Editor’s Note: Author/comedian Evan Sayet is the newest contributor to Breitbart California. Sayet, the author of KinderGarden of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks, delivers stinging political humor across the country as part of his long-running show The Right to Laugh. He previously contributed to the first incarnation of The Arsenio Hall Show and was a creative consultant on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.
Breitbart News caught up with Sayet this week, and he had this to say…
I was never a thoughtful–doctrinaire–Liberal.
Frankly, I don’t think there is such a thing as a thoughtful Liberal. It’s an oxymoron. Instead, I just knew what all Liberals know, that Democrats are good and Republicans are evil and I was good so I must be a Democrat. I knew that Democrats like peace and Republicans like war, so I was be a Democrat. I knew that Democrats like air and Republicans hate air and, well, I like air.
I call myself a “9-13 Republican.” It’s not that it took me two extra days to understand the significance of the attacks of 9/11, it’s that the attacks didn’t surprise me. Even as a New York City-born, (then) Liberal Jew, I knew just enough about the world to know that the same people–the Muslims–who were massacring the Jews of Israel (and people of other cultures and religions around the world) for no other reason than that they were the closest infidels would, when they could (with their primitive technologies) figure out a way to cross those 3,000-mile oceans, come to massacre the biggest infidel–the so-called “Great Satan.”
What shocked me–and rocked my intellectual foundations–came in the subsequent days (and then weeks and now years) after 9-11 and the Liberal response to the attacks. Here we had just witnessed the greatest and most obvious case of good versus evil of our lifetimes, and the Liberals were offering proscriptions that we be nicer to the terrorists in the future) and making the most obviously objectively false–and even hateful–anti-American arguments in order to do so.
I soon attended my first Republican club meeting expecting to disagree with these yahoos on every issue … except one: fighting Islamic fascism and the terror it breeds, but it didn’t matter because none of the other issues matter if you’re all dead.
What I discovered is that, far from being “yahoos” they were a pretty typical cross-section of my neighbors and colleagues. What struck me almost instantly is how every one of them had a thoughtful–if not always right–reason for what they believed. I’d never heard this when politics came up with Liberals whose only argument was, “we’re good/they’re evil” and “We love air/they hate air.”
And the more I listened the more conservative policies made sense. It dawned on me along the way that this was the first time I’d ever heard from conservatives what conservatives believe. Until then I’d only heard from Liberals–my Liberal rabbi, my Liberal teachers and professors, Liberal newscasters and so on–what conservatives believe.
That’s when I decided–after years of having been behind the scenes in my profession, to become a voice: a conservative telling others what it is that conservatives believe.
From 9-13 on I’d felt a need to understand, first, why those on the Left–including millions like I had been, just mindlessly accepting of the Liberal dogma–sided with the terrorists (religious fanatics no less targeting perhaps the most multicultural city and, in fact, buildings, in the world). In other words, what about their “thinking” led them to not only side with evil over good (even in their own world where “religion” is evil and multiculturalism good) and then I began to see that this is not an isolated case.
I soon recognized that the Modern Liberal (as I began to call them) will invariably side with evil over good as well as ugly over beautiful, failure over success–and do so, if they make any argument at all, with objectively false and even moronic arguments.
Since I know they are not all “evil”–I surely wasn’t when I was one of them. My favorite cousin isn’t evil. Bruce Springsteen’s not an evil man–I set about trying to understand the “thought process” (again, it turns out that’s an oxymoron) that leads the Modern Liberal to champion all that is evil, failed and wrong and dedicate his enmity towards all that is good, right, successful, beautiful and so on.
And I developed my “Unified Field Theory of Liberalism” and introduced it in a talk to the Heritage Foundation in 2007. That talk has now been seen by over a million people and is–by far–the single most viewed lecture in the Heritage Foundation’s history (just as its follow-up at the Conservative Forum is now by far the single most viewed talk in their history.)
It is through this lens of the Unified Field Theory of Liberalism that I understand all cultural, ideological and political acts of today’s Left. It is through this lens that I will write my pieces for Breitbart California.
In the meantime, I continue to pursue my work in the entertainment industry, these days revisiting some of the screenplays I’d put aside as I entered the political realm. I’m focusing most on a comedy about a folk-rock trio from the 1960s (think Peter, Paul and Mary–in fact, their hit song is “Drag, the Magic Puffin”) who broke up viciously soon after Woodstock.
Forty years later there’s a knock at Mary’s door–she owes millions in back taxes. Her only hope is to get the group back together. One’s still a hippie (think Tommy Chong) and the other has totally sold out, making his living turning rock classics into commercial jingles (he has awards in his office for a toothpaste campaign (“All the teeth are brown/and the gum’s decayed….”) and Michelin (“The Tires, They Are a-Changin'”).
The three spend much of their time discussing the “dream” of the Sixties and the real world devastation they wrought.
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