Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World

by Andrew Breitbart

Marcuse was widely accepted in the 1960s by the student movement—so much so that students in Paris during the 1968 uprising marched with banners reading “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.”

Marcuse had a big, big problem: America’s founding ideology is still far sexier than that of the Marxists, who insist on a tyrannical state of equality rather than freedom with personal responsibility. Even if Marcuse was promising unending sex, drugs, and rock and roll, most Americans were more interested in living in liberty with their families, in a society that values virtue and hard work rather than promiscuity and decadence.

In other words, if you disagreed with Marcuse, you should be forcefully shut up, according to Marcuse.

There’s another name for Marcuse’s “partisan tolerance”: Political Correctness. In fact, the term “political correctness” came from one of Marcuse’s buddies: Mao Tse-tung. Mao used the term to differentiate between those who had “scientifically correct” views and those who did not; those who did were termed “politically correct.”

important—“Our Constitution survived a revolution and a Civil War and two World Wars. Why should we worry about a few German eggheads?” Especially since America was economically thriving under such “oppression.”

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.

: 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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

After calling for the destruction of the system John Adams helped create, Alinsky, with his typical aplomb, actually quotes John Adams to back him up.

“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.

Don’t worry about methodological consistency, says Alinsky—just do what you have to in order to win.

He actually made the argument that Nazi resisters weren’t objectively moral—to the Nazis.

His bottom line is plain and unvarnished: Kick ass and then pretend you were doing the moral thing. Lie, cheat, and steal for victory.

Second, Alinsky looks for confidence. Weak-willed people never win,

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.

Sincerity: the good community organizer must be absolutely honest and sincere.

Curiosity and irreverence: the organizer must be curious, because everything needs to be questioned.

A sense of humor: This is probably the most important quality Alinsky mentions.

He is hilarious, and that hilarity breeds the sort of social change only a Jon Stewart or a Stephen Colbert could bring

about rather than a Noam Chomsky.

In the book, Alinsky makes jokes about sex and farting, both in order to shock and to cross cultural boundaries—after all, everybody poops. Conservatives are afraid to talk in these terms, and that’s one reason why they lose young people in particular.

Once he’s got his organizers, his soldiers for the battlefield, Alinsky lays out his tactics. He’s not just Machiavelli—he’s Sun Tzu.

Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

2. Never go outside the experience of your people.

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

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

Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside. Find the enemy’s most cherished belief, then exploit it against your target. Alinsky uses the example of passive resistance in India—by exploiting the British pride in their civility, Gandhi defeated them.

13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize, and polarize it. This is the most important and famous of Alinsky’s rules. You have to pick a target, then freeze it and prevent it from shifting blame elsewhere, then personalize it by making sure that it is something specific and identifiable rather than general, and finally, polarize it by demonizing it. It

Finally, Alinsky provides a simple reminder: the real action is in the enemy’s reaction. You must provoke your enemy into reacting so that you can work off of the reaction.

Alinsky responded by comparing Wallis to George Wallace of Alabama.35 Did it matter if the charge was true? Of course not. But it was effective.

He suggested that blacks buy tickets to the Rochester symphony orchestra, eat beans beforehand, then fart over and over again to disturb the upper-class white folks.

create an informal anti–First Amendment regime where if you speak out, you become a personal target.

We were making strides by using the left against itself at the Huffington Post and by creating a conservative underground in Hollywood.

It was the deepest cut, because in the recesses of my mind I was fully aware that I had gone on Maher’s show wanting desperately to be liked instead of trying to make my best case.

I knew Obama, and I knew he didn’t deserve a chance to turn America into a Frankfurt School dystopia.

I greeted the staffers I remembered from the last time and spent time preparing with Maher’s longtime executive producer, Scott Carter, an old-school liberal with an immense respect for difference of opinion.

I recognized that Maher, with political correctness on his side and as his chief weapon, was going to use Michael Eric Dyson to frame me as the racial Other, as the oppressor himself or, at the very least, as the unwitting aider and abettor of the oppressor.

Bill Maher predetermined to make mincemeat out of me using his winks, looks, nods, dismissive gestures, and comedy to make me the outsider. And I knew I wasn’t going to run away this time behind my shield of jocularity and submission.

“That’s bullshit,” I insisted. “You’re allowed to have independent thought in this country, and this type of intimidation by the Black Studies intelligentsia crowd that intimidates black people who are conservative… That’s why I became conservative.”

“Let me end on this note,” I said. “Back in 2001, when you were attacked by two yahoos down in Houston when you said what you said on Politically Incorrect, it was a Republican establishment, it was Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, [and] Dennis Prager who came to your defense, and you sent Rush Limbaugh a letter, a note thanking him for this.”

I cut through the crap with prepackaged talking points I had cribbed from the estimable Charles Krauthammer, whose work on the subject seemed eminently plagiarizable. It stopped them in their tracks.

My BlackBerry started to overflow with texts and e-mails. Dwight Schultz, who played “Howling Mad” Murdock on the hit ’80s show The A-Team, was the only one who immediately saw things the way I did. The verdict was otherwise unanimous, and everybody was trying to put the best spin on what appeared to be a horrific car crash of a show.

I had never been willing to stand out there and be the object of public ridicule. I had feared what it would be like, feared what retribution would come, feared what the social consternation would be, feared what the swords and the slings and the arrows and the rocks upon my body would feel like, feared a comedienne whose work I enjoyed mocking me in her presence. I had feared in both my waking and sleeping hours what it would be like.

want to bottle that and get it out to every American. I want to teach everyone I know that there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, and that there’s strength in numbers.

Not only can you take assaults, you can weather them and be strengthened by them—and gain the power to punch back, to go on the offensive. Our opponents have spent so many years on the offensive with people lying prone at their feet that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be on the defensive. If we come after them, they won’t know how to respond.

The right figures that talk radio, Fox News, and some independent Internet sites will allow us to distribute our ideas to the masses. There’s one problem: those outlets are exponentially outnumbered and outgunned by the Complex.