Understanding What Is Happening in America
Abridged from an essay from Larry Alex Taunton, Executive Director of the Fixed Point Foundation and a freelance columnist contributing to USA Today, Fox News, The Atlantic, CNN, and The American Spectator. Published 7/6/2020.
If we are to properly interpret modern events, we must understand how the thought of Saul Alinsky [1909-1972] is driving them, because his writings have been enormously influential on the radical Left.
Perhaps you are thinking, as so many are, there is no rhyme or reason to what is going on! It is just anarchy! But I assure you that those organizing it—as opposed to those who are simply caught up in it—are following a carefully prepared strategy.
As the title of his book [Rules for Radicals (1971)] suggests, Alinsky laid out a number of “rules.”
1. Divide and conquer This is done through carefully targeted agitation of various people groups, playing on their latent fears and suspicions of one another:
...black vs white, rich vs poor, Red States vs Blue States—it doesn’t matter so long as it brings conflict. It is the opposite of the “Melting Pot” philosophy and E Pluribus Unum—“Out of Many, One.”
2. Create scapegoats For Democrats, the scapegoats are Trump, evangelicals, white people, a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” Russian collusion narratives, white supremacists, Red State Americans, non-Democrat minorities—they have all become scapegoats.
3. Create chaos Riots, looting, and other criminal activity is to your benefit because it undermines your in-power opponent, making him look weak, indecisive, and incompetent.
If, however, he does respond decisively, so much the better! Now your narrative becomes that he is a violent oppressor of the people.
4. Make it a movement This tactic, almost always successful, gives a virtuous veneer to a sordid agenda with mass appeal. Those unwary souls who flock to your cause are what the late economist Ludwig von Mises called “useful innocents.” (Others call them “useful idiots.”)
Soon they’ll be hanging red banners, swastikas, or posting black squares on social media, wholly unaware that you are using them to accomplish something altogether different from the stated purpose of your movement.
5. Political trash talk “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” he wrote, because “it is almost impossible to counterattack.” Furthermore, “it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
6. Disinformation Maintain an unrelenting campaign of public disinformation while accusing your enemies of deception. The more outrageous the accusations, the better. Keep them busy defending themselves against lies while you move forward with your plans.
7. “The thing is never the thing” Many thought they knew what this was all about in the beginning: police brutality. But then they were caught off guard when the protests took an unexpected turn and began attacking not just perceived racism, but America in general.
The idea is to obfuscate the issues by continually moving the goalposts. Keep your enemy frustrated in his search for what you want. Don’t give him the endgame he seeks. Don’t be reasonable, but continually accuse him of being unreasonable. If he meets one demand, make another.
And then another. And still another.
8. Seize power This is done by presenting yourself as the solution to the chaos you created. Your bargain with the public is essentially this: you will have no rest until we are in power.
The Black Lives Matter and Antifa terrorists are counting on their enemies being bound by a moral code. This is why they can taunt police with confidence. If your enemy is as unscrupulous as you are it won’t work.
Where does the attack on America fit in all of this?
This is the part that has confused so many. Whether you agreed with it or not, toppling statues of known racists had a certain logic to it in the wake of George Floyd.
But then it morphed into a much broader attack on America and her heroes in general. None, it seems, are to be spared.
What’s this all about?
It has long been maintained by Marxist theorists that for socialism to truly work it must be implemented globally, thus achieving the highest stage of socialism: communism.
The problem for Marxists, however, is that Americans are traditionally a deeply patriotic people.
It is for this reason that globalists—i.e., Marxists—have set out to destroy patriotism under the acids of cynicism. You’re proud of your country? You’re a fascist! is typically the way the conversation goes.
In America the process is repeating itself with alarming rapidity. If I can make you feel ashamed of your country, I can destroy your patriotism.
Now, the self-righteous types filling the ranks of Democrats, BLM, Antifa, and the radical Left, themselves wronged by no one and possessed by a hateful, secular, utopian ideology absent any notion of grace, see themselves as the embodiment of retribution and national reckoning.
They are determined to keep America’s sins—both real and imagined—ever before her, reminding her, flogging her, as a means of reducing us all to a pathetic national guilt that will be leveraged for evil purposes.
Don’t fall for it.
America paid for and repented of the sins of slavery and racism long ago. And a tenet central to the Christian faith—and, incidentally the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution—is that one is not tried twice for the same offense.
Furthermore, no legislation, no executive order can save this country if it is, in fact, hellbent on suicide. There is one thing and one thing alone that can heal America’s deep divisions. Indeed, what Americans need individually is what they need corporately: The grace of God.
Thom Loring
@tloring
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