Breitbart on the culture

From an interview with Andrew Breitbart first published a year ago in GQ:

Your own book cover says you’re one of the most polarizing figures of our time. Do you think that’s a compliment?
Uh, yes. Because given the status quo that we exist in, in which the media’s dominated by people that disagree with American exceptionalism, the academic Marxist crowd’s worldview, somebody needed to start taking it on directly. And the thing is, the Right has focused its energy and its monies on the political process, thinking that that alone is enough. It just kind of shrugged off culture. But culture is everything and media is everything, and once you get down to the political level in this country, you’ve already lost the battle.

Also from the interview:

I deal with gay and black conservatives who don’t want to be called Uncle Toms of their politically correct Marxist multi-cultural unit structure. And they come to me saying, “What can I do?” And I say, lay low. Because right now if you stick your neck out, even in the slightest, and you get your head blown off metaphorically and your career’s dead, there’s nothing that anyone in the conservative movement will do for you. The conservative movement has written off culture. Dennis Miller—or even more importantly, David Friggin’ Mamet—goes from the left to the right, not only does the left predictably attack and, you know, negatively deconstruct their past career to say that they are hacks and not funny and not good writers, the right is nowhere to be seen. There’s no benefactor coming from the right saying, “I’m gonna produce your plays, David Mamet.” And worse than that, there’s nobody to defend them when they stick their neck out and they get their head shot off. That’s what I’m trying to do: go out there and fight on their behalf, for what is a righteous mission.

Well now this is making me feel guilty since I was skeptical about Mamet’s touted move to the right.

More of the interview:

If you can narrow it down, the biggest problem with liberals is what?
That their criticism of conservatives is projection, and their intolerance towards anything that disagrees with them is intolerable and has made living in a cultural world that they have created uninhabitable.

That’s interesting you used the word projection because that’s such a liberal term.
Yeah.

In your book, you had that long paragraph describing liberals: joyless, humorless, taxing, rigid, intolerant, etc. But joyless and humorless were the two first words you used.
Mm-hmm. They wake up and they think the glass is half-empty and that they’re living in hell on earth. But they’re sitting there and drinking the fresh-squeezed orange juice, with the 50-inch LCD screen in front of them, and saying, Okay, I’m taking my daughter from a tennis lesson today in my Escalade, and they somehow think they’re living in a bad country? It’s ingratitude. It’s not just that they’re joyless, it’s the ingratitude for how great this place is. And that their false philosophy of attaining perfection, when human beings are imperfect? You’re working with people who are psychologically rewired against human nature. They think that human nature can be perfected. But when they look outside, all they see are things that need to be fixed. They can’t accept the premise that life isn’t perfect and this country has figured out a roadmap, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, does not mean that at the time it was created we live in a perfect society.

You say in your book that you believe liberal journalists hate much of America. Do you really think that?
I think that they hate America as it exists.

Who’s good on the left? I know you wrote a lot about Jon Stewart, positive and negative. Piers Morgan?
[laughs] If you kicked me in the nuts, I wouldn’t know who he was.

Anderson?
I think he’s the one that is the closest to having an epiphany in which he realizes that he has been wrong most of the time. But I’ve seen moments of greatness from that guy … I certainly aspire to have his ear and Jon Stewart’s ear. Because if they knew me, and they knew what I would saying, and that they would engage with me in conversation.

Do you feel under siege? Do you feel that you’re not respected enough?
Oh, I don’t care. Honestly.

How much money do you make?
Um, I don’t want to get into that type of thing. But I can say this. When people call me a media mogul, I say to them, Why do I have a mortgage?

And four kids!
Yeah. I live a comfortable upper-middle-class existence. And I think the difference between me and many in Hollywood is that they have insatiable appetites and I go into Costco along with the hoi polloi and I say, This is enough. This is more than enough. The American middle class experience is more than enough for me.

Did you ever think you’d have four kids?
No.

How old are they?
4, 6, 9 and 11. I would call it Unplanned Parenthood.

And you’re 42 now?
Yes, as of a few days ago.

[end of interview]

It’s very sad that Breitbart, accomplishing so much, so full of life, and with a large, young family, should suddenly die like this. It’s a terrible loss.

By the way, Breitbart’s response to the question on how much money he makes, “I don’t want to get into that type of thing,” is of course the correct answer. And Mitt Romney, 64 years old, didn’t know enough about life to say the same thing when he was asked how much money he had.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 02, 2012 11:37 PM | Send