by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
This is just me playing pretend as to what I would do if given any real power when it came to thinking strategically about how to end this surreal political nightmare the nation finds itself in.
First, I would focus on what, exactly, the ideology of the Radical Resistance is. Though the use of the term “radical” is scary to a lot of people, a lot of other people, do, in fact, feel that Trump is radicalizing them on a political level. That’s why I think it’s inevitable that both Trump will use the term on Twitter for marketing purposes and blue check liberals will nervously oppose its use by fed up members of the now rather vague Resistance because they think it will scare off Republican housewives in the exurbs of Philadelphia. But we’re in a crisis and it seems to me if we design an ideology that makes it clear that the use of the term “radical” is more about walking in the tradition of Reconstruction’s Radical Republicans than it is, say, some crazy radical shit from the 60s. That would take some message management, especially given how hysterical Fox News will be once Trump finally gets round to using Radical Resistance instead of Radical Democrats.
I don’t know who would actually formalize the ideology of the Radical Resistance, which, for me, at least can be summed up as, “Do whatever it takes to get 67 Senators to vote for conviction on impeachment charges.” If you establish that as your “mission statement,” then trying to appeal to #NeverTrumpers who are great writers and thinkers — and know how conservative Senators think — makes a lot more sense. Remember, for me, the whole issue is simply assembling a passionate, focused coalition devoted to the specific political act of removing Trump from office Constitutionally as quickly as possible — preferably immediate.
That’s my personal vision for all of this, at least.
Meanwhile, after I got that settled, Iwhat I would do is design an app much like Vote Save The People from Crooked Media. That would be, going forward, the key to bringing down the Trump regime . I say this because right now we’re in this odd fuzzy world where 60% of the population is slowly beginning to cook with rage over Trump’s tyrannical behavior…but The Establishment is playing by “old rules” where you have to, like, at least pretend to get the lobotomized MAGA mouth breathers to the table before you can broach the subject of impeachment in any real way.
But, by definition, Radical Resistance rejects that view and says so what if we come off as hyperpartisan. It’s like Republicans weren’t potting to impeach President Hillary Clinton as soon as they could for “emails” or whatever else they could pull out of their collective asses.
Anyway, you come up with an app that serves the utilitarian purpose of kind of giving people like me a Deluxe MAGA-Free Twitter where we could plot our moves and mobilize en mass as needed. The app could start off basic and branch out as needed feature-wise. And if you should happen to design a Twitter Killer along the way AND save modern journalism, that would be pretty cool.
The issue at hand is the newspaper business is dying. It seems as though the best way to fix the problem is to completely re-imagine what a newspaper is. Newspapers have always been a platform for distributing news, but over the years they have come to have significantly great cultural meaning than that.I propose we get down to basics and provide a platform for writers, photographers and videographers to contribute quality content to a social media platform and be paid for it. Now, if you did it right, it’d be a win-win scenario because content providers would get paid and you, the startup, would make money from advertising.
I propose you base your startup loosely on Usenet concepts. I’m the first to say something like that already exists — Reddit — but this would take the Reddit model to the next level in various ways. Producers of quality content would be recognized and monetarily rewarded. They would have to be in possession of a Verified Account, but after that things would be pretty simple.
One a Verified Account holder could start a new Group and within that Group start a new thread, which I call a Conversation. All content would be threaded and based on the Post, which would be multimedia and have a WYSIWYG editor built in. Reddit has kind of moved towards this and that would be a danger — that Reddit would co-opt all your features even if you had a lot of cool ones, but anyway, I have no money, can’t code and don’t want to learn, so this is just a daydream.
Shelton Bumgarner
Once you have the app in place, you use it to connect the more motivated members of the Radical Resistance to the average person who might want to use the app for no other reason than it is better designed than Twitter. Population mobilization on the DL, if you will.
Anyway.
But there’s a fatal flaw to this dream — unless something causes us to lurch into a very scary no-end-game-in-sight situation, you could produce the greatest app in history and…meh.
There would have to be a tipping point. And, right now, I don’t see it. We’re just going to muddle along for six more long years.
Feh.
But if you had those two things established already once the opportunity arose, then maybe something might happen. And, yet, like I keep saying, if we don’t get Trump by August 2019, we ain’t gunna get him for a long, long time.
