Over at Mother Jones, they are noticing how effective the Alt-Right is getting at co-opting Alinskyite tactics (“How Ann Coulter and the Far Right Are Using the Lefty Playbook to Troll Berkeley”):
Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals, published in 1971 at the height of the counterculture movement, has long been required reading for community organizers on the left. It inspired activists with the labor movement, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. A young Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky and fawningly corresponded with him. But recently Alinsky has drawn a less likely group of devotees: the white nationalists and other bigots who make up the so-called alt-right…
“The Left is getting massively out-Alinskyed, and the hilarious thing is that this band of withered hippies, unemployable millennial safe-space cases, and unlovable + unshaven libfeminists don’t even know it,” wrote right-wing columnist Kurt Schlichter recently in TownHall. “Thank you, Andrew Breitbart. You yelled ‘Follow me!’ and led a movement that had previously been dominated by doofy wonks and bow-tied geeks over the top in a glorious bayonet charge against the paper tiger liberal elite.”
On the effectiveness of Coulter and (until his recent disappearance) Milo:
Which points directly to another Alinskyism that the alt-right is now testing: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” As one proponent of the idea explained on the neo-Nazi site The Right Stuff: “We want to get to the point where being labeled by the establishment as a racist, sexist, or antisemite (sic) is a sign of having done something correct.”
I really like this concept, and believe it is truly being actualized in wider, white, ‘normie’ culture. It is part and parcel of co-opting the tropes of identity politics toward the interest of whites.
The article points to this nice post by Lawrence Murray at The Right Stuff, where he discusses Alinsky’s tactics from an Alt-Right perspective.
