Top Highlights

• Their goal is to mobilize the poor and “oppressed” as a battering ram to bring down the system. Hillary concludes her thesis with these words: “Alinsky is regarded by many as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy. As such, he has been feared - just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has…
• In particular, they need to become familiar with a Chicago organizer named Saul Alinsky and the strategy of deception he devised to promote social change.
• Of no other occupant of the White House can it be said that he owed his understanding of the political process to a man and a philosophy so outside the American mainstream, or so explicitly dedicated to opposing it.
• For Alinsky, the revolutionary’s purpose is to undermine the system and then see what happens. The Alinsky radical has a single principle - to take power from the Haves and give it to the Have-nots. What this amounts to in practice is a political nihilism - a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the “people” (who, in the fash...
• The most important radical labor organizer of the time, Cesar Chavez, who was the leader of the United Farmworkers Union, was trained by Alinsky, and worked for him for ten years. Alinsky also shaped the future of the civil rights movement after the death of Martin Luther King. When racial unrest erupted in Rochester, New York, Alinsky was called i...