Andrew Breitbart was a merry prankster who challenged political correctness and the worst aspects of Leftist censorship, control, and bully culture with bold assaults and humor and did so in ways no one else was even trying – specifically – without being a doctrinaire right wing hack like Bill Buckley, an obsequious establishment partisan like Sean Hannity, or a moralizing religious zealot like much of talk radio. Instead he was fresh and funny and most importantly: not very political. He was political in the sense of challenging power and clowning on powerful members of the State infringing on rights. He wasn’t against same sex marriage and wasn’t a vicious school marm of a scold on issues regarding sex or cultural influence and involvement of marginalized groups of americans – which up until him was basically the cost of admission for any right-of-center political figure who combatted the dogma of big government shackles on individual liberties of speech, self-protection, and finance.
Former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay social commentator, agitator, admitted provocateur, and impressario, is the only figure who comes close to Andrew Breitbarts legacy of lampooning, trolling, and seriously discussing deep issues that force thought from different perspective amidst the other storms of chaos and mischief towards orthodox traditions of both political norms that they create and instigate.
And yet Breitbart.com abandoned him a year ago when he was attacked for joking and otherwise making light of his own experience as a victim of sexual predation by an older man. While Breitbart didn’t fire him or completely throw him under the bus and Milo left to save them the hassle of increasingly uncomfortable defenses of him that almost certainly would have culminated in a request that he leave, the publication still didn’t do anything to protect one of their own from the character assassination he experienced, and that was a severe error for their position politically, let alone the moral implications of not protecting “one of the family”.
Milo wrote on Instagram (one of the last media platforms that allows him after Twitter and Patreon banned him) under a screenshot of a Breitbart story headlining how Mitt Romney is a RINO or something boring and mainstream-conservative-safezone as it gets, a pretty excellent summation of my feelings towards the Breitbart that was vs the Breitbart that is vs the Breitbart that could have been. Milo’s commentary:
New year, new start! On reflection, and with a heavy heart, I’ve deleted Breitbart from my bookmarks. I loved my time there and I’d return in a heartbeat, but, without me, the team there has simply forgotten how to be interesting, and without Steve, they’ve lost their fighting spirit. There’s just nothing that grabs my attention on the site any more.
When I was at Breitbart, we defined the culture. We were the epicenter of exciting, rebellious countercultural thought. We crushed campus feminism, defended the heroes of Gamergate, threw bombs into campus safe spaces, named and shamed abusive Leftist bullies, published dissident gay editorials, christened new movements… and it was FUNNY and a joy to read.
But what are the writers I hired and trained doing now? Where’s the energy gone? Now the site is spineless and boring, chasing after other, more interesting people six months after everyone else has already covered them—and betraying, denying, disavowing and unpersoning its former stars.
What a waste…