Arlington, Va. — We are being called to give testimony. The tall bald man wants to know how often we visit his employer’s website. "Who goes to Breitbart-dot-com at least one time a day?"
Every hand goes up, including mine.
"At least five times?"
Most of them are still up, and a few remain when he asks who visits 10, 15, even 20 times a day.
Then the man, whose name is Andrew, starts on with something I’ve never heard at a D.C.-area happy hour before.
"Obviously everyone is here for some good time, some good discussion. There’s sure to be some disagreement," he says. "We want to ask that everyone refrain from any type of abusive or inappropriate remarks because that’s not us or what we stand for. Obviously we’ll make sure everyone is safe at the event. We do have a couple of security that are walking around. If there’s anything that’s goin’ on or anything that’s wrong, please feel free to flag one of those guys down."
Breitbart is a rather odd website. Stories go up seemingly unedited, riddled with typos, punctuation mistakes, usage errors. Ostensible hard news pieces veer off into crass editorializing. In the text of stories, giant pop-ups next to the names of senators and congressmen announce their "Liberty Scores."
Yet Breitbart is also one of the most successful digital media companies in the world, with a huge staff and bureaus on three continents and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of very loyal readers.
About 100 of those readers are here with me at a bar in Arlington, Virginia, to make friends and listen to Breitbart staffers speak at what is being advertised as the "First Ever We Are Breitbart - Washington DC Meetup."
Andrew’s introduction, which he brushes off as "house-keeping," is not the only thing that catches me off guard. The people here don’t look much like the crowd you see drinking wine in plastic cups after a Heritage Foundation panel. Only a few of the men are wearing jackets and ties. Many of the women are in flip-flops. The kid in front of me is wearing a t-shirt and cargo pants. Another has on what must be the first pair of JNCO jeans I’ve seen since Eminem released his second album. People greet each other and introduce themselves using only their first names. No one asks, "Where do you work?" We are a racially diverse lot, too. Which is unusual, to say the least, for an event on the right.
After the introduction, everyone claps for someone called Sonnie Johnson, not a byline I’m familiar with. When she comes up to the front, though, I realize that I walked in with her and her husband, who is eating French fries at a table far from the crowd. Her speech is very heartfelt. She begins by telling us how six years ago when her daughter, for whose healthy delivery she had prayed, turned five, God told her that she should start a blog.
"Be careful what you ask God for, because he comes back and eventually you pay your tab," she says.
She says that at first her blog was apolitical.
"One of the articles got picked up by a site, Hip-Hop Republican. I contacted them and said, ‘Take my article off of your website because I am not a Republican.’"
She tells us that as the months went on and the pick-ups and links continued, she noticed that none of the sites spotlighting her work were left wing. Eventually she found herself attending and even speaking at Tea Party events. She also appeared in a documentary about Sarah Palin and her supporters.
"That was kind of cool," she says. "I was the only black face in that video. The reason I say that is because that’s what progressives said. None of them mentioned my name. All I was to them was a little black girl."
It was at a convention promoting the documentary that she met Andrew Breitbart, of whom she, like everyone else here, speaks in awed tones.
"No one spoke to me. No one looked at me. No one greeted me. No one made me feel welcome. And I said, ‘This is the last time I will come to one of these events.’ Then I look up the escalator and there was Andrew Breitbart. So I run up the escalator and I was like, ‘ANDREW BREITBART!’ And he turned around and looks at me and was like, ‘SONNIE JOHNSON!’ Everybody all the sudden wanted to shake my hand, know my name, get to know something about me."
The crowd laughs and cheers.
"That was the beauty of Andrew. He took his light and he shined it on other people. He didn’t keep it for himself."
The rest of her speech is a brief for diversity in the conservative movement. She says there should be no "litmus test" on issues such as gay marriage. She talks about the need to reach out to people living in poverty and the importance of finding a good man, one who can afford to buy women birth control so that they don’t need to obtain it on the government’s dime.
I am very uncomfortable with the quasi-messianic way people regard Breitbart’s late founder. When Ben Shapiro resigned from the site last month, he said in a statement that "Andrew’s life mission has been betrayed," as though he were an early Christian polemicist accusing the bishops of not being faithful to the Gospel. Breitbart himself must have been a very charismatic figure, something that for me does not translate into his writings or clips of his speeches, much less into the vast media empire that bears his name or the eulogy I am hearing now. I feel like an atheist interloper who has wandered into a church on Sunday morning.
"You having a good time?" a kid in a hoodie asks me before I go.
"It’s wonderful," I say. And for him and everybody else, it probably is.