Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World

by Andrew Breitbart

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.

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. I call it the Democrat-Media Complex—and I am at war to gain back control of the American narrative. I have allies, veterans who have helped pave the way. Rush Limbaugh and the phenomenon of conservative talk radio are only twenty years old. So desperate was the right for an outlet to express itself that tens of millions now get their information from what was the formerly moribund AM dial.

Please understand that Rush Limbaugh is reviled less for what he says than because he shot the first shot of the New Media war over twenty years ago when he turned AM into the meeting place for America’s massive conservative underground. Because of Rush there are countless imitators influencing large amounts of people acros...

Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report were met with relentless attacks from the mainstream media class and the political left during the Clinton years—not because Matt was an aggregator of news stories or a conservative muckraker, but because he created a new front in the long-standing culture war—the Internet. History will look upon Matt Drudge as the Internet’s true media visionary. Millions of so-called bloggers write, report, upload their stories online, and influence the national and international political landscape because of the advent of the very liberating and democratic World Wide Web. And Fox News and its visionary creator Roger Ailes are relentlessly attacked by the same forces—not because Fox News reports the other side of the story, but because it showed that the other side of the story reflects the point of view of more people than CNN. The constellation of A...

Now 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, of asking Hill on a date. There was no “there” there. It was ridiculous. I was perfectly aware at the time that the Democrats were motivated by the abortion issue. And at the time, I was pro-choice. So when Thomas’s inquisitors pierced the sanctity of the “right to privacy” that is the hallmark of left-wing constitutional rights, flaunting that they had discovered through illicit means that Thomas had rented pornography, my mental anguish turned physical. I writhed in agony and actually threw a shoe at the television set. 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.

I’m at war with the mainstream media because they portray themselves as objective observers of reality when they’re no such thing—they’re partisan “critical theory” hacks who think they can destroy everything America stands for by standing on the sidelines and sniping at patriotic Americans with all their favorite slurs.

They use all the weapons they have at their disposal to intimidate every one of us and force us to shut up and not to speak our minds. Their days of doing this are over. They’re dying because they hate much of America and what it has historically stood for. Then they moan that no one wants to consume their product, saying it’s their business model that has just sold them short. News flash to the media: It’s not your business model that sucks. It’s you that suck.

I watched with increasing trepidation the ultimate attack on Bush that I had previously predicted to friends and family. I watched the collective effect of the Hollywood class’s reaction to 9/11, which consisted of splitting the country when we were united. And I decided to stop fighting behind coattails and to start fighting in my own name. That’s why, in 2004, I wrote Hollywood, Interrupted with Mark Ebner, a no-holds-barred underground Hollywood journalist. I wrote it out of the pure outrage welling up in me as I saw the Hollywood left filling the void in the Democratic Party after 9/11, normalizing the most extreme scorched-earth measures against a wartime president. I wrote it because of Sean Penn, and Martin Sheen, and all these radicals who had clean haircuts and wore three-thousand-dollar suits and used the power of their image to legitimize the profoundly damaging metamorphosis the Democratic Party was undergoing—the transition from the party of Joe Lieberman to the party of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean. The biggest point I wanted to make was one I’m still making: Hollywood is more important than Washington. It can’t be overstated how important this message is: pop culture matters. What happens in front of the cameras on a soundstage at the Warner Bros. lot often makes more difference to the fate of America than what happens in the back rooms of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill. That book covered everything from the sexual deviance of...

But along with those realizations came another realization. I began to see the fundamental flaw in the left’s scorched-earth tactics—they can only tear down, not build up. And it hit me that the tearing down of The Other wasn’t enough. Every time I did a Fox News hit where I attacked Michael Moore, no matter how valid the attack, no matter how much I had raised my fledgling Q rating, I felt emasculated and cheapened because I was only tearing down, not building. I felt the inherent lack that resides in the right, which was so removed from the cultural process because it had self-removed, abdicated its responsibility to be a steward of the culture, handed over the entire means of representing the United States abroad and teaching Americans about America at home to the hard left.

started creating a Rolodex, going out to lunch with the secret Hollywood conservatives, putting them in contact with each other. People who you would never believe in a million years are conservative, who create a left-of-center image to get work, but who despise what they have to do to get a job and long for the day true ideological freedom comes to Hollywood. Even the left has convinced itself that these people don’t exist. But they do exist, and there are huge numbers of them. Thousands of them, in every nook and cranny of the industry. You see them on-screen. You see them in the credits. You see them everywhere from the grips and the cameramen to the biggest directors and stars in town. And if they are introduced to each other, they will begin to break the stranglehold the left has on Hollywood. I was helping introduce them, helping them make connections. That was the first step.

The Huffington Post was great for another reason, too: the creation of Greg Gutfeld. Greg was allowed in by the Huffington Post editors as a token right-winger, and he was attacking the left from within with the most clever, insidious tactics ever. He was Jon Stewart–ing them, Stephen Colbert–ing them, and they hadn’t even caught on. He made them crazy, challenged them, teased them, and confused the hell out of them. While writing for the HuffPo, Greg was consistently the biggest driver to the site, bar none. Yet he was also the writer most out of sync with the site’s audience—that’s how talented he is. Of course, Greg now hosts Red Eye on Fox News.

If you tested the philosophical DNA of the Huffington Post and the philosophical DNA of the New York Times, it was obvious to anyone that they were identical twins. They were fighting the same battles, and the bylines at both places were of people who went to the same schools, married the same kind of people, voted the same way. They were all part of the same incestuous, elitist orgy. They were all part of the power structure of Hollywood, Washington, and New York. They were all from the same group of people who made tons of money, vacationed in the nicest places, flew first class—or private, and then dictated to the rest of America how to live “sustainable” lives. It didn’t matter how big Thomas Friedman’s house was or Al Gore’s vacation home was—they all felt the need to lecture Americans on how to behave sexually, what to eat, how to fly, where to shop… and what’s more, they agreed on the answers to all of those questions.

When you look at the history of the Soviet Union, what you see is the conversion of hundreds of millions to a corrupt and insidious worldview via the overpowering propaganda of communism. Yes, they used force. But they also used every means at their disposal to control the culture, the everyday lives, the very thoughts of their citizens.

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 ...

Adam Smith’s capitalism, of course, was based on the same principles, not the pure greed and selfishness Michael Moore or Barack Obama would have us believe. Smith knew that capitalism—the exchange of the products of one’s best efforts for the products...

To sum up, the Founders’ view was this: human nature is variable and requires training in virtue; no government should be given too muc...

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 wa...

The Founders’ realistic view of human nature and call for limited government and individual liberty found its opponent in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, later, Karl Marx. Rousseau thought that people were naturally good and were corrupted only by the development of the surrounding society (he himself was not naturally good, fathering five children out of wedlock and abandoning them all to orphanages). He also thought that modern society, created as it was to protect property rights and life, had destroyed the natural communism that prevailed before the advent of society. To people like Rousseau, the solution to the evils of the current society was the creation of a new “social contract,” one based on t...

Karl Marx’s ideas picked up where Rousseau’s left off. Unlike the Founders or even Rousseau, he didn’t care much about human nature—for him, human nature didn’t really exist. In fact, he went further: human nature was produced by surrounding society. If human nature was to be...

The idea was basically that capitalism carried the seeds of its own destruction—capitalism (thesis) would be faced with the wealth gap that capitalism creates (antithesis), and that wealth gap would be solved by socialism/communism (synthesis). This is what Marx meant in his famous statement in The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” In the final conflict, the workers would win and a communist synthesis would be established. Happy day!

President Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore. Even though Teddy was a Republican, he was no conservative—he was a “Progressive.” Progressivism was a strain in American thought that merged the Hegelian dialectic with Marxism,

basically, it was soft Marxism without the class struggle.

Progressivism, you see, was active. And that was the thing about Teddy—he always had to keep himself busy and powerful. Like an early-twentieth-century Barack Obama, Teddy slammed those who disagreed with him, characterizing typical American self-reliance as selfishness.

Both Roosevelt and Wilson were far less concerned about the rights of individuals or the value of republicanism; it was the job of Great Leaders to hand down good governance. They thought that great decisions should be made on high by men of high thought, and that the dirty process of democracy just blocked any chance at true change. This philosophy paved the way for FDR, and it echoes all the way down to Obama.

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.

Critical theory, says Horkheimer, is “suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as those are understood in the present order.”8 So if you liked ice cream better than cake, or thought a hammer might be more useful than a screwdriver in a particular situation, you were speaking on behalf of the status quo.

The real idea behind all of this was to make society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless. Critical theory does not create; it only destroys, as Horkheimer himself openly stated, “Above all… critical...

Well, all of these boring and bleating philosophers might have faded into oblivion as so many Marxist theorists have, but the rise of Adolf Hitler prevented that. With Hitler’s rise, they had to flee (virtually all of them—Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, Fromm—were of Jewish descent). And they had no place to go.

The United States’ tradition of freedom and liberty, its openness to outside ideas, and our highest value, freedom of speech, ended up making all America vulnerable to those who would exploit those ideals. We welcomed the Frankfurt School. We accepted them with open arms. They took full advantage. They walked right into our cultural institutions, and as they started to put in place their leadership, their language, and their lexicon, too many chose to ignore them. And the most dangerous thing you can do with a driven leftist intellectual clique is to ignore it.

We always feel that our incredible traditions of freedom and liberty will convert those who show up on our shores, that they will appreciate the way of life we have created—isn’t that why they wanted to come here in the first place?

We can’t imagine anyone coming here, experiencing the true wonder that is living in this country, and wanting to destroy that. But that’s exactly...

These were not happy people looking for a new lease on life. When they moved to California, they simply couldn’t deal with the change of ...

They had moved to heaven on earth from Nazi Germany and apparently could not handle the fun, the sun, and the roaring good times. Ingratitude is not strong enough a word to describe these hideous malcontents.

Brecht and his ilk were the Kurt Cobains of their day: massively depressed, nihilistic people who wore full suits in eighty-degree weather while living in a house by the beach.

Members of the Frankfurt School had some American allies—men who had accepted the Roosevelt/Wilson synthesis of Hegel and Marx, and who were now looking for the next step. The Frankfurt School had been sending mailers out to prominent fellow-traveler sociologists in the United States for some years and creating connections with them. Meanwhile, Columbia University’s Sociology department was dying. They needed new blood, and they liked what they saw in the Frankfurt School.

But all of these major contributors to the Frankfurt School of thought paled in comparison to Herbert Marcuse, the founder of the “New Left.” Marcuse was a former student of future Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, the father of “deconstruction,” a process by which every thought or writing from the past had to be examined and torn down as an outgrowth of its social milieu. Heidegger wasn’t shy about his intentions;

It wasn’t so much the freshness of Marcuse’s message that made the difference (it wasn’t a fresh message) as his timing—the kids brought up with Fromm and Freud and Spock were coming of age. The misplaced guilt of the Greatest Generation brought forth a new generation free to embrace Marcuse. While similar philosophies of sex had failed in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, by the 1950s the men and women who had suffered through the Great Depression and fought in World War II were determined to raise privileged kids who would never have to actually fight for their country or work for their food. The result was a group of kids ready and able to participate in the sexual revolution promised by the Frankfurt School. Marcuse excused sexual promiscuity as the fulfillment of the need for the people to rise up against Western civilization and to free themselves of the sexual repression it created. Not a hard sell for teenagers.

Marcuse carried his “critical theory” in another destructive direction as well: while repeating the Marxist trope that the workers of the world would eventually unite—he saw the third world’s “anti-colonial” movements as evidence that Marx was right—he recognized that in the United States there would be no such uprising by the working class. He therefore needed a different set of interest groups to tear down capitalism using his critical theory. And he found those groups in the racial, ethnic, and sexual groups that hated the old order. These victimized interest groups rightly opposed all the beauties of Western civilization “with all the defiance, and the hatred, and the joy of rebellious

victims, defining their own humanity against the definitions of the masters.”19

Marcuse’s mission was to dismantle American society by using diversity and “multiculturalism” as crowbars with which to pry the structure apart, piece by piece. He wanted to set blacks in opposition to whites, set all “victim groups” in opposition to the society at large. Marcuse’s theory of victim groups as the new proletariat, combined with Horkheimer’s critical theory, found an outlet in academia, where it became the basis for the post-structural movement—Gender Studies, LGBT/“Queer” Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, etc. All of these “Blank Studies” brazenly describe their mission as tearing down traditional Judeo-Christian values and the accepted traditions of Western culture, and ...

But he still wasn’t winning in America. Marcuse had a big, big problem: America’s founding ideology is still far sexier than that of the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility. Even if Marcuse was promising unending sex, drugs, and rock and roll, most Americans were more interested in living in liberty with their families, in a society that values virtue and hard work rather than promiscuity and decadence. So Marcuse had to find a way to defy the opposition. He found it in what he termed “repressive tolerance.” In 1965, Marcuse wrote an essay by that name in which he argued that tolerance was good only if nondominating ideas were allowed to flourish—and that nondominating ideas could flourish only if dominating ideas were shut down.

In other words, if you disagreed with Marcuse, you should be forcefully shut up, according to Marcuse. This made political debate very convenient for him and his allies. This totalitarianism is now standard practice on college campuses, in the media, and in Hollywood—the very places that the Frankfurt School sought to control.

The First Amendment—the same instrument that allowed the Frankfurt School to land on our shores and express their pernicious ideas in freedom—was now curtailed by those who had benefitted from it. Marcuse called for a tyranny of the minority, since the tyranny of the majority could not be overcome without a total shutdown. There’s another name for Marcuse’s “partisan tolerance”: Political Correctness.

And so Marxism came stealthily to our shores, squatted here, planted its roots, and grew like a weed—all before we even noticed it. It happened at the university level and at the governmental level and at the media level. We didn’t notice because we couldn’t read the rhetorical garbage these jokers were spewing, and we didn’t think it was important—“Our Constitution survived a revolution and a Civil War and two World Wars. Why should we worry about a few German eggheads?”

The foundations of the Complex had been built. But we still couldn’t see the Complex itself—the Complex was hidden under paragraphs of obscure text and in college curricula at places like Tulane University, under the unlikely auspices of “American Studies.” Talk about a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It all seemed so benign, and we figured that if college students went off and had sex and did drugs and engaged in teenage rebellious decadence, oh well, they’d eventually come back to the Constitution, just the way their parents had. We slept while the other side armed, and while we snoozed they secretly stole away our defensive weaponry—our allegiance to the Constitution and to freedom of speech and opinion.

The line was becoming clear. Marx and Hegel had paved the way for the Progressives, who in turn had paved the way for the Frankfurt School, who had then attacked the American way of life by pushing “cultural Marxism” through “critical theory.”