Folks Complaining About Pop Culture Don't Understand the Breitbart Doctrine

DAVID KARP

Celebrity is everything in this country — Andrew Breitbart.

Today I wrote a number of pieces here at RedState that covered a diverse range of topics:

AOC Doomsday Countdown Clock Update: We Don’t Have Much More Time Left on Earth

Advertisement

Former Obama-Biden Official Acknowledges President Biden Has a Problem at Our Southern Border

New Report Says Russians Shot Down Their Own Plane – Is Putin the Russian Biden?

Ricky Gervais Reveals What Joke He Would Have Told About Jada Smith on Oscar Night

Three of these pieces are political in nature and one is about pop culture. Yet the pop culture one about Ricky Gervais and his fabulous verbal jab about the Will and Jada Smith debacle at the Oscars this past Sunday I hesitated writing at first. Why? You may ask.

Because of an article I wrote yesterday — Will Smith REFUSED to Leave Oscars Ceremony After ‘the Slap,’ According to New Report — to which I received a response that gets a bit tiring to receive. The response is one that I have seen many receive who’ve commented about the mess that Will Smith created with his nonsensical reaction to the harmless joke Chris Rock told.

Here is just a sample of some of the responses I have received to the articles about the Sunday show.

Who REALLY, ONESTLY gives a s.. t about any of this PEACES OF S…T in HOLLYF**KINGWOOD!!!

Now, getting this or any response is not a problem — I enjoy going back and forth with people who have a reaction to any of the pieces that they read here at RedState, even if they are not my own. I genuinely appreciate that people take the time to react even if they have a negative reaction. This reminds me that this is as good a time as any to let you know that you can always reach out to me here by checking out my bio right HERE where I do try to get back.

Advertisement

Now in the example above, I did finally respond with this remark…

You just did give a $hit by commenting on it. @AndrewBreitbart
once said that politics is downstream from pop culture. So you can ignore that but I won’t. Plus it is fun to mock.

I, along with tens of thousands of others, was greatly influenced by the late Andrew Breitbart. The best way that I’ve ever been able to describe him was that he was a human version of a tornado inside a hurricane. The man was a tour-de-force and he changed the way that so many people look at and handle themselves in regards to politics and how to use social media to have your voice heard. Just calling him a revolutionary simply is not credit enough to him and is a disservice to exactly what he did during his short time on this planet.

Breitbart recognized early on that pop culture influenced everything else in this country and, quite frankly, the world. He also knew that conservatives had long ago given up the fight in trying to influence the Left Coast where Hollywood resided and that this error had cost the country dearly.

So with a couple of articles I’ve done this week on pop culture subjects and with some of the blowback that I received, I was beginning to become a tad bit hesitant to continue to write about this. Thankfully, I recalled the Breitbart Doctrine and one of the more famous phrases Andrew had coined to simplify it for dullards such as myself.

Advertisement

Here is the Breitbart Doctrine

Breitbart Doctrine

The Breitbart Doctrine is the idea that “politics is downstream from culture” and that to change politics one must first change culture.

Chris Wylie (formerly of Cambridge Analytica) stated in an interview with The Guardian: “The reason why he (Steve Bannon) was interested in this is because he believes in this idea of the ‘Breitbart Doctrine,’ which is that if you want to change politics you first have to change culture because politics flows from culture. If you want to change culture, you have to first understand what the units of culture are, and the people are the units of culture. So, if you want to change politics, you first have to change people to change culture.”[48]

Breitbart considered this idea an important one and often spoke of it in interview or cited it in print. Dan McLaughlin of Redstate writes “Andrew Breitbart, the late ever-controversial right-wing gonzo journalist … used to have a saying that ‘politics is downstream of culture.’

Politics is downstream from pop culture.

This is even more true today than it was over a decade ago when Andrew first coined this phrase. Yet it seems a very loud contingent of people who claim to care about the direction of this country still do not understand this simple axiom.

Advertisement

People may claim that they don’t care about what’s on TV or in the movies or in music because it’s all junk and that very well may all be true. Yet if you’re not actually following any of it, how do you know if it’s all junk or just some of it is junk? You can’t make that determination or make a salient argument to anybody if you haven’t at least checked in every once in a while.

Now I didn’t watch the Academy Awards on Sunday but when I started getting Twitter alerts that something had happened, I definitely checked in to see what was going on and immediately found the video of the incident between Will Smith and Chris Rock. Just doing that, I was able to start forming an opinion on what happened. Also, because I occasionally check on what’s going on in the pop culture arena, I happen to know that Will and Jada Smith are just a tad bit off their rockers and that Will Smith’s reaction was that of somebody who was not dealing in a rational manner.

I know that there are those who will argue that their time is better spent focusing on other things, and I’m not saying that you have to spend hours a day on pop culture, but you do need to have a balance in everything.

Yet I’m going to lay heavy money on the fact that the people who say that paying attention to pop culture is not all that important are also not paying attention to what was going on in their city’s local politics, their local school boards, or their state elected offices. They definitely are not, because look at the state of the country as it is right now.

Advertisement

Andrew Breitbart was 100 percent right in his quote. I hope that more people will take the time to consider it and decide how they can contribute by adding their voice to such an important topic that affects so much of this country today.

#War

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on RedState Videos