The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (47 page)

Several more years passed before Andrew Breitbart found his mission in life. In 1992—the
year Warren Buffett, a major investor in the Washington Post Company, warned that
“the economic strength of once-mighty media enterprises continues to erode as retailing
patterns change and advertising and entertainment choices proliferate”—Breitbart got
a job delivering scripts around Hollywood. He preferred listening to FM radio in his
Saab convertible to kissing ass in the outer offices of Michael Ovitz or going to
parties where people said, “I work in the clothing room at
Mad About You
.” But when grunge took over the alternative rock stations (“Who were these whiny,
suicidal freaks?”), he switched in disgust to the AM dial. There, talk radio was waiting
for him.

He found that he would do anything to listen to Howard Stern and Jim Rome. He put
on a Walkman and kept listening after getting out of his car to make his script deliveries.
But he was still enough of an unthinking liberal that, upon seeing Limbaugh’s book
The Way Things Ought to Be
on the coffee table of his girlfriend’s father, a TV actor named Orson Bean, he scoffed.

“Have you listened to Rush?” Breitbart’s future father-in-law asked.

“Yeah, he’s a Nazi or something.”

“Are you sure you’ve listened to him?”

Orson Bean, a game show regular from the sixties, was the seventh most frequent guest
on
The Tonight Show
—his opinion counted. And after tuning in to Limbaugh over months during the 1992
campaign, Breitbart began to regard El Rushbo as his true professor. “I marveled at
how he could take a breaking news story and offer an entertaining and clear analysis
that was like nothing I had ever seen on television.” The hidden structure of things
was becoming clear.

That same year, a friend from high school who was worried that Breitbart was adrift
paid a visit to his apartment and told him, “I’ve seen your future and it’s the Internet.”

Breitbart replied, “What’s the Internet?”

One night in 1994, he vowed not to leave his room until he was connected. It took
a rotisserie chicken, a six-pack of Pilsner Urquell, and several hours of sweaty effort
with a primitive modem of that time, but at last he heard the crackle of a connection
and suddenly Andrew Breitbart was linked to the Internet, the one place beyond the
reach of the Democrat-Media Complex where you could say and think and be anything,
and he was born again.

It wasn’t long afterward that Breitbart found a one-man news digest called the Drudge
Report—a mishmash of politics, Hollywood gossip, and extreme weather reports. He was
hooked, and when Drudge began exposing Clinton sex scandals that the media wouldn’t
touch, Breitbart knew what he wanted to do with his life. Drudge and the Internet
rescued him from the cynical irony of his generation and showed him the power of one
individual to expose the corruption of the Complex. Breitbart was so awed that he
sent an e-mail to the secretive Matt Drudge: “Are you fifty people? A hundred people?
Is there a building?” Drudge introduced him to a rich Greek-born L.A. divorcee and
author named Arianna Huffington, who wanted to do the same kind of awesome Web-based
muckraking as Drudge. In the summer of 1997—a year after MSNBC and Fox News launched—Breitbart
was invited to her Brentwood mansion, and over spanakopitas and iced tea Arianna offered
him a job. Pretty soon she couldn’t get him to go home.

The Internet and the conservative movement fused together in Breitbart’s brain. He
read Camille Paglia on academic politics and saw his whole life as an illustration
of the Complex’s totalitarian power. He’d been living behind enemy lines ever since
birth: the liberal fascism of the Hollywood elite, the left-wing bias of the mainstream
media, the Nazi-fleeing German philosophers of his Tulane syllabi who had settled
in L.A. and taken over higher education in order to destroy the coolest lifestyle
in history and impose their Kurt Cobain–like depressive nihilistic Marxism. The left
knew what the right ignored: New York, Hollywood, and college campuses mattered more
than Washington. The political war was all about culture. A barely employed, autodidactic
Gen-X convert with an ADD diagnosis and an Internet addiction was uniquely well armed
to fight it.

For the next eight years Breitbart worked with Arianna and Drudge. He helped Arianna
with her biggest coup, getting a Clinton crony who had fabricated his war record disinterred
from Arlington National Cemetery. Who needed
The New York Times
? “We were all doing more from Los Angeles with minimal resources than the mainstream
media were doing from Washington, D.C., with hundreds of reporters.”

The terrain Breitbart sauntered onto was diminishing, crumbling, wide open to him.
Pillars of the Old Media were turning to infotainment and opinion journalism to save
money and hold on to a distracted audience. Reporters were spooked because Jayson
Blair made up stories in the
Times
and Dan Rather aired phony documents on
60 Minutes
, while watchdogs on the right and left barked ferociously at their every hint of
bias and upstarts of the New Media jeered the frightened gatekeepers, until no one
knew who was right and what was true and no one trusted the press and the press stopped
trusting itself.

It was the perfect environment for Breitbart to stake his own claim.

In 2005—the year Rather was sacked by CBS,
The Wall Street Journal
reduced its width from fifteen to twelve inches, the
Los Angeles Times
cut another sixty-two newsroom jobs, and Arianna, by then a liberal convert, started
Huffington Post with Andrew’s help (he later claimed to have thought it up as a fifth
column in the Complex)—
Breitbart.com
launched. It was a news aggregation site for wire service stories (you could bash
the Old Media and feed off it at the same time) and a forum for truth telling, in
the spirit of the Swift Boat Vets and other citizen journalists. The great thing about
New Media was
anybody could do it
. Breitbart would fly to New York all the time and make sure he got invited to mainstream
media parties, where he drank their appletinis and pinot noir and made them think
he was on their side, but at the end of dinner he would get in their faces and say,
“You guys don’t get it. The American people are now in control of the narrative, and
you can’t grab it for yourself and drive it off the cliff.”

Everything changed for Breitbart on the August day in 2009—the year the
Chicago Tribune
eliminated its foreign desk and
The Washington Post
closed its three remaining domestic bureaus in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—when
a young citizen journalist named James O’Keefe walked into his house with a batch
of raw videos. They were the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society. They showed O’Keefe
and another citizen journalist named Hannah Giles posing as a pimp and prostitute
who wanted to set up a brothel using underage girls imported from El Salvador. James
and Hannah brought their hidden camera into offices of the national left-wing organization
ACORN, in Baltimore, New York, and other cities, where low-level staffers sat across
the table and gave them useful advice on how to establish their business while making
the federal tax code work in their favor. “It was like watching Western civilization
fall off of a cliff.”

Breitbart knew exactly what to do. Make news by breaking news. Feed the media like
training a dog, one video at a time instead of the whole meal at once, catching ACORN
and the news outlets off guard, exposing their lies and biases while keeping the story
alive. Use a friendly network like Fox News to amplify the effect. Stay on offense,
be outrageous. His real target was the mainstream media—honestly, who cared about
the poor homeowners that ACORN protected from predatory lenders, or the low-income
workers whose wages it fought to raise? Within a few months, ACORN ceased to exist
and Breitbart was a Tea Party hero and media bigs were competing to publish profiles
of him. It felt like he was doing every single banned class A narcotic simultaneously.

It was fun! Telling the truth was fun, having the American people behind him was fun,
fucking with the heads of nervous journalists and helping the mainstream media commit
suicide was fun. Breitbart went on
Real Time with Bill Maher
and stood up for himself and Rush to the politically correct hometown mob of an audience,
and it was an incredibly committed moment in his life. He found himself the leader
of a loose band of patriotic malcontents, and
right in front of him
was the same opportunity that the Founding Fathers had had—to fight a revolution
against the Complex.

And if he happened to get an Agriculture Department official named Shirley Sherrod
fired by releasing a deceptively edited video that seemed to show her making anti-white
comments when in fact she was doing just the opposite—fuck it, did the other side
play fair? Anyway, Old Media’s rules about truth and objectivity were dead. What mattered
was getting maximum bang from a story, changing the narrative. That was why Breitbart
was winning, with ample help from his media enemies, and why he must have been at
least semi-sober during his college classes on moral relativism.

In 2010 Breitbart was everywhere, Manhattan and D.C., the Tea Party Convention and
the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Twitter and YouTube, working his BlackBerry
while talking on the phone, turning his florid face and keen blue eyes and wave of
graying hair toward every camera aimed in his direction, getting up close with righteous
indignation and puerile humor, jabbing his finger.
Kate Zernike of
The New York Times
, are you in the room? You’re despicable … Ted Kennedy was a special pile of human
excrement, he was a fucker, a big-ass motherfucker … When people are like, “What do
you think we should do on health care?” I don’t have a fucking clue, it’s too complicated
for me … It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Representative John Lewis
to put up or shut up … They think they can take me down, that they can hurt me. It
just makes me bigger … Fuck. You. John. Podesta … Have you ever seen me on TV? I always
change the subject to the media context … Media is everything … It’s a fundamental
flaw in my psyche—I don’t do well with death … They want to portray me as crazy, unhinged,
unbalanced. Okay, good, fine. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck
—

On March 1, 2012, in the full flame of glory, less than a year after scoring his biggest
coup in the shape of Congressman Anthony Weiner’s erect penis self-photographed behind
gray briefs, shortly after leaving an evening of wine and talk in a Brentwood bar,
Andrew Breitbart collapsed from heart failure and died at age forty-three.

TAMPA

At the start of 2010, the
Times
took Mike Van Sickler off the housing beat and sent him to cover city hall in St.
Petersburg. He understood the reasons—the budget was tight, the paper was losing a
couple of hundred jobs. He had hoped to take his work on Sonny Kim to the next level
and look into the players who had made his deals possible, but he couldn’t tell his
editors exactly how he was going to get there and nail it in three months, and they
couldn’t afford to wait him out.

In June, Sonny Kim was indicted by the feds and pleaded guilty to money laundering
and fraud. It was a big case for Florida’s Middle District, but Van Sickler had handed
it over on a plate. The U.S. attorney’s office announced that Kim had been part of
a conspiracy and the investigation wasn’t finished, but months went by and no one
else was brought in. Van Sickler wondered, “Where are the big arrests? Where are the
bankers, the lawyers, the real estate professionals?” Kim was just one piece of a
network—what about the institutions? It was the same in Washington and New York: not
one criminal case brought against the big banks. Van Sickler was mystified. “It’s
going to be one of the great puzzles of history to figure out, when Obama became president,
why Eric Holder didn’t decide to make this a priority.”

Around Tampa, 2010 was the rock bottom. Unemployment in Hillsborough County passed
12 percent. The residential housing market was dead in the water, and commercial real
estate was starting to sink. Middle-class people were showing up at the crisis centers
and social service agencies, clueless how to navigate the maze of government benefits.
There were stories on TV about families of four sleeping in cars, schoolchildren who
didn’t want to tell their classmates where they lived. Radio ads for precious metals
warned of collapsing stock markets and hyperinflationary depression in the new Washington–Wall
Street economy. But no one seemed to have any solutions, other than to wait for the
housing market to come back, which was supposed to happen around 2015. The county
commission went back to cutting regulations and lowering impact fees on developers—anything
to jolt the growth machine into gear, even though tens of thousands of units around
Hillsborough County sat vacant. The sense of crisis would flare up, then wilt under
the humidity. The sunshine and beaches were still here. It was a torpid apocalypse.

There was one idea that inspired some people in Tampa: rail. Back when Tampa was going
to be America’s Next Great City, none of its rivals around the Sunbelt—Charlotte,
Phoenix, Salt Lake City—had commuter rail systems. Now they all did, leaving Tampa
behind. Tampa had standing plans for a light rail line, funded by a sales tax increase,
but the Hillsborough County Commission always refused to allow it onto the ballot.
In 2010, the wind shifted. Mark Sharpe, the Republican county commissioner—a fitness
buff, intense reader, and former navy intelligence officer with a crew cut—made light
rail his cause, saying it would bring economic development and finally elevate Tampa
Bay to the status that had eluded the area for a quarter century. Sharpe was a conservative—in
1994 he had tried to join the Gingrich revolution, running for Congress on Grover
Norquist’s no-tax pledge (he lost to the Democratic incumbent). But by 2010 he was
appalled at how narrow and extreme the Republican Party had become. He aspired to
be a John McCain–like reformer, and he talked in ways that other Republican elected
officials didn’t dare, quoting John Quincy Adams on the need for canals and roads
to unite the nation, Lincoln on federal land grants to the railroads, Eisenhower on
the interstate highway system, telling audiences with a chuckle, “It was
constitutionally okay
for the government at the federal level to be involved in building roads.” But now
those highways were jammed, gas prices chronically high, and you could widen I-275
only so much. Sharpe openly mocked the growth machine. “They build something, call
it Lazy Oaks, and hope there’s a canal running through it, put in a nine-hole golf
course. I don’t know about you, but after one or two times golfing I get bored.”