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To understand Andrew Breitbart's legacy, you first need to understand what he set out to do. If you happened to encounter him in Los Angeles during the middle of the last decade, when he was transitioning from Matt Drudge's anonymous No. 2 to building his own web empire, he would happily tell you, in a long, not easy to follow monologue, about the terrible creeping forces of "cultural Marxism." (To get a taste, here he is talking on the subject at the University of Redlands last September.) As he saw the world, there was still a grand battle raging between capitalism and communism, and the left -- the heirs to the Frankfurt School as he constantly reminded people -- had manage to twist the entire culture against capitalism. "The left is smart enough to understand that the way to change a political system is through its cultural systems," he told The New Yorker's Rebecca Mead in 2010. "So you look at the conservative movement -- working the levers of power, creating think tanks, and trying to get people elected in different places -- while the left is taking over Hollywood, the music industry, the churches."

His project was to take that cultural space back for free market conservatives. To make his brand of economic freedom cool. His cultural war may have aligned him with Republicans like Rick Santorum -- who joined mainstream Republicans like Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Donald Rumsfeld in mouring his death -- but it was decidedly not the same battle. "Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an abortion van driving along at a conservative convention showing aborted fetuses," he told GQ's Lisa DePaulo. "I think that's the wrong aesthetic." Breitbart wore his shirts open-collared and his hair floppy, and he made jokes with swears. "I like to call someone a raving cunt every now and then, when it’s appropriate, for effect,” he told The New Yorker. “'You cocksucker.' I love that kind of language." Drugs, sex, and rock n' roll aren't America's problem; it was, as he saw it, that liberalism was hogging all the fun: "I just like doing things that are wrong, feeling like I can get in trouble," he once said.