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On 19 July 2016, former presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson gave a speech before the Republican National Convention in which he claimed that Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky, who he said is greatly admired by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, acknowledged Lucifer on the dedication page of the book: But while it's true that one of three epigraphs on an introductory page (not a dedication page) of Rules for Radicals characterizes Lucifer as the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment, the book is neither dedicated to Lucifer, nor need it be read as an endorsement of devil worship or Satanism, despite what Carson seems to have implied. This is the epigraph in question: The name Lucifer appears nowhere else in the book, nor does the name Satan. The word devil is used several times, but only in the generic sense of enemy. By contrast, there are many references to Christianity — particularly early Christianity, the adherents of which Alinsky characterizes as revolutionary and compares to the young radicals of his own time (the book was first published in 1971). And, though Alinsky's book is a paean to neither Satanism nor Christianity, he does claim his principles rest on Judeo-Christian values: The point is this: Whatever else it may be and however one may feel about his ideas, Rules for Radicals is not a brief for Satan. Alinsky's opening acknowledgment of Lucifer is a literary allusion to one of the oldest stories of rebellion against authority in Western civilization. On careful reading, there's no evidence he intended it to be understood in any deeper or darker sense. As to Carson's implication that Hillary Clinton's reputation is tainted by anything Alinsky said or wrote because he is, according to Carson, one of her heroes, her mentors ... someone she greatly admired and that affected all of her philosophies subsequently, all of that appears to be based on hyperbole. It's true that Clinton interviewed Alinsky and wrote her undergraduate thesis on his political views, but that doesn't make him a hero or mentor. A New York Times review characterized her thesis as follows: Similarly, in a passage about Alinsky in her 2003 memoir, Living History, Clinton wrote: Based on what she has actually said and written about Saul Alinsky, to characterize Hillary Clinton as a starry-eyed acolyte of the Rules for Radicals author is a stretch.
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