If Breitbart recruits well-known figures to head local brands, as the Huffington Post has done, its path may be smoother still. In Britain, alongside Mr Kassam, it appointed James Delingpole, a conservative polemicist who writes in the Spectator, a 180-year-old right-of-centre magazine. Things are going well: the site’s audience has grown by 135% year on year, to 15m monthly page views in July, meaning it has a bigger reach than the Spectator’s own website. Not bad for a firm recently called a “bunch of nuts” by a spokesman for Mitt Romney, a former presidential candidate. The business of outrage, led in the early days by Rush Limbaugh, a right-wing talk-show host, and then perfected by Fox News, may well become another ubiquitous American export.
