Breitbart Continues to Undermine His Case Against Shirley Sherrod

A Twitter user named Deirdre Flannigan posted the following comment on Twitter:


Breitbart responded with a barrage of tweets with a common theme:
"One of your own kind" is a reference to comments Shirley Sherrod made in the edited clips Breitbart sent out that portrayed Sherrod as a racist. In fact, it is a key to Breitbart's sad defense in Sherrod's lawsuit against him.

Breitbart claimed that he didn't smear Sherrod because he included the redemptive portion of her story on his first post. The Breitbart story hinges on the sentence of his original post where he says, "Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help." This, he alleges, is what shows that he included the "redemptive arc" of her story.

However, the full quote from Breitbart was actually as follows:

In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement.

In other words, Breitbart's statement that Sherrod sent the farmer to get help was not intended to defend Sherrod against the charge of racism, but rather to bolster his claims based on the edited videos that Sherrod was racist because she sent him to get help from "one of his own kind." It was not "part of a redemptive arc," but rather an extension of his original smear. And the fact that Breitbart claims he'd like to "send people back to their own kind" in Twitter arguments just further supports the obvious fact that this part of his essay was meant as an attack, not as a defense.

And, in fact, the actual redemptive portion of Sherrod's tale, which Breitbart did not include in his original attack, was not when she sent the farmer to a white lawyer, but rather when she personally went to extraordinary lengths to help the farmer:

SHERROD: So, everything was going along fine -- I'm thinking he's being taken care of by the white lawyer, then they lift the injunction against USDA in May of '87 for two weeks and he was one of 13 farmers in Georgia who received a foreclosure notice. He called me. I said, well, go on and make an appointment at the lawyer. Let me know when it is and I'll meet you there.

So we met at the lawyer's office on the day they had given him. And this lawyer sat there -- he had been paying this lawyer, y'all. That's what got me. He had been paying the lawyer since November, and this was May. And the lawyer sat there and looked at him and said, "Well, y'all are getting old. Why don't you just let the farm go?" I could not believe he said that, so I said to the lawyer -- I told him, I can't believe you said that. I said: It's obvious to me that he cannot file a Chapter 12 bankruptcy to stop this foreclose, you have to file an 11. And the lawyer said to me, I'll do whatever you say -- whatever you think -- that's the way he put it. But he's paying him. He wasn't paying me any money. You know, so he said -- the lawyer said he would work on it.

And then, about seven days before that man would have been sold at the courthouse steps, the farmer called me and said the lawyer wasn't doing anything. And that's when I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think so to try to see -- help me find the lawyer who would handle this.

It's pretty funny to watch Breitbart work himself into a frenzy trying to defend his indefensible smears on Sherrod.