Daily Verse | Psalm 122:1
I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.”

Tuesday and with today’s “Daily Verse,” we start the second half of the year. If you’ve been keeping up with reading through the Bible in a year, congratulations! You’re half way there. Again, for those of you who are joining us late, you can download the reading plan we’re using here:

We’re also in the home stretch as we trace the beginnings of what eventually became cultural Marxism, with its most virulent form, Critical Race Theory, or CRT. Before we get there, though, there was one more piece of the puzzle that Andrew Breitbart identified in Righteous Indignation as key to the destructive behaviors and thinking that currently plague us.

“Marx and Hegel had paved the way for the Progressives, who in turn had paved the way for the Frankfurt School, who had then attacked the American way of life by pushing ‘cultural Marxism’ through ‘critical theory.’ The Frankfurt School thinkers had come up with the rationale for radical environmentalism, artistic communism, psychological deconstruction of their opponents, and multiculturalism. Most of all, they had come up with the concept of ‘repressive tolerance,’ aka political correctness” (RI, p.124).

Breitbart then makes an interesting observation:

“Frankfurt School philosophy was all about criticizing from the outside. It was about tearing down society by taking it apart, piece by piece, razing it to the ground … how did this outsiders’ philosophy penetrate our hearts and minds?” (p.125).

That, as they say, is the million-dollar question. I’ve asked it like this: “How in the world did we let some European malcontents—foreigners!—subvert our national culture, including our traditions, values and moral fortitude?”

And that’s where the final piece of the puzzle comes in. Breitbart writes,

“Then I read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: if Marcuse was the Jesus of the New Left, then Alinsky was his Saint Paul, proselytizing and dumbing down Marcuse’s message, making it practical, and convincing leaders to make it the official religion of the United States, even if that meant discarding the old secular religion of the United States, the Constitution.

“Rules for Radicals might just as well be entitled How to Take Over America from the Inside. It’s theory made flesh. Alinsky laid it out step-by-step, but we were too busy fighting the results to read his game plan” (RI, p.125).

Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago and became “an avowed communist dedicated to communism in America from the inside, using the most clever tactical means he could devise” (RI, p.125).

“One of the crucial lessons he learned was that he had to work from the inside. Whereas New Left leaders like Marcuse preferred to bash the system from the outside and alienate all those who were part of it, Alinsky knew that it was more important to pose as an insider to achieve his aims” (emphasis mine; RI, p.125).

So Alinsky disguised himself as a patriotic American conservative, knowing that our openness and freedom provided a perfect opportunity for exploitation.

He was a pragmatist and rejected the passive methods for creating change in place at the time. In 1971 he wrote Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. In it, he summarized his strategy for implementing Marxist change in America.

He explained what he looked for in a “community organizer” (e.g. his warriors): 1) flexibility (do what you have to in order to win); 2) confidence (being unafraid of conflict, a la Hegel); 3) experience (trying new things and ignoring the wisdom of the past); and 4) certain personal qualities such as sincerity, curiosity and irreverence, and humor.

Once he had identified his foot soldiers, Alinsky laid out 13 tactics for warfare. I can’t go into detail on any of them, but I’ll list them for you here:

1. Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure on the opposition.
11. If you push a negative had and deep enough it will break through to its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize, and polarize it.

The best known of these are #5 (remember Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin on SNL?) and #13, which is also known as the politics of personal destruction (think Brett Kavanaugh).

Alinsky’s final piece of advice: the real action is in the enemy’s reaction. You want to provoke your target into reacting because that’s when they may make a mistake—one that you can exploit for your benefit.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were deeply influenced by Alinsky. Clinton knew Alinsky personally and corresponded with him while in law school. Obama was a community organizer in Chicago from 1985-1988, hired by Jerry Kellman who had been trained in Alinsky’s organizing school.

We are now 50 years downstream from Alinsky’s published strategy. Did it work? And if it did, how do we counteract it and reverse the damage that has been done?