Dakota Beacon

If two of the most notable disciples of Saul Alinsky are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, then it begs the question, “Who is Saul Alinsky?”

By his own admission, Alinsky developed his rules while in jail as a result of his lawbreaking activism.

Born in Chicago in 1909, Alinsky was a Marxist fellow traveler and died in 1972 but his legacy lives on. His model for change is embodied in his books “Reveille for Radicals” and “Rules for Radicals.” For Alinsky, change is a euphemism for revolution. “Change comes from power and power comes from organization.” Accordingly, Alinsky devotes an entire chapter in “Rules” to the education of a community organizer.

The following list of Alinsky’s rules is not intended for analysis but rather to expose the reader briefly to the rules he or she may have heard so much about but never encountered. Naive folks who play nice and who go head-to-head against Alinskyites usually lose. Equally important to the rules are the issues which Alinskyites generate, especially when fomenting change at the national level. More on the issues will follow. Here are Alinsky’s rules.

  1.  Power is not what you have but what the enemy thinks you have. This is the first rule of power tactics.

  2.  Never go outside the experience of your people.

  3.  Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

  4.  Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

  5.  Ridicule is man’s most important weapon.

  6.  A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

  7.  A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

  8.  Keep the pressure on.

  9.  The treat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

 10.  The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

 11.  If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.

 12.  The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

 13.  Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. As a tactic, this is the most important rule.

Choose the issue and then apply the rules. “In the beginning, the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or the problems.” A blogger named Leon Puissegur listed some of the obvious issues Obama’s administration generated and to which it then applied Alinksky’s rules.

 -- Healthcare: Control healthcare and you control the people.

 -- Poverty: Exploit the poverty level and drive it as high as possible. People are easier to control and will resist less if you provide for all their needs.

-- Welfare: Take control of every aspect of people’s lives (food, housing, income).

 -- Debt: Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. This paves the way for increasing taxes thereby creating more poverty.

-- Education and Communication: Control what people read and listen to in school, in the media and on the internet (“net neutrality”).

-- Class Warfare: Pit the Haves against the Have-nots to cause more discontent.

Obama is not the only political notable who holds to the Alinsky model. Hillary D. Rodham was an ardent admirer of Alinsky’s theories. As a young college student at Wellesley College, she wrote her 93-page senior thesis in 1969 -- “’There is Only the Fight…’ An Analysis of the Alinsky Model”. Hillary personally interviewed Alinsky for her paper and subsequently maintained a stream of correspondence for years some letters of which may be viewed on the FoxNews and The Blaze websites.

Unlike Hillary, Obama never met Alinsky. He was mentored, however, by several individuals who were schooled in the Alinsky methods at the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation. Some Marxists acknowledged that Obama became a master practitioner of Alinksy’s methods through the Developing Communities Project where he worked as a community organizer. For several years Obama taught workshops in the Alinsky method.

Obama’s use of the Alinsky method to change America sheds a new light on the meaning of “Hope and Change.”

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at P. O. Box 337, Stanley, ND 58784 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).