Andrew Breitbart immediately emailed the author of the piece, Blake Gopnik, to point out that Big Hollywood had not been properly attributed on criticism of the piece.  Here’s Andrew’s email: 

“Ben Shapiro at Big Hollywood broke this story with a legitimate report. Not blog opinion. To credit Free Republic or conservative opinion sites is either bad journalism or… bad journalism. Even at Free Republic they cite Shapiro and Big Hollywood. The story was cited properly all over the Internet, why the Washington Post breach? We have been at the forefront of reporting on what the MSM won’t regarding this admin. We had the ACORN story, the NEA propaganda conference call. All hard news stories. And so is this. Shapiro is a Harvard law grad. He is hardly worthy of this kind of brush off. We’d like to see a correction as soon as possible.” 

And here is Gopnik’s response:  

I’m sorry, Andrew, but there WAS NO STORY OR SCANDAL HERE, at all, until the White House (seemed to have been) forced to withdraw the painting by conservative Web sites. We were well aware of the earlier comments regarding “Watusi,” but actively chose not to cover them in any way, because they were so ill-founded. Any writer with any real expertise in art would have known that Thomas’s riff on Matisse was always meant to be obviously legible as such, and was read as such from the beginning — there was never any fakery or plagiarism involved. Accusing Thomas of “plagiarism” here is precisely like accusing the Beatles of “plagiarism” for having recorded “Roll Over Beethoven” — after making the “discovery”, in 2009, that there was this other guy named Chuck Berry who’d written a song that sounded almost the same.           

Yours, 

Blake Gopnik
Chief Art Critic
The Washington Post 

I will freely admit that I am no expert art critic.  I am, however, a lawyer.  And I can read.  These constitute two skill sets that apparently elude Mr. Gopnik.  Gopnik admits that the White House was “forced to withdraw the painting by conservative Web sites,” which is more than he did in his Washington Post piece.  But at the same time, he says that everyone knows that Thomas’ piece is a “riff on Matisse.”  Everyone, it seems, except the New York Times, which originally reported the Obama White House Art.  In the pages of the Times, Holland Cotter, the Times’ art critic, described Thomas’ painting as “an out-and-out steal of a Matisse collage. Thomas just shifts the pieces around, cools the colors down, and adds a title that refers to a Chubby Checker song.”  I guess Cotter is as uneducated as I am.  (The New York Times, by the way, was just as bad as the Washington Post – in their coverage of the White House takedown, they selectively edited out Cotter’s line about “Watusi (Hard Edge)” as an “out-and-out steal of a Matisse collage” while keeping his description about Chubby Checker.) 

Whatever Gopnik knows about art, his claims about the nature of artistic plagiarism demonstrate total and utter ignorance of basic copyright law.  “Accusing Thomas of ‘plagiarism’ here is precisely like accusing the Beatles of ‘plagiarism’ for having recorded ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ — after making the ‘discovery,’ in 2009, that there was this other guy named Chuck Berry who’d written a song that sounded almost the same,” Gopnik patronizingly remarks in his email.  Except that the Beatles, presumably, complied with U.S. copyright law, which requires that re-recordings of songs acquire what is termed a “mechanical license” — a process which calls for the re-recording artist to both notify the original artist of the song and to pay a royalty for using it.  Alma hasn’t paid a dime to the Matisse estate to my knowledge. So it ain’t quite the same thing, there, Blake.  

As far as visual art, slight modification won’t obviate copyright infringement claims.  Just ask Shepard Fairey, the idiot artist who created the Obama Hope poster by ripping off an Associated Press photograph.  AP sued Fairey under the Copyright Act, explaining that “the Infringing Works copy all the distinctive and unequivocally recognizable elements of the Obama Photo in their entire detail, retaining the heart and essence of The AP’s photo, including but not limited to its patriotic theme … the striking similarity between The AP’s copyright image … of President Obama and the poster that Fairey made based on that image … is patently obvious.” 

There were strong legal grounds for the AP’s suit against Fairey – grounds which would be similarly applicable to Matisse’s work.  Under 17 U.S.C. §106, for example, the owner of copyright in a work as the exclusive right to “prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work.”  Under 17 U.S.C. §501, “Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner … is an infringer of the copyright.”  So Gopnik’s supposed defense of plagiarism in art in the Washington Post piece as “common practice in art for hundreds of years” doesn’t make it okay.  

The story of the Obama White House and “Watusi (Hard Edge)” was originally a story about the White House’s incompetent vetting process and inane taste in art.  Now it has become something more: the latest and most patently obvious attempt by the mainstream media to shield a president from any criticism, however minute – and their willingness even to endorse artistic plagiarism to do it.

Thank you for your Halloween Daily Dish in response to my Big Hollywood blog about the latest LGBT assault on Mormons.  We actually met once, briefly, at DC Pride, circa 1990.  I had never heard of you or The New Republic.  I do remember liking your accent.

More recently, about five years ago, I shot you an email to say thanks for a column you’d written about the threat of Islam to gays.  You sent a nice thank you back.  I’ve also admired your calling the hate crimes bill “boutique legislation” and urging your readers to stop sending checks to the Human Rights Campaign.

I appreciate the restraint of your posting, “A Gay Voice Against Marriage Equality,” though the title concerns me a little, as the last thing I want is for LGBTers to assume I am some kind of Anita Bryant (she was very active when I was coming out, and we don’t need a repeat of that).  Few things are as terrifying as the thought of becoming the object of gay fury (which I understand you’ve had some experience with).  It’s a sorry state of affairs when people within the gay community no longer feel they can speak freely without risking ostracism or threats.  I sometimes wonder if there should be a hate crimes bill to protect gay people from other gay people.

That said, there are a couple of points in your piece I’d like to address.

First, one does not have to ”search high and low” to find lesbians and gays who are suspicious of the cause formerly known as same-sex marriage.  Contrary to popular mythology, not all of us feel a pressing need for “marriage equality,” nor do we derive our self-worth from the state.  I know gay Californians who voted for Prop 8 last year because they sincerely believe it is in the best interest of children (some of whom will grow up to be gay), and of society as a whole (which includes gay people), to uphold the ideal of the man-woman nuclear family.

And by the way, the gestapo tactics used by the gay community against Prop 8 supporters didn’t win any hearts and minds - they simply spread fear.

Second, the current term for gay marriage, “marriage equality,” is deliberately misleading.  On the surface, it sounds harmless, even benign, but its bullet-proof banality is a con to nip dissent in the bud.  After all, who could possibly be against something as fair-sounding as “marriage equality?”

“Marriage equality” is like “social justice” – a catch-all phrase that means everything, and nothing.  But ordinary words are a powerful tool in the ongoing, subliminal campaign to disguise social revolution (the tearing down of mainstream institutions) as reasonable legal reform.  It’s the oldest trick in the book.

Meanwhile, gays often seem to mistake legal rights with moral approval.  Unfortunately, being able to say you are “married” will not buy daddy’s love – or that of anyone else who is already unwilling to give it.  And there are other consequences.  As Roseanne Barr put it: ”I am totally against gay marriage.  Haven’t gay people suffered enough?”  As we’ve seen over the past 40 years, approval and acceptance can be achieved incrementally – with time – not whole hog ASAP.

“But seeking equality surely is a way for the two belief systems to coexist,” you write.  “Not a whit of heterosexuals’ rights and privileges and families is affected, after all, and most of us who support marriage equality do so because we admire the stability that marriage gives straights.”  Again, sounds good, but you’ve got the motivation wrong.

Based on a lifetime of experience in the gay world – which has included caring for an ex- as he was slowly wasting away from AIDS - I’m sad to say I don’t believe that most gays “admire the stability that marriage gives straights.”  I wish I did.

On the contrary, many gays seem to resent the promise of stability that marriage gives straights.  Far too often have I heard upstanding lesbian and gay couples mock the alleged sanctity of heterosexual marriage – in their defense of same-sex marriage – with snide remarks about the sky-high divorce rate, Britney Spears, and other mainstream marital failures.  So spite has just as much to do with the grab as admiration.

The gay community is trying to usurp the word “marriage” without considering less antagonistic ways to attain the same goal (full legal rights).  What the advantages might be - for them - in keeping the ideal of traditional marriage intact (most gay people are themselves products of heterosexual nuclear families) never even registers on their gaydar.

As “male” and “female” are increasingly viewed as archaic social constructs – or elective surgical options (thank you, “Chaz” Bono) - marriage is rapidly becoming just another disposable lifestyle choice, with children fashionable accessories (largely to make their parents feel like “good” people).  This, of course, is not the fault of gays and lesbians; the deterioration started with irresponsible, sybaritic straight people.  But to further dilute the original intent of marriage (to raise children and keep us all going) isn’t going to help anyone.

If the LGBT community wants to do something really radical – and be truly honest about it - they should consider Alan Dershowitz’s suggestion to “unlink” the religious institution of marriage from any state control, and make civil unions the secular norm.

That would give religious couples, for whom the “m” word is sacred, the freedom to marry in a church, synagogue, mosque, or whatever – letting religious establishments choose which marriages to honor (including gay marriages, if they wish) – and non-religious couples the autonomy to register for civil union, fully recognized by the state, with the same rights and responsibilities.

This way, gay and straight couples would be equal under the law.  And gay couples would still be free to propose “marriage equality” to individual churches, without it being any concern of the state.  Dershowitz contends that a division of this magnitude would be good for gay people and the religious opponents of gay marriage, and that it would fortify the separation between church and state.

Not only would such a distinction shake things up (to satisfy the gays’ radical itch), it would also clear up a lot of the confusion and baggage that comes with “m” word.  Wouldn’t that be a relief.

Best of all, everybody would be happy!

Yeah, yeah – I know:  “But marriage in the United States is a civil union – while a civil union is not a marriage!”  So change it.  Dershowitz’s plan can’t be any harder than what the gay community’s already trying to do (and failing).  Imagine a marriage reform that gays, Christians, Jews, Muslims – and Mormons – could all agree on.  Kumbaya, baby!

Lastly, you write that my position on “marriage equality” is nothing more than “Breitbartism… not principled conservatism; it is cultural anti-liberalism so deep it forces people to take positions they otherwise wouldn’t.”  I’m touched by the ginger way you avoid placing the blame for what I wrote directly on me.  Seriously, it’s very sweet.  But there’s really no need to sidestep the issue.

If by “not principled conservatism” you mean that my appraisal of the situation isn’t by-the-book, you are right.  Unlike the liberalism I blindly believed in for most of my life – thanks to 24/7 media indoctrination - my conservatism springs from actual life experience and a hard-won trust in my own gut.  It’s organic.  And like being gay (but unlike “marriage equality”), it’s not a choice.

As for ”Breitbartism,” I’ll take that as a compliment, since the right-wing, alleged Svengali happens to be one of the most kind and open-minded straight men I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet.  What I’ve actually been the butt of is ”Sullivanism”: the subtle diminishment of an apostate who follows his or her conscience off the gay plantation.

You write, “No one should take a position on civil rights because a movie trailer made them retch.”  I couldn’t agree with you more.  But do you really think the full-length 8: The Mormon Proposition will be less overwrought than its teaser?

My one regret is that the preview didn’t come out sooner.  They could have put it to good use down in Guantanamo Bay.

In a “Big” way, Andrew Breitbart has injected into our modern cultural/media zeitgeist a foundational reminder of why it is so intellectually critical, even fun, to inspire and embrace the notion that “there’s nothing better than having convivial relations with people with whom you disagree.”

To that end, may I humbly share my own ideological apostasy and second thoughts that began in 1989. 

In that year, my oldest child was born and I found myself – as do many Los Angeles parents — driving around the city to various ‘play-dates’, supermarket excursions, pediatrician visits, and the 12-miles-distant playground of the ‘progressive’ pre-school where my wife and I intended to enroll our children. (I also began more closely scrutinizing and fearing the withholding taxes from my paycheck increasing the governmental intrusion into my young family). 

It was during those hours of drive time that I would engage our little ones with music from a Raffi jingle or the Beatles on my car’s now obsolete cassette player (yay, iPods!). When they’d invariably be serenaded to sleep — in their child-safety seats with the Bert & Ernie steering wheel attachment – I’d tune in the Howard Stern Show on 97.1 KLSX FM radio. 

I’d been enjoying Mr. Stern & Co. for years, and found his provocative, often hilarious and creative show reminiscent of the crude, in-your-face counter-cultural style to which I’d grown so attached in my teen years during the ‘70s. A style (with all due and biased respect to Mr. Stern) innovated by his broadcast predecessor, Chicagoland’s iconic Steve Dahl.

“Shock Jock” radio’s inherent vulgarities aside, for me its main troubles are the inevitable programming lulls. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate and admire the challenge of sustaining a three-hour comedy and variety show in any medium – let alone without visuals — and the herculean team effort that goes into such undertakings on a daily basis. Bravo! 

However, as any objective listener and talent might do, during those lulls I tended to channel-surf. 

It was during those car radio surfing safaris, in particular the nine-to-noon slot, that my fingers led me to KFI-AM 640 Radio. I began listening to what I first thought was just another loudmouth Shock Jock. Except this guy was different. He played little if any music beyond his bumper rotation. His material was intellectually-based, creatively entertaining, and unabashedly biased in ideological terms. 

As a young & liberal parent, I’d discovered Rush Limbaugh. I’ve been a dedicated listener ever since. 

Rush’s countless words and twenty years of wisdom, provocations and humor is an inspiration to me and his tens of millions of listeners to read and investigate further controversial issues, current events, history, and philosophy. 

Most beneficial have been the corroborating authors and resources he admires and/or recommends to this day: from Jesus to Blaise Pascal, John Adams to Ronald Reagan, the American Thinker to IBD, John Locke to Mark R. Levin, Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Sowell. 

As Mr. Limbaugh distilled it so beautifully: 

“I love being a conservative. We conservatives are proud of our philosophy. Unlike our liberal friends, who are constantly looking for new words to conceal their true beliefs and are in a perpetual state of reinvention, we conservatives are unapologetic about our ideals. We are confident in our principles and energetic about openly advancing them. We believe in individual liberty, limited government, capitalism, the rule of law, faith, a color-blind society and national security. We support school choice, enterprise zones, tax cuts, welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, political speech, homeowner rights and the war on terrorism. And at our core we embrace and celebrate the most magnificent governing document ever ratified by any nation–the U.S. Constitution. Along with the Declaration of Independence, which recognizes our God-given natural right to be free, it is the foundation on which our government is built and has enabled us to flourish as a people.”

How can reasonable Americans ‘convivially’ argue against that? 

The modern media (“Algore’s Internet”) has, Moses-like, led us to the promised land of instantaneous access to the widest diversity of information and accountability that mankind has ever known. There is no better example I know of human freedom. 

So, how should people take advantage of that, and what does all of this have to do with the Anguish of the Apostate? 

Hi, my name is Adam, and I am an apostate to the faith of Modern Liberalism whose ‘anguish’ has been relieved. 

Anyone with second thoughts out there care to join in that relief?

Earlier this week, Andrew Breitbart paid tribute to the late Ron Silver at the Center for Security Policy’s Keeper of the Flame dinner.  Attendees included Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

And, yes, the Super Bowl story is 100% true. 

A thousand years ago in Cairo, surrounded by ancient pyramids and the ghosts of lost civilizations, the great Arab scientist Alhazen conducted a peculiar optical experiment. Building on observations made by Aristotle thirteen centuries earlier, he first constructed a room, one completely shuttered from the light of the outside world, as dark as death. He then cleverly lit the space around the room with an array of bright lamps. Finally, he punched a single pinhole into one wall, just large enough to let a small beam of lamplight bleed in.

Alhazen confirmed that if you entered such a room, and sat in the darkness until your eyes had ample time to adjust, and then followed the beam of light emanating from the pinhole to where it splashed onto the wall opposite, you would be privy to an amazing, almost magical sight. As you watched, shapes and colors would begin to coalesce. Familiar forms would appear. And eventually, when your eyes had acclimated enough, you would be staring at nothing less than an exact upside-down projection of the outside world, perfect in every detail. Alhazen marveled at this, and gave the experiment an evocative name: Al-Bayt al-Muthlim, translated by later scribes into Latin as camera obscura — The Veiled Chamber.

In a sense, it was the very first movie theater.

A millennium after Alhazen, the world now brims with Veiled Chambers — tricked-out IMAX theaters with stadium seating, careworn revival houses, happily unkempt family rooms. Each plunges us into a darkling twilight that induces a spectacular hypnosis. Think about it: we’ve seen the likes of Kevin Costner, Meryl Streep, or Denzel Washington in countless films, we’ve watched them give interviews on television, we’ve read about them in tabloid exposés. We know, consciously, that they are actors. Fakes. Pretenders. And yet no sooner does the darkness engulf us than our logical, skeptical, twenty-first century minds shut down, allowing them to become a Civil War soldier, or a queen, or a mafia kingpin, or a globetrotting archaeologist. Over the course of two hours they pretend to fall in love, to risk their lives, to make and lose fortunes, to die. And somehow, through it all, we believe. We laugh, gasp, scream. We weep, with tears of genuine grief streaming down our faces. Only when cast back into the daylight does this madness pass, leaving only a bittersweet nostalgia as we realize that all the monsters and magic and galaxies far, far away were just so much hocus-pocus.

That, Dear Reader, is the essence of cinema (from the Greek kinēma — “motion”), and no other art form is as capable of such focused, vibrant, transformative power.

The power of cinema, I humbly propose, is at its peak when harnessed to the task of refreshing and strengthening our civilizational confidence — our deepest loves, our noblest aspirations, our cherished traditions, the beauty and poetry and truth of our language and songs, our regenerative myths, our moral certitudes, our martial might. Above all, the best films revel in shared humanity — that realm of pure feeling that soars far above politics, religion, race, age and gender, allowing us to commune with “the better angels of our nature.” By necessity, civilizations establish notions of perfection, of heroism, of worthy sacrifice, of right. To thrive, they must continually enforce and perpetuate these tenets through the medium of culture. The boundaries imposed by a strong culture act not as the walls of a prison but as the battlements of a fortress. Decorum, manners, styles of dress, the developed forms and structure of art — these serve the same purpose in a healthy civilization as the deadbolt on the front door of a house or the fence surrounding a backyard. They provide comfort, surety, self-possession. As such, they are an absolute good.

Alas, civilizations are also home to damaged and deranged people, twisted with bitterness and hate, who seek to become purveyors of what can only be described as cultural leprosy. Like any virus, they thrive wherever a civilization has succumbed to weakness, confusion, lawlessness, decadence, doubt. Incapable of real artistry, they resort to cruel acts of desecration and graffiti. A crucifix dipped in urine. A Madonna covered in feces. Songs that delight in scatology, rape, murder, fear, perversion. Movies that provide no sense of composition, sequence, or movement. Paintings that defy explanation or even description. Poetry bereft of form, meter, rhyme, or import. Criticism that warps meaning, denies standards, and condemns beauty. Left free to attack and spread, all of these things carve grievous wounds into a culture, breaking down the battlements of a civilization brick by brick. They are agents of anti-humanity, and their weapons are cancer, disease, and dissolution. While they can never be wholly eradicated, a healthy culture will fight these malevolent usurpations with the assured ruthlessness of a gardener ridding a prized flowerbed of poisonous weeds.

Ask yourself: what is the current state of our civilization? Of our culture? Are we awash in civilizational confidence? Or is our fortress crumbling and graffiti-littered and strangled by an ocean of weeds? If we set ourselves to pulling the weeds, what forgotten gardens might reveal themselves? What lost temples or treasures might be found? What senses of pride, glory, and strength might be enjoyed again? Most important of all, given the mission statement of this website: what part might cinema — that most powerful and hypnotic of art forms — play in rebuilding our cultural fortress and reestablishing a healthy and humane civilization?

In the words of Andrew Breitbart’s inaugural editorial here on this site: “Something has gone drastically wrong. . . Hollywood should return to its patriotic roots. . . [Until conservatives] recognize that (pop) culture is the big prize and that politics is secondary, there will be no victory in this important battle. . . We need to discover that spirit again.” The purpose of this blog series, For Conservative Movie Lovers, is to seek out those roots and that spirit, to make them relevant once again to modern conservative filmgoers, and to express a great many things regarding film and conservatism that I care about deeply — lonely, forgotten things that get precious little hearing in today’s high-octane, news-driven cultural arena, but which in the end constitute our only real protection against the darkness of cultural debasement and decay.

By way of achieving these goals, I have carefully selected a different film to represent each year from 1915-2009. Every Saturday here at Big Hollywood, my time and your interest permitting, I will introduce these pictures to you via rich, multimedia-enhanced essays. You will learn about the men and women who made each movie, and discover a cavalcade of actors destined to bring you countless hours of delight. You will learn something about cinematography, film music, costume design, dance choreography, and much else, becoming conversant with the names and careers of revered geniuses in each discipline. You will gain some knowledge of French cinema, German cinema, Hong Kong cinema. You will learn about what makes good criticism good, bad criticism bad, and why films do indeed need critics. Again and again you will be brought face-to-face with the old studio system, the facts and myths surrounding the “Golden Age” of American cinema, the infamous blacklists (both past and present), and many other things of high interest. All of this will be addressed from a conservative perspective and made relevant to the cultural battles of today.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to follow along with each group of posts, then seek out the movie in question and watch it. And by that, I mean really watch it, with all of the things you have learned informing and enriching the viewing. If you have any pertinent observations or are otherwise so inclined, you can light up the COMMENTS section of each post with additional discussion and argument. I’ll also provide a vast assortment of links for further reading and viewing, so that if a particular director, genre, actor, or thematic idea seizes your imagination, you can travel down those side-paths as far as you like. Think of For Conservative Movie Lovers as a graduate course in film (taught by a conservative, wonder of wonders!) right here at Big Hollywood U.

My hope is that, by the end of this long march through cinematic history, I will have armed despairing conservative readers with the certitude that they are far from defeated in this sphere, that they are in fact the heirs to an immense store of cultural wealth. If a Hollywood conservative uses something they find here in their next film or performance, if someone at home passes a telling anecdote or story onto their kids, if people leave this series feeling inoculated against those who yearn to destroy them and everything they hold dear, and if they achieve a sublime elation regarding their history, heritage, and especially their cinema, I will consider the effort as time well spent.

For in the end cinema is, by its very nature, an intensely conservative medium. Look at the movies from any decade of the last century, and you’ll get an education in how people looked, spoke, dressed and thought. No amount of nanny-state whining can take the cigarettes out of their mouths, steal the oh-so-offensive words from their lips, or dissolve their humanity in the acid-bath of nihilism. They and the times in which they lived are conserved, free from fleeting and ever-changing notions of political correctness and censorship. This is good to see, because it preserves truth, in a form that glitters and glows like only the very best art can, as beacons of light and hope.

I’ll leave you for now with a quotation from the late critic and filmmaker Lindsay Anderson, whose magnificent treatise About John Ford bears heavily on the first film to go under our microscope, and indeed remains the most penetrating and moving defense of conservatism in cinema I’ve ever read. Attempting to explain the natural appeal of old movies, he wrote many decades ago that:

With all the brilliance, the intelligence and sophistication that goes into filmmaking today, with all the multiplicity of elaborate and costly techniques, there is still this lack of feeling, of emotional exposure and commitment. Which is one reason why, again and again, we return in our dissatisfaction (not just with nostalgia) to the great films of the past in which we can still feel “the freshness of the early world,” and from which we can still receive refreshment.

The freshness of the early world (a phrase originally penned by the poet Matthew Arnold, while describing the appeal of Wordsworth upon the latter’s death in 1850). I like it. Let us begin, then, to refresh ourselves at the well of great cinema by meditating on some great films, with an especial focus on their makers and their making.

Coming tomorrow, For Conservative Movie Lovers begins its journey into The Veiled Chamber with our first film.

On Saturday, Oct. 10, more than 150 wounded heroes will complete a 7-day, 475-mile journey from San Francisco to LA. The Wounded Heroes, many home from Iraq and Afghanistan, are cycling down scenic Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Their goal is to raise awareness and money to provide bikes and equipment for mental and physical therapy for fellow military heroes. The final leg of this journey brings the riders down San Vicente Blvd. from 26th to the West LA VA. 

This is where you come in.  We are looking for everyone, You, your family, friends, community members, organizations, and congregations to come out and line San Vicente Blvd. all the way to the VA. Welcome home these brave men and women and cheer them on their final miles.  Special guest riders include James Cromwell, Adam Baldwin, Tobey Maguire, Mike Vogel, Patricia Heaton, David Hunt, Kristy Swanson, Adam Housley, and Andrew Breitbart. 

Afterwards, join us for a FREE celebration at the West LA VA next to the Wadsworth Theater. The entertainment will be provided by SNL’s Victoria Jackson, Jon David, and Rock Nation and you can visit and talk with the heroes including Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Walt Ehlers and the American Legion Riders.

Schedule

• 9:00 AM   Riders leave Ventura
• 1:00 PM  Join us on San Vicente Blvd. to welcome the riders home
• 1:30 PM   Riders Arrive – West LA VA 11301 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90073
• 1:45 PM   ROCK NATION                     
• 3:15 PM   Jon David Performs
• 3:30 PM   VICTORIA JACKSON LIVE
• 4:45 PM   Program concludes 

Join our community in saluting these Heroes

Andrew Sullivan (left) and Conor Friedersdorf

In the piece you link to and affirm in the Daily Beast, “The Right’s Lesser Press,” Conor Friedersdorf refuses to interview me as he continues to be my unofficial biographer. (I’m VERY reachable, Conor.) He writes opinion pieces on me purporting to be journalism. He doesn’t quote or cite me, he simply assumes and pushes the point of view he thinks I have and makes an argument based on these alleged positions. It’s sloppy and you, of all people, should know better.

Breitbart.com is MOSTLY a news aggregator. It carries the Associated Press, Reuters, even, Agence France Presse, from those dreaded croissant eaters!!!

It even carries the New York Times on its front page — a benefit that even Big Government and Big Hollywood don’t receive.

Big Hollywood is what it is: a counter-voice to the virtually monolithic Hollywood left. How dare I grant a platform, and a means for the defense of those in Hollywood who would dare go against the strident and intolerant Hollywood left.

Big Government, too, is providing an outlet for voices and ideas that are not proportionally represented in the traditional and mostly biased mainstream media.

(more…)

It’s a good thing there are conservatives willing to expose this administration for what it is.

President Obama and Kalpen Modi, Associate Director of the Office of Public Engagement

But the question is, what’s next? How can this be countered and how can the Obama administration be forced to back down? As it is, liberal groups, news organizations and individuals continue to cover up for the administration. Perhaps someone will be thrown under the bus again, but the thugs of Team Obama will remain in place and continue to “transform America.”

Exposing their tactics is necessary to fight them, but it’s not enough to actually beat them. Mr. Breitbart and team have learned that the tactics the left has used against conservatives for decades; to discredit them works wonders. But if conservatives want to take back the government, we have to copy the left’s organizing skills as well.

It’s an outrage that the NEA has been turned into a propaganda tool by the most liberal president the U.S. has ever had. But there is a reason the administration spoke to artists on the August conference call and was willing to take the risk of exposure: artists influence the people. The effect isn’t always immediate–it may take years for artists to truly influence society as a whole–but it’s there. If you want to “transform” society you need artists on your side.

Liberals have always understood this. They’ve been working with artists for decades. A lot of art already is politicized. The only reason this is a scandal now is because the radical left isn’t some fringe group at this moment but is in charge of the government. As Buffy Wicks put it, “we [meaning they] won.”

If they weren’t in charge of the government but were still activists, some would still be outraged, but it would not be considered a big thing. The strategy is nothing new–the only new aspect of it is that these people have taken over the government and continue to use artists as propaganda tools.

Whether we like it or not, this strategy has paid off. Liberals have influenced society tremendously by, among other things, using the arts to indoctrinate the American people. They’ve done this in the United States and in Europe. They’re influencing society by doing what free market thinker Friedrich Hayek told conservatives to do: getting second-hand dealers of ideas on their side who then slowly but surely influence society by a constant and never-ceasing flow of propaganda.

If we conservatives want to fight back in the long run, instead of just bringing down this particular liberal administration, we have to do what liberals have been doing for years. We too have to get as many second hand dealers of ideas on our side. Then and only then will be successful in the long run.

Breitbart has taught us that the strategies the left has used to discredit the right can be used against them. We have to act on that, continue to do what Breitbart and some here at Big Hollywood have been doing. But we have to do more than that: we have to destroy and create. And the wonderful thing is that to do this we can learn from the left once again, we can use their tactics against them in this aspect as well.

If we want the victories of the last weeks to be permanent, we should copy the left’s strategy in every way possible. Destroy and create.

Let’s get going.