« BACK  |  PRINT

RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

“The Left owns the Internet”

And other observations about building activists and organizers

By: Bill S (Diary)  |  November 30th, 2008 at 03:12 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

A number of interesting observations have percolated throughout the Interweb in the aftermath of the 2008 election – arguments about the “youth vote”, the “center-right versus center-left,” pushing aside social conservative issues, etc. But one of the most thought-provoking topics receiving attention is the issue of the presence (or lack thereof) of the Right in the online “Web 2.0″ universe. As a technology geek by trade, this topic is near and dear to my heart.

Much has been made of the aforementioned “youth vote” in the post-election analysis, and within that discussion are implications that the youth were energized by the online presence of the Obama campaign. Tools such as YouTube, Twitter, Friendfeed, numerous blog sites, SMS, etc. were used to not only educate, but to “activate.” A huge portion of Obama’s fundraising was done via the web – small donations that eventually added up to huge numbers (please, let’s not get into the issue of overseas donations, etc. – that’s really not the point). These tools were used to empower activism, through GOTV-type projects, state-by-state campaign events, as well as fundraising. I am not 100% convinced that there is an obvious correlation between the high percentage of the 18-29 crowd that voted for BHO and his online presence…since youth are already steeped in online culture, and youth seem to lean left to start with, it is difficult to assign a direct cause/effect relationship proving that Obama’s leverage of technology led to his success with that demographic. But it certainly didn’t hurt.


This week the Washington Post ran an article by Jose Antonio Vargas titled “Republicans Seek to Fix Short-Sitedness”. It focused on the efforts of Patrick Ruffini and others, including RedState.com’s own Erick Erickson, to move forward with efforts to ignite the GOP and conservatives in leveraging the resources of the Internet. The WaPo article is one of the best overviews of the situation to surface in the post-election mop-up.

The problem we have is illustrated by Vargas:

The right owns talk radio; the left owns the Internet.

For years, that’s been the simplest way to explain the online gap between the two parties. “Of course Republicans are behind online,” says Newt Gingrich, arguably the Webbiest of the party’s elder statesmen. American Solutions for Winning the Future, a group Gingrich founded, uses the Internet to harness grass-roots energy on issues such as oil drilling. “When one of Obama’s senior online advisers is the co-founder of Facebook, when Gore sits on the board of Google and Apple — well, let’s just say the Republicans are not in the same century yet, okay?” (Actually, Gore is a senior adviser to Google, but Gingrich’s point stands.)

“The right owns talk radio; the left owns the Internet“. Interesting observation, and mostly accurate. There are many conservative/GOP blogs and related sites on the ‘net, but few are aimed at the kind of “grass-roots energy” to which Gingrich alludes. “Talk radio” is, and will (hopefully) remain as part of our strategy, but more must be done…on the Internet, in particular.

What needs to be done?

Without question, the GOP/conservative world must become more active in the online “activist” universe, much like the Left did in the 2008 election season. Last week, Erick Erickson, RedState’s Editor-in-Chief and face to the world, posted a call-to-action for the RedState community. Please go back and read his posting again (and again) to get a feel for where we must go to succeed in future elections. I believe the most significant recommendation was that we must become “an army of activists“. Ruffini echoes this sentiment in the WaPo article:

Examples of the gap abound. State-by-state online activism was an integral part of the Democratic National Committee’s 50-state strategy, something the Republican National Committee does not have. A handful of congressional districts could have easily gone Republican, Ruffini says, if more conservative bloggers had helped to raise money and to get boots on the ground. “But as it stands, most bloggers in the right see blogging as a communications medium,” Ruffini says. “Bloggers in the right need to look at what the bloggers in the left have been doing and learn to be activists, too.”

Ruffini is kind enough to recognize the efforts that RedState (and others) have made already:

Some of the bloggers Ruffini is targeting write on such sites as RedState.com and TheNextRight.com, which he co-founded. They understand where he’s coming from. Many even signed up on Rebuild the Party, including Erick Erickson, RedState’s managing editor. Erickson says conservative bloggers are more concerned with debating policies and ideologies than with how close “a particular race is shaping up in this or that congressional district.” In the past three years, however — especially in the six months leading up to the election — that mindset has started to change. “There’s been a real shift to not just focus on national races but local races, too,” Erickson says. “But it takes awhile for the ship to turn.”

But we must move even more in this direction. Shortly after the election, Moe Lane called us out to produce more state- and local-focused diaries, and our readership responded brilliantly. That must continue.

This is not to say that we must cease discussing the issues and exploring the policy positions of our candidates. In fact, in the wake of the 2008 loss, it is all the more important for conservatives and the GOP to identify where we stand on the issues – and ensure that we (as many as possible) are singing from the same hymnal. Are we a three-legged stool conservative party? Should we jettison certain policy planks of the GOP platform? But let’s not get lost in this discussion and forget that we must also “go offline” and act outside our online debates.

We can rebuild it. We have the technology.

One of our goals must be to become more adept at using the technology at our disposal to get our message heard, understood, and accepted. I will cover some of this in future diaries, but for now, RebuildTheParty.com has a great summary of what must be done:

The Internet: Our #1 Priority in the Next Four Years

Winning the technology war with the Democrats must be the RNC’s number one priority in the next four years.

The challenge is daunting, but if we adopt a strongly anti-Washington message and charge hard against Obama and the Democrats, we will energize our grassroots base. Among other benefits, this will create real demand for new ways to organize and route around existing power structures that favor the Democrats. And, you will soon discover, online organizing is by far the most efficient way to transform our party structures to be able to compete against what is likely to be a $1 billion Obama re-election campaign in 2012.

RedState.com and our brother and sister GOP/conservative sites will be key participants in this effort. Soren Dayton illustrates how we can do this:

You can make the fundraisers a little more efficient. You can make the GOTV more efficient. You can have a better message and get it out better. These are linear improvements. But political organizations grow exponentially when you improve the organizers. That’s what the Obama campaign did. Everything was focused on making the organizer better.
Ultimately, the GOP will have to learn this message. We will have to learn to empower our activists by incentivizing recruiters. The person who recruits 100 volunteers will have to be as important as the person who raises $100,000. When the GOP organizes itself around these principles and deploys technology to make these people better, then the center-right electorate will translate into winning electoral majorities.

RedState and the rest of the conservative/GOP online universe needs to be building better organizers. This can be done with blogs, as well as other e-tools that are out there at our disposal. More on that later.

Better organizing through technology.

Tags: , , ,

COMMENTS

POSTING RULES  |  LOGIN TO COMMENT  |  REGISTER TODAY
  • simpson316

    Any time that there is something important that needs to be done, make sure that you tell at least 5 other people about it (online or otherwise). It’s all about the law of large numbers. The more people that get involved and get others involved the better. The use of tools like Facebook, Twitter, etc make this easier (and make the number 5 incredibly smaller than who you will actually reach…I have 354 followers on Twitter).

  • Lagomorph13

    This is Part 1, cross-posted at The Next Right:

    We’ve seen the Gold Standard, the Housing Standard, and the Dollar Standard. What’s next? Will the Information Standard be the real measure of value that we often refer to as “wealth”? How we create, accumulate, aggregate, package, protect, invest and proliferate information is what’s most likely going to influence and grow monetary, sociocultural and political capital.

    With the exception of technologically innovative methods of knowledge accumulation and proliferation, the methods of creating and promoting Liberal Intelligence have remained fairly consistent since the rise labor unions and labor activism which evolved into the civil rights and social justice activism of the 20th Century. These methods include printed materials, public demonstrations, speeches, rallies, civil disobedience, literature, theater, art, music, film, and media coverage which cumulatively result in mass participation which lead to public and academic support.

    Conservatives don’t usually embrace mass demonstrations and don’t enjoy the same media coverage or support from the arts, students and academics. Watching the success of Liberal grassroots movements online, it’s tempting for the Right to follow the successful lead of its opposition. The thought that if only the Right had its own version of the The Nation, Daily Kos, AlterNet, Talking Points Memo, MyDD, Open Left, et al, we would have a more cutting edge capability is fine until one realizes that we already have National Review Online, RedState, InstaPundit, PowerLine, Michelle Malkin, Free Republic, The Next Right, and so on – all helpful, with many more great sites such as #dontgo, Team Sarah, Rebuild The Party, SmartGirlPolitics, not to mention Twitter aggregates, MySpace and Facebook groups on the way.

    But what can Conservatives create that’s separate but equal to Liberal collective action? I believe that Conservatives have an ability to both centralize and decentralize authority, to delegate up to representatives and down to the grassroots in a networked hierarchy that rolls individual contributions into a consensus that can be mobilized.
    Opinion can be “Interesting and Thepautic”, but it’s not Quantifiable Data

    Most of the sites mentioned above proliferate opinion. Several of the Liberal Information sites seek to drive behavior, which can be especially powerful during a campaign. But opinions expressed in the form of large blocks of text are not quantifiable data. What I mean by quantifiable data is a small block of information which can be stored in a database, linked to relevant associated data, and either reported back to the public in the form of “the public needs to know this!” or reported to executive decision and policymakers in the form of “the voters want leadership to know this!”. Think binary (yes/no, good/bad, accept/reject) responses to survey questions, think brief statements, URLs, or Tweets as opposed to blog posts, diaries or comments.

    We know that the Democratic Party mobilized a mighty army of GOTV propaganda and boots on the ground during 2006 and 2008, but how responsive is that leadership to its grassroots, and vice versa? While we heard a great deal of antiwar lipservice throughout the Democratic Primaries and General Election campaigns along with bailing out Main Street as well as Wall Street, the installation of an Obama Administration’s centrist/moderate cabinet of Chicago School free market economists and foreign policy hawks would seem to indicate a counterintuitive disconnect. The Republican Party can listen and implement its constituents’ needs, and it can do so better, faster and smarter through the application of Business Intelligence.
    Use the corporate Business Intelligence model to create Conservative Information Intelligence

    We’re having great debates on whether we should have a Washington-based Ideas Czar, a British model Shadow Cabinet, whether Libertarian values should override Social Conservative values, whether Realpolitik should supersede Reaganism, and so on. But what do the majority of our constituents really need and want from our leadership? I suggest we take these debates out of the hothouse echo chambers of opinion and march them into the field as follows:

    1. Obtain funding for a GOP Central Information Office (CIO) with an executive and technical staff including Oracle Database Administrators along with web developers, data analysts, report writers and infrastructure (server/network/data security) specialists.
    2. Create a secure central data repository (data warehouse) to accumulate, aggregate and report on information collected from the far reaches of the Conservative Information Network (CIN).
    3. Task the GOP-CIO with outreach to the following types of decentralized Conservative Intelligence gatherers and providers: conservative websites, weblogs and social media sites, local RNC offices, local and syndicated columnists and talk radio pundits (including blog talk radio) and the offices of conservative elected officials at all municipal, county, State and Federal levels.
    4. Task the GOP-CIO with developing a mission, a strategic information management plan, a formal set of requirements for designing the initial warehouse schema, and a set of easily reproduceable templates/widgets for collecting information onsite or forwarding users to formal survey sites (like “MyGOP.com” for example)
    5. Employ a mandatory business rule throughout the CIN of affiliated sites that every user who takes a survey or participates in a poll must provide a verifiable email with voter registration affiliation and demographic information.
    6. Task the GOP-CIO with “data stewardship” to eliminate prank users, spammers and other forms of distraction and disinformation.
    7. Ensure that each site in the GOP-CIO network has the ability to collect donations as well as data, and pay any fees necessary to display a banner such as “McAfee Secure Site”.
    8. Enable (train, fund, provide widgets) for each CIN affiliated site to display data feeds from the GOP with the data that “the public needs to know”.
    9. Seed the data warehouse with the list of registered Republicans and their email addresses, and task the GOP-CIO with providing a weekly email newsletter indicating “what’s hot” and “what the public needs to know” throughout the GOP network of affiliated websites. A good prototype for this is the Sacramento Bee’s “Capitol Alert” email.
      1. Identify every elected Republican official’s email in the database and aggregate information under the category of “this is what the local, State and Federal leadership needs to know” by district, State and Region to help provide informed decision support.

    In the corporate world, managing cultural change in the form of “User Motivation and Training” is always the biggest challenge associated with Business Intelligence. Local RNC chairs may need to draw users in through “Life of the Party” get-togethers and/or send their staff out into the field to knock on the doors of their constituents and literally show them how to log in, bookmark their favorite sites, and use them so that we can have more conservatives participate.

    If it turns out that 8 states prefer a Social Conservative national platform but 42 states prefer a fiscal/security conservative platform, then a report could be distributed indicating why the GOP has taken a particular policy position based on participatory democracy – at the same time providing needed information to local candidates within those 8 states indicating how they can best strategize to win their down ballot elections.

    There are so many opportunities here to interact face to face as well as online, to collect ideas and consolidate them into workable proposals and projects, to proliferate information virally and help the GOP represent its voters by making better popular policy decisions, collecting donations, promoting worthy candidates and re-forming the Republican Party that it almost seems a no-brainer. Nonetheless it would take a professional, well-funded, well-organized and highly motivated team to make it a reality.

    What do other Conservatives think?

  • bs

    That’s one of the tools I am going to hit hard in the next installment in my “We Have the Technology” series.

    354 followers? I am truly jealous. :-)

  • Lagomorph13

    This is Part 2, cross-posted at The Next Right:

    In my post titled “How the GOP can turn conservative information into Conservative Information Intelligence”, I appreciate the following feedback which let me know I did not articulate the vision clearly enough, to wit:

    “It is a road map to further strengthen the corporate’s anti-fiscal conservatism in pursuit of higher profits”

    My vision is to create an integrated network, a knowledge and a database supporting a two-way conversation between Conservative constituents and our leadership. There are two objectives:

    1. Inform voters of upcoming decisions that they might want to weigh in on – creating a virtual “voter lobby” to compete with the special interest groups for leadership attention.

    2. Inform leaders of voter input on local, State and National policy which the Republicans can support in the form of bills and debates (think: Drill Here, Drill Now).

    Measurable key performance indicators linked to these objectives are:

    • A clear message of what the Republican Party represents in the 21st Century

    • Accurate reporting on which local, state and national Republican lawmakers promote legislation and policies which reflect Conservative values

    • Increased participation in the democratic process by Conservatives

    • Increased donations to races where Conservative candidates can win

    • Increased registration and get out the vote efforts

    • Improved technology and integration in websites dedicated to Conservative activism

    • Improved communication between legislators and constituents

    • Improved ability of Conservatives to represent the needs of local communities and develop local solutions which could become models for national solutions

    Because my career has been in Corporate IT, I’m proposing a solution which is within my experience. To say we should not use Corporate Business Intelligence as a model because we’re against Corporate bail-outs and lack of Corporate fiscal responsibility is to throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water. In doing this we limit ourselves to a potential solution which establishes the GOP as an Enterprise in which the leadership provides benefits to its constituents, who are in turn viewed as shareholders in the Enterprise. Let’s not confuse a corporate BI model with a corporate culture that’s broken because of the low ethics and accountability of those who utilize it.

    At the same time, there are web technology experts (Patrick Ruffini, David All, Eric Odom come quickly to mind) who may review the requirements and propose (or invent!) a much more agile solution than mine which provides essentially the same functionality of fully integrated two-way communication.

    I don’t believe I recommended that this project should be “funded by Corporate money”, only that it should be well funded (by donations, whether corporate or individual). The idea is to retain a permanent team of skilled, salaried technology experts and project managers reporting to a Chief Information Officer (CIO) who are able to obtain consistent, repeatable results and assist local GOP staff and interested independent web activists to plug into the network.

    Another colleague wrote:

    “The problem with waiting for the ‘thousand gardens to bloom’ is the clock; with midterms arriving in 22.5 months and the primary season in 38 months a long learning curve and lots of trial and error experiments may not be feasible. And if we go into the next couple of cycles with the same lame campaign architecture we used this year we are screwed.”

    Any large undertaking such as this generally undergoes many iterations, beginning with a pilot project Proof of Concept. If the pilot project obtains the desired result, then it becomes a model, a template, a Center of Excellence for corresponding projects. The short term objective targets just one specific region, with 4 and 6 year long range objectives.

    The idea is to grow a sustainable, interactive, networked Conservative community, motivate our leadership to articulate Conservative ideas that map to core values shared by this community, and implement strategies to get out the vote once the foundation of ideas, values and communication infrastructure are in place.

    The basic premise is that the Democrats network and organize along the lines of a labor union and community activism model. Republicans, on the other hand, can successfully organize along the lines of a business enterprise model which aggregates information and accurately reports on issues, ideas and decisions of interest to both leadership and voters, and engages millions of registered Republicans and independent Conservatives via both email and interactive websites.

  • simpson316

    and I got hooked up with a lot of people through Eric Odom’s Twitter group on Facebook where everyone is required to follow each other. You can find the group here. He hasn’t updated the list in a while though.

    There is also a blog dedicated to ranking conservative Tweeters based on number of follower’s called the Top Conservatives on Twitter. The guy that runs the site limits to people who actually use the tool rather than just use it as an RSS feed.

  • sadlurker

    Web 2.0 is not a top down enterprise. The biggest contrast between RedState and left wing sites like Kos is they are true grass roots enterprises, not extensions of a firmly established corporate empire. Like I said way back when RedState’s sale was announced, this site is not going to become as successful as Kos when it’s part of the “Eagle Publishing Family” and its primary goal is profit rather than grassroots organizing.

    Likewise, you’re not going to bring people around by being (unnecessarily) authoritarian. The fact that someone who reads the comment section here on and off for a week during election season can probably name five different RedState administrators speaks volumes. Publicly announcing the banning of someone for disagreeing with a frontpager might be fun, but it plays into stereotypes about the GOP and is certainly not going to get anyone to join this community.

  • smagar

    From what I can tell, the GOP had all sorts of tools—e-mails, robocalls, more directed mailings than I’ve ever seen in my mailbox in my life—to get our message out to those people who were willing to listen to us.

    The problem was…not enough people wanted to listen in 2008. And, our message wasn’t as compelling or appealing as it had been in 2004.

    By all means, let’s improve our Internet posture. But, let’s not overemphasize technology as a solution.

    IMO, if we’d had a better political environment and a more appealing candidate, we could have won this thing.

    And, by the way, how does one “own” the Internet? I suppose you could argue that it’s possible to “own” talk radio, because there’s a limited number of AM radio channels in any given media market.

    But, the internet is virtually unlimited.

    People can find all the GOP and conservative websites they could ever want, if they have the slightest inclination to look for them, just a wee bit.

    In 2008, the public didn’t care to look for them. That was our problem.

  • NightTwister

    Probably lost on most. More than activism though, we’ve got to get involved someway in local gov’t. More on that in an upcoming blog.

  • cp4three2

    I’m interested in working with some people developing better conservative websites. I used to work on the creative end (idea guy) for a development company. I was planning on writing a business plan for an idea I had, but became too busy with finals (grad student in history). When I sent an email to Rebuildtheparty.com I never heard back.

    I’d be interested in working with some other conservatives in trying to get a good web presence.

  • GENE_LALOR

    **

    THE WICHITA MASSACRE, YET ANOTHER INSTANCE OF A MEDIA BLACKOUT
    Not surprisingly since I had made reference to it in a previous article on news blackouts on homosexual crimes, there exists another group which is accorded preferential treatment by the mass media: Black murderers of White victims.

    Being a news nut, I should recall the ?Wichita Massacre? but I can?t honestly say that I do. It?s not ancient history, having occurred a scant eight years back.

    It was another grisly tale which rivals and even surpasses in some respects the grisliness of the homosexual murders of Jesse Dirkhising and Jason Shephard and was not something one could easily forget?unless it received little or no media attention outside of Kansas. That apparently was the case, as it was with Jesse and Jason.

    I was alerted to the ?Wichita Massacre? by dozer7 on FreeRepublic.com and it was indeed an atrocity which should have been reported far and wide, but wasn?t.

    On the bitterly cold night of December 14th, 2000, two Black men, brothers Reginald Carr, age 23, and Jonathan Carr, age 20, staged a home invasion in Wichita. They proceeded to terrorize, torture, and rape the Whites present, forced each to withdraw money from an ATM, executed them in a barren soccer field, and ran over their dead bodies with a truck for good measure.

    Then they returned to the residence and looted it.

    Beyond that brief summary, which says more than enough, the reader is referred to http://www.wichita-massacre.com/ for the explicit, horrifying details of that night.

    (It was later discovered that the wilding night of the Wichita Massacre was just the culmination of a crime spree during which the brothers, who already had extensive criminal records, had committed armed robbery and another murder, all within days of arriving in Wichita. Both the robbery victim and the murdered woman were White.)

    Suffice to say, the Carr Brothers, armed with a single handgun, had perpetrated such horrendous acts that the prosecution sought and the bi-racial jurors handed down well deserved death sentences for both. Those sentences have yet to be carried out.

    Four of the five victims, most in their mid-twenties, three young men and one young woman, were brutally killed after the Carrs tortured and otherwise abused them; another woman was shot but miraculously escaped into the freezing night.

    As with Jesse and Jason, the issue is not merely the facts of the case but rather the media?s reaction and inaction with regard to reporting said facts, or of reporting anything at all on the story.

    The judge at the preliminary hearing, Rebecca Pilshaw, was more blatant than most in suppressing…

    (Read the rest of this article at http://genelalor.com/ .)

  • bs

    You have been doing this repeatedly. Cease and desist.

  • Neil_Stevens

    I’m a RedState site administrator, and I have a few suggestions for how you can assimilate better into our site community.

    Firstly, it is not allowed to post in the comments or the diaries just an excerpt of an article, and then link to your own page for the rest.

    However, we do welcome you to use the Diaries section to cross-post articles in their entirety, with a link to where you originally posted the article.

    Also, you should keep the long cross-posts in the diaries section, not the comments.

    Lastly, please refrain from using ALL-CAPS in diary and comment titles.

    Thank you and welcome to Red State!

    Mgmt.

  • Neil_Stevens

    Let me know what you’re good at and I can help you find ways to help.

  • Lagomorph13

    Thanks to Neil. I still have a day job (this week, at least!) as a Business Process Analyst, so I’m interested in proposing ways to integrate data from and to Conservative websites moreso than creating the websites themselves.

    Apologies to RedState admins & readers for creating such long comment responses, next time I’ll create a separate diary entry. :-)

  • bs

    We are trying to build an “army of activists”. Part of what we need are technology volunteers to help with the effort. If the original diary or the discussion results in more resources working for “the cause,” then we’ve been successful.

  • bs

    and you’re disagreeing with me by implying that Redstate is not “grass-roots.” Believe me, it takes a lot more than simple disagreement to get banned. Persistent troublemaking and breaking some basic cardinal rules, like being a racist or using excessive profanity, or overt promotion of ideology that is contrary to those of Redstate can get you banned. But not disagreement.

    Heck, we have more than one or two admitted Democrat/liberals here, and they’re not banned.

    As far as Eagle goes, that’s between you and them. If you have issues with the way the site is managed, I suggest you email the contact link with objective criticism and not the mere speculation and baseless accusation that you’ve posted.

  • mbecker908

    Come on bs, I know you weren’t born yesterday. The left doesn’t do objective criticism or logical argument. They do feelings and I’m sure that Eagle has hurt his tender little feelings at some point.

    I hope he doesn’t get banned. I hope he posts on things like policy issues. I have a package of brand new, very sharp sticks.

  • sadlurker

    I have no particular problem with Eagle–I’m just pointing out that a website owned by the establishment and operated by an elected Republican city councilman can hardly be called a “grassroots” operation.

    As for people only being banned for breaking “cardinal rules,” well, no one would take issue with that if that just entailed banning spammers and racists. However that hasn’t been the case on this site since people are banned for, as you put it, “promotion of ideology that is contrary to those of Redstate.” See, e.g., the Ron Paul blanket ban.

    That’s not how a grassroots operation works. Like I said in my last post, a true Web 2.0 enterprise (or any grass roots organization for that matter) isn’t run from the top-down, it’s run from the bottom-up. In other words, for RedState to ever become a grassroots organization, it has to develop to the point where the community, not RedState administrators, decides what constitutes “ideology that is contrary to those of Redstate.”

    Say what you want about kos, but the personal viewpoints of him and his co-administrators do not dictate the extent of allowable discourse in his community, and his site is much more successful because of it. For a good example of that on the right, I’d point to race42008/2012 (though it unfortunately cannot become an effective grassroots mechanism for the GOP because of its very limited purpose).

  • sadlurker

    This is precisely the sort of post I was referring to in my original comment. Just because someone disagrees with a front pager or is critical of RedState does not mean that person is a logic-hating leftist. Here, I did not say a single bad thing about Eagle in my post, yet I’m called a leftist, told that I “don’t do objective criticism or logical argument,” and that I only made my comment because “Eagle has hurt [my] tender little feelings at some point.” If you really want to know why this website does not attract more and better conservative activists, this is Exhibit A.

  • Moe_Lane

    It’s apparently all your fault. Remind me never to owe you money.

  • bs

    with the term “grass roots”. The fact that the web site is owned by a company does not prevent the organizing that is fostered by the web site from being “grass roots”. And by the way, in case you haven’t bothered to look up what that term means, see here. You’ll note that the term means “the common or ordinary people, esp. as contrasted with the leadership or elite of a political party, social organization, etc.; the rank and file.” It is irrelevant that the SITE is owned by Eagle and edited by Erick (whose elected office has virtually nothing to do with how this site is run). The fact is that we (along with other sites – note that Erick and other directors have signed onto the mission of RebuildTheParty.com) are working to enable the “ordinary people” to serve in activist/leadership roles. Ownership and/or control of the site is (I repeat) irrelevant.

    And if you’ve kidded yourself into thinking that DKos is some sort of all-welcoming, all-loving site that permits all opinions to be freely shared, then you are quite a naive individual. Just as we see “Nyah, nyah, Moe Lane kicked me off of Redstate” stories, there are equal, if not greater numbers of those who report back here that they’ve been banned at DKos. Make no mistake – they are after the same thing we are: to promote their political goals and objectives…and those who do not share their objectives and who voice contrary opinions out loud are summarily ejected from the site.

    By the way, there’s no such thing as a “Web 2.0 enterprise.” There are web sites that employ Web 2.0 technology, such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc. etc. – those that use social networking to connect individuals. And those sites/resources are content-agnostic…Twitter doesn’t give a rip if I tweet on politics or religion or why the Rams are the worst NFL team ever to set foot on a football field. Now if you are referring to “Politics 2.0″ (aka. Open Source Politics), then you may be somewhat closer to reality. But the fact remains that corporate ownership of Redstate does NOT equal corporate control of its ideology. I can tell you for a fact that there is no “big brother” up in the sky directing the front page contributors on what to contribute. It is up to us to figure that out. Are there criteria for those who contribute regularly? Yep. Read Erick’s posting that I linked. But hey, it’s a site that has the explicit mission of promoting Republican and conservative ideals. There are minimum standards to be met.

    One other note (and this is my personal opinion): RedState does not claim to be the be-all, end-all Interweb resource for the GOP and conservatives. There are many other valuable resources on the ‘net that we also will (and must) work with to further our objectives. TheNextRight.com and RebuildTheParty.com are two that I referenced in the diary and that I believe we can and will have a good partnership with. RedState is, and I am confident will remain, a key focal point blog site for GOP/conservative politics. A good deal of that is because our directors and moderators keep it a place for civil discourse and intelligent discussion.

  • mbecker908

    I have no problem with disagreement. I have a real problem with idiots who bounce in here and post crap that they think passes for logical argument.

    I would offer two lefties, CrabCakes and flyerhawk who I have virtually no opinions in common with. Yet we, and the rest of the RS community, have vibrant discussion on all sorts of issues because they can construct a logical argument, marshal facts and opinion – and they understand the difference – and present their case.

    You, along with a couple of other people I can think of off the top of my head, are not blessed with those abilities. You throw crap against the wall and then get pissed when we don’t think it’s “art”.

    First of all, it ain’t art. Second, go whine someplace else.

  • mbecker908

    But then again, there’s a fairly large contingent who will insist I don’t have feelings, primarily headed by Mrs908, a sizable group of “former employees” and a couple of RS posters.

    Oh well. :>0

  • JSobieski

    Are you a leftist?
    If so, you should expect to receive a certain amount of grief on a right site.

    It not, why do you internalize comments that aren’t about you?

  • Moe_Lane

    All that I ever get accused of is being a big bully and shill for our Dread Corporate Secret Masters. You got to be responsible for the destruction of the whole GOP’s chances in 2008. That’s kind of impressive, really.

  • mbecker908

    (Where, BTW, the high today was a bone chilling 78 and the low tonight will be a “Turn up the electric blanket dammit!” 53.)

    And, in retrospect, I might just be responsible for the death of the GOP. After all, I had posted probably dozens of diaries blasting McCain last year. They were all, if I do say so myself, very well thought out, very logical and extremely well written. That those facts were somehow overlooked or disregarded by the Directors when it came time to promote diaries should have hurt my feelings given all the work I put into those masterpieces, but we’ve already covered THAT subject in this diary. Anyway, earlier this year I recanted and posted a diary to the effect that I would vote for McCain if he was the nominee, thereby halting my long practice of having never voted for him. Obviously, in retrospect, that diary must have carried tremendous weight (missed again by the Directors – what do those guys do anyway???) and the nomination swung to McCain. And here we find ourselves in the wilderness.

    All I can say is I’m sorry. And frog snot.

  • Gekster

    The majority of the people on Kos just like the fact that anyone can and do say literally anything, no matter how disgusting, profane or what.
    The majority are teenagers, and early collage, who think they have tossed the shackles of their parents.
    They can use all the foul language that they want among other things. That in itself is a good seller.

    If Redstate let anything be said along the lines of foul language, then I think their following would be much greater.
    And if you want to find an argumentative idea on the Kos, then good luck wading through that.
    I’m not saying grassroots support should be ignored,
    But the grassroots on Kos isn’t what you think.
    I am also only talking from my own experience on that site.
    I do read some lefty sites, if only to confirm if my own beliefs are right for me. The Kos cements my beliefs.
    As far as politics, the Democrats will belly up with a pit of snakes, if there were a sizeable majority, and if they could vote.
    Bill Ayers, anyone?

  • devCharles

    and not all of you think that he’s a real Republican, but Ron Paul did have a lot of success raising money online and getting a lot of grassroots support. His paleoconservative/libertarian policy obviously isn’t the same as neo-conservative policy, but it is a definite part of the Republican Party. Clearly he did something right.