There is so much we have to be thankful for. " Persuadable implies malleability. Crystal1Johnson would tweet 11 more times that day, a major increase relative to the real Crystal's posts, and in this noticeably different vein. Crystal1 also weighed in on a television remake of The Wiz, a remix of The Wizard of Oz with an all-Black cast.
They had encouraged the view that the basic activity of democratic life—the changing of minds—had become futile. But the major investment in the social-media project seemed to reflect a calculation that, of all the vulnerabilities of modern American society, its internal fracturing—countryside against city, niece against uncle, Black against white—was a particular weakness. Here, the politics of redistribution was turned into a difference in virility.
Trump, still a relatively new presidential candidate, had proposed "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. " I spoke with her once on the phone. But over the next two years, the account sent another 8, 000 tweets and garnered more than 56, 000 followers, putting it in the top 1 percent of Twitter users globally. Major in transgender activism crossword club.doctissimo.fr. He was born in Mexico, the son of a carpenter, and didn't know he was undocumented until he was 15 or so, when he wanted to get a job and his parents had to tell him the truth. I followed her work over the past two years as she advised major, if not widely publicized, projects of political persuasion: first, a quiet campaign that brought together disparate groups across the left to try to ensure as smooth a transition of power as possible in January 2021; and then regular Zoom strategy sessions for organizers, activists, and staffers working to implement the Biden agenda. In traditional political canvassing, campaigners might knock on supporters' doors to make sure they have a plan to vote, and quickly move on.
On the walls were inspirational posters: Leadership is action, not position. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become. They believe that, yes, immigrants enrich our lives, and, yes, immigrants cost us jobs. Yes, you don't like immigrants, but you like that immigrant you know. When I explained that I was looking into how her identity had been stolen and weaponized by Russian intelligence, she hung up and stopped answering my calls. Major in transgender activism crossword clé usb. A better term for moderates, then, might be "persuadables. " It read, according to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. They will never change. If Russian trolls could pull us apart, can we bring ourselves back together? The dominant view in the party, as she sees it, is: You have your base, so don't worry about them; reach out to those moderates in the middle, and if you need to water down your ideas somewhat, so be it—that is the price of big-tent living.
"But in America #KKK still is legal!! " Some posts were outright disinformation; others sought to whip up anger at the truth. The same survey asked whether Black people face greater obstacles to success than white people do, and 74 percent of persuadables said yes. The troll farm wanted Americans to regard people with different views as immovable, brainwashed, disloyal, repulsive. Late that summer, a job posting appeared online.
Krylova was a high-ranking official at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, an ostensibly private company that was connected with Russian intelligence. If this theory of the 60–40 voter who needs help sorting things through has a patron philosopher, it is Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging consultant who is upending many of the left's long-standing assumptions about persuasion. When it comes to big issues and policies, moderates are confused, torn, not sure which pole is their pole. The ease with which the Russian government exploited these tendencies is frightening, but it also, perhaps, points to a way out: If Americans are so easily manipulated in the direction of enmity and sniping and rage, might they also be more open to persuasion than we tend to assume? "The story of Russian interference was a really damaging crutch for the imagination, " the Russian American writer Masha Gessen told me not long ago. Political observers started saying that his campaign was more than a curiosity or a carnival, that it recalled the beginnings of some of the most dangerous movements in history. One way to think of this is, if I offer you a choice between a pizza and a burger, and you can't pick—you're an undecided voter!
I got to know a cognitive scientist and a cult deprogrammer who each work on combatting disinformation and manipulation, and who explained how the dominant approach to dealing with the victims of phenomena like QAnon is all wrong; they are thinking up what a public-health approach to the disinformation problem would look like. Organizers spend as long as 30 minutes at each door, and the goal is to get people to talk and talk—about why they feel some kind of way about transgender people or undocumented people or minimum-wage workers—while the organizer listens without judgment and builds trust before trying to persuade. Alicia Garza, a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, argues that those who want a "woke" future must make space for the "still-waking. " Her profile photo shows a Black woman in her 30s or 40s with short blond hair.
"My discovery in doing this work was that most people are 60–40 around most things, " Steve Deline, a longtime organizer for LGBTQ rights and a co-founder of the New Conversation Initiative, told me. Their methods included confronting politicians such as Senator Kyrsten Sinema and knocking on the doors of her constituents. On another occasion, the account sought to meld the left's pro-abortion-rights attitudes with its aversion to war: "Liberals are brave enough to kill unborn children, but not brave enough to kill our enemies #LiberalLogic. " A year ago in Flagstaff, Arizona, I visited the office of an organizing group called LUCHA, or Living United for Change in Arizona. On the first day of 2013, the real Crystal Johnson wished the world Happy New Year—as did her clone. And so they're capable of agreeing with things that are radioactively conservative, and they are capable of agreeing with things that are progressive. But they saw the great American write-off from a distance, recognized its potential, and exploited it. Liberal men were just plain lazy, the tweets suggested: "How do you starve Bernie Sanders' supporters? The ranks of the persuadable change from issue to issue, year to year. Many political campaigns seem to focus more on mobilizing sympathetic voters than on winning over skeptics. "Internet operators wanted! "
In just a few words, the tweet married contempt for city-dwelling hipsters to a fear of terrorism. 8 million repostings. But they also recommended that I look into another of the agency's top performers, its tenth-most-retweeted account—a right-leaning troll named Jenna Abrams. White people used Black Babies as Alligator Bait. Which is different from saying they prefer the mean between the two poles.
But when he kept digging, she realized, "Oh, well, yeah, my sister's husband is undocumented, and he got hurt at work. When you ask people to rate their support for various issues (as opposed to parties, about which people are far more tribal), a fifth are committed to your side; a fifth are reliably for the opposition; and most people are "moderate, " which is to say their minds are in play. The error of this way, by Shenker-Osorio's lights, is a misconception of what a "moderate" actually is. But it doesn't have to be this way.
And I learned a great deal about how confused and complicated and contradicted and, therefore, malleable millions of voters are. A few years ago, as the pandemic began and a cloud of doom rose over the horizon, I began to follow a group of these optimists: activists, educators, political professionals, and, above all, organizers. Loretta J. Ross, a reproductive- and racial-justice activist, says we need a prodemocracy movement that relies less on the callout and more on the call-in. Persuadable voters, she told me, are "the 'Good Point' People because they're like this: 'Good point. What they shared was their dissent from the great write-off. "Resale homes sales R up, " she wrote back in 2012. The Russian mission, far from dropping something on America from outer space, had been to fertilize behaviors already flourishing on American soil. And another time: "Awful! But this real problem was sensationalized as a lurid story of irreconcilable identities. Crystal Johnson is an actual person, a real-estate agent in Georgia. Measured by retweets, Crystal1 was the second-most-powerful Twitter user in the entire sprawling Russian effort, with some 3.
Hundreds of workers toiled in 12-hour shifts at the IRA offices on 55 Savushkina Street. But also … good point! "#BlackLivesMatter, " the account declared. On December 10, @Crystal1Johnson was back in action. In time, a more sobering analysis emerged. People associate "moderate" with the middle of the road, the center, but Shenker-Osorio thinks that's a mistake. "Task: posting comments at profile sites on the Internet, writing thematic posts, blogs, social networks. " A woman said, "No, I don't know any immigrants. " When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. The culture of the write-off, of mutual contempt and dismissal, could be found everywhere you looked. Beyond that, their activities are not well known.
The group was pushing for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. I visited a summer camp for families who had adopted children of another race where, in contrast to the well-publicized explosions over critical race theory, parents were sincerely grappling with how to convince white Americans to adopt new racial attitudes while neither alienating them nor watering down the truth. Plenty of evidence proves that persuasion remains possible, and tenacious people on the front lines of democratic life are showing how it's done. My guide to the process was a young LUCHA organizer named Cesar Torres. For these and other reasons, Americans have grown alienated from an idea central to democratic theory: that you change things by changing minds—by persuading. When the IRA's project became public knowledge, a simplistic, if seductive, story line grew up around it. And it took a swipe at "social justice warriors"— "A tip for SJWs: not all things're about sexism or racism, things can be just things, stop turning everything into an argument for equal rights. "The IRA's goals are to further widen existing divisions in the American public and decrease our faith and trust in institutions that help maintain a strong democracy, " Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren, scholars at Clemson University who became prominent analysts of Russia's campaign, have written. Bogacheva, her road buddy, a researcher and data cruncher, was more junior. It could be as simple as No matter our differences, most of us want similar things. Rather, he's trying to pit some things going on inside them against other things going on inside them, to get them to re-rank these things.
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