Mourning Andrew Breitbart, not letting America's critics monopolize the public sphere

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"Mr. Breitbart’s (Manhattan) mourners packed shoulder to shoulder in the narrow room and spilled out into the street."

3/7/12, "Mourning Breitbart," Atlas Shrugs

"Pamela Geller, of Atlas Shrugs, picked up on that theme as she spoke to the crowd, emphasizing the necessity of continuing the fight that Breitbart began, and of not letting America’s critics monopolize the public sphere simply because one of conservatism’s most resonant voices has been prematurely silenced. Pamela demanded that we all be Breitbart, as she pointed to the suddenly iconic gravatar that has come to symbolize the movement he spearheaded during his tragically brief life. She recounted how Andrew came to her defense even when other conservatives abandoned her out of self-serving “prudence” and fear of the potential repercussions to their own careers. Then she brought the discussion back to the present, invoking the unyielding guerilla campaign by the left to silence Rush Limbaugh, the most widely-heard and popular conservative voice of the past two decades. She averred that Rush “wasn’t controversial,” but that it was Katie Couric and the drive-by media-which form the consensus of elite, Beltway opinion-which should be viewed as controversial and beyond the pale.

It should be noted that this crusade doesn’t merely involve a relentless campaign to mau mau sponsors and syndicators of Rush’s program-which, though perfectly legal, serves as a rough indicator of the left’s tolerance of dissent-but a concerted effort to use extraconstitutional arms of the government to suppress his First Amendment rights.

Pamela made the trenchant observation that Andrew would have been the first to defend Rush from the Gramscian left, which not only wants to compel you to pay for their “choice,” but wants to prevent anyone who disagrees with this policy from voicing his or her objections in the public arena. This Catch-22 was something with which Breitbart himself was intimately familiar, as followers of the numerous boycotts initiated by official grievance mongers against Andrew’s presence anywhere will recall. He would have not taken the sustained propaganda campaign against another conservative icon lying down, but would have instead fought tooth and nail to debunk the lies and half-truths being propounded by Rush’s antagonists.

• Breitbart would not have relented until the truth outed.

And that is what we must keep in mind as we recall Andrew Breitbart. He never slacked for a moment when he saw good people’s reputations besmirched, or when the media narrative of a news event contradicted reality. His intensity was not a pose or an affectation adopted for the cameras, it was a fire born of genuine conviction and the knowledge that life is permanently impermanent. The best way of honoring and perpetuating the legacy of Andrew Breitbart is by continuing it in his spirit, and standing up for what we know to be right while we still have the privilege of doing."

Read it all.

What Would Breitbart Do?: Manhattan Conservatives Mourn Fallen ...
Politicker, NY Observer
... Ms. Geller was eulogizing right-wing firebrand Andrew Breitbart, ... One of the Libertarians introduced The Politicker to Abe Greenwald, senior editor ...

Mourning in America

alarmingnews.com

Like so many others, I haven’t stopped thinking about Andrew Breitbart since we learned the tragic news last week that he died at 43.

Breitbart’s Bright Legacy

There’s no reason for toasts to exist if we fail to clink your bottles and tipple for the dearly departed and eternally fearless Andrew Breitbart. Some of us Knickerbockers squeezed."..

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