When a former community organizer with little other experience became the Democratic Party nominee for president in 2008, conservatives began inquiring what, exactly, a “community organizer” does.
That led to a surge of interest in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, a secular Bible among Barack Obama’s cohort of left-wing radicals in Chicago. In the White House, as aide Valerie Jarrettso memorably put it, Obama remained a community organizer, using his old tactics topush his agenda.
Now that they have been relegated to the opposition, Obama and the Democrats are not only using the same old Alinskyite tactics, but amplifying them through the media, who will never forgive President Donald Trump for winning the election. (Far from retiring quietly, Obama has been swift to criticize his successor and encourage left-wing protests against his policies.)
Here are just a few examples of Alinsky’s rules being put into practice in an effort to bring down the Trump administration.
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” During the 2016 election, the media tried to stop Trump from winning by focusing on his personal flaws, real and imagined. That failed — so they are targeting the people around Trump.
VIDEO: Duke University Training Students For Anti-Trump Activism
Duke University is sponsoring a workshop for the purpose of training students to engage in activism against Pres…
RULES FOR RADICALS
“Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from two main sources – money and people. (“Have-nots” must build power from flesh and blood, both in plentiful supply. Government & corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)
“Never go outside the expertise of our people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don’t address the “real” issues. This is why. The (radical organizers) avoid things with which they (those being organized) have no knowledge.
America waits with bated breath while Washington struggles to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink of disaster. But many of those same politicians caused the crisis, and if left to their own devices will do so again.
Despite the mass media news blackout, a series of books, talk radio and the blogosphere have managed to expose Barack Obama’s connections to his radical mentors — Weather Underground bombers William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis and others. David Horowitz and hisDiscover the Networks.org have also contributed a wealth of information and have noted Obama’s radical connections since the beginning.
Yet, no one to my knowledge has yet connected all the dots between Barack Obama and the Radical Left. When seen together, the influences on Obama’s life comprise a who’s who of the radical leftist movement, and it becomes painfully apparent that not only is Obama a willing participant in that movement, he has spent most of his adult life deeply immersed in it.
But even this doesn’t fully describe the extreme nature of this candidate. He can be tied directly to a malevolent overarching strategy that has motivated many, if not all, of the most destructive radical leftist organizations in the United States since the 1960s.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis
In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?
Why?
One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
So many are now asking; What is happening to our country? The coarsening of our society is now evident – divorce rates are soaring, families are crumbling and Christianity is being attacked.
Home schooling of children is increasing because many parents are dissatisfied with the public schools as they feel that the schools are providing inferior education and indoctrinating their children. Our universities are no longer where there is open dialogue. Safe spaces and the shouting down of conservative opinions is all too common.
The feminist agenda is pushing abortion on demand, parents are no longer informed when their underage child is having an abortion. Schools are passing out condoms to children and there are gay pride parades as if homosexuality is something to be celebrated.
The number of Americans on food stamps is at an all-time high. Social Justice (also better known as Socialism) is the new buzz word that even our churches have adopted. Dependency on government is taking the place of American self reliance. The fibre of our country is being weakened as we are being destroyed from within.
At every opportunity, the Left is pushing for more gun control by telling us they want to keep us safe. I think many of us know better as we want to be able to keep ourselves safe as we have watched while the defenseless Europeans are attacked and killed by terrorists.
The answer to these and many other questions is in the following documentary film. Watching this one video will make it all crystal clear to you as you will understand how and why the Agenda of the Left is grinding down America.
How socialists from the ’60s primed millennials to Feel the Bern
By Stanley KurtzMarch 22, 2016
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reaches out to supporters at a rally in Columbia, S.C. (Lucian Perkins for The Washington Post)
Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about the rise of socialism.
Bernie Sanders and his young supporters say, “No worries, we’re democratic socialists.” Outsiders say, “No problem, they barely know what socialism is.” Others see Sanders’s movement as a passing response to an economic downturn.
All of this is largely mistaken. Modern American socialism is decidedly undemocratic; its young acolytes are far less ignorant of socialism than they appear; and contemporary socialism is more of a religious than an economic phenomenon. Distracted by the disturbing rise of Donald Trump, liberals and conservatives alike are responding far too complacently to a recrudescent socialist movement that is destined to harm our democracy.
Today’s socialism is a direct descendant of the student radicalism of the 1960s. Sixties radicals were enthusiasts of violent, socialist revolution. Ostensibly democratic in their preference for consensus-based decision-making, the radicals favored authoritarian “self-criticism sessions,” precursors to modern-day political correctness. As the passions of the ’60s cooled, the radicals placed revolutionary hopes on hold and flooded into two professions: community organizing and academia.
Saul Alinsky-style community organizing is a form of incremental socialism. Instead of overthrowing capitalism, Alinskyites “confront power” and “attack targets” (like conservative politicians or “capitalist” donors to conservative causes). Instead of nationalizing banks, Alinskyite groups intimidate banks into programs of financial redistribution. This ideologically reticent, yet still self-consciously socialist world was President Obama’s milieu. He has helped to popularize and legitimate it.
So many are now asking, what is happening to our country? The coarsening of our society is now evident – divorce rates are soaring, families are crumbling and Christianity is being attacked.
Home schooling of children is increasing because many parents are dissatisfied with the public schools as they feel they are providing inferior education. The feminist agenda is pushing abortion on demand, parents are no longer informed when their underage child is having an abortion, schools are passing out condoms to children, there are gay pride parades as if homosexuality is something to be celebrated.
The number of Americans on food stamps is at an all-time high. Social Justice (also better known as Socialism is the taking from one group to give to another) is the new buzz word. Dependency on government is taking the place of American self reliance. The fibre of our country and its people is being ground down. We are decaying from within !
What is happening to us ? The answer to these and many more questions is in the following documentary film. Please share with your email lists. Nancy
Scroll down below this article to see Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ and a link that will take you to background information on Saul Alinsky, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Please share with your email lists. Nancy
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Alinsky Way of Governing
What happens when those in power adopt ‘rules for radicals’ to attack their less powerful opponents
Pete Peterson Mr. Peterson is the executive director of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement at Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy.
Though the congressman lacked legal authority to demand information, his aggressive plan, which came to light in late February, should not be a surprise at a time when power holders from the White House on down are employing similar means against perceived enemies.
Mr. Grijalva left a clue about how he operates in 2013 when the magazine In These Times asked about his legislative strategy. “I’m a Saul Alinsky guy,” he said, referring to the community organizer and activist who died in 1972, “that’s where I learned this stuff.”
What sort of stuff? Mr. Grijalva sent his letters not to the professors but to university presidents, without (at least in the case of Mr. Hayward) the professors’ knowledge. Mr. Hayward was not even employed by Pepperdine at the time of his congressional testimony in 2011.
But targeting institutions and their leaders is pure Alinsky; so are the scare tactics. Mr. Grijalva’s staff sent letters asking for information about the professors, with a March 16 due date—asking, for instance, if they had accepted funding from oil companies—using official congressional letterhead, and followed up with calls from Mr. Grijalva’s congressional office. This is a page from Alinsky’s book, in both senses of the word: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have,” reads one tip in his 1971 “Rules for Radicals.”
Yet adopting Alinsky’s tactics may not in this case fit with Alinsky’s philosophy. This is Alinsky with a twist. Despite myriad philosophical inconsistencies, “Rules for Radicals” is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger. Alinsky writes: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” (more…)
NOTE: READ THE HILLARY CLINTON-SAUL ALINSKY LETTERS HERE.
Previously unpublished correspondence between Hillary Clinton and the late left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky reveals new details about her relationship with the controversial Chicago activist and shed light on her early ideological development.
Clinton met with Alinsky several times in 1968 while writing a Wellesley college thesis about his theory of community organizing.
Clinton’s relationship with Alinsky, and her support for his philosophy, continued for several years after she entered Yale law school in 1969, two letters obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show.
The letters obtained by the Free Beacon are part of the archives for the Industrial Areas Foundation, a training center for community organizers founded by Alinsky, which are housed at the University of Texas at Austin.
The letters also suggest that Alinsky, who died in 1972, had a deeper influence on Clinton’s early political views than previously known.
A 23-year-old Hillary Clinton was living in Berkeley, California, in the summer of 1971. She was interning at the left-wing law firm Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, known for its radical politics and a client roster that included Black Panthers and other militants.
On July 8, 1971, Clinton reached out to Alinsky, then 62, in a letter sent via airmail, paid for with stamps featuring Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and marked “Personal.”
“Dear Saul,” she began. “When is that new book [Rules for Radicals] coming out—or has it come and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation?”
“I have just had my one-thousandth conversation about Reveille [for Radicals] and need some new material to throw at people,” she added, a reference to Alinsky’s 1946 book on his theories of community organizing.
Clinton devoted just one paragraph in her memoir Living History to Alinsky, writing that she rejected a job offer from him in 1969 in favor of going to law school. She wrote that she wanted to follow a more conventional path.
However, in the 1971 letter, Clinton assured Alinsky that she had “survived law school, slightly bruised, with my belief in and zest for organizing intact.”
“The more I’ve seen of places like Yale Law School and the people who haunt them, the more convinced I am that we have the serious business and joy of much work ahead—if the commitment to a free and open society is ever going to mean more than eloquence and frustration,” wrote Clinton.
According to the letter, Clinton and Alinsky had kept in touch since she entered Yale. The 62-year-old radical had reached out to give her advice on campus activism. (more…)
Associated Press
