You have no doubt heard that the Bible for protesters on the radical Left is Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," but like most of us, you also haven't read it. 

Trust me, the book isn't written for us, but it is worth paying attention to because it explains why the Left uses tactics that seem utterly bizarre to observers. Such as why so many protesters wear goofy outfits, or why they use umbrellas, and why, when you observe them up close, they are such jerks. 

You might think the best way to protest is to follow the most successful protest movement in American history: the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King, who most people consider a modern saint and credit with fundamentally changing America for the better. 

Right?

Well, no. And Rules for Radicals explains why. The first lesson is that the book ends with the word "radicals."

Recommended
Wednesday's Final Word Ed Morrissey Jon Stewart Just Sank Even Lower Than Expected Christian Toto

We can argue about the details of King's life and nitpick plenty of things in his personal story, but the public King has a reputation and effect built on something easy to miss: his message was the opposite of radical. He was demanding huge changes to American practice, but not to American principles. In people's eyes, he became a modern saint because his message was "America should be more American." 

His critique of America is that we weren't living up to our aspirations, not that our aspirations were wrong. That's why conservatives feel so free to quote him when arguing with liberals, and why we wonder why they are so hostile to his actual message. 

Today's "protesters" ARE radicals, and their enemy is YOU, as in all people who participate in what they believe to be a fundamentally evil system. They believe they are at war with you, and Rules for Radicals is about how to conduct the propaganda war. 

So let me share a real-world example of how it works, via Alpha News. 

It all begins with a Riley Gaines event near, but not at, the University of Saint Thomas. Anyone associated with Riley Gaines is an immediate target, so, of course, a local provocateur, likely a paid protester who does this for a living, went there to provoke the crowd. 

It worked.  And the cost to the person who was provoked was her college career, which the radicals will count as a win. 

A University of St. Thomas student has apologized and is withdrawing from the school after a heated exchange with a left-wing activist went viral, drawing millions of views, sparking a firestorm of racism accusations against her and prompting plans for a protest on the university’s campus later this week.

“I want to sincerely apologize for my actions during the situation with the protesters,” she wrote in a statement published Tuesday on the university’s website. “Regardless of the circumstances, I should have handled the situation with respect, and I take full responsibility for my behavior. I am truly sorry.”

The student was referring to an incident captured on video in which she can be heard telling someone, “Go back to your country, bitch.”

And while the young woman faces the fallout from her words, little attention has been paid by mainstream media or the university to the man at the center of the confrontation — including his history of provocative behavior.

Alpha News spoke with Sarah Barker, who attended the Oct. 14 Turning Point USA event featuring women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines at the University of Minnesota, where the confrontation occurred. Barker says she is all too familiar with Derek Torstenson, the left-wing activist at whom the student’s remarks were directed.

Having encountered Torstenson at multiple events, Barker described what she says is his familiar playbook: Shout insults, hurl sexually explicit remarks and provoke people until someone finally snaps.

“He does this to get a reaction out of people,” Barker told Alpha News.

And this time, it appears he got one.

The viral video of the student has garnered nearly 8 million views on X, accompanied by a caption claiming she directed the remark at a “brown man.” The post sparked a wave of online backlash and accusations of racism against the student, with Bring Me The News even characterizing her words as a “racist comment” in its headline.

Torstenson, who appears to be white, claims to be adopted from Moscow and speaks with a “strong accent.”

The point of these confrontations is to get those viral videos, and this one amounted to a few clipped seconds in which a student tells a man using a bullhorn to scream obscenities at her — none of which made it into the public record — to go back to where he came from. 

From there, others in the radical movement blasted out that she shouted this at a black American man, despite there being no evidence of that at all, and that the actual provocateur was white. The point was to create a narrative of racist white right-winger shouting at an innocent black man. 

In fact, the man is, ironically, a Russian immigrant who carries around a fan yelling "C**T" at women, telling them he wants them dead, that their mother should have aborted them, and similar obscenities. None of that gets put into the clips, obviously, because the point is to personalize an enemy and make them look awful. The fact that the provocateur is the awful one is hidden. It serves the same purpose as the funny suits protesters wear — they look harmless, even when they harm others. 

Once the video came out, the university immediately denounced her; she was hounded, isolated, and eventually she withdrew from school, humiliated. This is a win because the point is to make anybody afraid to be associated with Riley Gaines or her cause, and the higher the cost, the better the outcome. This girl's college career was ruined because she lashed out with a few words at a man who said she should be dead and hurled misogynist names at her, and the media and the Left rallied to HIS side. 

This is textbook out of Alinsky's book:

  • Rule 13 — pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it: one student, one 5-second clip, no context, named and career-targeted (nursing) within 72 hours.
  • Rules 3 + 5 — go outside the enemy's experience; ridicule as weapon: megaphone-in-the-ear obscenity is designed to be unanswerable in kind by a normal student.
  • Rules 8 + 10 — keep the pressure on: provoke until someone snaps; the snap is the deliverable.
  • Rule 4 — make the enemy live up to its own book of rules: St. Thomas's own values/code language did the punishing; the provocateur needed no formal power at all.
  • The modern addition Alinsky didn't have: the clip economy does the freezing for free. The institution and the mob split the labor.

In no possible world was this girl the aggressor, and the ultimate lie was the claim that she shouted at an American black man, making it sound like she wanted the descendants of slaves deported back to Africa. But in fact, she shouted at a nasty Russian communist with a thick accent — a man hurling the word "c**t" and telling her she should be dead. Frankly, he should be deported back to Russia after a severe beating. 

Apparently, this guy does this all the time. It is the playbook, just as all those clipped videos of the ICE riots where protesters beat ICE officers, and when one responds, the clip goes viral with only the officer's actions. 

It's about controlling the narrative and imposing enormous costs on anyone who opposes the radical agenda. 

"You will pay" is the message. And because the media loves viral clips, they play along, and institutions find it easier to toss victims to the wolves. 

You see how effective this is? Instead of arguing about Riley Gaines' eminently reasonable message, the entire conversation is about a racist white girl. She becomes collateral damage in a propaganda war, and each ruined opponent is a win for the Left. 

Most people think that these events are spontaneous, the protesters sincere, and that it is ridiculous to argue that they are part of a larger plan. 

That is wrong. There are books, seminars, training, NGOs, funding streams... It's complex, with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and professionals dedicated to bringing about a fundamentally different country.