Cleaning Up The Kultursmog

As Emmett Tyrell wrote a few years ago, a “Kultursmog” as he puts it, exists in the legacy media and particularly in television, a medium which has long ghettoized conservatives. It’s to the point where, with the exception of Fox, openly conservative voices are extremely rare; and those few shows that allow them on, basically use them for cannon fodder. (See also: Palin, Sarah.) It’s gotten so bad that (a fortunately now demoted, if sadly not fired) CNN host can claim that the Republican convention “literally looked like Nazi Germany”–while “interviewing” the feckless chairman of the Republican party.

On Friday, Andrew Breitbart entered the snakepit of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher and lived to tell about it. As he writes, “Since the salad days of ABC’s ‘Politically Incorrect,’ which minted countless right-wing pundits and best-selling authors, conservatives have rightly assessed the HBO version of the Maher show as R-rated and shockingly hostile to their worldview. So most opt out.”

Andrew adds that he can “totally see why. But I think that’s exactly the wrong strategy:”

The next morning, the Starbucks barista recognized me and said he was a liberal. Go figure! Yet he also said my critique of Professor Dyson’s knee-jerk use of the race card struck a chord. He also complimented my on-air demeanor.

My trajectory from left to right began with a similar seed of doubt. Coincidentally, it was the race issue and how the media mistreated Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. It’s no coincidence I made that a central argument on the show, too.

We must plant seeds of doubt in the minds of the groupthink liberals in our dumbed-down and activist media culture. Yes, “Real Time With Bill Maher” is a hostile work environment for conservatives. But so is Hollywood – writ large. When conservatives withdraw from media and the entertainment business because they are intimidated or don’t want to get down and dirty, we lose even more, valuable political ground.

Even though Mr. Dyson filibustered in a poetic jargon only a linguistics student could decipher, and Mr. Maher glared at me in his trademark smirk, and the audience booed my every utterance, I left knowing I won the rigged bout simply by showing up.

Indeed. Much more here.

Related: On the other hand, it’s tough to fault Jay Nordlinger when he writes, “there comes a time when you have to stop trying to reason with people. And when you have to take ‘I hate you’ for an answer.”