Can You Use Saul Alinsky's Radical Tactics and Also Be a Conservative?

By James R. Edwards, Jr. on February 19, 2013

Left-wing extremist Saul Alinsky may have been evil, but he also was brilliant. And some supposed conservatives have forsaken civility and embraced Alinsky's ugliest, most immoral, repulsive tactics.

Why? Because they aren't really conservatives!

Consider a couple of Alinsky's radical rules:

Rule 5: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

Rule 12: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.


The thing about radicals is that they deliberately, repeatedly cross the borders of civility, of decency, of community, of morality. They're the most vicious violators of boundaries. Their willingness to destroy their opponents rather than engage them in the free marketplace of ideas, where truth wins out, proves they have zero respect for those who disagree with them.

Such was true of Alinsky's communist agitators. Such is true of certain open-borders zealots of the Right. In short, Alinsky's rules for radicals knowingly and willfully reject the rules that govern civilized society.

As it happens, immigration is one of those issues on which individuals from all political persuasions and walks of life find themselves allied with people with whom they may not agree on much else.

The immigration control movement draws supporters motivated by fiscal concerns, economic concerns, environmental concerns, cultural concerns, security concerns, patriotic concerns, population concerns, and religious concerns, to name a few. Hence, one can marshal an argument and interpret the facts from all of these perspectives.

Because conservative and Republican politicians have tended to support the rule of law (which amnesty abridges), fiscal restraint (which mass immigration undoes), individual responsibility (which present immigration works against), national security (which illegal immigration and mass legal immigration tend to risk), public safety (which mass illegal and legal immigration can jeopardize), and Judeo-Christian moral standards (which certain immigrant groups may offend), many have worked with the leading organizations making the case for restrained immigration. These, like CIS, are single-issue organizations with no agenda except for immigration.

That's why the open-borders right-wingers have gone nuclear in their latest battle for mass amnesty. They're trying to drive a wedge between the leading congressional allies and the leading advocates. The Alinsky tactics call for ad hominem attacks, character assassination, liberal use of half-truths and innuendo, and freeing themselves from being bound by truth. These attackers murdered truth when they started out.

The right-wing advocates for open-borders and amnesty have mastered the unseemly. They do what Black's Law Dictionary defines as "fabricated evidence" or "fabricated fact". To fabricate evidence includes, "To devise falsely or contrive by artifice with the intention to deceive. Such evidence may be wholly forged and artificial, or it may consist in so warping and distorting real facts as to create an erroneous impression in the minds of those who observe them and then presenting such impression as true and genuine."

A fabricated "fact" exists "only in statement, without any foundation in truth. An actual or genuine fact to which a false appearance has been designedly given." The cross-referenced term with each of these concepts is "perjury", or lying under oath. That's what's going on among the pro-amnesty radicals.

In other words, to the extent they ever were bonafide conservatives, these unfettered character assassins no longer are. They have sold their souls, have sacrificed their consciences, have heeded the serpent's smooth words in the garden, all for the sake of an open-borders agenda.

A growing number of true conservatives, who see through the trafficking in untruths by radicals in conservatives' clothing, have decried the smear campaign. Stellar examples can be found in National Review Online, Townhall.com, and FrontPageMag.com

To the question, can such peddlers of such filth truly be conservatives, it would seem the answer is no.

After all, conservatives must be for conserving something. If it's not the fundamental things that make this nation this nation, then what? If it's not the essential rules of civility and truth, then what?

I'll take a patriotic liberal any day of the week over a dozen of these public enemies of society.



Topics: Politics