This is worth reading

Roger L. Simon, PJ Media CEO gave a speech to the Roanoke Conference, — the annual gathering of Washington state Republicans — on January 25, 2013 and the text was published, appropriately enough, on PJ Media. It is an excellent and fascinating speech, which tells of his involvement with the New Left and the Black Panthers, his gradual realization about the reality of that politics, his change from left to right, the founding of PJ Media, the need to conduct cultural wars as "politics is downstream for culture" and his immediate plan.

Here are a few quotes:

All right, here are five words that should make you smile: You don’t live in California…. I would imagine that saves many of you ten thousand dollars a year or more right there. There’s something to be happy about. Speaking of which, since I live in L.A. but spend a lot of time in this state, I’ve always been perplexed why everything seems to work better up here… the roads are better, the services are better… but we pay the ridiculous amount of state income tax. I don’t have to tell this crowd — don’t ever go there.

As an illustration, a significant number of people changed their views of global affairs immediately after September 11, 2001. Our country was attacked by an ideology that was misogynistic, homophobic, anti-democratic, racist, xenophobic, and religiously intolerant and that sought world domination — in short was the enemy of all classically liberal society since the Enlightenment.

Yet all around me I saw split personalities, still do. The prototypical Hollywood (and DC) liberal lives two disparate lives, one public and one private. In public he or she is the greatest of altruists, in private the greediest and most ambitious of persons. The former acts as a cover for the latter, to themselves and to others.

This system is so enduring, so entrenched, that it makes political change exceptionally difficult to achieve. How do you change someone so successful, someone who has so much wealth and power while feeling so inordinately good about him or herself?

I am speaking obviously about the so-called thought leaders here — the elites of New York, Washington and Los Angeles who dominate our media and entertainment and tell the hoi polloi how to live and think. These people have little incentive for change, even though in some cases their careers are in jeopardy. The New York Times is hemorrhaging reporters, last time I looked. Still, it’s hard for them to make a connection between the current economic uncertainty and the system that nurtured them for so long.

My disaffection with Communist China and the Soviet Union was probably step one in my political evolution. Step two was, of all things, the OJ trial. The mega-circus took over my home city of Los Angeles back in 1994-1995. In fact it dominated the country’s media and in the process changed the face of media as we know it. I wanted to attend the trial myself. It was the hottest ticket in the city and every writer I new wanted to be there.

After I finally got to see it, sitting in the surprisingly small room in L.A.’s Superior Court, I was mightily depressed. The miscarriage of justice was overwhelming. I had been a civil rights worker in the South in the sixties and was appalled to see racism turned on its head with obvious DNA evidence disdained. In this one case at least, the blacks were worse than the whites. The great lie of political correctness stalked the land and I was just beginning to see it, even though I didn’t want to. Change, as I said, is hard.

But when step 3 happened, 9/11, all the scales dropped from my eyes. There was no longer any way I could hold them up.

I started writing about this change online — and that is some of the reason PJ Media, now called PJ Media, was born.

Read the whole piece. It is very well worth it.