The Iron Ding-Bat is having a bit of a winning steak at the moment.
True, she did lose on her efforts to close Carl the Barber permanently. But she did get the opening day of the recall drive pushed back forty days, (there is a limited window of time with which you may gather petition signatures for this purpose in Michigan. Consequently there has to be a fixed opening and closing day). Although, I find it intriguing that she made the effort, (her internal polling must be terrifying).
The other win, she just had yesterday. There was a petition drive to get a ballot initiative that would strip her of her emergency powers. That one fell short of the signatures needed to get it on the ballot.
And it failed because it was being run by former Tea Partiers.
The Tea Party was a mass political movement that had all the political impact of a litter of kittens mewing in a box. Which is to say, NONE. They were and are too fundamentally nice, and too civilized. They seem to be under the impression that the Culture War can still be won if they push hard enough with facts, logic, and picking up after themselves. Nevermind that those tactics would never work on an opponent that has rejected those things in favor of believing really hard in their own fantasies and having someone else pick up their shit. The more salient fact is that WE FUCKING LOST THE CULTURE WAR!!!
If you are at all curious as to why the ballot initiative failed it is because of the medium that its proponents chose to use to organize it.
I bet some of you already guessed which medium they used and are now groaning.
You guessed it right.
They used Facebook.
Facebook noticed that someone was trying to use their product to damage a Democrat governor and sure as the last three Star Wars movies were shit, they buried it.
The Tea Party is still dumb.
Okay, I’m done here.
The Dark Herald 
The Tea Party is not dumb. The Tea Party is ignorant (or naive). They don’t know what they don’t know. But today they learned that Facebook is not their friend. At least they realize there is a problem and are trying to do something. There is hope for them. It is like my wife. 20 years ago she was mad at me because I had a gun in the house. Last month she went out and purchased herself a nice 9mm. She learned and so can they.
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You prove his point. If the Tea Party is JUST NOW figuring out that “Facebook is not their friend,” they’re too stupid to live.
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Everyone knows that FB is hard left, including the Tea Party. Never assume someone is stupid. That includes leftists.
Before passing judgement on someone else, I always imagine myself in their place. What would I have done?
Do you know what’s really frightening? What alternative did the Tea Part have for reaching a mass audience of like minded people at very low cost?
Twitter? Buying an advertisement on Google? TV or radio commercials? Running ads on local newspapers? Does anyone believe that any leftist media outlet would run their ad? Does anyone here think it’s a good idea for the Tea Party to give money to a leftist MSM outlet?
Those Tea Party members weren’t stupid, they were trapped, as all of us are. Is there a single mass audience conservative outlet of similar scale and reach to FB?
The leftists have always known that they can use tech platforms to destroy conservative organizations and individuals. They’re now finding out that they can be completely biased and do great harm to conservatives and suffer no consequences. The leftist MSM and tech companies aren’t suffering much, if any loss of revenues when they promote the destruction of conservatives.
Those Michigan Tea Party members at least tried to do something and they were forced to use a leftist social media outlet because there isn’t a single conservative social media that would have reached enough Michigan voters to make a difference.
But maybe I’m wrong. Everyone who made fun of the Tea Party, what would you have done instead?
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You set up your own web page. Most places have templates to get you up and running fast. You point people to it using FB, Twitter, word of mouth, etc. But you don’t run the effort on FB. First, FB is absolutely horrible for stuff like that. Next, it requires you to have a FB account, which many people you want to attract no longer have. If they ever had an account at all. Once that is rolling, you use Gab or something similar to communicate with people in your group. You do not rely on FB to do it all. That’s lazy and stupid.
The Tea Party gets made fun of for believing the system is fair. If they play by the rules it will result in victory. Instead, the immediately got co-opted, IRS audited, and not are shocked the FB will work against them.
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“Facebook noticed that someone was trying to use their product to damage a Democrat governor and sure as the last three Star Wars movies were shit, they buried it.”
Using FB and Twitter to promote a Tea Party web page would have been buried by FB and Twitter. Surely you’re aware that Google has been manipulating search results to suppress conservative content.
The conundrum you present is this:
Using FB is stupid because they used FB to promote their petition.
Instead, set up a web page, tell the world and you will be successful..
How do you tell the world? You say, use FB!
That makes no sense. Word of mouth in the digital age makes no sense.
What I lament is that there doesn’t appear to be a single conservative social media platform that has the reach and power of FB. That’s the problem.
Are there zero conservatives willing to finance and implement their own version of FB?
I was hoping someone would tell me is there is such a platform.
But if you can’t suggest one, stop making fun of the Tea Party. They had no choice but to use an enemy platform.
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Mentions might eventually be buried, but you would have at least gotten the ball rolling. Putting everything on FB though means they just flip a switch and you are gone. There is a distinct difference between using the college bulletin board to get the word out as much as possible and trying to rent space in the Student Union for your subversive activities.
You would be shocked at how much of the world runs by word-of-mouth.
Now you are dreaming with “build your own X.” Let’s say you want to build a dissident right FB. You get your domain name with no problem because you name it Meet-N-Greet (MNR). You’re below the SJW detection level for awhile and build up a decent user base with advertisers. Then you get noticed. First, they pressure your advertisers and those drop to next to nothing. Several offer apologies for ever working with you. Next, your bank says they are closing your account and no longer offering you processing services. After that, you end up in a battle with your domain host who decides to simply turn off your site. You get that fixed and suddenly the cloud provider hosting your data announces you have violated your terms of service. You will be crushed.
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“You would be shocked at how much of the world runs by word-of-mouth.”
Sure. Everyone knows that. So why didn’t the Michigan Tea Party do that? The answer is that they did. It’s trivial, call up your friends and tell them about the petition. It didn’t work.
“Now you are dreaming with “build your own X.” Let’s say you want to build a dissident right FB.”
“You will be crushed.”
I didn’t say “Build your own X”. I was asking everyone here who sneered at the Tea Party to suggest a conservative alternative platform. So far, no one has. I further said that if you can’t make a suggestion, then stop laughing at the Tea Party. They did the best they could with the bad choices.that were available. The best bad choice was using FB and hope that it would stay up long enough to, to use your phrase, “get the ball rolling”.
I was lamenting the fact that SJWs own the entire social media infrastructure and they are using their power to crush conservatives.
You’ve very succinctly extended and summarized my argument. You’re absolutely right. SJWs would use domain name registration, credit card and digital payment systems and doxxing to smash any conservative platform. That was exactly the point I was making. We’re not arguing, we’re both in total agreement.
I’ve seen this kind of argument many times, always made by losers. “If I had only done that _one_ thing, I would have won. We were _that_ close to victory”.
It’s what I call “The Lie that comforts”. You’d rather believe that the Tea Party lost because of one simple mistake. Conservatives have been losing the public debate in Michigan. That’s an uncomfortable truth.
https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-government/petition-drives-target-gretchen-whitmer-and-shes-raising-money-them
“But organizers face a tight timeline and could confront legal challenges if they collect at least 425,059 valid signatures by July 7. ”
“And public opinion polls suggest Whitmer has the public’s support in her handling of the pandemic. One recent survey showed 60 percent of voters polled supported the governor’s response, while 41 percent approved of the response from President Donald Trump.”
The Tea Party failed with their petition because there wasn’t enough popular support. It wasn’t because they used FB, it wasn’t because they didn’t use word of mouth. Getting 425k signatures in only 60 days meant obtaining about 7000 signatures a day. That would only happen if the issue was extremely popular.
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How many of those Tea Party boomers would actually be willing to pay someone like me to make a website for them? Oh right, I’m just a lazy, stupid millennial that plays too much video games.
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I can tell you exactly why they didn’t pay someone to create a web page.
Step 1. Hire someone to create a web page to promote the petition.
Step 2. Use FB, Twitter, Google to promote the web page.
Step 3. FB, Twitter, Google buries all references to that web page.
Step 4. The petition fails.
Step 5. Conservatives laugh at the Tea Party for using FB, Twitter, Google to promote the web page.
The fact is, the Tea Party members knew what would happen if they made their own web page. They’d still have to use a leftist social media platform to promote the web page. Spending money on the web page would have been a total waste.
Here is what I think they tried to do. They created a FB page to promote the petition. They knew that FB would bury it, but they hoped that it would generate enough publicity and contacts to start a growing movement.
It didn’t work.
It’s comforting to delude yourself to blame the Tea Party for using FB.
But here are some more depressing possibilities:
1. There are zero conservative social media platforms. As a result, every conservative effort will be buried by the leftists running those platforms.
2. Conservatives knew about the petition, they decided that stability was preferable to a recall and declined to sign it. That might be a fatal flaw of conservatives. We actually want to conserve the existing social order, even when leftists are running things into the ground.
3. The FB page did its job, every potential conservative was aware of the petition and all of them signed up. It wasn’t enough.
What scares me is that maybe there isn’t a silent majority of conservatives. Instead, it’s a silent minority. What is *really* scary is that maybe we’re seeing all conservatives making as much noise as they can.
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Isn’t Craigslist a big thing in the US? Couldn’t they have used that or is that converged now too? Gab, for all its flaws, wouldn’t have been a bad idea either. At least users there lean more our way. And couldn’t the petition drive have also done it the old fashioned way by going door to door? Recruit others to help canvass other neighborhoods, who recruit others to canvass other neighborhoods, etc until they got the numbers needed. It’s not like conservative neighborhoods are hard to find in Michigan.
When does our side start repeatedly pushing until we get the result we want?
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