Back in 2009, as a conservative student, and thus a walking trigger warning in a pre-trigger warning era at Columbia University, I heard that Andrew Breitbart was coming to New York to speak about his mission to “diversify Hollywood.”
With glee, I signed up for a ticket and listened to Andrew speak, frenetic as ever, about the importance of culture and how all of us starry-eyed students should come to Hollywood and train to become movie moguls.
His ultimate vision was for the next generation of young conservatives to eschew politics — which he viewed as largely a lost cause consisting of people only focused on the next election — and instead build a sustainable conservative base by infiltrating Hollywood agencies and studios, and building our own.
The goal was to get conservatives into positions of power in the culture, who could produce compelling content with an alternative narrative, and thus challenge progressivism’s chokehold on society.
For as Andrew rightly advocated, “Politics is downstream from culture.” He saw that it was in popular culture where the field was cleared for elections to be won, and a country to be fundamentally transformed. He knew that the Left’s dominance in the space, and the conservatives’ lack of resistance, let alone interest in it, meant we would always be fighting uphill battles while losing the war.
Andrew evidently felt that his highest and best use was to go about delegitimizing and destroying the Left’s sacred cows in culture by exposing their rank hypocrisy and corruption. But he knew that when the Left’s cultural house of cards came tumbling down, there needed to be a credible alternative.
