CULTURE IS BEFORE POLITICS: David S. Bernstein: What Is Liberty Island? Welcome to the new counterculture. “Conservatives (and independents who refuse to be silenced) didn’t ask for a culture war. But for too long we’ve ceded the battlefield to new left commissars for whom the culture is the only fight that matters. Because their goal is not to win elections; it is to stamp out, utterly and completely, thoughts and ideas with which they disagree. We’ve had enough.”