This article is my opinion about joining online groups vs being targeted and bombarded with sh*t someone wants you to see until you see the world the way they want you to.
Although many of the principles of confidence artistry I’ve defined the terms for in the earlier half of my pinned post series apply in nature they will not always apply in terms of legality. Simply, that not all the influence campaigns, business funnels, campaign solutions, (etc.) that do the sort of down and dirty trolling ops that most people reading this have seen by now are exactly illegal. Some are definitely greasier than others and behave in ways that immediately should identify them as lacking any ethics or real socio-political value to furthering progress of your noble cause.
Joining any group or organization should always be voluntary. Your reasoning should depend on what your end goal is and you should take the time to ask different groups, shop around for the fit that you want. Don’t settle for people who employ street violence over civic duty, and FCS this should be obvious at this point but don’t get involved in any non-profits that use militarized titles for ranks of volunteer and have to protect their data from “feds” at all costs… that’s probably some type of racket.
Your group must have some sort of coherent way to express itself to people outside of its own roster in order to serve any purpose that would advance public policy in a humanitarian direction. If you have to speak only in certain terms to address an issue where other more commonly known and widely accepted and acceptable language is available, you’re in a fucking cult or one of the next things I’m going to describe which is basically just a fucking cult. This language switch is designed to isolate you and lock you into oversimplified binary paths that neglect complexity of stated issues and methods of how to reach your goals. Eventually everyone IRL is getting freaked out by how you’re talking and can’t understand some of the conclusions you’re making or why the language is so aggressive, and it allows the dog whistles the cult “whips” use to take root in the minds of the duped cult attendees and assets.
Since the niche or genre or whatever common denominator the people in an online group you’ve chosen to support would be pre-illustrated it may not be easy to tell if one you’ve chosen is astroturfing the cause to their own ends, always shop around and check orgs and sites like Charity Navigator. Always make sure you know who you’re signing up under.
It should be voluntary for both the helpers and the people sharing and consuming the information without the use of deception and repetition and psychological influence to onboard... You don’t just secretly stick your campaign signs into everyone’s lawn in the dark of night, that’s what hate groups do, not serious campaigns.
the sort of campaigns that would send a chatter group into a bar and buy them pitchers to say bad things about the opponent that are usually not even true or send thugs to bust up their opponents houses and terrorize their families; pay kids to destroy their signage, blackmail them with compromising pictures or other information… that exists and has for many years… and it’s not a stretch to just understand that those same dirty maneuvers are just a part of any other place you find intense competition. Brands and celebrities have both been charged at times in public with employing such “dark pr” and “ops”. These ops will often accrue cultivated “assets” and offer community by either common ground or shelter or attention or money or clout, whatever the need may be. In the case of targeting on a large scale such as in Cambridge Analytica they knew exactly what to say to each individual to onboard them, they said so themselves. The information was accessed in highly unethical ways and behavioral analysts poured through it before it was fed back to each group of targets as a 7-layer dogshit burrito in tiny bites seasoned like and mixed in with their normal information intake until one day they are like “let me have more of that stuff, please!”
When I share a slogan or idea by someone else, I want to be sure I’m not being misled. Are they repeating ideas I think may confuse people; are the slogans easy to understand or are they ambiguous with a possible negative connotation? Do I personally want what they want; wtf do they want? Who is in charge? Will they definitively tell me who is in charge and how transparent is their organization? Are they viciously verbally attacking other people or entire groups of people based on intrinsic differences such as age? Resorting to derision before onboarding?
Some groups claiming to be fighting for human rights are actually just doing it because it’s a multi hundred-million-dollar prospect to become the most public facing lobbyist group for the cause they’ve co-opted.
For example: In Wisconsin at the height of the pandemic in 2020 certain camps on the ends of the political horseshoe trended things like “boomer remover”. They were hoping that the decision by Wisconsin Supreme Court to make people show up in person to the primary would literally kill the age group of people they consider to be their opponents by giving them Coronavirus. Their main candidate was 79 years old and still they used this dangerous violent rhetoric. Their call is for literal eugenics to benefit them politically, which is genocidal.
Half of these are people who say they want everyone to be healthy, none of them enroll people for the current public option ever. Watch out for groups like this, it’s bait and switch all the way.
The same very antigov groups that employ influencers and use cult tactics to “cultivate” (trick) people into working with them went on that year to push the idea of fighting in the street with known domestic terrorist organization the proud boys (to be a zoo display for Murdoch’s FOX news and inadvertantly become an example for fascists to use against antifascists in their campaign materials). The entire time they sent disgusting homophobic memes to Mayor Pete, calling effectively progressive Democrat, Kamala Harris, “heels up” for engaging in a consensual relationship (they wouldn’t use this type of derision for a man).
They employ ambiguous tactics such as screaming to “defund the police” instead of “police reform” and “pro-abortion” instead of “pro choice” knowing that it was validating the twisted messages of fascists who were sending out flyer after flyer of their own words. When you bring up the slogan, they’d acknowledge they knew it was terrible by each giving different descriptions of what they meant. it depends on the most favorable explanation to their intended audience, as confidence tricks do.
Here is a popular independent influencer suggesting that the Supreme Court wouldn’t even matter in relation to whether or not the allowed Trump to be elected, despite his promise to insert judges who would destroy the Roe v Wade precedent and outlaw abortion.
Performative activity that doesn’t deliver political power to the people cedes power to fascists, it also normalizes some of the same extremity of rhetoric that causes mass violence.
At one point an organization tied to the political activity in the paragraph above dumped manure in the street and let essential workers clean it up in the name of erasing our defense spending. The same groups want to cancel our aid to Ukraine and deny that Assad has been bombing his own citizens since like 2013. There is a broad range of these not-new groups that have worked hard to polish their barrel scraping of damaged ideologies. It’s the people on the regressive extreme that maniacal insurrectionist leaders like Rand Paul and Mike Flynn can get to throw their vote on third parties while their own coalitions align to bring elections home for fascists. The same ones ironically quoting 1984 with hammer and sickle emojis and trying to redefine entire meanings of every moniker they try to unify under but always having to settle for something like “anarchy” as barrel scrapings would. When This group’s candidate lost the primary in 2020 many of them were speaking about holding the Democratic convention hostage until their nominee was forced in, which is a mirror rhetorical of what we saw the right wing extremist terrorists do on January 6th.
anarchy
noun
an·ar·chy ˈa-nər-kē
a: absence of government
b: a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authoritythe city's descent into anarchy
c: a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government (and eat unicorn droppings with a tribe of magic koala bears that wear underpants)
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Seriously, if you want anything good for humanity you don’t further the ends of fascism by putting power right in their hands.
Encyclopedia Britannica > Encyclopedia Dramatica, know the difference.
Dave Troy banned you from ToadSocial just like Jarvis.