Long tail activism

0:00In a world full of lies and deception, it takes courage to speak the truth. In a nation held bent on its own destruction, it takes honor to seek return to glory. Join us in cutting through the lies. Join us in cutting through the propaganda. Join us as we seek the truth on cutting through the fog from the America Out Loud Network. And here's your host, Wallace Garnow. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to cutting through the chaos of the America Out Loud Network, where we cut through the lies and the propaganda to bring you the out loud truth. I'm your host, Wallace Garnow, and I think I'm a great show for you today. I want to talk about what I call a long, tale activism. You see me posts up on Facebook, algorithms decide where to place it on your friends' feeds, as well as on the feeds of your friends' friends. These are the two groups, friends and friends of friends that make up your personal network.

1:00The sum of those in your immediate network may share your posts. I call these shares short-tailed shares, given that your friends' friends could already see your post. But if your privacy settings allow it, this may open your post to their extended network, as well, which moves your post one hop outside your personal network. Once a post is propagated outside your own network, each share brings it to two new networks of people, and then it has a chance to go viral. I call shares made outside of your personal network, long-tail shares, as neither the friends nor the friends of friends now seeing it could see it before. And the further from your own network your post goes, the longer its tail gets. Now you don't get to see long-tail shares. Facebook recently put me on a professional account. Why I don't know I didn't ask for it. They must have decided I'd reach some threshold to some kind and all of a sudden I'm on a professional account. But it's kind of cool, because now I can see total views for every post that I make.

2:00I can see how many, I can see the total of reviews. And I had a post recently that had over 45,000 views, and it's still growing, by the way. And it only shows 251 shares. How can that be? I should, if you, how can you get 2,245,000 views out of only 251 shares? Well, the reason is that I can see the names of those who share my content. And Facebook does not want me to see the names of those who are not part of my immediate network. So those shares stay hidden, leaving only the 251 short-tailed shares visible even on a professional account. Not only 2.7% of the viewers for that particular post are from my personal network. So clearly I had many additional shares outside of that 251 that were from my network. This is the power of the long-tail share and modern political activism now works in kind of a similar way.

3:01Most activism throughout history has had a short tail. Activists organize people, they make demands, they protest, and all of the work that happens is within a circle that the activist personally puts together. Every new battle requires another act of organization and someone has to provide the energy, identify the grievance, recruit the people, bring doughnuts, define the target, coordinate the pressure, and doing all of that to keep the momentum alive. Long-tailed activism is different. It begins when activism moves away from the activist and into our institutions, such as our universities, our public school systems, government agencies, corporate HR departments, professional associations, nonprofits, media organizations, etc. etc. with these institutions then taking over the work of the activists. The institutions begin spreading the activism on their own, making it a part of things like hiring decisions, educational requirements, and corporate compliance.

4:02Until all of a sudden the views of the activists start to become part of the ordinary language people use in their everyday lives. Long-tailed activism is the process by which political activism embeds itself into the institutions that are supposed to keep society functioning predictably. Long-tailed activism makes those institutions churn against one another and then against the nation as a whole. This is a viral form of activism in which the institutions stop helping to organize and manage society and instead act to reproduce, enforce, and transmit activist demands far beyond the reach that any actual activists could ever hope to reach. Now in this podcast what I want to do is I want to show you exactly how this process started and how it works. I'm not talking about institutional capture either which explains how activists gain influence over an institution. More by talking about bureaucratic entrenchment which explains why policy becomes difficult to remove.

5:02Long-tailed activism describes what happens after the institutions have been captured and after the bureaucrats are already entrenched. At that point the captured institutions begin to carry the activists ideas outward to change or attack all of the other institutions around it with the purpose of either fomenting revolutionary change from within or simply burning the nation down so they can build something new from scratch. I imagine Sololinsky's rules for radicals but instead of being used from outside our institutions, the way Alinsky envisioned, imagine those rules embedded within the institutions to change the purpose of the institutions to one of weakening the nation from within. Let's start with how this machine was built. The constitution made power difficult to concentrate. So none of this was possible with a limited federal government. Congress passed the laws, the president executed them, courts have churped them to prevent Congress from passing too many laws. It was split in two, one in which was initially filled by the states rather than by popular

6:04vote. The states had far more collective authority for most of our nation's history than the federal government and it would be impossible to build long-tailed activism if that's the case. It would have been far more difficult than it turned out to be later. Now Woodrow Wilson wrote an essay in 1887 titled The Study of Administration in which he argued that modern government needed to be professionally administered and at the federal rather than state level. He said the political leaders should set the goals while trained administrators run the country independently of elected officials. Such that the mechanizations of power do not change state to state. That's why he wanted to remove federalism and want it done with federal level or administration to administration. Now we have changed administration. His attitude was that it shouldn't change the people that actually run the country and just changes the political class. Wilson wanted to see a modern bureaucracy of experts to become a permanent, powerful, and immutable entity that would change with the times only as those bureaucrats saw fit.

7:08Now Wilson understood that a permanent class for federal administrators would begin to see itself as being above the people they covered. But Wilson also believed government had become too complicated to be run by elected officials and that a moral and intellectual elite could run the country far better than those the people might elect. Elected leaders, according to Wilson, could decide what the government should do. But trained administrators who could not be replaced every time there was an election needed to actually run the country. The administrators could then take what elected officials wanted and do a count and decide how to implement those things as policy. Woodrow Wilson did not envision bureaucrats becoming corrupt and using their positions for personal benefit. And he also did not consider that there could be a great deal of selection bias in terms of who would want to work in that kind of a job. Those who believe government should be limited are far less likely to work for work in government, particularly in the parts of government they do not think the government should do. As such, the mechanizations of power tend to lean left and tend to lean more so over time.

8:13The Pendleton Act was passed in 1883, before Wilson wrote his essay, putting in place a merit-based federal hiring system and replacing the practice of hiring based on patronage. It also protected federal employees who were being fired for political reasons. Initially, the Pendleton Act protected Republicans who had dominated the federal government going all the way back to Lincoln. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt under his new deal created agencies that were often staffed outside the civil service system, allowing Roosevelt to hire people who agreed with the Democratic Party and the new deal. Roosevelt then worked with Congress to create the RampSpec Act in 1940 to bring those new institutions, those new administrations into the civil service system so that you can protect them from future administrations. It was kind of a Texas two step. I'm not going to use the civil service system when I build these new organizations that are a part of my administration, but that I'm going to bring them into the civil service so that I can protect the employees that I have selected from outside the civil service

9:14system. Over time, the federal bureaucracy began to tilt more and more left and Lyndon Johnson expanded even further. Now, the Great Society did not stop with Medicare, Medicaid, and the War on Poverty. There's a lot more to it. Johnson also started a head start, the Jobs Corps, HUD, a domestic version of the Peace Corps called Vista, and a number of other programs, all of which expanded the power of the federal government over the lives of Americans and over the states. The federal government began taxing the people to pay for things, and the federal government actually had no authority over, including things like education, highways, healthcare, welfare, and housing. Washington would then fund those programs for the states, but only if they followed federal rules. In this way, the federal government could dictate to the states even where the federal government lacked a legitimate authority. The states remained sovereign in law, but they became dependent on federal money. And the more money watching to begin the fund, the states, the harder it became for state

10:15refused the attached conditions. Not only that, but it's not like the state doesn't like it. The federal government doesn't like how a state is doing education. It can only withdraw education funds. Now, it can withdraw all of the funds if it does not like what a state is doing. So essentially, by using money as a noose, the federal government has completely subjugated the states. State governments have increasingly then become administrators and programs designed, funded, and regulated from Washington, which has all but ended the concept of federalism. Now, it's easy to envision professional administrators running the country better than elected officials. Easy to envision it. We have no shortage of people getting elected. We either have no idea what they are doing or who have been captured by ideologies and simply don't work. So it's time to think the professional administrators would be immune to that. But in truth, professional administrators are just as fallible as those that we elect. And unlike those elect, we cannot easily remove them. By the end of the 20th century, the United States had something that the founders would

11:17have rejected, and that Wilson could only have dreamed of. Washington had a permanent professional bureaucracy, enormous regulatory and grant making power. Federal contracting systems, large enforcement agencies, armies of lawyers, and financial relationships reaching state governments, universities, corporations, nonprofits, media houses, and almost every other major part of American society. At that point, the machine was in place. All it needed was somebody to figure out how to use it. This brings us to rules for radicals in short-tail activism, because all Olinsky did not build bureaucracies. He organized people against them. And one scheme he actually figured out a loophole in how a chain of private cafeterias operated that essentially led him to eat for free. The loophole was clever. Customers took food and received a paper check showing what they owed. Olinsky would go in an order of five cents cup of coffee and get a five cent check. He then moved near the cashier, claimed he had lost his check, and because he had seen

12:19drinking only coffee, he charged him another nickel. Then allowed him to leave while keeping the original five cent check. He then walked to another location, ordered a large meal while sitting where the cashier could not watch him. When he paid, he gave the cashier the five cent ticket and threw the much larger wood away. Now, let's get it not just do this himself. No, he began to encourage others to do the exact same thing. He was outraged that private cafeterias would charge people for food. He actually told Playboy in an interview that the right to eat takes precedence over the right to make a profit. So we tried to get enough people to steal food to drive the chain of cafeterias out of business. That was his aim. He wanted to drive this chain of cafeterias that had the audacity to charge people for food. He wanted to drive it out of business. The restaurant chain eventually figured out what was happening and installed machines that issued serialized tickets that were only valid if the restaurant were they were issued. That killed the scheme. Alinsky joked at the time that his activists had become victims of automation of the process

13:23of finding a weakness in a system and organized people to exploit it. That stuck with him. Alinsky later called the cafeteria scheme his first experience as an organizer. When the cafeteria was finally closed the loophole, well the students he had organized came back to him and wanted to know what they were going to do next. And what started as a quest for free food at that point became a political movement. Alinsky went on to organize for the CIO labor union. And in 1939 he helped organize Chicago's back of the yard's neighborhood. There he looked for existing groups and institutions found common grievances, organized people around them and then looked for pressure points that could force larger institutions to react. Back of the yards became the model for the industrial areas foundation which Alinsky founded in 1940 to spread his organizing methods into other communities. For the next 30 years Alinsky refined those methods to campaigns in Chicago and other cities. He learned how to make a relatively small group look powerful, how to force an opponent

14:25to react, how to exploit and opponents own rules and how to make resistance more painful than giving in. In 1971 toward the end of his life he collected those lessons and rules for radicals. At that point the cafeteria scam became a political philosophy. We live in a democracy but each of us is a very small interest in any given policy. Whereas there will always be at least one industry that is a very vested interest, a very strong vested interest in any policy. As such it is very easy to organize industries for and against policies but very hard to organize people. People also tend to move on once the policy becomes law. Whereas the industries affected by a law stay very very aware of exactly how that becomes regulated over time. As such the public exerts a very little actual power over our institutions. An organized minority of people on the other hand can concentrate its efforts and resources, much more like an industry and then they can have enormous power. Alinsky's rules for radicals created a framework for using that power.

15:30Alinsky's method was to personify the target and attack them personally with the goal of making refusing so painful to resist at the institution cave zen. Alinsky came up with 13 rules to inflict pain. I'm going to list those. The first is power is not only what you actually have but your opponent believes you have. Second, when it stayed within your own people's experience, if you push them into unfamiliar territory they become confused and hesitant. The third is push your opponent outside his experience. Make him operate where he is uncomfortable or unprepared. The fourth is force your opponent to live up to his own stated rules and standards. The fifth is ridicule as an especially effective weapon because it is difficult to answer. Number six, a tactic works best for the people carrying it out and joy doing it. Number seven, a tactic used for too long becomes stale and loses effectiveness. Number eight, keep applying pressure, change tactics but do not let the target recover. Number nine, the threat of an action can be more frightening than the action itself.

16:32Number ten, successful pressure requires sustained operations that keep the opposition reacting. Number eleven, if you push a negative hard enough it can produce a positive result by forcing the opposition into an overreaction or contradiction. Number twelve, every successful attack needs a constructive alternative. If you tear something down you need an answer for what replaces it. And finally, number thirteen, pick a specific target, isolate it, personalize the conflict and polarize it. Do not attack an abstraction when you can make one person or institution carry the burden of the dispute. Now those rules allow relatively small groups to wield tremendous influence. A company, university or city government might have vastly more money and power than the activists, but it can also has far more to lose. And since the attacks are personal it is not just the institution that can be attacked but also the specific people within it. The weakness in the method was the organization required.

17:33Every new fight needed people to identify the grievance, rally the community, choose a target and then keep up the pressure. An organizer might force a company to change a hiring policy or pressure a city government to make a concession, but once the campaign ended the institution continued to operate. That is what made a Linsky's activism short tail. The activists could change what an institution did, but the institution did not take over the activism. The next battle still required another organizer, another campaign, and another round of pressure. The breakthrough came when activists learned how to remove themselves from the process. This brings us to Hillary Rodham and the problem of scale. Hillary Rodham spent her senior year at well as Lee Studing Saul Olinsky. Her 1960s and 1960s thesis there is only the fight and analysis of the Olinsky bottle, examined his methods. Olinsky later offered her a job, but she churned him down and went to law school. As Olinsky believed in exercising pressure on the institutions from without, Hillary Rodham

18:33's thesis suggested the institutions be taken over and attacked from within. Individual institutions could be taken over by activists and then used both to further the activism as well as to attack other institutions if they were not yet on board. The goal was to turn the government, the colleges, the media, and all other institutions against the governing system and to use the institutions, including the government, either radically reform our country or to burn it down and start over. Rodham's plan offered a much easier path, government agencies, universities, courts, corporations, foundations, professional associations, and media organizations all had enormous influence over how the country operated and how people in the country lived. If these institutions could be filled with activists, what Gramps called the long walk through the institutions, whether the systems Rodham wanted to tear down would do the work for her. Once activists had moved inside the institutions, institutional powers spread the ideas for

19:37the activists. Universities already taught students, professional associations already set standards. Licensing boards are already controlled who could enter the profession, corporations already set employment rules, and government agencies already wrote regulations. Added foundations that decided who got money and suddenly activists could change what those institutions taught, required, funded, or regulated. The institutions made activism go viral. The activists no longer had to reach people, the institutions put the protests together and let the activists do nothing but lead. Activism suddenly had a long tail. Now Hillary Rodham later met Bill Clinton and the two became the perfect power couple. Bill supplied the charisma and Hillary supplied the ideas. Bill was not an idealog though, and as present he did not implement all of Hillary's ideas. So once his presence he was over, what did Hillary do? Well she went into the senate and began to position herself for her own presidential run. I don't think most people have any idea how lucky we are that it failed.

20:42But it still brings us to networks of interrelated systems. Bill Clinton's national performance review was publicly framed as an effort to make government more efficient and less expensive. It did not claim to implement long tail activism, but it did put in place the architecture. The old will Sony and Model a management administration primarily as a hierarchy. Political leaders would make decisions from like 35,000 feet up and then professional administrators carried those decisions downward. They organized bureaucracies all the way to where the rubber meets the road. And those processes find in theory real governments work through interconnected networks that have interrelated systems. Federal agencies deal with state governments, local governments, private contractors, universities, nonprofits, foundations, businesses, advocacy organizations, and professional associations. Programs are delivered through partnerships and money is passed through grants and contracts. Even the border between government and civil society far less clear than what Wilson

21:43saw. Both parties, by the way, use networks like this. With conservatives, we tend to get contractors, partnerships, grants, think tanks, nonprofits, and private institutions. And there's nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for government to work with organizations that possess knowledge or capabilities that the government lacks. The structural consequences of what matters. The government became capable of influencing society throughout organizations that were not part of the government. This creates reach, but without clear ownership or accountability. Now Hillary Clinton was never able to implement her full strategy because she lost to Barack Obama in 2008. Barack Obama, however, was a community organizer who had used Sololinsky's methods and he knew exactly what Hillary Clinton wanted to do. So what happened, Willie Braderon boarded began to implement her plans for. Barack Obama also went to Harvard Law School and before becoming president, he practiced law.

22:44An organizer asks how to create pressure inside an institution. A lawyer asks how an institution can be compelled to act. A legislature asks what authority can be written into law and an executive asks what government can do with authority it already has. Well guess what? Obama operated in all of those worlds. This president Obama had tools Wilson could never even have imagined. Government could still regulate directly, but it could also use civil rights enforcement, grants, agency guidance, lawsuits, settlements, contracts and partnerships to shape how other institutions behaved. Education is a good example of this. The Department of Education used Title IX guides to change how schools handled sexual misconduct allegations, removing due process for the accused. The Department of Education and Justice later warned schools that discipline policies could create civil rights problems if they produced racial disparities, even if the rules were neutral, which led an explosion of violence in inner city schools where education quickly

23:45ground to a halt. Why? Because if students were misbehaving, you couldn't do anything about it unless you were punishing an equal number of white and black students. Well if the student body was, if they weren't acting out in equal numbers, this made it very, very difficult to enforce anybody. It was a ridiculous policy, but that's what happened. Now education, we know a better education system is. That's not the only reason we've talked about this before, but that is certainly a reason why our education system is as bad right now as it is. In schools across the country, we're forced without policies that talk to the slowest learners, encouraging them to eliminate standardized testing in advance curriculum, and the schools were forced to adopt federal educational standards that educated less and propagandized more. Our schools began to create what? Activists. They don't create professionals anymore. They create activists. The same thing is happening at one housing. The HUD housing and urban development used federal housing law and federal funding to influence

24:47how local governments dealt with zoning. Washington came up with kind of a market basket of demographics that represented the perfect American average and then demanded that all communities do everything possible to match it. Trump luckily killed that program before it's fully implemented, but had it got into effect local governments would have had to use a reverse redlining program to adopt federal standards for the racial makeup of their communities or they would have lost all HUD funding. Washington did not need to make local housing decisions. It only needed to threaten to deny federal funds. Her short-tailed activism when it had to have sent an army of organizers into every school district, university, corporation, and city in the country to accomplish this. Using the institutions to do the activism allowed the administrative state to perform activism on a viral scale. Well, once somebody had control over the institutions, the next step was manufacturing organizers. Imagine someone taking a job after an institution has already changed.

25:47She does not see the new rules as activism. To her, that's just how things are done. The employee handbook already uses the new language. The legal department already works from the new definitions. Employees are trained and professional groups begin to support the changes in licensing and accommodation systems. Grant requirements enforce those changes. Employees do not need to read a political manifesto when the institutions they work for teach activists ideas as a part of their jobs. And this sort of thing is going on long enough now that most of our institutions think the activism they are performing is what the institution was created to do. People learn very quickly what gets rewarded and what gets punished. They also learn what language is expected, what subjects create trouble, and I think most importantly they learn what gets people promoted. Most employees are not trying to become activists, but all employees try to succeed in the organizations they work for. Because of this, an institution can become ideological even when most of the people inside it do not see themselves as ideologues.

26:50See systems matter. Change out organization hires, trains, evaluates, promotes, defied risks, and measures success, and it will begin selecting people who fit that culture. Those people that train the next group and suddenly the institution starts to reproduce. A new employee may never even have heard of Sololinsky. It doesn't matter. She inherits his roles and this is when activism truly develops a long tail. Just to be clear Wilson did have a point. The government really does need people who know how to do complicated jobs and a new president cannot replace everyone in government every four years. He was right about that. The problem is not professional government employees. The problem begins when career bureaucrats start to see their own mission. It's more legitimate than the elected government they are supposed to serve. The real problem comes when the institutions become activists and stop doing what they are created to do. The institutions are supposed to keep our country. Basically the institutions exist to make activism. I don't want to say that it shouldn't be any activism.

27:52You have a right to be an activist. But the institutions exist to make activism unnecessary by running the country competently, by doing things competently. When they give up on doing the things they are supposed to do and try to tear the country down instead. That is when this becomes a real problem. And Wilson understood at least part of that danger. He wanted trained administrators who were protected from political patriots, but he still expected them to carry out the policies of the government and power. He did not envision a permanent bureaucracy deciding which elected leaders deserve to be obeyed. And he certainly did not foresee his own party encouraging career bureaucrats to ignore a duly elected president. An institutions develop cultures though. Career employees stay while presidents come and go. They train younger employees, write procedures, preserve old decisions, maintain outside relationships, and they brief in coming political leaders. They also know how the system works in ways a new political appointee was not.

28:52My dad once told me that when he was in the army, he was in it just long enough to figure out how everything gets done. He said he could have gotten anything he wanted on by the time he got out. He did not know he was speaking in lean language, but what he was talking about is how long it takes to learn the systems of a bureaucracy and it turns out for him it was four years. Interestingly, that is also the term of one presidential term. Eventually, the bureaucracy starts to see the elected government as temporary and its own mission is permanent. A president agrees that the bureaucracy, well, he is treated as normal, while a president disagrees with it can be treated as a threat. Resistance can then be called professionalism and leaks can be called public service. Sometimes those descriptions are fair by the way. Political officials can issue illegal orders and career employees should not follow illegal orders, but there is an obvious difference between refusing an illegal order and resisting a lawful policy when the bureaucracy believes its own judgment is morally superior to that

29:55of the president. And once that line gets blurry, the administrative state becomes a swamp. Wilson wanted enough insulation to let the government function, but now much of the government functions against the very state it is supposed to be a part of, and that insulation resists political correction. And with that, it is time for a word from our sponsors. You can reach our sponsors directly by going to america out loud.news slash shop or by clicking the shop button at the top of the website. Don't go anywhere as we still have a lot to go over on the other side of the bridge. Oral hygiene hasn't changed in 50 years. Brush, floss, repeat. We're told to use fluoride, which doesn't really address the acid creating bacteria. That is where the dentist recommended Sprite Dental Defense System shines. Sprite products contain xylitol, a natural sugar, which helps get rid of those nasty smelly acid creating bacteria in our mouth. The best way to care for your teeth and gums is by using Sprite.

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35:02health. Join your health now at TWC.Health-forward slash out loud and use code out loud for 20% off your first order plus free shipping. I'll never before has our American cultural, economic, spiritual and political fabric been more threat-bare. But the America most of us have drawn up with and laws under a relentless and pernicious siege from those carrying the banners of socialism, communism and Marxism. America out loud dot news is the antidote to these poisons and his own. America out loud dot news is that place to awaken your heart, soul and mind to the out loud truth. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to cuttings of the chaos in the America out loud network time. We're talking about long tail activism. We have a lot to go over so I'm just going to go right back into it.

36:02We talked about how we manufactured or how the help of organizers were manufactured from within the institutions before the break now we're going into the NGO ecosystem. Govern bureaucracy is only one part of the long tail system. The outside network matters at least as much. Consisting would have called non-governmental organizations or NGOs. Non-profits are private organizations but many work very very closely with the government. In a matter of fact we found out with USAID through Dodge that about two thirds to three fours of all nonprofit funding came from the federal government through USAID. And that's where they get their money. Some receive grants or contracts, others provide services, conduct research, file lawsuits, train people or advocate for policy changes. One often works with nonprofits as they can do useful things that government either cannot do well or does not want to do directly. Government even creates some of the NGOs. Government does not need a federal employee in every city or neighborhood if it can work

37:04through organizations that are already there. Those organizations work with universities, foundations, businesses, courts, state agencies and of course the media. The result is a much larger network than that government could ever build on its own. People move through that network too. Somebody may work it for an advocacy group, take a government job, move to a university and later work for a corporation on profit. As people move they carry their ideas, their relationships, their language and their assumptions with them. People often think that this sort of thing is conspiracy but it's not a conspiracy. A conspiracy requires people to coordinate and secret. A system does not and these systems coordinate openly. Governments add another layer to the system. Activist groups have always used lawsuits to force change. Litigation is part of the American system and consent decrees can make the results of a lawsuit much harder to reverse. The way it works is that a group sues an agency, city or other government body and it's

38:04done to go through a full trial the two sides agreed to changes. A judge approves the agreement and those changes can then be enforced by the court. That's a legitimate process but there's an activist version of it. The activist version is called sue and settle. It is but used frequently, particularly in environmental law. Environmental laws often allow outside groups to sue an agency when it fails to meet a deadline or perform a duty that was required by Congress. Before filing the suit, the group may even be required to give the agency notice that it intends to sue. That gives the two sides an opportunity to coordinate before the lawsuit is filed. An ordinary lawsuit, the two sides disagree and each tries to win. In sue and settle, the agency already wants to take some action. There is no disagreement. The agency often writes the lawsuit itself before choosing an outside group to file it and then says to the group, here, sue me with this. Critics call this regulation through litigation and during the Obama years congressional investigators

39:06accused the EPA of repeatedly settling lawsuits brought by environmental groups, sometimes committing the agency to regulatory deadlines and priorities without states regulated industries or other affected parties participating in the negotiations. It's actually worse than it sounds because what the agency can do is, you can say I would like to have this power that Congress did not give me that I don't have by statute. So I'll do is I'll find an organization, ask them to sue me and then through the negotiation with them, we will ask a judge to make a consent decree that gives me that says that I have to utilize this power that I don't actually have. This happens again and again and again. This is one of the ways the government grows so quickly without anybody really noticing. Our court system is becoming a legislature but it's not really the court system. It's the agencies themselves utilizing third parties. In many cases, set up by the government, having them sue the government to give those agencies

40:08powers through consent decrees that those agencies do not rightfully have. It happens and happens a lot. Now under Trump, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt issued a directive specifically intended to stop this practice. Among other things, you require the EPA to publish notices of intent to sue to involve affected states and regulated parties whenever possible and to allow public comment on proposed settlements. What do you think the EPA did? It ignored the directive and continued to use sue and settle. So what does it change is the environment. The most effective political systems do not need to give everyone direct orders. All they have to do is change the incentives involved in people act accordingly. If the government wants the university to change something, it could pass a law telling the university what to do. But it's easier and far less transparent to change the legal risks the university faces. You can also attach conditions to federal money, change civil rights enforcement or influencing accreditation and professional standards.

41:11Other institutions can also apply pressure to their own. Nobody has to order the university to change. The university can change because the incentives force it to. Corporations work in the same way. Government can change liability rules, employment law, contracting requirements, or disclosure rules. Groups can create public pressure and professional organizations can redefine what counts as accepted practice. Universities then train new managers under the new rules. The corporation adapts and then passes the new expectations down to employees and suppliers. Those suppliers may pass it on again. One institution influences another, which influences another. Before long, it comes difficult to say where a particular policy even started. This is why systems thinking matters. Political debate usually asks who is in charge. But the better question is what incentives keep producing the same result even when nobody is directing it. There comes a point when an institution stops responding to activism and begins doing the activism itself.

42:13That is what long-tail activism explains. Institutions are supposed to have purpose. Universities educate, for example, while hospitals treat patients. Newspapers reported information, professional groups set standards. Govern agencies carry out the law. The long-tail activism, a social transformation becomes up a part of, or perhaps even replaces the institution's actual purpose. A university may begin to see its job as not only educating students, but also to encourage a particular ideology and encourage students to become activists for it. A corporation may decide that changing social attitudes is just as important as selling products. Professional association may move beyond competence and ethics and begin requiring agreement on political positions before it will grant a license or recordation. This is what DEI is. This is what ESG scores are. Government agencies can do this sort of thing too by asking not what the law requires, but what social result they want to produce.

43:13At that point, the only difference between an institution and an activist is the ability to scale. Once an activist becomes a part of the institution, it goes viral. Viral activists are durable, whereas individual activists are not. And when individual activists are put into important jobs, even when they are put into important jobs, they may leave. But an institution's sense of purpose is very difficult to change. There are five stages of this. Long-tail activism occurs in five stages. The first stage was administrative capacity. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives wanted a professional government that could manage a modern society without being pulled in a different direction every time we have an election. The new deal greatly expanded the administrative state and then the great society extended federal influence over the states through funding regulation and civil rights enforcement. The second stage was political leverage. Olinsky focused on people outside the institutions. His question was how a relatively weak group could force a much stronger institution to change.

44:14His answer was organization, pressure and conflict. It worked, but every new campaign needed organizers. Third stage is scaling activism. Hillary Rodham wrote about transforming from working against institutions from the outside to working against them from the inside. Institutions under Obama slowly became filled with activists. The fourth stage was institutional propagation. By this point, the government was tied into much larger networks of courts, nonprofits, universities, contractors, professional groups, corporations and state and local governments. Obama understood community organizing law and executive governments. So under his administration, these different tools began to be used together in ways that orchestrated the activist networks, which by this time included much of the government. The fifth stage is autonomous activism. This is when the system no longer needs the people who built it. And this is where we are today. There are many reasons people hate Trump.

45:18Some of them move based on things that are true. He really has cheated on his various wives, for example, and he really did attach his name to a bogus real estate school. He has baggage. Let's face it. But then all politicians have baggage. The real reason Trump is as hated as he is is that all of the mechanisms of power outside is a media control. See him as an existential threat to their activism, and they see their activism as their true purpose. They hate Trump because he is working to strengthen the nation. They are trying to radically transform it. Wilson's model assumed that government administrators were serving a shared national purpose. Whatever its many flaws, including his terrible views on race incidentally, he did not imagine the permanent bureaucracy whose job was to undermine the country's cert. His administrators were supposed to carry out government policy efficiently. They were not supposed to decide that the country itself was the problem.

46:18Modern progressiveness increasingly treats institutions and traditions as things that must be changed. American history is often examined through race, sex, class, colonialism, power, and oppression. And no serious history of the United States can ignore slavery or segregation, discrimination, or other abuses of power. People say, it's happened. But the problem comes when those failures stop being part of the story and become the whole thing. There is a difference between teaching students about injustice in American history and teaching them that injustice is what defines America, or between fighting actual discrimination and assuming that every unequal result must come from discrimination. There is also a difference between teaching people to treat one another fairly and starting them into moral categories based on race, sex, or other group identities. To then all be treated differently. Our institutions have created a great many woke people. We have the ability to see a oppression where it does not exist. And that by the way is my definition of woke.

47:20Whenever somebody says, can you even define it? What is your definition of woke? I don't care if they're talking woke one point or a woke two point. The definition of woke is the ability to see a oppression where it does not exist. That's not an ability by the way you're reading it in. If you really want to, you can find oppression behind every blade of grass. I mean, it's not hard to make something up. It's not hard to have an imagination. That's what woke is. Woke is using your imagination to make up a oppression where it doesn't exist. That is what woke is. Once activists' ideas become part of the mission of our institutions, the same machinery Wilson wanted to use to administer the country was suddenly used to begin to reshape the country instead. Let's talk about why elections stop working because we all want to know why Republicans never seem to be able to do anything. Well long-tailed activism helps to explain what is frustrating and served as for decades, which is exactly that. Would Republicans win elections and take control of government? Nothing seems to change.

48:23But then a new present hares far more than laws. Today inherits the people, regulations, legal interpretations, contracts, grants, court settlements, internal procedures, and outside relationships created by early administrations. And if those groups don't agree with the present, they may work against them. That means winning control of the government does not necessarily mean gaining control over how the government actually works. I think Obama actually in Trump's first term, maybe doing it again in his second term, I don't know, but I think Obama in Trump's first term was actually running a shadow government and that many of the people working for the actual government as well as all of these networks were actually taking their marching orders from Obama. I can't prove that, but I believe that is what happened. I believe that there was a shadow government in Trump's first term and that Obama was still largely calling the shots and utilizing the powers of government in order to slow Trump down. I believe that was actually happening. I can't prove it. I believe that's happening.

49:26But whatever the case, Republicans, they often arrive in Washington ready to change policies. When the deeper problem is the system producing the policies, they're fighting the wrong fight. Sometimes they fail because the politicians are weak. That happens. Look at Mitch McConnell. But usually they fail because they are fighting the wrong thing. Now Republicans eventually started to wake up, which is why the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, including having the President retake control over every aspect of the executive branch, including agencies that had long since become quasi independent. That means tracing the connections between government agencies and the institutions around them, grants, regulations, court settlements, professional standards, accreditation, contracting rules, training programs, and personal networks all help determine how institutions behave. The goal should not be to define progressives and replace them with conservatives. That by the way is what I think JD Vance wants when he talks about Catholic nationalism.

50:27He talks about post-liberalism. He is a Catholic post-liberal. So he is, by post-liberal, that doesn't mean post-leftist. Post-liberal means post-enlightenment. He wants conservatives to take the levers of power that liberals have built over the decades and use them for conservative purposes. Instead of utilizing all of these networks and all of this long tail activism in order to push people further to the left, he wants to use it and push people further to the right to get our colleges to indoctrinate conservatives. And what have you? He is not a free market conservative either. I don't know what kind of conservative Vance actually is. He is not a free market conservative. He believes that the government should basically run the economy. Or at least the people that he follows believe the government should run the economy. He is not a free market guy at all. I would love to know more about what Vance's actual political views are. He has got a book out. I am actually going to read it. I have been asked by White Rose Magazine to do a book report on it. I am going to do that. I am also going to do a very detailed analysis of the post-liberal movement.

51:31So you can look for those projects coming up pretty soon. But the goal should not be to do that. The goal should not be to take these organizations, replace all the progressives with conservatives and then continue to use those abuses of power. That would just reverse the direction of the same system. No, the goal should be to find places where political choices have been buried inside supposedly neutral rules. Civil service reform is a part of that. Government needs professional employees who know how to do difficult jobs. But those employees still work for an executive branch led by elected officials. Career protection should not give bureaucrats an independent political mandate. It doesn't work that way. We need to do this. We need to tear the system down. We need to go back to institutions that do what they are designed to do. That are designed to make activism less necessary. That are designed to make our society function fairly equality under the law for all. That is what the goal should be. We should have institutions that are doing that independently. If you want to be a leftist fine, you still get treated equally under the system, under

52:35the law. That's how it should work. We don't want to take those abuses of power and reverse them. We want to get rid of the abuse of power. I guess that is what I'm trying to say. Congress also needs to take back more responsibility. It's giving of the responsibility away. It is a big part of the problem. Congress spent decades passing broad laws and allowing agencies to fill in important details. That gives Congress less responsibility for the results and give permanent agencies more power to side what the law actually means in practice. Consent to create an agency settlement deserve the same attention. Assettlements are necessary, but current officials should not be able to quietly make major policy choices much harder for future elected officials to reverse. Federal grants can also be used to push national policy and institutions if they are still tactically independent. Congress has every right to side off federal money is spent, but conditions attached to that money should have a clear relationship to what the money is actually for. Professional standards and accreditation matter for the same reason they should measure

53:37competence. They should not become political loyalty test disguises professional requirements. Most importantly, conservatives should not build their own version of the same machine. If they capture the same machinery and pose conservative ideological tests, fun conservative activists and make those policies difficult for future voters to change, they have accepted the progressive model. They are no longer arguing for limited government. They are arguing over who gets to control unlimited government. That's not conservative. That is the larger danger of long-tail activism. The problem is not simply that progressives learned how to use the system and conservatives did not. The problem is the system moved political power farther and farther away from the voters, and that brings us back to the long-tail share. When I post something on Facebook, I can see the people in my own network or share it. Once the post moves outside that network, however, it begins spreading through people I do not know and cannot see. Each new share exposes it to another network, and eventually the original post could travel far beyond anything I could have reached myself.

54:40Long-tail activism works the same way. When activists change a government agency, that agency changes the rules faced by a university. The university trains the people later run corporations, nonprofits, professional associations and government agencies. Those institutions then change the rules faced by still-more institutions. The people involved may not know where the idea started. They may not even think of themselves as activists. They may simply believe they are following the law, meeting professional standards, protecting their organizations and doing their jobs. Solowlinsky needed organizers for every new fight. Long-tail activism solved that problem by putting the activism into institutions that already had enormous reach. Once those institutions began spreading the ideas themselves, we have the activists no longer had to. Winning elections alone cannot fix this problem. The activists have already destroyed the funding mechanisms by taking down USAID, but a future

55:41administration could put that right back together. Now we have to restore the proper purpose of the actual institutions while keeping USAID down and preventing something with a different name doing the same thing from coming up. And that may mean tearing some of the institutions down and starting over. A long-tailed share becomes powerful when it leaves the person who created and begins spreading on its own. Long-tail activism becomes powerful exactly the same way. The activists eventually disappears. The activism does not. And just like that, we are out of time. But that's okay. I got through long-tail activism. And that was of course the topic, so we got through we want to. As always, thank you for tuning in. Please tell others who might be interested in cutting through the chaos to listen in either on Saturday and Sunday at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time or on podcast whenever they have time. It's also on Sunday at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

56:41And we will see you next week at the same time in place. We will once again be time to get involved and to get loud on America.