One year ago today I woke up to learn that Andrew Breitbart had died. I didn’t want to believe it. I hoped and prayed it was a hoax, a publicity stunt for the movie Hating Breitbart that was about to be released at the time. As the day wore on, I watched and listened to the grief pour from those who knew him best, people like Dana Loesch, Larry O’Connor, Joel Pollack, and many others. I joined the throngs of conservatives online in openly mourning his passing. I chatted at various virtual wakes held in chatrooms associated with the radio and internet shows of those who were in his inner circle. The death of Andrew was my generation’s Elvis. He had touched so many lives. Yet through the tears, a rallying cry began to form:
#IAmAndrewBreitbart
As conservatives all around me began to pick up the pieces of our shattered hearts, we all determined to carry on Andrew’s fight. In his CPAC 2012 speech, Andrew told us all he had bought us a Dog Whistle Factory – as “dog whistle” was the liberal media’s term dujour to ascribe racism to things that were not inherently racist whenever a conservative spoke – and that he was handing them out to each of us. After his death, I said, “Andrew said he bought us all a Dog Whistle Factory. But when he left us, we found it full of swords.”
The main lesson I learned from Andrew Breitbart was: Don’t let the media & the left control the narrative!
Yet that is what I’ve been seeing in recent days. The Bob Woodward story is an example. Woodward wrote a column in the Washington Post detailing Obama’s lies about the sequestration, and proving that despite what the President has been saying, his White House is responsible for this plan. Yet when Woodward released the information that he had been vaguely threatened by a White House Aide, the whole story became all about Woodward. People on our side fell into the media trap of talking about Woodward, and not his story about Obama’s blatant lies!
I see another example of this when we start using the President’s and the media’s terms regarding budget battles: “revenues” & “closing loopholes”. We are losing the narrative on the vocabulary! “Revenues” equals TAX INCREASES! Why aren’t we pounding this message home! “Closing loopholes” really means taking away deductions, like the Mortgage Interest deduction, that middle class families use to reduce their tax bill. We should be screaming this information from every rooftop! We should never let a media story that uses these terms to go unchallenged!
It drives me batty to see this happening. I leave you with Andrew’s 2012 CPAC speech –
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbycMtTUDfE[/youtube]