August 24, 2017

Trump fans still need outlet for collective action to get things done

Trump delivered another rousing campaign-style rally, where fans both in the stadium and in their homes all over the country were chanting along and pumping their fists as he touched on the major themes of the populist and nationalist movement -- getting out of NAFTA, building The Wall, draining the Swamp, and on and on.

But what happens the day after the rally, or the week after? I asked this question in an earlier post last month when he held a rally in Youngstown, Ohio.

During the campaign, there was an action that all Trump supporters could take as a collective, and make their force felt by the Establishment -- "Get out there and VOTE!" Each of those collective actions at the ballot box delivered blow after blow to the GOP Establishment during the primaries, and finally to the Democrat Establishment on the day of the general election.

Now there are no more elections. The federal government isn't going to hold "special issue" elections every couple of weeks when a big topic like healthcare comes up, or even an election to determine what topic will be tackled next -- should they go after healthcare first, or immigration, or infrastructure, or something else (please specify)?

Without monthly plebiscites as a way for the people to participate, there needs to some other kind of collective action to take. Just because a large number of individuals wants policy X, or does not want policy Y, doesn't mean it will happen. Even if the government were mind-readers or had good opinion poll data, they don't have to do anything we tell them to, if they have a way of avoiding negative consequences from us.

This means it's irrelevant if Trump still has strong support -- the Swamp does not recognize "popular support" per se as a legitimate form of political capital, unless that support could make their lives painful.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but it's what we need to start brainstorming, discussing, planning, and carrying out -- while excluding the gay embarrassment of the Alt-Right who destroyed their attempt at collective action. I'm talking about things that the attendees of any given Trump rally, 99% of whom are normies, can go do the next day or the next week.

Why is this so important in the Trump era, unlike Democrat voters under Obama or Republican voters under Bush? Because Trump's own party is opposed to his agenda and refuses to cooperate with him. As far as they're concerned, Trump came to Washington not with political capital but with political debt for having burned down their worthless do-nothing sell-out party.

That means Trump is unusually constrained in what he can accomplish single-handedly, even though he won a presidential election, and no matter how much he says the right words to his base. Bush, Obama, and every other President was not just an election winner, but part of a broader network of politicians and other movers and shakers who help each other out. Not only was Trump not a part of such a network, he campaigned proudly on that fact and argued for how great it would be if those networks disintegrated.

Unfortunately, that means that no one in DC will return his phone calls, carry out his instructions, or in general seek to implement the vision that Trump ran on and won with. It is easier for organized hostile factions to gang up on him and pressure him into doing the opposite of what he campaigned on (e.g. the junta from the Pentagon twisting his arm on war policy).

Still, it's not the end of the conflict since Trump does have a form of capital or leverage that no one else in DC does -- he has us, the tens of millions of citizens who voted for him. We are his only leverage.

If we were properly aware of who to vote for, and motivated to turn out again, we could eject all of the elitists and globalists from the government, and put populists and nationalists in their place. Suddenly Congress would treat Trump fairly and act more enthusiastically to carry out his agenda. Suddenly, Trump would not be so under siege within the Executive branch.

Trump represents none of the oligarchic power groups that jockey for control over the government -- not the Pentagon, not Wall Street, not big farms, not healthcare providers, not the media, and not the schools. They all have their own distinct forms of leverage in the struggle for power, stemming from the control they have over whatever domain they're from -- control over the military, over financial transactions, over food production and delivery, over health treatments, over the flow of information, and over enculturation of the next generation.

He is instead a man of the people, and his bargaining chip against those other hostile power groups is his ability to influence the collective behavior and action of millions, and even tens of millions, of ordinary citizens.

The oligarchic groups all desperately want the general public to butt out of politics, and Trump has a unique and distinct ability to turn the public loose on the political battlefield, and the oligarchs have no way to immediately shove the public back off. So that's quite a bit of leverage, if applied.

Maybe that means motivating them to turn out at the polling stations to determine the winner of an election, and maybe it means motivating them to turn out to the Mall in DC, where millions of citizens assemble to order the Pentagon to get the hell out of Afghanistan (and other places).

What is the RNC or the DNC going to do to counter-act our collective action at the ballot box -- rig tens of millions of votes? And what is the Pentagon going to do to counter-act a massive assembly demanding an end to our failed and wasteful foreign policies -- open fire on millions of normal citizens? I don't think so. They won't be able to ignore that level of escalation from the people, and will have to fold lest it get worse.

I'm not sure that Trump understands these power dynamics, although he must be getting pretty close to the same conclusion by now. He thought they would honor the electoral outcome and treat him like they would any other President -- but he's learning just how little they're doing for him and his voters, and how much they're outright sabotaging those goals.

But so far his response has been to try to shame them on Twitter, which does not work. Unless the tweet motivates his supporters to act collectively in a way that hurts the target of the shaming, the target will just blow Trump off. Again, he seems to be thinking that they either fear or respect him just because he won the election to the highest office, so that an admonishment from the election-winner will cause the target to change their behavior. There could also be a mindset carrying over from his long career as the dictator of the Trump Organization.

But left by himself, Trump has very little power to inflict damage on the enemy groups or individuals -- he needs his supporters to act as a force multiplier.

I'm also not sure that organizing from the grassroots level will do too much in the short term, since Trump supporters have been conditioned for the past two years to act collectively on orders from the man himself -- "Get out there and VOTE!" It is Trump who needs to rally his troops into battle, not the troops who need to organize themselves.

Over the medium term, though, grassroots organizing will prove more helpful -- especially if ordinary Trump supporters become aware of how little Trump can get done by himself, with every group in DC being so opposed to his agenda. It will feel like they have captured our leader, and we need to storm the gates to set him free so he can lead us again.

This view shows who among Trump supporters will be involved in that effort -- not the ones who assume that the Trump agenda is being accomplished, perhaps secretly, just because Trump won the election and therefore has enough power to do what he promised. And certainly it won't come from people who would be "rallying" all of 500 people across the entire nation -- no force multiplier there.

Maybe for the time being, something as milquetoast as signing petitions would be enough to get the ball rolling. "Recognize Antifa as a domestic terrorist group" has gotten into the hundreds of thousands of signatures so far, and Trump called them out by name at the rally this week. Once the petitions hit those numbers, it will be impossible for the information gatekeeper General Kelly to hide what the President's supporters are all riled up about.

Next up -- a write-in campaign or petition to the RNC demanding that Paul Ryan be removed as Speaker and some specific Trump supporter be put in his place?

9 comments:

  1. Hopefully Bannon's goal of using Breitbart as an attack dog for Trump's and his base's positions against the globalist elites works out. It was under his leadership and support of Trumpism that Breitbart grew so massively so if he can right the ship there (since they've been losing traffic) that would certainly be a good "unofficial" weapon for Trump to mobilize and energize the populace. By righting the ship I mean bringing back writers like Katie McHugh and Lee Stranahan, giving a larger voice to someone like Raheem Kassam, giving a platform to the likes of Mike Cernovich and downplaying (if not outright getting rid of) useless cucks and toadies like Matthew Boyle and especially Alex Marlow.

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  2. Your thoughts on this stuff are consistently balanced and interesting.

    One thing normal people can and should do is call/fax/write to Congress. Congressmen do seem to notice when they get a few thousand calls demanding they quit dicking around. However, that kind of thing is most effective when its coordinated and simultaneous, and we don't really have a good mechanism for doing that. I would say it's a good idea to check who Trump is currently beefing with on any given day and make sure that person hears from you. Calling is best, but faxzero.com has a good easy template for faxing Congressmen for people who don't like talking on the phone.

    Boycotts of companies that rip on Trump could also be a useful thing (though there's almost too many to choose from), but again, we need some means of coordinating as individual action will get lost in the shuffle.

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  3. Ag,
    This is off topic, though somewhat related, and I saw some more interest in it on twitter about how to deal with the media (on some things)...

    I just had absolute major success with a project, beyond my wildest dreams, and would like to share, probably tonight or tomorrow. Unless one was obsessively watching me, and I mean obsessively, from the very beginning, one would have very little idea of what I did; covering my tracks was absolutely instrumental. I've never done anything like it before, even tracking down the perps at the San Jose Trump rally doesn't compare, and I'm still emotionally and mentally exhausted. I throw my entire being into these things.

    It will be helpful to the people around here and at Steve's because you have to be intelligent to pull it off, yet, it's surprisingly simple. But I had a couple theories about how the media works, **how it affects people**, how to counteract those effects, and finally, how to get information past those gatekeepers and to the people ***who have no idea they are in need of it***.
    It was incredibly frustrating, to see a bombshell start to wither on the vine. There had been all this good information out there, before, for months, and it was beyond frustrating to see not a single MSM person or close put it all together. ***No, all the MSM and close had been programmed through abuse by a tiny cabal to completely shut their minds down and not even want to contemplate or even think about it.***
    This was what I set out to help fix. Within 48 hours, a change had taken place.

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    1. It was so scary, in the first half, I threw up twice. Those feelings are coming back just thinking about writing it, so I'm going to be painfully brief...

      **Anonymous**
      I became convinced after the election that one of the keys to Trump's victory was that he had thousands of people, especially young guys, who were so passionate about the cause that they worked for free with not even acclaim as a reward. Mouthpieces and guys who take all the arrows are important, but information being shared so rapidly was key and that kind of thing can only come when people don't care who gets credit.
      But for what I was doing, anonymity (and being brand new, not on the radar) became even more important: ability to evade the Praetorian Guard who's always keeping watch that certain information stays confined to a group and doesn't "break out".
      Further, having no baggage helped me with whom I needed to share.

      My operation was the kind of thing only a woman would come up with: hyper-targeted with no mission creep, ZERO trolling, plus cheerleading. Most of all, empathy. It was kind of the inverse 4-chan thing, save for the utterly critical anonymity. Figuring out what each group needed, what it would take for each group to be open to a message. Lots of subtlety most times. The elite center-right writers, for example, I would just show up and say something that was more intelligent, yet kind, than what they were saying (and certainly more so than their commenters) to pique their interest and have them check me out. Upon which they'd get a shock.

      The first and biggest hurdle I had to overcome was a people being beaten down by others more clever than they. Their confidence was in the gutter while most just didn't even want to think about the subject as the vilification had been so extreme. So, one small group of good guys had all the info, but was talking to itself and wasn't reaching anyone else.

      I will not go into my methods and who, but I completely had the truth on my side, the truth that is actively being suppressed by our MSM. I counted on an effect being produced when those truths became known and it is exactly what happened. A puncture, a bubble being popped.

      Contagion was my friend.

      The most nerve-wracking part was moving onto the TrueCons so I didn't do as much here as I would have liked. Very difficult. They didn't like it, but because I had been ever so respectful, one even kindly let me know that he accepted it, but that it hurt, too. And I acknowledged it and thanked him.

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  4. Not the way to rally the troops against the siege of their leader:

    "General John Kelly is doing a fantastic job as Chief of Staff. There is tremendous spirit and talent in the W.H. Don't believe the Fake News"

    @realDonaldTrump 9h

    If he isn't going to overtly take on the boarding parties from the Pentagon and Wall Street, at the very least he shouldn't broadcast the opposite message that everything is going perfectly with General Kelly choking off all Trumpian sources of information.

    It will make the tens of millions of supporters sit on their butts thinking everything's fine.

    Or maybe General Kelly put a gun to his head saying put out a tweet definitively saying "I'm a force for good in the WH".

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  5. Since Hannity's show is the only way for unbiased info to reach Trump (he watches religiously), another form of collective action for Trump supporters is to lobby Hannity on Twitter, email, radio call-in, etc.

    Bring up this issue, forget that issue.

    He was good at that when he had the Circa news people on the show, including Sara Carter who is the messenger for the handful of good guys in the bureaucracy.

    The intel guys knew to send a MILF-y honeypot type, just to make sure the messenger would get President Poonhound's attention, LOL.

    For the past week or so, though (after Charlottesville), all Hannity has been on about is why Democrats are the Real Racists, here's 20 minutes of the media freaking out and calling Trump a white nationalist, now here's 20 minutes of Trump disavowing white nationalists, and finally here's 20 minutes of black Republicans defending Trump against charges of white nationalism.

    And the 10-minute spots about the endless accomplishments of the first X months.

    These focuses squander the rare chance that the Trump movement has to break through the censors from the Pentagon junta and reach the besieged President.

    Maybe Hannity is too stuck on litigating the race issue -- which is supposed to be a red herring tying up the Democrats, not the Republicans who are supposed to focus on trade and immigration.

    Or maybe after General Kelly took over the White House, he sent a message to Fox executives saying he doesn't want any more daily intel briefings coming through Hannity's TV show and doing an end-run around the General.

    Laura Ingraham has been doing a better job, but she doesn't have a nationwide TV show that Trump can tune into every night.

    Tucker has a better take on the issues, so I wish Trump would tune into him to get a better analysis. But Tucker doesn't get the intel briefings like Hannity does, so it's hard to get specific information to Trump via Tucker.

    Lobby Hannity like crazy -- he is first and foremost a crowd-pleaser with little ideology of his own, so he can easily change topics if he hears about it enough from his audience.

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  6. I saw Kelly during a Trump conference (via a Youtube video) and he looked plainly uncomfortable. The Pentagon set doesn't trust Trump, will never forgive Trump for going off-script WRT foreign policy (by promising to reversing the invade the world and invite the world crap promoted by Leftists neo-Cohens who believe in a one-world utopian marketplace).

    The overall trajectory of the media's ideology is heavily influenced by the Pentagon (how else do you market war?). If the Pentagon really trusted and supported Trump, they could go to much greater lengths to clamp down on fourth estate treason. The media has long gone past the point of reasoned and justified criticism, as they openly and frequently say hysterical and baseless stuff about Trump, not to mention condoning civil unrest and dangerous race baiting.

    Bush had approval ratings in the basement during his 2nd term, yet I don't recall Bush getting anywhere near as much hostility as Trump has gotten from the legacy media, much of which plays fiddle to the Deep State which wants, first and foremost, the contrivance of greater wars and nation building. Goofing on Bush for his perceived, um, lack of curiosity was common, but there was little blinding rage provoked.

    I refuse to believe that Trump really has affection or full respect for the Celtic Pentagon overlords. For the time being, he's dealing with them as a necessary evil as he apparently has to (look what they did to Flynn). He's probably trying, mostly in vain, to reason and bargain with them. At some point, you'd think he'd snap over how they obviously are babysitting him as an unruly child.

    Thing is, Trump's known for years that the elites were full of shit. Why would he suddenly look up to the very people who were the architects of the things he once derided? And it's not like he can delude himself that they're apart from the idiots; after all, there's still an ongoing relationship between the Pentagon overlords and nearly all of the heavy hitters from Team Obama and Team Hillary (who inherited most of their ideas from Team Bush who've been involved in this BS since it started so many decades ago).

    They're even trying to revive the Crimea horseshit. Look, you goddamn fossils: people under 40 ain't buying it. Not for a minute. The cold war gave us the greatest thrash metal song ever in 1984; It's not 1984 anymore. The US has been the bully, the poison injector, since the Soviet Union dissolved. Younger people are ashamed of the US's foreign policy; when have we been the good guy? Blame Putin for the election? Sure, it's not like the Democrats back-stabbed their populist candidate who coulda won. Oh, btw, Bernie was supported by younger people too. Ya know, the people who were in grade school when Bush and Obama launched wars and invasions while kneeling to Wall Street.

    In case I haven't made myself clear, FUCK the Pentagon. Go to hell. I hope Kelly gets a coronary after having a nightmare of Trump and Putin launching joint operations to take over Saudia Arabia. Hope the Deep State is listening; pride goeth before the fall, and repression of dissent never ends well. You may think racism sexism homophobia is enough to forever divert attention away from globalist misdeeds, but think again. Time's up. It's over. Better join the good guys, the guillotine is being sharpened.....

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  7. This is surprisingly optimistic from a center-Left realist (close with the William Binney VIPS gang) and I'd love your take on Parry's article, especially with the blackpilling by Cerno:

    "Kushner’s “outside-in” scheme was symbolically acted out with Trump making his first overseas visit to Saudi Arabia and then to Israel in May. But I’m told that Trump eventually cooled to Kushner’s thinking and has come to see the Israeli-Saudi tandem as part of the region’s troubles, especially what he views as Saudi Arabia’s longstanding support for Al Qaeda and other terror groups.

    Perhaps most significantly in that regard, Trump in July quietly abandoned the CIA’s covert war in Syria. In the U.S., some “regime change” advocates have complained about this “betrayal” of the rebel cause and some Democrats have tried to link Trump’s decision to their faltering Russia-gate “scandal,” i.e., by claiming that Trump was rewarding Putin for alleged election help"
    https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/25/the-possible-education-of-donald-trump/

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  8. So Gorka resigned and the last straw seems to have been the Afghanistan troop surge and the speech Trump gave about it. I half-think getting information to Trump doesn't matter now because either Kelly's just that good at filtering out Wrong Think or Trump has resigned himself to being a figurehead and has been thoroughly browbeaten by the swamp creatures. Naturally the Omnipotent God Emperor cultists think this is a great move and it's just Trump freeing his warriors to fight on his behalf unrestrained but I think most people realize what's going on.

    Hopefully this energizes people to fight back even harder and doesn't just demoralize them into a "why bother" malaise.

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