What surprises me the most about things like this is that there are people who actually study how to destroy their own Country. After researching this book, I’m cynical to say the least.
Of course then we have The Nation, 45 years later, printing articles denying that Cloward and Piven ever intended to be the trunk of the tree of today’s political trends.
Richard Kim wrote an article called The Mad Tea Party. In this article, he ridicules the exposure that the strategy has gotten since Obama became President.
Well isn’t that one of the “rules”? 5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage."
These are some excerpts:
Leftists like to say that another world is possible, but I was never quite sure of that until I started reading tea party websites. There, a government of leftists is not only possible, it's on the cusp of seizing permanent power, having broken American capitalism and replaced it with a socialist state. Down that rabbit hole, Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel are communists, and "The Left"--which encompasses everyone from the Democratic Leadership Council to Maoist sectarians--is a disciplined and near omnipotent army marching in lockstep to a decades-old master plan for domination called the "Cloward-Piven strategy" or, as of January 20, 2009, "Cloward-Piven government."…. (subtle)
…..They also repeatedly cite Emanuel's statement, made in November 2008 after the passage of TARP but before the stimulus that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste." From The Nation's pages to the White House's brains and muscles--it took only forty-four years! (what else are we to glean from that statement???)
All of this, of course, is a reactionary paranoid fantasy. Rahm Emanuel is no more Frances Fox Piven's stooge than Obama is a Muslim. But the looniness of it has not stopped the Cloward-Piven conspiracy theory from spreading across tea party networks. And the left's gut reaction upon hearing of it--to laugh it off as a Scooby-Doo comic mystery--does nothing to blunt its appeal or limit its impact. In order to respond, alas, we have to understand, and that means going through the looking glass… (exactly! Coming back through to this side!)
….Glenn Beck has brought up Cloward and Piven on at least twenty-eight episodes of his show over the past year. Beck is sometimes aided by a blackboard on which he has diagramed something called "The Tree of Revolution," which links Che Guevara, SEIU and ACORN's Wade Rathke to Saul Alinsky, the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, Bill Ayers and, perhaps most improbably, to White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. In the center of the tree's arching trunk, above SDS and Woodrow Wilson (!?) but below Barack Obama, who adorns the tree's crown, Beck has scrawled "Cloward & Piven."… (on a nationally published show, if any of this were untrue, he would be immediately sued for liable. If there were only a shred of untruth, there’s no way it wouldn’t be exploited by that arm of the movement. Believe me, all angles are covered and they are good at what they do. If it were actionable, they would act!)
…..In a January 13 interview, Beck asked Sarah Palin if she had seen and believed in the case he had been making on Cloward and Piven. Palin replied, "I do. I do believe it.... It has to be purposeful what they are doing. Otherwise--otherwise I would say, Glenn, that there is no hope, that there are no solutions."…… (I like Palin)
….Suffice it to say, if Beck and crew believe half of this crap, they belong in an asylum in the middle of Shutter Island, where they can tend to their survival seeds and sleuth out imagined conspiracies apart from the rest of the human population. The danger, however, is that they will maroon a sizable portion of the electorate there with them…[i]
There you go. Richard Kim, it seems, is trying to put the genie back into the bottle…the toothpaste back into the tube...un-ring the bell…give the cat a bath…(…okay, I don’t know about that last one)
5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage."
Learn it, recognize it, expose it! Render it impotent.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
C.S. Lewis
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