Alinsky! Alinsky! Alinsky!

The inspiration for today's post comes straight from the House of Substance. Monsieur McGravitas is riffing on a sad post by "Townhall" doofus John Hawkins:

10 Musicians Who Should Be Blacklisted By Conservatives

Predictably, the list itself largely consists of people who haven't recorded anything of note in the last decade- as Mr McGravitas puts it: We here omit the various crimes of the artists named - saying things - in order to simply list them and let you, the reader, decide how the state of popular music would be rocked if conservatives gave up on:

Psy
Sheryl Crow
The Dixie Chicks
Bruce Springsteen
Moby
Madonna
Bette Midler
Barbra Streisand
Tom-Morello-from-Rage-Against-The-Machine-after-Paul-Ryan-said-he-was-a-fan-of-their-band
Kanye West


Yeah, it's just sad and out-of-touch, like all conservative attacks on last decade's pop culture. For me, though, the most interesting feature of the original piece is the invocation of combination bête noire and inspiration Saul Alinsky: "Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have." -- Saul Alinsky

I'd never heard of Saul Alinsky before the right-wingers elevated him to the status of combination Public Enemy Number One and Sensei. Most of the liberals I know are inspired by FDR, Woody Guthrie, and RFK, and are unfamiliar with Alinsky. To my Northeastern Establishment ears, "Saul Alinsky" is merely a poorly-attempted dogwhistle signifying "Jewy Jew Jew", a successor to "Upper West Side NPR Liberal" which is easier to gloss over ("we're not anti-Semitic, we just hate this one guy"). Googling "Saul Alinsky", the majority of the results lead to right-wing websites. In the first page of results, we even have a post by dopey John Hawkins (not gonna link, check it out for yourselves): 12 Ways To Use Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals Against Liberals. In the post, Hawkins writes:

Saul Alinsky was a brilliant man. Evil, but brilliant. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, everyone on the Left from the President on down is playing by his rules in the political arena.

EVERYONE on the left is playing by the rules of this evil man... therefore conservatives have to emulate this evil man. Got it? Hated enemy and inspirational tactician, Saul Alinsky serves as a combination Emmanuel Goldstein and Sun Tzu.

It's no wonder that conservatives are so unhinged- the cognitive dissonance necessary to simultaneously demonize and lionize a figure of no great significance would be enough to disorder the most brilliant mind, and righties like Hawkins are far from brilliance.