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The liberal New York Times would profess ignorance in its story on the crime increase with this opening about the murder rate, asserting, “experts cannot agree on what to call a recent rise in homicides, much less its cause.” Police killings accelerated in the summer of 2016 after two black men were killed in confrontations with police. Five Dallas police officers were killed, followed by three in Baton Rouge. The attacks were carried out by black racists.
The liberal left political juggernaut reached absurd levels over the use of bathrooms by those professing to be transgenders, physically born males and females who “self-identified” as the opposite sex and often had surgery and hormone treatment to try to change their sex. Using the classic information warfare tactic of legal warfare, or lawfare, transgender rights advocates demanded that public schools allow boys claiming to be girls to use bathrooms and locker rooms designated for schoolgirls. When North Carolina refused to go along with the politically correct demand and passed a law requiring men born as men to use the men’s room and women born as women to use the ladies’ room, a liberal political backlash ensued. Threats of sports boycotts were made unless the law was reversed. Rock stars canceled concerts in the state.
• • •
In Silicon Valley, the technological breadbasket of the United States, the tech community millionaires and billionaires also became hostages to leftist information warfare, under what writer Michael Anton called “San Francisco Values.” Liberal San Francisco information warfare goals were identified as support for gay marriage, medical marijuana, universal health care, immigrant sanctuary, “living” minimum wage, bicycle-friendly streets, and stricter environmental and consumer regulations. The list summarizes the incoherent impulses underlying the liberal Left: hedonism, utopianism, suicidal altruism, triviality, and overblown responses to sensible concerns.
“As should be obvious to everyone by now, in America (and in the developed world more generally), the very rich are different from you and me. They’re far more left-wing,” Anton said in describing how Silicon Valley’s titans of industry were cowed into adopting the leftist political dogma now dominating much of the establishment in the United States—not just California. The rich in America and especially in California have been bought off by the political Left mainly to keep them at bay and focused on attacking conservatives instead of them. As Anton stated in the Claremont Review of Books:
Politicians decline to stoke populist outrage against this partnership because the rich pay them not to and because, in a democracy, they must court the Left for reasons not dissimilar to Willie Sutton’s rationale for robbing banks. Sutton, though, couldn’t count bankers as backers or allies. Today’s Democratic Party, by contrast, enjoys near universal support not just from Wall Street but from the 1 percent in every industry, save Big Oil and Big Pharma. Yet as good postmoderns, our S.F. elites are uneasy with the concept of eternal, objective truth, which they assume inevitably leads to Babbitry, absolutism, slavery, fascism, the Inquisition, and other dreadful things people flee red states to get away from. Their solution to this paradox is not to think about it.
Technology millionaires and billionaires are now spreading the gospel of opinion morality not just as a replacement for traditional concepts of right and wrong, but as a superior ideology and the culmination of the Marxist maxims espoused during the leftist heyday of the 1960s and ’70s. Political correctness among the tech oligarchs is a key weapon for the Left, who have reached an implicit deal with the wealthy Silicon Valley class not to turn their information warfare skills against them and indeed have emerged as cheerleaders for them. The tech oligarchs return the favor by subsidizing leftists in funding nonprofit organizations and follow their lead in voicing politically correct views on politics, what Anton calls “socio-intellectual money laundering.”
As a result, conservatives’ efforts to woo the Silicon Valley titans by emphasizing sympathetic views on free market entrepreneurship, less government regulation, and other themes have failed to resonate. The tycoons there also failed to oppose the crushing tax burden imposed by both the federal and California governments and seem to have no interest in trying to change policies that would allow them to keep more of their money. Thus the wealthy in California effectively were co-opted into supporting the leftist agenda in a region that represents one of the most important financial engines and a major target of liberal left takeover plans.
• • •
The transformation of American society through political correctness was the work of self-declared progressives and liberal left political activists who systematically implemented what Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, five days before his election in 2008 as the nation’s first African American president, promised would be a fundamental transformation of America. “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” Obama said. “In five days, you can turn the page on policies that put greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street. In five days, you can choose policies that invest in our middle class, and create new jobs, and grow this economy, so that everyone has a chance to succeed, not just the CEO, but the secretary and janitor, not just the factory owner, but the men and women on the factory floor.”
Astonishingly, Obama would spend five years in office before anyone asked him what he meant by the alarming declaration. During an interview in February 2014 with conservative television host and author Bill O’Reilly, Obama dissembled about the radical-transformation comment. “I don’t think we have to fundamentally transform the nation.” What? Had the president already achieved his promised fundamental transformation of the American political system? Or was he backing away from the earlier comments? Pressed to explain, Obama insisted that “what we have to do is make sure that here in America, if you work hard, you can get ahead.” Good jobs, good wages, public schools that functioned well, and scholarships for less affluent students. The comment was clearly playing to O’Reilly’s working-class roots on Long Island. O’Reilly moved on to another topic after saying he agreed with the president. Obama then fell back on the current liberal lexicon, which is an outgrowth of the anticapitalism of the leftists who influenced him: “We’ve got to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to expand the middle class.”
The Left’s use of middle class is code for fundamentally transforming the country from a free market capitalist system into a socialist or quasi-socialist system where government controls, in Marxist terms, the means of production. Marcuse was among the Left’s most important Marxist philosophers who argued that the U.S. government was too strong to be overthrown by traditional means. Thus New Left Marxists adopted his strategy of long-term infiltration into the institutions of America as part of the path for bringing communism to the country. Marcuse used the analogy of the Long March through the institutions by stealing the term from Mao Zedong’s epic military retreat in 1934–35, which culminated in Mao’s rise to power in China. As Mao stated in 1935, “The Long March is a manifesto. . . . The Long March is also a propaganda force. It has announced to some 200 million people in eleven provinces that the road of the Red Army is their only road to liberation.” For American leftists, the Long March is the socialization of the United States under Marxist ideological principles. Marcuse said that on the Long March the militant minority has a powerful anonymous ally in the capitalist countries: the deteriorating economic-political conditions of capitalism.
If Marcuse is the Karl Marx for the rise of politically correct socialism in America, Saul Alinsky is its Vladimir Lenin. Alinsky, who died the same year Marcuse penned Counterrevolution and Revolt, produced a generation of Marxist radicals who followed the prescriptions for taking power he laid out in his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals. According to Alinsky, the book is “concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities
for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life.” Alinsky’s utopian vision was the same as the one held by communist dictators who turned normal nations into killing fields for most of the twentieth century. But Alinsky joined a school of neo-Marxists who believed the realization of communism would not come from armed, violent revolution but through gradual infiltration and subversion of existing institutions. As Alinsky put it:
A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage—the political paradise of communism.
In August 2008, Alinsky’s son, David Alinsky, wrote a letter to the Boston Globe hailing the Democratic National Convention at which Obama was chosen as the nominee, for having “all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style.”
As David Alinsky put it:
Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well. I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.
The fact that it took more than five years before Obama was questioned about his promise of American transformation remark can be traced to a liberal left political bias within the establishment news media, which viewed Obama as one who in sports terms would be called a franchise player. He was not just the best player on the progressive team. He was the player who was so important that an entire team would be built around him. In the eyes of the liberal elite political and media establishment, Obama as the franchise political player had to be protected from political opponents at all costs. Thus the New York Times, considered the most important newspaper in America, never provided a full vetting of the young community organizer from Chicago prior to his election as president. A July 7, 2008, piece in the Times, headlined “Obama’s Organizing Years, Guiding Others and Finding Himself,” mentions that Obama’s community agitation group, Developing Communities Project, was influenced by Alinsky. But the Times, rather than describing Alinsky as a radical leftist, summarized him as having “viewed self-interest as the main motivation for political participation,” and not Marxist ideology, as Alinsky actually advocated. According to the article, Obama shunned Alinsky’s confrontation tactics but followed his formula of meticulously planning for meetings with people in power. There was no mention of Rules for Radicals or other Alinsky Leninist political action plans. The only other passing reference to Obama and Alinsky in the Times appeared on August 25, 2008, and sought to present Obama as somewhat centrist and “squarely in the liberal mainstream of the Democratic Party,” yet also having a “sense of ideological elusiveness.” The article described Obama as a “communitarian” exposed to that view from the Alinsky-influenced group. (Communitarianism is a social system built on small self-governing communities.) Thus the importance of Alinsky, his politics, and his rules for radicals to take power was all but obliterated from national public discourse. There were no further references to Obama and Alinsky in the Times news pages during his entire administration.
The Left’s ideological narrative successfully suppressed discussion of Obama’s Alinsky views and the subject remained off-limits for the establishment news media during most of the 2016 presidential campaign, which involved another Alinsky acolyte: Hillary Clinton. In 2014, two years before launching her run for the White House, letters were made public between Clinton and Alinsky. “Dear Saul,” she wrote, “when is that new book [Rules for Radicals] coming out—or has it come out and I somehow missed the fulfillment of Revelation?”
“You are being rediscovered again as the New Left–type politicos are finally beginning to think seriously about the hard work and mechanics of organizing,” Clinton wrote on July 8, 1971, from Berkeley, California, adding that she had survived law school with “my belief in and zest for organizing intact.” Clinton was working at the time for the leftist law firm of Treuhaft, Walker & Bernstein, whose clients included Black Panther militants. Her admiration for Alinsky was deep. When she was a twenty-one-year-old student at Wellesley College, her political science thesis, “There Is Only the Fight . . . : An Analysis of the Alinsky Model,” lauded the Chicago communist. The paper praised Alinsky but made clear that poverty was not the result of a lack of money but a lack of power—a key Marxist tenet. Clinton’s paper concluded by placing Alinsky alongside Martin Luther King, Walt Whitman, and Eugene Debs, the five-time Socialist Party candidate for president from 1900 to 1920.
Regarding the Left’s Long March through the institutions, Clinton would say in her 2003 biography, Living History, that her fundamental disagreement with Alinsky was that “he believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn’t.” In other words, Clinton was convinced at an early stage in her political career that the Long March strategy advocated by Marcuse was the key to successful socialist revolution. As president, Clinton can be expected to go beyond Obama in carrying out a covert leftist takeover of the U.S. government.
For an anticipated Hillary Clinton presidential administration, the pattern has been set for information warfare operations against the American people, as shown in the Obama White House in its campaign against opponents of the Iran nuclear deal.
• • •
Further evidence of the radical agenda under Obama was on display at the Justice Department during his administration, involving a dangerous program promoted by liberal civil liberties groups in 2009 that exposed the identities of CIA officers to hardened al Qaeda terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility. The prison under Obama had become a rallying cry for the liberal Left, who regarded it as a symbol of American injustice. For the Left, holding terrorists at the Cuban prison was characterized as a grave American injustice left over from the administration of President George W. Bush. Despite critics’ claims to the contrary, both Bush and his administration had acted legally and constitutionally in holding terrorists captured on the battlefields of the post-9/11 war on terrorism.
The CIA launched a counterintelligence investigation in the spring of 2010 after the discovery of twenty color photographs of CIA officers inside the cell of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a Guantanamo detainee who was one of the financiers of the September 11 attacks. The photographs showed CIA interrogators and had been supplied by the terrorists’ defense lawyers. Behind the scenes, civil liberties opponents of the Cuban prison hatched a plan that involved exposing the identity of the CIA interrogators as part of a legal ploy that might fairly be called graymail. Graymail is a legal tactic that involves threatening to publicly identify sensitive information as a way to dissuade prosecution. Here it appears the groups planned to expose covert CIA operatives who had interrogated the terrorists held at Guantanamo as a way to force the military tribunal against the terrorists to be called off.
The effort was part of an American Civil Liberties Union–backed program called the John Adams Project. Investigators hired by the project worked to track down the CIA operatives and covertly photograph them. The photos were passed to defense lawyers for the terrorists, who then turned them over to the detainees. The ACLU and the John Adams Project did not deny a role in supplying the photographs but denied any lawyers working to represent Guantanamo detainees had compromised the security of CIA personnel. Both groups asserted that they had operated within rules set by a military judge. But the photographs given
to the terrorists showed CIA officials in public places and clearly indicated that they had been taken by private investigators. It is a federal crime to publicly expose the identity of covert CIA personnel. The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act makes it a crime to expose secret intelligence officers. The law was passed after CIA defector Philip Agee engaged in a public campaign of exposing undercover agency officers. CIA officials blamed the 1975 assassination of Richard Welch in Athens on the leftist operation to publicly expose CIA officers around the world. The legislation was designed to prevent a repeat of such killings.
Justice Department lawyers, including some who had been affiliated with the liberal ACLU and John Adams Project, opposed the CIA investigation and challenged a CIA counterintelligence “Tiger Team” that was set up to investigate the security breach. The team asserted that the compromise had placed the agency officers’ lives in danger. To try to tamp down the internal dispute, the Justice Department brought in U.S. attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald from Chicago. After his arrival, several Justice Department officials, including Donald L. Vieira, chief of staff of the Justice Department’s National Security Division (NSD) and counselor to the assistant attorney general for national security, recused themselves from the CIA–Justice Department probe. The reason for the recusal was not made public. But a U.S. official close to the controversy told me that some in the Justice Department had worked in the past as advocates for the detainees in nongovernmental organizations and were suspected of being tied to the CIA officer photos found in the Guantanamo inmate’s cell. Asked why he recused himself, Vieira, now in private practice, declined to say, but insisted in an email that what was reported about the case in the past was not accurate.