Scott's 50501 Strategy

All,

I wanted to give people a feel for my overall strategy for 50501. I cannot speak for national but I am speaking for 50501 Indiana. I want everyone to understand that we actually do have a strategy beyond:

Yay Protest!!!

Yes, protests are fun, but I will admit that, today, they won't change what we want. But, note the disclaimer, today.

The first thing to understand is that this is a marathon not a sprint. I'd love to tell everyone that we are going to win in the next few months but that's unlikely. We do need to recognize that we have an N month if not N year struggle ahead of us. I've heard it said that the civil rights movement took either 14 years or 150 years based on your perspective.

Now, I don't think we are facing 14 years, but I do think we need to be honest about what we are facing. And that's why all of us in senior leadership have focused on building a community here. We need community to make it through this -- Stand Together, Die Alone -- is how you have heard me say it.

So, if protests aren't the answer today, why are we doing this?

Action is the Answer to Anxiety. If you've been to one of our protests, I will bet you felt better after the protest then you did before you got there. If nothing else, protesting is helping all of us manage the hell that Trump is putting all of us through.
We are learning to protest. While some portions of American never forgot how to protest, I would contend that most of us actually did forget -- or never knew. Americans as a whole need to learn to protest and the only way to do that is to protest. We, including myself, are all learning how activism works.
We are recruiting. I look at what we are doing as building a startup where the product is tearing down the administration. If we want to bring down the most powerful man in the world and the insane Nazis supporting him, we need people. Lots of people. And that means recruiting. The tasks that you are taking on may be volunteer work but it is at least righteous work.

Now I'm not a traditional Democrat. I have a bias for action. I'm an engineer who has built multiple tech startups and I want to apply an ethical version of the approaches that build successful enterprises to tearing down Trump.

One thing you may not have noticed at our protests is our senior people talking to people, handing out business cards, making contacts. If you're passionate, we're noticing, have a brilliant sign, we're noticing. This is our recruiting process. We do not have the time or money or ability to recruit people traditionally but we can put on a protest and attract the people that are aligned with us.

So if our strategy is to recruit, what are we recruiting people for? Well that brings us to our view of protests: Tactical versus Strategic. At this point, we look at the national 50501 protests as tactical in nature. We know how to do them and we are starting to get good at them. The national 50501 protests are absolutely going to continue and we know that they will happen roughly once per month from now until either Trump is defeated or your leadership ends up in jail (that's not a joke; I'm certainly on a list by now and you might be too).

So if the national 50501 protests are tactical, what are our strategic protests?

And that, dear community member, is where things get interesting. Starting after the April 50501 protest, provided that the weather actually becomes warm, we will be introducing a second monthly major protest. And these protests will be directly aimed at the Trump administration's key allies. The titles of these protests are:

We Don't Trust You Jeff (protesting Amazon)
Project 2025 Needs to Burn (protesting Project 2025)
Rule by Law Not Executive Order (protesting Trump's executive orders)
Bite Me Peter Thiel (protesting DEI's greatest enemy)

Note: There will also be a Gencon initiative but that's more complex and will be covered later.

All of these new secondary protests are designed to be spectacles and they are designed so we can run them more than once. Some of you in our community have already been briefed about these new types of protests and the reception has been powerful. Those that know are excited and agree that these will be fun.

And this why we are recruiting -- we have a powerful vision -- and we need help to make it come true. That's why we are staffing up. If we were to run, say, We Don't Trust You Jeff now, we wouldn't get a good return on investment. Yes we'd have fun but we don't want fun. We want this to make a difference. And that only happens when we get the right people on board; hence the recruiting.

We keep saying that this is a movement and movements need members. We need to make a lot more noise to get the amount of members we need to succeed. We need to put on not just protests but spectacles. We need community engagement and we are only going to get that by putting on a show.

And we are going to put on a great show.

Never forget that our ultimate goal is that 3.5% of the population that Erica Chenoweth says we need. That means 288,000 people in the State of Indiana and 11.5 million nationally. I can't do anything about the national scene but I am the State Organizer for Indiana and this is our strategy to get there.

And, in closing, we've been working to organize 50501 Indiana along congressional districts. We now have three:

Indianapolis (District 7)
Evansville (District 8)
Columbus (District 6)
Bloomington (District 9)  The brilliant aspect of 50501 was that it brought Shock and Awe to protesting by organizing concurrent protests. It is my goal that we execute our strategic protests in all districts on the same day.