I, like many, was shocked to wake up to the news (actually I’d already been up for a few minutes, but it wasn’t long) that Andrew Breitbart died last night. I only met him once, at a party up in Hollywood, but I’m only one degree removed from him, having several good friends who were friends. So I can’t say a lot about him from personal experience, but from watching him on television and the web, he was perhaps the greatest current champion, our Achilles for the cause of liberty, in terms of his effectiveness in taking the battle directly to the enemy (and I use that word freely, because anyone who has seen his hateful retweets knows that it is exactly how the Left views anyone who values individual liberty). Except apparently, rather than his heel, his weakness was what by all accounts was his great heart. No one has been as successful at displaying the hypocrisy and venality of the Left, which is why there is such hatred for him among them. It is a great loss for that cause, but as Josh Trevino says, we must take up the sword of the fallen.

Instapundit has a roundup of links, and Ed Driscoll (who ironically, and sadly now) was celebrating, but now is merely observing his decadal bloggiversary, has more, as does Christian Adams and Richard Fernandez (in which Davy Jones makes a cameo appearance). The National Reviewers have preliminarily weighed in as well, with thoughts from Jonah Goldberg (who was also caught with his immediate reaction, when he was clearly devastated, on Fox News this morning because he happened to be there for something else), Kathryn Lopez, John O’Sullivan, and Dan Foster.

I’m sure that there will be a lot more in the days to come.

[Friday morning update]

“You can give this day back to the Indians“:

One thing that he [Breitbart] and Bill [Buckley] shared was this basic contempt for the premise that the mainstream liberal elite institutions in the United States are in a position to judge and adjudicate the worth of conservatives. That they are in a position to judge our souls. That if we disagree with liberals, that proves that we are somehow wanting or lacking in compassion; lacking in humanity. That is a fundamental thing that enraged Andrew, this idea that if you disagreed about public policy, if you disagreed about how to organize society, that proved you were a racist. That proved you were a fascist. That proved you were a homophobe. It was the fundamental bad faith of the leading liberal institutions that controlled the commanding heights of this culture that infuriated him. And he refused, at the most basic level, to give them that authority over him or his ideas, and that is what fueled his Righteous Indignation, as his book title called it.

And more from Jonah:

…what made him a public figure is what drove him to leap into battle day after day. Andrew had profound contempt for those on the left who claimed a birthright to a monopoly on virtue and tolerance.

He rejected in the marrow of his bones the idea that conservatives needed to apologize for being conservative or that liberals had any special authority to pronounce on the political decency and honesty of others.

Indeed, when liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.

He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on Obamacare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge — recycled over and over by the media — was a lie.

The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism’s undeserved monopoly on the “narrative” — one of his favorite words.

It not only exposed it, it has started to break it. We have to pick up where he left off, and finish the job.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Think Big, America.

[Update a few minutes later]

Who he was, how he was.

[Update a few minutes later]

Breitbart’s last laugh.

[Update a while later]

A seventeen-year-old woman (not girl) pays tribute to her inspirational hero.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ace versus the increasingly diminutive David Frum.

[Update a while later]

Apologize for WHAT?

Thoughts on Hollywood political correctness, from Bill Whittle.

Was the show classically liberal? The first of a series.

In the sixties perhaps it was, but it veered sort of left in TNG in the eighties, with Roddenberry’s socialist utopian fantasies.