The weekend encompassing CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Committee, has often been referred to as the Oscars for blazer-wearing Republicans who make the annual pilgrimage to the shores of Maryland to discuss the free market, social conservatism, and where the secret after-parties are held. And in 2017, no ticket was hotter than Breitbart News Network’s own CPAC extravaganza.
Over the years, Breitbart’s annual after-party has come to reflect the news site's evolving identity. In 2013, the event, held at the Capitol Hill town house known as the Embassy, which doubles as Breitbart’s D.C. headquarters, featured a taco buffet and mariachi band, which seemed to mock the immigration debate concurrently consuming Capitol Hill. In 2014, an anonymous guest told The Daily Caller’s Betsy Rothstein that the 50s-themed party bordered on an “orgy,” though not in a full-on sex party sense. “There was such a vibe at this house, so un-Washington,” the guest marveled. “It was sick and virile and intense and drunk and loud and horny in a way that seemed like a real tribute to [the site’s hard-living founder Andrew Breitbart].” (The guest requested anonymity, Rothstein reported, in order to ensure an invite back.)
This year’s event, however, was different. Breitbart had transformed from a renegade Web site with a few dozen agitators and an arsenal of carefully aggregated red meat into a political force that had propelled Donald Trump into the White House, under the guidance of its Machiavellian former chairman Steve Bannon. To celebrate its stunning ascendancy, Breitbart opted to rent a boat and take staffers out on the Potomac River for a night of hedonism. As the hours ticked down until Friday evening, CPAC was abuzz with people cashing in on favors, sidling up to staffers, and occasionally full-on begging to get in—the kind of wheedling that used to be seen among lobbyists trying to get into White House parties. The Breitbart party had never been in such high demand.
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Bannon formally stepped down from the news organization upon joining Trump’s campaign last summer, but his role in the West Wing has only amplified Breitbart’s exposure. While many on the right and left still doubt the site’s credibility (Milo Yiannopolous’s resignation was hardly enough for many), Breitbart has at least earned a seat at the table, as they like to say in the swamp. Breitbart correspondents now regularly attend White House briefings and get seats on Air Force One. Breitbart reporters can land interviews with the powerful players who once spurned them, even getting overtures from high-ranking Democrats in deeply red states. And, most importantly, Breitbart now has the political access—and, some would say, the deep pockets—to lure journalists in from prestigious mainstream publications.
More recently, however, the organization appeared to have been dealt a surprising setback. In late March, more than 60 days into the Trump administration, the Senate Daily Press Gallery denied Breitbart’s request for a permanent credential. BuzzFeed News reported that, among other reasons, the committee did not believe that the organization had adequately proved it had severed its editorial ties to Bannon. This judgment illuminated a lingering question in political and media circles. In a West Wing subsumed by ethical quandaries and potential conflicts of interest, just how close does Bannon remain to Breitbart?
Given Bannon’s responsibilities, some think it is highly unlikely that he is issuing any sort of regular directives from the West Wing. On some level, Breitbart may be fundamentally uncontrollable. For one thing, its writers and editors are based around the country, and many work from home. Even the D.C. staff rarely works out of the Embassy. (Like everyone else these days, staffers communicate via Slack, the enterprise communications software.) For another, whether you agree with it or not, the site is largely staffed by iconoclasts who are more experienced opposing power than placating the White House. “I have no proof otherwise, but I think that Bannon has his hands full and needs to be focused on the White House job,” said Eddie Scarry, a conservative media writer for The Washington Examiner who has followed Breitbart for years. “I really imagine it’s a 24-hour job. He’s focused on political strategy and thinking about long-term things.”
But Scarry also wondered whether Bannon needed to formally issue orders to exert influence. “At the same time,” he told me, “I do imagine that at Breitbart they’re still all very conscious that Bannon reads the content.” Indeed, Bannon hired or nurtured many of Breitbart’s most influential writers and editors, and their devotion to him, people familiar with the inner workings of the site told me, border on extreme loyalty. “If on the way out the door, he told [Breitbart Washington editor] Matt Boyle, ‘You know what I would want you to do? No matter what I say from now on, I want you to do what Steve Bannon circa 2015 would tell you to do,’ then I think it’s pretty clear what you would do, right?” conservative political commentator Matt Lewis observed. “You would keep attacking Paul Ryan and be populist or nationalist. Bannon doesn’t have to pull the strings. As long as that’s the understanding he put in motion, he can have plausible deniability about that.” (Breitbart did not return multiple requests for comment.)
Breitbart is easy to parody—essentially, write an all-caps headline about a random terrorist attack or Obama official, throw in a hyperbolic adjective or two, and publish it on a black-and-orange Web site—but it is still the subject of some profound misconceptions. The staff, for instance, is not composed of only knee-jerk xenophobes and hillbilly rabble-rousers. Many of the writers and editors have undergrad and graduate degrees from Ivy League and other elite schools. Editor-in-chief Alex Marlow is a U.C. Berkeley graduate; editor-at-large Joel Pollack has a Harvard Law degree; and Julia Hahn, a 25-year-old Breitbart prodigy whom Bannon brought to the White House as a special assistant to the president, is a University of Chicago alum. (Bannon’s résumé, of course, includes a degree from Harvard and stint at Goldman Sachs.) Breitbart recently hired John Carney, a veteran financial reporter from The Wall Street Journal, who has a blazing contrarian streak.
What differentiates this group from the usual crew of elite school grads who end up at The New York Times or any other traditional New York or D.C.-based media outlet, however, is a profound sense of disgust toward the establishment, a mischievous desire to get under its skin, and a willingness to accept anyone from any background who’s willing to pour his or her life into the site and share the same mission. And Bannon encouraged this, despite his bona fides granting him access to the global elite. It was certainly an attitude I encountered frequently as a recent college graduate in 2011, when I worked at Tucker Carlson’s site, The Daily Caller, and floated among the journalistic world that eventually became known to the mainstream as the alt-right.
Another differentiator is the organization’s youth and journalistic inexperience. While their peers were struggling for bylines at traditional outlets, or seemingly waiting in line behind more experienced reporters for plum beats, young Breitbart reporters enjoyed enormous professional freedom within the site’s nationalistic purview. “There are reasons why the military is interested in having someone who is 18,” said Lewis. “If you’re 18, you’re physically more capable of enduring the rigors of battle and of modern journalism—of staying up crazy hours and working crazy hours. I would also say it’s probably true that somebody who is 18 is probably less developed in terms of the ability to say no to something that could be ethically questionable.”
One former Breitbart employee agreed with this assessment. “A lot of people go there and they have no frame of reference for whether this is normal or not. That’s part of the dynamics there,” this person told me. “Journalists are supposed to write what’s true, but editorial decisions there treat the news instead as a weapon with little regard for the truth.”
This chaotic recipe was undergirded by Bannon’s own management philosophy. ”I’m sure you’ve noticed that the Trump White House is full of factions and leaking and all sorts of problems,” the former employee said. ”It’s chaos by design, [and it’s] how Bannon runs an organization. There’s no hierarchy, there’s no office, there’s no honest brokers. It’s just controlled chaos.”
Not even Bannon can control the army of young ideologues that he helped train. Business Insider recently reported that during the height of the Ryancare debate, Breitbart referred to the American Health Care Act as “Obamacare 2.0.” Boyle, according to B.I., was telling people that Bannon had committed “treason” by supporting the bill. He even noted on a Slack channel: “We are Breitbart. This is war. There are no sacred cows in war.” (In response, the White House arranged several interviews with top West Wing figures and allowed Boyle to interview Trump in the Oval Office.)
Breitbart is likely to change with Bannon in the West Wing. And less than 100 days into Trump’s administration, a few competing visions are already manifesting themselves. Several people working in conservative journalism, and who are familiar with the inner workings of Breitbart, told me that a fissure is opening between two high-ranking editors. Marlow, the level-headed protégé of the late Andrew Breitbart, and the site’s editor-in-chief, is largely seen as trying to professionalize the organization. Boyle, the site’s pugnacious, cannonball-like political editor, who has called explicitly for a war against Trump’s enemies in the White House, is less concerned with cooling the rhetoric. “I think that Alex Marlow saw Breitbart as more of a tabloid for working people across the country, like the national New York Post,” said Scarry. “Boyle, probably just by the nature of his job, was really more focused on disrupting Washington and effecting policy changes on the Hill. Bannon had this 30,000-foot view and wanted Breitbart to have some say in the shifting culture in America.”
Without Bannon to serve as a moderating influence between Boyle and Marlow specifically, or, to be more accurate, an overpowering influence, the site has already begun to change. “Bannon used to let me write whatever I wanted, but it’s much more controlled now,” right-wing agitator Patrick Howley said to Buzzfeed when he left, adding afterward that Bannon was a “classy barbarian.” Lee Stranahan, an on-again, off-again reporter for the site, recently quit over what he saw as “micromanaging.” “Bannon was smart and had done stuff,” he told The Daily Caller, saying he “was happy to work for him.” The new leadership, on the other hand, was going to involve “a degree of micromanagement I was not comfortable with.”
Despite the failures of Ryancare/Trumpcare/Whatevercare, and despite the cratering confidence the American public has in Trump, Breitbart’s homepage still declares deep faith and allegiance to the 45th president. Scarry, who has some experience trolling himself, said that he expected Breitbart would remain loyal to Trump, perhaps nudging him on certain issues as during the health-care debate, unless the president begins backtracking on his nationalistic platform. “The one thing that I think [would cost Trump Breitbart’s support] is if he entirely reversed on immigration. And when I say reverse, I mean any whiff of ‘we’re going to legalize anyone that’s here.’ . . . if there’s a sense that they’re going to strike a deal with the Democrats, they’re going to give legal protections to anyone who’s here, I think that will definitely be a point when they break away.”
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For now, the attempt to mainstream Breitbart seems to involve shedding the gleeful, anarchical, establishment trolling they were once celebrated for. The Washington bureau is finally looking for its first real office, having been notified that the Embassy is not legally zoned to be a business facility. The site is undeterred in its attempt to get formal press credentials from the establishment types, even if it means revealing its connections with the Mercer billionaires or its lack of a formal masthead.
Meanwhile, its much-hyped 2017 CPAC boat party, a luau-themed shindig, came as a disappointment, as if someone had attempted to replicate a Bannon-era party and failed. Attendees who got on the boat, which never left the dock, were aghast that apart from two custom, watery cocktails—a letdown compared to the zesty neon-lime margaritas handed out at the 2016 affair—guests had to pay for their drinks at a cash bar. At the moment, the Bannon party was over.
