Advocacy Campaign Quotes

The job facing American voters… in the days and years to come is to determine which hearts, minds and souls command those qualities best suited to unify a country rather than further divide it, to heal the wounds of a nation as opposed to aggravate its injuries, and to secure for the next generation a legacy of choices based on informed awareness rather than one of reactions based on unknowing fear.

If there is money for elections, there should be money for our communities. Raise money for our country like how you hustle to raise money for your campaign.

Why were self-imposed abortions and reluctant acts of infanticide such common occurrences during slavery? Not because Black women had discovered solutions to their predicament, but rather because they were desperate. Abortions and infanticides were acts of desperation, motivated not by the biological birth process but by the oppressive conditions of slavery. Most of these women, no doubt, would have expressed their deepest resentment had someone hailed their abortions as a stepping stone toward freedom. During the early abortion rights campaign it was too frequently assumed that legal abortions provided a viable alternative to the myriad problems posed by poverty. As if having fewer children could create more jobs, higher wages, better schools, etc., etc. This assumption reflected the tendency to blur the distinction between abortion rights and the general advocacy of abortions. The campaign often failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children.

These days, when I talk about success, I focus on what it means for women, as individuals, once they have broken the glass ceilings because that act alone isn’t enough. And this is what the public conversation must become. If we are truly going to make progress for women, we need to talk about what it means to support women. And women who have fought their way to unprecedented professional success need to be honest about what that battle meant for them.

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest. At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies. Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.

THE LEWINSKY PROCEDURE: A STRATEGY GUIDE FOR MINIMIZING POLITICAL SCANDAL Deny -The necessary first stage, where you question the accuracy of the facts. It will take time for all the scandalous details to come out, and if you’re careful or lucky, they may never come out. Deny everything until the point that the facts against you can be substantiated. Delay -Take every action possible to stall, postpone, impede, procrastinate, and filibuster. The longer the time between the initial news of the scandal and the resolution of the scandal, the better. Diminish -Once the facts against you have been substantiated, either minimize the nature of the scandal or its impact against you. “At this point, what difference does it make?” Debunk -Have a helpful news organization or advocacy group develop a useful counter-narrative that explains away the scandal or contradicts the facts or generally does something to get progressives back on your side. “Explanatory journalism” is a great help here. Distract -Change the conversation by talking about something else. It doesn’t matter what that might be, because there’s always something else more important, even if it’s reminding people to drink more water. Suggest that the scandal itself is a distraction from the real issues. Deflect -When in doubt, blame the Republicans. All administrative failures can be blamed on the failures of the prior administration. All political failures can be blamed on Republican legislation or Republican intransigence in not passing progressive legislation which would have fixed the problem. All personal failures can be excused by either bringing up the example of a Republican who did something similar, or by pointing out that whatever was done wasn’t as bad as serving divorce papers on your wife when she’s in the hospital with cancer, or invading Iraq. Divide -Point out that the scandal is being driven by the most extreme Republicans, and that moderates aren’t to blame. This won’t help you with moderates that much, but it will give the moderates another reason not to like the extremists, and vice versa, and this can only be positive. Deploy -Get friends and allies to talk about your positive virtues in public, without reference to the scandal. If the scandal comes up, have them complain about the politics of personal destruction. Demonize -Attribute malign intentions to the conservatives trying to promote the scandal. This approach should also include special prosecutors, judges, and anyone else who is involved in the scandal to one degree or another. Defenestrate -When necessary, shove someone under the bus. Try not to make this a habit, or you won’t have anyone around to deploy. The target for defenestration can be small (rogue employees in the Cincinnati regional office) or large (Cabinet secretary) but it needs to be someone who won’t scream overly much as they sail out the window. ❄ ❄ ❄

she was mostly steamed about how I’d portrayed my conversation with the Amtrak gate agent in Atlanta. She thought that my account fit in too closely with the white-male capitalist hierarchical construct of Amtrak as a failure of central planning, and that I should have tried to advance a narrative more consistent with both social realism and the need for additional Amtrak funding. I tried to explain to her that I’d written the blog post based on what actually happened, which got me a lecture on the difference between objectivity and advocacy in the pursuit of social justice for the downtrodden proletariat. “But she wasn’t a proletarian,” I said. “If anything, she was petty-bourgeois.” I got a long lecture after that about mystification and revolutionary sentiment and code-switching, which I wish I had recorded now because it would have made for an awesome episode of that NPR podcast everyone is listening to.

To this end, industry think tanks recruited a handful of scientists to serve as climate skeptics and paid them to travel around the country to give speeches and press interviews that challenged the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. As investigators discovered, ExxonMobil helped underwrite “the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign” waged since the tobacco days. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, between 1998 and 2005, ExxonMobil funneled $16 million “to a network of ideological and advocacy organizations that manufacture uncertainty on the issue.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) became particularly active.

Carleton took issue with Steck’s advocacy on behalf of Natives and embarked on a campaign with military leaders on Capitol Hill that eventually forced Steck out of his job.

The Obama Administration has been trying to indoctrinate the public with its climate ideology in many ways and through a variety of agencies. This includes material on agency websites, advocacy of climate “education,”470 exhibits in National Parks,471 and grants by the National Science Foundation. One example is the $700,000 NSF grant to The Civilians, a New York theatre company, to finance the production of a show entitled “The Great Immensity,”472 “a play and media project about our environmental challenges.”473 A second example is a $5.7 million grant to Columbia University to record “voicemails from the future” that paint a picture of an Earth destroyed due to climate change.474 A third example is a $4.9 million grant to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create scenarios based on America’s climate actions on climate change including a utopian future where everyone rides bicycles and courts forcibly take property from the wealthy.475 The general approach pursued by the Administration for arts and education-related climate propaganda appears to be very similar to the similar propaganda campaigns by Soviet and Eastern European governments to promote their political ends.

There are people that are to champion the campaign and advocacy against the cycle of ungodliness and injustice in every nation.

The “foreign hand” was Avaaz.org, an organisation that promotes pro-democracy movements through the Internet, social media, phones and sometimes with the help of citizen journalists. Avaaz was co-founded in 2007 by Res Publica, a global civic advocacy group, and Moveon.org, an online community for Internet advocacy in the US. The founding team had social entrepreneurs from six countries, including president and executive director Ricken Patel, Tom Perriello, Tom Pravda, Eli Pariser, Andrea Woodhouse, Jeremy Heimans, and David Madden. By 2011, Avaaz had run a total of 750 pro-democracy campaigns worldwide. Widely regarded as the largest global political web movement in history, Avaaz’s website is blocked in China and Iran.

You may have come to advocacy on your own, it may be part of your job or you may have been asked to “put a face” on a campaign by serving as its spokesperson. You may be acting as a lone crusader or as part of a larger advocacy effort. Either way, you share an objective with all other advocates: to have your story move audiences from apathy to empathy to action.

When they destructively branded me as a threat, risk, a brain-damaged person, a mentally-ill person, and a danger: I became the target of their mob lynching and cyber bullying through calumny, defamation, threats, digital aggression, libel and slander. Afterwards, the financial scammer, con, coward, political, financial, habitually abusive harridan in the Land of Windmills, Dykes and Bikes, and her Machiavellian manipulators asked again for help, food, homemade meals, and groceries delivered to her residence, restaurant bills paid, car services, urgent favours and donations. Under the halo of magnetising advocacy, they played their Machiavellian games of manipulations, their video smear campaigns, and global financial, well calculated opportunism in the legal limits but not within the moral limits.” ~ Angelica Hopes, Calunniatopia Book 1 Stronzata Trilogy

Forsaking Fundamentals: The Environmental Establishment Abandons U.S. Population Stabilization By Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz Center for Immigration Studies, Paper 18, March 2001 In the late 1990s, as in 1970, the problems stemming from U.S. population growth were huge news. But the underlying population growth itself and its causes were barely being mentioned. Al Gore, the "environmental vice president," gave it no emphasis in his national campaign against urban sprawl. In virtually a complete reversal of the 1970 conditions, U.S. population growth was treated by most environmental leaders and journalists as an implacable natural phenomenon, which, like hurricanes and earthquakes, we could not prevent but only adjust to. Historians may find that the key reason for that fundamental shift in the way the public learned about environmental issues through the news media was the behavior of environmental advocacy groups. Journalists tend to look to competing interest groups to define the issues they cover. Business groups always have defined one end of the growth issue spectrum as they pushed for ever more population growth. At one time, environmental groups defined the other end by calling for no growth. By the late 1990s, however, those groups no longer emphasized population growth as something a nation could choose or reject. Most of the scores of American environmental groups either ignored U.S. population growth altogether, treated it as a negative but inexorable force whose effects can only be mitigated, or even suggested that growth in human numbers is environmentally benign.

In our mapping conversations, donating time was the second most common activity, mentioned 16 percent of the time across all the discussions. Notably, these mentions of volunteering were separate from people’s counts of the time they spend cooking or transporting neighbors, working on political campaigns, mentoring others, donating blood, or doing advocacy work. Time is a factor in all of our giving choices, and we routinely undercount it.