Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism. “He’s a Marxist,” Breitbart says of Obama. “His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.”
The idea that critical theory is itself a conspiracy is too delicious to resist; I'm sure American studies departments would be surprised by the power they supposedly wield (Breitbart was exposed to the Frankfurt school at Tulane in the early 90s). It's remarkable, too, that someone who entered college approximately when the Berlin Wall fell can cling to the anti-communist legacy of the Cold War. But then, he also grew up in the 80s. Mead also identifies Breitbart as an ex-leftist, catches him imagining himself in a fistfight with a liberal, and hears him saying he'd take a bullet for Rush Limbaugh--but not a fatal bullet.
I'm not sure whether Breitbart is identifiable as a type, thought the paranoia nicely gels with Glenn Beck's fantasies about turn of the century populism. He, along with others, does demonstrate the wide recourse to conspiracy theory as a form of expression, at least on the Right. But because he's performing all this (the way Beck may be), clearly manipulating his image for kicks and profit, he's less easy to pin down then, say, an alienated militia sympathizer like John Pitner or Timothy McVeigh. For Breitbart, this all seems to be a game, or a business opportunity: “But, when the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that,” he said. There's a nice convergence of free-market ideology (in the sense of "the marketplace of ideas") and trad right paranoia here.
Mead also pokes at the malleability of truth accomplished by Breitbart and his ilk, along the lines of what Jodi Dean calls the decline of symbolic efficacy: "Breitbart had accomplished his goal: his alternative narrative had been established, and his Twittered dissent had evoked a response at the highest levels of the media establishment. The truth of what had really happened between the crowd and the congressmen had become almost immaterial, lost in Breitbart’s fog of words." All is spin, even if the Frankfurt school plot trumps this all.
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