Rules for radicals, real and fake
Maybe you missed the fake news nod to conspiracists and antiSemites from first daughter-inlaw Lara Lea Trump, the face of Trump TV and a senior adviser to Donald’s 2020 campaign when she’s not hosting high-level White House policy meetings. (Lara’s the one whose wedding planner, with no government or housing experience, is now in charge of public housing for the region covering New York and New Jersey for equally unqualified Dr. Ben Carson’s Department of Housing and Urban Development.)
She tweeted this last Sunday: “America: Keep your eyes open. There are people in the USA trying to make this a reality Never stop fighting to save our country #MAGA”
A finger emoji in the tweet points down to a picture of a newspaper clipping, marked up with a yellow highlighter and headlined “Beware the Useful Idiots.” It details Jewish community organizer Saul Alinsky’s supposed “eight rules” for creating a socialist state:
1) control health care, 2) increase poverty since “poor people are easier to control,” 3) increase the debt to “produce more poverty,” 4) gun control, so that “you are able to create a police state” We’re halfway through the fever dream. 5) expand welfare to “take control of every aspect of their lives,” 6) control education to determine “what people read and listen to,” 7) “remove the belief in the God from the government and schools” and 8) initiate class warfare to “cause more discontent” so “it will be easier to take (tax) wealthy with the support of the poor.”
That’s followed by a rhetorical question, circled by Lara or whoever did the highlighting: “Does any of this sound like what is happening to the United States?”
Not really. The list — which has been circulating with Alinsky’s name attached since around when Barack Obama was first elected President — also doesn’t sound like Alinsky. Because it’s not. It’s another of the whole-cloth fabrications that the members of the First Family seem to endlessly find and promote online (as I write this, her tweet has 10,000 likes, 6,700 retweets and nearly 1,000 replies).
I’m tempted to say that none of this is normal, but it’s so normal now it hardly registered what with Lara’s brother-in-law Jared working on his plan for peace in the Middle East when he’s not secretly meeting with the crown prince in Saudi Arabia just before prominent members of the royal family there were arrested, or frantically trying to get foreign investors to bail out the Kushner family’s collapsing real estate empire here before a $1.2 billion mortgage bill comes due in February.
There’s a reason Alinsky, despite dying in 1972, lives on as a bogeyman in the minds of Republicans. In the 1990s, attack dog David Brock, back when he was part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, made much of the fact that Hillary Clinton wrote her undergraduate thesis about him.
Rudy Giuliani tied former community organizer Barack Obama to Alinsky’s nefarious plans in 2008, and Newt Gingrich did the same in 2012.
Carson picked up the baton last year and hurled it at Clinton’s head, pointing to a throwaway line in Alinsky’s 1971 book “Rules for Radicals” about Lucifer being a dissident to bizarrely warn America not to take a chance on a President who admires a man who admired the devil.
I don’t know if Lara Trump knows the first thing about any of this, but she has no excuse not to after numerous people, including me, called her out online about the bogus article — one that touches on very old smears about crafty Jews using the poor and dark to reshape “our” society.
One irony, evidently lost on Republicans, is that Alinsky’s ideas are all about pressuring the people in power, not — as Obama and Clinton did — becoming them. Another is that most of Alinsky’s real rules, laid out in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals,” are a roadmap to Trump’s political style. Such as: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have,” “Never go outside the experience of your people,” “Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy,” “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules,” “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” “A good tactic is one that your people enjoy,” “Keep the pressure on,” “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself,” “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.”
We know Donald Trump prefers muddying the waters and tearing things down to reading, but he might want to open up the Alinsky book to study one rule he plainly hasn’t absorbed yet: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”