The Breitbart Doctrine Doesn't Go Far Enough
Its maker knew when to stop talking
One of the key concepts underpinning Cancelling Reality is that the Breitbart Doctrine does not go far enough. Once it is expanded to include the unspoken parts, the Doctrine explains the right-wing fantasyland and shows that its creation was all a part of a political strategy.
The Breitbart Doctrine
Andrew Breitbart was a right-wing political partisan who no one has thought about since he died, much like Rush Limbaugh. He started and ran the online pot-stirrer Breitbart News, a site that is on our list of outlets with zero credibility. When Breitbart passed away in 2012, it was taken over by Steve Bannon.
The Breitbart Doctrine is the idea that politics is downstream from culture. If you change someone’s culture, their politics will change accordingly.
In a culture that fears immigrants, you will get voters who demand immigration reform, deportation, and discrimination.
In a culture that fears government suppression, you will get voters who distrust the government, buys guns and ammunition, and staunchly defends the Second Amendment.
In a culture where whiteness and masculinity are virtues, you will get voters who back policies that solidify traditional gender roles and white supremacy.
In a culture that thinks the left wing is out to ruin America, you will get voters who will decry every single left-of-right idea, from abortion rights to racial equity to anti-discrimination to unions.
The Doctrine is Incomplete
But how do you change someone’s culture?
This is where the Breitbart Doctrine, as stated by the man himself, fails.
And I think it only failed because he knew to stop talking.
Politics is downstream of culture, yes. But culture is downstream of reality.
Change their culture, you change their politics, sure.
But change their reality, you change their culture, you change their politics.
The Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Proves Its Incompleteness
Of course, you can’t actually change a person’s reality. Reality is fixed, objective, and, well, real. You can’t just turn off gravity. You can’t change the fact that Black soldiers in World War II were largely excluded from the benefits of the GI Bill.
But you don’t have to change actual reality.
You just have to change a person’s perception of it.
And you do that through the media.
We are seeing the right-wing media ecosystem acting on this unspoken line in the Breitbart Doctrine every single day.
Take Fox News’ coverage of Trump’s hush money trial. While you can certainly criticize liberal partisan outlets like CNN for focusing too exclusively on the trial, or how the prosecutor’s legal argument is novel, the fact is that a former United States president and current presidential nominee is facing prison time on criminal charges for falsifying business records to pay off a porn star in order to get elected.
This is news.
Fox News just isn’t reporting it. According to Reuters, Fox gave “significantly more air time to other national news including protests on U.S. college campuses against the war in Gaza.” What time it did devote to the trial was focused on flaws in the prosecutor’s case, live broadcasting Trump’s usual claims of persecution by a Democratic judge in a “weaponized criminal justice system,” and breathlessly describing Trump as looking defiant and in charge of the situation.
Want to create a culture of fear that the left-wing is abusing the powers of the government to get its way? You create the perception that this trial is a politicized witch hunt against your leader.
Want to create a culture of fear of migrants and anger at Democrats? You create the perception that everything bad in America, literally anything that is bad, is because of immigration and President Biden is to blame:
The thing is, it’s working.
Look at the perception of the strength of the economy, broken down by partisanship:
Everyone’s perception of the strength of the economy cratered in 2020. It was the pandemic, and that perception was accurate. But now every metric shows improvement in the economy: Unemployment is way down, inflation spiked but wage growth has beat it in the long run, and the stock market is setting records again.
But right-wing media says the economy is bad and the people who consume right-wing media just take them at their word.
And this isn’t even the first time this has happened. Republicans didn’t believe in the recovery after the 2008 recession:
Who was president then? Obama.
And who became president when Republicans fell in love with the economy?
The best explanation for Republicans’ perception of the strength of the economy is simple. If the president was a Democrat, the economy was bad. If it was a Republican, it was good.
“Oh,” you might respond, “but this applies to the left, too. See! Democrats have only thought that the economy was better under a Democrat president!”
That’s only because of how wildly the red lines are swinging in these charts. The blue lines are fairly consistent, and you can see the general health of the economy in them. They dropped in the Great Recession and slowly climbed up. They dropped in the pandemic and slowly climbed up. They haven’t topped fifty percent in over two decades.
The Democratic perception of the economy largely tracks how it has been, in reality.
The Republican perception of the economy does not match reality.
This is the Breitbart Doctrine at work.
Change their reality, you change their culture, you change their politics.
The reason why Breitbart left this last part out of his doctrine is because, by saying it out loud, the gig would be up. He couldn’t just out and tell people that his intention was to skew his audience’s perception of what was real – i.e., lie incessantly to them, albeit with a consistent narrative. He knew that he’d lose credibility and viewers.
But given the conduct we’ve seen from Breitbart News and the rest of the right wing media – i.e., lying incessantly to their audience with a consistent narrative – they were all perfectly aware of the existence of the silent part.
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