Tea Party Supporter and Media Critic Andrew Breitbart

Andrew Breitbart is a conservative political commentator and the founder of an online media empire: Breitbart.com, breitbart.tv, Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism. He has also worked for the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report.

HPR: You’ve defended the Tea Party against charges that it is racist and violent or merely the work “Astroturf” organizers.

Andrew Breitbart: The most threatening thing in a Tea Party event I’ve gone to are people who dress their dogs in patriotic garb. These people have hand-made signs. It is not Astroturf. The opposition to the Tea Party is clearly Astroturf. Their signs are mass-produced. Organized labor is behind it: AFL-CIO, SEIU, the egg attackers I’ve caught on camera, Democratic Party field directors…

What’s interesting  is the power with which the Democratic Party can set the agenda and set up a baseline of propaganda. When the Tea Party movement started to emerge, the Democratic Party immediately called it racist and homophobic. It is a natural tendency of the cultural Marxist to use multiculturalism and race division in order to intimidate and marginalize a movement. It was expected. That’s why I go to the Tea Party events. I am not so much a political figure as a political media figure. I am trying to create equality in the mainstream media, so that the Tea Partiers do not have to be on the defensive against baseless accusations that cast their motivations in the worst, most horrific light.

HPR: What is the real meaning of the Tea Party in your view and what do you think is its proper role?

AB: There’s never a collective sense of being aghast when the Left organizes and protests and even gets violent. But there is a threat to the Democratic and media establishment when the conservative movement discovers the power of protest. Everybody thinks they are somehow not susceptible to the collective persuasion of media. We are immersed in a media world right now in which we are being inundated and hit from countless different angles. And the Democratic Party has understood far more than the Republican Party the power of popular culture, collective messaging, and aesthetics. Right now, the Tea Party is the sign of early adapters who are starting to recognize, “Wait, we can do the same thing that they’re doing.“

The media establishment is losing the viewership of red-state Middle America conservatives who have recognized that the media has behaved unfairly towards them for more than a generation. They’re starting to stand up and form an insurrection against the Democratic Party and the media. And both the Democratic Party and the media are threatened by this group of people. I’ve even stated that there may have to come a day when we do a Tea Party to the tune of millions of people on 6^th Avenue, Media Row in Manhattan, to show these people that we are serious, that we recognize the power of their propaganda. We recognize their power to frame decent Americans who are worried about the economic trajectory of this country, who are raising legitimate questions about who is going to pay for this Utopia, with baseless and reckless charges of racism.

HPR: We saw large increases in entitlement spending, an expansion of the national security state, and two wars under the Bush administration. Why don’t you think there was this kind of reaction then?

AB: If you’ve ever listened to conservative talk radio, there was no love lost with George Bush leaving the presidency. Many conservatives supported his wartime policy after we were attacked on 9/11, and the Right, which is much more oriented towards national security, recognized the collective threat of radical Islam to a great extent. They looked at the map and looked at where terrorist attacks had occurred around the world, and saw where the money was flowing, and noticed the demographic shift of unassimilated Muslims into Western liberal democracy, and recognized that we are going to have to figure out a long-term strategy to deal with it. It cost money to do.

George Bush tried to make accommodations. These were attempts to accommodate liberal entitlement programs, to try to make nice with the Ted Kennedys of the world. And he got burned for doing it. They still hated him, they still ridiculed his policies, and they still blamed him exclusively for votes that they took in favor of his war.

So George Bush was hoodwinked and bamboozled by the Democratic Party. He made accommodations with them that many would say were not wise, because he didn’t get as much bang for his buck as he could have. But he did make a commitment to the troops that he would follow through on the mission. He did. And I think history will look kindly on him for what he did.

The Tea Party is a radically different approach to what government is obligated to do, and the amount of money that should be put towards government as hundreds of billions in deficits turn into tens of trillions in debt. Tea Party people have legitimate concerns.

HPR: What do you see as your place, your niche, in the movement?

AB: I’m an individual. I don’t look for a leadership position. I’m trying to use my media savvy to protect these people, to guide them through a treacherous process. The media and Democratic Party have a political interest and self-interest in maligning them. Most of the Tea Partiers are not media-savvy. They’re not used to public debate and congregating publicly to vent their political concerns.

As a Jew, I guarantee you that if I sensed I was walking into a racist or anti-Semitic group of people I would run away from it. And I have not been shy to criticize [the Birthers]. The Tea Party has a series of legitimate grievances, and that to me is not one of them.

My involvement in the creation of the Huffington Post was an intentional sign to people that I believe, “May the best ideas win.” I believe in the free exchange of ideas. I helped to create a platform for the anti-war movement to exist. I am now trying to create a platform for the [conservative] side to be able to openly express its concerns about politics. The Left and its cultural Marxist tendencies, steeped in Alinsky and critical theory, tries to deconstruct every opposing argument into multicultural conflicts that put the other side on the defensive, as if they are secretly motivated by racism or homophobia. These desperate tactics are becoming too plain to the American people.

HPR: Do you think that it would benefit the Tea Party to stay as independent as possible of the GOP?

AB: Oh yes. I find it beautiful. Democrats are going to be put on the defensive about whether they are 100% for repeal or not. And the Republican Party is going to find that it now has checks and balances, which should have existed before, which would have kept the Bush administration more honest on issues of fiscal conservatism.

I believe in democracy. I believe in public debate. I am a staunch enemy of political correctness and the Left’s typical and predictable tactics of intimidation to stifle dissent. Wherever the Left finds itself in control, it stifles debate. Whether it is Cuba, or Hollywood, or the mainstream media. Wherever the orientation of the political Left becomes the dominant force, these tactics are used to shut people up.

I take this battle very personally. Having lived in L.A. most of my life, and I have an apartment in New York, I know how Leftists are. I know how they believe that their enemies are evil like Nazis. It’s not inexplicable that when given the choice between hiring someone who agrees with them politically and hiring someone they think is a Nazi, it is understandable that they would hire the non-Nazi. So that’s where I come from. I’ve witnessed and studied the Left. I find their tactics and their mindset deplorable and anti-democratic.

HPR: You have already launched several blogs focused on the “institutional Left,” such as Big Government, Big Hollywood, and Big Journalism, and you’ve said there may be more to come. Should we expect some kind of Big Academia, which would focus on the academy as a bastion of the Left?

AB: Yes. It’s going to be Big Education. It’s the one I will be the most passionate about, because that is the origin of this problem, that the Left took over academia at some point. There had always been a strong movement towards progressivism and even a movement towards economic Marxism during the 1930s and the Depression. But the arguments of economic Marxism never took hold in the United States in the way they did in other countries, because America had a unique makeup and a unique narrative. It was the idea that anyone could come from Ellis Island, and within a generation their family could pretty much be at the top of the heap.  So economic Marxism was not a particularly strong [ideology] in America.

But it was the Frankfurt School—people like Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno, who fled from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy—these people were Marxists who translated economic Marxism into cultural terms. That critical theory, that “deconstruction,” that language of [dividing] the country from e pluribus unum and split us up into little multicultural segments pitted against each other. And that is what I fight against—how the Left has used culture, especially academia, to pit people in groups against each other in order to achieve political gain.

That is my battle. That is what Big Education will fight mercilessly using video cameras and Alinsky tactics, to make life hell for totalitarian Marxist professors. [Families] are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, or, God forbid, students are taking out hundreds of thousands in loans in order to be turned against the system that they are about to graduate into. And I was one of those idiots.

And now I’ve turned against my master, and I’m pissed.

Alexander Sherbany ’11 is the Managing Editor. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Photo Credit: Flickr (shalf)

Read the full article at The Perspective.

Nonetheless, the article raises an interesting question on whiteness in America. Is America going to accept white ethnic pride (not in the sense of bigotry but in the way other ethnic groups have organized)? Multiculturalism is making huge strides in America, as the Blake article concludes. While minorities have long played an enormous role in shaping American culture from the periphery, they are now, more than ever, at the center. With Barack Obama in office, Sonia Sotomayor on the bench, and the ever-increasing diversity in Hollywood, American minority groups have come a long way since 1968. As the article points out, the face of America can no longer be assumed to be white (if in fact that assumption was ever valid), the diversity of our nation can thankfully no longer be swept aside because of white monopoly over positions of influence in society.

This growth in multiculturalism coupled with the prediction that Latinos will replace whites as the majority ethnic group in the US, leaves white Americans on the verge of being a minority for the first time since colonial days. My big questions in relation to this news are: will white Americans be allowed to mobilize as a race as the other minorities have? Will Caucasian American ethnic groups organize on college campuses and be accepted? Will there be continued growth in “Whiteness Studies?”

Harvard already has an Expos 20 course dedicated to the phenomena of being white in American society, and I would expect classes like this to continue to appear in American academia. Nonetheless, I am not sure if America is ready for Caucasian Americanism. White pride is so intertwined with white supremist movements, that I do not think that Americans (white, black, brown, ect) are ready for any serious and explicit Caucasian-centered organization and activity. Personally I am afraid that if I joined any kind of Caucasian American Organization or voiced white pride (not in terms of being better or against other groups but in terms of being proud of my ethnic heritage as a white American) I would be labeled as racist.

While many may write this issue off as extremists barking up reasons to revive “we speak English here so should you” xenophobia, the growth in academic interest in whiteness suggests that there may be something substantial in the white question. I’d really like to hear what people think about this, comment away!

Photocredit: Wikimedia Commons

But the UC bill deserves our attention, if only because it underscores the absurdity of the past few weeks.

When Peretz came to campus last month to be honored for his service as a former Harvard professor, he was greeted by a mob of shouting students. In spite of their apparent outrage, the protestors – with a wink and a nod at the camera – seemed to take great pleasure in the man’s discomfort as they stalked him across Harvard Yard.

The whole scene was a little reminiscent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s invitation to speak at Columbia University three years ago — except in that case, the world’s leading holocaust-denier was allowed to hold forth and defend his views at length to a packed auditorium.

Nevertheless, after the crowd had reveled in their two minutes’ hate, Harvard accepted the donations in Peretz’s honor. Perhaps the University had decided, as Max Novendstern wrote at the time, that it was “strong enough and secure enough to embrace this sort of intellectual antagonism with a bit of fearlessness.”

Two weeks later, some students in the Social Studies lecture course indicated their dissatisfaction with this result by noisily walking out of lecture (much to the delight of the still-seated majority, I’ve heard, who just wanted to learn.)

Now, with all of the ardor of the Inquisition, the Undergraduate Council has called on President Faust to establish a “committee of concerned faculty, students, and administrators” to “investigate the decision” to honor Peretz.

(It is a shame that the administration didn’t show a little more “spine,” if you will, in defense of its decision at the time; a weak defense tends to invite a second attack.)

But what the UC reveals is the essential close-mindedness of those who fervently seek to ”condemn” Peretz. They are unable or unwilling to see him as an intellectual whose ideas can and should be contested — only as a heretic to be purged.

Dutch anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders

Eli implies that burqa bans and the like could only be products of Geert Wilders-esque prejudice, neglecting a serious left-wing (and, by my lights, unprejudiced) argument for them. In her famous essay, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” , Susan Moller Okin argues that a good liberal has to care not only about inter-group inequalities, but also intra-group inequalities. In other words, before we get too excited about multiculturalism and “group rights” designed to protect traditional cultures, we have to look at whether all of those groups’ practices are really worth preserving.

This seems presumptuous on first glance, but think about it: for almost any liberal there will be certain practices so abhorrent that they could not be tolerated in the name of multiculturalism (e.g. genital mutilation… I think we can agree on that one). So the question becomes where you draw the line between acceptable group practices and unacceptable ones. Reasonable liberals, I think, can draw that line in different places, which is why I’m not going to come down hard on one side of the debate about Europe’s “Islamophobia.”

But it is surely plausible to argue that many Muslim women are not donning the burqa voluntarily, as Eli assumes, or even that they are under the sway of some sort of false consciousness. Feminists made the some sorts of arguments and assumptions way back when, and they were thought presumptuous for suggesting that many women actually didn’t want to stay at home their whole lives. But you know what? The feminists were probably right about that one. And I’m not so sure that liberals like Okin are wrong about certain Muslim customs.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

President Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo last June called for a new beginning between the United States and Islam, one based on tolerance, dignity, and mutual respect for religious differences. Just two weeks later, French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood before parliament to justify France’s infamous ban on burqas. “It will not be welcome on French soil. We cannot accept, in our country, women imprisoned behind a mesh, cut off from society, deprived of all identity. That is not the French republic’s idea of women’s dignity.”

There is a fundamental divide in the West over the definition of religious tolerance. Anti-Muslim sentiments and legal restrictions in Europe are often attributed to the Old Continent’s general aversion to public displays of religion.

But secularism alone cannot fully explain the French burqa ban or the Swiss minaret ban. These high-profile controversies reflect a continent that has been shaken by recent demographic changes, one in the throes of a collective identity crisis. And multiculturalism in Europe is in peril as a consequence.

Immigration and Integration

When Europe opened its borders with the creation and expansion of the European Union, Europeans found themselves asking one question: “What does it mean to be one of us?” Since 2004, the European Union has extended membership to twelve new countries and is currently considering Croatia, Macedonia, and Turkey. With the number of member states nearly doubling in the last four years, the European Union has seen a large spike in non-Western immigration. The European Commission estimates that as of 2006, there are about 18.5 million non-E.U. immigrants living in the E.U. zone.

New immigration has inflamed old questions of cultural identity and evoked memories of early European encounters with Islam. From the Muslim conquest of Andalusia in 756 C.E., through the Crusades and the Ottoman capture of the Balkans in the late 14th century, Islam and Christianity have had a long and violent history on the continent. Karl Kaiser, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, pointed to Europe’s long history of conflict with Islam as an important context for contemporary tensions. “Don’t forget European history. Europe almost became a Muslim continent. Only two great battles prevented it,” Kaiser explained to the HPR. “Somewhere in the collective consciousness there is this background of the enormous battle between Christianity and Islam in the Crusades.”

This history manifests itself in the fact that Muslims are singled out in the European consciousness as alien. Forecasts indicate that Europe’s Muslim population will more than double by 2015. Still, Muslims make up just a small proportion of European immigrants.

Jocelyne Cesari, an associate at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, told the HPR, “The larger problem is this [false] idea that most immigrants … have Muslim backgrounds.” Non-Muslim Europeans also tend to overestimate the cultural uniformity of Muslim immigrants, both reflecting and perpetuating the fear that the influx of Muslims might be threatening to Europe’s identity.

Isselmou Ould-Deilahy, a French Muslim Ph.D, told the HPR that “the French have problems accepting new citizens. You now have third-generation Muslims in places like France that are still designated as immigrants. How can someone who is born as a third generation French not be accepted as a French citizen?”

Faith and Fear

Fear of Islamic terrorism has also fueled anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe. “9/11 was of course a game changer,” Kaiser said. Incidents such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, and the London bombings in 2005 reinforced the link between terror and Islam. Todd Gaziano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the HPR that “many Western nations are at war with Islamic terrorism … so [religion] is not an unreasonable factor to take into account when determining immigration policies.”

Terrorist attacks have thus helped politicians to justify exclusionary legislation. Ould-Deilahy explained, “Anti-Muslim feelings are kept alive by political movements and the press.” He continued, “Some political parties use fear as their capital. The way for them to get ballots and votes is to create fear.” Fear no doubt played a large role in Switzerland’s November 2009 referendum, in which nearly 60 percent of voters supported a constitutional amendment banning the construction of minarets. Although the amendment will likely be overturned by the European Court of Human Rights, its approval “showed a degree of intolerance which is very detrimental to international relations,” according to Kaiser.

The anti-minaret campaign demonstrated a clear intent to identify Islam as subversive and dangerous. One campaign poster created by the Swiss People’s Party depicted several minarets coming out of the Swiss flag in a way that made the minarets appear to be missiles.

Redefining Europe

What does all this mean for the future of Europe? Aziz Al-Azmeh, professor of Islam at Central European University and the author of Islams and Modernities, told the HPR, “The earlier models of multiculturalism are not working very well. There is an emerging wall of separation between two certain kinds of people: Europeans, and on the other hand more recent immigrants from a variety of Muslim countries.” What Al-Azmeh describes as a wall of separation, Kaiser less provocatively calls “parallel societies.”

In order to bring these societies together into a workable whole, Europeans will have to minimize their fear of the foreign, particularly through improved education about Islam. “The way to address [the insecurity] is not to fuel the Islamic concerns but to demystify them,” said Cesari.

Although many governments have tried to educate Muslims about Western traditions, Cesari argued, “if you want to make room for another component, you have to educate both sides.” This may require not just lessons on Islam and its beliefs, but also restructuring history textbooks to include lessons on the importance of cultural diversity.

“Europe is not, as Americans believe, one thing,” Kaiser said. But Europeans themselves have started, in many ways, to act like it is. In their attempt to become one union, they have forgotten or neglected the fact that Europe is a patchwork of nations and peoples with different beliefs, histories, and problems.

Multiculturalism is imperiled in Europe, then, in large part because Europeans seem to have forgotten the fact of their own diversity. The debate is not between secularists and fans of public religion. It’s between different conceptions of European identity: one that includes Muslims, and one that does not. But the question of whether Muslims can be Europeans has already been settled on the ground, and settled affirmatively. Now the question is whether they will be treated like Europeans.

Ioana Calcev ’12 is a Contributing Writer.

If you’ve seen Avatar and haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s article “When will white people stop making movies like this?” then you’re missing out. Avatar — putatively anti-racist, seemingly simple and beautiful and extraordinarily entertaining — is in fact, she argues, mired with subtle racial biases and white ethnocentrism.

She writes:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

To me, this is a bit too clever. Let’s remember that Avatar, at its heart, is a story about resisting white cultural dominance. That’s a good story to tell, and from the perspective of the liberal multiculturalist, the fact that we’re telling it shows that at least as a culture we’ve grown up from a time when we were actually, you know, proud of colonialist domination and the marginalization of the other. So in this core sense,  Avatar is a victory (not a failure) of cultural liberalism.

Newitz asks us to stop telling stories about white people. But if you take the theoretical grounds of her analysis seriously then it becomes clear that that’s precisely what can’t be done — white people tell the stories they do precisely because they are white. That whiteness, the argument goes, is pervasive. There is no vocabulary outside of our own; there is no vantage point from beyond the world we stand on. And this is why we value ethnic and gender diversity in the first place: not because white, privileged directors like James Cameron refuse to tell racially unbiased stories, but because they can’t. White people are going to be making white movies because, well, they’re white.

And if you look at the story that’s clearly what the “avatar” device is meant to evoke. It’s a tool of transcendence. It’s the white man’s means of peering over the epistemological divide and seeing what the war is to the colonized indigenous. The avatar idea is cool precisely because it is so damn hard for white people to understand what it means not to be white.

So where does that leave us? To my mind, Newitz’s piece tells tells us as much about Avatar as it does about ourselves, or at least about the state of multiculturalist discourse. One of the most remarkable things about the Avatar backlash is that it has transcended ideological divides. On the right we have writers like Reiham Salam coming out with full-throated defenses of American-style capitalism. And on the left we have critics like Annalee Newitz charging racism. But both agree on one thing: let’s just leave the Na’vi marginalized people alone. In other words, both agree, but for entirely different reasons, that we should continue to ignore the ignored, continue to marginalize the marginalized. Odd, right? This is actually typical of the confused leftist position that any attempt by white people to protect or reify marginalized cultures is necessarily an unjust imposition of “white values”: it has this awkward tendency to converge with the rightist position that other cultures have less intrinsic value than our own. Both counsel nonintervention.

In my opinion, we we need to be more willing to tell Avatar-like allegories about the marginalized defending their cultural property. Understand that these stories are limited, sure, but then don’t take those limitations too seriously — or at least not seriously enough to stop telling the stories in the first place. Because otherwise the voices wouldn’t get heard at all. And that would be a shame.