Even as they pushed their hatred of Bush as fully legitimate and praiseworthy, the press did nothing. Actually, the press did worse than nothing—they gave them a microphone to distribute their views unchallenged. Susan Sarandon appeared on CBS’s The Early Show and Face the Nation; Madonna appeared on Dateline NBC; Harry Belafonte appeared on Larry King Live, as did Sean Penn; Mike Farrell appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. As Laura Ingraham writes in her book Shut Up and Sing, “Whenever a top entertainer has a political bone to pick, he or she has an instant platform.”10
Hollywood dragged out its oldest lefties and its youngest lefties. Jann Wenner, a Baby Boomer who still force-feeds the relevance of Bruce Springsteen with repetitive front-page power picks, used this movement to promote Green Day and any other pop-cultural vessel that would create antiwar albums. MTV found selective youth, sexy youth, wearing antiwar T-shirts, and put them on TV every night. There was an urge in Hollywood from the old and the young to affirm the Baby Boomer Boss-lovers’ yearnings for the Age of Aquarius to be reborn in the Bush age.
These were the loudest people in the world. And the press was giving them free rein to say and do whatever they wanted, to incite political stunts reminiscent of the Merry Pranksters, to use media trickery to make points, to spawn a youth rebellion against the president of the United States during wartime. They were representing America abroad, and they were representing us as evil hayseeds bent on killing brown people—and the media were abetting this slander.
Next, Hollywood engaged in a ploy designed to paint the Bush administration with the tar of fascism—they accused Bush and conservatives of shutting down their free speech. The juxtaposition was astonishing—the false accusations that conservatives and Republicans were telling the left to “shut up” alongside the simple fact that every burp these bratty windbags uttered during this period was printed and reprinted ad nauseam. But by accusing conservatives of McCarthyism and raising that bugaboo, they wanted to do just what they falsely accused conservatives of doing: they wanted to shut them up.
As part of this, they crafted a “dissent is patriotic” meme, an absurd slogan to begin with, that they intentionally misattributed to patriotic Founding Fathers like Benjamin Franklin (they would later be forced to attribute it to pseudoscholar Howard Zinn). Deconstructed, “Dissent is patriotic” is a self-negating slogan because its validity clearly depends on what kind of dissent you’re talking about. If you’re a member of the neo-Nazis in America, you’re dissenting, but nobody would call that dissent patriotic. But if you’re antiwar, dissent is automatically patriotic, according to David Geffen’s guest list (even if you’re a member of Al Qaeda, presumably, since they are antiwar, at least as far as the United States goes). The aphorism is nonsensical. But the left repeated it so many times and so often that it lost all meaning. They slapped it on every bumper sticker on every Prius at every Whole Foods. And it worked.
Next, they accused conservatives of quashing this dissent. They framed their arguments as though they were victims, even while saying things that were outrageous and arguably un-American. Susan Sarandon said, “It’s terrifying to me to feel the fear that exists now in the United States to even question anything for fear of being labeled anti-American.”11
“The early signs are this administration could go further, shutting down information, not allowing certain truths to get out,” said Robert Redford in January 2003. “And all you’ve got to do is look at history to see what that led to. The McCarthy era.”12
In April 2003, Tim Robbins, Sarandon’s former quasi–common-law husband and possibly potential corecipient of her Social Security check, famously warned of a “chill wind blowing in America.” Where did he say that? At the National Press Club, of course, on national television as broadcast by C-SPAN. Why Robbins would be at the National Press Club to begin with is a question that, if you’ve made it this far in the book, I suspect you can reason out.
Robbins started off by telling the assembled media sycophants that after 9/11, he was ready for unity. What kind of unity? A unity where President Bush would use the momentum from 9/11 not to defend America, but to help people “at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read… at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirm… convert abandoned lots to baseball fields.” Robbins’s kind of unity “would send a message to terrorists everywhere: if you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified.” Yeah, Tim, extending Head Start and giving funds to the local YMCA would have Osama bin Laden quaking in his sandals.
That unity didn’t materialize, and Robbins knew it would never materialize, because nobody would seriously think that the Bush administration would fight terror with increased welfare payments. So Robbins turned against Bush: “In the 19 months since 9-11, we have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been quickly compromised in a climate of fear.”
The only climate of fear was the one Robbins was generating, of course, but this new “climate of fear” allowed Robbins to pretend to be a victim: “A message is being sent through the White House and its allies in talk radio and Clear Channel [Communications]…. If you oppose this administration, there can and will be ramifications. Every day, the airwaves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent.”13
Robbins wasn’t the only one pursuing this line of thought. The Dixie Chicks bashed Bush overseas and then complained about it on Larry King Live when people reacted with outrage, with Natalie Maines explaining, “I feel patriotic and strong. We will continue to be who we are.” Sean Penn took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post in 2002, well before the Iraq War, in which he ripped President Bush for “[violating] every defining principle of this country over which you preside: intolerance of debate (‘with us or against us’), marginalization of your critics, the promoting of fear through unsubstantiated rhetoric, manipulation of a quick comfort media…” Yes, Penn was a victim who could afford to take out a $56,000 ad in one of the nation’s leading newspapers. (The best part of his ad was his suggestion that Bush “listen to Gershwin” in order to avoid war. Which Gershwin, exactly? Porgy and Bess? Or perhaps An American in Paris?)14
Even as the Hollywood left played the victim game, they shut down members of their own community (or their perceived community) who disagreed with them. This is a town, after all, that boasts about Janeane Garofalo, who preaches, “Our country is founded on a sham: our forefathers were slave-owning rich white guys who wanted it their way. So when I see the American flag, I go, ‘Oh my God, you’re insulting me.’ That you can have a gay parade on Christopher Street in New York, with naked men and women on a float cheering, ‘We’re here, we’re queer!’—that’s what makes my heart swell. Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag. I get choked up with pride.”15
It’s no wonder that conservatives in Hollywood are treated as though they suffer from highly contagious leprosy—and during the Bush years, that only escalated. They pumped out antiwar dud after antiwar dud, and they cast out every right-winger vengefully, or at least every right-winger they could find.
But the phenomenon wasn’t limited to Hollywood; it was a pattern that pervaded the left. If you offended the prevailing sensibilities of your “group,” you were made to pay. Joe Lieberman was a living example. He was savaged for dissenting on one issue at a time when dissent was supposedly patriotic, and at the same time the left was claiming false victimhood. The left painted Lieberman as the conscience of the Senate when he ran for vice president with Al Gore in 2000; now he was a traitor. He needed to be destroyed as a message to anyone who would actually dare to show true dissent. By 2006, Lieberman had been thrown out of the Democratic Party for his heresy and was now an independent senator from Connecticut.
Perhaps the best example, though—and one that played out in the New Media landscape—was Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan, an openl
y gay man, understands the penalties that go along with speaking out against the Complex if you’re a member of one of the subgroups; if he were given truth serum, he’d have one hell of a story to tell.
Sullivan said he was a conservative in the 1990s and the early 2000s. More than that, he backed George W. Bush’s election in 2000 because, as he put it, “when I look at what he is proposing to do, I agree with him far more than I do with Al Gore. For me to support Gore on his current big-government, leftist platform would simply mean renouncing most of the principles I have long believed in and cherish.” Sullivan even went so far as to renounce identity politics: “I believe in an equal society with equal rights for individuals—not a balkanized society where membership in certain groups guarantees special privileges and rights.” Even though he was for gay marriage, and even though Bush, as he said, “thinks gay people should live as criminals under sodomy laws (which is almost enough to send me back to Gore),” Sullivan realized that Bush “would represent an uneven and unprincipled check on the balkanization of America.”16
In June 2001, Michelangelo Signorile, a gay journalist who specializes in the vile practice of “outing” prominent people with whom he disagrees, went after Sullivan with a pickax in the alt weekly LGNY, along with buddy Michael Musto from the Village Voice and David Ehrenstein from the Los Angeles Times. They found his personal sexual advertisement on a gay website, where he was looking for partners who were also HIV positive and didn’t want to use condoms. He basically said in his ad that he liked it every way and liked to give it every way. And the gay left, which hated his endorsement of Bush, used it to embarrass him, ruin him, intimidate him.
Nonetheless, after September 11, Sullivan stood strong by Bush. On September 18, he wrote, “I am relieved that George W. Bush is President of the United States. I am more than ever proud of endorsing him last fall…. We have the right man in the job.”17
Over the next two years, Sullivan maintained his pro-Bush position, hoping to convince gay Americans that Bush’s push for liberty in the Arab world was good for the gay community. Then, in February 2004, in response to the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s ruling forcing same-sex marriage on the state, Bush came out in favor of a constitutional amendment to protect marriage. That was it for Sullivan. He went berserk. “WAR IS DECLARED,” he proclaimed in CAPSLOCK. “Those of us who supported this President in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this President was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.”18
In his well-traveled, influential post-9/11 writing, Andrew Sullivan had two fronts: progay, and pro-war-on-terror against radical Islamists. Which meant he was living two lives. For years, Sullivan was effectively fending off the gay left. It was a tenuous, delicate détente in which Sullivan rightfully posited that Bush was fighting for Western liberalism over the blatantly antigay and medieval radical Islam. How Sullivan held the gay left at bay for as long as he did was impressive. But when Bush disappointed him by taking a stand against gay marriage in the strongest possible terms, Sullivan had a choice: either lose his standing in the gay world, or keep that standing and ditch Bush.
Aside from Hollywood and the gay left, the mainstream left began trotting out “victim” after “victim” to blame Bush for their misfortunes. The left began politicizing 9/11 by suggesting that if anyone from the right mentioned it, they were exploiting 9/11 in grotesque fashion, while simultaneously granting authority to the Jersey Girls, whose husbands died that horrific day and who blamed the Republicans (exclusively) for presiding over the eight months prior to 9/11, as opposed to the eight years of prior Democratic leadership in the White House.
The left also accused the right of the tactics they themselves were using, claiming the right was politicizing 9/11 and challenging the patriotism of its political enemies. Max Cleland was brought out as a symbol of his hero status, his legs missing, not to defend his point of view from a rational angle, but as an unassailable symbol of the left’s invulnerability—if you attacked the left, you were attacking war heroes like Cleland. Cindy Sheehan came out of the woodwork and was granted automatic heroine status by the press (until she turned on the Democratic Party, at which point she was relegated to Crazyland).
All these tragic symbols were trotted out, one after another, in order to create a solid shield for the Democratic Party against the Republican Party’s foreign policy approach. Meanwhile, the eunuchs in the Republican leadership allowed this campy, over-the-top theater to grab the moral high ground, even though it was espousing surrender in the war on radical Islam and the disembowelment of George W. Bush. The Republican leadership allowed the antiwar movement to become mainstream.
There were few who spoke up against this. Only Ann Coulter had the guts to take them on at the time. Ann had experienced the underhanded attention of the media left and refused to be defeated just because her opponents tried to destroy her. Her refusal to play by the enemy’s rules made her a warrior of the highest order, exposing the leftist tactic of using grief as a means of stifling dissent. And even though the left threw every grenade in their arsenal at her, Ann shamed them into taking the Jersey Girls, Cleland, and Sheehan out of heavy rotation. She did so by pointing out that these “victims” were cynically being used as political weapons, and the charge was so obviously true it stuck. Coulter’s acts are pilloried to this day, yet those same manufactured spokespeople and those tactics are conspicuously still out of commission. Politics is not for the faint of heart.
Ann’s defiance and success taught me a valuable lesson: the people most detested by the Democrat-Media Complex, the ones who are most marginalized, are the ones who are the most effective. At that moment in time, I started to realize that we needed to fight the leftist wave with all of our strength and all of the means at our disposal. They can be beaten.
Between the war in Iraq, the introduction of “victims” of a manufactured “intolerance” toward dissent, the ire and tactics of the gay movement, and the unyielding propaganda of the Hollywood left, all the strands braided together to form a leftist rope of monumental strength—a rope made to hang George W. Bush from the highest turret.
I watched with increasing trepidation the ultimate attack on Bush that I had previously predicted to friends and family. I watched the collective effect of the Hollywood class’s reaction to 9/11, which consisted of splitting the country when we were united. And I decided to stop fighting behind coattails and to start fighting in my own name.
That’s why, in 2004, I wrote Hollywood, Interrupted with Mark Ebner, a no-holds-barred underground Hollywood journalist. I wrote it out of the pure outrage welling up in me as I saw the Hollywood left filling the void in the Democratic Party after 9/11, normalizing the most extreme scorched-earth measures against a wartime president. I wrote it because of Sean Penn, and Martin Sheen, and all these radicals who had clean haircuts and wore three-thousand-dollar suits and used the power of their image to legitimize the profoundly damaging metamorphosis the Democratic Party was undergoing—the transition from the party of Joe Lieberman to the party of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean.
The biggest point I wanted to make was one I’m still making: Hollywood is more important than Washington. It can’t be overstated how important this message is: pop culture matters. What happens in front of the cameras on a soundstage at the Warner Bros. lot often makes more difference to the fate of America than what happens in the back rooms of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill.
That book covered everything from the sexual deviance of the Hollywood crowd (it was like Tulane West) to the cult adherence to Kabbalah and Scientology to the discrimination against conservatives in the business. It was a total assault on the town and on the industry.
It was also my first taste of personal public scrutiny. For the first time, I was a public figure appearing on Fox News and AM radio, not just to attack these people and their methods, but to rem
ind Americans that Hollywood wasn’t trivial—that it was the most dangerous propaganda tool of the left in America.
During that time, Dennis Miller began putting me on the air, and I started to realize the value of some of these tactics that the left uses. I saw the value of telling a joke while making a point. I was beginning to act on my theory that it was more important to stay in Los Angeles and effect change from the outside of Washington and the inside of pop culture rather than the other way around. I was beginning to understand how to integrate jokes and humor into a hybrid persona that was part politics and part entertainment.
But along with those realizations came another realization. I began to see the fundamental flaw in the left’s scorched-earth tactics—they can only tear down, not build up. And it hit me that the tearing down of The Other wasn’t enough. Every time I did a Fox News hit where I attacked Michael Moore, no matter how valid the attack, no matter how much I had raised my fledgling Q rating, I felt emasculated and cheapened because I was only tearing down, not building. I felt the inherent lack that resides in the right, which was so removed from the cultural process because it had self-removed, abdicated its responsibility to be a steward of the culture, handed over the entire means of representing the United States abroad and teaching Americans about America at home to the hard left.
But I also knew that the left’s control was a false architecture born of smoke and mirrors, born of a media age in which the left controlled who was cool and who was not, who was in the in crowd and who was in the out crowd, punishing those who would step out of line and rewarding those who went with the flow. Even big stars were punished—how much more so would makeup artists doing Susan Sarandon’s eyeliner be punished if they openly traded views on the war in Iraq? Leftists without credentials made it in Hollywood because they were leftists—all they had to do was show up to Jeffrey Katzenberg–sponsored fund-raisers, and Katzenberg would scratch their back. But underneath the surface, there were a lot of people who didn’t agree with Katzenberg and who were waiting to be unshackled from the ideological slave ship.
Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 9