He came, he saw, he conquered, he keeled over. To his legions of admirers and loyal consuls, the publisher, punditeer, and lightning rod Andrew Breitbart was an American Caesar cut down in his prime. A righteous fighter who brought the battlefield with him wherever he went, Breitbart feasted on the lily livers of liberals and burped in their faces, just for fun. A news junkie whose nonstop jags helped hot-wire the Internet for political agitation (first as Matt Drudge’s lieutenant at the Drudge Report, then at the Huffington Post, and finally at his own Web coliseum, Breitbart.com), this digital prophet waged vigilante justice against what Sarah Palin, between Big Gulps, mocks as the “lamestream media.” What distinguished Breitbart from the average steamhead on talk radio or in blogdom was that he put his pugnacious attitude into action. Distortingly edited as they were, the undercover videos made by Breitbart’s malicious pranksters Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe to discredit the advocacy organization acorn proved devastatingly effective, hemorrhaging its funding. Another scalp was won when Breitbart’s Big Journalism site brought down Congressman Anthony Weiner for baring his dangler in Internet communications to a few young female fans, which is not how civics was taught when I was in school. The circus bizarro went surreal when Breitbart hijacked Weiner’s press conference at New York’s Sheraton Hotel and turned it into his gorilla thump of triumph before an agape press.

Breitbart seemed to be on a blitzkrieg roll. Where his mentor, Matt Drudge, had turned reclusive (a phantom in a fedora), Breitbart revealed a P. T. Barnum–Colonel Tom Parker flair for publicity stunts and ballyhoo, reveling in his role as the liberal establishment’s badass nemesis. A trailer for the 2012 documentary Hating Breitbart ends with its star relishing the prospect of a throwdown with those who defame the Tea Party as racists and nutters: “Fuck you … [long dramatic pause] War.” Once politics becomes a war rather than a game, however, you’re bearing down way too hard. Omnipresent, omnivorous, Breitbart looked and sounded unkempt in his 2012 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and flipped out at Occupy protesters, yelling (this is the abbreviated version), “Stop raping people! Stop raping the people! You freaks! You filthy freaks! You filthy, filthy, filthy, raping, murdering freaks!” Shades of Charlton Heston on the Planet of the Apes.

Even so, nothing prepared fans and foes alike for the shock news that Breitbart, taking a stroll in Brentwood late at night on February 29, 2012, collapsed and went down for the count, dead at the age of 43. Heart failure, the coroner ruled, though there were those who believed (and still do) that he was the victim of an Obama-sanctioned Chicago-Mob-style hit. In death, Breitbart’s name and image transmigrated into Che Guevara legend. i am breitbart, declared his mourners in far-flung solidarity, his scowling visage plastered in black and white across the conservative blogosphere like a vengeful Holy Ghost. He was eulogized as the Samuel Adams of the Tea Party movement, his head superimposed onto a portrait of the Founding Father. cpac 2013, coinciding with the first anniversary of his death, was a Breitbart jamboree. “Andrew Breitbart was the coolest thing at the first day of cpac, even though he’s dead,” reported Elspeth Reeve for the Atlantic Wire. “On Thursday, there were three events to celebrate Breitbart, the conservative provocateur who died a year ago, and they were filled with fanboys.” The National Bloggers Club touted the Breitbart Scholarship Fund, intended to encourage aspiring insurgents to pick up the torch of liberty and run naked through the lobby with it. To me, a disinterested yet completely hostile bystander, such gestures are consolation prizes that conservatives are giving themselves to sustain an illusion of continuity, a show-must-go-on sentiment. But personality cults are hard to perpetuate after Elvis has left the building. You can imitate tactics, emulate tone and posture, but you can’t inhale animal spirits from your fallen heroes and make them your own. Now that Breitbart’s metabolism is no longer exerting the magnetic force to bind everything together, the rinky-dinkitude of his school of right-wing muckraking is laid bare. Examples: