Ideas Matter

Saul Alinsky’s name is not widely known.  Indeed, he’s been dead over 40 years. But his writings and thoughts are read today, discussed, and his vision pursued by a wide swath of secular, academic, and political zealots in our society.

Educated at the University of Chicago, an ardent socialist, he was a community organizer who went on to write Rules For Radicals. He used and simply condensed Lenin’s battle plan for establishing communism in Russia.  Joseph Stalin implemented Alinsky’s design during his iron-fisted reign of terror.  He called those converted to his scheme “useful idiots.” Drawing from this well, Saul Alinsky gave eight rules for destroying a nation by destabilizing it from within.  When a nation finally collapsed, then the radicals could seize power and build an atheistic socialist state.

Alinsky’s eight rules are:   1. Control healthcare.   2. Increase the poverty level as high as possible. Poor citizens are more easily controlled, especially if the government is providing food, shelter, jobs, etc.  3. Increase debt to a level that becomes unsustainable.   4. Establish gun control by disarming citizens. They cannot fight back and a police state can thrive.   5. Encourage welfare. Teach the masses to look to the government for the provision of their basic needs.    6. Take over education. Control what children read and think.  7. Remove religion from the public sector—especially government, schools, and courts. Ridicule it as unreasonable, bigoted, and hopelessly medieval.   8. Divide people. Stir up class warfare between rich and poor, the races, religions, and genders. A nation full of those at each other’s throats is a nation on the brink.

Does this agenda look somewhat familiar in our nation today? Hilary Clinton wrote her college thesis on Alinsky’s writings. Obama wrote of Saul Alinsky in his books. He was a community organizer as well.

Clearly our nation’s storied values that built this country are under attack—the protestant work ethic, biblical truth, the melting pot, limited government, the worship of God, and the dignity of man.  The erosion of these time-honored values has been significant. And it is accelerating.

Ours must be a call to prayer, to alert and watchful citizenship, to education, to speaking up, to pushing back the relentless growth of big government.

It is not too late. But it is late.