If the satirists at The Babylon Bee ever need headline fodder, all they need to do is simply scroll down Rob Reiner’s Twitter thread; it’s rife with mockable content.

Reiner is a leftist nut, but he’s not just your run-of-the-mill leftist nut, like so much of the cannon fodder we see at the Women’s Marches and the drag parades. He’s a high-profile Hollywood filmmaker with 2.1 million Twitter followers, and one of the most consistent and cacophonous voices on the left; if I didn’t know better than to jump to conclusions, I’d say he was an entertainment agent of the CIA project known as Operation Mockingbird.

Reiner revels in his ill-perceived moral superiority; he’s prideful, so much so that his obnoxious presence provides us with the perfect reminder on how to rein in some of the Democrats’ destruction, and in glorious comeuppance, turn their own ploys against them. (If we are to flip the script on the masters of political manipulation, we must learn by what rules they’re playing.)

In Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky delivered to his reader thirteen “tactics” to acquire political power, with the thirteenth being, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” As Alinsky noted, the target is the “opposition.” For those of us who embrace political conservatism and traditional values, that opposition could be collectively summed up as the rubber spine, anti-American degenerates and their ideology, so prevalent in our government and political arena, but most obviously on “the left” side of the political center. But, also as Alinsky noted, the target must be “frozen” and writes:

By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate, passing of the buck.

….

It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target.

….

The forces for change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely. If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible.

Haven’t we seen that play out? Take a look at one frame of the supply chain crisis debate: First blame rightly falls on Biden, because we experience empty shelves on his watch; but then he shifts the responsibility onto Putin over the conflict in Ukraine, and secondly to “Covid,” a.k.a. issues caused by bureaucratic tyranny since the emergency of the virus; and soon enough, people actually believe the supply chain crisis has nothing to do with government incompetence.

Alinsky goes on, and determines that after freezing the target, it’s time to “personalize” it — and after last night’s Democrat casualties, we’ve got several from which to choose. As Alinsky says:

The other important point in the choosing of a target is that it must be a personification, not something general and abstract such as a community’s segregated practices or a major corporation or City Hall. It is not possible to develop the necessary hostility against, say, City Hall, which after all is a concrete, physical, inanimate structure, or against a corporation, which has no soul or identity, or a public school administration, which again is an inanimate system.

“The Democrats” or “the Left” or “the Biden administration” — those are “inanimate systems” as Alinsky described. But Fetterman is a person, and so is Hochul, and, according to their espoused beliefs, they are in full adherence to the tyrannical and godless agenda of the Democrat party.

Leftists like Reiner escalate the visibility of deranged and radical Democrat rhetoric, adding his face to the fray. See some recent tweets below:

Today the Fascist Seditionist Rapist is scheduled to be deposed. Let’s see how that goes.

— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) October 19, 2022

Case closed. Jan. 6 Committee has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt: Donald Trump is guilty of leading a Violent Insurrection to overthrow the United States Government. Donald Trump is guilty of Seditious Conspiracy. Case closed.

— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) October 13, 2022

Playing fast and loose with such inflammatory rhetoric is certainly deserving of condemnation as it’s extremely polarizing; after all, it’s arguably the same rhetoric that instigated the murder of Cayler Ellingson. Advocating jettisoning Due Process, a foundational pillar of this 246-year experiment, would also be “polarizing” to a vast majority of political moderates.

This isn’t to say we also shouldn’t fight against the “inanimate systems” that are deeply reprehensible, i.e. “gender-affirming healthcare,” abortion, Marxism etc. However, if we want to win elections, and tourniquet the bleeding, we need the political moderates to vote conservative. Convincing someone who historically voted blue to now vote red, is an uphill battle; but thank goodness for leftists like Reiner who do the personalization and polarization for us. So, especially around election time, remember to tie these radical policies to the appropriate “forces of change” rather than the “inanimate systems.”

Image: Montclair Film, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.