How Ann Coulter and the Far Right Are Using the Lefty Playbook to Troll Berkeley
"This isn't us taking on a brilliant book because we admire the guy," says Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. "It's us seeing what your tactics are and using them against you."
Far-right provocateur Gavin McInnes, whose "Western chauvinist" Proud Boys were among those who waged bloody fights with antifa in Berkeley, described Alinsky to me as "an immoral human being"—but nevertheless professed to be a student of his writings. "This isn't us taking on a brilliant book because we admire the guy," he told me. "It's us seeing what your tactics are and using them against you."
Nowhere has that strategy more clearly been on display than in Berkeley, where supporters of Trump-boosting media provocateurs Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter have gleefully taken their cue from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. Although the University of California-Berkeley canceled each of their planned speeches over mounting security concerns—exacerbated by the mayhem around Yiannopoulos' scheduled appearance in March—officials worked to reschedule Coulter's speech. She declined. On Monday, conservative student groups filed suit against the university, arguing that canceling Coulter's talk violated their free-speech rights. Then Coulter vowed to show up anyway. Then she vowed not to come—on Wednesday the New York Times reported she was out. "Everyone who should believe in free speech fought against it or ran away," Coulter declared. (Alinsky's Rule 4: "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules."
Then she told Fox News that she might still come: "I think I am still going to Berkeley, but there will be no speech."
Though most of Alinsky's devotees on the left eschew violence and laud, as he did, the passive resistance techniques of Mahatma Gandhi and the civil rights movement, his writings are not necessarily inconsistent with the alt-right's and antifa's embrace of street battles. "[T]he future does not argue for making a special religion of nonviolence," he wrote. "It will be remembered for what it was, the best tactic for its time and place."
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/04/ann-coulter-alt-right-berkeley-saul-alinsky-left-tactics-rules-for-radicals
i would just stay home rather than play any game the Rightly Crazy are Playing.
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