intellectual. we have ralph benko from the alinsky center. he has been called the second most conservative man in the world for his recognized adequacy of the gold standard. and david alinsky, famed architect of a new kind of political strategy. we will start with the

resolution. let me pull it up here. resolve that saul alinsky, the famous community organizer was a revolutionary marxist and many of americans problems today kca be traced to the destructive ways. we will start with dinesh d'souza. ten minutes for that resolution. yes. >> [applause] >> thank you very much. it is always fun to be back at freedom fest. today, i have my work cut out for me. it is a very awkward topic for me to be debating because we are debating the alinsky legacy and on the podium is theson alynn y

alynnsky -- and here is the chief on the stage of the family. it is a little bit awkward. i will have to try to get over that one. the first glance it would seem very difficult to debate two people who are so familiar with the alan alinkskalinksky. i think if we look at the example of the god father you realize very powerful people can have one public life and a completely different private life. the dawn, for example, was himself a family man. a very devoted to his life and straight laced in matters of sex, devoted to his children, here my point is that being the son does give you a certain

privilege position but you also not going to see the man as he relates to the world. you know, going to see the man as he relates to you and it is quite possible that alinksky was a lovely family man, a devoted father while at the same time in public life being kind of a g g gangster and a crook. now, my case on alinksky really relies on three links in a chain. to defeat the case, you have to break one or more of those links. the first link in the chain is to say that common experience tells us of the democratic party today is completely different from the democratic party of say 50 years ago. in other words, the democratic party today is not the party of, let's say, harry truman or john f. kennedy or even jimmy carter.

the democratic party today is the party of obama and hillary and to a lesser degree the part of of bernie sanders and elizabeth warren. that is the first link in the chain. the second link is simply to say what are the distinguishing features of this new democratic party? the old democratic party seemed to be a patriotic party committed to the goals and what to do at 5:30 and how to share it. or i guess it should be strong in the world but is it better for america to be more or less interventionists? these are about agreeing on the ends. the new democratic party i would

say is characterized by three new features. first, a kind of rather systematic deployment of lawlessness in public policy. the immigration laws say one thing but obama does another thing. the defensive marriage act does one thing but he does another thing. obama sees himself as above the law. the law is a tool. the second feature is a willingness to use the power of the state against your opponents. in other words, we live in a time where even the post office, the bureau of land management and places have s.w.a.t. teams. for the first time, i think this new democratic party uses the power of the government, of the irs, of the epa, to not only enforce its will but to bludgeon its opponents into submission. you get them on the wrong side of these guys and they think nothing of sending the tax audit people after you. this is the new democratic

party. and the third feature is enriching yourself by shaking down private corporation and the government. how they use to leverage the public power and rent or sell public policy and they figure out how to enrich themselves. obama was a community organizer but you will find not him around any poor people. he is hobnobbing with the billionaire secretary. bill and hillary came to washington, d.c. and despite having government jobs all their career, they have a net worth of $300 million. even saul alinsky died interestingly and tellingly enough in carmel on the sea, a community organizer who lived by the beach. you may say dies to the sounds of the waves. this is the new democratic party. how did it get that way?

i think the simple answer is it got that way not entirely but largely through the influence of one man, saul alinsky, and the influence he exercised independently over obama and over hillary. so, another key link in my chain is that hillary and obama will both at a formative time in life were shaped by an alinksky. obama kept going back to chicago. why? to study under the alinksky-ite. i am suggesting he learned his scamming techniques from the alinksky way. hillary met alinksky in high school, had a close relationship with alinksky, brought him to wesley college where she was a student and later offered a job by alinksky. both obama and hillary at, i think, a key time of life

invibed the alinksky cool aid. i want to talk about the kool aid to see if it was the destructive force behind the america we live in now. most people think you need to read the rules for radicals because there is the dedication to lucifer on the opening pages and that tells you all you need to know. i think that book actually tells you relatively little about alinksky. first of all, the dedication is problemat problematic. alinksky didn't believe in god and didn't believe in lucifer. why does a guy who does not believe in god or lucifer dedicate a book to the guy he doesn't believe in? clearly this is not about alinksky saying i want to be the

devil. clearly something else is going on. remember, alinksky himself embraces mack vely and one of his key pieces of advice is not to play your full hand up front. you can be fairly save in assuming the alinksky book is not -- safe -- including in the years he died, one was a play boy magazine and the another was a harpers magazine. in these interviews, alinksky says stuff that has never appeared in public or print before and they give you a real window into alinksky. the first thing he says is that from a very young age i tried to

figure out how i could get stuff for free without having to work for it. he describes the great relish of scam he developed for eating in dining halls without paying. a normal guy would be like i pulled off the scam, i am very clever guy. alinksky, and we see the alinksky method kicking in, is he said i began to hold seminars around the university to instruct other students in how they could eat without paying for it. i think it was the birth of community organizing in the united states. alinksky graduates from school, goes on to college and studies criminology. very interestingly he gets in with a series of gangs. an italian gang he talks about and then most significantly the al capone gang. here alinksky is very interesting but as he talks about his interaction with the

gang, at one point for example, the capones wanted to bring in an assassinator from out of state and alinksky objects to the high price of bringing in an out of state assassin. he tells the guys why don't we hire one of the local guys? they will do it for less. alinksky then tells "play boy" he ad mired the way in which the gang members should shake down people and drag money and stuff out of them. the only downside is they got shot every now and then. alinksky goes it got me thinking about how i could pull off a similar scam without the risk of getting knocked off. and then alinksky realized the crime is very similar to politics. and so, alinksky realized and again i am not talking about his

private thoughts, alinksky says a lot of the things i applied to community organizing i learned from the mafia. that is not a direct quote but it is a paraphrase of a direct coat. essentially alinksky took the mafia's shake down tactics which is essentially up against the wall pay up or we will get you and brought them into politics. here we have obamaism and hillary-ism. i want to talk about how it works. for example, obamacare. many people think it was obama colluding with the american people against the insurance companies. that is the public face of it. it is a very alinksky-ite scam. let's pretend i'm on the side of the people fighting for the little guy against the big, bad insurance companies.

in reality something different is going on. obama is meeting behind closed doors with the same insurance companies and basically using ince incentives to bring them over. the threats are obvious. we will be taking over the health care system and it will look very bad for you if you oppose it. in it is more cunning. obama says we will be forcing millions of americans, including young people, lots of people who don't want insurance, buy insurance, we will make them buy it. and that is hundreds of millions in profits for you. so, you have a carrot, an economic incentive in backing my program so here is my point. this was smoke and mirrors. obama is in bed with the insurance companies establishing government control over the economy. 1/6th of the economy while pretending to be on the side of the little guy.

this was really alinksky's speciality. his speciality was to participate in the rhetoric of social justice and ultimately for him it is about power. it is about power. in this country today there is a great fight over whether or not the entrepreneur, the creator of wealth, the people who actually work and make stuff, should they have the power? or should an outside grup of self-anointed bureaucrats and experts who declare themselves to be progressive on this side of the history and future, do they get to come in and take things over and deploy wealth ultimately for their own gain? for their own private gain. this is the democratic party that we have now. frankly, if you don't like trump, this is how we got trump.

the reason we got trump is the democratic party became a party of ruthless alinksky-ites. the republican party is a party of respectable gentlemen and these gentlemen were constantly being thrown up against the wall defenseless against the alinkskyites and finally people said we need to have a little big of a tug, and a little bit of a guy who can throw you across the room on our side for a change. [applause] >> remember how defenseless poor romney was about his wealth. but trump has more but you can't criticize him because the more you do the most trump boasts about how he has more than we thought. i admire alinksky from a

distance. he was a scheming, clever man. he was an interesting man. and i think perhaps it is the accident of history because he had no way of knowing at the time that his two jays that barack obama and hillary clinton who had nothing going for them at the time would actually reach the summits of power. but they did. and that is what put the alinkskyites method into operation. it is a big legacy although i am sorry to say a destructive legacy. thank you very much.

talk a lit about whew you think that is not the case. >> hi, ralph benko. wore by black hat in case there was any dubious about how far conservative i am in. he uses west wing victimizing tactics in his stick. and now shame on you. saul died in carmel by the sea where he was taking care of his ex-wife from whom he had a friendly divorce. not dabbling in the waves. he had a heart attack while there caring for her. but this is typical contorting of saul alinsky's legacy.

barack obama was 11 years old when alinksky died. they never met. i spoke to and interviewed a friend of mine, arny graph, who took over the industrial foundations and mentored barack obama for about two days or a week at a seminar. barack obama was mostly interested in how arnie was raising a racially mixed family. he turned away definitively from the alinksky message of community organizing to give power to the people against the government and the olgark telling him he wants to become a powerful political figure like a judge or lawyer. hillary clinton met saul alinsky two or three times and wrote her honor thesis about him and

turned down an opportunity to work with him because she said i think saul is magnificent but you can't take this to scale. i don't want to put pressure from the community on the government to carry out our will. i want to become a powerful central planner. she explicitly in her thesis, which is brilliant and i recommend you read it, turned away from saul alinsky. neither were saul alinsky's lites. both turned away from alinksky. trying to hang the corruption of the modern left and democratic party on saul alinsky is just factually wrong. you got one thing absolutely right and i hope everybody was paying attention. saul alinsky was all about

power. taking power. people think they saw the wise guy lucifer and by the way, lucifer according to martin luther and john calvin was not satan. in jewish theology and by the way, dinesh, you are wrong. you made a misstatement. saul alinsky was not an atheist. he was agnostic and a jew until his dying day. you say things that are not fac fac factually correct and confuse people. saul alinsky was a classical liberal in the british sense of john lock, adam smith, and the left has appropriated his

identity and work. i will summarize you one photograph from rules for radicals but -- paragraph -- don't be fueled by the rules or people who may or may not have read it but are circulating garbage. it is not dedicated to lucifer. it was dedicated to his beloved then wife, irene alinksky. this was an epigram which david will talk about sandwiched in with other epigrams. david will talk about that. he never said the ends justify the means. read the chapter. he asks explicitly what ends justify what means? it is very nuance. what did saul alinsky really stand for? live for? spend his life dedicated? he lived an open life, dinesh. there was no cover story in

rules for radicals. it was a summation of the way he lived which you could actually read about inlet them call me rebel who raised it out chapter and verse. here is a man with no secrets. this is what he stands for, this is what i stand for, and this is what i pray you will use your power to do. we learn when we respect the dignity of the people that they cannot be denied the elementary right to participate in the solutions to their own problems. self respect arises only out of people who play an active role in solving their own crisis and are not helpless, passive, puppet-like recipients of private or public services.

denying a significant part of the action contributes nothing to the development of the individual in the deepest sense. it is a denial of human dignity. i yield the rest of our time to our chairman, david alinsky. >> first of all, can you hear me?

35,000, the house that was known with a life clause on it. life prutuity means the former owner has the right to live in that house as long as he or she shall either live. my mother gene died in that house. i am sorry that i have talk about this. there are a lot of people who are sick today. i don't have to time to go into all of them.

but i do want to talk about a few things. there are three basic myths about my father. first of all, let me say, i am not hear to tell you amusing stories about times around the dinner table or times that our guests and friends. i am here it talk about the philosophy and the theory of my father. there are three basic myths about my father t. the first is the book is dedicated to lucifer. ralph touched on this. the fact of the matter is that that page in the book, if you look at it, is called a front piece. there are three notations on that page. one by rabbi hill who died in 110 bc, a little while ago.

the second is by thomas pane and the third is by my father. he talks about lucifer. all right. who was lucifer? historically he is a metaphor for evil inclination in hebrew that exists in every person. it tempts them to do wrong. this is from genesis 65. the word satan comes from a hebrew verb meaning to oppose or to instruct and she certain

intended to do that; to oppose or obstruct the establishment. the reference isn't about doing evil but opposing the status quo of the haves at the expense of others. the second myth is that his philosophy was bias toward the democratic party. this is also not true. while he uses the word democrat or democratic a number of times in the text, he never says that this is for democrats. this is for any organization, any people, any group as a series of sign posts on how to think about power politics in

which they say we are involved in one way or another in power politics. if we agree, fine. if we don't, we are looking for ways to convince or to otherwise obtain that power for the good of ourselves, for the good of our community, it for the good of our nation. his interest was solely in providing a means, a way of thinking and organizing for all people whether they be black or white, yellow or brown, american, native american, or any other group. including libertarians. people who regardless of color, politics, with no political power who gained a sufficiently

meaningful measure of political influence if they could see a path forward to attain for themselves that measure of freedom, security and independence that the haves have always exercised and taken for granted as their birth right. the third myth is he was a communist, marxist, socialist, capitalist hating, god hating, anarchist whose sole mission in life was to destroy the conservatives. he believed it was only through several interest that individuals and groups achieved anything. why work hard when in a communist system working hard achieves nothing. it is only the party leaders who

make out. everyone else we are just slaves. anyway, he would say i could never be a communist or a socialist. they don't have a sense of humor and that would be deadly. he used to say he would never join any organization, not even his own, but that is not exactly true. he was a jew. he said i doubt my independence too highly. the organization he belonged to and supported was that of the jewish faith. he supported and was a member of our neighborhood temple all of his years. i grew up in that temple and he would never have sent me to sen

gog if he had been anything less. when asked i am jewish. that is what he would say. that is not a sentiment of a god hating marxist. there were a lot of things said today and i don't have time to go into them. but to say simply that what he believed in. in his book it was his soul speaking. sitting in our apartment he would work long into the night, struggling over each word, each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph to find the essence of what he believed and what he wanted to work for.

what he did dedicated his life for. he was a democrat. there is no question about that. he was a life long democrat. however, more than being a democrat, he believed in the republic and the ability of people to organize for themselves regardless of their party, regardless of their community, regardless of their race, creed or color, to gain for themselves that the individual and collective rights that our country provides. thank you. [applause] >> very heartfelt statements. we are running low and will do a

quick response by dinesh maybe responding and a closing statement followed by a very brief two-minute closing statement by ralph and if david is willing. >> alinksky was a complex man. i think it is interesting that virtually none of what i said in my opening statement has been challenged by mr. eeth of you. they want to talk about when he was atheist or what not. he wasn't particularly religious. maybe he was merely an i don't know agnostic. fair enough. that is not the heart of the matter, though. the heart of the matter is is it

true that alinksky really had this impact on obama and hill y hillary? mr. benko says you can't call his legacy destructive because he didn't have a legacy at all. i think that is not true. it is true that obama and hillary developed a serious shift from alinksky. if you will, they broke with alinksky at the end. but they broke with him on one point and one point alone. essentially alinksky was an outside man. in that sense, my mafia analogy of controlling the street is apt. obama and hillary said wait a minute, we don't have to be outside threatening to bring the government to a halt, threatening to shutdown a corporation. what if we run the corporations? what if we run the governments?

we can use the weapons of the state against our enemies. so yes, obama and hillary, you may say out-alinksky alinksky. they used state power in a way alinksky never dreamed was possible. that is the first point. now, with regard to whether or not alinksky was a leftist or a rightist, let's just put it this way. once you start talking about the haves and the have nots and you create their health is accidental. something that rained like manna on their heads and they are trying to protect it. and the have nots are the victims of social misfortune who must organize and struggle to take from the haves we are now in a straight out marxist class

division of society between the haves and have nots. let's remember the whole of the united states was invented as an alternative to this framework. the united states is based on the idea if you limit the size of the government you avoid the kind of oppression that was common and systematic in futile europe and you allow something kind of new in the world which is wealth creation. people work hard, people come up with new ideas and patents and copyrights. people invent things and create wealth. am i have or have not? when i came to america with $500 in my pocket i was a have not. over time, through effort, by selling books, giving speeches, making movies i guess i am now a member of the haves. so is dinesh now an oppressor where as the old dinesh was an alinkskyite? this is the kind of shallow leftist way of dividing society,

never asking the question was this wealth stolen or created in the first place. now to give alinksky credit, he was a very genius man and figured out ways to make his point which essentially put the republicans in a very bad light. one time alinksky was approached by a group of leftists who wanted to protest the republican party by holding up bolsters saying the republican party is the part of the klu clan. the progressive eric stoner says for 30 years the klan was the domestic terrorist arm of the democratic party. alinksky knew this.

but what advice did alinksky give to the young leftists? he said don't have posters. he said all of you come dressed as klans men and when the republican speaker begins to speak jump up and down and cheer so you created a media event that makes it sound like the klan loves the republicans. here is a classic example of deception, historically invalid and a big lie. alinksky realized you could use the big lie to extract concessions. even when alinksky would protest against private companies he found out they are sponsoring a concert and say let's pay 500 guys to go into the theater and when the performance of

clasicate music starts all of us will get calm and fart. why? to disrupt and destroy the performan performance. the company will be embarrassed and we don't even have to do the protest it. they will pay us off behind closed doors before the event takes place. in conclusion, if you see a thrown of brutally, intimidation, a smoking mirror deceptive propaganda. we can see the nucleus of this in rules for radicals. alinksky didn't just do it. he was actually proud of it. thank you. [applause] >> ralph, two minutes. >> dinesh, i didn't disspell

your premise because life is not long enough to do to all of them in your statements. saul alinsky concealed carried a side arm because of death threats from the kkk. you continue to sport the message of saul alinsky when doesn't bother me. -- contort. you are a house cat. you sit on a pillow and drink creel and consider alinksky like an alley cat. he had nothing against earnings. you are making all of this stuff up. read the book if you don't agree. i don't have enough minutes for this. i have one minute to tell you the number is 56. not for you.

i checked the hands 42. what translated the declaration of independence from just one more document and rules for radicals is cut from the exact same classical liberal cloth as the declaration of indendance is 56 men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the proposition that the creator has given us certain unalienable rights and it is the government's job to defend them. there must be hundreds of people in this room and thousands of people in freedom fest. there are people at freedom fest like mark and steven forbes who have pledged their lives and fortune and their sacred honor. we need more of you to stand up and not criticize the government

but take power now. thank you very much. [applause] >> david, if you would like to make just a less than two minutes closing statement. >> that is a challenge in two minutes. what we are talking about here is means and ends. like i said pfr -- before, we are all involved in power politics in way or the other. the question is if you are being oppressed from whatever reason or source what are your means of fighting back and what is the end you wish to attend? communities like in rochester or in the south side of chicago, in new york, in canada, what do

they have? they didn't have the political power, they didn't have the money, they didn't have the police, they didn't have the laws. what did they have? they had themselves. so, you use what you have with what you have got. serious. we all know this. there are businesses and our lives use what you have. you use what you have got. so, what did he have? he had people. so, you could send a couple hundred people to the rochester symphony orchestra or to o'hare airport in that famous story. was he working outside the system? yes, he was working outside the system. how could he work inside the system? they were not in the system.

the system was oppressing the people and they had to find a way to fight back. means and ends. you use what you have with what you have got. it is as simple as that. [applause] >> thank you, everyone. i will end with this quote from saul alinsky which hangs in my office. it is saul alinsky quoting thomas pane saying quote let them call me rebel, and welcome i feel no concern from it but i would suffer the misery of devils where i can make a whore of my soul. thank you, everyone, for participating in this. [applause]

>> booktv visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. >> what are you reading? >> the life and times of robert kennedy. it is an incredible book about his life, political life, the history of his family and it is an enjoyable read. >> booktv wants to know what you are reading. send us your summer reading list via twitter at booktv or instagram at book underscore tv or post it to facebook, facebook.com/booktv. booktv on c-span2. television for serious readers.