colorlines.com

One, Breitbart and his cronies have proven with this stunt—actually, re-proven—that they are deliberate and systematic liars. There is nothing secret about the Harvard protest, Obama’s speech or the WGBH footage. There never has been. All of the utterly banal details of Obama’s utterly banal remarks have been readily available for two decades and were re-visited amid the first election. But like any professional liar, Breitbart knew none of those facts mattered. All that was important was that he scream bloody murder loud enough that someone pay attention to him. That someone, of course, is Fox News, which exists primarily to amplify deliberate lies promoted online by rightwing operatives.

Second, the right’s most professional hit men seem convinced—perhaps rightly—that there’s nothing so scary as a smart black man or a smart woman. With Obama’s remarks themselves proven noncontroversial, the attack has shifted to making Bell as scary as possible—in Shapiro’s words, he’s a “close associate of Jeremiah Wright.” This is a pattern with rightwing media’s anti-academic, anti-intellectual hits. The target always seems to fit a similar profile. Derrick Bell. Francis Fox-Piven. Shirley Sherrod. Heck, even Jeremiah Wright. And remember when Michelle Obama was supposed to be the modern Angela Davis? They seek not just to stir up trouble in contemporary partisan battles, but rather to undermine the credibility of a generation-old shift in the consensus over who’s ideas are valid. Racism is a negative feedback loop.

“Derrick Bell was an intellectual giant in the legal academy,” explains Dorian Warren, a Columbia University scholar and Colorlines.com board member. “Bell established an entire field and genre of legal scholarship examining the undeniably racial foundations of American democracy and law. His scholarship is now the mainstream of legal education—from property and employment discrimination to constitutional law—taught in the very best law schools around the country.”

That’s precisely the kind of outcome Breitbart spent his ugly, dishonest public career trying to undo. Sadly, his work goes on from the grave.