CHANNELING ALINSKY

One thing that’s overlooked in Rules for Radicals – even by Alinsky himself – is the key role played by what I call “Alinsky Republicans” or “Alinsky conservatives.”

These are the people who, despite their professed opposition to everything Alinsky and his book were trying to achieve, act as the catalyst – the trigger or fuse – for the climactic events leading to victory for radical activists.

These are the defeatists, the doom trolls, who, after being frozen and personalized in good Alinskian fashion, simply give up, throw in the towel, and sell out the cause they supposedly represent.

They act as a kind of seed, in the same way that dust particles seed rainclouds, around which other weak sisters can congregate until enough come together to bring down the entire system and allow the barbarian hordes in.

They’re always around, waiting in the background.

They’re always active, always ready to surrender.

They’re active today.

As far as the very Alinskian campaign in Minneapolis goes, we’ve seen several of these pop up over the past few days.

Among them is former White House press secretary Dana Perino, whose solution is to declare victory and flee – what in the days of my youth was called the “Vietnam option.”

Perino framed this as “advice” to Karoline Leavitt before Leavitt’s critical Monday afternoon press conference.

“They’ve obviously arrested a lot of illegal immigrants… These are the people that we wanted to capture, and we got them. [and] these are the people that we’re still waiting for and we’re asking the governor and the mayor to do the right thing, get these criminals out of Minnesota, for the safety of Minnesota, and let’s move forward.”

In other words, Trump is supposed to put himself in the hands of the very people who triggered this uprising in the first place.

But never fear, playmates, Dana has an answer for that, too.

She also suggested that Steve Witkoff, as soon as he got back from “wherever it is he might be,” be sent to Minnesota to negotiate some kind of treaty, exactly as if it were a foreign country.

She also predicted that the investigation into Alex Pretti’s shooting would “Blot out the sun,” though in fact the news that Pretti had quit his job as a nurse and was devoting his time to harassing ICE puts an end to that possibility.

In sum, it seems that Dana is suffering from a serious case of Peggy Noonan syndrome.

According to her, the way the White House is run is that the press secretary tells the presidential staff, “We have a problem, and I need better answers from you, before I go to the briefing room.”

Donald Trump, you see, would have to check with Dana before he made any decision at all.

Of course, none of this came to pass.

Instead, Trump repackaged the response to the uprising and dumped it in Tim Walz’s and Jacob Frey’s laps, with no less than Tom Homan delivering it.

I would have liked to have been there to see Homan put Timmy on his knee and give him a good talking to.

Results were immediate: on Monday night, the Minnesota State Police began mass arrests of protestors who were besieging a hotel supposedly housing ICE officers.

They also used a sonic weapon to disperse the mob, much the same as was used against Nicolás Maduro’s bodyguards early this month, which I find appropriate.

So I guess something else will have to blot out the sun.

Then there’s Trey Gowdy, always a weak reed, who compared Pretti to Kyle Rittenhouse:

“I think what frustrates people [is] you remember Kyle Rittenhouse and how he was made a hero on the right. I’m sure there are people on the conservative side who are saying ‘wait a minute, you mean you can’t take a firearm to a protest? Because you were just celebrating a guy for doing it a couple of years ago.’”

The differences in cases having escaped him, Gowdy goes on to whitewash Pretti’s involvement:

“We certainly should not be labeling him as being a domestic terrorist who was going to execute cops. There is no evidence to support that.”

That evidence having now appeared, we await Gowdy’s retraction, probably in vain.

The fact that he’s trying to frame this as a 2nd Amendment issue makes it even worse.

These are textbook examples of people leaping into the spotlight before all the facts are in.

These people – Perino in particular – should be aware that there are no conceivable circumstances in which the media will treat Donald Trump fairly and objectively and proceed accordingly.

Acting as Alinskyite cutouts is not a good look.

J.R. Dunn is the author of three novels, This Side of Judgment, Days of Cain, and Full Tide of Night, and his work has been published in various magazines and anthologies. He has been an associate editor of The International Military Encyclopedia since 1992, and is now a contributing editor for American Thinker.