This is a legacy post, originally posted at correntewire.com, here, on 6/24/2015
Here is the email I sent to the Trump campaign, with some minor editing. Fox News has Trump polling #2. (As a side note, can you imagine the debate fireworks if Trump wins the Republican nomination, and Sanders the Democratic nomination?) If anybody has any other ideas for potential funders, go ahead and leave a comment.
I’m an extremely frustrated activist, who has been listening in on the anti-TPP InterOccupy conference calls, and have been just sort of dumbstruck at how clueless these people are. I don’t want to get into all the reasons why, but I’ll just mention one for-instance. And that is, the “activists” didn’t bother to ascertain just how ignorant the public was of TPP (and hence, how inadequate their public educational actions were.) You would NEVER run a business like that! (See my facebook page “TPP Ignorance” to grasp the extent of the ignorance.)
I would like to know if the Trump campaign would be smart enough (yeah, I just said that) to implement my ideas for public education/ meme propagation. That would take the form of creating 2 new software tools – 1 is a negative vote block platform (like votizen.com used to be like, EXCEPT that the social-network-voting-blocks are organized to vote AGAINST incumbents.) The other tool is to facilitate (primarily) face-to-face meme-propagation, using messaging vectors (=people) that “jump organizational boundaries” and allow for “redundant ownership”. (E.g., a local anti-TPP activist, who is, say, 30 years old, can “adopt” a local Boy scout Troop, as well as a veteran’s organization, and make sure they are at least solicited to spread the message(s) every couple of months. Another concerned citizen, who has environmental sympathies, could “adopt” the same Boy Scout troop, as well as a local church, for some environmental messages. Since TPP will jeopardize national environmental standards, redundant anti-TPP messages would get propated by two different vectors, to the Boy Scout troop. The tool would allow for the public documenting of what organizations and contact persons were hit up, and when, so that self-organizing of the meme propagation campaigns can more easily and intelligently occur.)
Why should the Trump campaign care to implement these tools (as well as give them a push, by seeding them with paid organizers?). There are 3 reasons:
1) the TPP is treason (in the sense that it subverts the Constitutional order), Trump is a patriotic US citizen, and can afford the relative pittance to at least create these tools. (If they’re outsourced, my guess is that they’d cost less than $10,000 each. The optics of doing so would reflect badly on a Trump candidacy, so it’d be smarter to cough up the extra cash and just pay American programmers to do it.)
2) as Trump will be championing the defeat of TPP (or it’s repeal, if necessary), an enlightened and outraged American public would forsake the hypocritical wafflers (like Hilarious Clinton) and “free traitors” (like Rubio) and flock to anti-TPP candidates (like Trump). In particular, the meme-propagation tool would be a “force multiplier” for any politician’s campaign which resonated with a popular meme-propagation campaign.
Yes, expensive TV ads are usually an extremely important, even deciding tool, but note that Cantor lost to Brat even though he was an incumbent, and outspent him 26-1. You don’t want Trump to outspend other candidates, then lose to them because they had a better ground game…
3) even a President Trump will be hamstrung with a Congress as corrupt as the ones we’ve been getting for the last 40 years (if not longer). We really need to FIRE huge swathes of them. The soft point of their smug armor is attacking with reform candidates during primaries (due to gerry-mandering, and the smallish turnout in primaries). You don’t just want Trump to be elected President, you want Trump to be elected President ALONG WITH a bunch of allies.
Although I’m a web developer myself, the fastest way to get these tools made is to hire a crack TEAM of programmers, and at least 1 stellar software architect. They need only follow a specification that I would provide (more precisely, we would develop the spec together, and follow an agile methodology. I would initially provide a requirements document.) I’d be willing to donate my time, provided there was a firm commitment on the part of Trump (or the Trump campaign) to create these tools, ASAP. (Not that I’d refuse a paid gig.)
BTW, I’ve attended many tech meetup.com meetings, and have been far more impressed by entrepreneurs than clueless activists. E.g., one such event I attended was called a “co-founder date night” (they changed the name, later, but you get the idea), in Cranbury, NJ. People got a few minutes to pitch, and if they didn’t have an ASK in there, they’d be interrupted and prompted for one.
If only activists were 1/4 as practical….