ACORN, NEA, and Andrew Breitbart's PWNING of MSM

The rollout of Andrew Breitbart's Big Government blog, and its attendent exposé bombshell reports, has nearly had the effect of a category 5 hurricane on American politics this last couple of weeks. I mean, seriously, the tea parties and town halls have been an incredible experience for people all year, but now with Big Government's role in breaking the Hannah Giles/James O'Keefe undercover ACORN sting, folks are exclaiming that Breitbart's "making it fun to be a conservative again."

I met Andrew Breitbart briefly on April 15th at Santa Ana's Tax Day Tea Party Event. He's seen here with his father-in-law, Hollywood actor Orson Bean.

Breitbart was the headline speaker at the Santa Ana event, and I saw him again at the Pasadena "May Day! May Day!" Anti-Socialism Rally a few weeks later. The guy's an all-American entrepreneurial hustler. An electrifying speaker, he's also a political pugilist of the first order. He knows that big media is how conservatives will get their message out, and if the big MSM's not in our camp, conservative just have to construct their own. Hard to pin in one place for very long, I had a sense of a man with a mission the first couple of times I interacted with him.



My hunch was pretty accurate. Breitbart gave the political world a big heads-up on September 7 with his Washington Times essay, "Couric Should Look In Mirror": Offering a damning indictment of the media's non-treatment of the Van Jones scandal, Breitbart argued that exposing revolutionaries in the White House was just the beginning:

Two more stories demonstrate how the Democrat-Media Complex, the natural alliance of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, is more concerned with trying to figure out how to destroy Glenn Beck - "he's nuts!" - than to follow his methodical, accurate reporting. This dynamic - used against all potent critics and off-the-reservation journalists - shows that not only is the media ignoring all the negative things coming out about the Obama administration, it is acting like President Richard Nixon's henchmen, making life difficult for its whistleblowers.



One of the stories is that ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a massive radical organization, is poised to receive billions from the Obama "stimulus" ....



Another story not making the evening news is that of artist Patrick Courrielche, who has shown that the National Endowment of the Arts is seeking to use government funds to promote Obama administration initiatives. On Sunday's "This Week," George Will pierced the mainstream media veil.



"Recently there was a conference call arranged by the National Endowment for the Arts, with a representative of the White House, for potential grantees or actual grantees of the federal government, getting subsidies - the theme of it was how the arts community could advance the president's agenda. Now I don't know how many laws that breaks, but I am sure there are some."



What are you waiting for, Katie Couric?

Needless to say, Ms. Couric didn't run with the story. But Breitbart and the conservative alt-media did. The Hannah Giles/James O'Keefe ACORN prostitution sting broke a few weeks back. The story's been a phenomenal follow-up to the Van Jones resignation, and the MSM is still catching up. The Breitbart enterprise continues to break stories and its latest exposé is the rightly-promised investigation into the NEA's corrupt art-propaganda ring that's shilling for the Obama administration. Patrick Courrielche reported at Big Hollywood on the NEA on August 25: "The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?" The Courrielche piece was an early indication of the timed-release of damning investigative reports. And this week promises to be no let-up.



Andrew has a new piece up at Big Government, "Planting the Seeds: The Politicized Art Behind the ACORN Plan." As he argues:

When filmmaker and provocateur James O’Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN – the nation’s foremost “community organizers” – dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for – and getting – help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice. In the past, Mr. O’Keefe created brilliant social satire that rocked his college campus and even made its way on to the talk-radio and cable-news shows, but the magnitude of his latest adventure had the potential to rock the political establishment.



I was awed by Mr. O’Keefe’s guts and amazed by the footage, but explained that the mainstream media would try to kill this important and illuminating expose about a corrupt and criminal political racket, and that the well-funded political left would go into “war room” mode, with 25-year-old Mr. O’Keefe and 20-year-old cohort Miss Giles in the cross hairs. I felt I had a moral obligation to protect these young muckrakers from the left and from the media, and to devise a strategy that would force the media’s hand.



Once the American public saw with its own eyes the grotesque, common practices of ACORN’s housing offices, Mr. O’Keefe and Miss Giles could no longer be a legitimate focus of media scrutiny. Kill the messenger doesn’t work with the American people when they realize that the message is so devastating and honest. I think the video exposed the misuse of public funds and systemic manipulation of the tax code in the name of “helping the poor.”



If Mr. O’Keefe dumped the videos on YouTube, the political powers would have killed the expose before it got traction. I half-joked that he should secretly tape pitching the major television networks exclusive use of his videos for their nightly news broadcasts. But a simpler, less controversial method proved as fruitful.



I told him that in addition to launching his compelling and stylized Web videos, we needed to offer the full transcripts and audio to the public in the name of transparency, and to offer Fox News the full footage of each video before each was released.We had to devise a plan that would force the media to see the evidence before they had enough time to destroy these two idealistic 20-something truth seekers. Mr. O’Keefe agreed to post the full audio and full transcript of his video experiences at BigGovernment.com.



Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

Well, Breitbart's extending the multiplatform strategy this week. Here's this at Big Hollywood this morning, "Pregame Report: The NEA Conference Call." Read the whole thing. Breitbart's enterprise has exposed the corrupt propaganda machine inside the National Endowment of the Arts. As noted:

Among the Obama Administration officials on the call were Buffy Wicks, Office of Public Engagement and the lead White House official on the President’s Serve.Gov initiative to promote national service. Also on the call was Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov. One of their main goals on the call, it seems, was to encourage artists to produce works that would reinforce the President’s call for service; specifically through the Serve.Gov web-portal.

As Dana Loesch recently reported at Big Government, the Serve.Gov portal funnels citizens to volunteer or service projects connected with ACORN and other leftist groups. The taxpayer-funded website is evolving into a cyber-recruitment tool for the progressive movement.

Dana Loesch's essay is here, "Taxpayer Funded Serve.gov Filtering Activists to ACORN." All of this is devastating. What Breitbart and friends are doing is pulling together the strings of communuism and corruption that tie together the entire left-wing progressive infrastructure of the ACORN-Obama-Chicago-communist regime. And it's working fabulously. No wonder some folks are now more excited than ever about being a part of the conservative movement.



More at Gateway Pundit, and Memeorandum.