“I Would Go Back To Strangle These Malcontents”: Andrew Breitbart's First Draft

Earlier today, we showed that Andrew Breitbart's crew has been hard at work doctoring video in order to claim a university professor and a labor organizer have teamed up to teach "violent union tactics" to Missouri students.

As it turns out, Breitbart knows a thing or two about promoting violence.

A few weeks ago, Media Matters obtained an “uncorrected” review copy of Breitbart's new book, Righteous Indignation. In it, Breitbart devotes an inexplicable amount of space to ranting about a group of European intellectuals who settled in Southern California after fleeing Nazism. Breitbart writes that he wishes he could go back in time and “strangle” them:

Brecht and his ilk were the Kurt Cobains of their day: massively depressed, nihilistic, people who wore full suits in eighty-degree weather while living in a house by the beach. As Adam Cohen wrote in the New York Times, these were “dyspeptic critics of American culture. Several landed in Southern California where they were disturbed by the consumer culture and the gospel of relentless cheeriness. Depressive by nature, they focused on the disappointments and venality that surrounded them and how unnecessary it all was. It could be paradise, Theodor Adorno complained, but it was only California.”

Adorno was wrong. It was paradise. To the rest of the world, America's vision was a vision of paradise. And these Marxists were here to try and destroy the best lifestyle man had ever created.

If I could go back in a time machine, I would go back to strangle these malcontents.

Alas, this being a review copy, it contained the following disclaimer: “Material from this copy should not be quoted or used without first checking with the publisher, as some of this material may not appear in the finished book.”

And indeed, someone seems to have decided that it would be better for Breitbart not to share his strangulation fantasies with the reading public. In the final, published version of the book, the last sentence of that passage now reads:

If I could go back in a time machine, I would go back to kick these malcontents in their shins.