Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”
Here’s my answer:
Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.
We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as Ronald Reagan?
We tried propriety – has there ever been a nicer, respectful and decent human being than Mitt Romney?
And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky.
I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate”, “polished” and “presidential” [however that is measured] but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”`
Since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s the Left has been engaged in a war against America To the Left it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war the Left has fought from day one with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies– the violent take-over of the universities – till today. The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way [just look at how the Left has shut out any who disagree with them on college campuses] the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety. With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America ’s first wartime president in the Culture War.
During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
General George Patton was a vulgar-talking, anti-Semitic son-of-a-bitch. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum then, Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.
Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”
That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own nasty tactics. That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis. It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer; aka “The Devil.”
Trump’s tweets may seem rash, unpresidential and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do. First, instead of going after “the fake media” — and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri — Trump has isolated CNN. He has made it personal.
Then, just as Alinsky suggests, Trump employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.” … Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. … They need to respond. This leaves them with only two choices. They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery. The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve.
It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: “propaganda”) that keeps the unabashedly repressive Left alive. Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s church with indisputable ties to Louis Farrakhan. Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponization of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.
So, to my friends on the Left — and the #NeverTrumpers as well — do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years. So, say anything you want about this president – I get it – he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times.
I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.
The Left’s use of boycott mirror’s the right’s use of it during the McCarthy Era.
I discovered this by accident. I have an athletic shirt made by an a company called Under Armour that says, “Made in Jordan” and I thought it was a Jordanian company so I looked it up but it’s not. It’s an American company with branches all over the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Armour
Invented by a college athlete who invented a special shirt to deal with sweat and started the company in his grandmother’s basement.
He came out in support of Trump but was then intimidated with boycott and now came out as an anti-Trumper to save his business.
Pretty outrageous.
See Wikipedia article for details.
@ Edgar G.:
Why do I have 2 honeybees in my above pos-t one is more than enough…….??
@ honeybee</b@ honeybee:
Yeah dat de way I fin’ him too….. can’t even pudis shous on the right fete. And allus had to look for his hede when he want to pud’on his hat…..
@ honeybee:
Welcome back Honeybee. Where you been?
@ Felix Quigley:
honeybee Said:
No Darlin, we are not heading for the “dunghill” , were are just leavin yawl behind and in a Communist dunghill.
@ adamdalgliesh:
Darlin , you just hate Americans.
@ Felix Quigley: Your quite right, Felix, the human race is heading into the dunghill.. The disappearance of genuine culture and the rise of barbaric “musical” genres like “rap” and “Hiphop” are certainly evidence of this, as is the constant debasement of the English language by the media’s constant invention of new words and phrases (“body shaming,” “virtue signaling,” etc.). Increasingly, human civilization is dominated by “total vulgarians.”
Sebastien Imagine trying to make sense of Zionism by dealing with the present only, and with the machination of especially American Jews like Klein, and yourself, who have adopted ALL of Americana. You would not have a hope. With Zionism like with everything else you have to go back to origins and trace its development. That is the life of Zionism…its history.
Without that historical method you have nothing. Nothing at all to work with. No science. And anybody can say what they like.
That is how we are heading to Fascism as in these kids in the college hit by Cruz (if it was him that too needs to be investigated properly) who are projecting themselves as experts on America, as they leave out the seminal struggle against the British which started the Republic.
With your crap about Gramshi, a totally minor figure, you are doing the same.
The problem is that these kids are experts in nothing only bullshit. Just listen to the music that goes around today and then listen to any great classical recording and you will see how we are regressing. Yes it is a cultural thing.
I should be using the word “capitalism” here but will not bother but lets say that the human race is heading into the dunghill.
@ yamit82:
Shit into gold
@ honeybee:
For cattle fodder (feed)??? Haaaaaaaaaaa
@ yamit82:
A commie would be welcomed on a Cattle Ranch.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
xoxoxooxoxoox for you alone
@ honeybee:
I have never met a COMMIE with a Brain… They can make gold into shit see Cuba and Venezuela as recent examples and if you protest they kill ya if you are lucky…Only Muzzies have murdered more than the Commies but the Commies did it quicker. Being a Commie is a mental disorder.
@ honeybee:
Thank you, Honeybee and welcome back.
@ Felix Quigley:
Shame on you Felix, Sabastian is very simple
@ Felix Quigley:
I really don’t understand what’s unclear and are you really unfamiliar with the conflict between the IWW strategy of forming alternative revolutionary structures to William Z. Foster’s strategy of taking over the bourgeois labor movement, the AFl which became the AFL-CIO from within and Lenin’s siding with the latter strategy? That was even in the movie, “Reds” with Warren Beatty. It’s well known though I don’t remember where Lenin wrote it down exactly, googling it it doesn’t come up, and have you any idea how extensive his collected works are?
I cited links explaining Gramsci-ism and theories of Cultural Hegemony.
I have to explain Left? The radical and moderate wings merged in today’s Progressive movement. Terrorists like Bill Ayers became teachers, Marxist-Leninists like Obama became liberal democrats, they didn’t change anything but strategy and tactics.
The Woods Foundation. George Soros. Etc.
Rudy Duetsche’s long march through the institutions.
It would require a lot of work for me to summarize all of that more succinctly than I have.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
and Aaron Klein in his books, Red Army, and Manchurian Candidate.
I have sourced everything. You will have to do some more background reading before we can continue this. You are immersed in earlier periods, you have to catch up.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
You write about Lenin but could you source this using primary source…
“In this way, Trump is using the Left’s very success in infiltrating the commanding heights of society, to use Lenin’s term, against them using their own methods which worked very well for them when they were de-centralized and unencumbered by the very bureacracy they took over which is weighing them down.”
This is such a confusing sentence.
Who is the “Left” in your sentence?
You are saying Trump has taken over their methods. What methods?
Which methods you say had worked well for them. Again same question what methods and how had these methods worked well for them?
And finally this is double Dutch…”when they were de-centralized and unencumbered by the very bureacracy (sic) they took over which is weighing them down.”
Why not try again in simple language reflecting clear ideas?
@ Linda Goudsmit:
Thank you. I corrected the post.
This article was written by Evan Sayet.
https://townhall.com/columnists/evansayet/2017/07/13/he-fights-n2354580
In this way, Trump is using the Left’s very success in infiltrating the commanding heights of society, to use Lenin’s term, against them using their own methods which worked very well for them when they were de-centralized and unencumbered by the very bureacracy they took over which is weighing them down.
“The enemy, he is us.” – Pogo
Thomas Kuhn’s 60s classic “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” which is all about paradigm changing is also an important read.
This is why they are attacking the dictionary itself as well as historical memory. If you can make an existing word, that has emotional resonance, yours you can own it, and in the case of words like, “antisemitism,” eliminate it from common parlance by making nonsense out of it.
What we see going on Poland is part of this. Before that, it was the Muslims who got it from the Soviet bloc communists who always used this tactic somewhat.
Gramsci, who was the former head of the Italian Communist Party and wrote these observations down in the last 10 years of his life he spent in Mussolini’s dungeons, made this into the main play. He died around 1930. Took a long time, but now it is.
70s German Gramscian Rudy Dutschke introduced the concept of the long march through the institutions, a variation on Lenin’s boring in within, which they did with Hollywood, the State Dept. and the Unions but in a way that was defeated.
Other non-affiliated Communists who influenced this paradigm like CW Mills, who was an enormous influence on the 60s and the distortion of history for purposes of radicalism were untouchable because they had no foreign or radical affiliations. He was just an academic.
It’s also about redefining language and reality. Marxist paradigms that failed were rejected. Since the 70s, the Left has been mainly influenced by Gramsci and offshoots. Gramsci is all about taking power by changing the nature of the conversation at the grass roots and infiltrating and taking over the culture itself.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
and
“Red Army, the radical network that must be defeated to Save America” by Aaron Klein
which posed the interesting thesis that the Soviet Union was deliberately dismantled by the KGB to pursue a global Gramscian method, though I’m not sure if he mentions Gramsci but what he describes is pure Gramsci and Obama was an integral part of that.
And, I remember a lot of leftists abandoning traditional leninist and 60s tactics and openly championing Gramsci in the 70s. Obama was also an ex-Marxist Leninist like his parents who met in a Russian class during the Cold War. His earliest school was very close to SDS. Alinksky is the tactical handbook, but Gramsci is the Grand strategy. We have to understand both and fight back using the same methods to win this war.
Trump is actually doing that. He changes the conversation, the paradigm, and he uses shock tactics to create the pause in the conversation, the distraction necessary to restart it in a new way and since the Left is so top-down in its manufacture of consent, to employ Chomsky’s term, he’s another seminal thinker in the Gramscian tradition, it throws them off because it catches them by surprise and it takes time for them to regroup.
So true, well written.