Voter’s Revenge is a generalized, but opinionated tool to facilitate populist organizing.
It can also be used to organize anti-populist goals, but that is a ‘necessary evil’ in creating a generalized tool. It can also be used stupidly or smartly, strategically speaking, though the tool will attempt to guide users along more productive paths.
It can target Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, as will be the subject of a future post, transpartisan efforts can be facilitated by creating allied posses, which target both Democrats and Republicans, toward a single end. (See Glen Greenwald’s youtube Should the populist left ever work with the populist right? – System Update with Glenn Greenwald for real world examples of transpartisanship in Congress).
Development of the re-imagined version of Voter’s Revenge has been languishing, regretably.
Even so, my recent reading of BREAKING: RINOS WIN – AMERICANS LOSE: FISA 702 Again Passes House by Vote of 259-128 – Here are The 117 RINOs Who Voted for Warrantless Spying on Americans , pushed me to try and come up with a shortcut, that would address part of the vast problem with government. While RINOs may only be a part of the problem is, they constitute a HUGE target.
It wasn’t so much the article contents, but the comments that pushed me over the edge. There is nothing terribly surprising about the dark path that Congress is on, including RINOs, given the history of corruption by elites going back decades. Corrupt Congress Critters are going to Corrupt Congress Critter, RINOs are going to RINO, etc. It’s what they do, and who they are. Unless the populists develop real political muscle and more strategic smarts than they typically manifest, things will not get better.
As far as I’m concerned, the public is very badly led by it’s activists, including those who aren’t actually shills for “the man”. It’s the activists that should be looking outside-the-box for any edge against financially superior, entrenched, plutocratic opposition, so they can supply leadership to the “bewildered herd” of non-activists.
Ah, but where is the ground game? For anything? The only politically oriented things I can see, currently, in public spaces in NJ are billboards, both for and against Israel in it’s current military actions against Gaza. The support for Gaza could be considered left populist, but what about any other issue? The left populists used to have a significant anti-war movement, but that seems all but dead, overall. It’s quite dead with respect to Ukraine, even if not Gaza.
So, public spaces, that aren’t controlled by the usual censors infecting mainstream media and Big Tech media (like Facebook) are being ignored by the activists, by and large. 1
Therefore we should not be surprised that the commenters at thegatewaypundit are clueless about how to proceed, but it isn’t entirely their fault.
Anyway, to help out clueless right wing populists, led by strategically inept right wing activists, I am publishing a spec for “DumpTheRinos.org”. It’s tool which just lets nearby right wing populists find each other, via throwaway public emails they create just for this purpose, use geospatial distance calculated by zipcode. The zipcodes and throwaway emails provide a good measure of privacy.
Once these populists find each other, they can self-organize to vote out their common RINO during his/her next primary. (Or even general election, if they have the nerve; which they probably don’t. Once again, this lack reflects the persistent strategic cluelessness I observe on left and right, though it might be more rational for this particular election (for right wingers) because of the political configuration involving Trump facing relentless lawfare, and the enormity of damage that the Democrats have wrought, under Biden).
In the Voter’s Revenge world, the DumpTheRinos posses are voteslinger posses. The goal of such posses is termination of the political career of the target.
Today I tried to get developers on freelancer.com to implement this spec, but the two I talked to severely lowballed their bids. Apparently, to get a serious developer interested, you need at least $1,000 to $2,000. Chicken feed, compared to the $2 billion or so that will be spent in this Presidential election, but that is what it is. I can’t spend this sort of money, right now.
Finally, I’ll note that political websites are, and have been, WASTELANDS for publicly oriented political organizing. This is true of lefty ones (like dailykos) and righty ones (like thegatewaypundit.com and breitbart.com). They could EASILY ask for zipcode information and a throwaway public email, themselves, and provide spatially ordered search results. And thus, facilitate self-organization. Indeed, they could show geographic distance right in their comment sections, for users who are logged in, which would reveal geospatial info at a much smaller scale, but provide a constant reminder of what local organizing is possible.
I don’t think this is an accident. I think the “powers that be” want to contain and control the public, by just providing a place for them to vent; and then, during election season, be guided towards establishment candidates, where it’s understood that, rhetorically speaking (at least), establishment left and establishment right can be very different. After the election is over, the mobilized suckers are demobilized. As reported on more honest lefty websites (like firedoglake and openleft, both now defunct…) Obama’s organization deliberately dismantled his very enthusiastic base, at least after his first Presidential election. Wouldn’t want to let the rubes interfere with Obama’s neoliberal agenda, after all. I’m not aware of Trump asking his enthusiastic base to do much of anything, either, when he got elected.
I’m basically on lifelong independent, but in my previous online life haunted mostly progressive websites. There was a very lefty (but very decent) guy named Jeff Roby, who I ended up meeting, befriending, and even collaborating with. We only found out that we lived in adjacent towns (Newark and Jersey City) by accident, as it fell out of an online conversation. The host website, like basically all of them that I had surveyed way back when, didn’t bother facilitating any face to face organizing. (Some websites and organizations do occasional, social meetups, perhaps only when attended by the “big cheese”. E.g., I think nakedcapitalism does the “big cheese” version, and dailykos will serve up these meetups without markos present.)
1 – here in NJ. I’ve seen headlines about blocking bridges in CA. Hey, it’s a big country, and my point remains.