Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals: Now For Use By The Right?

“I have a radical idea. The door swings both ways, we could reverse the polarity flow through the gate.” – Ghostbusters (1984)

OPRESS

I haven’t figured out how to publicly indicate that I’m against protesting.

I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago, and casually mentioned Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals as a playbook that had been used by the Left back when they controlled very few of the country’s power centers.  Top Hollywood® stars like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Frank Sinatra were openly patriotic – it was the norm.  Politics is one reason I think Frank Sinatra would hate 2020, and the other would be whenever he started coughing he’d think he had Crooner Virus.

But the Leftist rot had already started long before the 1960s.  It started in academia.  Sure, that seemed safe.  Let the Leftists work quietly where they had little money.  It was thought the most important decision made was what the professor’s wife would wear to the faculty dinner and the most important rumors were about that new cannibal professor, Hannibal Lecturer.  But once it took root, Leftism spread from the colleges and out into the streets.

Alinsky started his quest to organize in the 1940s in Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune described his legacy this way:

“Rubbing raw the sores of discontent may be jolly good fun for him, but we are unable to regard it as a contribution to social betterment. The country has enough problems of the insoluble sort as things are without working up new ones for no discernible purpose except Alinsky’s amusement.”

The Tribune was one of the few papers that were negative about Alinsky.  By the time Rules for Radicals was published in 1971, the editorial departments of most newspapers had been taken over by Leftists that those “harmless” college professors had indoctrinated.  Most newspapers applauded Alinsky by 1972 when they reviewed his book.

KAREN

Professor Karen wants you to think for yourself, but will grade you based on her politics.

As I’ve documented in previous posts (some that include Stormtrooper® bikini shots and pictures of a lot of slave Princess Leia impersonators) You Are The Resistance, Plus? Lots of Star Wars Bikinis and American Civil War: Four Fates, From Freedom to Soviet Tyranny, the Left has taken control of the following sectors of life, not only in the United States, but also in most of the Western world:

  • The K-12 educational system.
  • Colleges and Universities.
  • Most Protestant religious organizations.
  • Most Catholic organizations.
  • The psychological establishment.
  • The American Medical Association.
  • All mainstream news media.
  • All mainstream entertainment media.
  • Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
  • The general officer corps of the armed services.
  • The courts.
  • Silicon Valley tech companies.
  • Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.

WARREN

Professor Warren now explains why free speech doesn’t apply to you.

One of the methods the Left used to obtain power was the vigorous application of Alinsky’s Rules.  Here they are – along with my annotations:

  1. “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – Most of the Leftist power is based on fear – fear of what they might do. That’s the reason the takeover of the media was so important to them – they use it to divide and minimize people on the Right so feel that they are as alone as a Joe Biden basement thought.
  2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” – Which may explain the rioting and violence of the Left in the riots today. They’re not good at building things, but they sure can hit a plate glass window with a brick from thirty yards.
  3. “Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” – The idea of the riots is to go beyond every expertise. It has been decades since a president had to deal with riots across the country, and even then, they weren’t all at the same time.
  4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” – For instance, Christians must be made to live up to Christian principles – that’s the example Alinsky himself used.
  5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” – Saturday Night Live® used to make fun of politicians on the Right and Late night comedians used to make fun of the Right and Left. Now?  Only the Right is mocked, and (for reasons I’ve explained before Why The Left Can’t Meme) even then, poorly.
  6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” – Whatever it is, it should give them emotional payoff – the people crying at the Trump protests early on were an example – they enjoyed feeling the pain and rage. And as we’ve learned in 2020, who doesn’t love riots?
  7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Sit ins? That’s so 1960’s.  Burning down Wendy’s®?  That’ll teach them to, um, exist.
  8. “Keep the pressure on.” – Ideally, it should be one event followed by another – don’t give your target a chance to think straight
  9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” – Alinsky threatened to do things – all of the time. The word “threat” appears 38 times in Rules for Radicals.  Often he would leak the threat of a plan, and never even have to do it as the opposition gave in to the threat alone.
  10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” – Back to point 8 – think of things that can be kept up for a long, long time. Riots in the spring and summer nights can go on for months. In December in Minnesota?  Not so much.
  11. “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” – A great example of this is how BLM has kept the narrative moving about police violence against blacks, when the truth is, statistically, that blacks are shot less often than their level of police involvement would indicate, and whites are shot more But push it long enough?
  12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” – The Left no longer does this – rather than have a constructive alternative, they want things like “removal of the systems of white supremacy” and “defunding of the police.”
  13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” – Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II and now Trump. It’s hilarious that they thought W. was the anti-Christ, and Romney was the Devil when they are now nearly saints of the Left.

IRRITATE

Sometimes, you can hear the “Reeeeee” from here . . . .

But can the Right use the same playbook?  Absolutely.  And they are.

  1. “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – The Left is really afraid of the Right, and fear the most the Right creating a coalition in the same way the Left has. They will do anything to stop that.  Sadly, we on the Right seem to be very, very picky on who is in the foxhole with us.  A heretic on one point?    The biggest power the Right has is in joining together.
  2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” – Protesting violently isn’t in the Right’s DNA. We have jobs.  Rioting isn’t in the Right’s expertise.  Planning is.  Communicating is.  Through years of necessity, we’ve also learned to meet quietly.
  3. “Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” – Memes are a good example. The Left ceased to be funny in 2004, and ceased to any sense of humor around 2012, so using memetic warfare is nearly as unfair as playing Twister® with a colorblind super model.
  4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” – /pol/, the politically incorrect part of 4chan, did exactly that when they posted signs around Seattle telling the homeless that CHAZ would have free food for them. “No borders” and “sharing” were in rules for CHAZ, so, they ran out of food on day two.  Plus?  It was hilarious – point 5.
  5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” – This, in part, explains why I write some of the things I do. It was particularly satisfying the day I saw one of my memes being made fun of by Leftists on Reddit®.  They don’t fight back unless you’re over the target.
  6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” – I love poking fun at the Left, because I know that it bothers them. I enjoy it.  Other things I see people on the Right enjoying are planning and organizing and communicating and moving away from California.
  7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Expecting things to go back to “normal” isn’t working for the Right. You can come up with other examples of these – but in large part the playbook needs to be re-written.
  8. “Keep the pressure on.” – The closest that the Right has come to doing this is The Donald himself and his use of Twitter® as a continual agency of chaos. He pokes.  He prods.  He shakes things up and looks for advantage.  He’s had Democrats so tied up in nots they said that Haiti was a paradise.
  9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” – The Right hasn’t been very good at making threats or even having a cohesive plan.
  10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” – Again, outside of Trump, there has been little pressure made on the Left, and next to no organized pressure on the mainstream Left. When has the idea of freedom of speech been used against the Left in an organized way on a college campus? This started with academia, and a good solution will leave college departments where the Leftists lurk defunded.  Imagine a Grievance Studies professor having to look for a real job because they violated the campus speech code?
  11. “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” – Opposition to illegal immigration is just one issue of the Right that, if it were pushed is a winner. There are others.
  12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” – What is it that the Right wants? Do we know?
  13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” – Groundwork has been made with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of her Leftist group, but the Left is expert at this – Justice Cavanaugh is a textbook study, even though they lost.

SQUAD

But what do we want when we have a victory?

Long term, I’m not sure Alinsky’s rules will be enough for the Right as we wander towards Civil War 2.0, but they’re a start, and they’re certainly fun.  As I mentioned above, it has lost institution after institution to the Left, and many of those without even a fight.  None of this will be quickly won, and the Right must begin to think in decades, and also look to make common cause with people who aren’t exactly fitting some sort of mental ideal for the perfect person on the Right, since they don’t really exists.

Back to the fun.

FLAG

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

31 thoughts on “Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals: Now For Use By The Right?”

  1. “As I’ve documented in previous posts (some that include Stormtrooper® bikini shots and pictures of a lot of slave Princess Leia impersonators)…”

    I read that as Slav Princess Leia Impersonators…’Twas a pleasant mistake.

  2. The big problem with the Right is that very few people can even agree on what we want. There are lots of rabid pro-2A people who are terrified of talking about mass immigration or being called “racist” even though mass immigration is going to lead to the end of the 2nd Amendment. Pro-life, “religious right” people are the same way, they see abortion as an issue in a vacuum and don’t seem to understand that abortion or “gay marriage” are permanent because of mass immigration. Some people on the right are thin blue line types and others are ACAB anti-cop. Some on the Right are convinced the Joos are behind everything and others think they are The Chosen People and Our Greatest Ally.

    Meanwhile a lot of the loudest voices on the Right are egomaniacs like Vox Day or obvious paid shills, so the Right seems to spend more time purity spiraling and banishing people from the movement than they do fighting the actual enemy.

    To summarize:

    The Left wants to fight now and then figure out the details.

    The Right wants to figure out all of the details and then start fighting.

    Guess who is about to win?

      1. We have to hit a point where they take so much away that anger overrides fear. We aren’t there yet, not by a long shot. But soon?

        Yeah, I think soon.

        1. With all due respect, I disagree. But then again, I do live behind enemy lines. Case in point is that the area that I live in is basically a red area in a blue state, in fact much of the state is red if you take away the cities, but I digress. Anyway, around two weeks ago the usual suspects set up shop around fifteen minutes from where I live. I notified as many of my neighbors as I could about what we might expect and most of them said, “Shit, thanks for the warning, we’ll prepare accordingly and if you hear of anything else, please pass it along.” They came and went without a problem, but I began hearing things from people I had warned that others in their household who were on the same sheet of music as myself and a number of others, suddenly got cold feet once they discovered that the hordes were at the gates.
          It’s those people I worry about because until folks like us have everything taken from us and we’re thrown out into the street, a number of folks we thought we could count on will be too scared to do anything. And once we’re all out in the street, it’s of course, too late.

      2. LOL

        In Connor McGregors accent “You’ll do NOTHING”

        20,000 heavily armed patriots refused to do anything than dress up and show off their toys to each other. Hilarious

        How America ends. Not in bloodshed but in farce

    1. Vox Day is not the loudest right winger: one antique blog, and a small YouTube channel. But he is one of the most effective: He builds up, over and around, as well as taking the fight to the opposition.

      I suspect that is because he has both figured out the details (step 12: where he wants to end up) and he fights now.

      Thus: Vive Castalia! Make Ours ArkHaven, and Go, go, UATV!

      On a more general note, perhaps with the real threat the Left represents to everything from one’s social circle, to one’s employment, and even, increasingly to one’s life; it requires an egomaniac not to rationalize selling out. I imagine being honest with oneself: I am not a part of the resistance because I am afraid is harder than taking the ticket and joining Vichy France a little.

      1. He isn’t the loudest but he certainly contends for the title of being the biggest egomaniac and has little influence outside of his small circle of sycophantic followers.

        1. I am not sure how you would know any of that. Though “egomaniac” is reasonable if you dislike him. As in I’m slim, you’re thin, he’s scrawny. YMMV.

      2. Vichy France didn’t have no go zones for Police / Christians / French

        At least they’re not speaking German! Peace be on his name

        And lastly. When the Germans were pushed out of France suddenly everyone was a Resistance Member and not surprisingly the people they had a beef with were German sympathizers. More French died after being liberated than during the invasion and occupation by the Germans.

        1. I agree with all your points Mr. Tony, but I do not understand what it has to do with the temptation to submit, and to rationalize one’s submission.

    2. I have much more hope than that. I know we’re looking for the perfect foot to match the glass slipper, but that will change.

      I think Vox is just being Vox, and feels that the ending of the USA before 2034 is inevitable. He’s two orders of magnitude more popular than me, so he does have a big platform.

  3. One restraint I’ve noticed in myself and I believe I share with friends on the right is the innate commitment to law and order plus a moral code.

    Nowhere near perfect compliance of course.

    This can be a hindrance because the left doesn’t share the belief in either.

    Problem is, according to John Adams, only one set of folks are compatible with the Constitution even though both enjoy its protections.

    1. Thus another problem with the Right. We voluntarily constrain ourselves with a moral code that is often dictated to us by our enemies who feel no obligation to reciprocate.

      1. I see it more like how a human body responds to cancer.

        There are nice orderly lung cells, pancreas cells, going to work, producing their product, and then there are good for nothing anarchic, destructive adolescent lung cells, pancreas cells that eat a lot, produce nothing of value and are bent on conquest just because.

        Problem is, the immune system and the orderly cells treat the anarchic, destructive cells as though they are well-behaved Americans, even though the destructive cells cause all sorts of chaos and they travel causing yet more chaos. This is like the treasonous behavior observed in Seattle.

        Without help from the outside, the organism often dies and so does the cancer. Very nihilistic.

        We as a society have cancer.

    2. The challenge for Christians to obey the Fourth Commdment is real.

      What does this mean? We should fear and love God that we may not despise our parents and masters, nor provoke them to anger, but give them honor, serve and obey them, and hold them in love and esteem.

      Perhaps this may help. We are, at least for a little while longer, both masters and servants in terms of our political authority. Albeit the former, with respect to Leviathan; the acedemic-corporate-government industrial complex, means the former is more honored in the breach.

      Nonetheless, in both cases our oath – and obedience – is to one’s State and our National constitution rather than the actors who serve at its pleasure. No King but Jesus.

      You’re still stuck with your parents, the Church leadership, and your boss though. Also you have to pray for dewberries like your governor, and probably stop calling them rude names.

  4. I think you have hit it spot on. The Left was terrified of the so-called “Alt-Right” because (a) the Alt-Right could meme, and (2) the Alt-Right was obsessed with logic and facts. The Left is so puffed up on its self-importance that it is seriously vulnerable to ridicule and being seen as stupid/ignorant.

  5. My husband adds that there are some of the R4R which we cannot follow because they are wicked.

    He reminded me that R4R is dedicated to Satan.

    I said that would make the triumph of a superversive R4R dedicated to Christ all the sweeter.

    This post is a good start.

    1. I apologize for being dense, but: “R4R?” ???

      And yes, I tried looking it up. Many answers, none of which seems predominant, nor suggested by the context here. Redditors for redditors? Resources for rethinking? Probably not …

    2. That is very true! I saw that years ago, and then forgot until I saw it while researching (3/4 of the way through writing) this piece.

      And thank you.

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