than 48 hours later he was dead. He was only 43.
The autopsy said he died of heart failure from a condition that had not been identified prior to his death. Honestly, I expected drugs. There were none in his system. Just an enlarged heart.
And his work was already done.
Though he wasn’t a Trump fan before his death, for similar reasons as Malkin probably, he sparked the chain reaction that led us to Trump’s presidency.
He had already exposed Anthony Weiner, ending Weiner’s career in elected politics but leaving Weiner with a laptop James Comey would reveal at the exact right time. After Andrew’s death, Breitbart the website was taken over by Steve Bannon who nurtured Republican connections to the “alt-right,” which have led to the normalization of neo-Nazism in the party. Bannon then took over the presidential campaign of another guy who understood the power of calling Republicans’ political enemies “rapists” and guided it to an electoral victory even the candidate didn’t seem to expect.
Now, the party is so gilded with hate that even Breitbart.com seems tame. But it’s Andrew’s shamelessness that courses through the blood of every Republican politician, media figure, and hater who exists to generate bomb threats on Twitter.
Still, I remember a time, a naive time, when Republicans were willing to nominate a wife guy, a wife guy who tried to be shameless and failed. It was a time when I thought that just fact checking a guy like Andrew Breitbart or Donald Trump could make them disappear.
Maybe this is a confession.
I’m sure I didn’t help Andrew’s heart by challenging him. But when I look at his face in that picture now, all I see is joy.