Tea Partiers are a bunch of hippies.Follow

Because no one seriously thinks that anyone who uses large public protests to sway politics is an "Alinskyite". When people use that label, they are speaking of a whole set of techniques which go well beyond simple and honest organizing. Folks on the right study Alinsky so that they can know how to spot the kind of dirty tricks he advocated when they are used against them. Amusingly, one of which is being used in this thread (associative dismissal).

Um... And that's before we address the issue of political ideology itself. Even if you can find commonalities between the methods, you'd be hard pressed to find commonalities between the objectives of Alinsky and the various Tea Party groups. They are directly opposed politically.

Alinsky's writings were specifically aimed at instruction with regards to building up support for leftist political movements. Specifically, how to obfuscate the details of the movement in order to gain broad support from people believing themselves to be individualists while they are supporting movements which hurt individualism itself. Alinsky's work is blueprint for how to get people to give up their sense of self and hand it over to a big government combine.

To call anyone in the Tea Party movement an "Alinskyite" requires that one utterly fail to understand what Alinsky was doing. It's like calling someone who gets the public exited about building public schools and a really nice freeway system a "Hitlerite". You're missing the most significant part of the definition...

Except for the fact where they use the same techniques.

His goals maybe, but not his methods, which is sort of the point.

No. You "defend" yourself from vegetarians by reading their literature, figuring out what their arguments are, and then generating your own arguments to counter them. It's not rocket science here Joph. Alinsky did not invent the public protest. He did not invent political advertisement. He did not invent packaging of political message through various media. Alinsky's specific work involved how to use those things to manipulate people into transforming a democracy into a socialist state.

To suggest that anyone using the same or similar broad techniques is an "Alinskyite" requires that one not know what the hell they're talking about. Of course, playing on ignorance is part of the Alinsky play book...

Only among liberals Joph. I've never heard of "FreedomWorks" until this thread, and I'll lay good odds that 90% of people who attend and even most who organize organize various Tea Party events haven't either.

It's the Left's desperate need to create a leader to attack that's creating this. Maybe if you lifted your head out of the liberal blogosphere for a few moments you might see a real world going on outside. Just a thought.




I can't. There appear to be thousand of internet sites repeating the same 3 Adam Brandon quotes though. Which kinda makes it tough. Without context, there is no way to know if he's saying that they read the book and then follow it's teachings, or if they read the book to form their own tactics to fight those taught in the book. Either one fits the quote.

Silly me. I'm not just going to assume it means what the people who plucked just that quote out want you to think it means. In my experience, when a quote like that sounds too unbelievable to be true (conservative spokesperson saying that his organization follows radical liberal ideological methodology), it usually is.


I get that this is the message of the week or whatever, but could you please at least try to act as though you possess your own brain?

Holy Christ are you stretching. Are you really this desperate?

Absolutely not. When we get our jobs in our organization, the first thing you do is you sit down with some of Saul Alinsky’s books, Rules for Radicals. And we read that book and we study that book, and everything that we've been trying to do here comes straight out of those pages.

He was asked about creating turn-out ad he says explictly that everyone in that organization is given Alinsky's books to study and that everything they do comes "straight from those pages". Not "Only things we do to get turn out on the this one day comes from those pages" but everything.


That fact that you repeatedly show yourself to be amazingly ignorant of modern politics and current events really doesn't mean shit except that Gbaji is amazingly ignorant about modern politics and current events. I doubt that this is a surprise to anyone. If I was looking for a gold standard for people with a clue about the world around them, you wouldn't be the first place I looked. Or the second, third, forth... etc.


You mean 90% of the Tea Party people are mindless tools who have no clue who is pulling their strings and have no idea that they're being fed Alinsky tactics? Well, color me shocked!!!

Edited, Mar 8th 2010 11:40pm by Jophiel

Shhh. If you don't let Joph and gbaji argue, Tinkebell dies.

You do realize you're invalidating your own life's work.

Dracoid?