Category: 7 Media Strategy Saturday

All the ways Trump is mangling his messaging and legal strategies EVERY DAY

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Turn on the televisions, or fire up the Series of Tubes, and by the time I am done writing this, Donald Trump and his minions will have made seven different media hits on FOX News shows, InfoWars, CNN, and all the podcasts they seem to host where MTG interviews Roger Stone or whatever.

You’ll also see mountains of stories about Trump’s legal woes, and I’ll only talk about the big ones: the federal search warrant that found top secret documents hanging out by the pool at Mar-a-Lago, the Atlanta grand jury, the New York attorney general case that could dissolve Trump’s business empire, and a couple of federal grand juries looking the attempted coup on January 6 along with the fake electors scheme.

These are serious threats that require serious lawyers and disciplined messaging.

Let’s look at what Trump is actually doing first.

Trump’s strategies

1) Flooding the zone

Steve Bannon talked a lot about this strategy, which is where you throw so much out there, from so many directions, that the press and public and your opponents don’t have time to refute it all.

2) Floating a fleet of test balloons

This is related to the first strategy. Trump likes to try out messaging (or lies) on the road, especially at rallies, and the ones that get the best reactions from crowds get workshopped and refined until they’re part of his schtick, like a standup comedian perfecting his schtick.

And it is a schtick.

3) Quick changes in direction based on the televisions

Whenever Trump sees something on the tubes that makes him reach for the Tums, he often responds by changing (a) messengers, (b) narratives, or (c) legal strategy.

4) Reflexively opposing the opposition

Whatever the other side says or does, Trump instinctively is against it, and attacks the specific people doing it.

If Democrats want to build infrastructure, it is no longer Infrastructure Week, and Biden did it wrong.

If the prosecutors want to keep a search warrant sealed, as is normal practice, he wants it released, and the judge/FBI is corrupt.

Trump is trying to win the wrong war

It’s clear what Trump prioritizes: winning the media war, especially on television. That mattered a lot more when he was a real estate mogul and as president.

He doesn’t listen to his attorneys, and has a history of not paying them.

All four of these strategies absolutely hurt him when it comes to the courtrooms he will be in for the next few years.

Think about what Attorney General Merrick Garland, the New York attorney general, and all of the other prosecutors and attorneys involved in cases against Trump are doing: exactly the opposite of Trump’s four big strategies.

They don’t flood the zone.

There is a pack of legal lions, all professionals, working diligently on these cases. Many of them we don’t know much about yet because grand juries operate in secret. The few leaks we hear often come from witnesses who’ve testified, or court filings, which aren’t really leaks.

No trial balloons. No hasty reversals based on whatever Fox & Friends just said.

And they don’t instinctively oppose things or attack the other side personally.

How all of this is seven different flavors of wrong

Here’s the real problem: All the things Trump does to win the political-messaging war actively hurt him once he lands in court.

Testing out different narratives and lies at rallies and when he’s interviewed only creates a video record of his changing his story, sometimes by the day.

Having his close aides and allies spread out to do media hits only gets THEM on record saying a volume of recorded words, much of which contradicts what was said before.

Even the most disciplined liar will have trouble keeping the story straight when they’re interviewed at length, day after day. That’s especially true when the story keeps changing by the hour.

Making all this worse is the fact many of these aides and allies–Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and White House hangers-on who followed Trump to Mar-a-Lago–are witnesses if not targets of various investigations.

Trump doesn’t listen to his attorneys, and has a history of not paying them. Although he finally hired a couple of former federal prosecutors, the rest of his legal team got hired because they look good on television. They don’t have serious legal pedigrees or a background in tough criminal cases at the federal level. He hired them because he saw them defending him on television were hanging around one of his golf courses. I am not making that up.

What a smart person in Trump’s shoes would do

First, you give up on trying to win every news cycle. That only hurts you when cases hit the courtroom.

Second, you hire real attorneys, actually pay them so they stick around, and listen to them. They dictate your legal strategy, not you and whatever talking head is on FOX News right now.

Third, you shut up. You do not talk about these cases, the prosecutors, the FBI, or the judges. You shut up. There are plenty of other things you can talk about: inflation, guns, crime, immigration, whatever. All the legal cases you’re facing? Have them talk to your lawyer, the only person you can trust not to say something to the media that will hurt you later.

Fourth, you make sure your allies, and possible witnesses/targets, also shut the hell up and get real attorneys.

Fifth, you stay off your phone, email, and texts. The January 6 committee found all kinds of incriminating text messages and emails. The FBI can get those, too, along with supposedly safe and encrypted email. Witnesses flip, the FBI can crack your iPhone, and they also have these things called wiretaps.

Sixth, you talk with your lawyers and stick to one narrative: the truth.

Because when so many people are involved, and facing their own legal jeopardy, people are going to take deals to avoid prison time. Some already have (there’s a long list).

And this is just the beginning.

Can you make millions as a social media influencer–and how well does this whiskey pair with an Americano?

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Here’s the deal: yes, a combination camera-supercomputer-phone sits in your pocket, and you easily could film various aspects of your life or skills and share them with people from South Korea to the South of Wales with the push of A SINGLE BUTTON, or a series of buttons that are kinda hard to hit on your iPhone 11 and a lot easier with a mouse.

Technically, you could do this, and technically, there are human beings who make a living making YouTube videos, TikToks, and other things that were invented this morning that Silicon Valley has not told you about.

Also, a social media personality who’s name rhymes with Togan Maul got paid a zillion dollars to hug and paw at an undefeated boxer who is 20 years older and 30 pounds lighter and the only reason he didn’t get knocked the hell out in the first round was the undefeated boxer would have totally thrown away the chance to get paid a bazillion dollars AGAIN to hit this clown for eight rounds.

But no, average people will not make millions of dollars on social media, whether it’s your 16-year-old cousin madly live-streaming 12 hours a day while he plays Call of Duty or the master gardener down the street making TikToks about ornamental roses.

They will be lucky to make serious dollars at all. Here’s why:

Whatever you are into, other people are also totally into it

And that’s the problem: if nobody else is talking about your special deal, and there’s a beautiful void in the market waiting for you to fill it, it probably means it’s such a tiny niche that the audience is equally hard to find with a microscope.

Yet if the opposite is true, and half the planet starts totally nerding out about ornamental roses or knitting hats for cats, you can guarantee those needs will get fed by magazines, blogs, and social media goodness. Why? Because they’re chasing eyeballs and ears, just like everybody else, for the ad monies.

The competition is insane

Sure, your friend the master gardener spent five years studying ornamental roses. There are, at a bare minimum, 5.621 bazillion other people who are into roses and have iPhones in their pocket, plus people with PhD’s in plant biology who are into roses, and a few who did their doctoral thesis on those suckers.

Also: it is far, far easier for somebody who is already (a) famous and (b) rich to hop into whatever social media field they want and make money, even if they have only spent five minutes staring at the ornamental roses their gardener put in this afternoon.

You need to get millions of views to make real money, and even more to make great money. Guess who has skads of followers, access to publicity machines, and a burning need for attention? Every actor, professional athlete, big-time journalist, and rock star.

So you are competing not just against all the other experts and aficionados in your field, but with every celebrity alive today along with some dead ones, because apparently Tom Clancy is a zombie robot still pumping out novels and video games.

I’m not saying the lead singer of Nickelback could get totally into knitting hats for cats tomorrow and crush your beautiful vlog into powder. No. That would be ridiculous.

I’m saying the drummer for Nickelback could steamroll your TikTok with their tour bus and not even know he murderized it.

There are a hundred ways to get squashed in this game

Ideally, you want to be (a) the first to show up on social media to fill an empty void, like that kid who reviews toys and now makes crazy amounts of cash, (b) the person with the most knowledge or skill about that topic, (c) the most charming and interesting and funny of all possible people, (d) the one with the highest production values, with a team behind you to shoot, edit, and produce a mountain of content every week, if not every day, and (e) the best possible person at marketing and publicity, with a different team handling the nuts and bolts of that.

You might be two of those things. Even if you are amazing in every area, and possess magical rocks that let you never sleep or eat, there isn’t enough time in the day. Which leads us to the next shebang.

One person cannot do all these things

Even if you are doing this by yourself, and beat the odds by becoming so well-viewed that you can quit the day job and buy your family and friends and casual acquaintances houses and yachts and Lear jets, that means all sorts of other people will notice there is CASH TO BE HAD, causing a gold rush to your peaceful little tropical island made of Benjamins, and these hordes will invade your favorite beach and try to take over the entire island.

Many of those people will be amateurs.

Others will be organizations–companies–that produce media content for profit. TV and movie production folks are far better at shooting and editing video. Radio pros rock the finest podcasts. And if the talent isn’t clicking, they can try somebody else in front of the camera or behind the microphone. And these companies already have viewership they can channel to new products.

It’s all about getting attention

And if you really drill down to the guts of it, social media influencers aren’t really into a specific topic or thing, per se. They don’t get famous for being an expert, or for being especially talented, funny, or sane.

Social media influencers are good at one thing: attracting attention. They are shameless chameleons who will switch platforms, interests, political views, issues, hobbies, and personalities if it means a bigger audience.

They are the trolliest of the trolls. Nobody can out-shame them.

This path leads to darkness, mug shots where the nightshow Jimmys try to guess what drug you were on at the time, then rehab.

Nope out of all that. Not worth it.

Do what you love for the love of it first

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t go wild on TikTok or YouTube–have fun with it. And yeah, you might do really well and make some side money.

But do not listen to that 16-yeard-old cousin, the one who isn’t going to college because he’s too busy training for his professional career streaming Call of Duty, the kid who says you should quit the day job and turn the guest bedroom into a video production studio.

Do what you love for the love of it, and do not endure sleepless nights trying to keep up with the Kardashians.

Do what must be done so your kids have food, clothes, and health coverage.

How well does this whiskey pair with an Americano?

While on vacation, my sister-in-law and I are trying tiny airplane-style bottles of Irish cream and such in our coffees.

I highly encourage all four of these glorious things: vacations, sisters-in-law, Irish cream, and coffee.

Today’s whiskey creamer is Brady’s Irish Cream.

It’s fine. Nothing terrible, nothing amazing. I was hoping to get hit by an F5 tornado of flavor, and perhaps it’s my fault for ordering the Largest Americano Known to Human Civilization, which could have diluted the itty bitty bottle into nothingness.

Verdict: 7/10.

Part 2: The Reckoning–Actually building an Evil Supercomputer to take over the world

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Creative types today need more than a typewriter or any old computer that can run Word.

You have to do social media, and maybe some video, which means having a computer that can run things like the Adobe Creative Suite, which wants you to have a supercomputer that can model nuclear explosions, even if all you want to do is add captions to Ice, Ice Baby.

If you haven’t read Part 1, which is about why this is smart, and how to pick out all the parts, go do that now, then come back to read this post while you wait for the Postal Service–which always, always delivers.

Once all of your precious, fragile, and magical parts have arrived, it’s time to unbox that stuff and build, right?

This is where things go wrong. Totally normal.

Keep the boxes and receipts in case (a) parts are broken or (b) you screwed up and there are incompatible bits.

The Case: You can’t have a Black Box of Doom without a black box

Retrieve all the wires they may have snaked all around. THERE ARE MANY.

These wires are actually Important, since they’re the ones that make the Evil Supercomputer turn on when you push the power button, or connect your USB ports and such to the actual computer bits that make them go. Those things are not wireless.

Thus the wires.

If you bought a bare case with no fans pre-installed, now is the time to screw some fans.

Your Motherboard is the Matriarch of All Power

Everything connects to the Motherboard, which has to corral all the random parts and make sure everybody gets fed power and data. She basically runs the world.

Treat your Motherboard right by having the correct number of Weird Little Bolts (I believe they are called stays, but who knows) to screw into your case to support the MotherBoard, which then is secured to your case with more normal-looking black screws through holes pre-drilled through the layers of silicon.

I say the word “pre-drilled” intentionally. You will not be drilling any holes today.

Double-check this step very, very carefully.

If you just put Weird Little Bolts wherever the hell, and not in the right spots for your size of Motherboard and case, things will not end well. Having random bits of metal poking in spots it’s not designed to poke can short your Motherboard, zap, goodbye, goodnight, game over.

Not having enough Weird Little Bolts can make it so your bendy and fragile MotherBoard isn’t fully supported. I made this mistake because the old components I took out were a little smaller and needed fewer bolts and screws. This could have been a disaster, as you need to press pretty damn hard to make the graphic card, sticks of RAM and such connect.

I got lucky. Nothing broke. But I should’ve gotten more Weird Little Bolts, which leads us to this pro-tip: No, do not order them online and wait two days for amazon.com.gov.org to deliver more tiny shebangs while your dining room table is covered in computer parts and half-opened cardboard boxes. Head on down to the hardware store, which will have them on that long aisle full of every screw, bolt, and nut ever invented.

Install the Hyperdrive

You are required by law to have bought one of those tiny and fancy M2 drives, the kind that connect directly to the Motherboard and make her extremely happy because now homework gets done A BILLION TIMES FASTER than connecting a stupid cable upstairs to the attic where an obsolete thing known as a Hard Drive lives, playing eight-track tapes of Billy Joel, who is fine and all, but please listen to something new because none of us can hear Uptown Girl on endless repeat, that is the torture.

There is a trick with these M2 drives. They come with a tiny, tiny screw–get a microscope, seriously–that is insanely easy to drop and lose. Also, this screw didn’t seem to fit in the hole.

I finally read the instructions again, and found a Silver Weird Little Bolt hanging out on the Motherboard, asking strangers if they’d buy him some beer, I’ve got money, come on, man, a six pack of whatever, please. Put him in the right spot, dropped the tiny screw for you know, six hours, and finally secured the Hyperdrive.

Other drives, they are optional

If you are smart, and starting from scratch, using an M2 Hyperdrive means two fewer cables to worry about: one for power and one for data.

This becomes important.

Since I saved money by reusing the same Black Box of Doom and FOUR DIFFERENT DRIVES (optical, SSD, then two big fat spinny hard drives), that means wrestling eight different cables. It worked, eventually, but it was not fun.

Try to connect the power cables first, then the smaller data ones are a lot easier because of the orientation of cases and drives. I had the data ones all hooked up, making me happy, and had to undo them all from not being able to see a damned thing when trying to shove power cables into tight spots.

Learn from my stupidity, and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Has the moon lost her memory?

She is smiling alone.

Sticks of memory–RAM, build Dodge tough–do not like being alone. They also hate dust and cat hair, so be aware.

You gotta install RAM in identical pairs, like junior high kids who synchronize outfits and go everywhere together, even the bathroom.

If you’re only putting in two sticks of RAM, they gotta go in specific slots. Listen to the Motherboard and re-read her patient instructions.

I put in four sticks of 16 gigs apiece. If you want to upgrade later, you gotta use identical sticks again.

Pinky and the Brain

Your CPU is itty bitty. A little square. Make sure you do all the things and put it in correctly, given the fact that bending the pins is a sin against the tech gods, who will punish you with the Slowness, the Black Screen of Death, or the eternal damnation of This Thing Won’t Even Turn On.

Put it in the right way. Read the damn instructions, for brand new CPUs cost many dollars.

CPU’s have sidekicks called coolers. Your own Brain may have come with a Pinky cooler, with the manufacturer designing them to get along. Maybe these things got ordered separately, and you’re hoping this arranged marriage will work out.

The CPU is easy, as long as you don’t flippantly put it in the wrong way and bend all the pins.

Coolers these days are like oversized carburetors on muscle cars, giant air-breathing contraptions with metal tubes running everywhere. I will bet you the deed to my house that the the people who design CPU coolers drive muscle cars, or have posters of them on their wall.

You gotta have thermal paste between the Brain and its cooler. Read the instructions. Do not cook Brain or you’ll be eating the cost of a replacement.

All the random non-power cables

I would suggest this as the time to put the funky cables coming from various parts of the case, along with any cables you might need for drives and such.

Manufacturers, hear my plaintive cry: this part does not have to be so hard.

Connecting fans isn’t bad. Same deal with the cables that make your USB ports talk to the Motherboard without pissing her off.

What’s truly awful, and The Stupid, is a set of cables every case seems to have that ends in a nightmare of a rat’s nest. Some need to get plugged into single pins, others double, except they all go into the same array of pins and there’s no room to see what you’re doing and whether it worked and OMGWTFBBQ.

If you do this wrong, pushing the power button and such will do nothing.

Please, please, manufacturers of cases and Motherboards, pick a standard configuration of pins and that Rat’s Nest Cable from Hell, and make it so it’s all together and you simply plug it into the right spot instead of wanting to drive to whoever designed and engineered this and put a flaming bag of donkey doo-doo on their porch.

The Graphics Card

These things are pretty big. Get that sucker in there before you go wild with the power cables, which will totally get in the way.

That’s it. I’m not even making jokes here. Pretty simple.

Power Station

Nothing runs without the power supply, and it knows. Oh yes.

When you order one of these bad boys, the photos are deceiving. A square box, no big deal. Except when you take it out, there are all these fat cables coming out of the end. Tons of them. And they are long.

If you only have one M2 Hyperdrive, and maybe a big old obsolete spinny hard drive as your storage, the number of power cables you need is way down.

Since I had four–FOUR–different drives already in the case to hook up, my cause was lost. Cable management? Hah! We were shooting for Yes, This Looks Messy, But the Evil Supercomputer is Happy and Turns On.

The instructions here are a little tough. Be careful. There are what seems like 25 different types of power plugs. I will not go into it here except to say a giant plug goes into your Motherboard, another feeds the CPU, and your graphics card may get TWO plugs, because he is a selfish dweeb who drinks straight from the milk carton no matter how many times you tell him that’s gross and will tell you he plans on going pro playing Call of Duty when really that’s an excuse to spend all day wearing a headset and talking smack when he should be not failing Pre-Calculus already when the school year is only a month old.

Will it turn on?

Unless I’ve forgotten steps, which is possible, all the parts should be installed and fed a steady supply of power and data.

This is where you hook it up to your monitor, keyboard, and such, and get out the USB drive of Windows 10 to install. You pretty much buy the DVD for the product activation key, then stash that thing in a shoebox full of CD’s from way back that you plan on converting to MP3’s someday.

And the magical moment arrives: you hit the power button.

It will not turn on.

I mean that literally. Unless you are lucky, and smart, and have spent the time to locate and sacrifice a TRS-80 to the tech gods, your Evil Supercomputer will sit there and laugh at you while you swear in languages you did not know until now.

This always happens.

Unplug it all and open the thing back up. Check every single cable and plug.

Did it happen to me this time? Oh yes.

I checked every data cable and power plug. Nope. Then I considered the unthinkable: unplugging that rat’s nest of connectors, the ones that go to the power button and such. Except getting to that was impossible with all the power cables and data cables clogging up the works. Couldn’t see a thing.

After talking to my brother, who is an actual Tech God, I figured out one stick of RAM was rebelling and poking out. Once that thing was fully connected to the Motherboard and listening like a good stick of memory, the Evil Supercomputer came alive and asked me if I wanted to play a game. You know, tic-tack-toe or Global Thermonuclear War.

Final thoughts

Though the hour or so the new computer would not come alive was maddening, overall this time wasn’t that bad and I could not be happier with how much faster this thing is than the old Black Box of Doom.

It’s not even close. Most of that is because of the M2 Hyperdive, but doubling the RAM and having a modern CPU and graphics card doesn’t hurt a bit.

Economically, building your own is smart, and having thought about and researched trying to upgrade the old one, building a new one every three years or so makes sense–but only if the current one can’t handle the latest requirements of Adobe and such.

If you’re not focused on creative things, and are more concerned about hitting 140 frames-per-second as you play Call of Duty on a 4k monitor that takes up an entire wall of your house, that’s a different deal.

I hope you find this useful, and if you do go down this path, please remember me when your 3D-printed army of robots designed on an Evil Supercomputer starts taking over the world.

Why a 13-year-old boy who stutters inspired America

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Brayden Harrington was the surprise star of the last night of the Democratic National Convention before Joe Biden’s acceptance speech. Which was also a surprise, one of the shortest speeches ever, and honestly one of the best.

If you haven’t seen the clip, here it is.

Why is someone cutting onions in this room?

I want to talk about why this brave young boy resonated with me, and America, so much.

Other segments made me verklempt, though I realize those pieces may have left different folks unmoved–because they touched on issues like Dreamers, racial justice, and climate change, and people have strong political opinions about those.

Brayden’s story is purely human. There was no political lens depending on who was watching.

And it’s because he struggled, and stuttered, that so many people talked about cheering him on from their living room, wanting him to have the courage to fight through and finish on live television. Knowing people might make fun of him like never before, on a national stage. Social media can be far more vicious than any school cafeteria.

Here’s another clip, an interview with Brayden and his dad by Lester Holt.

Bonus footage that’s a little hard to find: the moment Brayden Harrington met Joe Biden, and Joe talked about the two dozen stutterers he still helps, then asks for his phone number.

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It’s not about talent

Listen: 99.9 percent of people struggle with public speaking. It’s the No. 1 fear when you ask people in surveys, ahead of sharks and death.

I kid you not.

Think about that natural fear and add another layer–stuttering, dyslexia–and speaking in public is exponentially harder.

Yet some of the finest speakers I’ve ever seen, or worked with, weren’t powerfully effective in spite of those challenges. They were better because of them, since it took so much hard work to overcome them. And they continued working, just as hard, on every speech. Big or small.

It’s not about raw talent. Not in public speaking and not in anything else.

It’s about grit.

The grit it takes to suffer and sacrifice and sweat to get better, even if you fail at first and people make fun of you. Grit is what Seahawk coach Pete Carroll keeps looking for–not raw talent, not athletes who succeeded at every level and attempt. Players who were undrafted, unheralded. One recent draft pick was homeless during high school.

Grit.

Winston Churchill stuttered. He also had a habit of spending one hour of preparation for every minute of speaking time. That may sound crazy to you. It’s not. Not when you’re fighting for something that truly matters to your family or neighborhood.

I don’t think Brayden set out to inspire us all, and remind us what it’s like to simply be kind, and brave, and decent. But he did.

Thank you, Brayden.

Trump would torch his own house to get a headline

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I’ll add to that headline: Donald Trump wouldn’t just light his own house on fire if that’s what it took to get some press and a crowd.

He’d do it after getting the job of fire chief. After half the town burns, Trump would pull a Russell Crowe.

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Because that’s what he sees his job: entertainer-in-chief, not commander-in-chief.

Governing is Complicated and Boring to him. His tweet about Joe Biden being a boring ratings disaster as president, now, that’s telling. This is what matters to him: ratings, not results. Trump doesn’t solve problems. He’s hard-wired to create new ones.

It’s why he loves giant rallies and the ability to move the press with constant tweets.

And this is why Trump continually generates controversy, even when it hurts him. He believes in the theory that there’s no such thing as bad press, and that worked for him to generate name ID and coverage when he was a real estate developer. You can make a living selling overpriced condos and fake Trump University degrees if millions of people know your name. Doesn’t matter if 90 percent of people think you’re a buffoon–10 percent of millions of people is all you need.

Politics is different. Name ID can get you through a crowded primary, but it doesn’t help you run a country.

This is why I never look at Trump’s weird moves as three-dimensional chess. He’s doing what he knows, picking weird fights to get maximum media coverage even though (1) as president, he naturally gets more coverage than any person on earth, and (2) many of these battles are insane and counter-productive.

There’s nothing smart about picking a fight with Bubba Wallace and defending the Confederate flag when everybody is going the opposite direction: NASCAR, the state of Mississippi, the leaders of the military, voters.

If it generates press, owns the libs, and makes his base happy, he does it. Goya beans, marching neo-Nazis, kids in cages, travel bans–the list is endless. I don’t have time to type all the horrors.

So what changed?

The COVID pandemic, economic crash, and protests against police violence all hit at once this year. They exposed Trump’s incompetence in the face of a single real crisis, much less three simultaneous ones.

When times are good, sure, people like to be entertained and diverted. You can dominate the headlines with fights about the Confederate flag or whatever.

But if the nation is on fire, with the economy in shambles from the pandemic, people dying, and the largest civil rights protests in history, that’s what will dominate the press and the minds of voters. They won’t be distracted, no matter how shiny the object. Only a spectacular fool would try to divert attention from those pressing issues.

Here’s a headline for you: As COVID-19 Toll Soars, Trump Brags About Bringing ‘Back’ Incandescent Light Bulbs

So yes, Trump is a spectacular fool.

After years of this, he won’t change. Maybe he can’t. Clearly, he doesn’t want to, no matter how many advisors tell him it’s not working.

I think Mary Trump has it right: Donald Trumps is still a damaged little boy, the kind of kid who will swear at the Thanksgiving table and knock things over because he’s incredibly desperate for attention.

It’s not a brilliant political strategy. Any fool can make a packed room full of people turn around and pay attention.

Walk into a Safeway and throw a tantrum–about masks, QAnon conspiracy craziness, flat-earth theories, whatever–and kick over a carefully stacked pyramid of Coors Light and tortilla chips. With cell phones turning every person into a mobile, worldwide TV studio, you could easily go viral doing that sort of trashy nonsense. The shares and retweets might go crazy.

But it doesn’t make you a media savant.

And it’s not a good habit for an elected leader who’s supposed to be solving problems, especially when millions of people are out of work or infected with a deadly virus.

You can pitch ANYTHING except quality

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Quality matters. Oh, it matters a lot.

Nobody wants to pay money to see a movie that stinks, a book that you can’t get past Chapter 1 or an album where every song hurts your ears.

You want quality. I want quality. Everybody wants it.

But you can’t pitch quality.

And you can’t package it.

So unless you’ve got something else — a quirk, a hook, a unique twist — quality alone won’t get you anywhere.

It won’t get people to look, listen or read in the first place.

So let’s pitch and package random, made-up things. Why? Because it takes practice and because you’re too close to your own stuff to do it right. And because it’s fun.

First up: two different bands.

Band A is a trio: drummer, guitar and bass / lead singer. They’re all recent music school graduates in their late twenties. They’re serious, seriously talented, good-looking and ready to break out. Let’s say they play a lot of punk rock and post-grunge.

Band B looks like a sure-fire loser. They’re all five years old. College degrees in music? Try “Hey, we’re potty trained, and we know our ABC’s.” They don’t know how to read music, write music or understand music theory like the other band. The guitarist knows one trick: crank up the distortion and make it loud. But they know the rough melodies and words to three different Metallica songs, and they do a cover of ENTER SANDMAN that’s close enough to be damned funny.

Here’s a real-life example of this sort of thing. A ton of people — 383,000 plus — have watched this kid sing, DON’T BRUSH MY HAIR IN KNOTS while her brother or neighbor kid banged on the drums.

Alright, here’s your homework: Write a one-sentence pitch for each band. Four words, if you want to ace this. Six words if you feel like a Cheaty McCheaterface.

Do it now. Find a piece of paper or fire up Word and do a pitch for each. Don’t even think about it.

I’ll go find silly videos on YouTube about swamp monsters in Louisiana or whatever.

OK, time’s up. Let’s compare pitches.

My best shot at the music majors: “Nirvana minus flannelly angst.” Four words, and I’m sort of cheating by turning flannelly into a word. Hard, isn’t it? You can’t get anywhere saying any kind of variation on, “This band, they’re really, really good.”

My pitch for the kids: “Kindergarteners cover Metallica.” Three words. Doesn’t have to be poetry here. Are you going to click on a link that says “Nirvana minus flannelly angst” or “this band is amazing?”

No. Not when there’s another link that has five-year-olds playing heavy metal?

Who wins the quality test? The serious music majors, by a mile.

Who wins the pitch and packaging test? The little kids who play bad covers of heavy metal. It’s so much easier. I would have to kidnap reporters to get them to cover our post-grunge band of music majors.

Could I get free ink and airtime with the Heavy Metal Monsters of Hillman Elementary? Absolutely.

Next: two different books

Our quality book is a literary masterpiece that will make you cry while snorting coffee through your nose, then take a fresh look at life and possibly quit your job and join a Tibetan monastery. It’s about a middle-aged man who works in a cubicle farm and lives in surburbia with a wife who’s on industrial amounts of Prozac and a teenage daughter who’s too busy thumbing her iPhone to notice who provides her with food, shelter, clothing and a VW Passat with only 13,000 miles on it. The hero’s life changes when he gets mugged on the way home. Also, a mime is involved, and a janitor who lives in a shack but says witty, wise things before he gets hit by a train.

The other book is a cheesy sci-fi novel with horrible dialogue. The premise: dinosaurs didn’t die off after some asteroid hit. They were smart. Really smart. And they left the planet in a fleet of spaceships to escape Earth long before that asteroid screwed things up for millions of years. Now they’re headed toward earth. And they want their planet back.

Ready? One sentence pitch for each. Four words.

GO.

OK, let’s see what we’ve got. Here’s my instant, no-thinking pitches.

Literary book: “Hell is a cubicle farm.” Five words. More of a title than a pitch. It sings to me, though, in a small, squeaky, off-pitch voice.

Sci-fi nonsense: “Space dinosaurs invade earth.” This is a kissing cousin to “Comet will destroy earth,” which has been the basis for about six different movies, including five by Michael Bay, with the other one starring Morgan Freeman for some reason, despite the fact that Morgan Freeman has ZERO CHANCE of flying up in a space shuttle with Bruce Willis and that dude who is an old college buddy of Matt Damon to blow up the comet,  asteroid or whatever with nuclear bombs.

VERDICT

The bottom line is, quality is one thing. In the end, it’s probably the most important thing.

Yet nobody will read your masterpiece, listen to your amazing album or see you act like no actor has acted in the history of acting-hood if they don’t get hooked by your pitch and packaging. They have to know you exist first.

Quality isn’t a pitch. “You should see that movie — it’s really good” doesn’t work. Your friends and family will ask, “What’s it about?” and if you don’t have four words to explain it, to give them a pitch, then forget it.

The next time to read a book, see a movie or listen to a great new song, think of four words.

How would you package it? What could you possibly say, just to your friends so they could see it, but to a reporter or a TV producer?

The obscure art that rules the world

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Sure, you’ve heard of opinion polls. Yet that’s not what really determines things as little as who you’ll hire next in the office or what movie you’ll see on Friday night—and as big as who runs the corporate giants and entire countries.

There’s a common factor that matters more than talent, and it determines which actors, authors and rock stars get famous and which ones work their craft without ever breaking through.

Do you know their name?

Seriously. It all starts with which names you know.

Because if you never know a person exists, there’s no way you’ll hire them, buy their book/album/movie ticket or check a box next to their name on a ballot.

And yes, it’s an art, though there’s a bit of science to it.

The best time to watch the power of being known in action is during a wide-open presidential race with a lot of candidates running.

Not three or four, because everybody would know the names pretty quickly.

If you wanted to really dig into this topic, about two dozen would be perfect.

You know, enough so you need to have two separate nights of debates during the primary.

Fame versus infamy

Fame means well known, and it has a positive meaning. Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, Rihanna, George Clooney, Lebron James.

Becoming famous means your name ID goes up from zero along with your positives, meaning more people feel favorable about you than unfavorable.

Infamous means sure, people know your name, but for only because you did something so stupidly horrific or horrifically stupid that it went viral. Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the Cash Me Outside Girl–you get the idea.

Becoming infamous for terrible crimes or feats of viral stupidity is far, far easier than becoming famous, which usually requires doing something (a) quite impressive, using (b) loads of hard work and talent while (c) somehow making sure bazillions of people know about it.

Infamy is easier in large part because our caveman/woman brains are hard-wired to latch onto negative information, especially about people who seem powerful or important to our human tribe. You might find it amusing to hear stories about your neighbor drinking fermented wildberry juice all day and falling down when he’s supposed to be helping hunt those wooly mammoths, but it won’t keep you up at night.

If your best friend says the leader of your clan is drunk all day and falling down, that’ll stick to your brain and make you stare at the cave ceiling, because that leader is the one who’s supposed to keep everybody alive through the winter when the wooly mammoths head south or whatever.

Trump and the dangers of infamy

If you’re a struggling rock star, actor, author or artist, you can boost your name recognition on the low road, by becoming infamous, rather than climbing the hard-to-impossible mountain to fame.

This works for entertainers because if 90 percent of the population knows your name while 89 percent of them have an unfavorable impression, even 1 percent of hundreds of millions of people is enough people to buy concert tickets or books.

This school of thought says no press is bad press. As long as they spell your name right, who cares if the story is negative? Your name recognition is going up.

Some pundits think Donald Trump believes in this theory. I disagree.

Trump benefitted from infamy when he was a young real estate developer trying to come out from his wealthy father’s shadow.

Yet as president of the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth right now, no person on the planet gets more press coverage. 

Automatically. Relentlessly. There are stacks and stacks of clippings every day.

If he were actually playing 3D chess, and being smart, Trump wouldn’t pull stunts designed to boost his name recognition via becoming more infamous with reality TV chaos, fights, name-calling and vulgar behavior. Because yes, your name ID goes up with infamy, but so do your negatives.

For the leader of any country, constant national press coverage is guaranteed. This is why most rational leaders try incredibly hard not to do embarrassing, meanspirited or vulgar things that will make people lose respect for them.

I believe Trump has a bottomless appetite for attention. It doesn’t matter that he’s getting more press than any other human alive.

Too much is never enough. No matter how hard the firehose of media sprays, he craves more, and seeks to create more attention by tweeting all day, rage-calling into live FOX News shows or via risky PR stunts.

No matter what nation you lead, driving up negatives by seeking infamy at all costs isn’t smart. To get big things done, you need build bridges with world leaders and lawmakers while creating public support for what you’re proposing.

The razor’s edge

This ties directly back to the twenty-something people running in the 2020 primary.

Except for Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, who are quite well-known, the other candidates are all trying to break out from the pack and raise their name recognition. Except they need to do that without raising their negatives and going underwater, which just means their unfavorable are higher than their favorables.

This is why candidates in crowded fields like this have such trouble moving up. You want to boost your name recognition by good things: bold plans, speeches that make people cry, acts of kindness or amazing performances at one of the debates.

The candidates polling around 1 percent know they can break through the noise by punching upwards, by fighting above their weight. Though this is tough to do without driving up your own negatives. It’s walking a razor’s edge.

Punching down, on the other hand, is a guaranteed way to look like a bully and drive up your negatives. It’s why world leaders have traditionally never attacked individuals people or companies by name. And this is why frontrunners rarely mention, much less attack, candidates far below them in the polls.

Tracking the same people, before and after

There’s a great experiment going on at fivethirtyeight.com with the 2020 primary. Check it out.

They’re working with a polling firm, Morning Consult, that interviewed the same people three times: before the debates, after the first debate and after the third debate.

This is tremendously interesting and useful, because you can track all sorts of interesting things, including:

  • name recognition
  • favorables and unfavorables (along with no opinion)
  • exactly where support moved and from who

What’s truly fascinating isn’t whether somebody is above water or underwater. Check out the ratio of favorable to unfavorable, then the proportion of “no opinion” they have left. That’s their room to grow.

The absolute best thing about the polling and work here is the chart that shows exactly how support changed and which candidates people switched to and from over the course of the week.

Elizabeth Warren crushed the first of the two nights of debate, but did so against lesser-known candidates. You can track her support getting a big boost after the first debate (growing from 12.6 percent to 18 percent), yet after the second night of debate, she dropped to 14.4 percent, with a good share of those supporters switching to Harris.

And it’s quite remarkable what Kamala Harris did during the debates. She took on Biden, a front runner who’s well-known and liked, on a tough topic. And she did it without really driving up her own negatives. Her favorables jumped from 56.2 percent to 66.9 percent, while her negatives only went up a smidge to 12.8 percent. Harris also doubled her support in terms of who people would vote for today, going from 7.9 percent before the debates to 16.6 percent after.

Compare that to Cory Booker, who got a good boost in his favorables while keeping his unfavorables down, yet he actually lost first-choice support. Those who said they vote for him went from 3 percent before the debate to 2.8 percent after, despite a debate performance that got great reviews.

Same thing with Pete Buttigieg, who had a similar jump in favorables along with pundits saying he was one of the winners coming out of the debate. So why did he drop from 6.7 percent support down to 4.8 percent after the debates?

If you’re really want to see how name recognition, fame and infamy works, skip over the news about front-runners and focus on the candidates at the bottom. What are they trying to do to get attention from the press and public? When a candidate polling toward the bottom makes a big move up, can we pinpoint why?

I hope fivethirtyeight.com and Morning Consult keep tracking these same people over the next year. It would be amazing to see the numbers change over time, and to shine more of the light of science on what’s most often seen as an obscure and inscrutable art.

Introducing the iPad killer – the amazing and affordable L-pad

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Forget the latest iPhone and iPads, which are old and busted.

Here’s the new hotness: The L-pad.

Massive 16.3″ screen size.

Retina display? Try ATOMIC RESOLUTION.

Grab a magnifying glass, beer glass, telescope, electron microscope – grab anything you want and there isn’t a single pixel in sight.

Tired of long boot times? Sick of apps updating themselves every week, sucking up mondo megabytes?

Say goodbye to monthly bills for your data plan.

Say hello to instant on and instant off.

The ultimate in compatibility

Backward compatible? Come on, that’s easy.

What else out there is forward compatible? Nothing–except the L-pad.

The L-Pad is compatible with every writing instrument known to man, not just some officially branded L-pad stylus, which we believe is a fancy word for “expensive plastic pen without any ink.”

Whatever you want, use it: pencils, ballpoints, crayons, we don’t care. Go wild.

Sketch a sunset or compose a symphony.

Write a mash note or the Great American Novel.

Draw a house. 

Draw a battleship.

DRAW YOUR OWN SPACESHIP.

If you want to double your screen size, the L-Pad has your back. Do it.

Double it again.

Go crazy and turn an entire wall of your office into one giant screen.

Durable, renewable and edible

If the screen gets wet, no problem.

Every single L-pad screen can be recycled, because we love the planet.

Non-toxic and biodegradable. You can eat the L-pad, if you really want. 

Think you could crumple up what’s inside an iPad, stick it in your mouth and chew? No. That stuff would kill you, if you had any teeth left.

Portable and affordable and other -ables we can’t even list

The L-pad is for the working people and middle class, not the wealthy few. Everybody can buy the same fully functional L-pad.

They’re so affordable, Costco has stacks of L-pads for sale. 

Buy 24 – that’s right, two dozen — monstrous 16.3-inch L-pads for six bucks. 

Keep one and give 23 away as gifts. You’ll still have an extra $500 in your wallet instead of sending that cash to Apple and writing a check to Verizon or Sprint every month.

Want something more portable?

Pick up a dozen L-pads Minis, each with a 9.4-inch screen. They even come in fashion colors, no extra charge.

Stick them in your car, your man-purse, your European carryall or your Indiana Jones satchel.

Give them to your mother-in-law, your co-workers or random people on the street. 

The L-pad never needs to update its OS.

It will never ask you for a password, tell you it’s incompatible with that particular pen or lock up because you forgot some insane combination of upper case letters, special characters and numbers.

And if you sit on an L-pad, it’ll only bend, costing you nothing, instead of breaking and putting a giant hole in your wallet.

Because the L-pad is there for you, brother. Whenever and wherever you need it.

30 achy breaky Twitter mistakeys

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media strategy saturday meme

Hear me now and believe me later in the week: first impressions matter more than ever.

In the old days, you got to know people because they LIVED NEXT TO YOU, or because you saw them at the feed store when you saddled up Bessie and rode there on Saturdays.

These days, you can use the Twitter or the Book of Face to meet people around the world, except for North Korea and some other places where the Series of Tubes is illegal or the secret police only let you use a pirated version of MySpace or whatever.

Online, people make a first impression about your entire life in less than two nanoseconds, based on three tiny little things:

  • your profile photo
  • your handle
  • your bio

Sidenote:  If you don’t understand the headline reference to Achy Breaky Big Mistakey, here’s the original Billy Ray Cyrus video and a link to Mullet Junky, which is guaranteed to make you feel better about your hair. Enjoy.

So, instead of giving you five big Twitter boo-boos, or seven, I’m giving you 30 dumb moves to avoid on the Twitter — ten no-no’s apiece when it comes to your profile photo, your handle and your bio.

I believe, deep in my soul, that ten times three equals thirty, or possibly 30, depending on whether you use the metric system and what edition of the AP Stylebook you sleep with.

Top 10 achy breaky big mistakeys with your profile photo

You see the worst ones on Facebook, but Twitter is not immune from wacky profile photos.

Do not:

1) Make the duck face

2) Try to be sexy

3) Flash gang signs with your hat on sideways

4) Take off your shirt to show us your tattoos or how much you enjoy fake orange Oompa Loompa spray tanning (it makes you look like a reject from Jersey Shore)

5) Pretend to chug tequila or smoke the Biggest Blunt Known to Man

6) Make the duck face while trying to be sexy, flashing gang signs with your hat on sideways, showing us your tattoos and pretending to chug tequila

7) Use a self-portrait shot on your phone, using the mirror in the bathroom (we can tell, and yes, Mirror in the Bathroom is a good tune from the GROSSE POINT BLANK soundtrack)

8) Go with extreme close-up (I see your pores!) or incredible longshot (that might be a person, or Bigfoot) or a weird angle (up your nose)

9) Use a shot with two / four / six different people and make us guess which one you might be

10) Wear sunglasses, hats and other accessories that make it impossible to tell if you’re a 12-year-old girl, a 35-year-old man or a wax dummy

Basically, don’t freak people out or make people guess who you are. And don’t try too hard.

Now, there are some variations that aren’t bad. Random photos and symbols are sometimes bad, but not always. If you’re a writer or editor, go ahead and use a photo of books as your profile shebang. Totally fine. Actors can use the Hollywood sign or the comedy and tragedy masks. WE TOTALLY GET THAT. But the weirder you get, the weirder your first impression will be.

Also: A huge STAR WARS geek can use Yoda as a profile photo. Just remember the first impression — even if you’re a 6-foot-tall redheaded supermodel — will be that you’re a short, 900-year-old frog-thing with wrinkled skin. It is not really a surprise, or remotely cool, for men to be use photos of THE MATRIX, lightsabers, Captain Kirk or Call of Duty 17: Blowing Up Stuff on Mars.  Yet it is unexpected, and therefore kinda cool, for women to be into comic books, Spock, anime and all the things that would make you say “dorkahedron who lives in mom’s basement” if a man picked it for his profile shot. This is a paradox, and possibly unfair, but tough noogies. (My AP Stylebook is silent on the correct spelling of “noogies,” so by my reckoning, I’m establishing the correct spelling right here and now, for all time.)

Top 10 achy breaky big mistakes with your handle

Also known as your name, moniker, nickname, special badge for the Series of Tubes and “what Keanu Reeves is supposed to call you when you jack into the Matrix.”

This is more of a Twitter thing, though these 10 achy breaky big mistakeys also apply to what you pick as your email address, blog title or any visible tattoo involving the alphabet rather than a drawing of Wolverine riding a My Little Pony.

Do not:

1) Use a handle that nobody can pronounce,  like “puqnI’loD,” the Klingon word for grandson (I looked that up at Klingon Language Institute, which actually exists, and this fact frightens me)

2) Throw in a bunch of slang numbers in your handle like “2legit2quit,” unless you are, in fact, MC Hammer

3) Use lots of random numbers, because everybody really, really wants to be buddies with “fred349829402”

4) Get your full first, middle, last name and favorite hobby in there, aka “LauraIngridHasselbackLOVEShorses”

5) Use initials or whatever to make it completely impossible to know whether you’re a man, woman or cyborg from the future sent to kill Sarah Connor (there is actual science here, and not just me spouting off, but that is a post for another day)

6) Be so obsessed with pimping your business, book, movie or album that your handle is simply the name of your business, book, movie or album, and once you move on to the next project, you’ll abandon that handle anyway

7) Put serious TMI into your handle, as in “singlemomthinksmenSTINK” or “stillunemployedyear3” or “livinginmomsbasementplayingcallofdutyallday”

8) Get all lovey dovey with a handle that’s a bunch of mushy nonsense about your husband, wife, kids, dog, ferret, capuchin monkey or boa constrictor, as in “debbie+fluffy4evah”

9) Appropriate the name of a celebrity, unless it’s to make fun of Snooki, Jonathan Franzen, Charlie Sheen, Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump or any of the “Real Housewives of I Don’t Care” — and yes, you should follow @EmperorFranzen and @English50cent

10) Try to be funny with some kind of gag handle, a la Bart Simpson and “@ipfreeley”

Top 10 achy breaky mistakes with your bio

It’s hard to screw up when you only have 160-characters or whatever.

Despite this challenge, there are bazillions of bios out there which are assaults upon the English language and, left unchecked, will not only tear the very fabric of society, but will rip a hole in the space-time continuum, sending Jean-Claude Van Damme back in time to battle an ancient Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 9: NIGHTMARE AT THE NURSING HOME.

Do not:

1) Try to give your life history, in chronological order, using Every Abbreviation Known to Man

2) Claim to be a pro photographer, Olympic gymnast, black belt in Gracie jujitsu, supermodel, billionaire CEO, secret agent, actor, bodyguard and author who also drives Indy cars–we might believe two of those, maybe three if we’re drunk, but not six or nine

3) Throw in a bunch of wacky symbols and graphics that nobody understands, or use numb3rs & txtspk 2 say what8vr u cld say uzn wrds

4) Share TMI details that nobody needs to know, like how many times you’ve been married and divorced, how many kids you have or the nicknames of your seven most favorite cats

5) Treat the Twitter, the Book of Face or any other social media shebang like it’s a dating website, telling us how you enjoy slow dances, long walks on the beach and all that nonsense — and as a bonus, here is the worst bio page ever

6) Expect us to believe you live on nine different continents by listing your “location” as “London, Moscow, Tokyo, Kenya, NYC, Antarctica, LA and the International Space Station” (yes, somebody is going to comment with a link to Wikipedia proving there are only seven continents)

7) Get all cute with your location by saying, “in limbo” or “everywhere but nowhere” or “right behind you”

8) Turn it into a resume with where you went to college, a summary of skills and your career goals–please save all that for LinkedIn and such

9) Make it completely obscure by writing it in French when you are NOT FRENCH AT ALL, using a Gertrude Stein poem instead of a bio, wussing out by using a quote from a famous person — or Capitalizing Every Word Of The Entire Bio While Not Understanding That People Actually Want To Be Able To Read The Stupid Thing Without Getting A Migraine

10) Trying to be shocking by saying insanely offensive things while packing all seven of the FCC’s seven dirty works in there and working very hard to make your profile form an obscene gesture using ASCII art nonsense

In the future

Will I  do the same sort of post for the Book of Face? Nope. Sorry. I do this for fun, and for free, and the Book of Face keeps getting breached by hackers and such, so I’m kinda mad at Zuckerberg and all that.

Also in the future: There will be robots that mow your lawn and space-age looking trikes that turn into flying cars. Just wait. Are you done waiting? Here you go. If Daniel Craig doesn’t already have one of these, he’ll steal one this weekend.

News junky, heal thyself

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Listen: I get how watching the news right now is like a train wreck, except each new day brings a bigger, more fiery train wreck than the day before. And you just want it to stop, and go back to normal, but can’t turn away.

As a reformed journalist, I’m a complete and utter news addict. Went to rehab–didn’t help one bit.

So I feel you.

Here’s what is really going on.

Chaos and confusion

In normal times, a scandal is big news for weeks or months. One large scandal can easily end a political career, or bring a CEO down.

What’s happening now is a flood of scandals and outrages, and yes, part of that is because the world’s most powerful man is a moody, incompetent toddler. But it’s also by design.

Vladimir Putin has a large country with a tiny economy. He can’t beat the West in economics, or even in a straight military conflict. What he’s doing is sowing discord, distrust and chaos through lies, misinformation and propaganda.

Brexit and Donald Trump are only two examples. Look hard enough–or listen to the intelligence community pros and reporters who cover national security–and you’ll see evidence of this information war being waged all over the free world.

Putin + Trump = a perfect marriage

Putin’s strategy is perfectly aligned with what Donald Trump has done his entire life: use conflict and chaos to build his name ID and get press coverage. The twist is, Trump didn’t care whether the coverage was good or bad, as long as they spelled his name right. Affairs, divorces, scandals–didn’t matter. Just get him on the front page or the Howard Stern show.

Working in reality TV only cemented this strategy. If everything goes right on a reality show, the ratings stink. What sells? Conflict and chaos, betrayals and big fights. 

And when there’s a new political scandal or outrage every day, it’s hard to remember the seven train wrecks from last week, or last month. 

Attacking the media

The other half of this is attacking the foundations of truth–the free press–while trafficking in lies, misinformation and propaganda.

They want average people to be numb and apathetic, and to mistrust what’s coming from real journalists.

To create doubt and fear.

What you can do

It’s easy to get hooked on the news in times like this. It feels like the middle of a presidential primary, the days before a Super Bowl, the first moments of a war. 

When you care about something, getting glued to the screen is easy. 

I’m not saying you ignore the news, quitting it cold turkey.

The trick is balancing out gathering information, and being informed, with taking action.

Because gathering info in a time like this can never end. There’s always a new scandal, another angle you hadn’t considered, a rabbit hole to go down.

The more you care, the more you tend to read and watch, and it certainly feels like you’re doing something.

Except it’s not actually taking action, and it’ll take average people refusing to be apathetic to bring things back to normal.

Elections alone won’t win this kind of fight, especially if you live in a country where elections are partially or fully rigged. 

Check out this chapter for more on Winning the War on Truth.