Federal Judiciary

Rules for Counter-Radicals -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything. That was Democrat Joe Trippi?s 2004 manifesto. Taking On the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era was the title of another guide, by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, issued last fall.

Well, the system has been taken on. And it wasn?t televised: It was YouTubed. But it wasn?t Trippi or Markos. It happened on the other side of the World Wide Web street: Andrew Breitbart didn?t write the book, he did the deed.

?You can?t change the world without conflict,? Moulitsas wrote. ?Self-appointed and unaccountable gatekeepers have purported to operate in the public interest, but they are grossly out of touch with the public.?

He took his inspiration from Sixties radical Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, and quoted him thus: ?We will start with the system because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy. It is most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that revolution must be preceded by reformation. To assume that a political revolution can survive without the supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics.?

?Bypass the Gatekeepers.?
?Don?t Wait for Authorization.?
?Target Your Villain.?
?Adapt and Innovate.?
?Embrace the Attacks.?
?Fight Small, Win Big.?

It all sounds familiar, doesn?t it? Again, these are pieces of advice from Kossak-in-chief Markos. But it could very well tell the story of the launch of Breitbart?s Big Government.

Something happened as folks on the right sat around waiting for Sarah Palin?s next Facebook post, wondering who the next Ronald Reagan would be. Something happened while folks debated death panels, what Rush Limbaugh said at noon that MSNBC or Rahm Emanuel is up in arms about. Something happened while the president of the United States planned his strategy for getting a Washington his party runs to sign up for his health-care revolution.

The stuff of which media revolutions are made happened.

The Left rules, you could still argue. But that?s in spite of being Left. Barack Obama ran for president downplaying his left-wing ideology and record, instead talking vaguely about ?hope? and ?change? and even invoking Ronald Reagan.

You?ve seen the tea parties. You saw the march. Now you?ve seen inside the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

Andrew Breitbart, born and raised online, has been a longtime collaborator with web wonder Matt Drudge. Always a behind-the-scenes mover, he?s come out of the shadows a bit with his own websites, Breitbart, Big Hollywood, and Big Government -- taking the Rules for Radicals and Radical Change and running with them.

For as long as I can remember, the Right -- most notably the Capital Research Center -- has been writing about ACORN. And, for as long as I can remember, ACORN has gotten government funding anyway. For as long as I can remember, churches naively gave them money anyway. As recently as this summer, we exposed the ties of the Democratic party and its nominee to this community-organizing organization, its radical anti-capitalism and its voter fraud.

But what it really took was a cartoonish pimp-and-prostitute sting operation. A guy and a gal with a hidden camera and a website willing to publish. By now you know the story. When asked how to skirt the law and establish a brothel, representatives of ACORN offered them advice -- a gift to the Right that for so long has wanted to take them down. Want to know how to get on welfare? James O?Keefe III, portraying a pimp who sought to traffic in foreign children, got advice, with Hannah Giles, portraying a prostitute, by his side. Want to cheat the tax system? ACORN provided this advice, too. Public housing? ACORN helped! And always make sure to have a tin for hiding the profit, they added.

And then there is the National Endowment for the Arts. One of the very first things I wrote for National Review was an editorial item about the NEA. About some funding outrage. About unnecessary funding of the arts in America in the first place. I was far from alone. Again, Breitbart?s Big Hollywood has exposed the NEA for holding a phone call recruiting artists to serve the president?s political agenda, offering them talking points for doing so. The revelation gradually has led to a reassignment of duties at the NEA and a White House response.

If we were to continue to adapt Moulitsas?s book, ?Aim for the Gut, Not for the Brain? might be an appropriate chapter title.

The Left clearly wants to advance radical change. Their success is neither imminent nor inevitable. That has something to do with the fact that folks on the right are so obviously tired of the audacity. Of the presidential slights. Many of these are the same people who would have been -- or were -- standing athwart history yelling Stop! during the Cold War. They believe it?s about liberty and tyranny, as radio-talk-show host Mark R. Levin puts it in the title of his bestselling book.

In his chronicle of how Howard Dean was changing the world with new technology, Trippi wrote what he called ?the story of a person who spends his life reconciling two vastly different worlds -- politics and technology -- and wakes up one morning to find himself standing at the place where they?re about to converge, to crash together and begin reversing fifty years of political cynicism in one glorious explosion of civic re-engagement.?

That, Mr. Trippi, is where Andrew Breitbart lives. Exposing and getting results, from Congress, from the White House, even, reluctantly, from the media. The left-wing emperor issued many orders, but he has no clothes. If you thought the Right wasn?t competing online, and wasn?t capable of doing some organizing of its own, September 2009 has been an education.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on September 25, 2009 (boomark / email).