How The Modern Liberal Thinks

Don’t send a pussy to a knife fight

By Evan Sayet

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.

Bottom Line: Dont send a pussy to a knife fight!

/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.