Conservatives and Pop Culture

RUSH: I’ve mentioned in the first hour that I wanted to share with you off of Andrew Breitbart’s BigHollywood.Breitbart.com website. It’s a piece posted yesterday by Andrew Klavan. ‘This is by way of a friendly response,’ he writes, ‘to the estimable Jay Nordlinger, Senior Editor at the likewise estimable National Review. Jay wrote a strong column yesterday openly saying what I’ve been hearing many conservatives express tacitly ever since the election. Reflecting on the media’s disgraceful distortion of the characters of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, [Jay Nordlinger] wrote: ‘It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively. What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed.

‘They decide what a person’s image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney’s a monster, W.’s stupid, and Palin’s a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows” along. Now, this goes to something else, a point I made a couple weeks ago, and that is the pop culture. This is what Breitbart’s concerned about, one of the reasons he started his website, is that we don’t have any dominance in the pop culture, and the pop culture is made up of brain-dead people in large part. They read People magazine and they run around and they worry about what’s at Us Weekly and a number of other things; Entertainment Tonight, all these meaningless little gossip sites and pages and TV shows and so forth — and it’s all liberal. I mean it is unapologetic. It’s just culturally liberal, with no alternative whatsoever, and it’s unrealistic to expect people — by the way, I’m not singling out people who read People or Us Weekly.

There are people who are devoted to, you know, watching MTV, and all the music they listen to and the pap that suffices as entertainment from Hollywood these days. It’s pervasive, and it’s just not realistic to expect people who are immersed in that aspect of our culture to, every four years or every two years, go to a voting booth and vote conservative. It just isn’t. And Nordlinger was writing about that, too. That’s one of his points here. So Jon Stewart, Saturday Night Live, Bill Maher, they all say that Bush is stupid, a criminal; Cheney is a monster; Palin is a bimbo, and the country apparently follows. Now, Mr. Klavan says, ‘I’ve been hearing and reading prominent conservatives and Republicans say nearly as much on television, in print and in private conversation ever since the election. They say Sarah Palin can never make a comeback,’ and, by the way, this is a key point here because Mr. Klavan is exactly right, and that’s the point.

The point of this piece, which we’re getting to in a minute, is: Why are so many Republicans falling in line with the templates set by the left, on our people — that Bush is an idiot, that Cheney is a monster, that Palin is a bimbo, that conservative commentators are racist, sexist, homophobes and bigots, whatever? Why are so many on our side falling in line with that way of thinking? And that’s what Mr. Klavan writes about here. ‘I’ve been hearing and reading prominent conservatives and Republicans say nearly as much on television, in print and in private conversation ever since the election. They say Sarah Palin can never make a comeback. They say the fight for small government has been lost. They say we can’t have immigration reform that protects our borders. They say we have to distance ourselves from ’embarrassing’ commentators like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.

‘No, no, no, no. What the right is experiencing at the moment is a phenomenon called ‘cultural para-stimuli.’ You can read all about it in Tom Wolfe’s … novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. It’s sort of like peer pressure on steroids. It was discovered by Nobel Laureate Victor Ransome Starling, who found that when he surrounded normal cats with cats whose behavior had been bizarrely altered by brain surgery, the normal cats began acting like the crazy cats all around them.’ The crazy cats did not normalize with the normal cats. The normal cats descended the behavioral habits of the wacko cats — and, Andrew Klavan says, ‘That’s us.’ We’re the normal cats ‘surrounded by the mainstream media. So steeped are we now in their lies about our representatives, their ridicule of our commentators, their demonizing dismissal of the causes we know are just, that we’ve begun to adopt their attitudes toward ourselves!

‘And perhaps chief among the lies they’ve sold us is the lie that they’ve won, that the media are theirs for good and all, and that Americans are going to be hoodwinked and brainwashed by their constant barrage of misinformation forever. Well, only if we let them. And only if we in the [conservative] media surrender first. Look, the American media are in a bad way, a disastrous way. Movies, TV, literature — instead of illuminating vehicles for art and entertainment, they’ve become like the Matrix, replacing reality with a plausible leftist imitation. Journalists especially have so shamed themselves in their coverage of the last election — hounding Sarah Palin’s daughter and Joe the Plumber while all but ignoring Barack Obama’s ties to Illinois corruption, and his long and deep association with the racist anti-American Jeremiah Wright — that it’s going to take them years to recover’ respectability from all of this.

‘When people shame themselves that badly, they don’t admit it in a hurry. They savage their critics instead and continue their own shameful practices as a kind of defiant denial — anything rather than look in the mirror and confront what they’ve turned themselves into. So yeah, we’re on our own for now.’ Exactly as I have warned you. ‘But we’re not unarmed and we’re in no way defeated. We have great politicians like Sarah Palin — who could well be president in not eight years but four — honest newsmen like Bret Baier and genius commentators like Rush — and Ann Coulter, who’s only about ten times smarter, funnier and more talented as a satirist than Jon Stewart or Bill Maher will ever be. The left can’t out-argue these mind-warriors so they try to ridicule, disdain and isolate them, to make us feel ashamed that we admire and respect them.

‘And they tell us they’re finished, washed-up. Why, just look, it must be true: It’s right there in the newspapers and on TV. They’re lying. The left has to lie for the simple reason that they’re wrong and we’re right, their policies don’t work and ours do. Look at the cities that liberal politicians and programs have devoured like locusts. Look at the liberal states that can’t rein in their spending even as they go broke. Look at how environmentalists have made us energy-slaves to monsters overseas. And look at how leftist, anti-patriotic and anti-religious policies in Europe have turned a once-great culture into a corpse that is being consumed by Islamo-fascist bacteria as we watch. Hey, listen, our soldiers have to get shot at in the cause of liberty. All we in the media have to do is keep telling people the truth. Lies and insults are all the left has got to sling against us. They only win if we start to believe them.’

Now, I think this piece was profound. Because a lot of my friends on the right, frankly, folks, are dismayed and have been for the longest time at the chattering classes on our side who began to claim about a year ago that the era of Reagan is over. This is senseless. The left doesn’t talk about the era of FDR being over. Hell, we’ve got Obama trying to replicate it now while being Lincoln at the same time. And we have people on our side — many of whom are charged, entrusted with carrying forth the banner and the reputation of great conservative founders and their publications as conservative stalwarts — who have caved and are starting to adopt lingo of the left. We’ve gotta look at people as groups. We have to go out and get ‘the middle class.’ We as conservatives and Republicans need to modify; we have to go out and find a way to reach the middle class, and we have to find a way to reach minorities and immigrants and Hispanics. We have to come up with policies that use the government to give people what they want.

It’s a total flameout, a total, 100% conservative flameout from people who portray themselves as the intellectual wizards of smart in our movement — and those of us who are not on the same page with them are considered to be what the left says of us: bigots, racists, small-minded, you name it. Embarrassments. It’s how you get Colin Powell saying, ‘The Republican Party needs to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.’ By the way, what the hell’s Colin Powell doing in the White House at a Medal of Freedom ceremony after endorsing Obama against McCain? I guess he’s there because of his dealings with Howard and Tony Blair and so forth in his days as Secretary of Sate, but man. So you have all of these so-called brilliant conservatives who are basically echoing with what they consider to be more intelligent.

It’s liberalism! They’re calling it the New Conservatism. ‘Yeah, we need a powerful, engaged government, executive reaching out and understanding what people need and what they want and finding ways to show them we can be the ones that give it to them.’ That is a total bastardization of conservatism. It is a total capitulation, and these are the people out there trying to define it as they now think it. These are the people, by the way, some of them who were invited to dinner with Obama ’cause he’s already got them. As I say, Obama didn’t have dinner with anybody hoping they’d change his mind. So this piece, ‘Why We Fight’ by Andrew Klavan, at Big Hollywood, Breitbart’s website, cultural ‘cultural para-stimuli’, peer pressure on steroids. Inside-the-Beltway peer pressure: a bunch of outsiders wanting to be on the inside, a bunch of people not in the big clique wanting to be in the big clique even if the people in the big clique are liars, wrong, character assassins — and, in part, insane!

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Brad in Arlington, Virginia. Great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush, how are you.

RUSH: Good.

CALLER: Hey, I want to reference the Breitbart.com article that you were discussing earlier and the issue of cultural, um… I’m lost now. The issue of cultural —

RUSH: This is the Nobel Peace Prize winner and the study. He got a bunch of normal cats, and they injected some steroids into some other cats and made ’em wacky.

CALLER: Right. Cultural peer pressure.

RUSH: Yeah. Peer pressure on steroids.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: What happened was, in his study, was that the normal cats surrounded by the wacko cats became wacko.

CALLER: Right. My father was a career Marine. He’s old enough to remember the Depression and World War II, which he barely survived; and whenever he sensed that I was succumbing to peer pressure growing up, he used to… He had a knack for putting complex life lessons in simple terms, and he used to tell me, ‘It’s easier to go down the stairs than it is to go up,’ and I think that was an implicit way of saying, ‘Would you rather live in my basement or would you rather aspire to something higher than that?’

RUSH: I’d rather get an elevator and not deal with the steps, but that’s just me.

CALLER: But you know his point. And he also talked about how it only took a little bit of cancer to ravage the body by spreading, and I think that the cultural cancer that we face now is liberalism. So I always think back to the things that he told me, and when I hear you talk — he was not nearly as eloquent as you or the person that wrote that piece, but his lessons always stuck with me, and when I listen to you — I sometimes hear him speaking to me.

RUSH: Well, now, that’s one of the nicest things you could say to me. That is just… You’re melting my heart, here.

CALLER: Well, it’s true.

RUSH: I really appreciate that. What Brad’s calling about is Breitbart.com, BigHollywood.Breitbart.com has a story about a column today about why it is so many Republicans are caving to the Democrat majority. It’s ‘peer pressure on steroids.’ It’s, you know, wanting to be part of the big clique, and there’s a scientific name for this phenomenon when people suspend their principles, when people suspend their gut, when they get rid of what they know, when they throw away who they are. It is to be accepted by others or to join the crowd or what have you.