Let me show you an activist trick from the resistance years.
Interview ~150 people about a political candidate and ask them to use two, three words at the most to describe them.
Personality psychologists found that most words about people boil down to 5 dimensions -
1/4
- so in principle, every word you're hearing should cluster together with similar words.
Take those clusters together, and simplify them even further, until you have three to five (seven at most) words you use to describe someone.
The result is a consensus message.
2/4
When you take those boiled-down terms and then put them back into memes, the folks who responded to the poll are already "invested" and will spread your memes, because you listened to them and cared what they said.
This is the relationship you want.
3/4
You're trying to give something to people, not impose something on them.
What we did on #ParmesanGirl, or what actual #NAFO accounts are using on Brie right now, is similar process; just faster & informal.
It's still much more about listening and community than you might think.
If you think about it, a leaderless movement of activists resisting disinformation around a war is a kind of "anti-weapon".
"True" anti-war activism the way I mean it - getting, not just talking about, outcomes like sanctions & war crimes prosecutions - doesn't fit elsewhere.
First, nuclear weapons gave the U.S. a counter-advantage against the numerically superiority of the Warsaw Pact.
This was the first offset.
"Small wars" (in the Marines' sense), COIN and asymmetric conventional conflicts led to the second offset: precision munitions.
The third offset, though this is still a somewhat novel term to some people, I think (or at least an unfashionable one) is developing American technology superiority and innovation capabilities.
This is one way we're planning to address "near-peer" adversaries, basically.
She burned her rep by publicly backstabbing a fellow Berner.
And for what?
For a frankly piddling amount of fame: she was ~50th place for 'trending' on Twitter, because she tried to attack NAFO as racists, and we accidentally called her 'Brie' (like Brie Larson & Alison Brie).
I've linked this NYT article before, but this is the spot where my company is mentioned and linked.
For the next two months after this came out, I turned down Washington Post & New York Times interview requests. nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/…
In January of 2019, when that story came out, I could have gone public with, essentially, a lot of details on how political operations on the center-left are financed.
I mean names, companies, meetings, phone logs; basically the kind of thing that Breitbart or Fox would use.