Let the Right Take Heart: 'Woke' Is Doing the Left In

The left is destroying itself with "wokeness," and is doing so by applying a purity test, for wokeness to . . . itself.

I, a hard right-winger, am vocally critical of "cancel culture." It’s totalitarianism.

Yet we now can rejoice in "wokeness" as the left’s chosen means of committing mass political suicide.

Per Ryan Grim, writing at the honest left’s Intercept, "The Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History":

"[T]he progressive advocacy space across the board, … has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years. In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult."

As I’ve said many times before there isn’t one "left."

There are two.

One good. One bad.

The labor and ethnic (people of color) left, mostly concerned with practical measures to join, rather than wage class warfare on, the middle class, is good.

I, the only known leader of the vast right wing conspiracy while also dues-paying member of the AFL-CIO, am in solidarity.

Then there’s the bad left, the "progs," short for progressives. (Rhymes with trogs.)

They get all the goodies — lucrative sinecures, fawning media exposure, paid-to-posture TV-gigs, busily virtue signaling rather than generating progress.

We of the right perpetually fail to demolish the progressives.

So, it’s heartening that the progs are doing themselves in.

How? By the misapplication of Saul Alinsky’s Rule (for Radicals) #4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."

Almost nobody on the left (except maybe my archnemesis Joan) reads my Newsmax column. Thus, I can afford to call out the left’s self-inflicted Armageddon without fear they will awaken and call off their mass political suicide.

I value a worthy adversary and will miss them when they are gone. Yet totalitarianism being The Enemy, go they must.

As for Saul Alinsky. He is often mislabeled a leftist. Not so.

He was a provocateur  . . . for the cause of liberty. He detested big government, and contemptuously dismissed the "social justice warriors" of his day, then called Liberals: "Liberals have distorted egotistical concepts of their self-importance in the general social scheme. They deliberate as ponderously and as timelessly as though their decisions would cause the world to shake and tremble. … They truly fit the old description that ‘A Liberal is one who puts his foot down firmly on thin air.'" ("Reveille for Radicals," p. 28.)

To boot, Alinsky was fully cleared of false charges of communist sympathies by no less than J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Saul believed people should control the government, not vice versa. Like the Tea Party did.

Full disclosure, this writer was friends with Alinsky’s widow, Irene McInnis, to whom, not Lucifer, "Rules for Radicals" was dedicated. Once upon a time, I set up the Alinsky Center in an effort to bring the right back to Alinsky’s commitment to justice.

Justice is a core conservative value.

We right wingers really must uphold our Pledge, of Allegiance, to "liberty and justice for all."

Barry M. Goldwater said, "Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue."

I served as the Center’s president until asked to step down by Saul’s son, David. Now, the left, which routinely prostitutes Alinsky’s works, is destroying itself using Alinsky tactics.

Instead of making "the enemy" (me!) live up to my own book of rules, they are pwning themselves. Alinsky: "You can kill them (your adversaries) with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity." (Rules for Radicals, p. 132)

Instead, they are killing themselves.

Per The Intercept: "Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. 'I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations . . . . '"

What to do? Use Rule #4 against them? Escalate to Rule #5? "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."

Whatever we of the vast right wing conspiracy decide, the progs' wokeness is putting the progressive movement to sleep.

Poetic justice is served. Cheer up, my fellow conservatives!

Cancel culture does occasional injustices to us.

Meanwhile, take heart: it is proving utterly toxic to the progressives.

Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.