Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World

by Andrew Breitbart

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.