- Breitbart, Andrew.
Righteous Indignation.
New York: Grand Central, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-446-57282-8.
-
Andrew Breitbart has quickly established himself as the quintessential
happy warrior in the struggle for individual liberty. His
breitbart.com and
breitbart.tv sites
have become “go to” resources
for news and video content, and his ever-expanding constellation of
“Big” sites
(Big Hollywood,
Big Government,
Big Journalism, etc.)
have set the standard for group blogs which break news
rather than just link to or comment upon content filtered
through the legacy media.
In this book, he describes his personal journey from growing up
in “the belly of the beast”—the Los Angeles
suburb of Brentwood, his party days at college, and
rocky start in the real world, then discovering while watching
the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings on television, that
much of the conventional “wisdom” he had uncritically
imbibed from the milieu in which he grew up, his education, and
the media just didn't make any sense or fit with his
innate conception of right and wrong. This caused him to embark
upon an intellectual journey which is described here, and a new
career in the centre of the New Media cyclone, helping to create
the Huffington Post, editing the
Drudge Report, and then founding his own media
empire and breaking stories which would never have seen
the light of day in the age of the legacy media monopoly, including
the sting which brought down ACORN.
Although he often comes across as grumpy and somewhat hyper
in media appearances, I believe Breitbart well deserves the
title “happy warrior” because he clearly
loves every moment of what he's doing—striding into
the lion's den, exploding the lies and hypocrisy of his
opponents with their own words and incontrovertible audio and
video evidence, and prosecuting the culture war, however
daunting the odds, with the ferocity of Churchill's Britain
in 1940. He seems to relish being a lightning rod—on his
Twitter feed,
he “re-tweets” all of the hate messages he receives.
This book is substantially more thoughtful than I expected; I went
in thinking I'd be reading the adventures of a gadfly-provocateur,
and while there's certainly some of that, there is genuine depth
here which may be enlightening to many readers. While I can't assume
agreement with someone whom I've never met, I came away thinking
that Breitbart's view of his opponents is similar to the one I
have arrived at independently, as described in
Enemies.
Breitbart describes a “complex” consisting of the legacy
media, the Democrat party, labour unions (particularly those of
public employees), academia and the education establishment, and organs
of the regulatory state which reinforce one another, ruthlessly suppress
opposition, and advance an agenda which is inimical to liberty and the
rule of law. I highly recommend this book; it far exceeded my
expectations and caused me to think more deeply about several things
which were previously ill-formed in my mind. I'll discuss them below,
but note that these are my own thoughts and should not be attributed
to this book.
While reading Breitbart's book, I became aware that the seemingly
eternal conflict in human societies is between slavers: people
who see others as a collective to be used to “greater ends”
(which are usually startlingly congruent with the slavers' own self-interest),
and individuals who simply want to be left alone to enjoy their lives,
keep the fruits of their labour, not suffer from aggression, and be
free to pursue their lives as they wish as long as they do not aggress
against others. I've re-purposed
Larry Niven's
term “slavers”
from the
known space
universe to encompass all of the movements over the tawdry millennia
of human history and pre-history which have seen people as the
means to an end instead of sovereign beings, whether they called
themselves dictators, emperors, kings, Jacobins, socialists,
progressives, communists, fascists, Nazis, “liberals”,
Islamists,
or whatever deceptive term they invent tomorrow after the most
recent one has been discredited by its predictably sorry results.
Looking at all of these manifestations of the enemy as slavers
solves a number of puzzles which might otherwise seem contradictory.
For example, why did the American left so seamlessly shift its
allegiance from communist dictators to Islamist theocrats who,
looked at dispassionately, agree on almost nothing? Because they
do agree on one key point: they are slavers, and that
resonates with wannabe slavers in a society living the
twilight of liberty.
Breitbart discusses the asymmetry of the tactics of the slavers and
partisans of individual liberty at some length. He argues that
the slavers consistently use the amoral
Alinsky playbook while their opponents
restrict themselves to a more constrained set of tactics
grounded in their own morality. In chapter 7, he presents
his own “Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries”
which attempts to navigate this difficult strait. My own view,
expressed more crudely, is that
“If
you're in a fair fight, your tactics suck”.
One of the key tactics of the slavers is deploying the mob into the
streets. As documented by Ann Coulter in
Demonic, the mob has been an integral
part of the slaver arsenal since antiquity, and since the French
revolution its use has been consistent by the opponents of
liberty. In the United States and, to a lesser extent, in other
countries, we are presently seeing the emergence of the “Occupy”
movement, which is an archetypal mob composed of mostly clueless cannon
fodder manipulated by slavers to their own ends. Many dismiss this
latest manifestation of the mob based upon the self-evident vapidity
of its members; I believe this to be a mistake. Most mobs in history
were populated by people much the same—what you need to look at
is the élite vanguard who is directing them and the greater
agenda they are advancing. I look at the present manifestation of the
mob in the U.S. like the release of a software product. The present
“Occupy” protests are the “alpha test”: verifying
the concept, communication channels, messaging in the legacy media, and
transmission of the agenda from those at the top to the foot soldiers.
The “beta test” phase will be August 2012 at the Republican
National Convention in Tampa, Florida. There we shall see a mob raised
nationwide and transported into that community to disrupt the nomination
process (although, if it goes the way I envision
infra, this may be attenuated and be
smaller and more spontaneous). The “production release” will be
in the two weeks running up the general election on November 6th, 2012—that
is when the mob will be unleashed nationwide to intimidate voters,
attack campaign headquarters, deface advertising messages, and try to
tilt the results. Mob actions will not be reported in the legacy
media, which will be concentrating on other things.
One key take-away from this book for me is just how predictable
the actions of the Left are—they are a large coalition of groups of
people most of whom (at the bottom) are ill-informed and incapable of critical
thinking, and so it takes a while to devise, distribute, and deploy the kinds
of simple-minded slogans they're inclined to chant. This, Breitbart argues,
makes them vulnerable to agile opponents able to act within their
OODA loop,
exploiting quick reaction time against a larger but more lethargic opponent.
The next U.S. presidential election is scheduled for November 6th, 2012,
a little less than one spin around the Sun from today. Let me go out on
a limb and predict precisely what the legacy media will be talking
about as the final days before the election click off. The Republican
contender for the presidency will be Mitt Romney, who will have
received, in the entire nomination process, a free pass from legacy
media precisely as McCain did in 2008, while taking down each
“non-Romney” in turn on whatever vulnerability they can
find or, failing that, invent. People
seem to be increasingly resigned to the inevitability of Romney
as the nominee, and on the
Intrade prediction market
as I write
this, the probability of his nomination is trading at 67.1%
with Perry in second place at 8.8%.
Within a week of Romney's nomination, the legacy media will, in
unison as if led by an invisible hand, pivot to the whole
“Mormon thing”, and between August and November 2012,
the electorate will be educated through every medium and
incessantly until, to those vulnerable to such saturation and
without other sources of information, issues such as structural
unemployment, confiscatory taxation, runaway regulation,
unsustainable debt service and entitlement obligations,
monetary collapse, and external threats will be entirely
displaced by discussions of
golden plates,
seer stones,
temple garments,
the Book of Abraham,
Kolob,
human exaltation,
the plurality of gods,
and other aspects of Romney's religion of record, which will be presented
so as to cause him to be perceived as a member of a cult far outside the
mainstream and unacceptable to the Christian majority of the nation
and particularly the evangelical component of the Republican base (who
will never vote for Obama, but might be encouraged to stay home rather
than vote for Romney).
In writing this, I do not intend in any way to impugn Romney's credentials
as a candidate and prospective president (he would certainly be a tremendous
improvement over the present occupant of that office, and were
I a member of the U.S. electorate, I'd be happy affixing a
“Romney: He'll Do” bumper sticker to my
Bradley Fighting
Vehicle), nor do I wish to offend any of my
LDS
friends.
It's just that if, as appears likely at the moment, Romney becomes
the Republican nominee, I believe we're in for one of the ugliest
religious character assassination campaigns ever seen in the history
of the Republic. Unlike the 1960 campaign (which I am old enough to
recall), where the anti-Catholic animus against Kennedy was mostly
beneath the surface and confined to the fringes, this time I expect
the anti-Mormon slander to be everywhere in the legacy media,
couched, of course, as “dispassionate historical reporting”.
This will, of course, be shameful, but the slavers are shameless.
Should Romney be the nominee, I'm simply saying that those who see
him as the best alternative to avert the cataclysm of a second
Obama term be fully prepared for what is coming in the general
election campaign.
Should these ugly predictions play out as I envision, those who
cherish freedom should be thankful Andrew Breitbart is on our
side.
November 2011 