Politics

Breitbart legacy lives on in relaunched websites, final column

Matthew Boyle Investigative Reporter
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The late media mogul Andrew Breitbart’s final column was released Sunday night on a newly redesigned website that includes all of his “Big” sites under a single umbrella.

The column, which examines Obama’s admiration for radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, is titled “The Vetting, Part 1: Obama’s Love Song to Alinsky.”

Breitbart had planned the “Vetting” Obama series before his sudden death last Thursday at age 43. He announced the project during a speech at February’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

Breitbart said he didn’t believe the mainstream media did its job properly investigating President Obama’s past during the 2008 election and he would do the job the media failed to do this time around.

“I’ve got videos — this election we’re going to vet him,” he said in his CPAC speech, adding that “racial division and class warfare were central” to Obama’s 2008 “hope and change” slogans.

In his final column, Breitbart explored Obama’s decision in 1998 as a Illinois state senator to participate in a panel discussion after the performance of a new play celebrating the life of Alinsky.

“It truly is a love song to Alinsky,” Breitbart wrote of the play.

“In the first few minutes of the play, Alinsky plays Moses — yes, the Biblical Moses — talking to God. The play glorifies Alinsky stealing food from restaurants and organizing others to do the same, explaining, ‘I saw it as a practical use of social ecology: you had members of the intellectual community, the hope of the future, eating regularly for six months, staying alive till they could make their contributions to society.’”

The redesigned Breitbart website was planned before Breitbart’s passing. His staff had vowed to pick up the baton and finish the work of their late boss by launching the new website on time.

“Today, as Andrew dreamed and planned, we launch what he called ‘Breitbart 2.0,’” the late conservative firebrand’s lifelong business partner and friend Larry Solov wrote in an article accompanying the launch. “Many of you wondered what he was working on so hard during the last year of his life. Here it is.”

“This was Andrew’s design,” Solov continued. “And it is Big, like everything else about him. It took him — and all of us — sleepless nights and countless hours to make it a reality.”

The new website design is flashy, colorful and bold, employing a newsmagazine-type feel.

Stephen Bannon, a member of Breitbart’s board of directors and an adviser to Breitbart and Solov, told The Daily Caller that this new website design consumed much of Breitbart’s time during the last year of his life.

“Some people didn’t take him that seriously and didn’t realize how focused he actually was on the important stuff,” Bannon said in a phone interview.

“For one year, he worked nonstop on the design and construction of this site. There were thousands of decisions that had to be made on every piece of technology, the user interface, the design of the website and he made every final decision.”

“People think that Andrew was just on Twitter, AM radio, speaking at tea parties, and they miss a large part of what he was really doing: thinking through and building the next generation news and information site,” Bannon added. “That’s why Andrew Breitbart may be dead, but he lives on through this new site.”

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