Which led me to my next mission: finding as many people as I could who were right of center in Hollywood, and putting them in touch with one another, building an underground social network. It became an obsession—one that powerful people in the industry started to lead.
I 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 next step was exposing the left for what it truly was. That couldn’t be done by simply pointing them out. It had to be done with their consent, with their input. It required a near-magic confluence of events in order to happen.
And it happened.
At the exact moment in my life when I was recognizing the strength of my antileftism, my anticommunism… at the exact point when I was seeing that my emotions and theories were unintentionally driving me toward an accidental “culture-warrior” status… at the exact juncture when I was realizing that the most brutal, evil force I could imagine wasn’t Al Qaeda or radical Islam (at least you know where they’re coming from, the brutality of their mission and their anti-Western, anticlassical, liberal hatred), but the Complex surrounding me 24/7 in the form of attractive people making millions of dollars whose moral relativism and historical revisionism and collective cultural nihilism were putting them in the same boat as the martyrs of radical Islam rather than red-state Americans… at the exact time when I was undergoing the fundamental recognition that my neighbors in West Los Angeles were acting to undermine national cohesion in a time of war, which put me in a perennial state of psychic dissonance… at exactly that point, I got a phone call from Arianna Huffington.
“Do you have any ideas for a website?” she asked.
Now, by this point in our tale, Arianna Huffington had shifted her political viewpoint and was in league with the very people I had grown to oppose. How that happened is surely another story. But when that group of people came to me with Arianna as their spearhead, I saw that it was a unique and dangerous opportunity.
I approached my peers on the right with my idea, and they loved it. The idea was simple: “What,” I said, “if we can get the collective left that we have dinner with, cocktail parties with, the left that talks crazy in private but only expresses itself at the Daily Kos under pseudonyms—what if we can get them all to put their names next to their crazy ideas? What if we can make it a one-stop shop for exposing liberals for who they are, and forcing them to stand by their positions?”
I presented the idea to Arianna from a different standpoint, of course. I told her she should set up a salon for like-minded thinkers to express their views. And Arianna loved it, too.
I went in with dual purposes. While the Huffington Post in theory served Arianna’s and the left’s goals of creating a battlefront where they could fight their battles, it served my ulterior purpose of creating preparation for talk radio and cable news, where everyone could see what lunacies constituted the thought processes of the richest noblesse oblige liberals in our land, the people who benefit the most from our way of life and yet craft the culture of our land in opposition to that way of life. Frankly, I wanted to put them on display. And, for different reasons, so did Arianna.
I knew going in that this was going to be a difficult psychological test of my resolve. After going through it, I know why CIA agents take rigorous tests in order to ascertain whether they can go through the stress of becoming a double agent, and I realized very soon thereafter that I didn’t have what it took to attempt to be in consistent engagement with people whose ideas I found anathema.
Nonetheless, from November 2004 through June 1, 2005, I danced with these people, conspired with these people, and helped launch the Huffington Post. By April, however, when I realized that I wasn’t going to be a spy but their manservant—I realized I couldn’t live with myself or with my true friends, who relied on me to be their go-to guy for battles against the left. So I bailed out.
But it worked. I knew it had worked by the end of the launch date, May 9, 2005. I was driving down Lincoln Boulevard and listening to Michael Medved laugh aloud as he read Rob Reiner’s launch-day piece, entitled “Where Have You Gone, Woodward & Bernstein?” It was a typical leftie ode to the idiotic theme that journalists are right wing, which is as stupid a belief as you’re likely to find this side of John Cusack. “The so-called fourth estate is now little more than the public relations arm of a government propaganda machine in which all three branches are controlled by the same political party,” Reiner wrote. “Who is watching the store?”19
Medved was chortling as he read this nonsense. And I felt mischievously enthralled that my mission was somewhat completed, because I had always looked at the Medveds of the world as some of the smartest people on the right—and if he got what my intention was, then I had done something very right.
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.
Perhaps the best thing about the Huffington Post, though, is something I didn’t take into consideration at the time. The greatest victory for the right with regard to the site is that for years, conservatives argued that the New York Times, the most important journalistic entity in the United States, was radically left of center. And for years, the left denied it. But the Huffington Post was different—it was openly and loudly and radically leftist. When you read the Huffington Post, you knew there was a collective mind-set, a groupthink. And the great irony was that if you looked at the front page of the Huffington Post on any given day and matched it with the front page of the New York Times, they were virtually identical. 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.
By exposing part of the Complex via the Huffington Post, I had helped expose a major chunk of the Complex.
But I still didn’t know where the Democrat-Media Complex itself had come from. It gnawed at me. Why in the world had the greatest country in history submitted itself to the evils of
the Democrat-Media Complex?
Just how the hell had these nutty people gotten so much power?
CHAPTER 6
Breakthrough
Ever since college, I had experienced flashes of the Democrat-Media Complex. Then I saw it unmasked. But I didn’t know exactly where that Democrat-Media Complex had been formed and why it had taken hold.
After all, I spent most of my life in a world where the Soviet Union had been destroyed. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we felt that we had finally defeated global Marxism. Ronald Reagan and the United States had taken down the single largest repository of communism on the planet, and we’d done it without firing a direct shot. The whole world could see that communism didn’t work—its failure was on display for the entire globe to look at and say, So much for that.
At least that was what we thought.
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.
When I was at Tulane, I saw the same cultural forces at work: the forces of the thought police, of the cultural fascisti. People in positions of power who decided what was okay to think and what to write, what words meant and who was allowed to say them. Tribunals without oversight, kids thrown out of college for uttering the wrong sentiments. Looking back, I thank God every day that I partied to excess at Tulane, because it kept me from buying into that worldview, from learning that language. If I hadn’t been busy having fun, I could have become a professor, gotten tenure, and taught that cultural Marxism, propagated it for a living. I could have reinforced and propagated the Complex because it would have reinforced my position.
Later, I saw that the cultural Marxism of Tulane wasn’t restricted to Tulane—it was everywhere, from the mainstream media to Hollywood to the educational system to the government. And when I began researching the origins of that pervasive cultural Marxism, I realized that this wasn’t a result of America’s suddenly and spontaneously embracing a rebellious counterculture in the 1960s—it started long before that.
It started from the beginning.
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.
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 of someone else’s best efforts—required people to act with virtue.
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.
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 the “general will.” The “general will” didn’t need any checks and balances, because it embodied the entire will of the people. And if individuals argued with the general will, they lost.
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 changed, it could be changed only by destroying the surrounding society.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provided the “dialectic theory” that backed Marx’s utopianism. He believed that conflicts made the world a better place—that, basically, might made right. The struggle between two opposing ideological or philosophical forces—thesis and antithesis—would eventually end in a “synthesis” of the two sides, and that “synthesis” would be better than what had come before. Sort of like a guy (thesis) having a fight with his wife (antithesis) and then their having great makeup sex, and the product being a baby (synthesis). Only sometimes, thesis would rape antithesis in order to get to synthesis, or vice versa.
Marx married his own philosophy to Hegel in something vague and confusing called “dialectic materialism.” 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!
This all sounds confusing and would make anyone with common sense stop and say, “Wait a minute—explain that one slowly, and tell me why it isn’t intellectual babble.” Unfortunately, there’s only one problem: important people in America believed it.
Let me continue with this brief history lesson.
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, backed by a rosy Rousseau-ian view of humanity and the general will—basically, it was soft Marxism without the class struggle.
There was only one problem, of course—here in America, we have something they didn’t have in Germany or even Britain: a Constitution that protects individual liberty. But that didn’t stop Teddy. 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. Collectivism was the new cool.
Those who stand for Progressivism, said Teddy, “stand for the forward movement… for the uplift and betterment, who have faith in the people.” Ends, not means, matter: “We of today who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired. Our aim is to secure the real and not the nominal rule of the people.”1 That’s scary stuff—the business of government is all about means, which is why the Constitution is mostly a document describing how things get done, not what things should get done. Once a president starts ignoring means to get to ends, we’ve got a serious constitutional problem on ou
r hands.
Teddy was a serious constitutional problem. His Progressivism had practical consequences. In his 1910 speech “The New Nationalism,” he compared wealth inequalities with the Civil War and said that individual rights had to take a backseat to the common interest.2
In that same speech, Teddy went over the Niagara Falls of Progressive ideology in a wooden barrel—he actually said that people couldn’t be permitted to make money unless it was of benefit to the community for them to do so. “We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community,” he said. This was Marx in action. With a president behind Marx, his ideals were now competing on equal footing with the Founding Fathers’.
Teddy’s Progressivism had its most dramatic effects in shaping a new view of the Constitution. He summed up his thoughts about the Constitution in one line: “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”3
Teddy’s ideological heir didn’t make it to the White House until 1912. His name was Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson was the proto-egghead, a political science professor and Princeton dean who frowned upon democracy. Our American egalitarianism was beginning to be replaced by elites who knew better than the masses. Wilson had imbibed the best of European philosophy (namely, Hegel and his heirs) while studying at Johns Hopkins University, which was the first American university to mirror the German university model. Unsurprisingly, he rejected the idea of government by the people, and he rejected the old-fashioned notion that founding principles of free enterprise and private property should be protected by checks and balances on the growth of government. Government, he said, was a living thing, and it needed the freedom to do its magical work. Because government had stuff to do, the Constitution was a waste of time for Wilson. It held the people back. “Justly revered as our great constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth clothed in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws.”4
Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 10
