Posted on 03/07/2018 5:11:00 PM PST by SJackson
The response was professionalized. That’s not surprising, because this is what organization that gets results actually looks like. It’s not a bunch of magical kids in somebody’s living room.
“Can you believe these kids?” It’s been a recurring theme of the coverage of the Parkland school shooting: the remarkable effectiveness of the high school students who created a gun control organization in the wake of the massacre. In seemingly no time, the magical kids had organized events ranging from a national march to a mass school walkout, and they’d brought in a million dollars in donations from Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney.
The Miami Herald credited their success to the school’s stellar debate program. The Wall Street Journal said it was because they were born online, and organizing was instinctive.
On February 28, BuzzFeed came out with the actual story: Rep. Debbie Wassermann Schultz aiding in the lobbying in Tallahassee, a teacher’s union organizing the buses that got the kids there, Michael Bloomberg’s groups and the Women’s March working on the upcoming March For Our Lives, MoveOn.org doing social media promotion and (potentially) march logistics, and training for student activists provided by federally funded Planned Parenthood.
The president of the American Federation of Teachers told BuzzFeed they’re also behind the national school walkout, which journalists had previously assured the public was the sole work of a teenager. (I’d thought teachers were supposed to get kids into school, but maybe that’s just me.)
In other words, the response was professionalized. That’s not surprising, because this is what organization that gets results actually looks like. It’s not a bunch of magical kids in somebody’s living room. Nor is it surprising that the professionalization happened right off the bat. Broward County’s teacher’s union is militant, and Rep. Ted Lieu stated on Twitter that his family knows Parkland student activist David Hogg’s family, so there were plenty of opportunities for grown-ups with resources and skills to connect the kids.
THIS CONSPIRACY THEORY IS INSANE. Our kids know David Hogg. My wife and I know his mom, who taught at our kids' elementary school before they moved to Florida. Although David is very articulate, he is not a crisis actor.
He is a student who lost 17 of his classmates to bullets. https://twitter.com/AC360/status/966144548958224385 …
That’s before you get to whether any of them had been involved in the Women’s March. According to BuzzFeed, Wassermann Schultz was running on day two.
What’s striking about all this isn’t the organization. If you start reading books about organizing, it’s clear how it all works. But no journalist covering the story wrote about this stuff for two weeks. Instead, every story was about the Parkland kids being magically effective.
On Twitter, I lost track of the number of bluechecks rhapsodizing over how effective the kids’ organizational instincts were. But organizing isn’t instinctive. It’s skilled work; you have to learn how to do it, and it takes really a lot of people. You don’t just get a few magical kids who’re amazing and naturally good at it.
The real tip-off should have been the $500,000 donations from Winfrey and Clooney. Big celebrities don’t give huge money to strangers on a whim. Somebody who knows Winfrey and Clooney called them and asked. But the press’s response was to be ever more impressed with the kids.
For two weeks, journalists abjectly failed in their jobs, which is to tell the public what’s going on. And any of them who had any familiarity with organizing campaigns absolutely knew. Matt Pearce, of the Los Angeles Times, would have been ideally placed to write an excellent article: not only is he an organizer for the Times’s union, he moderated a panel on leftist activism for the LA Times Book Festival and has the appropriate connections in organizing. Instead, he wrote about a school walkout, not what was behind it. (In another article, Pearce defined Delta caving to a pressure campaign’s demands as “finding middle ground.”)
But it’s not just a mainstream media problem. None of the righty outlets writing about Parkland picked up on the clear evidence that professional organizers were backing the Parkland kids, either. Instead, they objected to the front-and-centering of minor kids as unseemly, which does no good: Lefties aren’t going to listen, and it doesn’t educate the Right to counter.
The closest anyone got was Elizabeth Harrington at the Washington Free Beacon, who noted that Clooney’s publicist was booking the kids’ media interviews pro bono, and said that a friend (not Clooney) had asked him to do it. The result of all this is that the average righty does not understand what’s going on in activism, because all they see is what the press covers. The stuff that’s visible. It’s like expecting people in the Stone Age to grok the Roman army by looking at it. Conspiracy theorists happily fill this ignorance vacuum.
On one hand, sure, the issue with people who believe in crisis actors and various other kinds of conspiracy theories is that they’re susceptible. If they didn’t believe in crisis actors, they’d believe in something else (and they probably do). But on the other hand, I think one reason there’s an opportunity for righty conspiracy types to get all hopped up on goofballs with respect to protests and such is the abject failure of the Righty establishment to explain to its people how protests actually work.
This results in occasional hilarity when the Right tries to organize its own protests. For example, then-Internet celebrity Baked Alaska tried to create pro-Trump flashmobs in Los Angeles during the election. His efforts consisted of posting times and locations online. And that’s it. You see this attitude often among Righties: “We have the Internet! We’ll post a notice and people will show up!” Well, no; they won’t.
It’s not that Baked Alaska needed a magical kid, because there are no magical kids. There’s just hard work, and our press and politicos do everyone a disservice when they pretend otherwise. Here’s an example of how to turn out people, cribbed from “Organizing for Social Change,” the activist manual published by the Midwest Academy, which has been around since 1973 and has trained over 30,000 activists, some of whom went on to found their own training schools.
Say you run an organization that wants to impress a city councilman, and you’ve landed a meeting. You want your group to look bigger than it is. You’ve got 15 dedicated people you know will go, but you want to show the councilman 60 people.
The first thing you do is get 10 people from other groups (you do know other ideologically aligned groups in the area, right?). That leaves 35 people. To get them, you don’t post an ad on Craigslist. You look in your database of people who’ve signed your petitions or whatever. Call and ask them to come.
If they say yes, call them again a day or two in advance to confirm. Of the people who say yes twice, only half will actually show up. So you need 70 people to say yes twice. Expect to make seven times that number of phone calls to get them. That’s 490 five-minute phone calls, which breaks down to five people a night making phone calls for five straight nights.
It’s not magical kids, and it’s not George Soros sprinkling money around. It’s hard work by people who’ve trained to do it. That’s a little more work than posting an announcement on Facebook. And that’s organizing. It’s not magical kids, and it’s not George Soros sprinkling money around. It’s hard work by people who’ve trained to do it.
Now that the organizations are more open about their involvement, at some point the Parkland kids will go into the background a bit in media exposure, the same way Deray and Linda Sarsour did. That’s part of how organizing fame works these days: Two Minutes’ Heroes, in frequent rotation. But the problem remains: until the press covers organizing campaigns accurately, organizers will be able to punch above their weight politically even if they don’t win every election.
In his excellent book “Hegemony How-To,” leftist organizer Jonathan Smucker wrote, “Power tends to appear magical to those who have less of it, and mechanical to those who are accustomed to wielding it instrumentally.” Or, for that matter, to even seeing it instrumentally.
For two weeks, journalists treated power as if it were magical. It’s not. It’s mechanical. The people organizing the response to Parkland, and a host of other causes, know that. So should you.
Because someone wrote about it before 4 weeks passed.
The kids are just useful idiots.
I guess, though they are high school kids. To the extent their parents are using them politically, mom and dad, why raise idiots
Thanks, I’ll let the AM know it’s a dupe
Useful idiots with handlers.
I have been watching these astro-turf con jobs for years now. I knew we were getting bs-d from the get-go. EVERYONE needs to read The Smear by Sharyl Attkisson.
The Lamestream Media knew--but reporting on the astro-turfing won't help push their preferred Liberal agenda.
Please define “astroturfing” for us unhipsters. Thanks.
It’s like fake news. Astroturfing is taking actions or publishing information masking it’s source, often in oppositions real motives. Leftists financing kids, presenting them as motivated kids, hiding the real source of their support and positions.
see post 7 for a shorter, better definition
Two weeks?
Many FReepers, 4Chan & 8Chan people figured it out within 24 hours.
Some knew it instinctively, immediately.
It's creating a false impression that a movement or support or demonstration is organic, a genuine groundswell, when it is bought and paid for, organized by string-pullers.
In a word, "fake."
Who could NOT see this from day one? Willful malcontents from Hogg and his butt buddy up to Oprah and all the money suppliers.
You can fool enough of the people long enough. But its infinitely harder to prove to them that they have been fooled because they will never admit they were duped.
SHAME ON THOSE AR 15’S
FOR WHAT HAPPENED AT THE PARKSIDE SCHOOL
BLAME GUNS
NOT
PREVIOUS GOVERNMENT POLICIES FAILURES THEY
MUST BE HIDDEN
The inability to counter this perverted (they call progressive) agenda created by the democratic party ( in name only) has its goose stepping adherents in the media left make it up as guns and the NRA garbage through their swill mills. When it should be contested by GOP state and federal legislators who should be demanding investigative hearings exposing policy failures
DON’T MENTION THIS
Besides examining the conduct and arrangements of the Broward county sheriff’s dept performance failures. A dramatic reduction in disciplinary incidents at Parkside were reported after the selection of Obama’s Chicago friend as school superintendent occurred which was publicly acclaimed.And that school district was receiving large grant money from Obama’s Attorney General because of those results. That many critics claimed encouraged criminal activity. Which should require Trump Administration US Attorney General beside find out why when the FBI knew that Cruz should not be able to purchase weapons did. And review these grant programs instituted by the previous Obama administration.
Sources for the formulation of this report come from postings from newspaper and television stations placed in the news aggregation web site Free Republic by volunteers during the period of Feb 14th to the 25th
The original sources are linked in these postings
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3635254/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3635029/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3634902/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3634905/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3634916/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3635556/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3636095/posts
http://www.theusmat.com/index.htm
never let a crisis go to waste
The making up of quirky word associations is common. Astroturf vs grassroots (and beats me who came up with "grassroots" either).
Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by a grassroots participant(s). ...The term "astroturfing" was first coined in 1985 by then-US Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) when he said, "a fellow from Texas can tell the difference between grass roots and AstroTurf... this is generated mail."
In other words the kids are puppets with the likes of Debbie W-S, the American Federation of Teachers and Soros’ Move-on.org pulling the strings......
We don’t have a free press — we have a propaganda ministry for left.
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