What and who Andrew Breitbart faced
Saturday Night Card Game — It’s no coincidence that the Israel haters also hate us.
On this second anniversary of Andrew Breitbart’s death, Legal Insurrection and others are remembering Andrew.
Some of Andrew’s enemies in life, however, continue their efforts in his death. I seriously thought about not calling attention to such people, but that would be a cop out.
At the Breitbart Awards in Providence in 2012, the only blogger conference I’ve attended so far, numerous people spoke to how Andrew thought of himself as the point man in the movement, the person who drew the fire so that others didn’t have to.
It’s important to remember what and who Andrew faced.
When I scrolled through a Twitter search for Andrew Breitbart’s name, I saw a tweet by Max Blumenthal referring to Andrew reaching his “tweet limit” and linking to an article by Blumenthal from May 2013 mocking how “it was convenient that Breitbart’s heart exploded when it did….”
I didn’t remember what the beef was between Andrew and Blumenthal. So I did a search and found this video by Lee Doren (via an Erick Erickson post) explaining the whole incident and confrontation at CPAC 2010:
(language warning)
I’m not sure why I didn’t recall that incident, since I wrote about it at the time for the Saturday Night Card Game.
Perhaps the 2010 CPAC incident was pushed down into my memory because nowadays I mostly hear Blumenthal’s name when he’s attacking Israel, which he does almost every day.
Blumenthal’s most recent book about Israel, Goliath, was so egregious that even the progressive writer Eric Alterman, himself a critic of Israel, dubbed it The “I Hate Israel” Handbook (emphasis added):
It is no exaggeration to say that this book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed) without a single word change once it’s translated into Arabic. (Though to be fair, Blumenthal should probably add some anti-female, anti-gay arguments for that.) Goliath is a propaganda tract, not an argument as it does not even consider alternative explanations for the anti-Israel conclusions it reaches on every page. Its implicit equation of Israel with Nazis is also particularly distasteful to any fair-minded individual. And its larding of virtually every sentence with pointless adjectives designed to demonstrate the author’s distaste for his subject is as amateurish as it is ineffective.
It’s no coincidence that the Israel haters also hate us.
Keep that in mind when you hear about the BDS movement.
Defeating BDS is not about Israel alone, it’s about our own freedoms and civilization.
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Comments
Andrew committed what was, to the liberal mind, the greatest of all sins–he told the truth.
Breitbart was a great and needed voice who is much missed.
But his encounter with Blumenthal was nothing special. It is as if I squashed a cockroach: yes, my victory was clear, but it wasn’t exactly an even match.
Blumenthal is a despicable human being, thoroughly dishonest and repugnant in every respect. When his worthless human detritus father dies, the best thing to be said of him is that his son is even lower.
It was special. Here’s why. I notice you identify Blumenthal as “despicable.” In fact, that was the word Breitbart used. But who had ever used this word about Blumenthal before Breitbart did, and who had dared to confront Blumenthal with the fact of his “obvious” despicability in such a setting, and to make the obviousness of it a subject of our conversational political reality. Indeed, was it even “obvious” before in this way?
Blumenthal appears a cockroach, easily squashed. But that is easier to say now, after Breitbart, isn’t it? Was it even conceivable that he could be squashed in such a publicly and popularly resonant way (and sincere way), before Breitbart?
It is one thing to know something to be true, within our own minds, in our private conversations or even our confined cultures such as blogs. It is another to confront and expose this truth where and how and when no one else can, to bring it into our shared reality and the wider culture.
The fact is, never before or really since, have we had a warrior willing to violate or break the fetters of public decorum (without crassness but with deep moral outrage) imposed upon us by the awesomely influential popular culture, i.e., to confront the Left on their own terms, to make them eat their despicability and hypocrisy.
This is who the Collectivist is, and what they do.
Breitbart’s genius was in his uncanny ability to know them, and show them.
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