I knew that John Fund was a liar, but I didn’t know that he was an amateur conspiracy theorist. He’s quite bad at it. Let’s start with the headline of his piece: Obama’s Alinskyite Administration. You may be wondering what the hell that is supposed to mean. It’s a reference to Saul Alinsky, a Chicago-based community organizer who died when Barack Obama was ten years old and living in Honolulu.
Alinsky’s influence on President Obama was indirect. He learned his methods and even taught them when he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, but as Ryan Lizza reported in a 2007 profile, Obama was not a disciple of Alinsky.
But, although he was a first-class student of Alinsky’s method, Obama also saw its limits. It appealed to his head but not his heart. For instance, Alinsky relished baiting politicians or low-level bureaucrats into public meetings where they would be humiliated. Obama found these “accountability sessions” unsettling, even cruel. “Oftentimes, these elected officials didn’t have that much more power than the people they represented,” he told me.
The main things that Obama learned from Alinsky are that successful organizing has to tap into self-interest, not mere idealism, and that the purpose of organizing is to gain power. What he took from Alinsky is a combination of pragmatism and aggressiveness, but he largely eschewed the theatrics or “radicalism.”
Ironically, it has been the Tea Party organizers who have become modern day Alinsky acolytes.
Adam Brandon, a spokesman for the conservative non-profit organization FreedomWorks, which is one of several groups involved in organizing Tea Party protests, says the group gives Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals to its top leadership members. A shortened guide called Rules for Patriots is distributed to its entire network. In a January 2012 story that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, citing the organization’s tactic of sending activists to town-hall meetings, Brandon explained, “his tactics when it comes to grass-roots organizing are incredibly effective.” Former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey also gives copies of Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals to Tea Party leaders.
If you remember all those townhall meetings in August 2009 where citizens seemed to spontaneously stand up and berate their congressional representatives, then you can understand actual Alinsky tactics in action. What Mr. Fund is doing is he is accusing the Department of Justice of utilizing those kind of tactics to intimidate the Sanford Police Department into indicting George Zimmerman, and he is suggesting that this was done through the direction of President Obama who presumably trained Eric Holder in Alinskyite tactics.
Judicial Watch, a conservative legal foundation, has used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover documents that show Eric Holder’s Justice Department used a “community relations” unit to support and stage-manage public protests in Florida against George Zimmerman after his controversial February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin.
Justice’s Community Relations Service (CRS) even helped organize a meeting between Sanford, Fla., public officials and the local NAACP. The result was the resignation of police chief Bill Lee over his handling of the Martin case.
Mr. Fund doesn’t link to the Judicial Watch press release, probably because it is such an obvious nothingburger. The Department of Justice has a Community Relations Service (CRS) that is supposed to get involved when there are racial tensions, especially between a police department and the community it is supposed to serve. The “discovery” that the CRS spent a few thousand dollars to “work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain” or that they facilitated a meeting between the NAACP and the Sanford Police Department is not a scandal. The CRS wasn’t organizing the protests; they were trying to make sure that they remained peaceful. Judicial Watch provides no evidence to suggest otherwise. In fact, the Orlando Sentinel article they reference to argue that the CRS was responsible for the ouster of the Sanford police chief is headlined: DOJ ‘peacemakers’ helped Sanford stay cool amid rising tensions.
The peacekeepers have a specific mandate outlined in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to go into conflict zones within American communities that perceive discrimination or feel wronged because of their particular race, color or national origin.
“We are unique in that we don’t investigate or prosecute but foster communication between communities,” said acting Community Relations Service director Becky Monroe. “The real goal is to build local capacity to deal with these issues.”
They negotiate, ameliorate and communicate “under strict confidentiality,” Monroe said.
City officials said when battle lines were drawn and dialogue broke down, they called in the conciliators.
Does that sound like some kind of radical community organizing?
Mr. Fund shows his most impressive wanking skills in this next bit:
Sadly, I am not surprised that Eric Holder’s Justice Department engaged in suspect activity in the Trayvon Martin case. Barack Obama frequently touted his experience as a “community organizer” during his 2008 campaign. The media gave him almost a complete pass on the more controversial parts of his record, especially his role as a top trainer and lawyer for the infamous Saul Alinsky–inspired group ACORN, which by 2008 had had many of its employees convicted of voter fraud. After Obama’s election, the Justice Department dropped any pending investigations of ACORN. Congress finally revoked the group’s federal funding in 2010 after filmmaker James O’Keefe’s hidden cameras caught its employees giving advice on how to conceal money gained from a fictional teenage prostitution ring. It soon declared bankruptcy, and some of its affiliates continued operations under new mismanagement.
This is so factually inaccurate on every level that the National Review should issue multiple retractions. I am a former employee of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). While I was employed there, I never once heard the name Saul Alinsky. President Obama never worked for ACORN. He worked, from April to October 1992, as a director of Illinois’s Project Vote, which is a completely different organization from the Project Vote that worked with ACORN in the 2004 election. No ACORN employee was ever convicted of voter fraud. Some canvassers were convicted of submitting fraudulent voter registration forms for fictitious individuals. They did it to avoid getting fired for lack of productivity. I had to deal with that problem all the time. And James O’Keefe’s videos were so misleadingly edited that he had to pay $100,000 in a civil settlement. The only thing that’s true in Mr. Fund’s paragraph is that the federal government cut-off ACORN’s funding and destroyed an organization committed to helping poor people.
I guess Mr. Fund knows his audience. They’ve already internalized all the bullshit he regurgitates. But it’s complete bullshit on every level.
