Loving Breitbart, Our Happy Warrior

Why go see a movie with a title like “Hating Breitbart?”

In this shill-a-minute, 24-7 multimedia news cycle, what’s the point of looking back, to analyze in depth the ephemeral headlines of 2010, the squabbles between the NAACP and the Tea Party protesters against ObamaCare? Wasn’t the whole point of Andrew Breitbart’s career to get ahead of the curve, and be “out there” with eyes open, ears akimbo, and camera phones blazing to capture the next big outrage of the institutional Left? Would Andrew even bother to watch a movie called”Hating Breitbart?”

Absolutely he would, and wherever my good friend is right now–in the Valhalla of the heroes, or in heaven with the warrior-saints–he is certainly glad that this behind-the-scenes, detailed account of his last and greatest battles has been put on history’s record. That is why I urge anyone who saw Andrew Breitbart as an ally or a champion to pack the theaters where “Hating Breitbart” is showing–and helps its distributors find more screens where Andrew’s message can reach the millions.

For all his tactical victories, Andrew’s long war is still underway, being waged by the men and women he trained and his oldest, most trusted friends. The networks are still overwhelmingly, chokingly leftist. Most reporters still train their minds to stay in the same narrow range of opinions. We still need tribunes of the people to challenge these swaddled patricians, to drag them into the Forum and make them explain themselves, to strip away the rhetoric they substitute for analysis and insist on an honest debate. And Andrew taught us how to do just that.

If Andrew cared about winning, he cared even more for truth. For all the really vicious things that talking heads like Keith Olberman or Rachel Maddow said about him–and as you’ll see in the film, terms like “hatemonger” and “lie machine” got thrown around like doubloons at Mardi Gras–Andrew never used lies to win his battles. What infuriated Andrew was not opposing counsel, but biased judges and bigoted jurors: the self-appointed guardians of “objectivity” at allegedly non-partisan media such as CNN and The New York Times, who gain social power and credibility through the pretense of even-handedness.

That was the “mainstream media” which Andrew vowed to destroy, by taking away its audience and exploding its credibility, with what he called his “citizen army” of new media reporters and guerilla journalists–like the irrepressible James O’Keefe, whom we see here in painfully funny clips dressed up as a pimp from a low-budget ’70s crime drama, secretly running tape as overpaid “volunteers” working for ACORN offer to help him lie on his tax forms, get public assistance he obviously didn’t deserve, and set up a brothel full of underage illegal immigrants.

“Hating Breitbart” shows how the MSM spin machine first ignored, then tried haughtily to dismiss O’Keefe’s reporting–and when that failed, how news show after news show let ACORN’s director peddle repetitive falsehoods on network television. Andrew’s relentless dedication to telling his story drove him to analyze every lie, then the next day lead his sites with the facts that the media tried to hide.

That is how, in a matter of weeks, Andrew’s tiny team of relative newcomers dismantled ACORN’s seedy empire, shaming the U.S. Senate into cutting off taxpayer funding from those lawless poverty pimps.

Andrew exposed a similar conspiracy of like-minded media “management” in the treatment of the Tea Party. Just as tens of thousands of grass-roots fiscal conservatives and small-government activists from all across America began to make their impact on U.S. politics, “Hating Breitbart” reveals that Democratic party operatives began to panic. What scared them most? Apart from the sheer numbers of Tea Party people flooding public squares and writing their congressmen, the Democrats saw their worst nightmare coming true: An impressive number of the candidates being fielded by the Tea Party were members of racial minorities–proud Americans who agree with Andrew that our nation must become one (“unum“) out of many (“pluribus“).

The multiculturalist Left saw how important it was to discredit the Tea Party movement “by any means necessary.” And Andrew knew that the Tea Party had to be defended at all costs.

Those of us carrying on the fight for the facts, defending American values against the unwashed mobs of Occupiers and the perfumed flocks of Vassar grads who populate NPR, must learn from Andrew the strategy and tactics of our opponents–and how to use his new media judo to turn their methods against them. I for one will treasure this record of the last few months of my good friend’s life, and it will help me to remember him as what he was: a happy warrior in defense of the common good.

Unpretentious, sometimes foul-mouthed, and possessed of the common touch, loyal to friends and fierce to enemies, Andrew was the kind of man America produces when we need him. I am proud to carry his flag. I hope you will line up and join the march–which starts at theaters nationwide this weekend. To find one near you where “Hating Breitbart” is showing, visit the film’s official web site.