February Editorial Winner

The Lay of the Land: America's Rosetta Stone

By Zeke Lay, Choctaw Times

In 196 B.C., after war and revolt, Egypt had a new king, the twelve-year old Ptolemy V. In the royal city of Memphis, a congress of priests chiseled a decree proclaiming his reign into a stone block. Because this was an international city, the same message was repeated in three different languages. One was Egyptian hieroglyphics, ancient even then.

Nearly two thousand years passed. The stone, the size of a suitcase, had been torn down and moved, perhaps many times, eventually ending up as construction filler in a fort built by conquering Turks. Now, a new victor had arrived, Napoleon. One of his officers, Pierre-Francois Bouchard, discovered the stone. Two years later the British would run the French out of Egypt and the treasure was sent to the British Museum. The Rosetta Stone is the most visited object there.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are pictograms, the writing system of the Pharaohs. They tell stories, etched in stone, of this Nile civilization lost in time. But they had baffled European scholars since medieval times. By understanding the other two languages, a young French genius Jean-Francois Champollion, could decipher the mystery. Without the Rosetta Stone, it is likely that all the stories of ancient Egypt would still be lost. 

Americans have our own Rosetta Stone. To use it, we must step back, past the fiscal mess, the open border, the pandemic mayhem, the incivility, crime, and, well, you can add your own. We must back up still further; until we see the creeping corruption that underlies it all; in our very language, morals, and impunity of the lawless. These are our pictograms. And we must decipher them in total because we must fight what they represent in total.

Our Rosetta Stone is a 196-page book from Saul Alinsky called ‘Rules for Radicals, A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals’. Published in 1971, it has only 13 rules. I can-not over-emphasize the influence this book has on generations of professors, politicians, lawyers, artists, and activists. Like an outline for a high-octane new football formation, the instructions could be used by any group willing to embrace this method. The Left was all-in from the start.

With masterful insights into human nature, it shows how to corrupt or-der into chaos and come out on top. The list of influential organizations adopting these rules is longer than I could print here. It would include our largest teacher’s union. Imagine the influence over 5 decades. You don’t read this book; you are trained by it. It has no fans, just followers. Hillary Rodham, entranced, wrote her 92-page college thesis “There is Only the Fight…: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model”. In the first few pages, the ultimate radical activist is admiringly acknowledged to be Lucifer, who won his own kingdom. It is the vampire squid of chaos.

The repercussions in every single rule sur-round us. But the most important one, our cipher, is Rule 4; Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. If that sounds innocent or fair, look how it’s being used. Our chaos today comes from powerful, well-organized, well-funded forces poised to exploit every chink, twist every intent, corrupt every rule, that gives foundation to America. Question everything, yes, Corrupt everything, no. We must refuse to be an America in shambles.