Rules For Retrogrades: Forty Tactics to Defeat the Radical Left - A Review

[Gnarwhal]

I'll just say up front I'm a big fan of Tim and Dave Gordon, so take this review for what you will. I've been listening to Tim since he was doing shows more frequently with Taylor Marshall (dubbed "TnT" episodes), and then he went off on his own and has been doing a show with his brother Dave from which they got the name of the book: Rules For Retrogrades.

These are smart dudes. They both have law degrees, with Tim also possessing three other degrees in history, literature, and philosophy. I'm actually not sure what Dave's current profession is but Tim teaches philosophy and theology at a college. Both of them live in Bakersfield near Southern California. Great dudes!

So the book is a response to Saul Alinsky's infamous book titled Rules For Radicals that was published almost 50 years ago. The Gordons note that Alinsky's work has virtually gone unanswered by conservatives and as a result liberals and leftists have been allowed to run amok with their absurd ideologies. Completely unchallenged.

What is a retrograde? Well, wherever the book is sold this description is usually given:

In the words of Shakespeare, a retrograde is one of God’s spies.

The retrograde has the unique capacity for understanding the stark chasm between the degenerate, socialist-infiltrated world of decay on one side and the well-meaning, good-hearted, but clueless Christian world on the other.​

Here are some examples of rules given for retrogrades:

• No truth is “off-limits”; we must never be ashamed to be candid.
• It is a damnable lie that humility disallows Christians from standing up (for what they believe) in the cultural and political forum!
• Control of language is control of thought; don’t let radicals control the language.
• Never trust a man who is unwilling to have enemies.
• Radicals form coalitions but retrogrades form fellowships.
• The root of cultural decay is feminism: end feminism to end radicalism.

I thought this book was fantastic. Each rule is digestible with about 4-5 pages devoted to explaining the reason for the rule, the rule itself, and examples of what it may look like to live out that rule.

The rules are also tactical and behavioral in nature, for the most part. For example, one of the rules is called "Laughter is war", which is pretty straightforward: some of leftist ideology is so absurd, and so utterly wrong, that it's better to openly laugh and mock it rather than try to counter it. Put another way, think of the phrase "I will not dignify that with a response." Laughter and mockery is how you do that.

Another rule was basically saying: "hey, get married young and have lots of babies." The reasoning essentially being two fold. First, the boomer advice about dating a long time, having careers and experiences, and waiting until our thirties to marry is wrong, even counter-natural, advice. People are most fertile in their early twenties so having kids at that age is crucial. Furthermore the "conventional wisdom" that we should have our finances squared away before marriage and children is misguided because poverty can actually be good for a family (they also make the distinction between poverty, which is a virtue, and destitution, which isn't). And the fruit reaped from doing so would be that retrogrades essentially out-breed radicals because of the latter's contra-natural views on life and family.

Those are just a couple of examples.

Aside from the content itself which I thoroughly enjoyed, the brothers diction in the text is superb. They write with a prose that drew comparisons in my mind to the Founding Fathers of the US. They wrote with dignity and precision, harness the appropriate verbiage and express their thoughts accurately.

These rules arm men of good will with intellect and reason to take on the radicalized culture that has been overrun in the past 60 years or so. An approach worthy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.

A hardbound copy is about $20-25 depending on where you get it (I recommend grabbing it directly from the publisher - TAN - so more of the profits go to the publisher and the Gordons rather than, say, Amazon).

I enjoyed this so much I'm going to grab Tim Gordon's other book Catholic Republic (Sophia Press) that he published in spring, 2019. He contends in that book that the Founding Fathers actually sourced the principles and ideals that they built the nation on from the Catholic faith, but in hidden way so to speak, because of the anti-Catholic sentiments in American culture at the time.

 

[Chesterton]

Thanks for this. Hadn't heard of them. I'll definitely check out the book and the show.

• No truth is “off-limits”; we must never be ashamed to be candid.
• It is a damnable lie that humility disallows Christians from standing up (for what they believe) in the cultural and political forum!
• Control of language is control of thought; don’t let radicals control the language.
• Never trust a man who is unwilling to have enemies.

Please forward these bullet points to the moderators of CF. I think they're not aware of them.

The rules are also tactical and behavioral in nature, for the most part. For example, one of the rules is called "Laughter is war", which is pretty straightforward: some of leftist ideology is so absurd, and so utterly wrong, that it's better to openly laugh and mock it rather than try to counter it. Put another way, think of the phrase "I will not dignify that with a response." Laughter and mockery is how you do that.

It's funny that there has been specific discussion of this on the internet. I was on the fence about it years ago, but I've come around to realizing that laughter and mockery are essential. As Christians, we don't want to mock any person, but we can mock an idea. St. Paul did. If a man tries to assert something as absurd as 2+2=5, it would be condescending and dishonest to him to pretend to treat it seriously.