Sept. 8, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:17
3405 The Truth About Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals
“Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” was written by community organizer Saul Alinsky in 1971. It has become the de facto progressive manifesto for effecting political change. Opening: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton met with Saul Alinsky several times in 1968 while she was writing her college thesis on his community organization theories. President Barack Obama’s education was also greatly influenced by Alinsky and his theories. What is The Truth About Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals – and how does it work? Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/rules-for-radicals
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So this is a long-requested item.
Thank you for your patience.
This is a review and an explication of Saul Alinsky's famous book called Rules for Radicals, which is a great handbook for understanding the swirling maelstrom of social attack and defense and maneuvering and some of the hidden mechanics behind some...
More considerably on the left in terms of what they want to achieve, but it's also been used by Tea Party groups and others, and it's a very, very important book to understand just to know what is going on in the battle for the soul or future of a nation.
It's particularly relevant at the moment in these presidential elections.
There's a big reason why this is an important book, and it mostly has to do with the fact that, let me tell you something, as someone who's been at the epicenter of the world's largest philosophy conversation low these 10 years, and for decades before that, more off the grid, People are not excessively rational when it comes to understanding the world and solving their problems.
And when you have urgency and you don't have philosophy, a lot of times you will end up with strategy or tactics.
It could sometimes be called manipulation, but that may be a bit too harsh a term.
When you really, really want something and reason and evidence isn't going to win the day, Then you are going to have to fall back on maneuvering, on appearance, on sophistry.
You don't see rules for radicals in the scientific community, right?
Because in the scientific community they have the scientific method to resolve their disputes.
you don't see rules for radicals in a logician's community because they have logic, hopefully, to solve their issues in mathematics and so on, where there is an objective discipline, then you don't need rules for radicals.
And I also wanted to mention just before we dive in that if we lived in a very free society, a society without an all-powerful state that can dictate just about everything that it wants at the center of society, we would have, I don't know, Petri dish isn't really the right word.
It sounds a little bad.
But we would have endless experimentation in various forms of social organization, and some would flourish and some would diminish, and it would be a wonderful time to figure out which kind of community you wanted to live in and have that match what your preferences are.
When you have a big, giant, powerful state, though, then it has the power to impose its will.
We don't have a separation of state and society.
This book and the reason for its effectiveness and the reason why you need to know about it is because there sometimes is precious little reason in human affairs.
So, let's get started.
So, the book title, Rules for Radicals, A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, was written by community organizer Saul Alinsky.
In 1971, it has become the de facto progressive manifesto for effecting political change.
Now, Saul Alinsky died actually the year after he wrote the book.
He'd been a community organizer.
I'm not sure I know any more about what that means than you do, for decades, and this was sort of the sum total of his experience in the field.
He described himself as a small-c communist.
So he was a communist, that's important, but he'd never officially joined the Communist Party.
He viewed them as too dogmatic, and he was very much a pragmatist in that the end justified the means.
If you're aiming at victory, whatever you do to get there is mostly for the better.
So it gave him a kind of nimbleness that is...
I think conservatives have a lot more structure in their thinking, for better or for worse, and when dealing with leftists, seeing the contradictions and the loosey-goosey nimbleness of their approach sometimes can be disconcerting.
That comes out of this kind of work.
So the opening paragraph of the book, don't worry, I'm not going to read the whole thing, is this.
What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.
The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the haves on how to hold power.
Rules for Radicals is written for the have-nots on how to take it away.
And...
I think more it's how the have-nots can take the power that the haves have.
Now, Saul did actually divide—it's fairly typical, this sort of tripartite analysis or triple-layer German cheesecake of society in that there were the haves, the have-nots, and in the middle there were the have a little but want more, which is—and he was really aiming for the people who had no say, no power.
Now, interestingly, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton met with Saul Alinsky several times in 1968 while she was writing her college thesis on his community organization theory.
Said college thesis was unavailable for decades, but now has emerged.
You can find it on the internet.
On July 8th, 1971, this is a letter from Hillary Clinton to Alinsky.
Quote, Dear Saul, when is that new book, Rules for Radicals, coming out?
Or has it come and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation?
So I guess you could say, kind of a fan.
She said, I have just had my 1,000th conversation about Reveille for radicals and need some new material to throw at people.
You are being rediscovered again as the new left politicos are finally beginning to think seriously about the hard work and mechanics of organizing.
The book Living History, written by Hillary Clinton, came out in 2003.
She said, Alinsky offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school.
Alinsky said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within.
Now, President Barack Obama's education was also greatly influenced by Alinsky and his theories.
Alinsky's son, L. David Alinsky, praised Obama in 08 for the use of his father's theories.
Quote, Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness.
It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and to get the supporters on board.
When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen.
Obama learned his lesson well.
So, what are these rules for radicals?
And how does the entire book work?
Well, obviously this is going to be a surface and a skim.
You can find much more information on the internet and, of course, read the book yourself.
But here we go.
Rule number one.
Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
So, when Occupy Wall Street says, we are the 99%, they are claiming to have a mass amount of support.
And this income inequality movement protest began September 17th in 2011 in Zuccotti Park in New York City's Wall Street Financial District.
And, of course, immediately the...
Reporting on it was as if it was somehow a 99% consensus.
New York Times 2011.
Who are the 99%?
Ways to teach about Occupy Wall Street.
Huffington Post 2013.
Occupy Wall Street.
Actually not all representative of the 99% report fines.
So it kind of...
We are the 99%.
And, you know, people were keen on it to begin with.
And I actually did a video analysis of one of the manifestos that came out of the movement some years ago, which you can find on this channel.
But...
How many people really understood the movement and actually approved on it?
Well, it doesn't really matter, because what matters is that people think that you're a mass movement.
Power is not in what you have, what the enemy thinks that you have.
So, Oakland had some very militant protests, and 34% of Oakland, San Francisco area residents supported Occupy Wall Street, while 54% opposed it.
This is of May 2012.
And 24% of the residents who'd once supported the protests now oppose Occupy as of 2012.
And 32% believe that the police have not been harsh enough with, you know, what were, I guess, a lot of fairly smelly and haze-enclosed squatters.
And so it really, it sort of peaked relatively high in terms of support.
Wow, they're really into doing something.
They're really into changing something.
And then as the movement kind of Became more known to people and the chaos and some of the crime that occurred in there.
Well, only 16% of Americans in April 2011 said they were supporters.
That was a high of nearly 29% in early November.
So, not anywhere close, of course, to the 99%.
And there is, of course, this sort of final question that a lot of people have.
You know, it's interesting at the beginning when you see people really enthusiastic about change and getting things done.
And then at some point, you notice the same people on camera all the time.
And it's hard to miss that question.
Don't you guys have any jobs to go to or anything like that?
And so that is important.
If you look at Black Lives Matter, this is a protest movement which grew in popularity in the aftermath of Michael Brown's Well, he was supposed to have been shot execution-style.
Turned out that was not the case.
He had committed a strong-arm robbery at a convenience store and then assaulted police officer Darren Wilson.
And according to Pew Research, 43% of Americans support the movement, including 18% who strongly support it.
Black Lives Matter support is highest in the black community, of course.
65% support the movement.
41% who strongly support it.
12% of blacks say that they oppose the movement.
So you want to, and of course, Saul Alinsky was very much into catchy phrases and so on.
Of course, Black Lives Matter.
Who would want to say that they don't?
So it's a little tough to oppose that if all you know is the slogan.
And a lot of times, do you support Black Lives Matter?
People are like, well, yeah, I don't want to say Black Lives Don't Matter.
Who would want to say such a wrongheaded thing?
But...
Generally, it's not because people have really delved into what the perspective or the arguments are within the organization.
And power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
So this is true in a sense of the media.
I've said before on this show, there were two memorable figures from my childhood.
One was a little bit before my time.
And this was, of course, Joseph McCarthy, who was trying to root out communist spies in the State Department.
And Richard Nixon.
And both of them were attacked by the media and destroyed, largely, by the media.
And that has really changed because now there's a lot of punchback that occurs.
People like Chelsea Johnson, Mike Cernovich, and others who punch back against media narratives.
I guess I do to my small degree as well.
And so now there's more...
So people are less afraid of the media than they used to be.
So if you don't think that the media has as much power as it used to to harm you, well, then you're going to have more courage in speaking the truth to a hopeful waiting world.
And that really is very important, and it's one of the great benefits that the Internet and its capacity to allow us to communicate directly has offered us.
Rule number two.
Never go outside the expertise of your people.
When an action or tactic is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
It also means a collapse of communication, as we have noted.
Now, never go outside the expertise of your people.
I guess it kind of means don't surprise them with information that goes against their preferred narrative.
Don't get complicated.
Keep it simple.
You can see this with, you know, some of these, I don't know, I guess kind of mindless chants that you see going on with these kinds of protests and waving signs and the sort of physical intimidation of the mob and the intimidation of the Donald Trump supporters that has been That is really important.
It is kind of playing to ill-informed prejudice, and it strives not to overcomplicate things with a huge amount of reason and evidence.
So, for instance, I did an interview recently with a researcher who pointed out that when the police wear body cams, a shooting of suspects actually goes up.
Why?
Because the police have a record of everything that happened and aren't afraid of confusing reports making it to the media, then turning their life into the kind of living hell that Darren Wilson and others have Never go outside the expertise of your people.
So, for instance, one of the things that's on the left that's kind of common is all wealth is capitalism, right?
All accumulations of wealth is capitalism.
All wealthy people are capitalists.
Well, there's a difference between somebody who's earned their money in the relative free market through voluntary association, through providing value to customers, and other people who buy off politicians to get preferential Federal Reserve policies or trade policies or tariff policies, and then skim the very blood andicker of the soul and other people who buy off politicians to get preferential Federal Reserve policies or trade policies or tariff policies, and then skim the very blood andicker of the soul of the
So looking at Wall Street, Wall Street is an entity that is largely bloated by, you know, a lot of times they're the first people to get a hold of the freshly minted Federal Reserve cash when it's still worth its old value before it trickles out to you and I and is kind of low in terms of value.
They are groups that, you know, a lot of people don't want to be in the stock market, but in order to keep their money away from the tax man, they put their money in the stock market, and that, of course, drives up the value and price of stock.
So, all rich people, all wealth, everything which contributes to the Disparities in income must be the result of the free market, and therefore Wall Street is a perfect expression of the free market, and that just ain't the case.
So this is a big challenge, and of course when you have 12 years of really, really bad government schools not teaching kids how to think and how to reason, how to question, how to examine evidence or any principles, well, when you say don't go outside the expertise of your people, sometimes it just feels like teach them to walk in a straight line, hold signs, and chant.
So, every economic concern for the leftists is the fault of, you know, the greedy capitalists, the crooked banksters, the evil corporations.
The government is always the savior.
You need the government to control the evil corporations who are just yanking at the people, gnashing at the people like feral wolves through a decaying chain fence.
I mean, this is just the general standard.
And you don't want to confuse them with, well, you know, the Federal Reserve is privately owned, but Has a monopoly on money creation given to it by the government.
It is the only agency that's allowed to counterfeit in the world.
Central banking is a state socialist phenomenon.
Blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
So...
It's a little challenge.
So, in 2007, 2008, when the housing bubble pops, well, it's just the excesses of capitalism, and that's all, and it's the greedy banks, and so on.
It's not the fault of the Federal Reserve, which had been granted the monopoly privilege to control interest rates.
Here's a hint.
If the government is controlling it, it's not in the free market.
It's also not the fault of regulations, which essentially demanded banks make certain percentage of subprime loans.
Towards minority groups or towards underprivileged groups or they would be sanctioned for being racist or discriminatory.
No, it's crazy.
It's always the free market that's the problem.
It doesn't matter how free the market actually is, how many thousands of pages of regulations or government oversight distort these market forces.
It's just the free market.
Everything that involves buying and selling is just the free market.
Slavery was the free market.
No, it really wasn't.
And They'll say, of course, that, well, you can't get a job because people are prejudiced against you or there's sexism or whatever it is, not because regulations have made it very expensive to hire employees and it's become increasingly difficult to fire employees, which you can see in France.
They just can't fire anyone, so it makes it very hard to get a job.
Everything that occurs where there's any kind of trade is always and forever completely and totally the free market, and the solution in general is always and totally some sort of government control.
And so, yeah, never go outside the expertise of your people.
Don't teach them the complicated ways to analyze the modern economy.
Just give them some oogie-boogie men and let them rip.
Rule three.
Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
Here you want to cause confusion, fear...
And retreat, right?
So this is a corollary.
I used to know that word.
Maybe I'm thinking of coriander.
So this is a corollary of the rule number two.
Stay within the expertise within your own people.
Wherever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.
So this is a typical sort of...
Gotcha!
That people do is, and this is a little bit on the left, particularly to the right.
So Andy Hiller to George W. Bush in 1999.
Sort of ambushed him with it.
Can you name the president of Chechnya?
The president of Taiwan?
The general who's in charge of Pakistan?
The prime minister of India?
All of the My Little Ponies?
Can you name every Pokemon?
Do you have them on your phone?
How about the shape of the mole on my inner thigh?
What does it look like?
I mean, it was just boom, boom, boom.
Hit them with these kinds of questions.
You don't really see Democrats being peppered with the same...
Spray.
George Stephanopoulos to Mitt Romney, 2012.
Nobody can win with these kinds of questions.
So he said, Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception, or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?
Yeah, okay.
And, you know, I don't mind these tough questions.
It's just that they seem to roll a little bit down towards the Republicans and a little bit not towards the Democrats.
Hugh Hewitt to Donald Trump, 2015, the same kind of thing.
He said, I'm looking for the next commander-in-chief to know who Hassan Nasrallah is, and Zawahiri, and al-Julani, and al-Baghdadi.
Do you know the players without a scorecard yet, Donald Trump?
Do they ask the Democrats these kinds of questions?
Go outside the expertise of the enemy.
Meghan Kelly to Donald Trump, 2015.
How will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?
New York Daily News had a quiz.
Quiz.
Who said it?
Trump, Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin?
And these are all the kind of gotchas that happen.
Give impossible answers.
Give answers that at least annoy some significant segment of the population and so on.
And what's interesting as well is a pattern that you'll see is that when Democrats, reporters, but I repeat myself, when Democratic reporters question the Republicans, what they say or what they ask for is, give me every step-by-step detail.
Of how your plan is going to be implemented, how your plan is going to be executed.
Oh, you want to deport 11 million people.
How is that going to happen?
How is that going to work?
How many cars are going to be involved?
And how many nightsticks?
And how many people?
And how much overtime is going to be involved?
And if you don't have the answers, then you are perceived to be a person who deals only in windy generalities.
And hey!
That's my job.
So, on the right, every proposed plan has to be gone through in excruciating detail.
Whereas, when Democrats talk to Democratic politicians, all of their windy generalities and sentimentality, and we're going to make the country wonderful, and everyone's going to be better together, and so on, there's no implementation.
Because implementation questions are always off-putting to people.
So again, go outside the expertise of the enemy, and that's important.
Rule number four, make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to its Christianity.
Hey Saul, I think your communism might be showing a little bit.
So, if you have a rule, and I'll get into how, you know, people try to sort of snare me with this one as well.
It discourages people from having principles, because if you have principles, then the principles are going to be used against you.
So you try to keep your principles at bay.
So Ayn Rand was criticized for accepting social security payments while criticizing the welfare state and forms of income redistribution.
And sometimes that's the only argument you'll ever hear because, you know, she's a challenging thinker to rebut if you get a real understanding of her arguments.
And she actually wrote a whole article rebutting all of this.
But, um, you had a rule that welfare was bad and income redistribution is bad, but here you are taking income redistribution.
Right?
Right?
Well, it's kind of boring.
And so, you know, I talk about free will.
And I've got a whole series on free will.
Three-part series on free will.
You should really check it out if you want to see.
Young Steph.
Brie Scar.
So I talk about free will.
But I also talk about the statistical negative outcomes of bad parenting or abusive childhoods.
So because I say we have free will, but there are environmental influences on our behavior, I'm apparently both a free willer and a determinist at the same time.
Anyway, the wind blows.
Pick your pick.
I talk about the universal application of the non-aggression principle.
And then I'm called a statist when I point out that If you have no borders and you have a welfare state, you're going to have an economic collapse.
And of course, in a free society, things are privately owned.
Everything is a border.
You know, like the walls around your house and your property, that's a border.
Your skin, that's a border.
Your skull.
And of course, national borders are just another government program.
This is just...
And look, I mean, I understand these criticisms because I spent a lot of time as a philosopher with very big abstractions, very generalized abstractions.
I've got a whole book on secular ethics called Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
It's available at freedomainradio.com slash free.
It is, in fact, free.
And you should check it out.
So I've done a lot of abstract work.
And then when I start to deal with current events and apply certain principles to current events, suddenly I'm betraying all of my principles.
I mean, okay, but there's...
There's the blueprints and then there's the building.
The blueprints are two-dimensional and hopefully the building is not.
I say that there's a diminishment of personal responsibility.
You know, everything happens to people.
They're just victims and so on.
And that's pretty bad when it comes to ethics and choice.
But then when I talk about that, and then I talk about I have empathy for people who've made bad decisions after growing up in difficult circumstances or bad childhoods, suddenly it's like, oh, you're taking away their personal responsibility because you're giving them the excuse of a bad childhood.
And it's like, nope.
No, I mean, the reasons their childhood were bad was because their parents in general didn't take personal responsibility and sort of act it out.
So I'm just trying to break the cycle, that's all.
Yeah.
Yeah, people rag on Donald Trump because he doesn't denounce eminent domain.
And sure, that's the government taking private property.
But then those same people universally support the income tax, which is, oh, wait, wait, I think I remember this.
Oh, yeah, the government taking private property.
And you can find these hypocrisies, if you want to call them that, anywhere where people attempt to bring any ideals to bear on real-world situations.
There are always going to be compromises that occur.
And saying that this is hypocrisy is damning people to either Act as a body without a mind or act as a mind without a body.
In other words, you just go out and roam the streets and punch people to get what you want.
Or you sit in your study dreaming up the most fantastical Cartesian abstract systems while never applying them to the real world.
The collision between ideals and reality can be a little bit messy.
There's a perfect circle in our mind or in math, not necessarily in the world.
That does not mean that the imperfect circle is hypocritical.
I mean, you can pick this on the left, and generally it's people on the right who get hit with this, but Karl Marx wrote a lot about the exploitation, both financial and sexual, of the working classes, and then he banged his maid, got her pregnant, didn't pay her, and kicked her out on the street to hide his affair with her.
So, I don't know.
I just...
It's analyzed the ideas and their application, but this constant...
He said, oh, if there's some group that says we'll respond to every inquiry with a letter, then get everyone to write them 30,000 letters.
They say, well, you said you'd respond to every inquiry.
You've got to hold them.
And of course, that means, of course, is that the people who have the fewer standards are the ones who win the most.
This is a pragmatist's game.
And the way to oppose it, of course, is to say that the people who don't have really any standards have no particular business trying to make the world a better place because they have no particular standards.
Rule number five.
Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule.
Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
So the Guardian, and I did a whole video on this, which I think is good and surprisingly popular.
John Oliver targets Trump with the Make Donald Trump Again campaign.
New York Daily News.
Expert urged Donald Trump to fix his reverse raccoon eyes.
Washington Post.
Yeah, Donald Trump's hands are actually pretty small.
Salon.
Donald Trump is just this dumb.
He doesn't even know what he doesn't know, but his latest ignorance is breathtaking.
The son, Donald Trump, micropenis statues are erected all over America in attempts to prove he isn't well equipped to run the country.
Mother Jones, going a little more low rent, Donald Trump is a big fat idiot.
Independent said, Donald Trump's use of grammar, typical of children aged 11 and under.
And Hillary Clinton to Matt Lauer in 1998.
This is the great story here for anyone willing to find it and write about it and explain it.
It's this vast alt-right, I mean, right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.
And you saw this, you know, Rupert Murdoch essentially ordered Megyn Kelly to take out Donald Trump in one of the first debates by quoting his meanness to women.
And he replied in a moment that is stunningly powerful and pivotal in American political history.
He said, only Rosie O'Donnell, which got a laugh and defused it.
And then he pointed out how politically correct everything was and how ridiculous it was that you couldn't have any fun anymore.
And at that moment, I remember sitting up just going, man, he won.
He just won right there.
He just won right there.
And, you know, you can do things like dig, dig up an old tweet, take it out of context, take a little snippet of something someone says and broadcast it like it's their entire political over and so on.
So in general, rule five is a big giant umbrella called not an argument.
So I hope that clears things up.
Although, to be fair, it can be pretty funny.
Rule number six, a good tactic is one your people enjoy.
If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
So, the common theme for the tactics that leftists enjoy is kind of the abdication of personal responsibility.
You know, groups can only fail because of systematic racism or sexism or whatever it's going to be.
And that is...
That is, of course, very enjoyable.
And look, when people fail at something, they, I assume, feel bad.
How would I know, having never failed?
But no, I mean, if you fail at something, you feel bad about it.
And if someone comes along with this magical goo called, oh, no, it's not your responsibility, it's somebody else's fault, and they're bad, and your failure makes you good because you're a victim, and they're bad people who are oppressing you, it's tempting, right?
I mean, it's tempting to take that painkiller, so to speak, and...
Replace the discomfort of having made a mistake with the self-righteousness of having been a victim.
Very, very heady and addictive stuff.
And there is a particular market for that.
So, for instance, here's a couple of titles or headlines.
Chicago Tribune.
Did I get drunk last night because of the patriarchy?
CNBC. This is a man's world.
Wage gap for mothers.
Can reach 33% study fines.
See, the key word there is mothers.
I can tell you, as a full-time stay-at-home dad, children can be a little time-consuming.
So, yeah, you can't really work as much or as hard when you have children, despite what the welfare state says.
New York Magazine, quote, domestic violence has a huge impact on the wage gap.
Which is, again, one of these things that doesn't make any sense once you understand that domestic violence is about 50-50 male to female.
MSNBC wrote, Huffington Post.
Trans men open up about their experiences with male privilege.
And they obviously...
I mean, sort of like...
Excuse the phrase.
It's sort of like shitposting, right?
Now, the alt-right and other kinds of trolls in general have started enjoying their tactics.
And since...
The alt-right is now following rule number six and enjoying all of the trollery that they are doing.
They're just terrible mean people.
When the left does it, it's effective and it's a rule for a radical.
When the alt-right does it, they're just plain mean, which is, again, we'll go back to rule or two before for understanding that.
Rule seven.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings.
Hey Saul, I think your communism might have slipped through just a little bit there.
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
Militant interest in any issue for only a limited time.
Rile people up and point them somewhere and call yourself an organizational genius.
So, Hillary Clinton's alt-right speech, which occurred shortly before she started hacking up a tsunami of lung butter, which I guess only confirms the alt-right's voodoo powers.
Love you guys!
Don't hurt me!
She said, Yeah, it's funny how there is this radical fringe taking over the Republican Party composed of people who are actually listening to Republicans.
It's really, really quite shocking.
So, apparently, this is, you know, really, really bad.
Prejudice and paranoia, and it's just really, really bad to do all of that.
So, does the left ever do this themselves?
Let's see.
New York Times.
Is Donald Trump a racist?
Washington Post.
Hillary Clinton essentially just called Donald Trump an unrepentant racist.
ABC. Montel Williams blasts Donald Trump.
A racist is as a racist does.
MSNBC. Why Donald Trump's racist remarks matter.
Think progress.
The unthinkable consequences of Donald Trump's racist attack on a judge.
Huffington Post.
Donald Trump's four decades of racism.
Is there a pattern?
Fortune.
Is Donald Trump a racist?
Here's what his record shows.
GQ, meet the people trying to convince America Donald Trump isn't racist.
Isn't that a person?
So, ah, the question mark that prevents a counterattack.
So, the reality is that, I gotta tell you, I think, you know, that this calling people racists and sexists and so on, I think that's a tactic that's dragged on just a little bit.
I saw this the other day on the internet.
You can do a search for a graphic which is the number of times that the New York Times articles mention the word racist or racism and it's like through the roof.
It has just become a kind of mob mentality word that is just sprayed like random bullets trying to take out people.
So I think that tactic has, it's become a cliche, a ritualistic commitment.
As the great Dr.
Tom Sowell has said, what is a racist?
Well, a racist is a Republican who just won an argument with a Democrat.
And in this war between the articles and the comments, which seems to be happening at the moment between the establishment and the voices on the internet who are passionately against it, This racist thing doesn't really seem to work anymore.
It probably works among people in an inner circle, but it doesn't work out in the real world anymore.
Which is good.
It'll help the left to become more creative.
Rule 8.
Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
Now this rule did have more of an impact before the internet was around to rebut the mainstream narrative.
Now, that having been said, the absurdity of leftist accusations can certainly keep rational people off balance.
BBC Why does sexism persist in the video games industry?
Everyday feminism Three ways men wanting to focus on her pleasure during sex can still be sexist.
The Huffington Post White people should be banned from doing yoga.
Salon Meet pedophiles who mean well.
Oh, please don't make that your ringtone.
CNN. Trump wants GOP to court black voters, then slams voting rights for felons.
Washington Post.
Admitting that white privilege helps you is really just congratulating yourself.
Slate.
Some white guys love to mansplain away sexism when it comes to Hillary Clinton.
Right?
So, if they just sort of attack you with, like, various crazy things from every single direction, what you end up with is a kind of paralysis.
Well, I... I have white privilege, but I can't talk about white privilege, and I can't act on white privilege.
No one has ever really defined for me what it is.
I can't transfer white privilege, but having white privilege makes me a bad privilege.
Like, you end up with this, I don't know, Jesuit, monk, self-flogging, self-flagellation paralysis because you just get all this pressure.
I can't mansplain.
If I'm explaining something to a woman, am I mansplaining?
Right?
I mean, it's crazy, right?
And you should see this up with race as well.
People are going to have an honest conversation about race.
Well, I don't know if I can be...
What does honest mean?
Does it mean just saying I'm a bad person?
Anyway, it just gets very...
All of these rules, they just keep piling up these rules, which is ironic for a group that a lot of times does...
claims to sort of boastfully claim that they don't really have any rules.
So...
Yeah, they're just trying to program things into your head to get you paralyzed.
It works pretty well.
Rule number nine, the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
So just keep people on edge with threats or scaremongering or dangers that just keep them nervous and off balance.
Because if people are scared, then they'll look for a leader or a state To manage and help them get things done and to solve them from this big ooga-booga, right?
Like, you know, if aliens are attacking, we're okay with world government, so all the people who want world government are probably dressing up in funny little spacesuits as we speak.
So environmentalist Nigel Calder from 1969, the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.
This stuff bugs the living hell out of me, I'll tell you that.
Because, you know, when I was a kid, this stuff was everywhere.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, DDT will dissolve birds and cause the oceans to turn a fire.
Instead, 60 million people died from malaria because they banned DDT. Good plan.
And, oh yeah, when I was a kid, there was going to be worldwide starvation by 1980.
The world was going to run out of oil.
It was going to run out of water.
There was going to be global...
A new ice age.
It's just boom, boom, boom.
Just keep the threats on coming.
Ecologist Kenneth Watt, 1970.
The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years.
If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000.
This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.
Harvard biologist George Wald, 1970.
Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
You saw this with the Arctic ice and the polar bears and, I mean...
Reuters, November 1999.
Euro deputies warn Y2K could cause atomic disaster.
So for my younger listeners, Y2K was a software feature slash bug that way back in the day, you didn't have much storage or memory in computers, so you didn't store four-digit years, you stored two-digit years.
And when they ticked over from 99 to 00, apocalypse was supposed to consume us all.
And I think a couple of subway turnstiles in Japan had problems, and I think that was about it.
Ah, David Cameron.
In the mirror.
Brexit could trigger World War III. And financial...
No, it's not him, but other people say financial collapse and disaster.
Business Insider.
Get ready for an economic crash if Britain leaves the EU. New York Magazine.
How Hitler's rise to power explains why Republicans accept Donald Trump.
And of course, you know, whenever you say that the government is not a great way to ensure the provision of goods and services and healthcare and stability to the poor and the old and the sick, then people think that somehow you want to drive a combine harvester called the non-aggression principle over the bones of said poor and old and sick.
So, boom!
Fear!
Disaster!
Consequences!
Nonsense.
Independent wrote, How much of a psychopath is Donald Trump?
Worse than Hitler, apparently.
That's Godwin's law, I think.
Whoever brings up Hitler in an internet debate loses immediately.
The first person to do that.
I think that's also become, like the word racist, just a little bit tired and beat up.
Rule 10.
The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.
So boom, boom, boom.
Just keep them going.
Keep them hitting.
So this Vox Dei, as a writer, has been on the show a couple of times.
He wrote a book called Social Justice Warriors Always Lie, Taking Down the Thought Police.
And here are some examples.
Dr.
James Watson, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of DNA, awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, forced to resign as chancellor and board member of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after 43 years due to comments he made concerning human biodiversity.
Brendan Eich, CEO of Mozilla, forced to resign due to a single $1,000 political donation made five years prior.
Sir Tim Hunt, Nobel laureate, awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, forced to resign from University College London and fired by the European Research Council Science Committee due to a comment about women crying in the laboratory.
Pax Dickinson, Chief Technology Officer of Business Insider, forced to resign due to tweeting several politically incorrect comments.
Kurt Schilling, former Major League Baseball pitcher, baseball analyst, and expert ASL player, was suspended by ESPN and removed, quote, from his current Little League assignment pending further consideration for a single tweet comparing the estimated percentage of Muslims who are extremists to the historical percentage of Germans who were National Socialists.
Boom, boom, boom.
Just, you know, every direction.
Think about everything you write.
Think about everything you say.
Self-censor, self-censor, and you're paralyzed.
And this is not something that the left is particularly subjected to.
So that is beginning to change.
Gamergate, of course, was the big pushback against what seemed like this inevitable tsunami takeover of culture and art and everything and entertainment by social justice warriors, by what could be charitably described as leftist hysterics.
And this pushback is beginning to occur.
People are really beginning to understand this on the right and fight back.
I mean, it seems like sometimes the alt-right is simply the alternative to slow Republican surrender.
Rule 11.
If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.
This is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.
Now, the civil rights movement in the 60s benefited from acts of violence from police or individuals which turned its members into sympathetic underdogs.
You can see these pictures.
There's a chilling picture of, I think it's a young black man and a ferocious I think it's an Alsatian or a police attack dog about to bite him, held by a white police officer.
You know, chilling, horrible stuff.
And so it turned the blacks, and rightly so, into sympathetic underdogs when they were looking to gain the same rights as whites.
And that was important in getting that message across and getting that perspective across.
It's kind of changed a little bit lately because more recently There was, I think it was in Chicago, there was a sort of slowdown or work slowdown as protests by the police and murders just went up crazy.
94% of them are unsolved.
It's like 500 murders.
It's crazy.
And so the leftist attacks on police officers that have occurred, I mean, it happens fairly regularly during election cycles because, you know, the leftists always want to make sure that they get the black vote.
And one of the ways that they have done that in the past Or try to, is to say that there's, you know, a war on blacks, you know, the same way they get the women's vote by saying there's a war on women and so on.
But what's happening now is the leftist attacks and criticism towards police officers is having the same impact in provoking sympathy for law enforcement.
So it is a pendulum that can kind of swing back and forth.
The Washington Post wrote, Don't criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence.
The civil rights movement did too.
Chicago Tribune.
Cops taunted, victim disrespected, and the violence goes on.
Front Page Magazine.
How the media covers up Black Lives Matter racism.
Blue Lives Matter bill classifying police attacks as hate crimes.
So there is a sort of pendulum that goes back and forth.
A lot of times, particularly when it comes to the cops, the poor are the victims.
Because when you hammer the cops, the cops tend to get more tentative about policing, which opens up more aggressive capacities for the criminals.
And this Ferguson effect has been fairly well documented.
So it is a very dangerous game to be playing.
Rule 12.
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
BernieSanders.com.
Making the wealthy, Wall Street and large corporations pay their fair share.
Now that is, again, sort of stay within the expertise of your people.
There was a tax many years ago in Canada, I think it was called the Fair Share Health Levy.
See, if you say levy, it's not a tax.
Drove my Chevy to the tax.
That doesn't work at all.
But yeah, I mean, the other, the rich, the wealthy, the people who've stolen from you, and the reason you don't have a job, I don't have to work at Starbucks, I have too much student debt, we're going to pay their fair share.
Other people aren't paying their fair share.
And that's where they go.
Fox News.
Clinton says rich are not paying their fair share in taxes.
Clinton unveils plan to stop price gouging on old drugs.
Huffington Post.
Health insurance companies price gouging the U.S. economy.
LA Daily News.
Huge oil company gains a sign of gas price gouging.
CNN. Whole Foods accused of massive overcharging.
You know, price fixing, price gouging.
It's as regular as spring sometimes here, or at least it used to be until the price of oil went down, that in Canada there'd always be an investigation into price fixing by the oil companies that always came up kind of empty.
And so yeah, you see this, you need to have a constructive alternative.
Because if you push through, you need to say, you know, like for the civil rights movement, they went sort of straight past equality and into things like affirmative action and so on.
And then that's their solution.
And he said, he wrote, you cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in a sudden agreement with your demand and saying, you're right.
We don't know what to do about this issue.
Now you tell us.
So...
When people are concerned about income inequality, I think that's not a bad thing to be concerned about.
It's an interesting phenomenon to examine.
But, of course, the government has taken over more and more control of the economy.
The government redistributes more wealth, or I shouldn't say redistribute it.
It's not like it's distributed in the first place.
The government forcibly transfers wealth by the trillions of dollars every year.
So if there is still income inequality, How can it be the fault of the free market?
Because the government has supposedly been trying to solve this problem for, I don't know, at least 50 years since the creation of the welfare state under LBJ, or at least the modern welfare state in the 60s.
The more government, when the government's been spending trillions and trillions of dollars trying to solve this problem already, I don't know.
But, you know, again, if you just have one answer, stay within the field of expertise.
Rich people are all capitalists and are all your enemies.
Well, that means that you don't have to really process much complicated information.
So, when Donald Trump sort of turned the table on the Democrats, because he was saying, look, after seven and a half years under a Democratic president, Obama, who promised significant improvements, a lot of the metrics and statistics for the black community are much worse now than they were before.
When Barack Obama first got into office.
So when he's sort of pointing this out, he's doing a bit of an end run around the Democrats.
And what is she going to say to that?
Is she going to say, well, no, there are no problems in the black community?
Well...
That's not, that can't be real because the Democrats have just been talking about systemic racism and cops who kill blacks for no reason and all of that sort of stuff, although they generally don't talk about illegitimacy because single moms tend to vote on the left pretty consistently, at least for a bigger government, because, you know, real men can be hard to keep.
So when Donald Trump points out that there are big problems in the black community, what's Hillary Clinton going to do?
She can't say there are no problems, and she can't say that the problems are bad, and she certainly can't say the problems are getting worse because she's Obama 2.0, right?
To some degree.
So, what does she say?
She says, ah, under the guise of outreach to African Americans, Trump has stood up in front of a largely white audience, in front of largely white audiences, and described black communities in insulting and ignorant terms.
Poverty, rejection, horrible education, no housing, no homes, no ownership, crime at levels nobody has seen.
Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.
He doesn't see the success of black leaders in every field, the vibrancy of black-owned businesses.
He certainly doesn't have any solutions to take on the reality of systemic racism and create more equality and opportunity in communities of color.
So this is just the general kind of switcheroo that you see on the left, right?
Blacks are doing really badly, so vote for us, we'll make it better.
Oh, Donald Trump said blacks are doing really badly, but they're doing really well.
That's just having no principles, the expediency of the moment.
That's all they're talking about.
Rule 13, pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Now, this is a very, very powerful Movement or attack that happens.
Boom!
You pick someone.
You attack them.
You try to separate them from their source of income.
You try and separate them from their friends.
You try to get them fired.
You try to boom, boom, boom, boom.
Like jackals on a wounded zebra.
I guess they would attack zebras.
I don't know.
Not a big biologist.
And you want to polarize it, right?
So the New York Times.
Interesting, right?
And you'll see this kind of stuff a lot.
He likes Trump.
She doesn't.
Can this marriage be saved?
I guess that...
I'll let you guess what the answer is to that.
The slate says, it's okay to end friendships over Trump.
NBC, Vote Trump, Get Dumped movement aims to hit Trump where it hurts, right?
So this is women who won't date you or sleep with you if you are pro-Trump.
I guess this is taking a phrase or a movement from Lysistrata by Aristophanes.
And actually, I watched a great video by Lauren Southern.
She goes to a campus in Toronto, I think it is Ryerson, and tries to find a single Donald Trump supporter.
And basically, everyone's like, no, I can't say that, right?
Especially the guys, because, you know, The women are generally lefty at that age and whatever.
And so just vote Trump get dumped.
I mean, if you are on camera on the internet speaking positively about Donald Trump, you know, good luck getting laid for the next four lifetimes or so.
Chicago now.
Sorry, but I can't be friends with you if you support Donald Trump.
Huffington Post.
Here's an easy way to defeat Trump.
Refuse to sleep with his supporters.
Not an argument.
CBS.
Coalition of New Jersey black mayors call for national boycott of Trump assets.
Hollywood Reporter.
Toronto city council urges boycott of Trump's hotel for his bigoted and hateful comments.
CNN.
Daily Beast editor calls for Trump boycott.
Think progress.
140 companies drop advertising from Rush Limbaugh.
And, yeah, so they.
And I have no problem with boycotts.
I think that they're not arguments, but it's a free market in those areas if you want to buy someone's products or you don't want to buy someone's products.
It is, just on a personal note, I will occasionally go to the entertainment section of the newspapers because I like pretty people too.
And it is always...
a little bit of a challenge when you know there's actors that you like or singers that you like who just say Really dumb stuff with no argument.
And you just know that they're virtue signaling and it diminishes just a tiny little bit the enjoyment that you can have in their art.
I don't know if I'm going to boycott anyone or anything.
So you want it to hurt people.
You want them to feel separated, isolated, alienated, friendless, their income threatened, their careers threatened and so on.
That is harsh, right?
And remember earlier, Alinsky was saying, pick tactics that your followers or the people you're organizing really enjoy.
They love it.
They love that bloodlust.
They love that feeding frenzy.
I don't know.
Pick tactics that people enjoy.
Let's try destroying people's lives.
Ooh, I'm going to love that.
I don't know.
Call me a little old-fashioned, but I'm not sure that's the very best approach for being healthy and happy.
And...
This sort of by-the-by, I mean, there is, YouTube has had a policy for a while that if you do controversial videos that they can demonetize them.
In other words, advertising won't show up.
And if that's your source of income, that, of course, is a big problem.
This, of course, is not censorship any more than, as Mike Cernovich pointed out, Donald Trump is a private citizen.
If he chooses to not allow certain newspapers into his meetings, he's a private citizen.
That's not censorship.
It's Just exercising a boycott.
It's the same kind of boycott that the media urged against his Macy's connections and his Chinese ties or whatever it was going to be.
So people are upset about that.
But it's, you know, if you're an advertiser, you don't necessarily want your ads playing next to something that is upsetting or controversial or disturbing for people or you name it.
So I, you know, I don't think it's terrible.
And people say, well, it's selective.
If it's CNN, then you know it's already gone through a big vetting process.
And if it's just some guy, then it hasn't, probably.
And so they're less likely, even if you have the same footage as CNN, they're less likely to take the ads off CNN than they are to take the ads off you.
So this is not shocking.
It's not surprising in many ways.
And it's another reason why...
I didn't monetize these videos because you know once in a very great while I don't know, maybe every 16 to 18 months, statistically, I might say something that's controversial or upsetting to people.
Yeah, break up marriages based on whether you like Trump or not.
And friendships.
And don't date people.
It's like, I don't know, break up with your boyfriend or girlfriend.
Who's kidding?
Boyfriend, probably.
So anyway, it's just kind of funny.
But again, this is the kind of standards for you, standards for thee, but not for me.
That is generally typical with this kind of stuff.
So...
This is important to know and understand.
Like, once you get fluent and fluid in understanding these things, and you might want to watch this more than once just to enjoy the jokes again, but once you understand these things, you'll see it, you know, coming over and over again.
You'll see, and it's not all, I mean, there's more, and these are not all equally deployed, but you'll see it very consistently showing up.
These tactics result from the fact that people really can't think.
We've got a presentation on this channel called The Death of Reason, which was the death of my hope to some degree, but, you know, trying to always get the information.
But if people don't have philosophy, well, things have got to get done in society.
Decisions have to be made.
Communities want to improve.
And if you don't have philosophy, if you don't have reason and evidence and you don't have freedom, then you're going to try and grab the ring of power and use it for benefiting your group at the expense of others.
If other people are rich because they've stolen from you, then you want to use the power of the state to go and tax the rich and give the money back to you because they stole your bike and you just plain want it back.
So when you get subjectivism combined with urgency, you get these kinds of tactics.
They're not debates, there's no reason, there's no evidence, there's no information, there's repetition, there's intimidation, there's attack, there's bullying, there's harassment, there's all of this kind of stuff.
So Saul Alinsky basically said that if you're too certain, then you're dogmatic and you're not going to do any good.
But these all require significant degrees of certainty to deploy, to enact these kinds of tactics.
So, emotions bring certainty and usually error.
Like if you're sort of acting emotionally, reacting emotionally, it's going to bring you certainty but error.
Philosophy brings doubt and caution and freedom.
Freedom fundamentally is the doubt.
It emerges out of the doubt.
That is sown by philosophy.
I don't know how you should live your life.
I know that you shouldn't use violence against me.
I know that I shouldn't use violence against you.
But I don't know how you should live your life.
I don't know what's best for you.
I don't know what kind of job you should have.
I don't know exactly who you should date.
I don't know if you should have kids or not.
I don't know if you should save for your retirement or spend the money.
I don't know.
I don't know any of these things.
So you should be free to do what you want to do in your life.
But when you get that kind of emotional urgency And it's got to be this way.
Well, then you're willing to bully others, and you're willing to control others, and you're willing to exercise power over others.
And that's my concern, that these tactics vault over the humility and self-doubt of philosophy and just tell you how to get shit done.
It's kind of a blind missile, in a way.
I think the alt-right and a lot of trolls, not that they're the same group always, they do understand these tactics.
And the alt-right has, in my view, sort of grown out.
It's a pretty common view.
It's grown out of political correctness.
And I think that the trolls, as they're called now on the internet, on the right...
Are basically saying, well, we've been told, well, don't sink to their level.
Don't sink to use their tactics.
And it's like, actually, without your permission, we think we will.
And that's when the conflict is going to get interesting and possibly volatile.
And that's why I'm trying to bring as much illumination and reason and evidence to these proceedings as humanly possible.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Main Radio.
Thank you.
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