Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World

by Andrew Breitbart

In June 2009, I didn’t know much about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). My attitude toward it was a generic conservative’s attitude: I knew that the lack of interest the mainstream media were showing in ACORN—especially with all the accusations leveled against it regarding its illegal voter fraud and ties with the Democratic Party—meant that there had to be something really, truly horrific about it. Whenever there’s smoke and the leftist media aren’t calling 911, that means there’s a huge fire raging out of control somewhere.

Make no mistake: America is in a media war. It is an extension of the Cold War that never ended but shifted to an electronic front. The war between freedom and statism ended geographically when the Berlin Wall fell. But the existential battle never ceased. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the battle simply took a different form. Instead of missiles the new weapon was language and education, and the international left had successfully constructed a global infrastructure to get its message out. Schools. Newspapers. Network news. Art. Music. Film. Television. For decades the left understood the importance of education, art, and messaging. Oprah Winfrey gets it. David Geffen gets it. Bono gets it. President Barack Obama gets it. Even Corey Feldman gets it. But the right doesn’t. For decades the right felt the Pentagon and the political class and simple common sense could win the day. They were wrong. The left does not win its battles in debate. It doesn’t have to. In the twenty-first century, media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything.

If the political left weren’t so joyless, humorless, intrusive, taxing, overtaxing, anarchistic, controlling, rudderless, chaos-prone, pedantic, unrealistic, hypocritical, clueless, politically correct, angry, cruel, sanctimonious, retributive, redistributive, intolerant—and if the political left weren’t hell-bent on expansion of said unpleasantness into all aspects of my family’s life—the truth is, I would not be in your life. If the Democratic Party were run by Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, if it had the slightest vestige of JFK and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, I wouldn’t be on the political map. If the American media were run by biased but not evil Tim Russerts and David Brinkleys, I wouldn’t have joined the fight. Except for about 3,213 people (friends, family, and former acquaintances), you would not know who I am. You would not be reading this book—because I would not have written it. If the college campus weren’t filled with tenured professors like 9/11 apologist Ward Churchill and bullshit departments like Queer Studies, and if the academic framework weren’t being planned out by domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers, I wouldn’t be expanding my Internet media empire to include Big Education. If art wasn’t almost exclusively defined by degradation of cultural norms—unless when promoting an all-knowing “HOPE”-ful leftist leader, I wouldn’t be spraying my Jackson Pollock political/cultural musings on the American New Media cultural canvas. If America’s pop-cultural ambassadors ...

My parents granted me a brilliant middle-class life, one that didn’t overwhelm and lavish spoils on me to the point of absurdity. The house was not filled with objects or celebrities that would cause my friends to envy me, wish they could live at my house, or hang out with our social circle. My parents were also about fifteen years older than some of my friends’ parents, so while my mother was watching Lawrence Welk on television on Saturday nights, one of my friends’ dads rented a limousine so he could hit the Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry concerts in the same night. While my parents’ house had a pool and four bedrooms and a scenic canyon view of West Los Angeles, it couldn’t compete with the beachfront Malibu property that two of my friends at school occupied. And I’m ashamed to admit: those families existed in an ether that became growingly intoxicating to me. Along with my friends’ parents’ elite addresses came original art, celebrity friends, and a very specific brand of liberal politics. Bobby Kennedy, to this crowd, did not just represent a political philosophy, but an aesthetic that started to lure me away from my parents’ simple, grounded nature. That, and those pesky palpitations in my loins. Between the lure of a greater material life and my emerging sexual teen persona, my parents’ chaste, safe haven became less and less appealing, other than as a place to catch some Zzzzs and get three free square meals. And in a gesture of trust, my parents granted me the indep...

My lifestyle began to change as I hit puberty and high school. I recall those years as spent ignoring school as best as possible while spending weekends at the best beaches and private houses, behind gates and tall bushes. I took tennis lessons with Steve Morris, the top tennis pro in Malibu, the same guy who taught Farrah Fawcett, Bruce Jenner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the entire tennis-playing Van Patten family (Joyce, Dick, Vince, Nels, and Jimmy). After one of those lessons, I vividly recall Schwarzenegger, before his ascent into megastardom, literally terrorizing me and my best friend, Larry Solov, by hitting ball after ball as hard as he could at us, to the point where we wailed in the corner and he cackled aloud. Yes, the Governator is one sadistic bastard. And, yes, I voted for him.

The funny thing about sleeping—and this holds true to this day—is that as I would drift into sleep, that’s when the harrowing reminders of what my life had become would visit me. I knew that, at some point, I would have to do an about-face, to change everything. But I didn’t know how, and to be honest, the cons of this lifestyle had yet to outweigh the pros.

My favorite pastime during this four-year phase was to lure my high-school friends down to New Orleans for a weekend, preferably Mardi Gras or Halloween. During those two-to three-day forays, I would afford them the trip of a lifetime, showing them things that they couldn’t imagine, bewildering them with the euphoria of the 24/7 surreal New Orleans lifestyle. During these benders, I would try to convince myself I was having fun, too. But when I would take them to the airport to send them off, where they would thank me for the most spectacularly wild weekend of their lives, as they got on the plane, I’d feel the deepest despair. And under my breath, I’d say, “Take me with you.” Did I mention that I liked a lot of the people that I was at school with? Some were funny. A couple of the ladies even let me be inside of them. So don’t get me wrong. My time was not completely misused. It just wasn’t productive in any way, shape, or form. And at heart, I knew it.

I was beginning to understand that my self-worth was in direct proportion to how hard I applied myself to productive pursuits. My values were returning from exile.

I was still a default liberal. Around this time, I watched the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings with the alacrity of a boxing fan at the Ali-Frazier fight. It was a major media event and a political heavyweight match. The way that the media had billed it, the Rocky Balboa was Anita Hill. She was the protagonist. The only people in Clarence Thomas’s corner were members of the Republican Party. And to me, they were the scolds, the hypocrites, the town elders in Footloose, the people who represented the people who would give over their hard-earned money to Jim and Tammy Bakker in exchange for eternal salvation. My perspective on the political process was an inch deep. But my desire to see Clarence Thomas’s blood was immense.

I was expecting Hill to deliver a relentless barrage of accusations and evidence about a man whose behavior around women was professionally unacceptable. I expected lurid details of intimidation, coercion, and harassment. But Hill and her allies described a workplace and a boss-employee relationship that seemed utterly unremarkable. To listen to the media commentators affirm the outrage of Democratic female harpies, parroting the overwrought cries of Anita as channeled by this driven core of Democratic officials, was infuriating—it was so obviously unjust. (Leading the questioning, by the way: Senators Howard Metzenbaum, Pat Leahy, Joe Biden, and Teddy Kennedy.)

I may have been a Democrat. I may have been a liberal. But I was not stupid. Something was very wrong here. The melodrama did not come close to matching the lack of evidence that was being presented. They were accusing Thomas of spotting a pubic hair on a soda can, o...

At the same time, it was impossible for me to not recognize that Clarence Thomas’s being black was part of the story. How in hell could white Americans Leahy, Biden, and Metzenbaum, let alone former KKK grand pooh-bah Robert Byrd and Chappaquiddick’s very own Ted Kennedy, so arrogantly excoriate this man whose personal narrative from sharecropper’s grandson to Supreme Court nominee embodied the American dream? A narrative that would send a clear signal to African-Americans that anything is possible in this country? Why were so many white Democrats in the media and in the political class working in concert to assassinate this man’s character and to stop that dream in its tracks? During this media feeding frenzy my eyes were opened, perhaps for the first time, to the fact that something was awry in American political and media life. What secret bit did Kennedy and Biden know about the NAACP, ABC, NBC, and CBS that they could grill a black man on such weak charges and know that those politically correct entities would not savage them? If the tables were turned and Clarence Thomas were a liberal Democrat, the NAACP wouldn’t have waited a second. Somehow, these white male senators of privilege knew that they could get away with it. My sympathy for Thomas was utter and complete. I wanted to stop the hearings. I wanted him to be issued public, formal apologies. I naïvely expected that the press would do the job of forcing those apologies. I could understand how the mainstream med...

I did not leave the Clarence Thomas hearings a Republican. I did not leave the hearings an originalist. But I did leave the hearings deeply cynical of media that I had thought were neutral and a Democratic Party that I’d believed was guided by principle. This was the beginning of the end of the self-deception that I was like everyone else around me. It would take a few more years to get there—to discover that I was a conservative—but this was the exact point where I realized that it was not just that I disagreed with the Democratic Party but, more important, that the media were its dominant partner in crime. The national disgrace that was the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, for me, changed everything.

This is not the point in the story where we cue the montage of success. Based on the available evidence—that the only tangible skill set I had was that I could make people laugh, and that I was in Los Angeles—I took the first available job in Ho...

And in my car was AM radio. My habit came about accidentally. My devotion to KROQ FM and San Diego’s 91X, trailblazing alternative rock stations, began to fade with the invasion of the grunge rock movement. Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, Blind Melon, Screaming Trees were replacing The Cure, New Order, The English Beat, Echo and the Bunnymen. It was like watching your youth get cancelled. And my hatred of grunge was visceral. The forced thrift-shop flannel look belied Los Angeles’s temperate weather. Who were these whiny, suicidal freaks? I didn’t want to know, I just wanted them off my car radio. So in an act of absolute and pure desperation, I flipped the dial to AM.

One day I asked him why he had Rush Limbaugh’s book The Way Things Ought to Be on his shelf. I asked him, “Why would you have a book by this guy?” And Orson said, “Have you ever listened to him?” I said yes, of course, even though I never had. I was convinced to the core of my being that Rush Limbaugh was a Nazi, anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti–all things decent. Without berating me for disagreeing with him, Orson simply suggested that I listen to him again. While I was listening to Jim Rome and Howard Stern, the intensity of the 1992 election cycle warranted that I switch the frequency over to hearing about the horse race. This is where my rendezvous with destiny begins. I turned on KFI 640 AM to listen to evil personified from 9 a.m. to noon. Indeed, my goal was to derive pleasure from the degree of evil I found in Rush Limbaugh. I was looking forward to a jovial discussion with Orson to confirm how right I was. One hour turned into three. One listening session into a week’s worth. And next thing I knew, I was starting to doubt my preprogrammed self. I was still a Democrat. I was still a liberal. But after listening for months while putting thousands of miles on my car, I couldn’t believe that I once thought this man was a Nazi or anything close. While I couldn’t yet accept the premise that he was speaking my language, I marveled at how he could take a breaking news story and offer an entertaining and clear analysis that was like nothing I had ever seen on television, ...

While Professor Limbaugh provided me an understanding of the architecture of how politics and media relate, Professor Prager provided me articulation of the ethical framework my parents had lived out. I saw that my parents were fundamentally right and that those ecstatically exuberant and audaciously fun New Orleans years came at a great cost. I knew that I was estranged from my parents’ belief system and that a permanently libertine lifestyle was no substitute for a clean conscience, work that felt satisfying, and a decent night’s rest.

My AM professors taught me to ask questions, to use the Socratic method. And I started to ask everyone around me some basic questions, but they didn’t want to engage or couldn’t engage in basic civil debate. The person that made this new pursuit of intellectual engagement invigorating and sexy was Camille Paglia. Her book, Sexual Personae, made me realize how little I really had learned in college. Her articles and assorted writings began to open my mind up to the fraud that is higher education in America. The origins of the problems in the media and in Hollywood begin in the sacrosanct, stultifyingly politically correct world of academia. It seemed to me that while Professor Limbaugh was focusing on the corrupt relationship between politics and the media and Professor Paglia was focusing on the corrupt relationship between politics and academia, I was beginning to hyperfocus, as we ADD types are apt to do, on the corrupt relationship between Hollywood and politics, and how academia, the media, and the political class conspicuously either ignore or denigrate all the ideas, authors, and voices that were now my lifeblood.

“George W. Bush,” I said to John, “is making a huge mistake with his ‘uniter not a divider’ line.” Using his lieutenant governor—Bob Bullock, a Democrat—as a campaign prop in order to demonstrate his goodwill was a mistake. Establishing the standard that he was the good guy who could work with the other side? A mistake. “It’s a mistake because they’re going to use that ‘uniter not a divider’ line as a means to mock him and pillory him, undercut his affability and his frat boy good nature, his charming-nickname-for-everybody-in-the-room style,” I told John. “They’re not going to grant him his legitimacy; they’re not going to grant him his humanity. They’re going to take his personable friendliness—his biggest skill set—and turn it against him. They’re going to try to destroy George W. Bush. We are about to witness one of the greatest assaults on an individual in the history of the country.”

Even before Bush stepped into office, the left used Florida as its first launching pad. The Gore people picked their targets: Bush, Dick Cheney, Katherine Harris. Mark Fabiani, a Gore adviser, told the New York Times candidly: “We needed an enemy.”1 It was raw hysteria plus total media conformity. It didn’t matter that Bush won Florida by every possible count, and it didn’t matter that even the New York Times and USA Today and every other major publication ran stories tabulating the “uncounted” votes and recognizing Bush’s victory (on page 16B, by and large). What mattered were the front-page stories emphasizing that Gore had won, Bush had stolen the election, and the Supreme Court was in the pocket of the big corporations that wanted their man in the White House.

Then 9/11 happened. September 11 obviously changed everything. It stopped the left from bleeding the country dry with its cynical partisanship veiled as “objective” and “neutral” coverage and commentary. The liberal model of separating Americans into different categories as a means toward empowering group leaders to tell their followers what to think, what to believe, and how to fight everyone else was over. They couldn’t pit Americans against each other anymore, and that scared the hell out of them, because that was how they’d gotten themselves elected for decades. September 11 took the pendulum and swung it away from polarization and toward unity; it brought America back to its natural state of E Pluribus Unum for a very short time, a time in which even Democrats were awkwardly forced to hold hands with Republicans and sing “God Bless America.” Nothing was clearer to me at that time than the artificiality of the feeling, the fact that Democrats were caught in an unpredicted, unpredictable moment in which their tactics for gaining and holding power and manipulating situations were frozen solid. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to handle things, because it had been a lifetime since the honest Democratic Party was taken over by the far-left operatives. Into that void stepped George W. Bush. He acted as a real leader, and he brought the country back together. He was no-nonsense, and he wasn’t the cowboy the Complex had made him out to be. “When I take action...

The Democratic Party, which had put on a face of TLC moderation during the Clinton years, which had been headed up by the greatest triangulator and faux-moderate in American history, had painted itself into a corner. It was one thing for Americans to embrace the soft socialism of the Democratic Party and their hatred for the American military when we were in the context of a peace dividend, when foreign policy was considered of secondary importance. It was okay during the 1990s that the Democratic Party had an obvious disposition against a strong foreign policy, and that but for Joe Lieberman and a very few others, the people in the Democratic leadership were primarily motivated by concerns of “social justice” and economic equality—socialism in everything but name—and that they wanted to decrease funding for the military because they were naïve doves. But when 9/11 happened, the Democratic Party’s position became untenable—it granted the Republican Party a default dominant position in perpetuity if national security and terrorism were going to be the top story of our time.

I remember looking at Susie and saying, “This is going to be the resurgence of the professoriate and the Baby Boomer left. This is what they’ve been waiting for. This is going to be their last stand to fulfill their self-appointed ’60s revolutionary mission.” They had been gathering. They had maintained their existence within the protective walls of college campuses. Their gray ponytails got more gray as time went on, but they never shed their belief systems. If you walked through the hallways of UCLA and looked at the professors’ and lecturers’ doors, you would have known they were still true believers in the 1960s world, and that they had allies in positions of power in unions all over the country and in Hollywood. These were people who had never met an antiwar storyline they didn’t love. An alliance of preexisting, seemingly marginal, left-of-center remnants of a bygone era simply walked through the front door and took over the Democratic Party. The marginal political world of the alt weeklies that I used to read had taken center stage.

Hollywood is a leftist colony. It was easy for Hollywood people to be the first “brave voices” to say “politically unpopular” things on soapboxes because their jobs were protected, because their bosses believed what they believed in. After 1972, in which Richard Nixon won and George McGovern lost (a fact Hollywood never really accepted—the late New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael said she couldn’t believe Nixon had won, since everyone she knew had voted for McGovern), America sent a message to the left: we’re not interested. So Hollywood decided to send a message to the country. The natural aging process was culling out patriotic Hollywood, with John Wayne and Gary Cooper dying and Jimmy Stewart coming to the end of his career, and the paradigms of the Western and the pro-war movies were giving way to the anti-Vietnam consensus. The counterculture took a foothold in the ’60s in Hollywood, with the radical leftists inside the business taking over completely. They didn’t just take over the business—they took over the art, infusing movies and television with antiheroes instead of heroes: Easy Rider instead of Casablanca, Midnight Cowboy instead of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

The Founders of our country were realistic men who understood human nature, who recognized that people weren’t infinitely changeable, that they had certain traits born into them. In The Federalist #51, James Madison famously said that men were not angels—that they were ambitious but rational, and that we therefore needed to construct a system of government that pitted ambition against ambition. John Adams knew government had to be limited, since “it is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.” Thomas Jefferson agreed.

The Founders understood human nature because they were part of the great Western tradition of philosophy and literature and history. They valued their heritage, because it sprang from basic knowledge about what human beings are. That was why the Founders were so ardent about instilling in future generations moral teaching, virtuous teaching—men were not naturally good and needed moral education.

To sum up, the Founders’ view was this: human nature is variable and requires training in virtue; no government should be given too much power, or the people comprising that government will use the power in the worst ways possible; individual freedom, when used within the boundaries of morality, is the highest good. The Constitution was written as a living testimony to this view.

Critical theory was exactly the material we were taught at Tulane. It was, quite literally, a theory of criticizing everyone and everything everywhere. It was an attempt to tear down the social fabric by using all the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, political science, etc.); it was an infinite and unending criticism of the status quo, adolescent rebellion against all established social rules and norms.

Leftist assassins like Max Blumenthal, a one-trick hit man, have tried to label me and many of my allies as racists. I don’t let them get away with it. I don’t just call them out, I make sure that my righteous indignation registers on the Richter scale. I don’t pull out my record on civil rights or my black friends. I simply point out that what they’re doing is pure Alinsky and that it has no basis in fact or reality, and that they’re showing themselves to be racists in their own right by citing race every time they meet someone with whom they disagree.

I noticed that in many pieces by the “objective” mainstream media, I was described as “ultraconservative” or “überconservative.” But I bet these people can’t even tell you what my position is on most political issues. Were they intentionally marginalizing me by calling me über-and ultraconservative without any clue that I voted for Proposition 19, which was an attempt to legalize marijuana in California? Were they labeling me in order to discredit me without even finding out that my agnostic sensibilities cause me to waver on the tectonic issue of gay marriage? And then I realized that it didn’t matter how they labeled me. At the end of the day, I know I’m not an aspiring political pundit, that I don’t consider my voice any greater than my neighbor’s voice, that my opinion on gay marriage is no more important than that of someone who is gay and is in a committed relationship, and that my thoughts on marijuana legalization are no more important than those of an orthodox Jew who has a deep problem with illegal drugs. I understood that if anybody thinks that my mission is to become another person you see on TV or hear on radio pontificating “It’s my way or the highway” on such matters, they’ve completely missed my point.

*Tom Wolfe famously wrote about this elitist poseurism in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, which, if you haven’t read it, is a must.