He Fights
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. Original Article 1st published on Townhall.com
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.
Evan can be reached at contactevansayet@gmail.com.
