The Darby Principle

The terror at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, was palpable. It was a Wednesday night, and the then-governor of Alaska was on stage, addressing a horde of thousands who hooted their approval as the governor delivered the words: “commu-ni-ty or-ga-niz-er?” Thus began the next five years of United States’ special blend of spitting-mad oppositional politics.

That same week, across town from the RNC, there was another political shift happening. This one was at a microlevel; this one was undercover. It was the reeducation of ex-radical leftist Brandon Darby, the same man who claims to have stemmed the threat of activist violence from the radical left at the convention.

In 2008, Darby was a big name in the radical left’s social justice community. He rose to prominence for helping to organize and get relief services to the ignored, battered residents of New Orleans’ lower ninth ward following Hurricane Katrina. In the middle aughts, Darby proudly held aloft the revolutionary ideals, and an impassioned hatred of the federal government, which made him a star to a certain breed of disaffected, passionate youth several years his junior. Ahead of the 2008 conventions, Darby gathered close several young Austin-based protesters and tucked them firmly under his wing. Darby and his band of young radicals road-tripped together to the RNC in St. Paul; a few days later, the group left town with two fewer activists than they counted in their number when they came.

That, as it turns out, is because Darby was responsible for the arrest of those two activists. He had been working as an FBI informant and had tipped off the agents to the house where protesters had made eight Molotov cocktails. After Darby’s name came out as the informant, the (leftist) activist community disavowed him; and he disavowed them right back. Since that rupture, Darby has taken up with Tea Party groups, and has embraced every attempt to paint the whole of the left, from Barack Obama on out, with the same tired brush.

Darby is the subject of a new documentary, Informant, released on September 13. The film attempts to explain what happened during that week five years ago. It includes interviews and testimonials from the young people Darby helped get arrested, the broader activist community, and journalists who covered the story in depth. Most believe that without Darby’s role in the episode—urging the activists to be macho tough—those eight Molotov cocktails would never have been made in the first place. The activists, et al., insist that without Darby’s prodding, they wouldn’t have considered putting the homemade explosives to use. Darby, unsurprisingly, disputes these claims. He says that he saved lives. Terrorism charges were filed against the two young activists and the charges were successfully prosecuted.

The film itself is beside the point—though, the blurry reenactment shots performed by Darby proved a bit much—except to the extent it reveals how Darby, and his new cohort of conservative friends, describe their political development over time.

To hear them tell it, Darby came to the radical left out of a pure, altruistic desire to help people, as well as a clear philosophy that the federal government is an imperialist, racist institution whose primary purpose is criminalizing the dissent of the less fortunate. Several years later, however, Darby, like many before him, became disenchanted with the far left. He came to believe there were too many apologists for violence within its ranks. As a result, he decided to go undercover with the FBI to disrupt “plots”—in which he initially riled up and then called in stings on leftist and anarchist communities. After the fallout from the activists’ arrest, Darby said he took some time for deep reflection. He decided he was over the leftists. What’s more, he discovered that he’s a political conservative, who truly believes that leftist thought, in any form, will give way to chaos.

But what if Darby’s dramatic political paradigm shift wasn’t a shift at all? Maybe there was a more obvious, and prevalent, archetype unveiled during that week in St. Paul. Darby might be one of those classic characters who has minimal political principles, but a strong sense of self. This is the person who moves across the political spectrum toward whichever political faction will pay the most deference to him at any given time.

Put another way, Darby was simply an opportunist trying to hide his vulnerabilities. After all, as a young man, Darby was a bit unmoored until he came to the attention of the activist community post-Katrina. It was when he could no longer stand the drudgery and chaos of the left’s vision of “horizontal leadership” that he became unstuck, turned to the FBI, and then, eventually, toward Andrew Breitbart and the Tea Party, who worshipped him as a hero.

Indeed, Darby’s story runs roughly parallel to the less dramatic rise of Breitbart, his late benefactor and mentor. Breitbart’s journey began from a more apolitical place, but his rise to prominence came after he grew tired of the rhetoric spewed by coastal leftists. Embracing fame, he threw himself into the arms of an adoring community of right wingers. They rapturously listened to him rail against both liberal elites and lefty activists, Barack Obama and Occupy Wall Street all in the same breath.

What is so odd, even pitiful, about the political legacy Breitbart left to similar-minded mentees such as Darby is that developing a political philosophy was never their central organizing principle; attention, adoration, and acceptance always was. Once Darby may have understood that there was little connection between the Democratic executive of the United States government and his activist buddies from the lower ninth ward, but now he’s feigning ignorance. That’s just another respect in which Darby has proven the type of political figure who tells whichever audience whatever it wants to hear.