Andrew Breitbart dead: Blogger saw himself as defender of black conservatives
theGRIO REPORT - Conservative activist and online entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, who died of natural cases Thursday at age 43, had emerged in the Obama era as a singular figure...
Conservative activist and online entrepreneur, Andrew Breitbart, died of natural causes on Thursday at the age of 43. Breitbart had emerged in the Obama era as a singular figure, eager to take on causes that even the most ardent of conservatives avoided, and was known for employing an aggressive, confrontational style defined by bombastic speeches and Twitter posts.
A behind-the-scenes player in the creation of both the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, Breitbart played a leading public role in a number of controversies over the last three years. A website he created called BigJournalism.com once posted a selective part of a video showing a black Department of Agriculture employee named Shirley Sherrod, who appeared on the show to say that she was discriminated against by a white farmer who was looking for federal aid.
The Obama administration pushed Sherrod to resign, only to reverse itself after the full video showed that Sherrod had actually helped the farmer. (Sherrod did not return to her job, but later filed a lawsuit against Breitbart.)
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Breitbart and BigJournalism also aggressively pursued the Twitter postings of then-Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), eventually leading to his resignation for using the message service to send shirtless photos of himself to women. A series of videos on Breitbart’s site about the community organizing group, ACORN, helped lead to it being disbanded.
He was also one of the loudest voices among conservatives in saying that the Tea Party was not racist, while at one point accusing the NAACP of that same charge.
“There’s been a concerted effort to portray the Tea Party as a toxic body of water,” Breitbart said in a 2010 speech, according to the Associated Press. “When I see good people who are Hispanic or gay or black who are in these groups, and the mainstream media abides by a concerted attack to call those people traitors to their cause, I’m going to stand up to those bullies.”
Breitbart, who lived in Southern California, said his essential cause was changing the media, which he argued was always unfair to conservatives. He traced his anger at the press to the early 1990s, arguing that then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was unfairly defamed by the press.
“They’re able to frame the narrative and we’re always on defense,” Breitbart said to a group of conservative activists in 2009, complaining about what he called the “Democratic-media complex” — Democratic politicians, Hollywood and traditional mainstream media.
He added, “The Republican Party has never had a long-term strategy on fighting the narrative. The narrative should be fought on college campuses, it should be fought through the media and it should be fought in Hollywood, and the conservative movement is AWOL on all three.”
Breitbart once wrote:
I’m not an emotional person, but when I met his wife, and she tapped me and said she was Ginni Thomas, I started to tell my story about how I switched to the right and I started to break down and cry. His stoicism and humility and grace under unspeakably evil leftist Alinsky attacks is the very reason why I fight the way I do and I don’t back down. Without Clarence Thomas, there would be no Andrew Breitbart and that is not something that the Left can like to contemplate.
I would say I align myself with Allen West, Tim Scott, Congress of Racial Equality, and other black conservative organizations and leaders because if minorities, people of color, whatever the politically correct term of the day is, don’t embrace the Constitution, don’t embrace the re-founding of this country based upon our core principals of limited government and a constitutional republic, then this country is doomed.
We need black conservative leadership and Hispanic conservative leadership to lead us away from the divisive multi-cultural model whose very goal is to pit people against each other over superficial qualities such as skin color.
Conservative activists expressed sadness over his death.
“I admired @AndrewBreitbart’s fighting spirit. Thoughts & Prayers to his family. He was my friend & I will miss him,” Herman Cain wrote on Twitter.
Follow Perry Bacon Jr. on Twitter at @perrybaconjr
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