This is the draft of the speech I gave at YAL’s Revolution 2022 in Orlando. Given the most recent release of classified Pentagon documents, I think it is important to remind people how and why most government information is classified.
Introduction
I want to start by thanking the two people who had the most influence on my path to liberty… Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. If the regime had been able to produce two halfway competent candidates in 2016, their propaganda might still have a hold on me.
We can’t really talk about war or the antiwar movement without discussing propaganda. Nobody except the most blood soaked monsters are pro war. People have to be tricked into supporting the mass killing of other humans. The propaganda starts in grade school and continues on in academia at all levels. It’s in our culture from movies, TV shows, and comic books. Good people learn stories of how war has saved people from brutality, oppression, and hardship…. Think about that. People have to be convinced that War… this absolutely brutal, inhumane, hell on earth activity some how saves people from brutality?
I want you to remember that when you’re talking with people about war. Most people in this room understand how the propaganda is used and see through it. But you have figured it out much earlier in life than most.
While this propaganda might be easy to see for the red pilled and well versed among us, there are many layers beneath the surface that are intended to obfuscate the truth in order to keep the regime’s very employees in line.
State propaganda is used to convince the populace to believe in a lie. This can only be done if the state keeps certain information secret. But how do you get all the employees of the state to believe the propaganda if some of those secrets are available to them? They must be motivated to either keep the secret and/or believe the propaganda. This can be achieved through fear, obfuscation, or incentives. Fear that one might go to jail or worse. The truth might be confusing enough to not be able to make sense of the secrets one knows and the propaganda one hears. Or they may be incentivized to work within the system, know the truth, and use it to gain more power.
This is the system of classified information that governments have developed to intimidate, confuse, or encourage their employees to tow the party line. That is the system I will try to explain, from my personal experience working for the Empire.
Bio
I went through Army ROTC at the University of Alaska Fairbanks from 2005 to 2009. During the Ron Paul Revolution I was too busy with school and military training to focus as much on politics as I should have. I mean, I thought I was being pretty well rounded by watching CNN AND Fox News. I thought I was really on top of things, but the only time I heard Ron Paul mentioned was when Jon Stewart was discussing the media blackout of him and said “There goes crazy Uncle Ron babbling about the unsustainability of multiple trillion dollar wars”…. That was during his second run in 2012!
I was in the Army for 9 years, from 2009 to 2018. I started out as an infantry officer and deployed to Iraq in 2011. Even then, when I was still pretty blue pilled, I knew the Iraq War was based on lies. I think most people in the military by 2011 knew that to be the case. But most of us still felt like we had to clean up the mess and get our people back home safe. Afghanistan was still seen as a just war… again, looking through blue pilled glasses.
In September of 2012, I was going through Special Forces Assessment and Selection when the incident in Benghazi, Libya occurred. If you recall, it took place on 9/11. So as our instructors were telling us about the incident, it was already shrouded within this patriotic symbolism. Little did I know at the time, and I wouldn’t find out for years later, how intertwined the events of that day would be woven into my own story. More on that later.
In 2014 I finished my Special Forces training and became a Green Beret. 2015 was a crazy year in which we had Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as presidential candidates. I mean, I might have still believed in the system, but those were two dumpster fires I was trying to stay away from.
So I started looking more seriously into this libertarian philosophy. During college when I heard the old trope of “fiscally conservative, social liberal” I thought, yeah, that sounds like me. When I mentioned to an older family friend that I think I might be a libertarian they said, “No, you’re not a weirdo.” Well… turns out I actually am… and that’s a good thing. Especially when all the “normal people” continue to support forever wars.
So in my very early days of being a Green Beret I was getting introduced to this philosophy and found out one of my former Squad Leaders is a libertarian. He turned me on to Dave Smith’s Part of the Problem. Along with other research, everything I heard and read made complete sense. All the cognitive dissonance I didn’t even realize I had suddenly was brought to my attention while simultaneously giving me the explanation and philosophical way forward. Even this cooky guy named Scott Horton who was talking a mile a minute about foreign policy was making more sense than any intelligence briefing I had ever attended.
War Propaganda
And that is largely what the story I want to tell you today is about. Many people know and understand the war propaganda that’s used to start wars. The many lies, half truths, and slanted reporting that comes out of the government and the corporate press. But few people know and understand the propaganda that the National Security State and the military use on its own employees to keep them in line and obfuscate the truth.
Classified information – Fear
99% of all classified information in the military and the intelligence community is classified simply to keep the American citizens from knowing the truth, not some foreign nation or our so called enemies. Putting this muzzle on its employees and making an enemy out of anyone who dares speak out helps to keep almost everyone who knows silent and makes an immediate criminal out of those who don’t. See Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning for prime examples. While we all might rightly know that their crimes were nothing more than exposing the crimes of our government, most people see a criminal who broke the law and don’t look any further into the matter. And for those who do, does it matter when the corporate press is regurgitating the government line continuously for years on end?
I say that 99% of classified information was classified to keep the American citizens from knowing the truth. That other 1% comprises the names of sources and maybe troop locations. This information, if known to the American people, would certainly put US service members and intelligence sources at risk. But let’s dive deeper into this 1% of information that the regime uses to justify the other 99%.
When I was in Syria, we could not tell friends and family what country we were in, and certainly not any more granular details like the town, city or on what day we were moving from one location to another. You can’t post photos on Facebook because the meta data could be used to identify your location.
And yet, Syrian helicopters would fly over our training site on a regular basis. I feel pretty confident that the Syrian government knew exactly where we were. And if the Syrian government knew, I’m sure their Russian allies knew.
Every other week our base was fired at with rockets, flown over by an ISIS drone, shot at by some dude with an AK, and on a couple of occasions, they coordinated attacks using all of these means. I have a suspicion that maybe ISIS knew where we were.
I remember thinking that during one such attack. Like, these guys obviously know we are here. We’re in THEIR country. So who are we trying to keep this information from? Seeing as how every nation state seemed to know where we were and even this rag tag terrorist group on its last leg with over the counter drones can find us, it seems pretty obvious that the only people the USG wants to keep in the dark is its own citizens.
So we are already chipping away at the 1% of classified information that could even have a semblance of justifiability.
Let’s zoom out and take a look at how people in government use the other 99% of classified information. I wasn’t totally honest when I said it was to prevent the American People from knowing the truth. It is also designed to keep people within the regime in the dark. In the world of politics, information is power. This information is guarded and wielded both for institutional power and personal power.
Institutions want to protect their “turf”. They don’t want the information they collected to be used to benefit another agency of the regime. So they compartmentalize it for one reason or another. Why else would the US Government need 18 intelligence agencies!? Every institution wants to run, control, protect, and wield their information for their own institutional benefit.
Additionally, this information is protected for personal power. Individuals within the federal government can use information as leverage against other individuals who do not have access to this information. For both politicians and bureaucrats, moving up in seniority, position, and status usually means becoming privy to more information. Think about the Gang of Eight; the eight members of the Senate and House who, by law, must receive intelligence briefings from all 18 of these intelligence agencies. This was done under the guise of transparency, but of course, what are the chances that your state’s two Senators and your district’s Representative are one of those eight? It’s a system that allows those with seniority, position, and status to receive more information. So congratulations to the young Representative from Timbuktu who was elected to bring transparency and change to DC. But you’ll have to hang around for 30 years before getting a chance at that. Hope you stay convicted to your morals that long.
The same is true within the military. Depending on your seniority or rank, position and status, you will be privy to certain information. A Top Secret security clearance really means nothing except you got your foot into the first door. The full acronym for a Top Secret security clearance is TS-SCI: Top Secret – Sensitive Compartmentalized Information. To a certain extent, this makes sense. If I’m working in Syria, why do I need access to Top Secret information relating to China? Of course, you don’t really know unless you know, which is why information is power, when guarded and wielded to one’s benefit.
Here is just a small example of how information, regardless of how mundane and mission focused it may seem, can be viewed as a threat if certain people know about it.
No Peace Deals
From March to June 2017 I was the Team Turkey Commander. Myself and three other guys on my team replaced what had been an entire Special Forces Company mission and I was reporting directly to the 5th Group Commander, basically bypassing two bosses above me. Because there were fewer layers of bureaucracy between the politics and what I was dealing with on the ground, I was less filtered and simply told the truth as I saw it. I also had the benefit of having just been red pilled by some of the best minds in our movement, so I was less susceptible to the BS. Or maybe in hindsight, I was just ignorant of the power games being played and how the system really operated.
We were partnered with several FSA, or Free Syrian Army units, one of which was Liwa al-Hamza, or the Hamza Division. When I came across that name in the first line of an article by Lindsey Snell from The Gray Zone, I had to keep reading. The article was eerily depressing because I found myself feeling terrible for these mercenaries, simply because we had worked together, even though they were led by Syrian warlords. It’s a weird dilemma I often find myself in. As a fairly recent convert to the antiwar movement, having spent nearly a decade working for the Empire, I am often torn between past accomplishments and the realization that what I was doing was terrible, morally and strategically.
As I continued to read the article titled “No one cares if we die”, I realized that I should absolutely care if they die, just as I care when innocent women and children are being killed. These people, not unlike my former self, are being used like pawns to maintain those in power.
One of the worst things to read in the article was how, just 9 months after I left, Turkey captured and occupied Afrin. I already knew this, but having it reframed with my now antiwar perspective, it stung as if I was learning it for the first time. Especially because one of our partner forces, the Mu’tasim Brigade, had frequently pushed for a peace deal centered around Afrin.
Afrin was in the center of a section of northern Syria that had recently been cleared of ISIS by the FSA and US Special Forces. To the east and west was Kurdish controlled territory. Our partner forces were Arab, but the area had previously been occupied by the Kurds. Turkey wanted to keep the Kurds divided as much as possible. The Mu’tasim Brigade commander wanted to discuss returning the displaced people to their homes in Afrin. I have no doubt he wanted to leverage a peace deal to build up his own power within the FSA coalition and there is no guarantee any of these “peace talks” would have amounted to anything. But being willing to have the discussion is the first step. Having learned our lesson on exit strategies from Iraq War II, a sustained peace and way out was always on my mind within our Area of Operation.
I brought up Mu’tasim’s intent to have peace talks during one of our daily Commander’s Update Briefs. He brushed it off and quickly moved on to the next briefer. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. He had a lot on his plate and it would always be something we could come back to. Immediately after the briefing, the Operations Officer called me to chew me out for having brought it up in a meeting when the Turks were present. The Turks were flipping out because someone might be discussing peace on their southern border!
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was one of my many pivots that led me toward the antiwar movement. Seeing how just the mere idea of peace made people in the military recoil was disturbing. This certainly was not going to be the deal that saved the region, but to never even discuss it meant that nothing like that would ever be discussed. We hadn’t learned anything from Iraq War II. Maybe forever war really was the plan, if not through any intentional political strategy, but from the bumbling around of military leaders constantly looking for their next mission, purpose, and promotion.
I later found out this was information that the Commander already knew. He knew this peace proposal existed. But of course, it wasn’t a topic that benefited him maintaining his current job and he knew his Turkish partners would not like it. Maybe this information was simply withheld because he was too busy to tell me everything. Of course, there is an entire intelligence section who’s purpose is to control this information. No one there felt the need to inform me this was old news. They were likely told this information needed to be “compartmentalized”. That’s just a euphemism for “make it go away… make it harder to find”.
There is a lot of that going on throughout the military, intelligence community, and government in general. Hiding information that doesn’t benefit a mission, organization or individual.
Institutional Power – Obfuscation
I mentioned earlier how the Benghazi attack was intertwined with my story. For me, Syria has been like a puzzle with key pieces missing that have obscured the reality. I’ve been finding pieces here and there along the way. The Special Forces team I took command of had conducted an Interagency Tasking prior to my arrival. In our world, that simply means we went and worked for the CIA. Because I was not Read-On to their mission, technically my own team members could not discuss this mission with me. All I was allowed to know was that they were in Jordan. I knew enough, through other discussions and common sense, that they must have been training people in Jordan to send them in to Syria to fight. What I didn’t know until much later, was that this program began under President Obama, by moving weapons from Libya and funneling them along with fighters into Jordan, training and equipping them, and then moving them into Syria to start a civil war against President Bashar al-Assad
The CIA used other countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Qatar to fund the operation. Because of this, they could avoid having to disclose this information to the Gang of Eight, skirting the law by labeling this a “liaison mission”.
So all this classification helped to insulate the CIA from having to disclose its operations to Congress. That less than 1% of classified information the government and corporate press uses to convince the American people that they should accept state secrets, was being used to justify the 99% of secrets kept from not only them, but the politicians who ostensibly provide oversight of these secret programs.
This is an example of information being used for institutional power. The CIA can get away with a lot more by keeping other organizations within the government from knowing what they’re doing.
Cruise Missile Strikes
Now, the Pentagon has long been wary of the CIA, since its inception, for not sharing intelligence, or manipulating intelligence to meet political agendas, either for itself or the President. This has been especially true since the lies of Iraq’s WMD have been revealed and how that intel was cherry picked by political operatives within the Bush administration.
Don’t confuse that to mean the Pentagon is trying to inform the American people or Congress. They simply have their own interests to protect and don’t want to be drawn into a war they are not willing or prepared to fight. This is one of the reasons why the Department of Defense has nine intelligence services of its own.
Following the first uses of chemical weapons in Syria in 2013, the DoD knew enough information to know they weren’t being told the full story. While Obama was preparing a massive allied airstrike against Syria for crossing his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons, the Joint Chiefs were preparing their own intelligence report to stop him. The Pentagon feared that these airstrikes would lead to a larger war across the Middle East. The Obama administration had just finished overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi and destroying Libya, turning that region into a humanitarian nightmare with open-air slave markets.
The DoD used intelligence collected from their counterparts in the UK to show that the chemical weapons used could not have come from the Syrian regime of Assad, and likely were used by Turkish backed forces in Syria, specifically the Al Nusra Front.
While the CIA and DoD were having a pissing match to meet their own institutional objectives, none of this information made it down to my level by the time I was in Turkey four years later. The top leadership in both organizations might have wanted this information to use against each other, but they weren’t about to disseminate this much dirty laundry lower down in their organizations. They were still protecting their institutional power, and probably to a large degree, their own personal power.
So I was in the dark on all of this while in Turkey, where we spent most of our time on a small outpost on the Syrian border. On April 4th, 2017 I started receiving videos from my Free Syrian Army partner forces. Men, women, and children were being hosed down from an apparent chemical attack. There wasn’t much context outside of a chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun that they were blaming on Assad’s forces.
There were reports, including from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, that indicated the attack was conducted by the Assad regime. Now by this time we have a new president and new leadership at the CIA. But that matters little to those holding the levers of power. Especially when the objectives from one president to the next don’t significantly change and the power brokers still have institutional and personal power to protect.
Two days after this attack, on the night of April 6th, I received a call instructing my team to kit up, put on body armor and helmets, and be prepared to move into our bunkers. The President was about to launch a cruise missile strike against Syrian regime forces and they were worried about a possible counter attack. As we were the closest US forces and an easy target on the border, there was concern we could be a likely target for a retaliatory strike.
This moment was the one and only time that the corporate press gave praise to Donald Trump. He acted “presidential” in their opinion when he was escalating a conflict on short notice and with very little, likely faulty intel. This is pure state propaganda. It is indistinguishable from what Russian media sources report on the Ukraine conflict (and vice versa with western reporting on Ukraine).
How can I be so convinced that this is state propaganda? Because the day after the cruise missiles were launched from naval ships in the Mediterranean, I received a call from the intelligence section of my higher headquarters. They asked me to use my partner forces to collect evidence of the chemical attack.
My first thought was, “Why the hell did we launch cruise missiles at Syria for if we aren’t sure who was responsible?”
Now, I’ll skip over some of the more classified parts of this story, as it doesn’t really pertain to the topic at hand and I’d very much like to stay out of federal prison. Suffice it to say that we collected a sample, that when tested, sent the alarm bells ringing. It tested positive for a precursor to the nerve agent Sarin.
Now, part of the story I skipped over involves the Turkish National Intelligence Organization, their version of the CIA, knowing about our operation to collect evidence of the attack. Since I knew they had a hand in our collection process, I couldn’t rule out, and highly suspected, that Turkish intelligence could have played a role in ensuring our sample tested positive for a chemical agent. Turkey had a vested interest in keeping the US engaged and at war along its southern border. So long as we were there, we were helping them fund, arm and supply the forces who were fighting their enemies, while playing lip service to the fight against ISIS.
It wasn’t until three years later, while reading Scott Horton’s book Enough Already that I had enough pieces of the puzzle to see what took place. Scott briefly describes a report from Seymour Hersh explaining how Turkey and Saudi Arabia were working to build a chemical weapons capability for the Al Nusra Front. Specifically, there are DoD intelligence reports describing Turkish and Saudi attempts to obtain sarin precursors in bulk. Additionally, local Turkish police arrested 10 members from Al Nusra and told reporters they had two kilograms of sarin. Turkish intelligence later claimed it was anti-freeze and all 10 members were released.
It simply wouldn’t make any tactical or strategic sense for Assad to use chemical weapons. It wouldn’t help him any more than conventional weapons to suppress the resistance fighters, a fight he was winning. And it would only be a reason for western nations to go to war.
It was clear that the DoD was still trying to protect itself by collecting its own intelligence, to verify or deny the claims made by the CIA. And how much of this did the President even know? After all, political operatives have admitted they withheld troop numbers from Trump to make him think the American footprint was smaller than it really was. Of course Trump had made repeated threats to pull out of Syria. It seemed each time resulted in a chemical attack, ensuring the US presence was prolonged.
The obvious explanation is that there were Turkish backed forces in Syria that stood to lose millions of dollars in cash, as well as the continued supply of arms and equipment if the US withdrew. They were heavily incentivized to create a situation that would ensure the US stayed. And those incentives lined up well with competing intelligence organizations fighting for institutional and personal power.
Of course, to read or watch any of this from the corporate press, it would simply look like Assad used chemical weapons on his own people. Nevermind that the CIA said it was Sarin, my collection showed it was a precursor, and even the fabricated OPCW report stated it was chlorine. Even before putting all these other pieces together, it was apparent that the corporate press was throwing whatever propaganda it could at the wall to see what would stick. The corporate press is the conduit between the internal propaganda aimed at protecting state secrets, and the external propaganda aimed against the American people.
Killing Civilians
These lies and power struggles have real world consequences. Consequences that only the most vile, evil states would think are worth the costs. And that is why it is so dangerous for people like Julian Assange to expose the crimes committed by governments. If the people are allowed to focus on the truth that he exposed, their propaganda would come crashing down. Their only recourse is more propaganda, creating more lies, and more opportunities for people like us to see the truth and expose it.
This last story is less an anecdote about propaganda as much as it is a story of the costs of it. That’s not to say that there aren’t factors of propaganda at play and possibly these are the most important factors to consider in all of what you’ve heard here today. But ultimately, these are the costs that we must be ever present of when we allow evil continue to rule.
I will be the first to tell you that the US military does not actively target civilians. That job is left to the CIA. But no, the military, in any capacity that I have ever engaged, does not actively do so. But, that doesn’t mean they take very good steps in preventing it. They believe they do. They believe their hands are clean because they have used military lawyers and the Rules of Armed Conflict and international law to wash their hands clean from any wrongdoing.
Civilian casualties are just a reality of warfare that can never be overcome. Even if you granted that every drone strike only killed the intended target, that target was not given a trial… no evidence was presented before a jury… no judge made a ruling. Except the Judge, Jury and Executioner that is the military commander giving the order to launch a strike.
But we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where the innocent suffer disproportionately from war. That’s why this insane policy of prolonging the war in Ukraine to hurt the Russian’s is so disgusting. It’s absolutely evil. None of the leaders on any side will suffer while the people of Ukraine, Russia, and even Europe have suffered greatly with no end in sight.
Most of this suffering is financially, which alone is terrible enough for people to endure when this could have been prevented and could easily be stopped. But many people will die from direct conflict, no matter the measures taken to prevent this.
Before our deployment to Syria, we underwent extensive training in the Rules of Engagement. To a large extent that was due to the presence of Syrian Government Forces and Russian Forces who we were not at war with, and with which a larger escalation would result. But we also focused heavily on avoiding civilian casualties. There are certain criteria that must be met before engaging even a legitimate military target. The first criteria is that the target must be maneuvering on US forces or partner forces to conduct a preemptive strike. Well, in military lingo, maneuver is defined as the employment of forces to achieve a position of advantage. So the simple act of using a cell phone can be construed as “maneuvering forces”.
The pinpointing of targets was almost always done through the use of cell phone data. Through “classified means” leaked by Snowden, the military can identify cell signals associated with “known terrorists”. So given that almost every target was identified via their use of a cell phone, the first criteria was always met.
To meet the criteria for a preemptive strike, we needed a second source of intel, independent of the cell phone data, to conduct a strike. For this, we used a map overlay with years of intelligence collected on ISIS. Think Google Earth with a little note on your house saying, “bad guy seen here”. Now, this is a little into the nuts and bolts of how this intel was collected, but imagine we are flying drones over an area following “bad guys” and we make a note at every place one of these guys stops and takes a piss at or grabs a falafel. It doesn’t take very long before just about every building on the map has some piece of intel associated with it. And going back to the fact that no trial or evidence was ever presented in court, who’s to say that the people on these lists are even “bad guys”? Americans get put on the No Fly List all the time, without due process, and even after they find out they’re on it, it is very difficult to get taken off. Some poor Muhammad who shares the name with half the people in his country gets put on a watch list and we label his favorite deli a terrorist hangout.
Now, we started this by talking about civilian casualties. But don’t worry. Even though we’ve discussed how easily it would be to mistakenly get put on a watch list and even though there is a second piece of intel that can easily be correlated with that first piece of mistaken intel, we have a solid, full proof final process to eliminate civilian casualties… We are not allowed to fire if we see civilians in the area. It’s kind of like cancer. You don’t have any as long as it’s not identified.
In all seriousness, there were times when we did not fire because a target got too close to women and children… Oh… this might be a good time to clarify that by civilians, the US military just means women and children. Military Aged Males or MAMs were considered guilty by association. If you were hanging out with this “known terrorist” then you’re just a terrorist we haven’t identified yet.
So drones flying high above, even if unarmed, were critical in the strike process for determining that no women or children were present. This process, as I stated earlier, is absolutely full proof… so long as all of the women and children are outside when you plan to conduct a strike.
But wouldn’t you know it, terrorists tend to do a lot of their extracurricular activities inside, at night, when the women and children are inside sleeping. So very often when we conduct these strikes, all the sensors at the US military’s disposal will never see the women and children inside asleep.
I found that out the hard way one night when we conducted a strike. Cell phone data pinged on a location with previous enemy intel. Check and Check. No civilians identified in the area. Check. Strike was approved and ordered. As we watched the video feed from the drone and waited for the impact and resulting cloud of smoke, we saw the munition punch a hole in the roof of the building… and then… nothing. No cloud. No smoke. It was a dud. Maybe the Air Force munitions technician failed to remove the safety pin before flight. Maybe there was faulty wiring in the Raytheon guidance system. Whatever it was, shortly after the impact, about 15 women and children came running out of the building. That was an eye opener.
I think I already had my suspicions about the reliability of the intelligence we were using, but to see the impact of what could have been and realize we had no way of knowing the truth about who was in all the buildings where the bombs did go off. It’s a sobering reminder of the costs of war.
According to Airwar.org, there were about 160 civilian deaths in our Area of Operations during the three month period I was in Syria. Speaking out and taking action against the war machine is my small penance to pay for the role I played within the War Machine. I think it’s the reason that many veterans take their own lives, because they struggle to live with their actions while still trying to believe they were protecting their nation. Try to remember that most people are trying to do the right thing. That’s why those in power depend on propaganda. To trick good people into doing terrible things. That is all war has ever been.
Conclusion
So what can you do? The first step in any war is understanding the battlefield. You were already on that path before even coming here this weekend. You are continuing on that path by listening and talking to and learning from the speakers here this weekend.
Whether we are talking about the antiwar movement or the broader liberty movement, the path forward is pretty much the same. Build your network and spread the message of liberty.
Step one: Build your network. You’ve made contact with hundreds of people here this weekend. Continue to build those relationships. Help out where you can and ask for help when you need it.
Step two: Spread the message. Talk to people from where they’re at. There is no silver bullet or one liner of perfect information that will change someone’s mind. My talk today was centered around moments. Small, incremental, but significant moments in my life that were pivot points that got me from being a Green Beret dropping bombs on people who did nothing to me, to speaking out and fighting back against the Empire.
When you’re spreading the message of liberty, focus on that word pivot. In basketball, a pivot is a small step with one foot while the other foot stays in place. Give people the space to stay where they are, feeling like they have one foot firmly planted in their belief system, while their other foot can feel out some new ideas. Eventually those new ideas take hold and that because their new pivot point. You have shifted their Overton Window so they now feel comfortable moving their belief system to the other foot. And then you start working from there, and this process repeats itself.
This is a process that you can work on with like minded people as well. We are currently engage in it with each other right now. So as much as we are all very like minded, we can also grow, learn, and pivot together. Just last night at the Florida Mises Caucus event I was talking to two locals. Sarah said she wasn’t an anarchist and didn’t think she could get there. Terry didn’t understand Bitcoin and seemed a little overwhelmed by all of it. I started small with each of them, but by the end of the night, they were very interested and intrigued to learn more.
As much as you might think you’re in an echo chamber, don’t let the echos drown the fact that we all have room to grow and things to learn.
When we think of pivotal movements in our lives, we think of big events that led to big change. We forget about all the small, incremental pivots that led to those big moments. Ron Paul made small but meaningful changes to the things that candidates talk about and that has led to a Revolution!