Andrew Breitbart at home in his bathroom in Los Angeles on March 15, 2010
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After returning to Los Angeles, Breitbart met Matt Drudge, founder of the conservative Drudge Report. It was the mid-1990s, and the Web was in its infancy. Breitbart went to work for Drudge and served as his legman for 15 years, learning how to excavate news items from databases and wire-service feeds. More than that, he adopted Drudge's contrarian worldview. "Matt rejects entrenched thinking," says Breitbart. If Drudge (who did not respond to messages seeking comment about his protégé) taught Breitbart a new way of seeing, it was another former employer, Arianna Huffington (who also refused to speak about the boss of Big), who whipped him into intellectual shape. Drudge introduced Breitbart to Huffington in the late 1990s, when she was a right-wing provocateur. He worked for her as a researcher. "I was a slacker," he says. "Writing, rhetoric, argument--she demanded that I take a disciplined approach."
Breitbart helped launch the Huffington Post in 2005, but the marriage was destined to fail. Huffington had become a progressive. "It became impossible for me to work with Arianna's staff. They're liberals." But as he walked out the door, Breitbart experienced an epiphany.
The Big sites were born of Breitbart's realization that if Huffington could create a virtual salon for the left, he could create one for the right. "Most conservatives are individualists," he says. "For years, they've been pummeled by the collectivists who run the American media, Hollywood and Washington. The underground conservative movement that is now awakening is the ecosystem I've designed my sites to tap into."
Like some elements of the Tea Party movement, the Big sites can be crude. Also, Breitbart has shown an increasing propensity for bombast. While accepting an award at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington in late February for his role in breaking the ACORN story, he called New York Times reporter Kate Zernike "despicable" for referring in the Times's Caucus blog to a young CPAC speaker as a racist. Two days later, Breitbart got into a verbal altercation with freelance writer Max Blumenthal. "You are the lowest life-form I have ever seen," Breitbart said. Blumenthal's putative offense had been to accuse O'Keefe in an article for Salon.com of attending a gathering that featured "white nationalists." All these outbursts were captured on cell-phone cameras wielded by members of competing camps. The videos went viral. The attack dog had become a mad dog.
While Breitbart is a polestar to many Tea Partyers, his excesses have the potential to cause the movement embarrassment. "The smarter conservatives who know Breitbart regard him affectionately," says a plugged-in Republican player, "but they think he's a little out of it. In another age, the Big sites would have been produced on a mimeograph machine. I'd call him the first neo-crank."
Critics on the left are, of course, harsher. "The CPAC stuff was ugly," says Eric Boehlert, who writes for the liberal website Media Matters for America. "He's become known as the guy who yells at people in the halls. And his sites have little impact. The last time I looked, no one in the mainstream media had picked up the campaign Big Government has going against Obama's education guy."