[Bret L]

Alinsky's Avenging Angels: Tea Party Saboteurs

By Michelle Malkin

"One of the popular signs spotted at Tea Party protests across the country over the past year goes like this: "It doesn't matter what this sign says. You'll call it racism, anyway!" It's a pithy, perfect rejoinder to the fusillade of attacks that limited-government activists have weathered from their Democratic detractors and a hostile national media. Committed Alinsky-ites never let reality get in the way of a good Tea Party-bashing narrative..

The radical acolytes of Chicago's late left-wing organizer Saul
Alinsky also understand the importance of manufacturing demons.
"Before men can act," Alinsky preached, "an issue must be polarized.
Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the
side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the
side of the devil." This explains the left's relentless campaign to
sabotage the anti-tax, anti-bailout movement from Day One.

President Obama's community organizing allies whispered "racist,"
"fascist" and "fringe" in the earliest days of the stimulus
demonstrations in January and February 2009, when hundreds of first-
time protesters turned out on the streets in Washington State,
Colorado, Arizona and Kansas. The whispers turned to hysterical
screams as hundreds became thousands and thousands became millions of
peaceful marchers who gathered for the first nationwide Tax Day Tea
Party. Some fringe, huh?

The latest effort to smear Tea Partiers involves self-appointed agents
provocateurs who are organizing a "Crash the Tea Party" campaign to
discredit the April 15 Tax Day Tea Party by making up bogus racist
signs and providing false portrayals of grassroots activists to the
press. An online punk, Jason Levin, is spearheading the infiltration
effort to "act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate
their least appealing qualities" and "damage the public's opinion of
them." Never mind that public opinion polls now show that the majority
of Americans stand with the core principles of fiscal responsibility
espoused by Tea Party activists.

Levin may be a lone wolf operator, but he has many fellow travelers in
the Democratic establishment and left-wing fever swamps. And their
efforts wouldn't be possible without friendlies in the press who have
openly insulted Tea Party activists with endless vulgar sexual taunts
and Taliban comparisons.

A few months ago, Craig Varoga—a Washington-based Democratic political
operative and overseer of a convoluted, money-shuffling web of
political action committees—launched "TheTeaPartyisOver.org" to target
Republicans who supported the Tea Party movement. The site declared
that it would prevent the "radical" and "dangerous" fiscal
accountability agenda from "gaining legislative traction." Varoga's
money funneling is designed to obscure the Big Labor/progressive
funding of his enterprises under the umbrella of his "American Public
Policy Center (APPC)."

After conservative blogs and Fox News exposed his deceptive web of
grassroots groups, Varoga password-protected his website so that the
Democratic plotting against Tea Party activists could be conducted out
of view.

I speak from direct experience about the underhandedness of Tea Party
smear merchants. On Feb. 17, 2009, at one of the country's first tax
revolt rallies in Denver, a man approached me amid a throng of bona
fide anti-stimulus protesters and thrust a camera in my face. I
obliged cheerfully, as I usually do after such speaking events. I
later learned from the character assassins at Progress Now, a left-
wing outfit that just happened to be there and just happened to snap a
close-up photo of the interaction, that the man pulled out a sign at
the last minute (which I didn't see until later) sporting Obama's name
with a swastika on it. He held the sign away from me, but in direct
view of the Progress Now cameraperson.

That cameraperson just happened to be a former CNN producer, whose
blog post on the photo just happened to be immediately disseminated by
the local press and to the hit men at the radical-left Media Matters
website. The narrative was set: A conservative supporter of the
nascent Tea Party movement posed for a photo with a man holding up a
swastika at a protest against out-of-control spending! Ergo, the anti-
stimulus protesters and the entire Tea Party membership are all
racist, fascist menaces to society!
Fast-forward to April 2010. Alinsky's avenging angels have declared
open warfare on April 15. Will they be enabled again by "mainstream
journalists" who have turned their Tea Party reporting assignments
into search-and-destroy missions? The signs point to yes."


http://vdare.com/malkin/100414_alinsky.htm