By Daniel Rigney
What is it about Palm Beach, Florida that is attracting such a critical mass of conservative media celebrities? Is Palm Beach becoming the new Hollywood of the right?
This morning’s New York Times business section (8/22/2011) brings news that a growing number of right-wing celebrities, including Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, business populist Lou Dobbs, and Donald Trump (when he’s in town), now make their homes in the physical and financial barrier island community of Palm Beach (pop. 10,000), just off the coast of the rest of the United States.
Palm Beach offers this secluded colony of gifted Right-Coast spin poets the private time they need to compose and perform their immensely popular multimedia works, far from the madding crowd of ordinary working men and women whose pains and frustrations they effectively channel and feed back in an endless ideological loop.
Between performances, Right Coast artists enjoy a lively social calendar that features rounds of golf, dinner and tea parties, and Republican fundraisers. God and the market have been gracious to these champions of populism, who understand better than anyone the resentments and hostilities of ordinary working people.
Ken Chandler, editor of influential conservative newsmaker Newsmax, also based here, explains that Palm Beach is “outside the Washington-New York ‘bubble,’ as he called it.” Escaping from this bubble to their gated outposts on an opulent and secluded barrier island, this political meme colony directs the rage of the common man and woman, from coast to coast, toward America’s cultural elite.
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