I recently interviewed former American Spectator intern
Greg Gutfeld
on the weekly podcast that I host for the American Enterprise
Institute’s “Values & Capitalism” project. A mere handful of
weeks later was asked if I wanted to start blogging at The
Spectacle. Coincidence?
Absolutely.
My name is R.J. Moeller and I am a recent transplant to the
once-fair city of Los Angeles. I’m also a member of the current
“Millennials”
generation who, apart from blogging/podcasting duties at AEI,
moved from Chicago last year to begin working for syndicated talk
show host and columnist Dennis Prager. I contribute weekly to the
new pop-culture website Acculturated and help with social
media for various outlets, including Ricochet.com. My interests include
Twitter (@rjmoeller),
the moral case for free enterprise, Christian theology, walleye
fishing, and subverting progressive ideology in any and every way
imaginable.
Aside from my deep-seated respect and admiration for Mr. Prager,
the real reason I moved West was simple: When most young
conservative guys in their /'20s want to “change things” they head
to Washington, D.C., in hopes of landing a plumb job on Capitol
Hill or in the beige-colored offices of (insert any think-tank name
here). Their days consist primarily of boring meetings led by the
55 year old vision-less versions of themselves and happy hours
jam-packed with Type A personalities who are just dying for you to
ask them where they went to graduate school.
All right, so I may exaggerate a bit for effect — but not much.
And, having been employed by one for the past two years myself, I
clearly believe in the work that center-right groups like AEI,
Heritage Foundation, etc. do in a place like D.C.
But when young liberals want to “change things” — or even if
they have no interest in intentionally changing anything — they
move to cultural centers like Los Angeles and start taking Improv
classes, writing scripts, forming bands, and going to parties where
being anything to the right of Saul Alinsky is grounds for possible
excommunication from the artistic community.
We’re not losing to the Left simply because of poor
policy-making. The “Big Tent” is not ever-fracturing because we’ve
failed to plan enough conferences (for the Republican National
Committee to bungle the handling of). And the greatest force for
alleviating poverty the world has ever known — free market
capitalism — isn’t an eye-roll-inducing term met with misguided
indignation among an ever-increasing number of Americans because
Mitt Romney saved his best stuff for one measly debate performance
in October.
Politics is unmistakably down-stream of culture. It shapes the
thinking and worldview of Americans under the age of 30 more than
anything else. Popular culture despises everything the Right stands
for not because movies or music are un-conservative things, but
because the Right abandoned the culture (and corresponding cultural
centers) like disillusioned and disgruntled inhabitants of an Old
West boomtown circa 1850. The serious problem with this is that the
boomtown we deserted was not only still lousy with supremely
precious metals, but the folks who moved in when we moved out
happened to be our fiercest ideological enemies.
The combination of fiscal licentiousness (economics), unchecked
immigration (rule of law) and the moral decadence of Hollywood
(values) has put my new home-state of California on a
collision-course with a “manifest destiny” — a term, ironically,
coined by Democrats in the 19th century — only
socially-engineered utopias like Greece could be proud of. Both
culturally and politically, California is the canary gasping its
last few labored breaths in the coal mine.
It dawned on me a couple of years ago that Wyatt Earp didn’t
change things by staying put where he started back in Illinois.
Neither did
Ronald Reagan. Both men went West.
And so have I.
Plus, the girls are hot.
