Andrew Breitbart didn't die?

What if Andrew Breitbart did not pass away prior to the 2012 presidential election, and remained in control of his conservative media outlet?

Would he have steered it in grassroots populist right, then outright alt-right, direction that Steve Bannon did? Or would he have kept it in the conventional Bush-Romney establishment Republican conservative mold, albeit with a harsher tone than FOX or NRO?
 
Probably the former. I didn't frequent that site, but I've heard from several conservatives that the site went downhill in a big way without him.
 
aw yiss boi

Breitbart was much more of a Christian conservative rather than a trump one or a nazi. If he lived, Breitbart would support Ted Cruz and not give Trump a major news outlet on the internet besides nazis mostly. Trump doesn't do as well and Cruz wins. Clinton may win but idk. Bannon goes nowhere important in life thankfully.
 
Well Bannon already has the distinction of holding at least partial responsibility for destroying one ecosystem (Biosphere 2), so he already has that distinction going for him. But as to Breitbart, this is a man who believed that liberals were more brutal and evil than Al-Qaeda, who regularly engaged in race baiting with James O'Keefe's videos as but a few examples, and in one of his books managed to not only plagiarize several sources for a chapter on "Cultural Marxism" (including a LaRouche publication), but ends up making them more anti-Semitic by mentioning that the Frankfurt School, comprised of refugees from Europe for added fun, all happened to be Jewish. He and Trump would be a match made in heaven, so odds are he goes full in on #MAGA and we end up with White House Chief Strategist Andrew Breitbart.
 
Breitbart had known Bannon since 2004, per Wikipedia. Bannon may have come on board anyhow but in a different role.

Would Bannon have come aboard at the level he did? I'm not sure, but we could see the outlet become much stronger.

I don't think you'd have seen the schism between Ben Shapiro's wing of the organization and the wing that Bannon ultimately led.

I think Breitbart would have given Trump hell over the Michelle Fields incident - probably prompting trump to fire Lewandowski and apologize. But he also would have recognized Trump was tapping into the Rust Belt in a way Romney was unable to.

But there is another theory - another possibility.

Suppose Breitbart took up the IRS/Tea Party scandal during the 2012 election?

At the time, Glenn Beck's TheBlaze.com had done two articles on possible IRS harassment:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/02/14/is-obama-using-the-irs-to-silence-opposition-voices/

http://www.theblaze.com/news/2012/0...llied-by-the-irs-clear-obvious-overreach/amp/

Suppose Breitbart ran with it? Brought in O'Keefe, Bannon, and a full-court press, maybe timing releases during the spring and summer of 2012 - with those allegations becoming the talk of Fox News, talk radio, the Washington Times, and other conservative media outlets?

Put it this way... we may completely butterfly away the Trump 2016 campaign as we know it because the President would be Mitt Romney.
 
Well Bannon already has the distinction of holding at least partial responsibility for destroying one ecosystem (Biosphere 2), so he already has that distinction going for him. But as to Breitbart, this is a man who believed that liberals were more brutal and evil than Al-Qaeda, who regularly engaged in race baiting with James O'Keefe's videos as but a few examples, and in one of his books managed to not only plagiarize several sources for a chapter on "Cultural Marxism" (including a LaRouche publication), but ends up making them more anti-Semitic by mentioning that the Frankfurt School, comprised of refugees from Europe for added fun, all happened to be Jewish. He and Trump would be a match made in heaven, so odds are he goes full in on #MAGA and we end up with White House Chief Strategist Andrew Breitbart.

What if he was more and more right wing like propagating conicndience detector? Or What if he promoted fact that most of USSR leadership was Jewish? What would happen? Would "USA ditch Israel" be platform for Trump?
 

Archibald

Banned
Hey cool, a connection with the space program. No biosphere 2, a different trajectory for Bannon and maybe - butterflies - no Trump by 2016 ! :p
 

CalBear

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Breitbart had known Bannon since 2004, per Wikipedia. Bannon may have come on board anyhow but in a different role.

Would Bannon have come aboard at the level he did? I'm not sure, but we could see the outlet become much stronger.

I don't think you'd have seen the schism between Ben Shapiro's wing of the organization and the wing that Bannon ultimately led.

I think Breitbart would have given Trump hell over the Michelle Fields incident - probably prompting trump to fire Lewandowski and apologize. But he also would have recognized Trump was tapping into the Rust Belt in a way Romney was unable to.

But there is another theory - another possibility.

Suppose Breitbart took up the IRS/Tea Party scandal during the 2012 election?

At the time, Glenn Beck's TheBlaze.com had done two articles on possible IRS harassment:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/02/14/is-obama-using-the-irs-to-silence-opposition-voices/

http://www.theblaze.com/news/2012/0...llied-by-the-irs-clear-obvious-overreach/amp/

Suppose Breitbart ran with it? Brought in O'Keefe, Bannon, and a full-court press, maybe timing releases during the spring and summer of 2012 - with those allegations becoming the talk of Fox News, talk radio, the Washington Times, and other conservative media outlets?

Put it this way... we may completely butterfly away the Trump 2016 campaign as we know it because the President would be Mitt Romney.
Please don't hawk conspiracy theories here.

Please don't quote lunatic propaganda sites as "proof" of Conspiracy theories.
 
Hey cool, a connection with the space program. No biosphere 2, a different trajectory for Bannon and maybe - butterflies - no Trump by 2016 ! :p
Best thing about it, according to a CSPAN interview, when he was made acting director he changed the focus of the project from space exploration to...pollution and global warming. Being suckered in by those dastardly Chinese must have made him want to get even I guess.
 
Please don't hawk conspiracy theories here.

Please don't quote lunatic propaganda sites as "proof" of Conspiracy theories.
Sorry, but I don't see the hawking of conspiracy theories? I see fb111a saying that there were theories that the IRS was hounding Tea Party groups at the time, and citing those articles as proof that those theories existed. It seems relevant to this discussion...
 
Sorry, but I don't see the hawking of conspiracy theories? I see fb111a saying that there were theories that the IRS was hounding Tea Party groups at the time, and citing those articles as proof that those theories existed. It seems relevant to this discussion...

fb111a was citing those articles as proof that the IRS was hounding Tea Party groups; they weren't posting them in a general "People believe these things" way. Presumably, their point was that if Breitbart had lived and taken up the story, the "truth" would have come out.
 
fb111a was citing those articles as proof that the IRS was hounding Tea Party groups; they weren't posting them in a general "People believe these things" way. Presumably, their point was that if Breitbart had lived and taken up the story, the "truth" would have come out.
I do not see that.

Suppose Breitbart took up the IRS/Tea Party scandal during the 2012 election?

At the time, Glenn Beck's TheBlaze.com had done two articles on possible IRS harassment:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/02/14/is-obama-using-the-irs-to-silence-opposition-voices/

http://www.theblaze.com/news/2012/0...llied-by-the-irs-clear-obvious-overreach/amp/

Suppose Breitbart ran with it? Brought in O'Keefe, Bannon, and a full-court press, maybe timing releases during the spring and summer of 2012 - with those allegations becoming the talk of Fox News, talk radio, the Washington Times, and other conservative media outlets?

Put it this way... we may completely butterfly away the Trump 2016 campaign as we know it because the President would be Mitt Romney.

(Bolding mine)

fb111a carefully sticks to calling it "possible" and "allegations," rather than claiming that the IRS actually was hounding Tea Party groups. In fact, the only factual point claimed is that these allegations actually existed, which the Glenn Beck articles were cited in support of. The substantive portion only says that these allegations could become the talk of conservative media, again without rendering any judgement about their truth or falsehood.

For comparison, consider an alternate timeline where "Swift Boaters for Truth" never got anywhere beyond being a minor blip and, say, Kerry got elected. It would be completely reasonable, in my opinion, for a poster to cite the existence of this as potentially being something that could damage Kerry in the election even though it was a completely false conspiracy theory. The discussion of the impact of a conspiracy theory is entirely separate from the actual correctness of the theory.
 
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