I mentioned this in brief at the end of a comment on the 2nd Virtual Signal show, but I think this deserve it’s own blog post.
I would like to see a show produced here where Scott Ott talks about what’s involved in running for local office. He could share stories of his time running for office and give step-by-step instructions for things like preparing for interviews or debates and for how to reach out to neighbors at events. It would give those who want to run for office a playbook to follow, and perhaps teach us all a few things about how elections are run.
Perhaps it could even be a reversal of the BW Now shows where Bill is asking Scott the questions instead.
I’ve always admired Scott’s optimism in the Right Angle shows and would love to see him put together something like this to dovetail with Bill’s MB2A series.
14 replies on “Proposal for a new show”
Because what we need is another show trying to make MB2A look like a real thing. But hey!, we got lots of new members.
How would it be a bad thing to have someone who’s been involved in local office help others understand what it’s like and how they can also do it? Sitting back and letting others run things is how we got into this mess, after all.
My point is that MB2A as a movement ain’t gonna happen. Sure, there might be a handful of people out there running for office but they’ll all be isolated efforts. Bill isn’t going to step up.
He has even backed away from it in what’s supposed to be the movement’s signature series, the “MB2A” videos. It’s been weeks since any of them have “Moving Back to America” in the upper left and they’ve become nothing more than yet another series talking about politics. He never interacts with members, never reads the blog or comments, can’t have private messages sent to him, and overall just isn’t involved.
It’s dead.
I’m sorry you’re so disappointed by what Bill & the team are putting out (given the general tenor of your comments that I’m seeing on multiple blog posts). Personally I’m pretty happy with the current slate of shows, especially when considering how much video editing must be going on in the background–which is a time-consuming process, even with minimal edits (speaking from personal experience).
If you feel like there’s something that should be done that isn’t happening, perhaps that’s a gap that you personally need to step forward to fill. Remember: Bill’s just one guy. As I understand it, one main point of MB2A is to get the general citizenry more involved in the running of things again….
I did step up. I started a group specifically to work on MB2A. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard of it – I’ve been posting about it regularly on the blog and in the forums for weeks now.
It’s been rebuffed by the powers-that-be here.
Bills just one guy, yes. One guy who asked people to get to work on a movement that he started but now has no more interest in. He’s one guy who asked for help, and that is, if course, the thing to do for an endeavor as large as he proposed. All he had to do was lead the way, provide a little encouragement, do some minimal coordination even by delegating it, and remain the face of and inspiration for the effort. As of now he has completely abdicated his role, leaving no one in that leadership position. He expected people to do the work and they’d be glad to if he would just stand there and acknowledge them. It’s not much to ask of the man who thought of it and claims he wants to see it get done.
I don’t see the point of trying to support an effort that’s not even supported by the man who started it, and with claims that work needed to start immediately. I’ll find other ways to work against the new tyranny, thank you very much.
You and I are getting very different messages from Bill’s videos, then.
I won’t try to tell you what you’re getting, but I’ll tell you what I’m getting out of them (and why I think a video series like I requested above would help).
What I’m getting out of his videos is that I’m part of the problem, and I need to do something about that. Sure, I stay informed on issues, and I research candidates and I vote for who I think is best for the job, but I’m not *involved*. I don’t go to city or county council meetings. I’ve never volunteered at the polls. I’ve never run for local office. I’ve just let other people do the job that I, as a citizen, should be involved in.
In order for me to step up, I don’t need a big organizational structure above me. I just need to start doing some of the things that are my responsibility, as a citizen. Me, personally, I don’t feel equipped at the moment to run for public office, so I decided that the first thing I need to do is get involved by volunteering to be a poll worker (I’m checking weekly right now and so far, my county’s website just says they don’t need any more volunteers for 2020) and look at how the votes are counted in my area by actually counting the votes. At that point, I’ll be informed enough that I could go to city and county council meetings to raise the relevant issues and, if the local office-holders don’t fix the problems, then step up further to run for office.
Some other people may feel that they can jump right into running for office, and even though I don’t feel equipped to do so right now, hearing from Scott (or others who have run for/held local office) would help me understand what’s involved so I might feel more equipped.
And again, I don’t need a big organizational structure behind me. I just need to know how to do it, what’s involved. I’ve often felt this is the problem with 3rd parties like the libertarians, greens, and so on. They all focus on the big top-level stuff, like a presidential candidate and a national organization, and I almost never see a 3rd party running for any race lower than governor– no state legislatures and certainly no local stuff. I don’t even necessarily need a party, since most of my local (city) races are non-partisan. At the county level, party is a part of it, but it’s still small enough that if I ran as an independent, if I knew what I were doing, I could reach enough people to swing those few thousand votes needed to get a county position.
This has gotten a bit long, but that’s about as short as I can get it to get my impressions of Bill’s MB2A videos summed up. I respect what you were trying to do, but it’s just not the same objective I got out of the current videos.
There was nothing “big” about my former group. The only set objective we had was to discover, encourage, and assist campaigns of the type Bill talked about as well as people doing as you describe. No thiught for higher offices or any sort if bigger things until waaaaay down the line, maybe. I was also hoping to do some viral-style advertising of MB2A, get people talking about it and looking into what it is. Everything else was administrative stuff that wouldn’t really matter until we had a lot more members than we did at the time I shut it down.
I saw it as quite in line with Bill’s vision.
Michael, I am seeing this kind of backing off and slowing down in ALL of my interactions with others. I started a group of like-minded souls last week, and some of the members were activated and ready to roll up their sleeves, actually do constructive things besides sharing outrage articles and memes.
Saturday everything ground to a screeching halt. I though “Okay, it’s the weekend.” But now it is Wednesday and the place is still dead.
Another group of conservatives that I was in is still useless, just like they always were.
I joined BW.c because the “Art of the Snub” made me think we are building a network here, to go AROUND the DC establishment and politics as usual. I hope that is still the case. Like you, I am quite miffed at the onset of doldrums in general. I need to catch up the latest BW videos, I have been busy and have not had time to watch them.
I would like to give a HIGH FIVE to Scott Ott for helping me with that bizarre disappearing comments issue we had near the end of last week. That was impressive and fast, not the sort of thing I have come to expect from an online platform. So kudos for that.
In case anybody wonders “So what are YOU doing?”, I am doing stuff like this: Bullet-proofing my group so that friends who have good reason to be EXTREMELY careful and not get doxxed can join the group and at least talk freely on the socials. Helping a pastor move a group from facebook to MeWe. Helping a lady who is super scared and cannot sleep due to her to addiction to outrage articles and clickbait and ridiculous scare-monger memes.
Stuff like that. That’s what we can all do on the side, as we anticipate and try to contribute a “new media” or whatever is forming by osmosis here.
I started my organization to do the work of MB2A, inspired by Bill in those early MB2A videos. Then the series changed, dropping “Moving Back to America” from its background and becoming a bog-standard political commentary series. Near the end of yesterday’s episode, Bill says we’re in an “intermediate stage” between now and starting the effort. This from the man who said in one of the early MB2A videos that we needed to get started immediately because the two years until the 2022 elections is such a short amount of time to accomplish what we were going to do.
What’s the point of working on Bill’s idea if he isn’t going to at least once in a while acknowledge that we already are?
You know, I started to join your organization, because I really believe the only way we can take this country back is at the state level. Strong state governments promoting strong election laws. I was ready to get involved and do what needed to be done. But then, you post that long long list of rules — don’t talk about the organization, nobody can join unless someone within the organization recommends him, don’t even let anyone outside the organization know it exists, etc, etc.– it really set my spidey senses off. The whole thing felt just a bit too creepy and cult like for me, so I declined to request the information. That you want it to be so super duper secrety makes me wonder what it is you have to hide. I wish you well, but count me out.
All that was meant to be secret are the specific plans we would have made. Just like businesses don’t want their trade secrets or other knowledge that might give them a competitive advantage out in the open, political organizations don’t want the other side to know what their plans are. That was all the secrecy would have been for.
The rest was meant to protect our members from things like cancel culture, doxxing, or even physical attacks because our kind of thinking is now considered by the other side to be, effectively, treason. And the requirement for a member vouching for a potential new member was to keep opponents from being able to join at will to learn what we were planning.
If I did a poor job of making that clear, that was an error on my part. You could have asked about it instead of jumping to a ridiculous conclusion. Everyone else understood it right away.
But you don’t have to worry about my “cult” any more. We won’t be trying to brainwash you with our evil secret plans to reestablish good government and our dastardly concern for the welfare of our members. I decided yesterday that I’m shutting it down. There’s no point in continuing.
I would enjoy that as well.
Most of the documents I’ve read on the process have been overwhelming. A simplification or real-life process would help greatly.
I’m sure he’d be a valuable resource in doing that.
Oh, yes! I had the same thought a few weeks while walking the dog and then promptly forgot it when I sat down at the computer again. The whole candidacy process is pretty much a black box to most of us–to hear what’s actually involved would be very helpful, and might encourage more people to consider throwing their own hats into the ring.