Remembering Andrew Breitbart

Andrew Breitbart was an angry man. He was angry because he found himself in a world where the mainstream media lied to the American people with impunity, wielding its immense power to tear down a country he loved. A pioneer in new media, Breitbart helped found the Huffington Post, launched Breitbart.com, and broke stories large and small in pursuit of a single great aim: exposing and destroying what he called the Democrat Media Complex. 

In March 2012, Breitbart died suddenly at the age of 43 from heart failure. He left behind his devoted wife, Susannah Bean Breitbart, and four young children. We now live in a media world largely shaped by his no-holds-barred style of journalism, and by his insistence that the truth, however inconvenient, must be told.

Adopted as an infant, Breitbart was raised in Brentwood, California, in a mostly secular Jewish household. Breitbart’s formative years in the 1980s coincided with an America governed by Ronald Reagan and a California governed by Republican George Deukmejian. If Aristotle was right that the regime shapes the character of its people, then it is certainly true that Reagan’s America shaped Andrew Breitbart. Hollywood still made movies that, mostly, extolled the virtues of the United States. Those virtues were in abundance in the California of his youth, where hard work was rewarded aplenty.

He saw this in his adoptive father, Gerald Breitbart, who owned a steakhouse in Santa Monica. Seven days a week, his father served customers at what would become a landmark restaurant. Going to school with many children whose parents worked in the entertainment industry, Andrew once asked his father whether any celebrities had dined there. Gerald replied sternly that he didn’t notice celebrities and treated every customer the same. This left a strong impression on the young Andrew: that a man should be judged on his own terms, celebrity being irrelevant. He would write in his 2011 book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, that his parents, both Republicans, never discussed politics, let alone conservative politics. They simply lived it.