Dan Ancona's Blog

July 7, 2020

Beautifully put!

Beautifully put!

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Published on July 07, 2020 12:13

May 8, 2018

Absolute numbers would be awfully helpful to know here.

Absolute numbers would be awfully helpful to know here. If you doubled it from 3 to 6, that’s great, but also… not great.

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Published on May 08, 2018 10:29

January 5, 2018

White people are about to make a fortune from something black folks have been getting tossed in…

White people are about to make a fortune from something black folks have been getting tossed in jail for for decades. Not sure how fixing that is remotely comical.

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Published on January 05, 2018 10:42

December 14, 2017

AL Sen Message Landscape

A link dump for AL Sen ads. Contact Dan for Always Forward’s detailed report.

Jones Camphttps://medium.com/media/33aaf955574e7f9b9497b7dcfc34b6dc/hrefhttps://medium.com/media/302daadd28b01336226a70fd64fef8c5/hrefhttps://medium.com/media/795fc51f082070920d9b1d998e8f1826/hrefhttps://medium.com/media/7c41d2d7ede3a170528212842e8f8bea/hrefbody[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;}

AL-Sen: Doug Jones up with new spot responding to hits. Ran during the #SECChampionship -- Jones: "Roy Moore's attacks on me just aren't true." https://t.co/GrkXm89w1R

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: New Doug Jones TV ad features quotes from Ivanka Trump, Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby Voiceover: "Conservative voices putting children and women over party. Doing what's right." https://t.co/gadoU4lfh0

 — @MediumBuying

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@realDonaldTrump And Doug Jones is up with this new spot -- https://t.co/gY5Adn9eDn

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: Doug Jones is up with a new radio ad featuring a clip of Charles Barkley Barkley: "I don't understand why that's even a question. I mean Roy Moore is running with Steve Bannon who's a white separatist." https://t.co/BMc1kBpGX4

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: Biggest TV audience of the campaign -- Doug Jones goes with his positive bio spot Was last avail before the Post Game Show on WIAT (Birmingham) #IronBowl https://t.co/a1cXTepMov

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: Doug Jones is up with this to-camera closer https://t.co/7rjvDF74Di

 — @MediumBuying

This sparked a rather incredible amount of backlashDem IEs — Highway 31/Putnam TV Ads/Stand Up Republic

Anti-Roy Moore ad removed from You Tube after complaints

Full text of removed pre-roll ad: “If you don’t vote and Roy Moore — a child predator — wins, could you live with that? Your vote is public record and your community will know whether or not you helped stop Roy Moore. On Tuesday, December 12, vote for Doug Jones.”

Screenshots of video that was briefly available on facebookbody[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;}

AL-Sen: Pro-Doug Jones group Highway 31 is up with this creative -- Voiceover: "What do people who know Roy Moore say?" https://t.co/R0dvYU05ve

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: Highway 31 radio ad -- "Tigers. Crimson Tide. Hank Williams. Hank Aaron. Bo Jackson. Bear Bryant. Rosa Parks. War Eagle. Roll Tide. This is Alabama... But, after this Tuesday Alabama could become something very different." https://t.co/aZf0R8V5QF

 — @MediumBuying

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Highway 31 is also up with this TV ad focused on Roy Moore's charity $$$ -- https://t.co/wrlW0Hwrke

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: Pro-Doug Jones group Highway 31 is up with this spot -- https://t.co/VKaDq7s3c0

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: New TV ad "Strong" from pro-Doug Jones super PAC Highway 31 Voiceover by (of course) Nick Schatzki https://t.co/sfs1IPbRM8

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: New TV ad from @StandUpRepublic airing in Birmingham DMA -- "I love our country and I want decent people in office. That's why I can't vote for Roy Moore. What he's done and what he stands for... he makes us Republicans and us Christians look bad." https://t.co/hWy3kOt7L6

 — @MediumBuying

Moore Camp & IEsbody[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;}

AL-Sen: Roy Moore is back up with a spot he first ran back in August (graphics modified for general election) https://t.co/bEvzjhWQY6

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: America First Action is up with this spot -- Voiceover: "Jones is so extreme he supports abortion even at 20 weeks when a baby can move and be felt by the mother." https://t.co/9hYHw5NsG6

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: Pro-Roy Moore group Proven Conservative PAC is up on TV with this spot Voiceover: "Well Doug Jones, your extreme views embarrass Alabama." https://t.co/QsjRHGFqQh

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: Roy Moore campaign up with radio ad featuring @DrJamesCDobson Dobson: "Recently I have been dismayed and troubled about the way he and his wife Kayla have been personally attacked by the Washington establishment

 — @MediumBuying

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AL-Sen: New ads up on TV tonight -- Roy Moore has rotated in this spot featuring @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/zE2yitEy0i

 — @MediumBuying

Nonpartisan/other databody[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;}

AL-Sen: The Southern Poverty Law Center is running TV and radio ads encouraging people to vote https://t.co/fluXqdaoYj

 — @MediumBuying

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On TV in AL-Sen -- Roy Moore direct Proven Conservative PAC Great America Alliance America First Action (starts 12/6) Restore Our Godly Heritage PAC (starts 12/6) Doug Jones direct Highway 31 Stand Up Republic (starts 12/7) Also: SPLC up w/ ads focused on voter turnout

 — @MediumBuying

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Mobile time spent up *43%* since just last year. https://t.co/MtANzxELVT h/t @michaelbeach

 — @PeterHamby

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AL SEN spending stats, crunched by @IssueOneReform: Race (including primary) has cost $40m. Doug Jones has raised $11.8m, $10m since Oct 1. Roy Moore has raised $5.3m.

 — @PoliticsReid

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Published on December 14, 2017 15:09

October 3, 2017

Well I’m definitely writing one of these!

Well I’m definitely writing one of these! I’m about half way done, but I’m curious — where this is going for me is (like with Venus Shrugged) that it is more of a story about HOW this happens, more than what happens after it’s implemented. That’s just the area I’m the most interested in! Not too late for me to change course, and of course there’s no saying what’s going to resonate with the judges. And I am planning on having a bit of what happens after. But I’m curious if this seems like the kind of thing you’re hoping to get out of this contest. Thanks!

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Published on October 03, 2017 14:43

July 3, 2017

James this is outstanding.

James this is outstanding. I’m glad this conversation is coming up again, and I hope it gets farther than it did ten years ago, when I wrote this…

Another New Vision | DMI Blog

I’m having to build out an updated version of this to go into my book (fiction, about how it happens and what the world is like when it does), but I will definitely take your framework into account too.

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Published on July 03, 2017 10:12

June 29, 2017

Large corporations are grappling with racism and sexism in their ads. Why are Democrats afraid to?

This just might possibly have something to do with why Democrats have lost 1000 seats over the past eight years.Not a metaphor at all, nope. (via Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
“There’s nothing in the middle of the road except yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” -Jim Hightower
“When all else fails, blame the consultants.” -Apocryphal

Because I enjoy many forms of suffering, I’ve been going through all the ads I can find online for the GA 6 special election. I’m limiting this analysis to just ads that are available online. It’s possible that some ads were tv-only, and if so, they aren’t included here. And to be honest, I gave up after watching a bunch of the IE (Independent Expenditure, i.e. SuperPAC) ads attacking him. The patterns became clear enough.

I have no idea if this race was winnable or not. Yes, it is a deep red district, R+one gazillion or so. Yes, it’s in The South, with its ever-present Deep Cultural Issues. (we’ll get to this) Yes, he was viciously attacked by a bunch of outside groups and SuperPACs that raised and spent nearly as much as he did. And yes, he did pretty well despite all that, pulling up 10k votes shy of what Hillary got in the general, which is an impressive performance in a special election, no matter how you slice it.

But, winnable or not, the media approach his campaign took was yet another gigantic missed opportunity. And it’s a problem that’s going to lead the Dems to snatching defeat from the jaws of potential victory in 2018 if they don’t sort it out.

The question Dems need to be asking themselves right now is that between so many unambiguously catastrophic GOP policy failures, a health care bill that literally nearly everyone hates (it was polling at 17% when I started writing this morning, but it’s almost lunchtime now and it’s dropped another point — oh, and now another poll has it at TWELVE), and with Trump so clearly in over his head and already below 40% approval, is this:

Why is anyone still voting for Republicans?

One of the better books on contemporary politics was Matt Bai’s The Argument, from back in mid-2008. It was snapshot of the progressive and Democratic world, from online activists to donor communities like the Democracy Alliance. His basic theme was that despite a large pile of evidence showing their ideas lead to better outcomes, Democrats don’t spend a whole lot of time making arguments as to why they’d be better at running the country.

Eight years later, the basic premise of this book holds up incredibly well. Ossoff’s race was a textbook example of this problem.

His ads started out stronger than they finished, for some reason. This ad uses an anti-corruption frame …

https://medium.com/media/574cd7068ecba9ef0d4324bc48312b44/href

… which is a much stronger argument for a Dem (particularly in the age of Trump!) than the bland “both sides waste money” argument that became the theme he later stuck with:

https://medium.com/media/934b0da94baf26d86aa814292ee25763/href

I won’t make you sit through the attack ads. There were … a lot of them. These two are utterly ridiculous, but will give you the basic idea:

https://medium.com/media/46f28cdaee87d6ac06c36103ced95e14/hrefhttps://medium.com/media/f2206c47da72fe1525d3fd4638cef2aa/href

Here’s the overall message box for the two of them:

From that you can see the race was won in typical fashion: by puking a mountain of garbage on Ossoff. Handel’s definition honestly was pretty weak. Maybe even worse than Ossoff’s. But given that it was a lame-off on the positive (left-hand) side of the box, she ended up winning the positioning battle through two factors: first, Ossoff’s anti-government messages made a better case for Handel’s candidacy than it did for his own, and second, by absolutely torching him with repeated broadsides of negative ads.

Ossoff did go weakly negative, but apparently solely on Handel’s defunding of Planned Parenthood. But there were SO MANY lines of attack that he never attempted. He ran one incredibly limp ad mentioning Trump (but not tying Handel to him). He ran one defensive ad denying that he liked big government that broke the basic rule of responding (add a charge of your own). He never defended Pelosi. He never mentioned Handel’s outside funding, despite the clear opportunity to do so (and keep in mind that since negative ads are usually run through outside spending, Handel spent well over twice as much tearing Ossoff down):

via nytimesvia huffpo

As a Vox subhead summed it up: Handel, running against Ossoff’s outside money, is almost totally funded by outside money.

What COULD he have done?

I am not suggesting the Ossoff needed to run as the Second Incarnation of Bernie, Architect of Single Payer, Taxer of Wealth, Slayer of Corporate Power. (Although with even conservatives starting to talk about post-Obamacare insurance company profits being out of control, you have to start to wonder if, just maybe, there’s a leeeetletinybit of room to start dragging this conversation to the left.)

But even without tacking hard to the left, Ossoff could have at least tried taking his own side in the debate. Instead, he let Handel and her outside groups completely dominate the terrain.

Here’s one example: there is no doubt that immigration played a big role in this race under the surface. It wasn’t a core part of Handel’s media, but she’s got pro-wall stuff on her site and it surely was a part of her stump. But why would any average scared white suburban voter be against the wall? Plenty of Dems have pointed out that it’s a stupid waste of money, but how many of them have had the guts to run an ad about it? Let alone an ad with a vision of how the economies of our two countries should work.

You have to somehow connect with people’s actual problems. It’s not just a campaign strategy: if you’re not doing this, why on earth are you bothering with running? During the primary, a bridge collapsed and a major highway in Atlanta buckled:

Low taxes are awesome!

Either of those incidents would have made a terrific visual for an ad about infrastructure that could have been easily contrasted with all of Handel’s blah-blah about being against big government.

Or, he could have talked about health care in some kind of remotely substantive way that went beyond “we should fix Obamacare, not repeal it.” Ossoff’s ads repeatedly talked about how great entrepreneurs are but failed to mention that the ACA helps them, let alone how further stabilizing health care access would help entrepreneurs and small business even more.

The point is, there’s lots of stuff he could have done. Republican ideas lead to lousy outcomes. But it’s not reasonable to expect voters to connect these dots on their own.

[Whispering] But … what about the racism?

You’re probably thinking, but, what about those Deep Seated Southern Cultural Issues (*cough*racism*coughcough*) that we’re always hearing about? You know, the ones that Trump has made so much more of a salient factor?

Sure, there are some racist Republicans in the South. I guarantee there are some racist Dems, too! But as big of a problem as racist voters are, the bigger problems are that some “leaders” are cravenly exploiting that racism. And it’s maybe just as bad that nominally anti-racist candidates from a nominally anti-racist party are running scared from talking about antiracism.

As an indication of just how weak this is, even corporate brands are starting to take on racism and sexism. Even during the Super Bowl! They falter sometimes (c.f. Kendall Jenner ad or Heinekin), but sometimes they do alright. Alright enough that it’s clear that this is where the culture is going:

https://medium.com/media/be02fccffcfb280f498b1c532709fd64/hrefhttps://medium.com/media/462f113ec31733c6245e92b528439671/href

Our ads don’t have to all be this amazing -

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Holy shit. This ad from @IronStache announcing his run against Paul Ryan is something. Take a couple minutes. Watch. #WI01 https://t.co/oveJZVle2c

 — @timjhogan

But if Dems want to win in 2018, they should probably consider targeting strategies not aimed at their own feet.

How does this happen, and is there anything we can do?

There are a lot of systemic pieces at play here. This is part of the problem:

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This is something @sarahkliff mentioned on the Weeds 2 days ago & I think she's right: There's something broken about Dems' ad focus groups.

 — @mattyglesias

But it’s not entirely that simple. Ultimately, positioning comes down to the who the candidate is and what they want to run on. But they’re always going to get buffeted around by lead consultants, media consultants, pollsters, large donors, the DCCC if they’ve been anointed, and who knows who else, and those people simply need to get better at this. (The DNC itself is less involved, but you have to think that if Rep Ellison or Tom Perez were on top of this, they could have made a couple of phone calls.)

There are things you can do!

Build Your Local Democratic Party. When I was on a local Democratic County Central Committee, we saw weeding out candidates that were weak, too cozy with various special interests, or that just didn’t get it as a big part of our job. We weren’t always successful, but we were at least a strong countervailing force. Bernie was flat-out wrong about building the party. This is not an esoteric question. It’s something everyone, everywhere should be doing.

Support Diverse Candidates and Diverse Consultants. New organizations like Reflective Democracy Campaign and Democracy In Color are working on exactly this problem. Follow and support them. And if you’re a candidate, stand up for what you believe in and don’t settle for less. There are lots of good, diverse consultants that get this stuff, and there should be more: if you work in TV or advertising, think about getting more involved. Your country needs you. Or choose already awesome consultants. Hire Jessica Byrd. Hire Chuck Rocha. Hire Anat Shenker-Osorio. Hire Frank Chi. I’m sure there are lots of other good consultants. Someone should make a list!

Buy, Read and Share My Dang Book. You knew this one was coming, right? But seriously, we have to get better at telling stories and thinking about the future we really want. My book definitely isn’t THE vision, but it’s A vision, and we need a heckuva lot more of that:

Read Venus Shrugged, a new novel from Dan Ancona

It’s Not Hopeless

When I first watched these ads, I was feeling pretty depressed. Particularly the hit tying him to the black-bloc protestors — it’s downright depressing not just that they’d throw an attack like that, but that they wouldn’t get laughed out of the country for it.

But it’s not hopeless. We can track candidates that are doing better. Building local party infrastructure is hard but deeply satisfying work, as is building a reflective democracy. And absolutely everyone should read my book. Some candidates will figure this out in 2018, some won’t. Hopefully it will be enough that do.

Dan Ancona is a democratic and civic technology expert, weirdly awesome DJ and novelist. You should b efriend his bot , sign up for his email list , or just go ahead and buy a few dozen copies of Venus Shrugged and start handing them out on street corners.

p.s. If you’re not scared enough yet, watch this beautifully produced video that is essentially an open call for white-nationalist based civil war on the left from the NRA:

https://medium.com/media/4d17eb452774688ea635d124431694cd/href

p.p.s. This bit of awesomeness is proven effective at cleaning that out of your brain:

https://medium.com/media/f627cf69c7ee0eac4dbac1768ef8e8ca/href
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Published on June 29, 2017 13:54

June 3, 2017

How to Win the Climate Imagination Battle

Future Earth, by Marco

Last week, a new novel book by a moderately well-known conservative author launched, and Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords. These things are connected.

This about sums up the Paris Accords decision:

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This is a real, real low point.

 — @chrislhayes

I’m not going to give the conservative author the free promotion by mentioning his name or his book, but here’s the deal. I follow a lot of conservatives. Some of them seem like genuinely nice people, at least most of the time.

This guy is not one of them.

Sure, It’s probably a schtick for his online persona. Who knows. He’s probably lovely in person. But when he’s hitting the ol’ Twitterbong he seems to lack even the most basic veneer of impulse control. His timeline is full of climate denial, racism, sexism, subtle and not so subtle threats of violence, and paranoid attacks on anyone to the left of Dick Cheney. His own self-described political strategy is “buy more guns and ammo.”

I haven’t read his new book, or his previous ones. I kind of want to, but it’s been tough to really prioritize. But based on the description, it seems pretty similar to the Glenn Beck (sketchily ghostwritten) “Agenda 21” series book, which I did read a couple years ago. Beck’s book is weirdly relevant to my day job, and I saw it all over the place in airports while I was traveling for a work project, so I grabbed a copy on one of those trips. Paid for it, I mean. Didn’t shoplift it. You’re welcome, Glenn.

The common theme in a lot of these books seems to be this weird environmental authoritarian fantasy, where the objectives of a future police state are somehow switched from protecting private property, large corporations, and profit to not just protecting public goods, but attacking private ones. There’s a lot of handwaving about how this comes to pass; i.e. it’s not just not clear how the jump gets made from “laws that encourage car companies to build more efficient cars” to “laws that make it ok for the police to shoot someone driving an inefficient car” — but that issue never gets approached in any form. Nor does the fact that the vast, overwhelming majority of the antiauthoritarian, anti police state pressure is coming from the left (broadly speaking), not the right. The conservatives this guy supports are the ones governing by royal decree, putting people like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice and supporting his backwards agenda in Congress.

Even given the fundamentally nonsensical premise, you’ll never guess how his book is selling. If you guessed, “I bet it’s selling pretty good!” you’re right:

Having studied this stuff, those numbers are pretty good. Not amazing. He’s ranked high up in a bunch of smaller categories, which says more about his ability to choose good niche categories than his ability to sell lotsa books. And, this is his 8th or 9th book on Amazon, and book marketing efforts are cumulative. So clearly he’s found a pretty decent sized audience. (If see where this is going and you’re tempted to skip ahead and check Venus Shrugged’s ranking vs. these, I’ll save you the trouble: he’s doing a LOT better. But don’t panic! I’ve got a plan, these things just take a while to kick in. We’ll get there.)

Who cares, right? Some conservative is a jerk on twitter and manages to sells a bunch of books, what does it matter?

Unfortunately, ideas have consequences:

Is there a direct line between some guy selling books and Trump tossing a 200 country agreement in the trash can?

Yup.

How could it possibly be? But the more you think about it, the more true you realize it is. Politics is a war of ideas. Just because it was Newt Gingrich who said that, doesn’t make it any less true. In the artist and organizer Terry Marshall’s phrase (via Adrienne Maree Brown), we are in an imagination battle. The stories a civilization tells itself matter profoundly to the direction that civilization goes.

My fellow US lefties seem to often be a bit confused on this. We seem to have a tendency to get caught up in today’s battle, while forgetting we are in a longer war. We do things like argue that abortion should be considered as an economic issue, setting aside the deeply dehumanizing ramifications of that line of argument, because maybe it will change a few people’s minds on how we build our coalition in the next election cycle.

And our speculative fiction engines of imagination seems to be trapped in a bit of a trap where we can’t help but talk about what the world looks like assuming ongoing political catastrophe. KSR is one of my writing heroes and by all accounts his new one is a positive book about how to thrive in a world we’re almost headed for, but the cover doesn’t exaaaactly send a message of confidence that we’re going to pull this off:

Or take Cory Doctorow’s recent novel, Walkaway. It’s a blast of a read, and maybe the first anarchist future that’s made me think: OK, that actually sounds pretty awesome, I could live that life and dig it. (This gets lots easier if you assume some of the technology advances he supposes, like auto-assembling buildings and universal fabricators) But it’s full of outright government failures. Every time the malevolent police state inflicts carnage on the emergent community Cory writes about so lovingly (and entertainingly), I couldn’t help but think, damn — can’t we just fix that, too?

This doesn’t just play out in the world of fiction. It plays out in the messages we tell ourselves through elections, too. I drew this (crappy) message box the day after the election:

Unfortunately, that looks like it’s holding up pretty well through the special elections so far this year. How bad this is, why it’s happening, and how we might be able to fix it are all topics for another post. But that upper left hand quadrant — what our candidates say about ourselves — is a critical one. That is an area where we have a lot of work to do, and fiction has to be part of the solution.

One weird thing about the modern conservative dystopia novels is that they’re not even drawing us a picture of what the world looks like if they win. They’re only drawing the imagined horrors of what they think is going to happen if some truly bizarre funhouse parody of the actual left wins. Maybe this is a fallback strategy, since anyone with half a brain could see where the whole Galt’s Gulch thing was headed. But no author I know of since Ayn Rand has really tried to paint a picture of what the positive conservative future looks like. It’s tough to even imagine when their agenda revolves solely around doing things that liberals don’t like:

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If the rightness of a Trump decision is judged by the level of hysteria that decision causes among elites, yesterday he was very, very right

 — @WalshFreedom

As always, there’s something you can do.

And as always for the foreseeable future of anything that I write, that something is going to be to not just buy my book (which is now available as a paperback as well as e-book) …

Venus Shrugged: Part 1

… but to read it immediately and vigorously, post extensively about it on every social media channel you are aware of, start an international series of salons to discuss it, and then buy a few cases of it and dedicate your life to handing them out on street corners.

The withdrawal from the Paris accord is a short term tragedy, but as fellow idea-warrior Alex Steffen eloquently puts it, it doesn’t have to be a defeat in the longer war. This could be a real moment of awakening:

Paris: Time for Passion, not Despair

Can we really write our way out of this? I don’t know. It’s possible, particularly given recent events, that the kind of massive political failure is an inevitability. Although if you look at the rest of the world — all the other 195 countries that have joined and stayed in the Paris Accords (keep in mind Nicaragua only isn’t in because it doesn’t go far enough) — they seem to have more or less figured it out. Even if it’s not possible and we are doomed, and we’re going to hand a planet with rising seas and greater migration pressures and energy wars and food insecurity and all the horrors that will go with it to our children …

I sure as hell am not going to skip the fun of going down without a fight.

Part 1 of Venus Shrugged is now available in paperback and as a Kindle e-book.

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Published on June 03, 2017 09:52

May 19, 2017

This is a great post and a great project!

This is a great post and a great project! This paragraph in particular sounds a lot like the design space I’m working with in my new novel, Venus Shrugged. I call it “vaguely plausible” — the generally positive, democratic/design future that I hope the current age of crazysauce is a prelude to.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZYXNS2C

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Published on May 19, 2017 10:34

May 17, 2017

This is good analysis, although there’s really just one principle at the heart of all the GOP…

This is good analysis, although there’s really just one principle at the heart of all the GOP reform efforts. I bet you can guess what it is:

Why is Every Single Republican Healthcare Idea So Horrendously Awful?

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Published on May 17, 2017 10:27