“OhmyGod, the Dems are screaming the N word outside of my house,” Breitbart Tweeted. Illustration by Steve Brodner

On Sunday, March 21st, the day that the House voted to pass health-care reform, Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Internet entrepreneur, was thousands of miles away, at home in Westwood, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Breitbart, who in the past year has become a fixture on Fox News and a regular at Tea Party events, spends a lot of time on the road. In the preceding weeks, he had addressed the California Republican Spring Convention, in Santa Clara—“It’s warfare to save the soul of the United States of America,” he told the audience—and had introduced Sarah Palin at the National Tea Party Convention, in Nashville. But, the weekend of the historic vote, Breitbart, who has four young children, was fulfilling paternal obligations: taking the kids to watch the Los Angeles Marathon; having a ragtag group of little friends over to play.

These pleasant diversions did not, however, prevent Breitbart, who is forty-one, from posting frequently to his Twitter account, which he did in a manner that suggested he was in the midst of a hostile attack, or undergoing a psychotic break. “OhmyGod, the Dems are screaming the N word outside of my house. I swear. No, really. Trust me. It’s true,” he wrote just after 11 A.M.; four minutes later, he added, “Why are elected Democratic leaders in front of my house in LA standing lock-armed screaming racial epithets & homophobic slurs?” Four minutes later, he posted again: “Why is Steny Hoyer in Los Angeles sitting on Anthony Weiner’s shoulders screaming the N word into my home? Weird.”

These digital outbursts were prompted by Politico, which was reporting that several members of the Congressional Black Caucus—among them John Lewis, a hero of the civil-rights movement—had been subjected to racial slurs while walking through a crowd of Tea Party protesters in Washington; at the same event, Representative Barney Frank had allegedly been called “a gay epithet.” On Twitter, Breitbart linked to the story, adding a condensed interpretation: “Dem strategy: Coordinated bloc walks in front of ‘tea partiers’ hoping to get youtube provocation to turn tables.” Not long afterward, he posted again: “How’s the Dems transparent, concerted attempt to provoke Tea Partiers going in this YouTube/FlipPhone environment? They got nada.” The accusation of racist slurs, he suggested to his Twitter followers, who now number eighteen thousand, was no more plausible than was his own fictional harassment by Hoyer, the Majority Leader of the House, and Weiner, the Democratic congressman.

Breitbart is the founder of Breitbart.com, which, since 2005, has aggregated news from the Associated Press, Reuters, and other wire services. He is also the proprietor of several newer Web sites—Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism—that provide right-leaning commentary and original reporting. Their content is largely supplied by unpaid bloggers, who are given a more prominent platform than they might otherwise attain. The Big sites are dedicated to countering what Breitbart believes is the leftist bias of American cultural and media institutions.

Breitbart’s biggest scoop thus far has been a series of videos made by a twenty-five-year-old activist named James O’Keefe, which was posted on Big Government last September. O’Keefe, along with Hannah Giles, then a student at Florida International University, travelled across the nation and entered several offices of Acorn, the community-organizing association, with a hidden camera; they posed as a pimp and a prostitute who were seeking housing and business help. O’Keefe’s approach did not adhere to traditional standards of journalism, bearing a closer resemblance to the methods pioneered by Sacha Baron Cohen. In a visit to an Acorn office in Baltimore, O’Keefe and Giles politely introduced themselves as having “kind of a unique life situation.” As Acorn employees solicitously offered them routine small-business advice (file a 1099 tax form, look for deductions), O’Keefe and Giles slowly revealed what their unique life situation entailed, then presented an unorthodox business plan: to smuggle a number of underage Salvadoran girls into the country, with the goal of sexually enslaving them. The Acorn employees were, alarmingly, unalarmed by the proposal. “My job is not to judge people,” one of them told O’Keefe and Giles.

The hidden-camera footage, which Breitbart has called “the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society,” did not expose endemic corruption at Acorn: though O’Keefe and Giles induced employees to coöperate with an appalling scenario, they did not dig up evidence of any actual wrongdoing by those employees. Yet the repeated airing of the footage on Fox News has been devastating, and Acorn now describes its financial situation as “precarious.”

The Acorn prank did not originate with Breitbart, but it was in keeping with his aesthetic, which privileges outrage over nuance, and comedy over comprehension. “I’ve never met Sarah Palin before,” he told the National Tea Party Convention. “I always imagined I’d eventually meet her. A man can have his fantasies.” He readily adopts the cultivated oafishness that is pop culture’s dominant idiom: one day, as we were driving through Westwood, he pointed out the restaurant where he had first met his wife, Susie, twenty-two years earlier. “I remember peeing next to Rob Lowe that night,” he said. “We didn’t crisscross, or anything intimate like that.”

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.”

Breitbart is tall and burly, with eyes the color of Windex, silver hair that he sometimes forgets is no longer blond, and jowls that he wobbles for emphasis when he wishes to express outrage. He is fond of saying that he has two modes of discourse: righteous indignation and puerile jocularity. “I like to call someone a raving cunt every now and then, when it’s appropriate, for effect,” he informed me. “ ‘You cocksucker.’ I love that kind of language.” Constitutionally adversarial, he enjoys imagining himself paired with an equally combative leftist opponent, such as Sean Penn. “Sort of like ‘Barfly,’ with Mickey Rourke—that’s how I envision it being with me and him,” he says. “I’d hate him, I’d fight him. He’d fight me, he’d get in some punches, I’d get in some punches. We’d drink some more. At the end of the day, we’d agree to disagree. And then I’d punch him again.”

No battle is too petty for Breitbart, no target too small or pathetic. He once showed me a series of messages that he had received from an apparently unhinged visitor to his Web sites. One missive concluded with a postscript: “You drank human urine three times—how did it taste?” Breitbart recalled, “That is when I said, O.K., I am not going to ignore him anymore—I want to create a level of pain for him that makes him realize this is not worth this.” He published the messages, as well as the sender’s name and photograph, on Big Journalism, along with a scathing editorial saying that the sender’s “stylings deserve a far greater public platform.” Breitbart told me, “I am sure if you talk to shrinks, or prosecutors, who are experts in these types of people, it is best to avoid them. But that’s not how my brain works.” Conflict also has the useful function of driving traffic to his sites. Breitbart.com is currently looked at by an average of 2.4 million people a month, according to Quantcast.com.