Tag Archives: rulesforradicals

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Daily Broadside | The Insidious Strategy of the Cultural Marxists Deserves a Response

Daily Verse | Psalm 133:1
How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity!

It’s Wednesday and we’re back to work after the annual celebration of our independence as a country. It’s unfortunate, but the blathering ninny pretending to be president is visiting near where I live today. If I could, I’d go stand by the road and hold up a sign that reads, “BIDEN IS A FRAUD.” I’d like to say that (and much, much more) to his face and have him tell me I’m a lying dog-faced pony soldier. But, like most responsible Americans, I’ve got work and personal appointments to keep, so I’ll just read about it in the paper tomorrow.

Hopefully you’ve stayed with me for the last week as I’ve traced the development of cultural Marxism in the United States based on Chapter 6 of Andrew Breitbart’s book, Righteous Indignation. Here is the series so far:

  1. DAILY BROADSIDE | CULTURAL MARXISM GOT ITS START IN THE 1700s
  2. DAILY BROADSIDE | MARX FOLLOWED ROUSSEAU WITH A VIOLENT TWIST
  3. DAILY BROADSIDE | TWO U.S. PRESIDENTS EMBRACED MARXIST THEORY—AT THE START OF THE 20TH CENTURY
  4. DAILY BROADSIDE | CULTURAL MARXISTS ARRIVE ON AMERICA’S SHORES
  5. DAILY BROADSIDE | THE APOSTLE SAUL AND HIS RULES FOR RADICALS

According to Breitbart’s pithy summary prior to looking at Saul Alinsky:

“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'” (RI, p.124).

And then Saul David Alinsky took Marcuse’s vision of dismantling American society through diversity and multiculturalism and developed the playbook which he executed via “community organizing.” It was Alinsky more than anyone else who figured out how to successfully agitate for Marxist change.

So, here we are, 50 years later (Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, was published in 1971) and we’re in the midst of a creeping anarchy. We have sitting Congress members openly savaging America on July 4, advocating for socialism, and agreeing that the greatest threat to our nation is “white supremacy.” Critical Race Theory, which demonizes white people for “systemic racism,” is being taught in our schools. The “1619 Project” seeks to replace our historic founding with an outright lie. Criminal penalties in many large cities have been so eviscerated by activist district attorneys that groups of young men and women now brazenly steal in broad daylight. We now have a “Black National Anthem” competing on equal footing with “The Star Spangled Banner,” our true, historic, national anthem. BLM, Inc., and Antifa spent most of last year burning, looting and murdering, not to mention pulling down statues of everyone from Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass. (Frederick Douglass!)

If those current circumstances didn’t grow out of the critical theory, multiculturalism and Marxist ideology, how do you explain this young woman who is advocating for the abolition of “the United States as we know it”?

Here’s how Tyler O’Neil explains it in the article about Sinclair (with my emphasis):

Sinclair believes that white “oppression” is so ingrained in the minds and attitudes of supposedly oppressed people that they have to “unlearn” the “colonized thought” of Christianity and the “gender binary” — which is rooted in the scientific binary of biological sex. She seems to believe that certain “cultural expectations” rooted in the “genocide” upon which America was founded have brainwashed her and she needs to unlearn basic truths like the fact that people are male or female.

This comes from Marxist critical theory, which analyzes the world in terms of power and oppression. The evils perpetrated against both black slaves and Native Americans supposedly sully the entire American project, which must be uprooted in order for people to be truly free.

[…]

Yet Sinclair believes this because so many powerful institutions teach it. Just last month, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) released a horrifying Marxist lesson on whiteness that “deconstructed” various aspects of American and Western culture, including capitalism, science, the nuclear family, and Christianity, as nefarious relics of white supremacy. The lesson also claims that a work ethic, delayed gratification, being polite, and getting to meetings on time are aspects of the “whiteness” culture that must be deconstructed and rejected.

The philosophical infrastructure of Marxism evolved over 200 years but was operationalized in the United States through academia and then community organizing during the last 70. Cultural Marxism is so obviously embedded in our society that there can be no easy fix.

So what can we do about it? Breitbart had 13 rules (mimicking Alinsky’s) in Chapter 7 of his book, called “Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.” I’ll list them and quote a sentence summing up the idea.

  1. Don’t be afraid to go into enemy territory. “Groupthink happens, and we have to take it head-on. We can’t win the political war until we win the cultural war.”
  2. Expose the left for who they are—in their own words. “Today, we all have the power to be citizen journalists via the Internet.”
  3. Be open about your secrets. “If you’re going to go out in public, be absolutely open about what you’ve done in the past … we have to out ourselves before the left does it for us.”
  4. Don’t let the [Media] Complex use its PC lexicon to characterize you and shape the narrative. “The fact is this: if you refuse to buy into their lexicon, if you refuse to back down in the face of those intimidation tactics, they can’t harm you.”
  5. Control your own story—don’t let the [Media] Complex do it. “Serialization is good … Keep your story alive by planning its release down to the minutest detail.”
  6. Ubiquity is key. “When playing for political or cultural keeps, impact matters most … That means developing relationships with like-minded allies or even enemies and news junkies and allowing them to share in the good fortune of a good scoop.”
  7. Engage in the social arena. “A well-socially-networked person can soon carry more weight than a household-name columnist at your local news daily.”
  8. Don’t pretend to know more than you do. “Don’t be the guy with a knife at the gunfight. It rarely ends well.”
  9. Don’t let them pretend to know more than they do. Ask them “to provide evidence for their assertions is always fun, and it’s even more fun asking them to provide the sources for that evidence.”
  10. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. “It’s the truest of Alinsky’s statements, and it’s the most effective.”
  11. Don’t let them get away with ignoring their own rules. “At the very least, we need to force these hypocrites to stand up against their own PC regime in order to defend themselves.”
  12. Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth. “We have to falsify their [Marxist] theory by presenting unvarnished truth after unvarnished truth until the light dawns on everyone just how right we are.”
  13. Believe in the audacity of hope. “We have the power to unravel the Complex and destroy the Institutional Left. It won’t be easy. It will take time and effort … but we’ll do it, because we have to do it.”

Breitbart was concerned with the liberal media’s monopoly on the press, so some of these seem a bit irrelevant for your average patriot or like-minded conservative. But there’s a few of them we can all do:

“Don’t be afraid to go into enemy territory.” That might mean engaging in debates with others online (“the social arena”) or in person. It might be joining a counter-demonstration at a local event. Show up where the enemy is and don’t be afraid to give your opinion. Doing so inspires like-minded others, gives them material to work with, and adds to the growing chorus of those of us who refuse to cave to the extremists.

“Expose the Left for who they are—in their own words.” Don’t let Joe Biden get away with saying racist things such as, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Yes, others called it out, but don’t be afraid to do the same. Fear of reprisal and intimidation allows Marxist thought to proceed unchecked. Remember, truth is truth and we should never shy away from telling the truth.

“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” It’s okay to point out the absurd and to do so by over-exaggerating or being absurd yourself to make a point. Leftists are seriously unserious, so why shouldn’t we point that out? Joe Biden has a penchant for nuzzling and putting his hands on women and children, and has been credibly accused of “penetrating” a female intern when he was a Senator. But the MSM ignored it, unlike how they piled on Trump’s one comment that “when you’re a star” women let you “grab ’em by the p***y.” So why not draw attention to the double-standard by calling Biden “Gropey Joe”?

This is a light touch on responding to the situation we find ourselves in. I’ve got more thoughts about what we can do, but I’ll save those for another post.

Chapter 6 of Breitbart’s book was massively helpful to my understanding of how we’ve gotten to where we are today. I hope that this series has been helpful to you, too, and that you’ll be able to make sense of why it’s showing up in our culture and recognize it when it does.

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Daily Broadside | The Apostle Saul and His Rules for Radicals

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:

BibleReader_C2C2021Download

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?