Andrew Breitbart at home in his bathroom in Los Angeles on March 15, 2010
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Breitbart perceives himself as a new-media David out to slay old-media Goliaths. As he sees it, the left exercises its power not via mastery of the issues but through control of the entertainment industry, print and television journalism and government agencies that set social policy. "Politics," he often says, "is downstream from culture. I want to change the cultural narrative." Thus the Big sites devote their energy less to trying to influence the legislative process in Washington than to attacking the institutions and people Breitbart believes dictate the American conversation. Recently, Big Hollywood has gone after Sesame Street for a musical number titled "We All Sing with the Same Voice" that, it alleges, contains "controversial political messages designed to promote multiculturalism." Big Government has targeted the Obama Administration's safe-schools czar, Kevin Jennings, for a reading list, compiled when he headed the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, that includes books depicting adolescent homosexual encounters.
Such cultural crusades might seem to appeal mostly to the far-right fringe, but Breitbart is tapping a deep reservoir of conservative dismay. Former Bush Administration official (and TIME contributor) David Frum says, "What matters to [conservatives] is not why the government is spending $15 million on this or that. What matters is a perception that hostile forces are invading your home, school and family. Those forces come in on TV and in newspapers. An enormous amount of what conservatism now does is media criticism."
The Merry Prankster
Breitbart was raised in Brentwood, on Los Angeles' privileged west side. The area is home to studio executives and producers, and the politics are Democratic. Breitbart was never fully comfortable in L.A.'s '80s social milieu. His parents are Midwestern Jews. (His father ran a Santa Monica steak house.) They saw life differently than the other kids' sophisticated dads and moms did. "My folks are from an older and very silent generation," Breitbart says. "My dad is as conservative as William F. Buckley was, but without the same presentation. He expressed his conservatism by working 16-hour days at the restaurant and never complaining."
By the time Breitbart entered the Brentwood School, an élite private academy, he was out of step with his classmates. "Andrew didn't fit the mold," says Larry Solov, a friend since childhood and now Breitbart's partner in the Big sites. "At Brentwood, you got A's and bought into a system set up to get you into an Ivy League college. Andrew got C's." Soon enough, Breitbart adopted the guise of skeptic and prankster, staging acts of subversion designed to win laughs and undermine the school's prevailing assumptions about wealth and meritocracy. It wouldn't be Harvard for this wiseacre. He was going to Tulane.
The South was a revelation for Breitbart. Southerners, whom he'd assumed from their depiction on TV to be Neanderthals, were warm and smart and less neurotic than Californians. The social life at Tulane was splendid. "I was a drunk," says Breitbart, who estimates he spent five nights a week at New Orleans bars with fellow Delta Tau Delta fraternity members. The classroom experience was less satisfying. "I didn't read Mark Twain," he says. "I read critical theorists. I graduated with a degree in nihilism and nothingness."