Recently I noticed a subtle change when I was checking my blog page on Facebook. In the right-hand corner of each of the images that link to articles I attach to my posts was a little “information” icon (context button). I clicked on it and a pop-up window appeared giving me information about where the link originated and a little background on the publication.
I clicked on a few more, and for the first time in a long time I was pleasantly surprised by something Meta had done. Apparently, not so long-ago Meta rolled out something good for society. I wonder if Zuckerberg is aware. A tiny little step forward for mankind on the path to truth and transparency. Access to real-time context about where a particular link is coming from and data on the source. Unfortunately, it did require the publication to be big enough to have a Wikipedia page, but it’s a good start.
I did a little follow-up research to find out what this was about and when it rolled out. This is what I found on the Facebook Business help center pages:
“Facebook’s context button is designed to provide more background and information on the publishers and links that appear in Feed so people can decide for themselves what to read, trust and share.
The context button appears alongside links shared in Feed. When clicked, the button opens a card showing the publisher’s Wikipedia entry, related links, information about how many times the link has been shared on Facebook and where it has been shared, if available.
If we cannot find a Wikipedia entry, then we will not show the Wikipedia module.
Feature availability
We are rolling out this feature in more markets gradually. This information will show up for anyone viewing the content in the available markets, regardless of where the publisher is based. Publishers cannot edit the content that shows up in these modules or turn this feature off.”
It’s about damn time!
This small shift toward transparency is not perfect, but a positive start toward empowering critical thinking. This feature is rolling out market by market, so if you don’t see these context buttons on the links in your Feed hopefully it will be there soon.
Anyway, this faint breath of fresh air made me stop for a minute and reflect. The current pace of change and destruction of our government and media channels has made it nearly impossible to recognize any progress or see successes through the fog of chaos. But there are some glimmers of hope and some actual wins.
Therefore, I have decided to take some time to highlight them.
Don’t get me wrong. I recognize we have a lot of work ahead of us to really fix the current mess and make sure we, the people, return to a government that makes life better for “all” the people, not just the Christian far-right oligarchy. It won’t happen right away, and there will be setbacks. Good news is we are making continuous progress with respect to slowing down the slide toward authoritarianism, and here’s why I believe that to be the case.
Lawsuits are beginning to deliver constitutional wins:
So far, assuming the Trump regime upholds the rule of law and does not defy the courts, our constitution and justice system is delivering encouraging results. There are over 100 lawsuits against this administration. Here are some of the wins:
- The most promising win comes from the recent Supreme court ruling 5-4, that rejected Trump’s attempt to keep billions in foreign aid money frozen.
- Along the same lines a judge barred the Trump Administration from slashing National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding, ruling it was likely unlawful. This is a major win for research institutions across the country, and the health of mankind frankly.
- In addition, just today a Rhode Island federal judge agreed with 23 attorney generals that the Trump freezing of congressionally allocated federal funds is unconstitutional and violates Congress’s power of the purse.
- Also today, a federal judge ruled that Trump illegally fired a National Labor Relations Board member (NLRB) Gwynne Wilcox and ordered her reinstatement. A win for workers and unions.
Even though Trump’s administration continues to fire and slash federal jobs many are being reinstated due to pushback and lawsuits.
People are organizing and peacefully making their voices heard:
Today, March 7th, thousands are gathered for rallies in multiple cities across the nation for the “Stand up for Science” protests. The nation’s capital was just one of the locations.
A 40-day boycott of Target was recently launched following their decision to end all diversity programs, and some of the largest protests to date happened in all 50 state capitals and other major cities in parallel to Trumps recent speech to congress. Many more are planned and growing in mass with the help of the organizers at 50501.
Sadly, outside of Rachel Maddow’s shows on MSNBC very little coverage on the peaceful protests can be found in mainstream media, but there is an effort building to gain visibility online. The good news is legitimate media organizations, and progressive influencers and independent journalists are starting to reach more people and break through the right-wing propaganda.
Meidas Touch News podcasts recently surpassed Digital Fox News and the Joe Rogan podcast in viewership. BlueSky, the alternative to X, has taken off with over 35 million registered users, and there are no algorithms in place to dominate news feeds with alt-right messages and Russian bots and propaganda. True that it is an echo chamber for progressives but a much needed counter offense to the extreme alt-right echo-chambers of X (aka Twitter) and Truth Social catering to and keeping the MAGAs radicalized.
There has been so much push back on congressmen and women in their own states that Mike Johnson has told Republican representatives to stop holding town halls. This may not sound like a win with respect to having our voices heard, but it is apparent the American voters have a very strong resistance campaign building and are willing to take action by showing up and demanding to be heard. Now we also have a platform to gain press inside the States by calling out the deliberate lack of representation and an opportunity to host town halls with democratic candidates and independents that plan to run against the Republicans avoiding their constituents.
If you are interested in getting more involved below are a few organizations you can follow or join.
- 50501
- Indivisible
- Alt National Park Service
Most importantly we now know exactly who and what we are competing with.
In marketing, unless you understand your competition and the product they are selling, you cannot compete effectively. You cannot know what your key messages should be, or what new features to prioritize until you know what your competitor’s product is exactly and where they fall short. For a large corporation with layers of bureaucracy the biggest threat comes from stealthy, well-funded start-ups quietly building out both their delivery channels and their products that focus on solving and/or exploiting a key pain point for a common target audience. First movers’ advantage is real. Once the new product is launched, the competition needs to be ready to fill the pipeline before you can counter with a better solution or competitive marketing campaign that exposes their weakness. The Christian nationalists and plutocrats are busy filling the pipeline fast and frantic.
In this context the target audience is the American electorate, the competition or founders we are competing with are right-wing Christian nationalists, and the techno-plutocrats. The product they are trying to launch is a dictatorship run by the right-wing oligarchy. The pain points they have exploited are inflation, immigration, and the inefficiencies of the current democratic government.
These are real pain points; however, their weakness is that their product is misleading and clearly falls short of the promises made to the mass market. There is a lot of false advertising and propaganda being used to grab market share, but the product does not deliver.
The product they are selling is smaller and sleeker than the current government. From the outside it looks kind of appealing. Less bureaucracy, a focus on decreased taxes, a promise to get rid of regulations that slow down businesses and deport immigrants that are increasing drugs and crime on our streets.
However, now that this shiny new dictatorship is on the market, we’ve had a chance to reverse engineer it, hold and touch it. We can see that the efficiencies they are exploiting do nothing more than eliminate their own barriers to greater power and wealth, by whittling away programs designed to make the average taxpayer’s life better, safer, freer and more affordable.
We also have proof of how this dictatorship falls short of the promises made. It is no longer rhetorical and impossible to deny by the average voter. The price of eggs is simply $10, the stock market has crashed, retirement accounts are smaller, and the unemployment rate is rising. People are at risk of losing their healthcare, social security, and medication already costs more since programs were slashed. Why is all this happening, because the new shiny government needs to pay for tax cuts that target the richest.
Unfortunately, the right-wing plutocrats own the media, and they are counting on voter ignorance to pave the way to their success and power. So far it is working – but we’re on to it and the independent journalists and media platforms are actively reporting and amplifying their messages.
We now have a marketing channel, and we can counter with a message that will resonate with the target audience.
As mentioned, we also know exactly who we are competing with:
Project 2025, the playbook published by the Heritage Foundation is a well laid out business plan that is accessible to anybody interested in taking the time to read it. Making the reverse engineering process quite easy. Admittedly they do make money on every download of the entire 900-page book, but there are plenty of independent investigative journalists that are already documenting the relevant points.
It is worth pointing out that the Heritage Foundation has been around for a very long time and considered one of the most powerful conservative think-tanks to ever influence our government. In fact, The Heritage Foundation started laying out the groundwork in the 1970s during the Nixon administration and played an active role in the Reagan administration and defined conservative policies for Bush. But it has become far more extreme. With an endowment from the Devos family (aka Amway – yes same Devos as the Education secretary during Trump’s first term) it has grown into an even more powerful organization focused on moving government much further right than it was in the past and has been taken over entirely by Christian Nationalists. Originally, they were anti-trump but during the first Trump administration the Heritage Foundation cut a deal to support him if he placed many of their members into his administration. Those same Christian nationalists spent the Biden years crafting a plan to control every arm of the government at the federal level once they got back in power, hence Project 2025 also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project.
The tech broligarchy who have bought into the crazy-ass philosophy of Curtis Yarvin, strong governments with clear hierarchies must remain minimal and narrowly focused with one single CEO in charge, are newer to the scene but have been building out their network and power grab for well over a decade. Thiel, Andreesen, Musk and JD Vance are tightly linked to this group. They appear to be recruiting and successfully growing their followers with additional plutocrats like Bezos and Zuckerberg. This group is being empowered by DOGE, a group of primarily unelected extremists that are rapidly infiltrating our government entities.
These are the organizations we need to keep our eye on, and the people we should do everything in our power to permanently oust from our government going forward. As a side note it is important to understand that JD Vance is funded by the broligarchy and closely tied to the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts. He is a bridge to both organizations. Impeaching Trump only empowers them more if their guy, Vance takes over. To fix this Vance must go too.
Ironically, Trumps stupidity, arrogance and chaos is a glimmer of hope in many ways. Trump is not the mastermind, just a marketing tool along with Bannon, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Newsmax, Ben Shapiro and the army of online influencers being used to reach and brainwash the MAGA voter base.
These two power groups (the Christian nationalists and the tech-plutocrats) are not fully aligned, but they do overlap. They both believe that they must have full loyalty in and across every government entity. Government should be small enough to control, too small to regulate business, but big enough to manipulate the information flow and maintain military might. Capitalism is king, and controlling the media and voters is mandatory. Programs that support the neediest of our society should be privatized and run by corporations or philanthropies (ideally Christian based). It is not a government for the people, by the people, unless you are part of the oligarchy in control. It is not a separation of church and state. You get only what you can afford to pay for, and work for the billionaires who pay you only what they want. Often far below a livable wage. Remarkably similar in many ways to the governments found in Hungary and Russia today. Project 2025 is indeed a joint effort with the help of a think tank controlled by Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary.
So what is the good news?
Clarity is gold, and the fact that the GOP has full control makes it very transparent who is to blame for the path we are on and the mess we are in. We know who to vote out. The GOP as a whole has moved far to the right even since Reagan and they no longer represent the majority. The Public Religion Research Institute found that in 2023, only 10% of Americans identified as “adherents” of Christian nationalism, while 20% identified as “sympathizers”. Even in the reddest of states that only increases to 14% and 24% respectively. As expected in the blue states with the larger more educated populations those numbers are significantly smaller.
We know exactly who our competitors are and what they are selling, now we need to get our plan together and strike back with a single powerful voice and a campaign that breaks through. We need to make it clear we are not buying. There are more of us than there are MAGA extremists. We are the majority and 68% of us chose something other than the Trump regime. Most of us still believe in and want to be on the side of democracy, and we will.
Which brings me to our global allies.
The good guys (our past allies) are stepping up to fight back against tyranny:
Since 1898 the US has been the strongest economy in the world, and following WW II we became a global super power siding with and protecting democracy globally.
Trump has kissed that goodbye by changing sides, abandoning our allies, and choosing isolation while siding with Putin in the name of nationalism and, well we’re not quite sure why else – maybe he is a Russian asset. Honestly he hasn’t done anything to disprove this theory, so for now we will leave that there.
In any case, power breeds arrogance and greed, and population growth brings new super powers. China, India and Indonesia are projected to be the world’s largest economies by 2050. These are countries and economies I paid a great deal of attention to as a marketer. It appears that for now Trump has kept these economic powerhouses in the enemy column, and is using tariffs as his weapon of choice. As a side note Russia is not on that list, they are part of another group, power hungry dictators, but not economic powerhouses.
The latter can easily be beaten (without military force) if we really wanted to. In fact, Russia’s economy at the end of 2024 was near collapse due much to the economic sanctions and isolation Biden’s administration was enforcing with the help of our NATO allies. Sadly, Trump is actively sabotaging this effort. The good news is our “past” allies have the will and the combined might to win without the US by their side. They are coming together, pooling their resources and strengthening their own EU alliances and military budget. One day I am hopeful the United States will join them once again on the right side of history. For now, the EU, and others including Canada are making it clear that Trump is not the final say, and that democracy still has a chance to prevail.
Another burst of sunshine through the haze is the tamping down of the Nazi-sympathizing AfD party in Germany. Even with the meddling of Trump’s right-wing, racist regime, and Russia’s cyber-sabotaging propaganda campaigns a center right leaning government won control, and they are committed to Ukraine and democracy going forward.
Which brings me to my next glimmer of hope…
There is a lot of talent on the Democrat’s bench:
It is well past time for a new generation to step up and take the baton, and it is becoming clearer everyday who is rising to the top. Below are a few of the leaders I personally have my eye and hopes on.
- JB Pritzker
- Pete Buttigieg
- Jasmine Crockett
- Jamie Raskin
- Ro Khanna
- Chris Murphy
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
- Elissa Slotkin
There are also many billionaires championing democracy and ready to push back on fascism and authoritarianism. We need to encourage them to put their money and power to work. We cannot beat a competitor with deep pockets unless we have investors of our own. Here are a few I believe are starting to step up:
- Mark Cuban
- Michael Bloomberg
- JB Pritzker **
- Reid Hoffman
- Warren Buffet
- Melinda French Gates
- MacKenzie Scott
- Vinod Khosla
- Sheryl Sandberg
- Reed Hastings
Our team in the future has a chance to make it to the finals, but the American voters must work as a team to make it happen. Remember 68% of eligible voters chose something different than the regime currently in power.
It is going to be harder to get all the facts as the current regime works hard to erode fair and transparent media, but the truth is out there if you take the time to know your source and read.
And on a final note of good news… Saturday Night Live is once again quite funny in large part due to the current regime’s rapid flow of idiocy at work. I’m looking forward to their latest skit.
To keep the momentum here are some things you can do today per Senator Elissa Slotkin:
- Don’t tune out.
- Hold your elected officials accountable.
- Pick one issue you’re passionate about and organize.
Stay educated, think critically. Every truth matters.
Sources:
https://www.science.org/content/article/thousands-gather-across-u-s-stand-science-events
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/from-orban-to-trump-part-ii?r=ad31s&utm_medium=ios
https://www.theconcis.com/p/eu-summit-delivers?r=ad31s&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true