Wednesday, June 24, 2015

The Confederate Battle Flag, ISIS, and Saul Alinsky

 

Saul Alinsky addressing a crowd, app. 50 years ago
 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

The "Alinsky-izing" of America
By Jeffrey Lord
June 24th, 2015
The Conservative Review

                             “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

                                              -Rule 13 of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

Now the target is the Confederate flag on the South Carolina State Capitol grounds. No matter that the flag was put there in the first place by the liberal Democrat Governor of South Carolina in 1962 (originally Governor Ernest “Fritz” Hollings—a friend and ally of John F. Kennedy—had it placed atop the Capitol dome. Only just a few years later was it moved to a separate flag pole on the Capitol grounds.)

Whatever the individual merits of removing the flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol and placing it in a museum, the issue is but the latest in a string of Alinsky-style assaults...

But in fact the flurry of attention surrounding the flag (accurately it is the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia) is but the latest example of what might be called the increasing “Alinsky-ization” of America by the American Left. A pattern that goes unchallenged by flummoxed Republicans who apparently have never read leftist guru Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, a book that became holy writ for leftist community organizers and in fact was once taught at the University of Chicago by a young Alinsky disciple named Barack Obama. Another admirer who did her Wellesley senior thesis on Alinsky? None other than the young Hillary Rodham.

Whatever the individual merits of removing the flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol and placing it in a museum, the issue is but the latest in a string of Alinsky-style assaults that succeed in making a huge issue of something that is, in fact, either a local matter (in fact only South Carolina gets to decide about the flag) or a matter that was heretofore not considered an all-consuming matter worthy of the white heat of modern media attention.

Take the business of liberals—with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (of Nevada!)—suddenly trying to force the NFL’s Washington Redskins to change their name. Or replacing the image of Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill. Hamilton was both the founder of the American financial system and the first Secretary of the Treasury and his visage would be replaced with a politically correct woman. None of the women being suggested to replace Hamilton’s portrait have the remotest thing to do with establishing the nation’s financial system much less serving as Treasury Secretary. 

Then there was all that turmoil surrounding Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which launched hysterical outsiders into boycotts of the state and a direct attack on a small family pizza business where the owner’s young daughter innocently answered a media question that the shop would not cater a gay wedding for religious reasons. Lost in the furor was that the shop had never catered a wedding—period. And don’t forget Arizona’s SB 1070, a tough anti-illegal immigration law that merely provided that Arizona should enforce a state version of federal law. This one launched massive protests in some 70 American cities. Arizona U.S. Congressman Raúl Grijalva (D) demanded outsiders begin an economic boycott of his own state. Eric Holder’s Justice Department jumped into this one, an injunction was issued keeping the law from taking effect and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court stepped and essentially invalidated three key provisions of the law.

Last but not least—and come to think of it this will surely not be the “last” of these things—Senate GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has suddenly decided to request that a statue of Jefferson Davis be removed from the Kentucky State Capitol. The saving grace here is that at least McConnell is a Kentuckian.

Back in the ancient days of 2000, when there was a GOP presidential debate in South Carolina, the flag issue was percolating even then. And there is this telling clip of—yes—NBC’s determined truth-teller Brian Williams trying to badger Texas Governor George W. Bush into demanding the flag be removed. 


George W. Bush, South Carolina GOP debate on NBC (2000)


As seen here, Bush refused to take the bait. Instead he took the position—and stuck to it—that the decision was up to “the people of South Carolina.” The audience of South Carolinians cheered.

Where is the Republican - the new George W. Bush - who will recognize the pattern here of Alinsky-style assault on everything from flags to football teams to pizza shops, statues and state statutes - all in the name of some greater cultural good that curiously never seems to arrive? An assault that is now joined by big corporations with names like Walmart or the online e-Bay threatening not to move here or there or stop carrying this or that item because it’s assumed to be good for the ole corporate image. As George Neumayr points out over in the American Spectator: 

Americans can trot off to Walmart to pick up an abortifacient, but its clerks, the company announced, will no longer let customers purchase a Confederate flag. “We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer,” the company explained. That hasn’t stopped the store from selling sex toys over the objections of parental groups, but it feels that it has to draw the line somewhere. The company has concluded that the flag under which Robert E. Lee fought is too corrupting for its customers.

In other words, if the American Left gets its way, the truth shall never be uttered much less be given the chance to set ye free.

Collectively this pattern begins to resemble nothing so much as a Westernized version of ISIS, the latter distinguishing itself (again) by blowing up another piece of history, this one a 2,000 year old shrine in the legendary ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. In the Westernized version, the Left roams the American landscape Alinsky-style, finding targets to “freeze…personalize… and polarize.”   Once the target is acquired it then points its intellectual and media ray-gun and “boom!” Boom, boom, boom! Religious liberty? Zapped. Pizza shop or photographer’s studio uncooperative with a Leftist agenda item? Zap! The Redskins? Zap, zap, zap! And so it goes.

As this is written the University of California Berkeley, reports the Daily Beast wants to exorcise from campus usage those hotly controversial phrases “ ‘America is a melting pot,’ ‘Why are you so quiet?’ and ‘I believe the most qualified person should get the job,’ which are all phrases that should raise red flags, according to the UC speech police.”

This pattern has gone so unremarked that when someone like Donald Trump comes along and observes of illegal immigrants crossing the U.S. southern border that: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people”?

In fact, as Ann Coulter has documented in her new book Adios, America what Trump is saying is exactly correct. Separately from Coulter, who has done extensive research on the subject, I too have looked into this and found one incident after another reported by mainstream news outlets around the country of illegals arrested for rape, child rape included, precisely as Coulter documents and Trump asserts. The same goes for drug smuggling and murder. Yet when Trump says this out loud in his speech there is that collective gasp that filters through the media as if he has uttered some diabolical and insulting untruth. In other words, if the American Left gets its way, the truth shall never be uttered much less be given the chance to set ye free.

When will Republicans stop pressing the panic button every time one of these episodes arises? When will they identify the pattern for what it is - Alinsky-style radical targeting? The iron fist of leftist totalitarianism always present in leftist societies merely disguised as indignation over issue X? Particularly when it comes to race the American Left has an absolutely horrific record of supporting everything from slavery to segregation to lynching to the Klan to, in today’s world, the race-baiting antics of Al Sharpton. The moment it was learned that Charleston shooter Dylaan Roof was a staunch segregationist is the moment the deeply segregationist history of the Left should have been surfaced. It’s safe to say Dylaan Roof wasn’t sitting around reading old Republican Party platforms - something that can’t be said with any certainty about those written by Democrats.

Suffice to say the issue of the Confederate flag is not going to be the last time this kind of thing happens. Somewhere in America as this is written there is another - and another and another - “controversy” just waiting to erupt when it comes into some Leftist’s Alinskyite sights. The demand will go up: ban X, shut down X, X is a sign of racism, sexism, genderism or whateverism. Indeed, Rush Limbaugh predicts the American flag itself will soon be targeted. And right on cue, CNN is suggesting the Jefferson Memorial should be removed from Washington because, yes, Jefferson was a slave owner.

The real question as this pattern continues to unfold? Will Republicans finally have the courage and the guts to stand up and say: this is a pattern, this is Alinsky-ism. Which in turn is designed to take America to one place and one place only: the Leftist totalitarian re-making of America.

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com

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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousWednesday, June 24, 2015 at 5:35:00 PM EDT

    It would be funny if it wasn t such a sad reflection of society.As I ve said before, what do they blame after the flag is removed? Who do we blame for the black on white crime? I ll answer that one....it s the person.

    ReplyDelete