This is a rush transcript from “Hannity,” April 2, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
RICH LOWRY, GUEST HOST: In the wake of the health care debate liberals have been going crazy trying to paint conservatives in this country as extreme. However, video evidence is telling a far different story.
Good evening, I’m Rich Lowry in tonight for Sean Hannity. It seems that those on the left feel that the First Amendment applies only to themselves. Members of the Tea Party movement saw that firsthand last weekend as they attempted to travel to a rally in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada.
Reid supporters lined the streets throwing eggs at the Tea Party buses as they passed by. There are even reports that some of those Reid supporters intentionally redirected buses in the wrong direction as they approach the rally.
Journalist Andrew Breitbart was there and watched it all go down. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANDREW BREITBART, BIGGOVERNMENT.COM: They throw eggs. They’re throwing eggs. Lovely. They threw eggs, isn’t that nice.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Everybody on the bus.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get them out of here or I’m going to jail today. Get him out of here.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Out of my way.
BREITBART: What did you just say?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I said I love you! In spite of what you are! You heard what I said.
BREITBART: You’re going to jail if I don’t get out of here?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everybody (INAUDIBLE) disagreements.
BREITBART: I haven’t said anything provocative.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I know, I know.
BREITBART: I I haven’t said one thing provocative.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It’s over! It’s over!
BREITBART: My mere standing here is causing people to get — intimate that they want to be violent against me.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LOWRY: Joining me now with more on this is the man himself, the founder and publisher of BigGovernment.com, Andrew Breitbart.
Andrew, thanks so much for being with us tonight.
BREITBART: Hey, thanks for having me, Rich.
LOWRY: So, Andrew, set out what happened here. You go and stand on the sidewalk in the middle, I assume, of Harry Reid supporters and union activists. Then what happens?
BREITBART: Well, I actually thought that I had arrived where the event was, because there was a guy holding up a sign that said Searchlight. And as I got out the guy actually said to me, I’m misdirecting traffic, and he laughed like he was in a movie or like some type of a clown house.
And I walked over to him and I asked why are you redirecting traffic down the wrong highway? And a bunch of the Harry Reid supporters surrounded me and while that happened, as I was asking him why he was misdirecting traffic, the Tea Party bus procession started to go down the highway and right then and there, as you can see on the video, that group of people started to throw a barrage of eggs. I’d say there were about a dozen eggs that were thrown. And I found myself in that incident.
LOWRY: Now you didn’t do anything to provoke anyone, obviously. But you have this gentleman, and I use the word loosely, in the baseball cap come up and say get this guy out of here or I’m going to jail today. And presumably he didn’t mean go to jail for jaywalking, or littering or anything of that nature. It was a threat.
BREITBART: Well, I’m not a psychologist but they call that passive aggression in my neighborhood.
(LAUGHTER)
LOWRY: And you —
BREITBART: Passive aggression, yes.
LOWRY: And Andrew, this wasn’t on the video that we played but you captured this up on your site. You had a — I assume it’s a cop or some court of security official come right afterwards, very angry about these eggs being thrown. And you have someone else from the crowd talk to her and try to tell her that you were the one throwing the eggs.
BREITBART: They called the police on me. As you can see, I didn’t throw the eggs. As you can understand I have no desire to throw eggs at the Tea Party Express bus. But they did.
(CROSSTALK)
LOWRY: That would be a very strange psychological disorder if you did, Andrew.
BREITBART: Indeed it would be. And while I was going to my car, two police cars pulled up to me and said that they had been called because I was alleged by the group of the people who did throw the eggs, that they said you threw the eggs.
I said well, as you can see, I’ve got a cameraman behind me and I can show you right now that the video will show that they were the ones that threw it. And the guy — the police officer, as opposed to going back to the crowd that called the police, and he now had a new crime on his hand that they had falsely called the police on me, just drove way.
He could have cared less that there were threats of assault on me, which I told him about. He could care less that the eggs had been thrown at the Tea Party group by this group of people. And as you can later see at BigGovernment.com we isolated who the individuals were who were involved and they were from the IBEW, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, out of Nevada.
They were the ones that were throwing the eggs. And the person who called the police and who on camera is seen blaming me for what is obvious that I didn’t do, is a guy by the name of Bryan Dimarzio who is — works for the Nevada Democratic Party.
He’s the field director for the Nevada Democratic Party. He used to be a staffer for Hillary Clinton. And he was the one who was involved in this Alinsky tactic of misdirection and accusing me of what they were trying to do, which was trying to stoke and provoke an incident at the rally.
LOWRY: Yes. And now you actually have a freeze frame with a big arrow pointing to one of these guys with the egg actually in his palm.
So Andrew, let’s get to the deeper political import, which you began to do right there. What if this were Tea Party activists who had eggs and threw them at a bus carrying Harry Reid or Harry Reid supporters, and threatened a Democratic activist in their midst?
What would the media have done with this story?
BREITBART: Well, the narrative that came out of false accusations from the Capitol protest the day before the health care bill was passed was that the Tea Party movement is racist. That it’s on the verge of some type of violent outburst when the facts have not aligned up to that whatsoever.
But the mainstream media is buying the left’s new tactic of trying to destroy the Tea party by maligning it and marginalizing it to the outskirts of society.
This is a coordinated attempt to destroy the Tea Party movement. That’s my assessment of what is going on. And this goes against the narrative. The video of them trying to go to — they had to go so far out of their way to go to Searchlight, Nevada, which is a place that I think was last touched upon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
This is a lunar landscape where these Americans came to protest and talk about the Constitution. You can watch the video.
LOWRY: Andrew —
BREITBART: Every —
(CROSSTALK)
LOWRY: Really quickly —
BREITBART: Yes.
LOWRY: We have about a minute left or so, talk a little bit about the incident prior to the health care vote where a group of African-American congressmen were allegedly called the N-word by Tea Party protesters and this was blown — reported by every major media outlet in the country pretty much, and was used to tar the Tea Partiers as racist.
You guys have done a lot of the analysis of the video, you don’t see it at all on there, and you believe it’s a hoax.
BREITBART: Well, I’ve offered $100,000 to John Lewis — Congress John Lewis and to the Black Congressional Caucus to prove that that incident happened. There was a sea of new media. Everybody was holding up iPods throughout the entire event.
If you heard the word, N-word, if they heard the N-word, their heads which were caught on video would have moved left or right to the commotion. It didn’t happen. This is all a concerted effort to try and destroy the Tea Party movement by branding it as violent and racist.
LOWRY: Andrew, thanks so much for being with us tonight. Keep up the great work. You’re invaluable.
BREITBART: Thank you very much.
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