Tag Archives: Freedom

Tom DeWeese to speak in Ohio

The Institute for Principled Policy is proud to welcome Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center, to Ohio to present a seminar: “Sustainable Development: The United Nations’ Agenda to Eradicate Private Property Rights” on Saturday, April 30th from 10:00 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. on the campus of THE Ohio State University, 31 Hitchcock Hall, 2070 Neil Ave., Columbus, 43215. Tom will also be signing copies of his new book “Now Tell Me I Was Wrong”.
The Institute is joined in this effort by the Ohio State chapter of Young Americans for Liberty, the Ohio Liberty Council, and the Ohio Freedom Alliance.
The event is free and open to the public.
Join us for a very important discussion on how to combat the attack on property rights being waged through your local governments!
Please RSVP to [email protected]

Changing the Culture through Winning Campaigns

Can you answer “yes” to any of the following questions:

1.  Are you frustrated with the absence of principled leadership in politics?

2. Are you fed up with elected officials who talk the talk, but refuse to walk their talk?

3. Have you grown weary of being handed candidates by political parties who are “electable” instead of principled?

4. Would you like to have elected officials who adhere to our country’s founding philosophy (ie: who adhere to the Constitution)?

5. Are you willing to stand up and run for office yourself or become someone who can effectively “hold up the arms” of someone who will?


If you answered “yes” to any of these, then the training school that is being put on by Citizens for Community Values in Cincinnati on January 14 and 15 is something you just can’t afford to miss.

This candidate training school will be held at the Courtyard Marriott hotel at the Greater Cincinnati airport on Thursday, January 14 and Friday, January 15.  Nationally recognized trainers will be putting on this intense campaign training, and it is being provided for free!

This training is not just for candidates and their campaign staff members, but as well as for potential candidates, leaders in politics and the culture, and for grassroots activists and volunteers who want to begin the process of bringing real hope and change to our country.

Check here for more information and for how to register, but be quick, registrations received before January 8th will receive a special “Campaign Jumpstart Toolkit” with materials that will help potential candidates to create a winning edge.  Some of the board of the Institute for Principled Policy will be attending, and we hope to see many of you there as well.

American Majority–Grassroots Organizing and Mobilization

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series American Majority Training

constitutionMost grassroots movements have the same fundamental parts to them, with the tea party movement being a notable exception.  Understanding those parts will help activists and candidates to generate and sustain momentum and support for your issue.

Chris Faulkner from Faulkner Strategies discussed the keys to a grassroots movement.  You have to have ‘The “IT”‘, ie. the key root basis of your movement:  the idea, issue or value(s) that define your movement, identified clearly and succintly.  Think abortion for the pro-life movement, war opposition for both the Dean campaigns and the Paul campaigns, etc.

You also have to have “The ‘Host'”, the person or group that becomes the avatar and carries the “IT”.  Most “hosts” have been too weak to carry the “It” effectively (think Howard Dean) but sometimes a “host” is strong enough to carry the “It” (think Barack Obama carrying the “Move ON” idea).

The “Host” can’t do it alone; in come the “Evangelists”: those who are opinionated, well-informed, and more interested in the “It” than in the “Host”.  These folks are the ones who really drive and make the movement happen and catch fire.  Sometimes they may be “sneezers” who push information out (think bloggers, talk radio, etc.).  Next you need the “medium” of how the message is going to be delivered.  In our Founding era, it was Committees of Correspondence and the Federalist Papers; today it is the Internet and social media.

All of this is focused on getting the message, and the momentum, to the “Crowd”, ie. everyone else.  The Tea Parties seem to have found a way to effectively do this and also bypass the need for a “Host”, thus decreasing the likelihood of a personality eclipsing the message or turning off those who otherwise could and should be part of the movement.

Maybe the conservative movement can learn some lessons.  The time is now, and the resources are available.

American Majority–New Media and Online Engagement

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series American Majority Training

constitutionChris Faulkner spoke to the entire group after lunch on the ability to harness and utilize the “new media”of social networking and other online portals to create a more effective campaign (either political or activist).  He gave a disclaimer that this is the most difficult session for him to teach, as he has 20% who won’t get it, 20% who is already using it effectively, and 60% who may get useful information out of the presentation.

Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc.  are all tools that allow for greater online engagement (dynamic interactive communication), versus the early days of the Internet where someone might have an online presence (static website).  A major focus of Faulkner’s presentation was on the potential power of Twitter as a means of creating community and building your persona.  I was impressed by the fact that there are approximately 15 million Twitter users (as opposed to 300 million Facebook users) and President Obama has 12% of that community following his ‘tweets’ (1.8 million follwers).  There is potential power in this application, as Faulkner put it, 140 charcters to take over the world.

Faulkner discussed how you need to “control your brand” by using social media effectively, and getting your message and your information up to the top of the list on search engines such as Google.  It’s all about getting your name out long enough, loud enough, and in as many venues as possible to give it “juice” to help you control your “brand”.  Another good way, especially for candidates, is the creation of “fan pages” for your campaign or business on Facebook.

An amazing, but not really surprising statistic is that of various contact media being utilized today, Facebook is used as the primary contact point by more people than who use email (24% vs. 11.1%).  Twitter is a close and growing third at 10.8%.  It is pretty apparent that instead of a time wasting distraction, social media is becoming somewhat of an indispensible communication tool.  Sorry, US Postal Service!

The conversation turned to blogging, and how to go about setting up an effective blog site, how to drive traffic and attention, and how to make your blogging become an activist activity.  Faulkner presses the point home that new media will be increasingly more critical to message successs, and in generating action for your agenda.

Social media is now creating a new way of accountability.  As Thomas Paine put it, “An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soliders cannot.”

American Majority–On the Candidate track, part 1

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series American Majority Training

constitutionChris Faulkner of Faulkner Strategies out of Indianapolis led the Candidate track for the American Majority training.  I am impressed to see that there are about 30 people who are taking this track our of the 50+ who are in attendance.  Some of these people are support or campaign staff/volunteers, but the numbers are encouraging, nevertheless.

The opening session of this track is on the development of the campaign plan to ensure success.   Faulkner opened with what I found to be refreshing:  Create your entire campaign plan in PowerPoint utilizing a maximum of 10 slides!  He is now breaking down the overall plan with five major areas that must be focused upon, with questions the candidate must be asking themselves and their campaign in order to make sure they are on the right track.

He is discussing the necessity of fleshing out the administration and committee aspects of the campaign, the message you are delivering and how to deliver it, how to position both yourself and your opponent for maximum benefit for your campaign, how to structure the campaign budget to meet your goals and prepare for unexpected expenses, create your finance committee and asks for contributions, how to set vote goals and know how to sift the information to create accurate benchmarks and targets, how to effectively get out the vote in an era of early voting (in Ohio, voters can cast ballots 35 days prior to the election) and setting GOTV timelines for the greatest impact.

A former Marine machine gunner trainer, Faulkner’s presentation is engaging, lively and filled with significant pieces of information that are very helpful for those seeking to be effective candidates.


The Revolution is Here

This entry is part 6 of 28 in the series Freedom 21 Conference

f21-banner-4Professor Alan Quist, professor of political science at Bethany Lutheran College in Minnesota, presented an update of some significant changes happening in educational policies, many in the last three weeks, which may have a more significant long-term impact on the American way of life than even the health care debate or the cap and trade fight currently underway.

Quist notes that there is a worldwide revolution taking place, and it is centered in the effort to undermine the unique position of America and the way in which our country’s foundation was built by our founders, specifically our principles of national sovereignty and of the acknowledgment of a universal moral code .  As the US was the only major country founded on ideas rather than on personalities or on power concentrations, it makes America, according to Quist, the only real bastion of freedom in the world.  It is that distinction that makes the US the target of every globalist UN initiative undertaken, which he documented with UN publications which say as much.

Quist is concerned that we must win the war of ideas in order to retain our freedoms that we have because of the unique way our country has been structured.  That war is being fought most fiercely on the battlefield of education, and we are losing the war.  The current education modality in effect in American schools is that of “consciousness transformation”, which is the application of the principles of Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci upon our education system.

The Obama administration issued a press release on July 24th of this year, which may be the first salvo in the final battle over our educational system.  The “Race to the Top” may be a race over the edge of the cliff into the total surrender of any last shreds of local control over education not just to the federal government, but to the United Nations through UNESCO.  The call for “internationally benchmarked standards” and “national standards” (read federal curriculum control)  to be coordinated by the already created National Assessment Governing Board will be delivered to local districts who line up to get the “stimulus” linked to the program, in essence buying total federal control over the development and delivery of curriculum.  This will allow the Obama administration to get local schools to teach what they want them to teach.  Now enter UNESCO.

The UN, through UNESCO, is planning a full scale tranformation of education and in fact has already written the international curriculum benchmarks (standards) which the Obama administration notes they are wanting to drive American education standards toward.  In order to ensure universal coverage, the Obama administration through the NAG Board, will require successful passage of this “nationally standardized test” before any student can be eligible for college (at least no colleges that have ever taken one penny of federal money).  That means that the vast majority of private school and home educated students will have to take this UNESCO-driven and aligned testing to be able to go any farther in their formal educational pursuits.  In order to help this train down the track, the National Governor’s Association has issued a call for “voluntary national standards” to be adopted by this administration.

It makes one want to go back and look very closely at the recently-passed and enacted House Bill 1, Ohio’s budget bill, which made some significant changes to our education policies in Ohio.  Could the revolution have already come to Ohio?  We’ll have to get educated on what is happening around us and see.