“Maybe one day, the media will be a bit more balanced. Andrew was here to even the scales a little, and I love people like that. Like him, I hate bullies and liars, and I’ll never stop fighting them, whatever their creed, political stance, or lack of same.”
[…]
When Andrew was starting “Big Hollywood” and other derivative sites of Breitbart.com, I was at a party at his house. He introduced me to John Nolte, the editor. In short order, I wrote two dozen articles for the site, which seemed popular with readers, given the extensive commentary. It seemed like a big happy family. When I learned Nolte’s wife was a huge fan of Patti Page, I got her a copy of Patti’s memoir, which I’d ghost-written. Mrs. Nolte received the only copy on earth autographed by both Patti and myself.
Andrew also invited me to become a member of the secret Hollywood Republican group “Friends of Abe” (FOA) started by Gary Sinise, shortly after he learned about it. I began going to FOA events, and getting others involved.
Then Andrew and I had a falling out over intellectual property. I wrote a non-political article about what I thought was missing in America — some Christian principles that had guided it in the beginning — and John Nolte rejected the piece. I was surprised; he’d always published the others with little comment, if any. I ran it by Andrew and he thought it was okay to publish, but in the interim I happened to read a “click-on” agreement I had encountered when first signing up on the site. It stated that the site owned in perpetuity everything I wrote for it — even though I was writing for free! I asked Andrew about that via email, and got no reply. Same with Nolte. When I realized I was getting nowhere, I finally emailed them both to say, sorry, you don’t own what I created for you to use for free, take my articles down.
And they did. After that, I would see Andrew at FOA events but there was a noticeable emotional distance between us. I didn’t bring up my exit from his site, and neither did he. The last time I saw him was when he did a signing of his last book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World, at the Barney’s Beanery in Westwood where the group met every month. The time before that was at an FOA lunch in the San Fernando Valley, which he was moderating. When it came time for discussion, I announced I was writing a book for Broadside Books, the conservative imprint of HarperCollins that publishes authors like Dinesh D’Souza and that I wanted to talk to anyone interested in being interviewed for the book. Andrew’s mouth literally dropped open in surprise — I guess because it was a somewhat major project with regard to Hollywood conservatives, and he didn’t already know about it.
[…]
