Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World

by Andrew Breitbart

The Frankfurt School thinkers had come up with the rationale for radical environmentalism, artistic communism, psychological deconstruction of their opponents, and multiculturalism. Most of all, they had come up with the concept of “repressive tolerance,” aka political correctness.

They had penetrated the academies—my American Studies program at Tulane had far more Adorno and Gramsci and Horkheimer and Marcuse than Twain or Jefferson or Lincoln. There was some trickle-down intellectualism going on—all the college students who worked through these programs and took swigs from the Frankfurt School bottle labeled “Drink Me” shrank mentally and ended up as parts o...

And I had another question, too. Frankfurt School philosophy was all about criticizing from the outside. It was about tearing down society by taking it apart, piece by piece, razing it to the ground. That stuff doesn’t go over very well in this country, because people here are generally happy—we don’t see Disneyland as an emblem of corporate greed or capitalistic exploitation, we see it as a fun place to take our kids, and if somebody tried to tear down Disneyland in the name of the collective, we’d have a shit fit.

So how did this outsiders’ philosophy penetrate our hearts and our minds? How did the Complex, which was a huge philosophical system designed to take America head-on, recede into the background so much that a few decades later, we can’t even recognize that it exists? Then I read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: if Marcuse was the Jesus of the New Left, then Alinsky was his Saint Paul, proselytizing and dumbing down Marcuse’s message, making it practical, and convincing leaders to make it the official religion of the United States,

Rules for Radicals might just as well be entitled How to Take Over America from the Inside. It’s theory made flesh. Alinsky laid it out step-by-step, but we were too busy fighting the results to read his game plan.

Let’s start by noting who Saul Alinsky was. Alinsky was an avowed communist dedicated to installing communism in America from the inside, using the most clever tactical means he could devise. He was born in 1909 in Chicago, and like his Frankfurt School counterparts, he quickly migrated toward Marx. He attended the University of Chicago and majored in Archaeology, but dumped that after he couldn’t get a job. After working as a criminologist, he became a community organizer—yes, a community organizer—for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a major union run by John L. Lewis, an anticommunist leftist who actually pushed for the election of Republican Wendell Willkie in the 1940 election

One of the crucial lessons he learned was that he had to work from the inside. Whereas New Left leaders like Marcuse preferred to bash the system from the outside and alienate all those who were part of it, Alinsky knew that it was more important to pose as an insider to achieve his aims.

It worked brilliantly. Time magazine bought into Alinsky’s act in a 1970 profile: “It is not too much to argue that American democracy is being altered by Alinsky’s ideas. In an age of dissolving political labels, he is a radical—but not in the usual sense, and he is certainly a long way removed from New Left extremists.” This, of course, was not true—not in the slightest. His own beliefs were intensely close to those of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School—it was only his practicality and pragmatism that distinguished him and made him infinitely more effective.

Alinsky took on the trappings of American constitutionalism in order to insinuate himself insidiously into the American consciousness. He scorned flag-burning as counterproductive. He talked about the Founders on a regular basis. He even posed as a conservative when it suited his purposes. Time sums up the popular view of Alinsky, a view he cultivated with minute forethought: “Alinsky claims to be doing nothing more un-American than following the precepts of the Founding Fathers. In the Federalist papers, James Madison warned against allowing any class or faction to acquire too much power. In his own way, Alinsky is trying to redress the balance of power within contemporary America. If the desire to preserve basic American principles makes one a conservative, then he indeed qualifies…. He surely offers proof—i...

Alinsky summarized his strategy for instituting Marxist change in his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. It’s actually an excellent book, clear where Marcuse is foggy, irreverent where Adorno is stagnant, dirty and funny where Horkheimer is abstruse and boring. The book’s dedication page explains in a nutshell what was so dangerous about Alinsky—he mixed a dash of religious fervor, a sprinkle of American founding talk, and a heavy dose of “kiss my ass” into a concoction that was relatively easy and fun to swallow. The first page has an epigraph from Rabbi Hillel, one from Thomas Paine, and finally, Alinsky’s “kiss my ass” epigraph: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the very first r...

Alinsky immediately makes clear where he stands on politics: he’s a Marxist, and a pragmatic Marxist at that. Alinsky’s role, as a pragmatic communist, is to succeed where his “fellow radicals” had failed.

He despises those impractical Marxists who “panic and run, rationalizing that the system is going to collapse anyway of its own rot and corruption,” those who go “hippie or yippie, taking drugs, trying communes, anything to escape,” those who “went berserk… the Weathermen and their like.” He laughs at the college students who embrace Marcuse-ian philosophy while doing nothing, those who spend their time cribbing from the communist puppetmasters and wear Che T-shirts.25 He also knows that America’s openness provides communists the opportunity to destroy American values, which makes working from the outside a waste of time. Militant outsider-ism is counterproductive. Alinsky, first and foremost, knows that to win, communists must communicate in the language of the people.

They must embrace the world as it is, not as they wish it were. “As an organizer,” Alinsky writes in Donald Rumsfeld–like language, “I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would lik...

The people, Alinsky thinks, are like happy sheep. In order to steer them in the politically correct direction, they first must be made unhappy, and that unhappiness will result in passivity, then finally in discontent, and then, in the end, revolution. Incrementalism, as Frankfurt School’s Antonio Gramsci taught, is the name of the game. And the only way to begin opening the door to the revolution is to make people unhappy with the status quo. Revolutionaries aren’t supposed to afflict the comfortable...

Alinsky’s clever merging of fake founding philosophy with his own Marxism led him to internal contradictions that would have sunk a lesser ego. While championing “freedom,” for example, he hated the idea of individual freedom the Founders loved—he wanted “communal freedom,” which is to say tyranny led by the government. “The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself,” he wrote.27 This is typically Rousseau-ian messaging—community trumps the individual, and in fact, individualism can only exist within the body politic. In other words, workers of the world unite—from within the system. And he united his ideas under the rubric of “change.” Yes, “change.”28 He also liked “hope,” because his personal philosophy “is anchored in optimism.”29 Sound familiar?

He tells us straight out what he’s looking for in a “community organizer.” First off, he looks for flexibility.31 That means moving from method to method, argument to argument, fighting like a guerrilla rather than like a coordinated army. Don’t worry about methodological consistency, says Alinsky—just do what you have to in order to win. Alinsky believes that the ends justify the means as a general rule. He believes that fearing corruption of your internal values only leads to paralysis, and that the only way to truly win is to abandon yourself wholly to your ends. As Stalin would have put it, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Alinsky liked omelets.

This obviously runs directly counter to the notions of Judeo-Christian morality, which ardently state that right ends cannot justify wrong means. That is why American society has such a tough time handling Alinsky’s acolytes: he didn’t play by their rules, and

they couldn’t play by his rules. Alinsky simply didn’t care about Judeo-Christian morality—he was a total moral relativist who declared, without batting an eye, “O...

His bottom line is plain and unvarnished: Kick ass and then pretend you were doing the moral thing. Lie, cheat, and steal for victory. If you have to lie to win, then lie and win, then lie about your lie. If you have to win with brutality, then be brutal and win, and then rewrite history about your brutality.

Second, Alinsky looks for confidence. Weak-willed people never win, and those who doubt themselves are weak-willed.34 It takes confidence to go after your opposition with a chainsaw.

Third, Alinsky espouses the value of experience. Education as a community organizer means embracing Rousseau-like experiential learning, since history doesn’t repeat itself—all history is changeable and changing. This is also an excellent rationalization for young people to ignore the wisdom of the past—this time, just like every time, things are different.

particular. As it stands, the Frankfurt School–taught left is fighting the political battle on both the political and the cultural battlefields. Conservatives are fighting it only on the political battlefield. That means that art, humor, song, theater, television, film, dance are all devices used every day in order to influence the hearts and minds of the American people. Conservatives have to pray that their kids will eventually discover George Will’s column to knock some sense into them.

It took Alinsky to shut up the opposition using the methodologies of political correctness, to frighten people into submission and create an informal anti–First Amendment regime where if you speak out, you become a personal target. It took Alinsky to put the Complex totally into effect. Every successful interest group and social movement in the United States since the 1960s has used Frankfurt School ideology and Alinsky rules. It’s tragic it has taken conservatives so long to realize it.

realized that I talked a mean game, and I thought a mean game, and I gave a lot of people great talking points and great ideas, but I’d spent too much time thinking about the persona I could craft for myself that I and my family could bear while living in the middle of West Los Angeles, the heart of the beast. For the next four years, that Maher appearance gnawed at me. I had been flirting with acting like myself in public, but I was still afraid. Sometimes in the midst of my sleep pattern I would wake up from nightmares in a cold sweat, one thought running through my mind: what if I went in front of the public and got booed? What if they rejected me? It became a constant, growing fear in my life. Am I going to be who I am, I asked myself, or am I going to craft a more sophisticated yet untruthful public persona where I pull my punches?

Even moderate conservatives were still telling their followers to give Obama a chance. I knew Obama, and I knew he didn’t deserve a chance to turn America into a Frankfurt School dystopia. He was a Frankfurt School scholar, a Marxist gradualist in moderate’s clothing, a community organizer in the Alinsky mold. But I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stake out that position with Bill Maher. Perhaps they even invited me on because I had complied with the rules of the game back in 2005.

And now, walking out of the Maher show, I realized that what I had feared most—expulsion and derision—didn’t really even hurt, not when you are standing up for what you believe. I raised my Cactus Cooler in honor of the individual who came up with the aphorism “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Nietzsche, by the way. I realized that while adulation has its moments and can be like a bath in warm water after coming in from a snowstorm, the psychic high from standing up for what you believe in and being attacked for it far surpassed the comfort to be derived from that bath of praise.

My transformation from empty-headed, pop-culture-infused, talking-points-parroting liberal to New Media warrior took me four decades.

Before we get to the application of the tactics, and before I lay out my game plan for the next few years, let’s summarize the rules every conservative activist needs to use when fighting the left:

1. Don’t be afraid to go into enemy territory. This is perhaps the most important rule you’ll read in this book, and the one most likely to be ignored by the Republican Party and the Old Guard in the conservative movement. They would say I shouldn’t have appeared on Maher, because it was an audience stacked against me. But that’s the same mentality that led the right to abandon Hollywood, academia, and the media—and the effects have been disastrous. The right figures that talk radio, Fox News, and some independent Internet sites will allow us to distribute our ideas to the masses.

Obama is leading the charge, targeting specific hosts and specific outlets. Remember Rush Limbaugh? Or their insistence that Fox News isn’t a real news outlet like CNN or MSNBC? The problem is that it works with the vast majority of apolitical voters in America. In my neighborhood, our strategy of disengagement isn’t working too well. People who don’t watch Fox News or listen to Rush have strong, defiant, negative opinions about those outlets, just like I did when I was a liberal. I’d never listened to Rush in my life, but I knew—I knew!—that Rush was the epitome of evil. I knew, just as the Complex wanted me to know, that Rush was a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot that only KKKers listened to while driving their broken-down pickups and drinking moonshine.

The army of the emboldened and gleefully ill-informed is growing. Groupthink happens, and we have to take it head-on. We can’t win the political war until we win the cultural war.

By neglecting The View or, worse, by ignoring Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Maher, and David Letterman—we allow them to distort and demean us as they romanticize and elevate themselves. It’s harder to attack people to their faces than behind their backs, and we have to confront them face-to-face. Young people suckle at the teat of pop culture—but by refusing to fight for their attention, we lose by default.

Our most articulate voices, likable faces, and best idea-makers need to go into hostile territory and plant the seeds of doubt in our ideological enemy and the apolitical masses who simply go with the media flow.

There’s no time to continue backing away. If we’re standing still, we’re moving backward. Get in the game. Get in the fight.

2. Expose the left for who they are—in their own words. It’s easy to label the left, to analyze them, to take them apart using your rationality—their program fails every time it’s tried, and their lexicon, once you know it, is as predictable as the sun rising in the east. What’s much harder than understanding the left is exposing it. That’s where citizen journalists come in. Drudge was a citizen journalist, and he took on a president. Today, we all have the power to be citizen journalists via the Internet—there’s no Complex gatekeeper to stop us from posting the truth about enemies of freedom and liberty in this country. In the past few years alone, citizen journalists have deposed Dan Rather for his scurrilous and baseless attacks on George W. Bush; exposed John Kerry’s true war record during the 2004 election cycle; debunked Reuters’s photography fraud in the Middle East; raised the question whether Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, was ghostwritten by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers; gotten rid of communist Van Jones; and the list goes on.

The key to the success of the New Media, though, is making news by breaking news. And that means that conservatives need to use their new best technological friends: the MP3 recorder, the phone camera, and the blogosphere. It’s one thing to say that the left likes socialism, but it’s a real story to get Barack Obama to admit it on camera, as he did to Joe the Plumber during the 2008 election cycle. Video journalism is the most potent kind of journalism. We live in an age of sound and sight, not text, and we have to adapt to that age.

3. Be open about your secrets. If you’re going to go out in public, be absolutely open about what you’ve done in the past.

The left never gets cited for hypocrisy (see Clinton, Bill), but the right is cited with it all the time because we actually have standards. That means we have to out ourselves before the left does it for us.

Hypocrisy is such a powerful argument for the left because it appeals directly to the emotional heart of politics: one standard for you, another for me. It’s no wonder Alinsky relied heavily on his rule 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. We have more rules than they do with regard to morality, which means we have to live up to them more often. But mistakes in the past don’t need to be skeletons waiting to come out of the closet. If you’ve made mistakes, reveal them at the first available opportunity. Embrace those mistakes. Don’t talk about how you regret them—talk about how you lived through them and how they made you who you are today. Embracing your mistakes makes you invulnerable to their slings.

Don’t let the Complex use its PC lexicon to characterize you and shape the narrative. If you’ve got a big story, the Complex will do what it always does: attack you personally using the PC lexicon. You immediately become a racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic nativist.

Don’t let them do it. The fact is this: if you refuse to buy into their lexicon, if you refuse to back down in the face of those intimidation tactics, they can’t harm you. You’re Neo in the hallway with Agent Smith after he figures out that the Complex is a sham—the spoon isn’t bending, he’s bending. Once it hits him that he’s not bound by the rules of the game, he can literally stop bullets. You can stop their bullets because their bullets aren’t real.

Leftist assassins like Max Blumenthal, a one-trick hit man, have tried to label me and many of my allies as racists. I don’t let them get away with it. I don’t just call them out, I make sure that my righteous indignation registers on the Richter scale. I don’t pull out my record on civil rights or my black friends. I simply point out that what they’re doing is pure Alinsky and that it has no basis in fact or reality, and that they’re showi...

The key to the conversation was that I didn’t start defending myself against his baseless charge of racism. I dismissed it out of hand as ridiculous because it was ridiculous. He was a punk for leveling that kind of charge without any basis whatsoever. I don’t let my enemies characterize me without any evidence, and you shouldn’t let them characterize you. Name-calling is their best strategy, and if you don’t lend it credence, and instead force them to back up their charges with specifics, you win. Revel in the name-calling—it means you’ve got them reduced to their lowest, basest tactic, and the one that carries the least weight if you refuse to abide by their definition of you.

Feeding the media is like training a dog—you can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over and over again until it learns its lesson.

The important thing to remember here is that the media are like a leech hanging on the back of the news makers, and the news makers have every right and ability to feed that leech little by little instead of letting it suck them dry all at once. Keep your story alive by planning its release down to the minutest detail.

6. Ubiquity is key. As a capitalist and as a web publisher, pageviews are certainly a desired commodity. But when playing for political or cultural keeps, impact matters most. And, when ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBC and the dailies are working against you and ignoring you, ubiquity is a key weapon. That means developing relationships with like-minded allies or even enemies and news junkies and allowing them to share in the good fortune of a good scoop.

7. Engage in the social arena. My first instinct about Facebook was my first instinct about Twitter was my first instinct about MySpace. I was right about MySpace—it sucks. I was definitely wrong about Facebook and Twitter. Using my “ubiquity” rule, the citizen journalist isn’t always reporting in the ledes, headlines, and paragraphs form. Sometimes a tweet or a re-tweet can grant an idea more legs. Sometimes a status update can lead to the mother lode.

8. Don’t pretend to know more than you do. This one trips up conservatives all the time. We want to argue policy because when we know policy, there’s no way they can beat us, because all they have is their lexicon of name-calling and societal expulsion. We have reason on our side. But just because we have reason on our side doesn’t mean that everyone is equipped to be Charles Krauthammer or Michael Barone, policy wonks who can pull facts from the Office of Management and Budget out of every orifice.

Had Wikipedia not been invented, I would have had nothing to say. But I did, and I survived. My takeaway from the revealing moment about the low standards for TV punditry was that if I valued my career, I would only accept media invites where I could dictate the terms of engagement (i.e., bring my own stories, my own perspectives, etc.) or where I could change the subject to war footing. By avoiding talking about that which I do not know, perhaps I limit my ability to appear on more shows. But I definitely limit my ability to screw up. Put another way: don’t be the guy with a knife at the gunfight. It rarely ends well.

9. Don’t let them pretend to know more than they do. This is really the converse of the last rule.