Radicals Uncovered: Bill Ayers and Obama Both Quote Alinsky

Originally posted at American Thinker.

Over the years, liberals occasionally get sloppy and let it slip that the inspiration for their vision of America comes directly from a left-wing activist/community organizer and student of Chicago mobsters, Saul Alinsky, author of a handbook for revolutionaries entitled Rules for Radicals.

Just prior to his death in 1972, while discussing life after death in a Playboy interview, Alinsky said that, if given the choice between heaven and hell, he’d choose hell.

So it’s probably no coincidence that Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals guidebook, also written in 1972, included a reference to Lucifer, whom Alinsky called “the very first radical,” because he “rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.”

Alinsky’s writings helped mold the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and ultimately, through her husband’s influence, Michelle Obama.

In her Wellesley College senior thesis, Hillary Rodham chose to research and write a dissertation entitled There is Only the Fight… An Analysis of the Alinsky Model. That model may be the reason why, after Bill Clinton took office, nasty tactics, shifting blame, and truth-parsing became commonplace in American politics.

As for Barack and Michelle Obama, neither one has ever been timid about citing Chapter 2 of Rules for Radicals, which says,”The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.”

Michelle Obama has shared many times that it was while attending a small group meeting in a church basement conducted by a young radical she had just started dating that she first heard him discuss “The world as it is” and “The world as it should be…”

In her speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, again Michelle shared Barack’s words, saying, “All of us [are] driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do — that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.”

Though not verbatim, the basic Alinsky “world as it is… the world as it should be” premise is what the Obamas latched onto and continue to repeat to this day.

The “as it is… as it should be” reiteration proves that over the years Obama’s affection for radical rules hasn’t waned much since that day in Chicago he impressed his future wife when he conjured up the ghost of Alinsky past.

In March of 2012, while addressing young Israelis in Jerusalem, Obama displayed his high regard for Saul Alinsky when he again endeavored to quote him, saying, “Israel has the wisdom to see the world as it is. And, Israel has the courage to see the world as it should be.”

More recently, in the least likely of places, Obama’s commitment to radicalism, as if it were ever in doubt, was reestablished, but this time not by him.

It happened at a Dinesh D’Souza-Bill Ayers Dartmouth Review-sponsored “What’s So Great About America” debate held at Dartmouth University.

What’s ironic is that the reconfirmation didn’t come from the man recently indicted for exposing the truth in a highly successful 2012 documentary entitled 2016: Obama’s America. Instead, it was the president’s old Weather Underground Chicago buddy, the bomb-throwing, anti-capitalist, America-hating, flag-stomping, ghostwriting Alinskyite, Bill Ayers.

While struggling to debate Dinesh D’Souza about why America isn’t so great, Ayers waxed philosophically poetic when he quoted the same words both Michelle and Barack attempted to cite from Chapter 2 of Rules for Radicals.

At exactly 43 minutes and 14 seconds into the contest, there it was, plain as day when Bill Ayers said this: “Standing right next to the world as such, a world that could be or a world that should be and committing ourselves to work toward that better world.”

Saul Alinsky, the man Obama and Ayers attempted to quote but sometimes fail to do accurately, once said this about the middle class: “The despair is there; now it’s up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change.”

Thanks to Bill Ayers, America, “rubbed raw with sores of discontent,” is again reminded from whence our president came. As evidenced by the pandemonium his progressive policies are delivering to every corner of American politics, society, and culture, Barack Obama is still very much committed to “radical social change.”

Tracing backwards from Bill Ayers to Saul Alinsky to Alinsky’s source of inspiration, Lucifer, it’s undeniable that the president still firmly believes that “the world as it is just won’t do.” And what proves it is that he is currently in the process of ‘fundamentally transforming’ America’s world into the sort of hell Saul Alinsky thought “it should be.”