New media phenomenon Andrew Breitbart likes to call his sites BigThis or Big That Big Journalism being the most famous, along withBig Hollywood and Big Government.
He should have titled his latest book Big Truths, for that iswhat he ladles out with gusto. Breitbart homes in on absolute truthslargely absent in popular culture.
Or he could have named the book Big Lies, for the falsehoods thatmany in the mainstream media have been telling us for years thattheyre objective and nonpartisan, for example. Breitbart relishescalling those out.
In the end, the book was titled Righteous Indignation: Excuse MeWhile I Save the World (Grand Publishing; $27.99), fitting for awork not shy about the writers anger at how Americas narrative isbeing told.
Those of us who like how Breitbart uses new media to taunt thecultural behemoths that have tried to police our thoughts for yearswill discover a call to action in 258 readable pages.
Notice I didnt say packed pages. Righteous Indignation doesmeander a bit. Did we need to read about Breitbarts alcohol- andgambling-fueled years at Tulane? Im not sure.
But such occasional rambling doesnt make the book drag. It is,after all, if not a beach book, at least a book that came out insummer.
And Righteous Indignation does zero in on its targets early onand stays on them throughout. The main three are the mainstreammedia, academia and Hollywood (the Three Horsemen of the LeftsApocalypse), which he cudgels mercilessly. Breitbart understandsthat all three are intertwined, forming a cultural beehive he callsThe Complex.
America is in the middle of a media war, he states on Page 3. Andhe doesnt let up thereafter: Schools. Newspapers. Network news. Art.Music. Film. Television. For decades the left understood theimportance of education, art and messaging.
Breitbart is right, of course, and his Big sites are designed tochange this state of affairs. Hes made it his lifes mission to showthat at least one conservative gets it.
He rightly intuited, as we did at the Heritage Foundation, thatthe Internet provides us with the right tools to start regaining themessage. This is partly because the Internet, which allowsconservatives to bypass the lefts chokehold on the newsroom, mocksthe very idea of gatekeepers. But its also because of the Internetsnature.
The Internet, after all, is the antithesis of the centralplanning that has become the hallmark of the Obama era. It isindividualistic, moved by the invisible hand of millions of separatedecisions.
It speaks to the very essence of what unfettered free markets areabout. Thats why old-time liberals, especially those who oncetrusted the newsroom to be the command center of the Complex, whineso much about it.
But how was the left able to take over the Complex? It is herethat the book is at its best. In a must-read chapter calledBreakthrough, Breitbart maintains that it was a methodical invasion,naked to the untrained eye perhaps, but purposeful nonetheless.
He traces the origins to the enthrallment of Europeanintellectuals with Marxism at the turn of the last century, and howthey realized, as Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukacs put it, that aworldwide overturning of values cannot take place without theannihilation of the old values and the creation of the new ones bythe revolutionaries.
These ideas, Breitbart points out, migrated to America in theaddled brains of disgruntled European academics who fled fascism.But rather than be grateful to their saviors, they tried to do thesame thing here: destroy America so they could put their blueprintinto action.
All pillars had to be taken down, as one of the most famousthinkers in this so-called Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, wrote:One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protestis directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including themorality of existing society.
These people had an outsized influence on Americans such as SaulAlinsky and Bill Ayers (to randomly pick two names) and countlessacademics and journalists.
Their thinking begat the questioning and spurning of all Americanvalues, whether religious, patriotic or economic, which we see dailyon our TVs, on the front pages of many of our newspapers, and in ouruniversity classrooms.
Over the top? Read it and see for yourself. Its a frighteningpicture. Good thing Breitbarts around to serve as the new media copon the beat, fighting to free us from this future.
Michael Gonzalez is vice president for communications at theHeritage Foundation.
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