News

March 1, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart passed away early Thursday morning of natural causes at the early age of 43, his network of news agencies have reported.

The news comes only weeks after the father of four called the pro-life cause “the most important issue” in America during a stirring speech at CPAC to Students for Life of America.

Image

“With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart,” writes Larry Solov, president of Breitbart.com, LLC.

“Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles,” he continues. “Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love.”

In the speech at the Students for Life CPAC briefing last month, the conservative icon revealed that he was adopted and that this was a crucial factor in his conversion to the pro-life cause.

As a “cultural liberal” in Hollywood, he said, “I had never heard the pro-life point of view,” and so called himself “pro-choice” because everyone around him did. “It was a key card that got you in everywhere,” he said.

“As I started to have my political awakening, I was able to connect with my conscience literally and say wait one second,” he explained. “I cannot accept the premise of the post-Roe world in which it’s virtually impossible to adopt, and abortion is the option that is handed to people as the cultural default. It is unfathomable.”

He credited pro-life activists with the fact that it is now possible to be openly pro-life as an actor in Hollywood, noting that Feminists for Life spokeswoman Patricia Heaton, of Everybody Loves Raymond fame, still gets jobs.

“I don’t think I would have seen the light if there weren’t brave people like you that stood up to that, especially young people,” he said.

Breitbart, owner of Breitbart.com, and blogs such as Big Government, Big Hollywood, and Big Journalism, was a major leader in launching a revolution in conservative media in recent years, and a leading critic of the mainstream media’s liberal bias.

“The left, to me, in essence, is the media,” said Breitbart an interview with CBN’s Matt Brody in May 2010. “The media is a left-of-center ecosystem, it’s a left-of-center organism. So the media can change the dynamics of what we’re talking about.”

“I aim everything at attacking the media for its biases and holding them accountable for their biases, and the things that they report incorrectly, or the things they fail to report,” he said.

While not strongly religious himself, he was nevertheless a strong defender of religious freedom. The attack on Christians perpetrated by the mainstream media “angers me to no end.” “I consider myself to be a Judeo-Christian. … I relate to the world view that America has,” he said. “It’s a distinctly Judeo-Christian one and I think that it works.”

Breitbart said he hoped his battle against the liberal media could become “an international movement,” and likened the battle to the previous century’s battle against Communism.

“This is the same battle that Ronald Reagan and many millions of other people fought in the 20th century, it just has a 21st century new media battleground,” he said. “The Cold War is now a new media war.”

See also CPAC video of Breitbart’s speech on Feb. 10 at CPAC convention.