Saul Alinsky is the Democratic party.

That leftist community organizer has long been an influence on the Democrats, but now his philosophy forms the heart and soul of the party. Alinsky is famous for his book Rules for Radicals which has an acknowledgement to Lucifer as a rebel “who at least won his own kingdom.” Alinsky died in 1972, but his poisonous ideas are finally coming to full flower.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, a documentary about Alinsky, identifies three major aspects of what the film’s writer Richard Payne calls “cultural Marxism that seeks to infiltrate film, school, all of the different institutions.”

The Dark Trinity of the Left

First is the Frankfurt School, founded by Leninists in Weimar Germany, who later fled to America. Its intellectual leaders (such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse) “were the initiators of what we’ve come to know as the Sexual Revolution.”

The second initiative came from Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who sought to Bolshevize the culture and de-Christianize society, to lay the foundation for Marx’s Utopia.

Third was Fabian socialism, whose advocates founded the London School of Economics, as part of an effort “to bring down our economic system” piecemeal, if an outright revolution wasn’t possible.

By 2023, these three movements have captured the Democratic party. Leftists from Capitol Hill to the campuses are talking about “late-stage capitalism,” sounding like Marxists in 1930s Moscow, and pushing transgenderism to complete the destruction of traditional sexual mores. It’s incredible how blatantly the Democrats have embraced this dark philosophy. No wonder the Satanic Temple is now welcomed as a player on the left.

From the Shtetl to Hillary’s Bookshelf

The child of poor Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Alinsky was born in 1909. He majored in archaeology at the University of Chicago and later became a criminologist. In the late 1930s, he worked as a labor organizer and focused his attention on organizing communities in places like Chicago’s depressed Back of the Yards neighborhood, made famous in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

After being mentored by the labor leader John L. Lewis, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), which trained community organizers around the country. Aided by the liberal millionaire Marshall Field III, Alinsky expanded his mission of inspiring and organizing poor, urban communities across America. Reveille for Radicals, his 1946 book, became a best-seller.

During the 1960s Alinsky set up institutes to train other organizers, and his reputation as a visionary organizer and activist began to spread. Hillary Clinton chose his work as the topic for a Wellesley College thesis in 1969. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wrote her honors dissertation on Alinsky, whom she described, quoting the Economist magazine, as “that rare specimen, the successful radical.”

How Marxists Captured the Liberals

“It’s amazing how unaware people are of these realities that have played such a major social role in society. In capturing the word ‘liberal’ and then the term ‘progressivist,’” the film’s writer Richard Payne told me, “People do not realize what was underneath.”

In A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, Alinsky (played by actor Jim Morlino) admits:

I knew plenty of Communists in those days and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the 30s the Communists did a hell of lot of good work. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a liar. Their platform stood for all the right things. And unlike many liberals they were willing to put their bodies on the line.

Payne sees Alinsky’s worldview as even originating before Marxism. “The rise of Marxism is very much in line with the French Revolution and what was behind it. … A worship of self. We worship our Reason over the reality of the persons of God, especially the person of Jesus Christ.”

Perversely, making a fetish of abstract Reason leads to devaluing real, living people, and sacrificing them when they stand in the way of implementing a “perfect” plan hatched by the “best” intellectuals. Hence the 100 million who died in serial Marxist genocides, from Russia to China to Cambodia. Hence the 60 million who died in our abortion mills. The Sexual Revolution was no more bloodless than any other. And no more tolerant of dissent.

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C. His new book is The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.