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Wednesday, January 19, 2022

The Simplistic Argument of Andrew Breitbart

"The left does not win its battles in debate. It doesn’t have to. In the twenty-first century, media is everything. The left wins because it controls the narrative. The narrative is controlled by the media. The left is the media. Narrative is everything.” ~ Andrew Breitbart in his book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World 

Breitbart is making a simplistic argument. He was a media guy. He represented the bombastic and furious faction in the conservative media. The conservative journalists are not known for their candor. In most democracies, the conservative media has the reputation of being more corrupt than the leftist media. The left controls the narrative because they have better intellectuals who can come up with arguments and theories which the masses find convincing. 

Conservative intellectualism is no match for leftist intellectualism. In the last hundred years, the leftist intellectuals have driven the global debates on history, culture, science, politics, and economics. On current events, the conservative journalists fail to out-argue the leftist position. Breitbart is wrong: the left actually wins its battles in debate. The side that has better intellectuals should control the media—thus, it is natural for the media in our time to be leftist.

Instead of ranting about the power of the leftist media, the conservatives (the acolytes of Andrew Brietbart) should do some soul-searching. They should compare their work with the intellectual work that the left has done in the last 100 years. I have made this kind of comparison and my verdict is that the left has won because they have played a better intellectual game, they have produced better books and media reports.

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