I recently had the pleasure of having a little chat with Andrew Breitbart about his new book,  Righteous Indignation; Excuse Me While I Save the World! Sadly, since Andrew and I have been in the same place I think exactly three times over the last three years, we did the interview via email. But below is our short discussion, not only about the book, but his thoughts on the tea party movement and other topics:

Ned: What compelled/motivated you to write “Righteous Indignation?“

Andrew: The un-ironic answer is that the book tells you why I wrote the book. It is ultimately the story of my awakening, my transformation from being a default cultural liberal in the bluest, most elite part of a blue city in a blue state: Hollywood.  And over the last 15 years, I’ve increased my knowledge of what it means to be a conservative and connected it with my desire to alter the cultural landscape.  When I see a conservative movement that is solely fixated on politics, I realize that I’m in a unique position to inform and to focus on the cultural side of our political problems.  We, as Americans, are not going to win back our country if we don’t take back K-12, the humanities departments, and the graduate schools of our nation’s top higher education institutions.  We’re not going to win if we don’t neutralize the devastating, repetitive attacks on American exceptionalism, capitalism, and Judeo-Christianity from the leftist cynics in Hollywood who are too drugged or ungrateful to understand that they’re helping slowly to rot the greatest country on earth from within.  In short, I wrote this book to do my small part in trying to reclaim this righteous country, and to awaken as many people as I can to join this army.

Ned: When was the “I am going to be a journalist” moment for you?

Andrew: The book delves somewhat tragicomically into the way that my ADD-addled brain works.  And one common thread through my unfocused youth was an obsession with “the news.”  By the age of nine, I was watching every edition of local news through the nightly national news and then the 11 o’clock news, only to be buffered by my father’s subscriptions to the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and the Los Angeles Times.  That orgy of information now seems quaint compared to the information overflow I received when I logged on to the Internet for the first time.  If I’m Humphrey Bogart in the movie, the Internet was my Lauren Bacall.  Not only did the Internet provide me more immediate news data than I could possibly consume, but it also gave me a mechanism to be a participant and a contributor.  That personal revolution had immense political consequences for me.  It was clear that those who controlled the media were now losing control to highly democratic forces. We the people are now acting as checks and balances to the status quo.  There hasn’t been a moment since 1995 that I haven’t felt the raw excitement that comes from knowing that these are historic and revolutionary times and that the primary battlefront is the media.

Ned: What is the biggest threat to our republic?

Andrew: The barriers to an informed electorate (**cough**ahem**the media**cough**ahem**).  Once the truth is transcendent, if the American people are given a choice between truth and lies, I’ll have faith that they will make the right decisions.

Ned: What one book has influenced you the most?

Andrew: The politically correct answer is Whitaker Chambers’s Witness.  It had the intended effect on me–I’m drawn to apostates’ tales, and that’s what my book ultimately is, the story of how someone who once considered himself a liberal saw the light.  The apostate’s goal is to show those lost in the fog of liberalism the error of their ways.  Two other books blew my mind: One is Tammy Bruce’s The New Thought Police. Her vivid depiction of going from a lesbian National Organization for Women Los Angeles Chapter President and liberal media presence to becoming a conservative rabble-rouser possessed cinematic “reveals” of her recognizing that her peers on the left were steeped in intellectual dishonesty and an ends-justifies-the-means mentality.  Better yet, I’ve read a book that has yet to come out that is the most important book from the most important voice: master-playwright David Mamet.  While perusing Amazon.com for my book, please pre-order The Secret Knowledge, an almost too-good-to-be-true, incisively written evisceration of liberalism and a shockingly powerful defense of conservatism from one of the twentieth century’s most regaled liberal minds.

Ned: Where do you think the tea party movement will be in 5 years?

Andrew: If it’s gone, we’re gone.  The future of this country is the tea party movement.  It must grow.  It must get younger.  It must courageously defy the mainstream media’s admonition to minorities to stay away.  It must grow more diverse, but not in the name of tolerance, not in name of political correctness, not in the name of multiculturalism, but in the name of e pluribus unum.

Ned: What are the three greatest milestones in the life of Andrew Breitbart?

Andrew: Aside from the obvious—meeting my wife, getting married, and having four children—being at Kurt Gibson’s 1988 World Series home run means far, far, far more than it should.  But you have no idea how wonderful that moment was. Meeting Drudge at the beginning of his ascent; and watching the ACORN game-plan play out as devised to force a reluctant political and media class to takeJames O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s powerful journalistic exposé seriously.

Folks, there you have it. Now go buy a copy of Andrew’s Righteous Indignation.