Posted on 11/26/2007 4:23:00 PM PST by Richard Poe
| by Richard Lawrence Poe Monday, November 26, 2007 |
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MOST AMERICANS never heard of Saul Alinsky. Yet his shadow darkens our coming election. Democrat frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both worship at the altar of Alinskyism.
In a 1971 book called Rules for Radicals, Alinsky scolded the Sixties Left for scaring off potential converts in Middle America. True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism, Alinsky taught. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.
Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.
In his native Chicago, Alinsky courted power wherever he found it. His alliance with prominent Catholic clerics, such as Bishop Bernard Sheil, gave him respectability. His friendship with crime bosses such as Frank Nitti – Al Capone’s second-in-command – gave Alinsky clout on the street.
In our book The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party, my co-author David Horowitz and I trace the rise of Alinsky’s political influence since the 1930s.
He excelled at wooing wealthy funders. Start-up money for his Industrial Areas Foundation – a training school for radical organizers – came from department-store mogul Marshall Field III, Sears Roebuck heiress Adele Rosenwald Levy, and Gardiner Howland Shaw, an assistant secretary of state for Franklin Roosevelt.
Alinsky once boasted, “I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution for Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.”
One Alinsky benefactor was Wall Street investment banker Eugene Meyer, who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1930 to 1933. Meyer and his wife Agnes co-owned The Washington Post. They used their newspaper to promote Alinsky.
Agnes Meyer personally wrote a six-part series in 1945, praising Alinsky’s work in Chicago slums. Her series, called “The Orderly Revolution”, made Alinsky famous. President Truman ordered 100 reprints of it.
During the Sixties, Alinsky wielded tremendous power behind the scenes.
When President Johnson launched his War on Poverty in 1964, Alinsky allies infiltrated the program, steering federal money into Alinsky projects.
In 1966, Senator Robert Kennedy allied himself with union leader Cesar Chavez, an Alinsky disciple. Chavez had worked ten years for Alinsky, beginning in 1952. Kennedy soon drifted into Alinsky’s circle.
After race riots shook Rochester, New York, Alinsky descended on the city and began pressuring Eastman-Kodak to hire more blacks. Kennedy supported Alinsky’s shakedown. The two men had an “understanding”, Alinsky later wrote.
Alinsky’s crowning achievement was his recruitment of a young high school student named Hillary Rodham. She met Alinsky through a radical church group. Hillary wrote an analysis of Alinsky’s methods for her senior thesis at Wellesley College. They remained friends until Alinsky’s death in 1972.
Alinsky tried to hire Hillary as a community organizer, but she chose instead to attend Yale Law School. Nonetheless, Alinsky’s network continued guiding Hillary’s career.
Fresh out of law school at age 26, Hillary received a prestigious appointment to the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate investigative team in 1974. She got the job on the recommendation of Peter and Marian Wright Edelman.
The Edelmans have been trusted mentors of Hillary since 1969. New Republic editor Martin Peretz called Marian “Hillary’s closest sister and ideological soulmate”. Marian Wright Edelman also happens to be an Alinskyite, having served on the Board of Trustees of Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.
Many leftists view Hillary as a sell-out because she claims to hold moderate views on some issues. However, Hillary is simply following Alinsky’s counsel to do and say whatever it takes to gain power.
Barack Obama is also an Alinskyite. Trained by Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, Obama spent years teaching workshops on the Alinsky method. In 1985 he began a four-year stint as a community organizer in Chicago, working for an Alinskyite group called the Developing Communities Project. Later, he worked with ACORN and its offshoot Project Vote, both creations of the Alinsky network.
Camouflage is key to Alinsky-style organizing. While trying to build coalitions of black churches in Chicago, Obama caught flak for not attending church himself. He became an instant churchgoer.
That Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama share an Alinskyite background tells us two things. First, they are leftists, dedicated to overthrowing our Constitutional system. Second, they will go to any length to conceal their radicalism from the public.
That is the Alinsky method. And that is today’s Democratic Party.
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Richard Lawrence Poe is a contributing editor to Newsmax, an award-winning journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. His latest book is The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party, co-written with David Horowitz. |
the loathsome Alinsky...
Which is why for Hillary control is everything. She hitched her wagon to Bill Clinton's star to be able to stay in control behind the scenes, unexposed and not subject to scrutiny. She ran for Senator in a state that is perhaps the most 'Rat of all 'Rat states. Hillary knew from the get-go that she could control the "tough" NY press which, when it came to Hillary, went from tiger to pussycat. Now she'll hide behind the gender-victim-group identity cards if anything tough happens on the campaign trail.
When Hillary is seated behind that desk at 1600, one of the first things she;ll do is reassert control of the media by liberals. That means the "Fairness Doctrine" makes a comeback. Then she'll move for government regulation of the Internet. Remember what she said when Drudge broke the Lewinsky scandal after Newsweak spiked it? Something about how the Internet needed "professional monitors", or something like that.
It simply cannot challenge another position on an intellectual or pragmatic level, even when it is on sound ground.
Which is why you see the tactics you do today in "debates" on college campuses for people like Horowitz and Coulter. They can't cogently argue, so they shout down and sometimes physically attack their opposition. Classic Alinsky-socialism-Marxism.
“Which is why you see the tactics you do today in “debates” on college campuses for people like Horowitz and Coulter. They can’t cogently argue, so they shout down and sometimes physically attack their opposition. Classic Alinsky-socialism-Marxism.”
Yeah, Alinskyism explains a lot of what many of have witnessed. Hopefully, we now have the guts to call the emotional terrorists on their game. The victim card ain’t working real well for Hillary. May she and hers continue in this and other veins of action.
An interesting point in the movie was the failure of these drugged/sexed-out leftist folks was their inability to bring in the "blue collar youth" into their movement to overthrow the US gov't. They couldn't understand why people who worked for a living and cared for their families didn't recognize their own "oppression" and just join in their little part of the global revolution.
They interview these nuts as baby boomers, and they are totally unrepentant (and well paid in the non-profit world and in academia, busy brainwashing away), still reprobate, and are extremely optimistic about the future of the communist revolution in America. Seeing Hilary's and/or Obama's progress, makes one wonder what they know that we don't.
Then, reading this about Alinsky solves it all for me.
And Hillary is now the ‘expert’ on that and Obama is taking lessons from her!
What Alinsky means by this "feeling for and with the people" is simply how much one person really cares about people unlike himself. He illustrates the feeling by a series of examples in which he poses questions such as: So you are a white, native-born Protestant. Do you like people?
... feeling ... poses ... lots of material to work with. :) Probably best to keep it simple by simply answering Mrs Clinton's question with my own rhetorical question.
So you are a white, native-born Atheist progressive. Do you like conservative people?
Although Hillary's paper starts with a strong active voice it soon degenerates into a rather simple gruel of matter-of-fact statements peppered with mind numbing third person passives and the odd Chomsky-ism thrown in for brownie points.
OTOH your daughters maintain an active voice throughout making it a delight to read. Well done!
I am becoming increasingly convinced that the wealthy, powerful, and somewhat archaic media conglomerates that have controlled the messaging to America for so long are beginning to crumble. As they begin to deteriorate under the weight of a more democratic media system, opportunities to infiltrate the pervasive and corrupt lies and spread truth in love are becoming abundant. As America continues to grow fatigued and sluggish from decades of the mainstream media's preaching of godlessness, bright lights are beginning to shine in the most unlikely media places. And like any small light in a pitch black room, the effect will be unmistakable. - Brian Fisher, Coral Ridge Ministries
she has the most hideous taste in clothes.
Thanks for the ping and your article/research. I was not aware of Barack’s ties to Alinsky. BTTT!
Since the ‘60’s many of us here have been fighting this battle. I’m grateful that good Americans like you and David Horowitz, et al, know what’s ahead if either of those two are elected.
FR will be shut down, Rush will be “balanced” with liberal double speak, and we’ll all be forced underground. God help us, because “our” government will roll over us like a steamroller.
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks Richard.
Great work.
Ping.
BTTT
Leon Trotsky lives!
Obama is more the post-1960s radical whose approach is more Fabian socialism. For that reason, he could be the more dangerous of the two in terms of presenting a "pretty picture" and seeming more charming and acceptable and approachable than the more dogmatic and ruthless Hillary. But then again, Hillary may destroy him before he gets too far.
self-ping for later read
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