A Tale of An Awakening, or How Andrew Breitbart Reignited the Pilot Light of Cultural Orphan, and Hope for Conservative Storytellers

What was once conventional is now considered alternative. We would do well to take Breitbart’s admonition to heart.

Sep 08, 2024

Some time in 2018, I became largely indifferent to the GOP as a whole, and to congressional Republicans in particular – that will be explained in slightly more detail, shortly. In the time since, I’ve become politically agnostic whereas in years previous, my worldview had been heavily influenced by my conservatism which had been heavily influenced by what I perceived and understood to be the Republican Party.

I came of age (politically speaking) in 1979 – having spent the summer touring Europe with a symphony orchestra, it struck me as personally offensive how most of the media in the countries visited covered the U.S. with a decidedly jaundiced eye.1 My conclusion was that my country’s president’s foreign policy had a lot to do with that, so as I began to pay more attention to domestic politics and would be eligible to vote in the next election, I would not be casting a ballot for President Carter.

The assignment for each of us in my social studies class2 was to attend the local precinct caucus for the party with which we each most identified. At the suggestion of my parents, I attended the Republican one. My very first taste of partisan politics, and it was sweet – a neighbour helped me prepare so that the process was understood, and most everyone else in attendance was welcoming and supportive of my participation, such as it was. As far as I was concerned and based on that experience alone, my political home was the same as Reagan’s.

Throughout the rest of my college years, and after graduation as I assumed more responsibilities of adulthood, more and more of my identity came from my political party affiliation rather than cultural orientation. Much too often, instead of pursuing associations with others with whom there might have been common interest that was not political – like enduring another season in which the Vikings can’t even go .500 in the division; or mutual disdain for Norm Green’s relocation of the North Stars to Dallas (of all places); or film; or even pop-culture and entertainment; the crucial criteria was whether I was among political friendlies – my disappointment in my all too frequent lack of depth is beyond words.

Thankfully, such is no longer the case. In fact, partisan politics now only matters to the extent I perceive one party posing an existential threat to all that I hold dear, and one not. Today, that existential threat is the Democrat Party, albeit by only the most slim of margins.

What got me started on this piece was determining whether there was anything I felt needed to be said. Commenting almost exclusively on our current politics is not only unproductive, but it is also pointlessly derivative. As one Daniel Helkenn so eloquently and succinctly put it, “Too many people saying the same things. It’s eating away at my IQ and I’ve really got none to spare.” – I’m with him.

When I began writing this substack, I envisioned it would be thoughtful, intelligent, ocassionally witty commentary on our culture, both popular and classic. My writing hasn’t always upheld my own ideal, and aspiring to produce something that at least came close to meeting that standard is why it has been such a long time since I last posted – that, and so many others3 are expressing many of the same sentiments so much better than I.

This quote:

Politics is downstream from culture.

…attributed to the late Andrew Breitbart, has persisted in my waking thoughts, lately.

The first time I heard the phrase, ‘Politics is downstream from culture’, I had no idea what it meant. After figuring it out, and explaining it to a few Conservatives, they dismissed the concept. The truth, however, is that it may be one of the most important phrases of the New Media Age, and it’s vital that people understand it.

Why, do you suppose that the film Sound of Freedom performed at the box office as well as it did, when the entire cultural and political landscape was aligned against it – even after having been in theaters for a couple of weeks? Jim Caviezel explains:

‘Steve Jobs once said the most powerful person in the world is the storyteller,’ Caviezel said. ‘Abraham Lincoln credited Harriet Stowe when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin – this powerful story inspired millions to rise up and fight against slavery.’

Breitbart continues:

Stories instill moral and ethical values. They place joy and tragedy in context. They preserve cultures. At their best, they deliver the secrets and meanings of life.
As Dr. Neal Baer, the longtime showrunner of Law & Order: SVU tells in my book Inside the TV Writer’s Room, humans live story on a daily basis. What happens when you run into a friend? He asks what you’ve been up to. You tell a story.
Most importantly, it isn’t only the text that is important. It is also a story’s context and it’s subtext that deliver messages. It’s those messages that are significant…
Popular culture is delivered to us in the form of story via books, TV, film, music, video games, and new media. Obviously, most of us are there to simply be entertained. However, along with that entertainment comes messaging. It may not be intentional. Often times, it isn’t.
Because whether you like it or not, or believe it or not, the messaging of popular culture is resonating inside everyone’s conscious and subconscious mind. And if those messages are not consonant with the things you hold dear, then it is incumbent upon you to challenge yourself. First ask why it threatens you, and then, if appropriate, accept or reject the message. Never reject it out of hand. Do yourself the favor of letting yourself be challenged, in the event you make a discovery about something that never occurred to you.

Assuming that Breitbart is correct (he is) and our current political environment is the downstream representation of our culture, then it’s no wonder that our society – our culture, as a whole – is in serious trouble because this nation’s politics is a cesspool. All manner of toxins are flowing downstream but have nowhere to go, collecting in what I would describe as a cultural tide pool.

Unlike the tide pools that Noah Cross told Jake Gittes were so beloved by Hollis Mulwray because that’s where life begins, this one is where life ends.4

Breitbart’s now timeless observation notwithstanding – politics (cesspool that it is) takes an interest in, and affects every one of us regardless of whether we are interested in it – and whether we wish to effect its ends. Hence, in the tale of my awakening, politics has had an outsized influence, sad as that is.

Time was that one could proudly identify as a Republican or a Democrat without later realizing one had been played for a fool. Despite FDR’s attempt to make America socialist, in the years immediately post-WWII the two parties held the welfare and best interests of the nation at heart, but had legitimate differences of opinion on how best to see to that welfare, and to defend those interests.

Paraphrasing the Democrat and long-time Speaker of the House, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neil, “[that]...all politics is local…”, if he’s right (he is), then except for the 83rd congress (1953-55), from 1951 until 1994, Democrats were just better at it (for whatever reason) than were Republicans.

Excepting the 104th through the 109th congresses, the Republicans had largely settled into their role as the beta party in the unholy alliance of Democrats and Republicans known as the UniParty. The UniParty was born in 1981 as a result of the surrender to House Democrats by Bob Michel (R IL 18) then the House Minority Leader, whose “...go along to get along…” approach to governance and legislation resulted in an emasculated Republican Party, reduced to little more than controlled opposition. His ghost haunts the GOP establishment to this day.

In the years since Newt Gingrich left congress, the party has been a circular firing squad, the epitome of ineptitude – from the inability to close the deal on repealing ObamaCare, to outright refusal (disguised as failure) to building the wall to secure the southern border, to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the most crucial of elections.5

When faced with the prospect of a federal government shutdown,6 congressional Republicans will acquiesce to Democrats’ demands every time. The Republicans talk tough, but the Democrats know their weaknesses (at the 00:02:13 mark):

They continue to demonstrate that they are not up to the task, unable to rise to the occasion and stand up for their own voters (for whom they have nothing but contempt), let alone all Americans. It’s the same when it comes to holding the line on raising the debt limit:

Dr. William Bennett’s book, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals, may have been borne of the scandal following the revelation of Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, but it bears mention, today. More than twenty-five years after the fact, it not only was a watershed in the national culture, but also the death of public shame. With no stigma, and no more embarrassment by abhorrent behaviour, Democrats sensed that acquisition, consolidation, centralization, and possession of all cultural and political power was within their reach.

Beginning in 2008 (having bode their time through the two Shrub administrations), almost everything fell into place for Democrats over the next eight years. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with her Democrats united and marching in lockstep behind her, legislated as many of the Democrats’ agenda items as she could between the 2008 and 2010 elections.

By 2016, what the Democrats had dreamed of in 1998 had become reality: they had effective majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives, and in the U.S. Senate. Democrats all but owned SCOTUS. They owned the administrative/regulatory (aka deep) state. They had politicized every single law-enforcement agency of the federal behemoth, and had weaponized the FISA court (star chamber), the FBI, the CIA, and the DoJ against president-elect Donald Trump, who they saw as America’s own Sidney Reilly.7

Trump may have been President nominally, but he was surrounded by deep-state operatives and UniParty members in key cabinet positions, almost all passively working against his directives and initiatives at every turn.

Given the manner in which the GOP establishment sought to destroy the Trump administration through death by a thousand cuts, it became obvious that the Republican Party had abandoned me, and millions of others – and it was liberating.

Today, it makes absolutely no difference which political party is in control of congress, or the White House – unless it’s Trump. The contrarian in me is such that if the regime, almost all of the most powerful institutional forces, and domestic and global oligarchs perceive him to be an existential threat, he must be doing something right (at the 00:01:59 mark) –

and for that reason alone, he has my vote.

Democrats have been in power for so long that possessing it, and acquiring more of it is woven into the fabric of their DNA – hence, they can’t help themselves. To them, power is a birthright, and Hillary being denied hers liberated them to show everyone just how ruthless they could be and how effectively they could use what power they possessed against their enemies – not adversaries – enemies.

Between the moles in the administration, Obama loyalists in the federal judiciary, and surrogates Big Tech, these jacobins and their global allies would see to it that Trump’s time in the White House was a mere speed bump.

They seized on the opportunity to leverage the deadly virus that wasn’t to openly work hand-in-glove with social media, the Corporate Class, the propaganda apparatus, the deep state, and the shadow government of the Kenyan Light Bringer to so disrupt American life that the voters would deny Trump re-election.

Leaving nothing to chance, they brazenly coordinated with governors and legislatures (even in red states like Texas) to completely re-write voting laws and facilitate election fraud on such a scale that it would be all but impossible to challenge in court. Not that it was much of a concern – no federal judge appointed by The Kenyan Light Bringer was going to allow any such challenge in his courtroom. Months later, they boasted about it.

The Democrats flexed their political muscle and through their allies in the American Federation of Teachers and its locals across the nation, schools were shut down and classes went online. However, when parents began to learn what their children were being taught – and what the teachers, administrators, and local school boards were not just allowing, but promoting – they were horrified.

In shutting down the schools, and then seeking to keep them closed, the Democrats overplayed their hand, and it backfired. Parents were the ones who stood up and acted in the face of the truly harmful ideologies in which their children were being indoctrinated, and they pushed back – hard.

Parents, not as part of some non-existent vast right-wing conspiracy, but as individual mothers and fathers, did what their representatives both nationally and locally would not. They took action and opened up a front in the culture war for which the Democrats, and the left (but I repeat myself) were not prepared.

They started attending local hearings and school board meetings, and they began to speak up. In response, led by the authorities, they were often shouted down, their microphones turned off, kicked out and banned from attending future meetings, physically removed and in some cases, arrested for speaking the truth, calling out the evil, and exposing the identities of those visiting that evil on their children.

What they learned was that for longer than anyone would believe, organizations like the American Library Association8 have been indoctrinating children of virtually every age in liberal sexual progressivism. In public school libraries, they are making homosexual pornographic literature accessible and available to children as young as age ten, along with organizing, sponsoring, and hosting drag-queen story hours as part of that effort.

In the classroom, Critical Race Theory remains a staple of the curriculum in more school districts and private schools than you could even begin to imagine. A curriculum, incidentally, that considers every subject in the sciences and humanities through the lens of racism and has abandoned fundamentals entirely.

According to some friends and relatives, a few of which are former teachers, this video is not so far off the mark:

Perhaps the most heinous development is how schools are willingly allowing themselves to be weaponized against the parents of the children they are teaching (read as, indoctrinating) and doing all within their grasp and without it to separate children from their parents in the name of LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ tolerance. What’s happening in California, just the latest example:

Make no mistake – the Democrat Party, in championing every manifestation of evil to which the rest of the nation has borne witness – chief among these is the celebration of all manner of sexual depravity and deviance, most notably homosexuality and all its attendant ills – is Frankism9 made manifest.

The celebration of homosexuality in both the political and pop-culture realms gave rise to same-sex marriage which in turn ushered in the embrace of pedophilia in an attempt to normalize it.

Similarly, embracing fluid gender identity has all but encouraged mentally ill males who claim to be females to prey on little girls in women’s restrooms.

Weak men in high school and college who can’t compete against their own kind instead identify as women to “compete” against them and invade their locker rooms.

As she said in an episode of her podcast, Gaines for Girls:

‘This is the most anti-woman, anti-reality pursuit we have seen from this administration thus far…
Across the country and in various sports, males are entering women's athletic competitions, being given spots on women's teams, and being granted entry into our locker rooms. To date, males have stolen over 943 trophies, medals and titles from women and girls across 458 different competitions and in over 31 different sports. But the harm they cause is exponential, as every time a man even competes in an event or makes a team, a female athlete loses an opportunity to race, a spot on that team or playing time on the field.
Allowing males to compete in women's sports is risky, it is unfair, it is discriminatory, and it is regressive. And it must stop. Which is exactly why we have been so tenacious in this pursuit for sex-based protections. I know that the six attorney generals, including General Skrmetti and General Morrisey, will not quit until women and girls sports, spaces and opportunities are for women and girls only.’

Transgenderism has legalized surgical mutilation of teenage children, transforming much of the medical profession10 from a trusted institution to human butchery, practicing their evil on the most vulnerable in our society.11 Some of these kids (a very small minority) are legitimately suffering from body dysphoria, a treatable disorder, while most are simply experiencing common phases of childhood development. In either instance, what they have in common are parents who are not loving, and who selfishly care more about being in good standing with their ultra-left Democratic tribe than in seeking the best for their own children’s welfare.

Normalizing homosexual behaviour has not only been an all-out assault on the divine natural order, the traditional nuclear family, and established cultural mores rooted in Judeo-Christsian ethics, but with its obsession with satisfying its unquenchable lust for selfish sexual pleasure, male homosexual couples are pimping their own adopted children for financial gain.

With their commitment to open borders and policies that promote and facilitate illegal immigration to the United States, Democrats (the current administration in particular), have made the U.S. a major contributor to the worldwide child sex trafficking industry. Whatever else one may or may not believe, know that this was no accident – it was by design.

Pedophile rings both domestic and abroad are where the vast majority, if not every last one of these children, have gone.

There are very powerful forces that remain hidden, though some are known quantities, like NAMBLA (National Man-Boy Love Association – I’m not providing a link as I don’t want that in my search history), and these “loose affiliation[s] of millionaires and billionaires” (to quote Paul Simon) directly contribute very large sums of dark money to the Democrat Party or to Democrat candidates, almost exclusively. Not only can the money not be traced, but it also circumvents campaign finance laws. In return, these nefarious entities receive the protection from US law enforcement for which they pay. There’s a reason Democrat law makers fight tooth and nail to keep Jeffrey Epstein’s guest list from ever seeing the light of day, and it’s why the truth of these children’s whereabouts will never be known, either.

To add insult to the injury of the scourge of violence at the hands of elementary and high-school age children who use a firearm (a parent’s or one acquired illegally) to fatally take revenge on their peers and teachers – the latest one being at Apalachee High School12 – is that these kids never developed healthy coping mechanisms to deal with the common bitter pills of childhood like exclusion from the popular clique, teasing at the hands of classmates, and schoolyard bullies. For most of us, learning to successfully handle such adversity was a rite of passage, and it built character.

Lately, a common thread through these horrific incidents is that the perpetrator – be it Colt Gray, or Audrey Hale – was undergoing treatment to transition from one gender to the other, and an undisclosed side effect of the medication prescribed to facilitate it is uncontrollable, irrational rage and anger. The propaganda apparatus won’t include that fact in its coverage.

Again, all of this wickedness (and more), are part and parcel of the Democrat Party’s legislative agenda, and these items persist from one congress to the next. You may doubt that, but consider that those who are most visible in their activism or who most loudly protest on behalf of these depravities are registered, proud, card-carrying Democrats. That doesn’t make Republicans any better, but it does make Democrats worse.

Yet, for all the evil that are Democrats, establishment Republicans are magnitudes worse because they outright refuse to stand up to that evil the Democrats visit on the nation, despite being in a position to do so. Both individually and collectively, they illustrate the quote widely attributed to John Stuart Mill:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Democrats have my admiration for their ability to play a long political game and their commitment to it – for them, though, the political battle is but part of the larger culture war. The Democrats are much better positioned to fight, and win the political conflict, and they know it.

The dirty little secret is that the Democrats are relying on the fact that they have owned the culture for so long, it isn’t likely to change any time soon. They also know that the culture war could be lost for generations if conservatives engaged with any resolve for a sustained period of time – and this is where I begin to more fully understand what Breitbart was trying to convey to his conservative friends.