Andrew Breitbart: Remembering a Warrior

“The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” ~ Lao Tzu

You can go to Breitbart.com and find a host of articles from friends and colleagues remembering Andrew Breitbart today on the one year anniversary of his untimely death. All of them capture the impact that Andrew made on those around him, as well as reflect the movement of new media that he helped to usher in during this modern age of leftist establishment mainstream media sycophants.

Best friend (since childhood) and business partner Larry Solov reflects from that Lao Tzu quote...

He was a flame that burned twice as bright. It was in his DNA.

But if Andrew’s flame burned half as long, his legacy will never burn out. To the contrary, it will only burn brighter and brighter. It is one of love and laughter, of an amazing family consisting of his widow Susie and their four extraordinary young children, and of a friend, a patriot and a happy warrior.

It burns in my heart and the heart of all those who loved him and whom he so deeply affected. It also burns as his mission continues and expands at Breitbart News Network. In his book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save The World (which was largely written at my kitchen table while I hovered over Andrew forcing him to focus) he wrote some words I find particularly pertinent about that mission.

First:

The left does not win its battles in debate. It doesn't have to. In the twenty-first century, media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything. I call it the Democrat-Media Complex--and I am at war to gain back control of the American narrative.

Second:

Walk toward the fire. Don't worry about being called a racist, a homophobe, a sociopath, a violent heteronormative xenophobe with fascistic impulses. They say all those things about you because they're keeping you inside the Complex, forcing you to respond to their playbook. They want to stop you in your tracks. But if you keep going, if you tell them you can stop their verbal bullets and keep walking, you'll send messages to people who are rooting for you, who agree with you. That's how you build an invincible movement willing to play by its own rules.

...while editor-in-chief Joel Pollak's turn to Andrew's last speech to the team: Seek, and Expose, the Left!

Andrew gathered the editorial team in the center of our former office, a giant warehouse space with a row of desks above overlooking a recreation area below. We were just a few days from the re-launch of the website.

Most of the editorial staff, scattered around the country, had flown to LA for a week of intense training in the new technology that would power the website. While we learned, we still had to work, putting up posts and videos.

To the muffled sound of typing, Andrew began his pep talk.

The re-launch was the culmination of months of intense work, hundreds of design meetings and long conference calls, he said. The new website meant a new mission. We would no longer solely be a set of blogs. We were going to focus our energy on driving narratives and leading the news cycle, constantly.

But the news we covered would not be the same news everyone else was watching, he said. Andrew grew more animated as he described what he meant. He emphasized, for example, how radical fringes of the left were providing some of the most important content to the mainstream media, and how mainstream political and entertainment figures were driving that process by encouraging the radicals.

Tracing those connections, Andrew said, was one of the many important investigative projects that needed to be done--and that the mainstream media would not do. As far as he was concerned, he said, that was the news. It explained how radical ideas that had circulated in remote corners of the Internet would pass through outlets like Current TV and MSNBC and eventually find their way to the headlines of the local nightly news bulletin.

It has been a mad year. And a successful one. Andrew would have been proud to see how far we have come.

Yet we are still making the transition he envisioned. And the attacks--from the Obama machine, the institutional left, and the mainstream media--are multiplying.

Our mission remains that which Andrew gave to us. And it remains daring. I could not be prouder than I am to be part of the team Andrew built.

Perhaps bittersweet, just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of the unexpected death of her beloved son, Arlene Breitbart passed away in Los Angeles of natural causes (RIP 1925-2013). May she rest eternal with her magnificent little warrior, who grew up to challenge the corruption of the old media and helped bring about the rise of a new venue.