Guerrrilla Wordsmiths - Join Today

I have a suggestion. How about a guerrilla war of words? Facebook has chosen to ban the phrase "S.t.o.p t.h.e. S.t.e.a.l"  I did that to dodge the FB algorithm that searches out the phrase and automatically deletes me! So here's an idea.

Let's keep Georgie Porgie Soros's henchmen busy trying to ban all the variations of the words and phrases they want to ban. They can't write an algorithm to ban individual words without crippling the Facebook platform. So, I challenge fellow wordsmiths to come up with thousands of variants of our call to arms (which phrase HAS been banned here). For that matter anytime we find they've banned a phrase we start crafting variants as fast as we can.

There are so many other ways to say a thing that it's impractical and impossible to keep up with a truly determined gang of guerrilla wordsmiths. Let's keep them busy with trivia and appeals when they ban us. With enough of us assaulting social media with banned post variants, we can drain their resources. We've got time and we have access to thesauruses. This'll be fun. Pass this link along ASAP before some rat-fink turns us in to the speech police. The trick is to keep it rolling and morphing into something different every time the thought police find a new phrase or iea. What collapses socialism is its inability to control everything from Moscow, uh, I mean Beijing on the Potomac. 

Death by a thousand cuts they call it. The trick is to use their own madness against them. And almost as importantly, we can have fun while we are doing it. The cheerful tweaking of the over inflated egos and the poking of holes in the pompous know-it-all Marxist gasbags is really enormous fun, especially if you can make them run around chasing their tails. They do it to themselves. 

So lets do as all those politically correct mommies and teachers tell us to do. 

"Use your words!"

© 2021 by Tom King

 

What Can We Do About........?

The Secret of Getting the Grassroots Growing

(c) 2012 by Tom King

You hear it every day in places ranging from the supermarket checkout line to Facebook to the nightly news. What can we do about ___(insert public issue here)___?  Most of the time we just talk about stuff like this and never really do anything about it.  We hope the politicians will get the message when they see the polls, but we block our phone numbers to robocalls and refuse to do "surveys" which is where the pollsters get their information.

Well, I hate robocalls in the middle of supper as much as anybody, but I also would like to get my way in Washington, Austin or Olympia (or wherever my statehouse currently is). The thing is, if you care about an issue, you can do something about it.  I did and apparently what I did and the group I was leading at the time did, made a difference.  I actually spoke with the head of a committee who asked me what I'd done to get him all those phone calls, emails and letters. I think he believed I must have hired people to write all those individual letters because he got hundreds of letters, each individual and most handwritten. He got dozens of phone calls stretching over weeks.  As a result, he sent the bill we wanted voted on out of committee to the floor for a vote. He's a Democrat.  I'm a Republican. Our group was made up of people on both sides of the aisle. That's what a true grassroots movement looks like.

If you want something done about an issue you are interested in, be prepared to work.  You can't get a politician's attention by chaining yourself to a bus. The media loves that.  Politicians hate it. If you really want to get their attention at the state capitol or even in Washington it can be done.  Washington's a tougher row to hoe than the statehouse, but not as impossible as you might think.  It takes determination and focus, but anyone can do it and thanks to the miracle of the Internet, it isn't as expensive as it used to be.

Starting the Grassroots Growing

Step 1:  Gather a like-minded crowd of local voters. The reason conservatives like me like smaller, more local government is that it makes it easier for real people like me to get to them.  It's a lot easier for me to get a face to face with my state rep than with my Congressman.  And my senator in Washington?  Fuhgettaboutit!

Step 2: Establish communications.  Set up a weblog, a Ning website with a forum, a Facebook group or some way for people to meet and share in cyberspace. Don't leave out the technically illiterate.  Use the telephone and snail mail to engage these folk.  In a way, they are your group's most powerful allies.


Step 3: Create your message.  Do some public forums, attend meetings where folks are likely to be like minded.  If you want school vouchers for instance, here's how you create your message:

1. Hit the PTAs, haunt the soccer fields and Little League games.  Talk to everyone about vouchers. Hand out cards to people who agree with you and ask them if you can contact them to help you get a bill passed.  
2. Get the emails or phone numbers of people who "get it" and collect their contact information in a database. Send them a message immediately after you talk to them, thanking them for their input and letting them know about your website and any upcoming meetings, events or pertinent information. Handwritten notes are powerful, but even an email works.  
3. Create a 30 second "elevator speech" you and your trusty lieutenants can use so that you have a quick, clear description of what you want done and why it should be done.  That way, like a commercial, you repeat a coherent message and when people see something about vouchers in the news or someone brings it up in conversation, they remember what you said.
4. Find a bill or ask your local rep to start a bill through the legislature in favor of school vouchers.  It's likely some organized group already has that information and likely has a bill written.  Hook up with them, even if they aren't members of your favorite political party, if they share your belief about this one issue, find common ground with them.  Your efforts are far more powerful if they are bi-partisan. Remember every politician believes they win or lose by the moderate vote and they will confuse bi-partisanship with being a moderate. Don't confuse politicians, let them believe what they want about who you are.  Just make sure they know what you believe.
5. Create a model letter/phone speech.  At each point in the battle, you need to tell people what's happening and why they should contact their representatives.
6. Ask people to call and write about specific things at different points along the way. If the bill is stuck in committee, as people to call and write about getting it unstuck.  If there's a vote on the bill coming up, encourage your rep to be there for the vote and vote "yes".  If there's a public forum about the issue, call and write people and ask them to come.  Give people rides.  Old people have more time than busy parents, so they often will come along to support your issue if you'll give them a ride.  The personal contact is the key.  Ask people to do things. Remind them and then check up to see if they did it.
7. Let people know when you've succeeded.  In doing the work I did on the state funding formula for rural transit, we let people know when the bill reached each stage toward passage.  People sent letters thanking their representative for his work on the bill and we told everybody when it passed and followed up later to let them know what changes were made as a result of their work.

I spoke with the chairman of the committee that initiated the transportation bill we worked on.  He couldn't believe how many ordinary people had contacted him.  He asked what we'd done.  I told him we talked with each other and passed around his address.  It was a little more than that, but I didn't want to demystify the process.

"You know," he told me, "I've changed my vote based on no more than a dozen unscripted letters in the past."  The kind of letters and calls we dumped on him and the rest of his committee got our attention, because they weren't form letters and they weren't canned speeches, scared the heck out of him and got them to act."

The dirty little secret of politics is that politicians are afraid of ordinary voters.  If they think regular voters are hacked off enough to simply pick up a pen and write a letter or call their offices on their own, they sense votes shifting away from them and can change a vote overnight. They'll vote the way a campaign donor asks in most cases, but not against a groundswell of his voting consitituency.  It would be political suicide to do so.

What can you do?  Plenty.  Pick up the phone and call your representative or senator.  If it's a federal issue, call both your senators and your congressman.  Ask everyone who believes like you do.  Make you some cards to give people so you can contact them.  Keep a small pad to write down names and phone numbers and then nag people to write and call too.  Best thing you can do!

I'm just saying.

Tom King

Cut-Rate Community Organizing Disrupts Traditional Political Advocacy

Even the Anarchists are whining. The traditional methods of grass roots organizing are being challenged by the low cost community organizaing tools being offered by the Internet and the new technology.  Here's the problem as they see it. 

Advocacy groups with absurdly small budgets can have a surprisingly large impact on public opinion, on the vote and on the actions of politicians.  Where once large budget political groups could virtually buy themselves a grassroots movement, the new amazingly cheap communications technology has muddied the water with second opinions.

There is an old adage that "What is "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."  When the Internet first appeared, pundits feared that the web would intrude into our lives in a downright Orwellian fashion.  To their surprise, the Wild West country of the World Wide Web, rather than supressing opinion and free expression, actually encouraged an incredible outburst of creativity, free speech and political debate. It seems few people care whether or not Big Brother is watching all this (and he probably is) Talented individuals have proved capable of influencing public opionion profoundly, creating high quality films, essays and promotional pieces that regularly get millions of viewers from being passed around on Youtube, Facebook and talked about on Twitter.  These rogue public opinion shapers are able to bypass all the traditional filters like network news media, editorial boards and publishers and speak directly to the public.  It's little wonder that the leaders of last century's great political movements are 'disturbed'.  All the tools they have worked so hard to establish control over are suddenly becoming obsolete. 

Technology has had a powerfully disruptive effect on good old boy networks everywhere, whether they be corrupt county judges and their cronies, unions, corporations, anarchists, Marxist progressives or the local garden club. I've been involved for some years with a small npo that teaches other small nonprofits how to do what I call "fund-raising without permission". This group helps train and organize collaborative projects that skirt the traditional "permission of the local elders" track that for decades has limited the numbers and types of charitable activities that are conducted locally. If you didn't have the blessing of the local equivalent of the Skull & Bones Society, you just couldn't raise money for your cause.
After almost 15 years of teaching grant-writing and community organizing, things have changed dramatically in the area. One bank complained that local groups were creating "too much affordable housing". Others complained that there were too many nonprofits in town for them to control. City officials, on finding out a group had applied for funds to develop affordable senior housing in a town that advertised itself as Texas' first 'certified retirement city' was quite upset. "We don't want to attract THOSE kinds of retirees!"

One group I worked with was actually able to co-opt a member of the ruling elite who called in a favor and got us federal funding for a transit project that helped people with disabilities get home from second shift jobs. Many such things were done that would have been impossible without the Internet and the technological tools that have burst upon our culture in the past couple of decades.

But as I said what is sauce for the goose......

As we've gained access to new more sophisticated communication resources, talented organizers have risen who care about doing what's good for the community. We work across political lines without stopping to ask who among us are Republicans or Democrats. The question, in an organization with an absurdly small budget tends to be, not what is good for my union, my party or my company, but what is good for my children, my community, the poor, people with disabilities or our seniors.

The troublesome Tea Party rose so quickly because of the Internet and social media. Social media provided a perfect organizing tool. Whatever you might think about the values and beliefs of the Tea Party, it is as thoroughly grass roots an organization as you'll find. If you don't believe me, check Craigslist under "nonprofit jobs" and see how many "re-elect Obama" paid jobs are being offered by organizations like SEIU and ACORN (or whatever it's calling itself now) versus how many paid "Elect Romney" jobs are being offered by the Tea Party. Hint: I have yet to find a single paid Tea Party job and I've looked.

I do agree that the new low-cost advocacy is going to be a disruptive development, especially for those with powerful ideologies. The ability of poorly funded groups to slug it out with massively funded political action committiees dilutes the power of the pursestrings to some extent. It's not entirely gone, but as an ever-larger segment of the population becomes tech-savvy, it's only goint to make political cow-herding more difficult. Demographics that certain political groups have always found "reliable" are no longer reliable as the Republicans found out in the last election when they pushed a moderate onto their conservative base and expected them to show up at the polls and vote as instructed. The Obama administration is discovering to its dismay this go-round that it's base is beginning to think for itself and may not just pull the lever because they've been told to.

As in every new cultural upheaval, there is potential for great good and great evil. If the wise amongst us don't keep their heads and learn to use these new tools for the greater good; if they keep using the old kiss some babies and vote the graveyard tactics, things will blow up in their faces.

And perhaps it's a good thing if they do. And perhaps with access to a better understanding of history, we footsoldiers in the infowars won't wind up in a political version of the first World War where the generals, using the tactics of the 18th century, marched blindly obedient soldirs into the guns of the 20th century.

Hopefully, we're smarter than that these days.We certainly have access to better quality information and organizational tools than we ever have in the history of the world. . One wonders whether the next war will be fought to preserve the freedom we've come to enjoy on the World Wide Web.

Tom King