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.
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.
