What The Heck Is The Alinsky Method?
Being Used To Destroy Our Freedoms
Albert V. Burns
The education establishment in this country, at all levels, continually decries the absence of parental involvement in the everyday process of educating the young people of this country. We are asked to volunteer time to ease the burdens on the teachers. We are NOT expected to assume that we will have any input into decisions effecting what they will be taught or how the teaching process is to be done. In the book, "Educating For The New World Order," the author, Bev Eakman points out repeatedly the necessity of the educationists to preserve the ILLUSION that there is: "Lay, or community, participation in the decision making process, while in fact lay citizens are being squeezed out." It is interesting, and EXTREMELY important to Americans, both as parents and as citizens, to clearly understand just HOW the "squeezing out" process takes place. It is a well defined, if not well perceived, process known as the "Alinsky Method"(which was derived from a procedure named as "The Delphi Technique.") This method of manipulating people is based on the fact that people in groups tend to share a common knowledge base and display certain identifiable characteristics known as "group dynamics." In this process, one or more people known as "Change Agents" or "Facilitators"appear to be acting as organizers, "allowing" each person in the group to express their concerns about some program or policy under consideration. While this process is going on, people are urged to make lists or form into task forces. The Facilitator carefully notes which members of the group are leaders, which are "loud mouths" and which may be easily swayed to different viewpoints. At a certain point, the previously friendly Change Agent begins to act as "devil’s advocate," becoming an agitator. The process involves playing one part of the group against another, the "divide and conquer" technique. Anyone who is not clearly in accord with the Facilitator’s agenda is made to appear ridiculous, inarticulate, ignorant or dogmatic. The idea is to make these members of the group angry thus escalating tensions. The end object being to shut opposition voices out of the group. The "targets" of such manipulation rarely, if ever, realize how they are being manipulated. If they do suspect, they generally have no idea how to defeat the process. This method is being used at all levels of government to force meetings toward PRESET conclusions. There are three steps to defeating this process. They are simple to learn, if not always easy to put into practice since the Facilitators are well trained in agitation techniques. The first rule is: Always be charming, pleasant and courteous. SMILE! Speak in a normal voice to avoid seeming to be belligerent or aggressive. Rule No. 2 is to STAY FOCUSED! Write your question or statement down in advance to help you stay on track. These Change Agents are trained to twist the conversation around to make the questioner appear foolish or belligerent or aggressive. The idea being to put the questioner on the defensive. Be careful! As mentioned in Rule 1, always be charming, pleasant and courteous (if it kills you to do so!) Often an attempt will be made to change the subject, digress or distort your intent. Always bring them back to the question you asked! If they distort your question into what amounts to an accusation of them, simply state clearly and precisely: "That is NOT what I stated. What I asked was..."(here repeat your original question.) Do not be distracted or angered by their efforts to make you look bad. Rule No. 3: BE PERSISTENT! When the Facilitator realizes that putting you on the defensive is not going to work, quite often he, or she, will go into some long drawn out discussion of some unrelated or only vaguely related subject. Such a discussion may drag on for a number of minutes. The intent being to have the crowd become bored and forget what the original question was. Let them run on, then very calmly, quietly but with determination drag them back to the subject by saying: "But you didn’t answer my question! My question was..."(again repeat your question.) Never, NEVER allow yourself to become angry. Anger directed toward the Change Agent makes him or her the victim. Their object is to become liked by the crowd, to be seen as a friend by a majority of those present to convince that majority the ideas of the Facilitator are correct and acceptable. With the increasing demand for education reform, increasing agitation among the public and more and more grassroots research exposing the defects in our currentgovernment indoctrination centers, also known as public schools, more and more people are being exposed to this Alinsky method of maneuvering public meetings toward preset goals. Somehow, people walk out of public meetings wondering just what happened - how were their ideas and objections so neatly derailed. This consistent pattern of manipulation of public meetings is causing concern about the corruption of the very process of government established by our Founding Fathers. |
