Townhall.com
Evan Sayet
July 13, 2017

My 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:

We 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 John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever 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 and the Chicago mob.

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” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, 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 they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – 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, 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, 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 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.


Trump’s tweets may seem rash 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 isolated CNN. He made it personal. Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”

Everyone gets that it’s not just CNN – in fact, in a world where Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are people of influence and whose “reporting” is in no way significantly different than CNN’s – CNN is just a piker.


Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. With Trump’s ability to go around them, they cannot simply stand pat. 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 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.

Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing 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.

This makes “going high” a non-starter for CNN. This leaves them no other option but to ratchet up the fake news, conjuring up the next “nothing burger” and devoting 24 hours a day to hysterical rants about how it’s “worse than Nixon.”

This, obviously, is what CNN has chosen to do. The problem is that, as they become more and more hysterical, they become more and more obvious. Each new effort at even faker news than before and faker “outrage” only makes that much more clear to any objective observer that Trump is and always has been right about the fake news media.

And, by causing their hysteria, Trump has forced them into numerous, highly embarrassing and discrediting mistakes. Thus, in their desperation, they have lowered their standards even further and run with articles so clearly fake that, even with the liberal (lower case “l”) libel laws protecting the media, they’ve had to wholly retract and erase their stories repeatedly.

Their flailing at Trump has even seen them cross the line into criminality, with CNN using their vast corporate fortune to hunt down a private citizen for having made fun of them in an Internet meme. This threat to “dox” – release of personal information to encourage co-ideologists to visit violence upon him and his family -- a political satirist was chilling in that it clearly wasn’t meant just for him. If it were, there would have been no reason for CNN to have made their “deal” with him public.

Instead, CNN – playing by “Chicago Rules” – was sending a message to any and all: dissent will not be tolerated.

This heavy-handed and hysterical response to a joke on the Internet has backfired on CNN, giving rise to only more righteous ridicule.

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.

Evan Sayet is the author of The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks. His lecture to the Heritage Foundation on this same topic remains, some ten years later, by far the single most viewed lecture in their history. Evan can be reached at contactevansayet@gmail.com.

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Precisely.

We should fight the Left as we would fight ISIS. As there is no reasoning with either of them, the response and fight should also be similar.

"I can't spare this man; he fights." - A. Lincoln with regard to General U.S. Grant.

We can only hope.

I can't argue with anything in that article. Nothing.

I particularly like his take on Trump applying the "Alinsky Doctrine" against his enemy's. What goes around, comes around. That's something I never would have thought of.

Jim

this guy wins the internet today

everything he wrote is the truth

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Thanks, Jim

Well spoken.

Ted Turner married Jane Fonda. Are we surprised that CNN is what it is?

I like it. Thanks for posting.

One thing I've seen time and time again is that he can control an entire news cycle or more with one tweet. His tweets are like a magician's assistant distracting the libtards from seeing what the magician is really doing. IMO, Congress could have already repealed 0bamacare bit by bit if every time they had a repeal vote that Trump would've tweeted a real zinger before 10AM when the official Congressional business day starts.

Yep. Alinsky. It's about damn time to fight back.

Shared immediately. Thanks for posting, Jim.

Spot on! He fights! As a rather large pro Trump sign near Gardnier, Montana says:
TRUMP: Brains and Balls.

Silent

They don't like him because he's not one of them. He's one of us.

Everyone knows Trump fights to win. The trick is getting the rest of the loser republicans to fight just as hard. Trump can't do it alone.

Very good article, would have never considered the parallel between Trump and Grant.

Though Grant's personal flaws were easily seen, I've long admired him for the good he did for our country. At least the side I favored, I guess.

Like Grant, POTUS' personal flaws are easily seen, but damn the man fights. Awesome.

quote:

Originally posted by soflaac:
Very good article, would have never considered the parallel between Trump and Grant.

Though Grant's personal flaws were easily seen, I've long admired him for the good he did for our country. At least the side I favored, I guess.

Like Grant, POTUS' personal flaws are easily seen, but damn the man fights. Awesome.

Their similarities are different.

Jim, you seem to have had to give up many of your activities as time goes on, but SigForum is the beneficiary of that, if you are devoting more time to enlightening all of us.

God bless.

Trump has to either fight or surrender.....I don't think that our Pres. would know how to surrender!! A good article.

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
Jim, you seem to have had to give up many of your activities as time goes on, but SigForum is the beneficiary of that, if you are devoting more time to enlightening all of us.

God bless.

Thanks, doc. That is very kind.

I certainly have been forced to give up most of my activities. I spend almost all the time in or on my bed, reading, surfing the net, plotting and scheming, enjoying the media melt down. Thank God for iPad and Kindle!

I just finished reading The Complete Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant, 11 volumes, ~12,000 pages, that I have been reading for months, it seems. I did take a couple of breaks, read some Thucydides, and some Gibbon. I need to get out to the radio shack and finish up that transceiver I have been hoping to get on the air. The case is being printed (!) now. I may have missed the mark on trying some new antennas.

I'm on 6 lpm now, 24/7.

Here's Evan's speech at Heritage Foundation, it's 48 minutes long:

HERITAGE FOUNDATION: "How Modern Liberals Think"



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c