#also its hallmark brand from what research told me!

[warpfactor9]

please enjoy this magnificent coaster my folks presented to me after trawling through some estate sales today

[yodaebusiness]

The 25 Best Ways to Increase Your Online Presence in 2021 (+ Free Tools) | Online Sales Guide Tips

Kristen McCormick May 21, 2021

Guys, we spend eight hours a day doing digital activities. That’s more than half the day. More than most of us sleep. And we have different identities online—we’re hobbyists (gaming), alter egos (Reddit), social butterflies (Facebook), professionals (LinkedIn), and consumers (what we’re focusing on in this post).

So whether you’re a service-based, brick-and-mortar, or online business, a strong online presence is everything today. And this does not pertain to just ecommerce. While ecommerce growth has been accelerated by the pandemic, so, too has support for local businesses. And the fact remains that 97% of consumers go online to find and research local businesses.

But as the internet evolves, so, too, does the definition of a strong online presence. In this definitive, data-backed guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know, including:

By the end, you’ll be ready to fill every nook and cranny on the internet.

How do you define online presence?

Online presence is, and isn’t, exactly what you may think. You can very well exist online, but that doesn’t equate to having a presence. Your presence is a deeper layer that paints the full picture of your business, according to:

So while an online existence may get you on the map, an online presence is tied to your visibility, credibility, and reputation.

Without a strong online presence, you really don’t have one at all. It’s all or nothing in the noisy world of cyberspace.

But before we get into the tactics and strategies, let’s back up that bold statement.

Why you need a strong online presence

The more ways you can place your business in front of your target audience with quality experiences, the more opportunities you have to build brand awareness and improve your reputation. But there are other ways a strong online presence benefits your business.

Finally, flock mentality. Each of your online assets and identities gives power to one another. Each channel performs better in concert with the others than it would on its own.

How to increase your online presence with your website

No matter how someone finds out about your business—whether through social media, an ad, a listing, direct mail, a friend, or even seeing it in their travels—their first inclination is to go to your website. Going into the business or calling is far less appealing than browsing your site on their own terms and gathering the information they want, quickly. Which is why 30% of consumers won’t consider a business without a website.

30% of consumers won’t consider a business without a website.

And that’s a stat from 2017, so the percentage has most likely grown and been further accelerated by the pandemic.

So with that being said, here’s how to use your website for an optimal online presence.

1. Get a modern, attractive site

Consumers have high expectations these days—to the point where if you don’t have a good website, you’re almost better off not having one at all. In fact, 75% of consumers have admitted to judging a company’s credibility based on their website design.

And truth be told, I would highly suggest hiring an expert to set up your site. DIY builders are awesome in theory, but in my own experience, people end up spending hours on them and experiencing endless glitches—oftentimes to the point of eventually spending more to hire someone. Having a lead-generating website that looks and functions exactly the way you want it to without losing hours of your time or hairs on your head is, to me, worth every penny

2. Perform SEO with the latest updates in mind

Did you know that only 49% of small businesses invest in SEO? Or that only 18% of small businesses do not plan to ever pursue targeted SEO efforts like link building, content creation, or keyword research?

SEO is a free way to get on the first page of Google—the hallmark of online presence.

It takes time, but when done right, it is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Here’s how to use SEO to increase your online presence:

3. Target more keywords with a business blog

The core pages of your website (homepage, about, pricing, products/services, contact) are relatively limited in terms of optimizing for keywords other than your service and location. You don’t have much text to work with and the goal is to distill the information down to the essentials visitors are looking for.

With a business blog, each post you publish can dive deep into a relevant keyword and be individually optimized to rank for that keyword, allowing you the opportunity to appear in search results for tons of searches your target customers are performing at various stages in their journey. More first-page appearances doesn’t just mean stronger web presence; it also equates to more traffic to your conversion-optimized site and greater credibility. In fact, businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don’t.

Plus, this is where you can demonstrate your expertise and let your brand personality shine through—both of which play into the reputation component of your online presence.

When blogging for online presence, make sure to:

How to increase online presence with social media

Using social media to increase your online presence is a no-brainer, as its vast user bases and sharing capabilities make it an amplification tool. Plus, according to Sprout Social, after following a brand on social media, 91% of consumers will visit its website, 89% will buy from the brand, and 85% will recommend the brand to a family or friend.

Here’s how to improve your social media presence.

4. Limit the number of platforms to only what you can handle

Online presence is about quality, not quantity. Choose the platforms that your audience is using, and limit the number you choose based on your bandwidth. Having just one or two accounts with solid engagement is better than having several accounts with weak activity.

Platforms to consider include:

5. Think audience, not followers

Your online presence doesn’t improve with more followers. Rather, your following improves with a stronger presence. So work on cultivating a quality, niche audience of individuals who are interested in and can benefit from what you have to offer. This will translate into more likes and comments with your posts and more user-generated content. And if you didn’t already know, marketing campaigns with user-generated content result in 29% higher conversions than campaigns or without it.

It’s better to have fewer followers with a vibrant page than to have lots of followers and not much value to offer.

6. Post with emotion for shareability

Quality posts that get engagement are important if you want social algorithms to display your posts in users’ feeds. But quality isn’t really enough. You want your followers to feel something when they consume your content—so much so, that they feel compelled to share it with others. Use emotional words and phrases in your captions. Add emojis. Use compelling stats and evocative images.

And speaking of shareability, pay attention to small nuances in your captions to see if you can find any patterns. We recently found that leading off with a key stat in the caption resulted in more shares. Another approach is to create link-free posts that followers can consume quickly. They don’t always want to read a long post or go to a link, and they’re more likely to share something that isn’t a big ask for their followers either.

7. Perform social media SEO

Facebook receives over 2 billion searches per day. And in 2020, Instagram announced that it now supports general keyword searches (as opposed to just accounts, hashtags, and people). So just like with your website, you should include popular keywords in your profiles and posts. You can use many of the same keywords as you do with your site, but perhaps with a bias toward idea-oriented and lighter-hearted queries. Social media platforms are more of the browsing and inspirational types. But it all depends on your business. The first result for the query “how to clean a sink” on Facebook is a video with almost a million views.

You should also still be using hashtags in your posts to improve your social media presence, but treat them as you would keywords. Use broad hashtags sparingly and focus more on location-based and niche terms so that you can increase your visibility to the right audience.

8. Be active (duh)

You’ve heard this a million times, and now, for the million-and-oneth time: If you’re going to make social media a part of your online presence, you need to have an active account. So that means publishing quality posts regularly, responding to likes and comments on those posts, liking and commenting on your followers’ posts, answering direct messages, sharing content from other sources, and more. And it means doing this consistently. This is the difference between a profile and a presence.

If being able to have this type of engagement means only having one profile, then so be it. Better to have one vibrant profile than to have three that are subpar. And precisely why it’s important to only take on the number of profiles you can manage.

Plus, if you want to find and connect with influencers, you need to be active in your niche so you can identify who is realistic to reach out to and gradually build your relationship with them.

How to improve your online presence with listings

With thousands of online directories out there, creating listings for your business can help you show up in more places online. In addition, links to your site from popular directories serve as citations for your business, which Google takes into consideration when ranking your site. Finally, curated “Top 10” lists from popular directories can dominate the SERP, so if you’re ranking in their top 10, you can achieve that much more exposure.

But reaping these benefits takes more than just throwing your NAP out there and then kicking back. Let’s cover the steps for using online listings to properly boost your online presence.

9. Start with the heavy hitters

Many of the smaller directories out there aggregate information from the biggest ones. So take the time to perfect your listings on the following sites:

Google My Business (If you only do one of the suggestions in this post, let it be this one!)

Your Google My Business Profile is arguably the new homepage for your business. It provides all of the essential details of your business, directly in the SERP for Search and Maps.

Change the category on your business page to “Local business or place” so you can then add your location and collect reviews. Also, get listed on Facebook Places by attempting to check in at your location and then adding your business there.

The fact that an HVAC business can show up on a Facebook search speaks to its validity as a directory.

We know that Google is the leading search engine, by far. But that doesn’t mean Bing is to be ignored. Here are some stats that prove it’s worth being present on:

Small businesses, in particular, can benefit from a presence on Bing because there is less competition and the older audience may be ideal.

Foursquare has fizzled out as a social platform, but its Places technology powers location data for Apple, Uber, Twitter, Microsoft, Samsung, and 120,000 other developers. When your business is listed on Foursquare, it’s automatically included in thousands of local apps and services.

For a more complete list of listing sites, check out LOCALiQ’s 10 Best Free Business Listing Sites.

10. Populate every field, meticulously

Like social media feeds and search engine results pages, listing results are determined by an algorithm. This means that the quality of your listing matters. Make sure that for each listing, you populate every section available, such as:

As much as possible, make sure the information you provide is identical across listing sites. We’re talking St vs street, [Business name] vs [Business name], LLC, and other tiny details. This is because Google looks at consistency of information about you across the web when determining your credibility and ranking; and also because auto-populated listings risk inaccuracies, so you can keep deviations to a minimum with identical listings to begin with.

11. Have a proactive review strategy

Reviews have perhaps the most powerful influence over how high you show up in directory results. Not to mention the fact that they are one of the top ranking factors for Google local search. Simply providing review-worthy service will not do it. You need to have a proactive strategy in place to keep a steady stream of reviews coming in. Here are some ways to obtain and ask for reviews:

12. Maintain and monitor your listings

With the thousands of directories across the web that pull information from one another, your listings can develop inconsistencies or inaccuracies over time. And 80% of consumers lose trust in local businesses if they see incorrect or inconsistent information. You don’t have control over all of these profiles, but take the time to keep the ones you do have control over updated and consistent. Another option is to use a listing service provider who can stay on top of everything for you.

Monitoring your reviews on these directories is also crucial, for obvious reasons.

How to improve your online presence with advertising

Paid advertising is a fast way to show up prominently on search engines, social media feeds, and websites your ideal customers frequent. With SEO, you can really only target your audience with keywords, but with PPC, you can layer audiences onto your targeting based on a number of criteria. Here are some of many the different ad options you can use to increase your online presence.

13. Search ads

It’s worth investing in paid search ads because not only do they land you at the top of the SERP, but they also reach your target customers when they have the highest intent. And if you can get your site to rank in both organic and paid results for a keyword, the chances of getting a click on one or the other are higher.

And although Google is the most popular search engine, there are still many advantages of advertising on Bing.

14. Social ads

Social media ads can be used to improve your online presence because ads have higher reach and engagement rates than organic posts. And while social media users have less intent than on search engines, social ads come with stronger targeting capabilities and more creative freedom. Plus, you can leverage the power of video ads.

15. Display ads

Display ads put your business in front of custom audiences based on their interests, behaviors, types of websites and apps they frequent, and even places they’ve visited. Though display ads have lower engagement rates than search ads, they will earn you lots of impressions and like social media ads, you have more options for branding, color, and creative.

16. Retargeting ads

Retargeting ads appear in front of users who have previously expressed interest in your business, such as by interacting with a previous ad or visiting your website. This is a great way to maintain a presence with prospects as they engage elsewhere on the web.

17. Google Local Service Ads

Google Local Service Ads also show up at the top of the SERP in card form. If you go through the application process, you can appear with a green “Google Guaranteed” badge under your name, which makes for a stronger presence in this section of results.

This is, by no means, an exhaustive list. There’s podcast advertising, Google Shopping Ads, Reddit ads, and more.

More ways to increase your online presence

Your online presence isn’t just limited to your website, social media profiles, online listings, and ads. Here are eight more ways to increase your visibility online.

18. Have a presence in the inbox with email marketing

The advantage that email marketing has over other channels is that your recipients have opted in to receive your emails. Yes, your social media followers have opted to follow you, but feeds are infinitely more crowded and competitive than email inboxes. Plus, while 79% of Facebook users check Facebook once a day, 99% of email users check their email every day, some as much as 20 times a day. Lots of opportunity to get exposure.

99% of email users check their email every day, some as much as 20 times a day

The email marketing best practices are pretty evergreen, but if there’s three to focus on with regard to your online presence, it would be these:

19. Use guest posting to reach more potential customers

Do you know of any complementary businesses or local media outlets that have a strong online presence? See if they’ll accept a guest post from you. Not only can you get your business in front of their audience, but a link to your site from theirs can help to improve your SEO.

You can also accept guest posts on your own blog. Writers are always eager to share their publications with their audiences.

20. Leverage the power of video for more shares and memorability

There are tons of video marketing stats that highlight the importance of this medium for growing your business, but in terms of online presence, you should know these three:

Here are some ways to use video to improve your online presence:

21. Encourage your employees to share your content with their networks

According to Linkedin, employees have a network that is 10X larger than its company’s follower base. And Social Media Today tells us that content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels.

Take advantage of this! Share your blog posts with your company employees and encourage them to share it on their networks. The added bonus is that your sales and support teams can stay on top of content that can be of use to them.

And don’t forget that your online presence is also made up of what others say about you online. Get listed on Glassdoor, treat your employees well, and let them play a part in building your reputation.

22. Build relationships with lots of different people

Building your online presence is a lot of work. But who says you have to do it alone? Those with whom you have a strong relationship can help you in a number of ways.

Plus, these immediate connections can introduce you to their connections. Maybe you connect with a developer that can help you with your website, or a young videographer offering inexpensive work to gain experience. But as always, networking and building relationships should not be self-seeking. The goal is to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships from which organic opportunities can arise.

23. Make your content accessible to all

Make your website pages and emails accessible to people with disabilities. Not only does one in four adults have a disability in the US, but also, the assistive technology industry is growing. With those with disabilities having more access to online content, you have the opportunity to expand your online presence to the 61 million adults in the US who have one—not to mention demonstrating values that matter to consumers today.

With the antiracisim and inclusivity movement that began in 2020, incorporating diversity into your workplace and marketing material is more important than ever. Plus, people are attracted to material—whether visual or written—that represents them. This is partly due to the familiarity principle (more on marketing psychology here), but also because it conveys to them the message that they are heard and seen. By representing the diverse range of people within your audience in your online assets, you can get noticed by more people while also demonstrating social responsibility.

25. Use mobile-specific marketing strategies

As mentioned earlier, Google is now using mobile-first indexing for all sites on the web, so having a responsive site and enhancing performance with tactics like lazy loading is essential. Plus, with more than half (60%) of internet searches being performed on mobile devices, you really do need to prioritize your mobile online presence. This means making sure your website pages and emails render properly on tablets and phones, but also leveraging mobile-specific strategies, such as:

And for local businesses in particular, local SEO is crucial for mobile marketing. According to Google, 76% of consumers who search for a local business on their smartphone end up visiting the business within a day, and 28% of them make a purchase.

Free tools for online presence management

With so many online channels, building and maintaining your online presence is a big undertaking, but with big returns. Here are some free tools that can help you with your efforts.

1. LOCALiQ’s Digital Marketing Healthcheck

With LOCALiQ’s free presence checker, enter your business name and address and get a report showing you which of your business listings are complete, which ones are missing information, and which ones are missing entirely.

Here’s how missing or incomplete listings show up:

2. Google search

Google yourself. See what shows up on the SERP. Hopefully your website is the first result and your Google My Business profile appears on the right. It’s likely that the rest of the results will be directory sites that have you in their database. Take a gander through them to make sure each listing is complete and accurate, and that reviews are accounted for.

3. Google’s Page Speed Insights

When you plug your website into the Page Speed Insights tool, you’ll get a score for both mobile and desktop as well as recommendations to improve page speed.

4. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Simply Google “mobile friendly test” and enter your website into the search result.

Hopefully you won’t get the dreaded red text…

5. Google Alerts

Set up Google Alerts so you can be notified when new results for a topic show up in Google Search—i.e. your business.

6. WordStream’s Google My Business Grader

BrightLocal’s research has found that businesses with more than 100 images in their Google My Business listing get 520% more calls, 2,717% more direction requests, and 1,065% more website clicks than the average business. This is just one of the many small tweaks you can make to your profile to get big results. WordStream’s free Google My Business Grader identifies what’s missing in your profile and exactly what you need to do to improve it.

7. WordStream’s Google and Facebook Ads Graders

Our free Google Ads Grader and Facebook Ads Grader tools perform a thorough audit of your accounts and provide a detailed report on optimizations you can make to increase the visibility of your ads, prevent wasted spend, and get more conversions.

Use these strategies and tools to increase your online presence (and ultimately, your revenue)

You can only exist in one place in the physical world, but with the internet, you can be in multiple places at once, places your current and potential customers are spending most of their time. Having a strong online presence allows your business to get discovered by new customers, and the more touchpoints you have with your audience, the more you can build your reputation, increase brand awareness, make data-driven optimizations, and ultimately increase revenue.

There were many strategies mentioned in this post for improving your online presence, so let’s recap:

This content was originally published here.

[katvontea]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Most labs devoted to women’s diseases are accompanied by obvious symbols of womanhood: a rose, a tulip, an hourglass silhouette. Not Linda Griffith’s. Tucked away in the building for biological engineering, the M.I.T. Center for Gynepathology Research is marked only by the letters CGR in red and black, the G formed from a curved arrow representing the hand of the engineer.

“We needed something that wasn’t all pink and flowers,” said Dr. Griffith, the lab’s director. “We really thought it should be, like, ‘This is science.’”

Dr. Griffith founded the lab in 2009 with the goal of helping researchers solve endometriosis, a chronic disorder in which tissue similar to that which normally lines the uterus instead grows outside it. The disease strikes one in 10 women, as well as trans men and nonbinary people who menstruate. Its hallmarks are extreme pain and, in some cases, infertility.

Yet it suffers from a branding problem: It falls into the abyss of “women’s diseases” (overlooked), diseases that don’t kill you (unimportant) and menstrual problems (taboo). Researchers often call endometriosis “benign,” as in noncancerous — but doing so, Dr. Griffith believes, lessens the seriousness of a common, painful disease.

Her mission is to change the conversation, from one of women’s pain to one of biomarkers, genetics and molecular networks. “I don’t want to make endometriosis a women’s issue,” she told the M.I.T. Tech Review in 2014. “I want to make it an M.I.T. issue.”

Dr. Griffith, 60, with a fringe of blonde hair and a slight Georgia drawl, is uniquely poised to help effect that transition. She started her career in bioengineering, sculpting organs like liver and bone from scratch by seeding polymer scaffolds with living cells. In 1997, she helped create an iconic creature called the “earmouse” by injecting a human ear-shaped scaffold with cartilage from a cow’s knee, and growing it on the back of a lab mouse.

Now she brings those skills to the task of better understanding the uterus. In her lab, she has begun growing uterine organoids — tiny domed droplets, with glands that look like swirling craters — from the uterine cells of endometriosis patients. These “patient avatars” are ideal tools for testing potential new treatments for the disease: Biologically, they are closer to human uterine cells than those of mice (which don’t naturally menstruate). And they enable researchers to sidestep the ethical issues that would arise with human trials.

“That’s really the power of this,” Dr. Griffith said. “You can take patients who we know how they respond or do not respond to therapies, and compare and start to understand and tease apart why that is.”

Her research highlights what a remarkable organ the uterus truly is — and not just during its signature function, pregnancy. Humans, unlike almost every other mammal, grow their entire endometrium — the womb’s inner lining — once a month, whether or not a fertilized egg takes hold. If no egg appears, they shed it.

Dynamic, resilient and prone to reinvention, the uterus offers a window into some of biology’s greatest secrets: tissue regeneration, scarless wound healing and immune function. “The endometrium is inherently regenerative,” Dr. Griffith said. “So studying it, you’re studying a regenerative process — and how it goes wrong, in cases.”

Now, her work “is drawing the interest of those who have never worked on or never thought about endometriosis,” said Dr. Stacey Missmer, a reproductive biologist at Michigan State University and co-director of the Boston Center for Endometriosis. Essentially, Dr. Missmer said, Dr. Griffith is saying: “All you cool kids in the other disciplines, this is a really interesting area to ask questions.”

A name for the pain

Before Dr. Griffith turned her scientific lens on the womb, she spent years trying to avoid thinking about the pain it caused her. For nearly three decades doctors dismissed her symptoms — stomach-turning nausea, stabbing pelvic pain and alarming levels of blood loss during her period — as just part of being a woman.

“I felt like I was being gaslighted,” she said.

She grew up fearless, a tree-climbing Girl Scout in Valdosta, Ga. In high school, she sewed her own clothes, earned a black belt in karate and fixed her family’s car radiator. “There was nothing we couldn’t do, whether we were male, female, whatever,” said her younger sister, Susan Berthelot. “We had a lot of confidence, and a lot of love, and a lot of freedom.”

But when Dr. Griffith hit puberty, her body began imposing limitations. Her period was so agonizing it would leave her curled in the fetal position for days. When she was 13, a gynecologist prescribed birth control pills, a scandalous proposition. “In the South especially, it was not done,” she said. Her mother, at a loss, gave her gin.

Unable to control what was going on inside her body, she focused on what she could control: math, and building things. She went to Georgia Tech on a scholarship to study chemical engineering. But she found herself failing tests when she was on her period, and going to the infirmary to get monthly shots of the opioid Demerol.

By the time she began graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, she had developed an elaborate period regimen: She wore all-black outfits, inserted three Super Plus tampons and swallowed upward of 30 Advil tablets a day. But her pain kept increasing. When she consulted a male doctor, he took one look at her black leather jacket, pixie cut and Kawasaki motorcycle and diagnosed her as “rejecting her femininity.”

Her real diagnosis came by accident. In November 1988, soon after she went to M.I.T. as a postdoc, she checked into the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston to drain a small cyst on her left ovary. She woke up the next day to find a row of staples along her midriff, holding together a six-inch incision.

Her gynecologist told her she had a disease called endometriosis, which had fused her pelvic organs together with a sticky, speckled tissue that resembled the lining of her uterus. This rogue tissue responded to her monthly hormone cycle, swelling, shedding and attempting to bleed; that was the origin of the pain.

Surgeons had burned or scraped off as much of the tissue as possible; there was little else they could do. In 1940, the gynecologist who gave endometriosis its name, Dr. John Sampson, deemed the disease “tantalizingly alluring and elusive.” A half-century later, not much had changed. There was no cure, and researchers still didn’t know exactly how endometriosis took root.

Still, Dr. Griffith treated the diagnosis as good news. “To have someone tell me something was wrong with me, it was a huge relief,” she said.

Her gynecologist presented two options: She could go on Danazol, a hormone-blocking drug that would halt the growth of the disease but would also send her body into a menopause-like state; or she could get pregnant, a common recommendation in the 1980s, and not uncommon today.

The medical reasoning — which has since been questioned — was that by temporarily stopping menstruation, pregnancy could reduce symptoms and slow or reverse the growth of lesions. “It was almost viewed as a two-for-one benefit,” said Dr. Elizabeth Stewart, who performed Dr. Griffith’s first surgery. “It’s clear there was some sexism in the approach to endometriosis then. I think there’s still some now.”

Dr. Griffith recalls her then-husband answering for her: “We’ll have a baby.”

She opted for the Danazol. Eight years later, she divorced the husband.

Soon she was jump-starting the field of biological engineering, developing technologies to 3D-print organ scaffolds and growing artificial human ears on the backs of mice. She was an architect; her medium was the building blocks of life. But it never occurred to her to try to solve her own disease.

“Psychologically, it wasn’t something I wanted to think about,” she said. “I just wanted to pretend like it wasn’t happening.”

A ‘women’s thing’ worth doing

The turning point came in 2007, when a member of M.I.T.’s board of trustees, Susan Whitehead, asked her to speak at a Women in Science and Engineering luncheon about how her work on tissue engineering could benefit women.

Dr. Griffith was annoyed. “I was working on all the things that guys were working on,” she later recalled at a 2018 scientific meeting. “It didn’t ever occur to me to work on a women’s thing.” But Whitehead was a friend, so she agreed.

Near the end of the event, the moderator asked her where she saw herself in 10 years. Something welled up inside her. She had just had her eighth surgery for endometriosis, and had helped her 16-year-old niece, Caitlin, receive a diagnosis for endometriosis after years of having doctors attribute her symptoms to stress. Watching Caitlin go through the same ordeal “made lava shoot out of my head,” Dr. Griffith recalled recently.

“I have a chronic disease called endometriosis,” she blurted out to the luncheon audience, and mentioned her niece. “There’s no better treatment for her, 30 years younger than me, than there was for me when I was 16.” If a major breakthrough in treatment didn’t come soon, “that’s where I’m going to be in 10 years,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be solved, but I don’t think so.”

The audience broke into applause.

Dr. Griffith reset her goals. When it came to making liver and bone, “so many other people could do them,” she recalled. “But there was this one thing only I could do.” She had recently been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant, which came with $500,000 for any research project.

In 2009, she used it toward opening the Center for Gynepathology Research, the only engineering lab in the nation to focus on endometriosis. (In October 2020, federal funding for endometriosis research doubled from $13 million to $26 million after Representative Abby Finkenauer of Iowa, 32, shared her own endometriosis journey on the House floor.)

At the launch event for the center, Padma Lakshmi, host of Top Chef and co-founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America, lamented the lack of research on such a devastating disease.

“I have to say, I’m really shocked that it’s the first research center of its kind in America,” she said. “That is stunningly bad news on the one hand, that she’s the first one doing it. On the other hand, better late than never. Thank God for Dr. Linda Griffith.”

A window into the womb

Imagine the uterus as an orange, with the lining as the rind: fluffy, living tissue that serves as a plush bedding for a potential embryo. Each month, triggered by a drop in the hormone progesterone, the lining sloughs off and grows anew, complete with delicate, spiraling blood vessels.

This process repeats itself swiftly, scarlessly, without a trace of injury, again and again, as many as 500 times in a woman’s life. “How the body can coordinate that is extraordinary,” said Dr. Hilary Critchley, a reproductive biologist at the University of Edinburgh — and still poorly understood.

But this remarkable dynamism, some researchers argue, is a double-edged sword. “A little thing gets out of balance, and there you go,” said Dr. Griffith.

Dr. Griffith’s models offer a glimpse into what happens when the process goes wrong — for instance, when this growing tissue takes root in places it shouldn’t. Her bits of bioengineered tissue allow researchers to visualize the growth of lesions and systematically parse the role of immune cells, inflammation and hormones in the disease.

“You’re actually seeing in three dimensions what’s going on inside the uterus and this gland formation and nerve formation,” said endometriosis specialist Dr. Keith Isaacson, who co-directs her lab. “That is incredibly exciting.” (Dr. Isaacson, who has been Dr. Griffith’s endometriosis surgeon since 2000, provides the patients’ cells for her models.)

With her background in systems engineering, Dr. Griffith sees the uterus not as an island but as an organ that interacts intimately with everything around it. To capture these systemic interactions, her team connects her models to other organs like bone marrow, gut and liver, and hopes one day to seed them with blood vessels, nerve cells and immune cells.

The insights from this research transcend the womb. For instance, one enduring mystery about the disease is how lesions can appear in places as far-flung as the lungs, eyes, spine and even the brain. Dr. Hugh Taylor, chair of the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine, is investigating whether stem cells, which are plentiful in the uterine lining, could contribute to this process by circulating throughout the body.

Because uterine stem cells are relatively accessible, they could also be a boon to regenerative medicine. Dr. Taylor has shown that, like other stem cells, they can be grown in vitro into new neurons and insulin-making cells to treat diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes.

Another area ripe for improvement is diagnosis. One of the most frustrating aspects of endometriosis is that women typically wait seven to 10 years or more to learn that they have the disease, a process that requires invasive surgery. Now, researchers are developing a simple test to screen for genetic markers of endometriosis in menstrual blood and return a near-instant diagnosis.

Just a few milliliters of this blood, collected on a sponge, provides a wealth of markers of health and disease, said Christine Metz, an immunologist at Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research who is developing the test with Peter Gregersen, a geneticist there. Besides endometriosis, it could also help doctors screen for pelvic inflammation, infertility, fibroids, environmental toxins and early cancer.

“We were kind of surprised that it had been neglected as a natural resource,” Dr. Metz said.

They soon discovered why. In 2018, Dr. Metz began approaching male gynecologists to ask their patients for menstrual samples, and “some people said we were completely insane,” she recalled. Others, she added, “had never heard of a menstrual cup. Which was also, I’m going to say, disappointing.” They began asking patients directly for samples, and have since enrolled 1,000 patients in their study.

One might well ask why more researchers have not focused on the uterus until recently. Bioengineers in particular have always taken an interest in tissues that regenerate and self-heal. “And yet it took them how many decades to recognize that one of the most regenerative tissues is found inside the uterus?” asked Kathryn Clancy, a biological anthropologist who studies reproduction at the University of Illinois.

The reason, she believes, is simple: “Because none of the researchers had uteruses.”

Lessons from cancer

Three stone cherubs form an arc above the doorway to Dr. Griffith’s kitchen in Cambridge, Mass. They were a gift from her mother, to commemorate the embryos that she and her current husband, Doug Lauffenburger, a systems biologist with whom she shares a lab at M.I.T., made in 1997 through in vitro fertilization. Endometriosis prevented the embryos from implanting.

She held on to her dream of having children, but in 2001, just after her 40th birthday, the pain in her abdomen grew unbearable. On Sept. 11, as the Twin Towers fell, she rushed to the hospital in a fog of painkillers and underwent a hysterectomy with Dr. Isaacson. (Endometriosis pain is the leading cause of hysterectomies for American women in their 30s.)

“There was no decision,” Dr. Griffith recalled. “It was hysterectomy or death.”

Even after that, her disease returned, twice. Then in 2009, just after she had pivoted to studying endometriosis, she faced a new obstacle: cancer.

Dr. Griffith likes to say that compared to endometriosis, stage 2 breast cancer was a walk in the park. “Not like a super-beautiful day — like a stormy-day walk in the park,” she added. “But it was, like, people understood.” Colleagues wrote her cards, sent her food, extended condolences. Her dean offered her a sabbatical semester.

Dr. Griffith soon learned that the way breast cancer research was categorized was far ahead of endometriosis. Doctors used molecular tests to classify patients into subtypes, which dictated which targeted treatment they should receive. With endometriosis, “there’s no metrics,” she said. “This was this huge thing for me that was so crystallizing.”

Dr. Griffith knew that her disease, like cancer, was not one disease but many, a medusa of waving tentacles. She began talking to Dr. Lauffenburger, who had been studying breast cancer for over a decade, about how to take a similar approach to classifying endometriosis patients.

Together, they identified networks of inflammatory markers that tended to be associated with more painful manifestations of the disease and fertility, and published their findings in Science Translational Medicines in 2014. The work was cited as the first step toward creating subtypes of the disease. “That was really us together, because it was his vision of systems biology but filtered through my practical connection to the clinic,” Dr. Griffith said.

For the next year, she held lab meetings from her hospital bed in between chemotherapy sessions. “We transformed our lab meetings, literally,” said Dr. Nicole Doyle, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Griffith’s lab at the time. “We just showed up for her chemo treatments and would sit there with her. That diagnosis had to adapt to her life, not the other way around.”

Throughout chemo, Dr. Griffith never seemed to waver in her positivity. When she shaved off her hair, she threw a lab party. But Dr. Lauffenburger found it excruciating to watch his wife suffer from this new foe, after battling the old one for so long.

When it came to cancer, “I viewed it as a terrible thing,” he said one evening over dinner at their home.

Dr. Griffith saw it differently: She took a curse and turned it into a gift.

“It was a terrible thing,” she allowed. “But it was a good thing, scientifically.”

[bountyofbeads]

"Those caught in the web of Trumpism do not see the deception that surrounds them."

"The very things responsible for the success of democratic transition are under near constant assault from Trump and his Republican abettors."

"And if scandals too numerous to list have not dented faith in Trump, those holding out for an apocalyptic moment of reckoning that suddenly drops the curtain—the Russia investigation, or his taxes—will only be disappointed. In all likelihood, the idea that Trump is a crook has been “priced in.”

Millions of Americans are blindly devoted to their Dear Leader. What will it take for them to snap out of it?

By ALEXANDER Hurst | Published December 13, 2018 | New Republic | Posted September 27, 2019 10:15 AM |

ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH MEYER

On December 20, 1954, some 62 years before Donald Trump would be sworn in as president of the United States, Dorothy Martin and dozens of her followers crowded into her home in Chicago to await the apocalypse. The group believed that Martin, a housewife, had received a message from a planet named Clarion that the world would end in a great flood beginning at midnight, and that they, the faithful, would be rescued by an alien spacecraft.

Unbeknownst to the other “Seekers,” three of their group—Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter—were not there to be saved, but to observe. Psychologists from elite institutions, they had infiltrated the pseudo-cult to study Festinger’s recently elaborated theory of “cognitive dissonance.” The theory predicted that when people with strongly held beliefs were presented with contrary evidence, rather than change their minds they would seek comfort and “cognitive consonance” by convincing others to support their erroneous views.

Festinger’s prediction was right. When neither the apocalypse nor the UFO arrived, the group began proselytizing about how God had rewarded the Earth with salvation because of their vigil. His subsequent book, When Prophecy Fails, became a standard sociology reference for examining cognitive dissonance, religious prophecy, and cult-like behavior. What the three researchers probably never predicted, though, was that over half a century later Festinger’s theory would be applicable to roughly  25 percent of the population of the United States and one of its two major political parties. Nor could they have foreseen that the country’s salvation might well depend on its ability to deprogram the Trump cult’s acolytes—an effort that would require a level of sympathetic engagement on the part of nonbelievers that they have yet to display.

Personality cults are a hallmark of populist-autocratic politics. The names of the various leaders are practically synonymous with their movements: Le Pen, Farage, Duterte, Orbán, Erdogan,  Ch��vez, Bolsonaro, Putin. Or if we were to dip farther back into history: Castro, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin. Like religious cult leaders, demagogues understand the importance of setting up an in-group/out-group dynamic as a means of establishing their followers’ identity as members of a besieged collective.

Trump, like the populist authoritarians before and around him, has also understood (or, at least, instinctually grasped) how indispensable his own individual persona is to his ultimate goal of grasping and maintaining power. Amidst his string of business failures, Trump’s singular talent has been that of any con man: the incredible ability to cultivate a public image. Of course, Trump did not build his cult of followers—his in-group—ex nihilo; in many ways, the stage was set for his entrance. America had already split into two political identities by the time he announced his campaign for president in 2015, not just in terms of the information we consume, but down to the brands we prefer and the stores we frequent. And so with particularly American bombast and a reality TV star’s penchant for manipulating the media, Trump tore pages from the us-against-them playbook of the European far right and presented them to a segment of the American public already primed to receive it with religious fervor.

In an interview with Pacific Standard, Janja Lalich, a sociologist who specializes in cults, identified four characteristics of a totalistic cult and applied them to Trumpism: an all-encompassing belief system, extreme devotion to the leader, reluctance to acknowledge criticism of the group or its leader, and a disdain for nonmembers. Eileen Barker, another sociologist of cults, has written that, together, cult leaders and followers create and maintain their movement by proclaiming shared beliefs and identifying themselves as a distinguishable unit; behaving in ways that reinforce the group as a social entity, like closing themselves off to conflicting information; and stoking division and fear of enemies, real or perceived.

Does Trump tick off the boxes? The hatchet job he has made of Republican ideology and the sway he holds over what is now his party suggest he does not lack for devotion. His nearly 90 percent approval rating among Republicans is the more remarkable for his having shifted Republican views on a range of issues, from trade, to NATO, to Putin, to even the NFL. Then there are the endless rallies that smack of a noxious sort of revivalism, complete with a loyalty “pledge” during the 2016 campaign; a steady stream of sycophantic fealty (at least in public) from aides in the administration and its congressional Republican allies; and an almost universal unwillingness by Republican congressional leadership to check or thwart Trump’s worst instincts in any substantive way.

As for disdain, or disgust even, for nonmembers, who include “globalists,” immigrants, urbanites, Muslims, Jews, and people of color? “I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate / He stirred up that bloodroot of human hearts,” Woody Guthrie sang in 1950 about Fred Trump’s discriminatory housing practices. Those words could just as easily apply to Fred’s son Donald, as The New York Times details, about his birtherism, his view that dark-skinned immigrants come from “shithole countries,” his frequent classification of black people as uppity and ungrateful, his denigration of Native Americans, his incorporation of white nationalist thought into his administration, his equivocation over neo-Nazis. The “lock her up!” chants of his rallies are less about Hillary Clinton individually, and more about who belongs and who doesn’t, and what place exists for those who don’t. In perhaps the pettiest form of their disdain, Trump’s supporters engage in “rolling coal”—the practice of tricking out diesel engines to send huge plumes of smoke into the atmosphere—to “own the libs.”

Trump sold his believers an engrossing tale of “American carnage” that he alone could fix, then isolated them in a media universe where reality exists only through Trump-tinted glasses, attacking all other sources of information as “fake news.” In the most polarized media landscape in the wealthy world, Republicans place their trust almost solely in Fox News, seeing nearly all other outlets as biased. In that context, the effect of a president who lies an average of ten times a day is the total blurring of fact and fiction, reality and myth, trust and cynicism. It is a world where, in the words of Rudy Giuliani, truth is no longer truth. “Who could really know?” Trump said of claims that Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “It is what it is.”

Reason rarely defeats emotion—or, as Catherine Fieschi, an expert on political extremism, told me, gut instinct. If it did, right-wing populist movements from Brexit to Bolsonaro would be on the retreat, not in the advance. Those caught in the web of Trumpism do not see the deception that surrounds them. And if scandals too numerous to list have not dented faith in Trump, those holding out for an apocalyptic moment of reckoning that suddenly drops the curtain—the Russia investigation, or his taxes—will only be disappointed. In all likelihood, the idea that Trump is a crook has been “priced in.”

When presented with his actual record, which has often fallen short of what he promised on the campaign trail, Trump supporters time and again have displayed either disbelief or indifference. As a Trump supporter  explicitly stated in reference to the president’s many, many lies, “I don’t care if he sprouts a third dick up there.” What actually is doesn’t matter; what does is that Trump reflects back to his supporters a general feeling of what ought to be, a general truthiness in their guts.

Amidst the frenetic pace of disgrace and outrage, Trump’s support remains stable among too large a chunk of the American public to just ignore. Trump, who insisted on the presence of voter fraud by the millions in an election he ultimately won, and a coterie of prominent Republicans spent the week after the 2018 midterms delegitimizing the very notion of counting all the votes in key races in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. Trump’s claim that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still retain the loyalty of his followers is jokingly referred to as the truest thing he’s ever said, but it’s less funny that 52 percent of them would hypothetically support postponing the 2020 election if he proposed it. What happens when a man who has already  promoted political violence, and whose most hardcore supporters have shown their willingness for such violence, finds on election night two years from now that he has just narrowly lost? Do any of us truly believe that Donald J. Trump and his followers will simply slink away quietly into the night?

So, how do we get those caught up in the cult of Trump to leave it?

Daryl Davis has played the blues for over 30 years, including with the likes of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s also spent 30 years talking to Klansmen, over 200 of whom have quit the KKK as a result of their conversations, handing over their robes to Davis—who is black. “When two enemies are talking, they’re not fighting,” Davis told NPR in 2017. “I didn’t convert anybody,” he explained. “They saw the light and converted themselves.”

Davis’s success is more than a cute, feel-good story. It involved the real-world application of techniques that scholars advocate employing to help individuals leave cults. A 2011 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that, “Factors associated with leaving street gangs, religious cults, right-wing extremist groups, and organized crime groups” included positive social ties and an organic disillusionment with the group’s beliefs or ideology. As psychologists Rod and Linda Dubrow-Marshall write in The Conversation, it’s extremely difficult for people to admit they are wrong, and it’s crucial for them to arrive at that realization on their own.

The debate over how to deal with Trump’s anti-democratic following has largely avoided the question of engaging it directly. These days there is no shortage of articles and books dealing with radical-right populism, despots, democratic backsliding, and the tactics that authoritarian leaders deploy. Dozens of experts have pointed out that liberal democratic institutions need constant attention and reinforcement in order to be effective bulwarks. But most of the solutions on offer are institutional in nature: maintaining the independence of the judiciary, thwarting a would-be autocrat’s attempts to grab hold of the levers of justice, maintaining a legislative check on executive authority, enshrining political norms more clearly into constitutions.

In their 2011 book, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Post-Communist Countries, Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik conclude that democratization in Eastern European nations like Croatia owed much to assistance from transnational pro-democracy networks, civil society, and energetic election campaigns run by a united opposition. In some ways this analysis offers us a modicum of hope: Trump, despite his desires, commands far less power over the political system than did any of the autocrats that Bunce and Wolchik studied, and the United States enjoys many of the elements they cite as critical, like robust civil society, energetic elections, and a mostly unified opposition. But at the same time, the very things responsible for the success of democratic transition are under near constant assault from Trump and his Republican abettors.

Democracy, especially liberal democracy, has always been dependent on the trust and belief of the self-governed. It is one thing to implement tangible measures to prevent the decay of bedrock institutions, and when it comes to voting rights, elections, the courts, and restraints on executive power, we know what these measures should look like. It’s another, far tougher thing to figure out how to maintain the legitimacy of these same institutions—and how to restore it once lost.

Javier Corrales, a political science professor at Amherst College and expert on the Chavez regime, has written that one lesson from Venezuela’s experience is for the opposition to avoid fragmentation within the broader electorate and, when possible, polarization. When it comes to Trump, he told me that rather than pursuing impeachment, which could backfire by polarizing institutions and the general environment even more, “the opposition needs to focus on strengthening institutions of checks and balances, and embracing and defending policies that produce majoritarian consensus rather than just cater to the base. The more defections they can get from voters that would otherwise side with the illiberal president, the better. If the opposition can get the other side to split, they win.”

When it comes to helping individuals leave cult-like groups, many sociologists agree: Positive social factors are more effective than negative sanctions. Lalich counsels  using dialogue to ask questions and reinforce doubts, rather than “to harp” or criticize. Testimonials from former cult members can be particularly helpful in fueling disillusionment, she says.

On a nationwide scale, this would probably look a lot like a field called “conflict transformation.” John Paul Lederach, professor emeritus at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, laid out the basics of conflict transformation in his 1998 book, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. He argued that outsiders should work with mid-level members of the community who could simultaneously engage ordinary people and their leaders. He also called for an “elicitive approach” whereby solutions were developed by people themselves, in accordance with their own specific cultural contexts.

Of the places in the world where conflict transformation has worked, Northern Ireland probably most approximates the United States, in the sense that it was part of a wealthy nation with a democratic tradition (though in the 1980s, Northern Ireland was in a far worse situation of political division and communitarian violence).

Maria Power, a researcher in conflict transformation studies at Oxford, sees strategies from Northern Ireland that could be deployed on the other side of the Atlantic. She cited the example of dialogue-building between Unionist and Republican women, who faced much tougher obstacles to reconciliation since they were “risking their lives” every time they met in East Belfast during The Troubles. She said that the peace effort in Northern Ireland hinged on incredibly tough, person-to-person groundwork carried out by dozens of organizations and ecumenical groups. She emphasized above all the importance of investing effort and time into building trust, first within, and then later between, identity groups.

Power said that conflict transformation in the United States would likely involve local, grassroots community development in the areas that Trump likes to hold rallies. “I don’t mean that progressives should go to these communities and start knocking on doors,” she explained, “that would be the worst thing that could happen to exacerbate tensions. I mean that there should be a focus on real community development in these areas.”

Individuals would be led through a “single identity dialogue,” a safe-space where someone who has gained the community’s trust can guide them through discussion of their identity, why they feel threatened, and why they feel the need to otherize those they see as different. This does presume some legitimacy to their fears; as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, among others, has written convincingly, Trumpism is not primarily a story of globalism’s dispossessed, but rather one of identity politics. But there is reality, and there is perception, and the truth is that Trump voters perceive themselves as victims who have been culturally dislocated, disdained, and in danger of being left behind.

Power said that, in the mid-1980s, Northern Ireland had some 300 of these single-identity groups. She added that there was a tough balance to strike between allowing people “to become comfortable enough with their own place in society that other people don’t seem to be a threat,” and “dripping” in truth in such a way that avoided a reinforcement of their existing beliefs.

Only once that step had been undertaken on a local level were people able to have cross-community conversation, and eventually to engage with each other through social action projects—schemes to bring people together, not over political discussion, but in tasks beneficial to their communities. Power lamented that overall this is quite a long-term process, perhaps even a generational one.

That sentiment was echoed by Emma Elfversson, who researches peace and conflict at Sweden’s Uppsala University. Elfversson told me that because trust in the state and institutions is often crucial to reconciliation, democratic backsliding in the U.S. is worrying. “Important work to overcome divides is done at the grassroots level—through NGOs, religious initiatives, social service programs, schools, at the workplace, etc.,” she said, adding, “Civil society organizations that cut across identity borders can promote reconciliation and reduce conflict.”

Such an approach might seem fuzzy to those who seek to buttress qualitative observations with hard data, but there are concrete examples of places where community-based peace building has been effective. Fieschi thinks that the way to short-circuit populism is to create an environment where people can think. “Populism encourages every fiber of your being not to think,” she told me. “In fact, it pretty much posits that if you have to think you’re not to be trusted. We need to create those spaces and times that offer the opportunity to exercise agency, to think things through.”

The problem for the modern left is that none of this is emotionally satisfying. It’s just hard, hard work. Push too hard, and you risk fostering even greater resentment and reaction. But let people off the hook, and the myths they perpetuate about race and national identity might never get punctured.

Above all, it also rings as profoundly unfair. Why should a group that still enjoys the momentum of historic privilege, and is still afforded outsize political weight, be handheld through an era of demographic change? And why should minority groups, who continue to suffer from oppression, be the ones to extend that hand?

American politics, as Alexis de Tocqueville once observed, has often had a religious character to it, with the nation itself exalted in a messianic way. After the end of the Vietnam War, Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, two researchers of cults, wrote, “There is a recurrent sequence in American history in which sectarian (and sometimes rather authoritarian) religions emerge and elicit tremendous hostility.” The decline of Cold War orthodoxy after Vietnam, the two noted, had produced a crisis in American civil religion, resulting in “the proliferation of cults as well as the growth of anticult demonology.”

We can understand Donald Trump’s rise as a civil religion giving way to its cultic expression. Con man, cult leader, populist politician: Trump is all of these, rolled into one. He has become all-encompassing, even to nonbelievers. We all feel the fatigue of merely existing in the Trump era, the rapid-fire assault on all of our political and social senses. We want immediate solutions to the Trump problem. We want to beat reason into his followers, until they recognize how wrong they are, or at the very least, submit. We want to blame them—justifiably—for perpetuating his sham.

I want these things. I want them in my gut. But I also know that the cult’s pull is so powerful that it risks destroying its opponents, by eliciting a counterproductive reaction to it. If we want to bring members of the Trump cult back into the mainstream of American life—and there will be plenty of those who say we should move on without them—resistance means not only resisting the lure of the cult and exposing its lies, but also resisting the temptation to punish its followers.

“When the cultic behavior is on a national scale, [breaking it up] is going to take a national movement,” Lalich says. Such an approach promises no immediate gratification. But it also might be the only way to move forward, rather than continue a dangerous downward spiral. Andrés Miguel Rondón, a Venezuelan economist who fled to Spain, wrote this of his own country’s experience of being caught up in an authoritarian’s fraudulent promises: “[W]hat can really win them over is not to prove that you are right. It is to show that you care. Only then will they believe what you say.”

[omegasupremeconservative]

The MAGABomber Story: What The Media Isn’t Telling You

Is The Mail Pipe Bomb Story A False Flag Or Is It Real?

Americans are sometimes skeptical, cynical, and pessimistic. We are bombarded everyday by large amounts of information, some research into advertising has suggested that the average person sees up to 4,000 ads everyday. My point is more than ever we have to practice “getting out of the matrix” and instead of being sheep and simply believing what we are told and what is reported, we need to question everything and ultimately believe our own instincts aka “trust our own gut”.

I live in the Washington, DC area, you have to be very careful wearing a MAGA hat, contrary to popular belief many liberals are intolerant, they are emotional and tend to believe everything the media says about Donald Trump and his supporters. Make America Great Again is racist to many people in the DC Swamp and they believe Trump supporters are Nazis.

With that said how can this man living in South Florida not a place friendly to Donald Trump be driving around in a van fully covered with Trump stickers all over every window? How wasn’t he pulled over by police for having stickers covering up literally every window (see picture below).

MAGABomber Van

From Rush Limbaugh: “This van, every window has stickers, decals, bumper stickers! There are so many of ’em, you can’t see out these windows. The first reaction I had when I first heard — when I first was told and believed it — that this was the guy’s van, my first reaction, “How in the world does a van like that in south Florida not get defaced?”

If you are a Trump Supporter wearing any kind of MAGA gear depending on where you live you will be attacked by unhinged Democrats, liberals and progressives. There is no doubt about this and the media could care less. Look at this report of 133 attacks on Trump Supporters. Just putting a Trump bumper sticker on your car will get your car keyed up and defaced in many places but if you have an Obama or Hillary sticker your safe. People have gone mad when it comes to Trump. The point is unless you live in a place that is very conservative and Trump friendly you usually wouldn’t find anyone behaving like this.

Key MAGABomber Details The Media Won’t Ask

According to this article Cesar Sayoc is a registered Democrat. Here is a screenshot of his profile on MyLife before the internet police scrubbed it.

Cesar Sayoc Was a Registered Democrat

The mail bombs didn’t even have the correct postage stamps on them another red flag. If this guy was supposedly smart enough to put together a bomb how come he wasn’t smart enough to put the proper postage on the packages? See pictures:

Mail Bomb Package 2

How did the authorities apprehend all these mail bombs so quickly?

“The USPS does not deliver to homes of anyone under Secret Service protection like former presidents Clinton and Obama. All mail addressed to their residence is delivered to the Secret Service field office. Therefore, the reports that bombs were delivered to the homes of 2 former presidents is an absolute LIE!” -> (this comes from a Twitter account called @RedWaveSurfer but I can’t confirm the actually account). This information is still accurate regarding how USPS handles former Presidents mail.

Bill Mitch on Twitter wrote this

Wait let’s see. “Bombs” sent in envelopes creating maximum suspicion (because they look and feel like bombs). You send them from the same district you are actually in. Your van is covered in Trump stickers to point of being ridiculous.

This guy WANTED to be caught.

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) October 26, 2018

All the stickers on the suspected bombers van haven’t faded, if you are living in South Florida where it’s usually hot and you have these many stickers on your vehicle how come none of them are faded? In fact they look brand new.

The so called MAGABomber was homeless living out of his van, how did he have the means to put together fake bombs and mail out 13 IED devices?

His Twitter profile which has more than likely been removed by now is skeptical, he was only following about 30 people including President Trump but he had another Twitter account where he followed mostly liberals. Was this guy bipolar?

His Twitter account also looked like it was just created the hallmarks of a false flag operation. Take a look at any real Twitter account from a Trump supporter and you will see a long trail dating back to 2016 at the very least.

He was tweeting the same type of content over and over, another red flag that this was a troll account or a sock puppet account, his social media account was NOT REAL in my opinion.

Check out YouTuber TrutherTalk (you must subscribe to her on YouTube) give her point of view on the so called #MagaBomber Cesar Sayoc story.

Watch Shepard Smith Try To Make Trump Responsible For The So Called MAGABomber Attack

I was surprised to see Chris Wallace debunk the subtle attacks from Shepard Smith.

Watch Ali Alexander’s Breakdown On The Bomber Hoax

Please listen/watch this video, Ali Alexander has the same attitude as me. “When the gatekeepers tell you not to think”, its because they want to think for you“. This is what my entire website blog is about, thinking for yourself, expanding your mind your perspective and point of view. Get used to using your mind and thinking on a regular basis. Don’t rely on the media to tell you the truth, that goes for all the major media outlets including Fox News. Some people think that because I am conservative I love Fox News, let me be clear I don’t trust them either but “sometimes” they put out truthful information.

Check Out A Lionel As He Discusses The #BombHoax

FBI Director Chris Wray came out last Friday October 26, on the same day they captured Cesar Sayoc to give a press conference. He confirmed that 13 devices were sent out via mail. Each device consisted of PVC pipe, a small clock, a battery, some wiring and what is known as “energetic material”. He makes it clear that these are NOT hoax devices. Much of the rest of Director Wray’s conference was dedicated to applauding the work of the men and women of law enforcement for their effort in catching this criminal. I agree and applaud our law enforcement and thank them for everything they do!

Director Wray made a statement that is very concerning towards the end of his press conference saying “there may be other packages in transit now“. What makes him say there may be more packages? What evidence does he have? Is law enforcement not confident they captured the mastermind? Then he says if you have any information to please call us. This is very alarming and it seems this situation may not be over yet.

We still don’t know what the motive was for sending these bombs that didn’t work? Are we supposed to believe that a homeless deranged Trump supporter who used to be a Democrat decided to send 13 IED devices in the mail with the wrong postage stamps, misspelling many of the “targets” names on the labels, sending one of the packages to the wrong address, and intentionally making sure none of the bombs go off? Why would he do that? Are more bombs coming? Is this going to happen before the 2016 Midterms. Is Cesar Sayoc a complete idiot, a patsy or a criminal mastermind?

Dan Bongino a former Secret Service Agent weighed in saying this:

“I believe this person is going to be caught expeditiously in the coming days. I believe who it is…. I better not say too much…is going to surprise you. I think it’s going to surprise a lot of people what’s going on behind the scenes with this,” said Bongino, adding that the culprit wanted the devices to be detected.

“Bongino also suggested that the individual deliberately designed the bombs not to go off because none of the packages exploded and some were constructed with shoddy plastic piping.”

Dan Bongino mimicked something that Director Wray said during his press conference saying that he is worried that there will now be a “tactical shift” from devices that didn’t go off, to devices that WILL GO OFF. I pray to God this isn’t true.

The mainstream media seems to be content with blaming this all on Trump’s rhetoric but they have yet to really do a deep dive and ask tough questions. The first question would be WHY?

President Trump has openly said at rallies he hopes his political enemies like Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, or Hillary Clinton run for President. This is all on tape and public record. He WANTS them to RUN because he believes he will beat them easily. He has bragged about it. If you understood President Trump’s personality you would know he takes pride in winning. Winning for Trump isn’t having someone else win for him and it’s certainly not having some deranged criminal send pipe bombs in the mail to his political enemies.

Paul Joseph Watson Chimes In On The Mail Bomber

Check out this video from Patriot Douglass Ducote Sr. Founder and CEO of Veterans United For Justice also retired US Army and veteran law enforcement officer as he explains from his vast military and law enforcement perspective that “there is way more to this than what we are being told”.

Of course there are contrary arguments and voices on the other side. Check out these guys from The Damage Report who seem to be reasonable liberals (I think they are liberal but I could be wrong) ask the question if this #MAGABomber story could be fake. Specifically they discuss the van the alleged perpetrator drove in this video.

Their conclusion so far is:

They say “take it with a grain of salt” that this guy Cesar Sayoc is a genuine Trump supporter.

“He is about as Trump Supportery as you can be”.

“That combined with his long list of targets that he chose, an enemies list of Donald Trump effectively that he was able to compile from Donald Trump’s statements and speeches..makes it pretty clear”.

My analysis and perspective:

I am a genuine Trump Supporter, there is no way I would stick all these stickers on my vehicle, why on earth would I block all my windows including my rear windows with Trump stickers? Whoever thinks this is a genuine Trump supporter is misguided. Most Trump supporters are in the closet because they live in cities where the liberals are unhinged and intolerant and it will cause problems for them to “come out” as a Trump supporter.

This van is strange and I bet you can’t find one genuine Trump supporter with a vehicle like this. Many of these stickers don’t even make sense to me as a Trump supporter.

Trump supporters will wear MAGA hats, a MAGA shirt of some kind, that is usually about it. We aren’t draping ourselves with Trump gear from head to toe even at a Trump rally and we certainly aren’t pimping out our vehicles with MAGA, PENCE, and all this other nonsense that liberals think Trump supporters are into.

Hopefully we have no more bombs, I pray we don’t. We still don’t know why the bomber did this, if he did it, or if we even have the right guy. Could there be others? Donald Trump has been President for almost 2 years, he has given over 100 rallies, if these rallies were so violent and divisive in nature wouldn’t there be more Cesar Sayoc’s out there? Wouldn’t there be more tragedies if Trump rallies are so divisive? The Trump rallies are fully televised for all to see I challenge anyone to point me to what Trump has said at any rally that would cause a person of sound mind to commit an act of violence.

Any nut-job, crazy psycho can be triggered by anything or nothing at all so the mental stability of a person is key. These accusations against Trump for his so called “divisive rhetoric” is ludicrous when he is doing what every politician on the planet does which is make derogatory remarks against his political opponents.

      The post The MAGABomber Story: What The Media Isn’t Telling You appeared first on Alternative News Source, Research and Analysis.

source http://ugetinformed.com/politics/the-magabomber-story-what-the-media-isnt-telling-you

[yasbxxgie]

What Makes a Greeting Card Black?

In 1991 the Hallmark greeting card company, based in Kansas City, Mo., decided it was time to get serious about diversity. America was changing, as was Hallmark’s work force, and while the brand had dabbled in cards for black consumers since the 1960s, it didn’t have a perennial line that addressed them directly.

Over the years, businesses of all kinds have had to acknowledge blind spots for racial exclusion, including “flesh-colored” crayons mixed and melted in dusty peach shades to cosmetics lines that offer few to zero options for dark complexions. Hallmark realized that speaking authentically to black people would require a slight shift in its traditional tone and direction. And so, 81 years after its founding, the company created Mahogany, its first year-round imprint dedicated to cards for the African-American community.

What makes a greeting card black? According to Dierdra Zollar, the editorial director for the Mahogany brand studio, sometimes it’s explicit, like a Father’s Day card bearing the silhouette of an African-American man, or a card touting “black love” for romantic occasions. Others, however, are more subtle.

Mrs. Zollar said that a black customer browsing the greeting card aisle at a CVS may notice on a Mahogany card “familiar expressions,” terms or phrases that hint at a shared history. “I see these cultural signifiers that let me know you’ve been to my house, you’ve been in my neighborhood, you’ve participated in some of these church affairs, you have that insider knowledge that really speaks to being known,” she said.

I saw it for myself while browsing cards for mothers on Hallmark’s website on a recent afternoon. The 543 options covered a lot of what someone might want to say to a mother — barring more extreme cases of familial dysfunction — from a “Thank You for Your Love on Rosh Hashana” card to one whose cover featured a drawing of an androgynous figure farting out Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence formula. The inside read: “Happy Birthday from your smartass kid.”

But many of the Mahogany cards did indeed stand out from the rest. They addressed their intended recipients as “Mama” and “Auntie,” and their covers said things like, “Baby, your love game is tight.” I found that if the inside of a card mentioned “strength” or “dignity” in the face of obstacles, it was often a Mahogany product. One Mother’s Day offering read, “There is something deep within black women that allows them to stand strong, carry on, and make it over — with their dignity, class, and courage intact — no matter what challenges they have to face in life.”

Mrs. Zollar nevertheless balks at the notion that Mahogany cards touch on perseverance and fortitude more so than any other Hallmark brand.

“I do not think that embedded in Mahogany is the expectation or idea that, for whatever reason, African-Americans have this need to focus in on drama,” she said. “I think that what our Mahogany consumer wants to acknowledge is that, within the wide spectrum of experiences that African-Americans have, there is some of that. But that’s in all cultures, I would say, and we also have many cards that don’t speak to that.”

Still, in an America where the mothers of murdered black children lead protest rallies around the country, it’s hard to miss the poignancy of a Mahogany Mother’s Day card that reads, “I know it must have been tough raising a son in this world.”

Several years ago, Mahogany did dip a toe into social issues — however unintentionally — with the Father’s Day card “For Mom on Father’s Day.” Many customers thought the gesture to single mothers was in poor taste, exaggerating a stereotype that has dogged African-Americans for generations.

Mrs. Zollar points out that other, race-neutral Hallmark imprints were offering similar cards at the time, as well as cards for single fathers. “There was not an intention to pigeonhole this caption to speak to a particular situation that was unique to African-American family dynamics,” she said. Despite Hallmark’s intentions, Mahogany has stopped printing the cards.

The goal now, one would think, is to ensure Hallmark’s enduring relevance under the cultural dominance of computers and other digital devices. Can snail mail compete with the speedy romantic overtures of swapping suggestive photos, sliding into DMs and faithfully liking your crush’s SpongeBob anxiety memes on Instagram (even the ones you’ve seen posted elsewhere)?

Mrs. Zollar said Mahogany keeps up with the trends through constant market research, some of which involves watching online communities like Black Twitter. It’s the reason Mahogany cards currently implore recipients to “slay,” “grind” and wield their “black girl magic.” The illustrations have changed as well. “For example, a few years back, as we noticed more and more blogs and websites devoted to natural hairstyles, we knew the aesthetic on our cards needed to reflect that,” Mrs. Zollar said.

That may explain why even white people periodically find themselves drawn to Mahogany cards. Increasingly, the lexicon of the internet is actually the lexicon of black teenagers, which is then co-opted by the white majority. That’s how you end up with the official Hamburger Helper Twitter account releasing a SoundCloud mixtape. It’s also probably why some nonblack Hallmark customers have told Mrs. Zollar, “‘Oh, we love to buy Mahogany cards. They’re so rich and the language is so expressive.’”

A quick Google search turned up such a customer, who in 2013 wrote a blog post about being a white woman who preferred to give Mahogany cards. “The messages were WAY less cheesy, and just more genuine,” she wrote. She also wondered if it was odd to buy a card for her grandfather illustrated with black people instead of white people, before adding, “This leads me to think about how black people (and other minorities) have felt since forever about not being represented on consumer products.”

[morapandora]

Happy new year everyone! 🌟 Today’s post rings in the new year with my monthly news round-up, with all the details on what’s coming up for January 2018 – we have the Valentine’s  Day and Chinese New Year 2018 collection launches, some Disney Parks updates, info on the next Pandora Disney UK release, and more! 🌈

I hope you all had a lovely time celebrating (or not celebrating) the new year! We cooked a nice dinner with family, and then spent the evening playing Pictionary, learning how to play poker and watching The IT Crowd. 😊

I apologise again to anyone who was disappointed by the Pandora SS18 sneak peeks being removed. I hope to be in discussion with Pandora about this soon, and will provide an update when I can. I’ve read through and appreciate, as always, all your interesting and thoughtful comments, but will hold off my responses for the time being.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this round-up!

[line]

Pandora Valentine’s 2018 collection release

The main event for this month is the launch of the Pandora Valentine’s 2018 collection. The collection has had mixed reviews from collectors, and features a set of lip-themed jewellery alongside the usual hearts and pinks. It’s due to launch on 11 January – and you can see a full preview if you look through the Pandora Valentine’s Day 2018 tag.

In the meantime, I have some live images to show you! The first comes from Pandora’s official Instagram, offering a rather pretty look at the new charm bracelet coming out:

#DOCelebrate love this year with this new padlock-inspired bracelet, available in stores and online soon. Its eye-catching, detachable heart clasp makes a foolproof combo with love-inspired charms and dangles. #PANDORABracelet #DOPANDORA

A post shared by PANDORA (@theofficialpandora) on Jan 1, 2018 at 1:09am PST

These next are courtesy of tiedyedeb – I’ve picked a selection out here, but there are more if you follow the link. 🙂

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

Image by tiedyedeb

The Pandora Club charm for 2018 is also making its debut alongside the Valentine’s 2018 collection. We have a great collection of live shots of the charm from all angles, courtesy of Lady G Forty. As usual, it comes in a heart-shaped box, stamped with the year.

Image by Lady G Forty

[line]

Pandora Chinese New Year 2018 release

As is tradition, Pandora are also putting out a special release in honour of the lunar new year. This year, we’re being treated to two new dangle charms – you can see a full preview here.

We have this cute live shot of the two charms, thanks to Sha! The charms strike me as being quite representative of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Pandora: the figure, with its two-tone and red enamel, being more in keeping with existing CNY charms; and the heart, with its sparkly pink CZs, more in line with newer Pandora collections.

I’m told that these will be available in North America and Australia/New Zealand, but not the UK. 😦 I am in love with the little God of Fortune and so I’ll definitely be getting him to go on my red Asian-themed bracelet:

[line]

Pandora Disney Cruise gift set

There’s a new Disney cruise exclusive Pandora gift set available, including an engraved version of the Frosty Mint shimmer murano, the Cruise ship dangle charm and a Disney version of the usual engravable pavé button charm. This features a sailor Mickey Mouse on one side, and the Disney cruise logo on the other.

We have a couple of beautiful close-up images of the charms included in the set, thanks to Mark Scott.

Image by Mark Scott

The set is available for $225 USD. The murano even has the copyright symbol next to Disney, which tickles me for some reason!

Image by Mark Scott

The only stock image I’ve seen so far is this one by @dpantry:

In other news, the 2018 Disney Parks Pandora charm is now available for $75 USD. (I previously previewed this with the Pandora Disney Parks AW17 collection.)

[line]

Pandora Disney UK February 2018 Release

The next Pandora Disney drop for the UK will be in February – there won’t be brand new beads included, but we’ll be catching up on some of the charms that have already made it out in other countries. The new Disney beads will be out on 15 February. 

I don’t have specific details of what charms exactly will be coming out, but I can confirm the characters that will be making an appearance:

Tinker Bell

Winnie the Pooh & friends

Donald & Daisy Duck

Ariel

Snow White (including the Anniversary charm)

Rapunzel’s Dress (but not Maximus! :()

Other princess pieces

I’m told that, once this launch has dropped, our Disney offering in the UK will be pretty much on a par with what’s offered in Australia currently.

[line]

Pandora hallmarking changes

I’m sure every collector is familiar with Pandora’s hallmark: 925 ALE if the charm is 2011 or before, and S925 ALE if the charm originates after that point. However, charms have been cropping up over the past few months with new, unfamiliar hallmarks, and I’ve had a few questions about this. After a little research, I found the following info, courtesy of Dora Melinte. 🙂

This text from a French Pandora brochure explains that additional hallmarks have been added to certain Pandora products to help them pinpoint any quality control issues. The new hallmarks include a range of different symbols:

The text translates as follows:-

As part of our quality control process, we have added different symbols & hallmarks to our products to help us identify manufacturing locations. You will see the following symbols on our products.

[line]

Pandora Winter 2017 sales continue

Winding up the round-up, I wanted to note that many of Pandora’s regional winter sales are still running and will do so for the first week of January in many cases. I’ve listed the details for most of the sales in my previous sales alert post. Pandora US has extended their sale until 7 January, too.

I’m aware that I don’t want much from Valentine’s (if anything) apart from the CNY bead and the Club charm, and so I’ve gone a little bigger on my sales purchases than I might have done otherwise. 😂 After all, I have a little window to absorb my sales spending before March, lol.

I got the red Twinkle murano, the Club charm 2017 and the Koinobori in the US sale. Yes, I finally cracked and got the lovely Koinobori! I’m wanting to put the muranos on my red leather as a complementary design to my main CNY red bracelet.

Then, as my brother is over in Australia again and can be my Pandora mule, I hit that sale too… two Rapunzel muranos for me, and the Lock of Longevity too, neither of which have made it out in the UK thus far.

Finally, in the UK sale, I got the lovely little Wise Owl. I’ve wanted this for such a long time! He’s on my Halloween bracelet. 😀

[line]

Pandora, as told by SNL

Finally, we have a little oddball contribution to this month’s round-up 😶 This SNL skit did the rounds just before Christmas, and I thought it was absolutely hilarious:

(The embarrassing thing is that I think the little coffee cup would be a pretty cute charm 😂)

[line]

My Comment

It’s going to be a bit of a quiet month for me, as I need to hunker down after indulging so much in the sales. ^^ I’m looking forward to seeing all the Valentine’s 2018 pieces in person – I don’t intend on buying anything, but I’m open to being pleasantly surprised by something when I see it in store. The Lock your Promise bracelet is a possibility, although I don’t really need to start a new design.

Have you been sales shopping at all? Are you planning on getting any of this month’s new launches?

Happy new year everyone! Today's post rings in the new year with my Pandora news round-up for January 2018 :) Happy new year everyone! 🌟 Today’s post rings in the new year with my monthly news round-up, with all the details on what’s coming up for January 2018 - we have the Valentine's  Day and Chinese New Year 2018 collection launches, some Disney Parks updates, info on the next Pandora Disney UK release, and more!

[massivecollectionpatrolme-blog]

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[lucyariablog]

How Brands Use Pop-Up Experiences to Make a Lasting Impression

A couple of months ago, my daughter sent me a link to a place in San Francisco that I just didn’t have a name to describe. Some might call it a museum. Or maybe it was a pop-up experience? To me it looked like attending a toddler birthday party while on ’shrooms.

I’m talking about the Color Factory – an appointment-only museum. If you’re not familiar with it, spend a few minutes browsing #colorfactory on Instagram. (Or check out the Color Factory account @colorfactoryco.)

It’s essentially a space designed for the selfie generation. In one room you wander through millions of ribbons hanging from the ceiling. In another, rainbow confetti showers over you. And there’s no need to keep your smartphone at the ready for that perfect shot. In each room, cameras click away at just the right angle and with perfect lighting. It’s nearly impossible to take a bad picture … and that’s kind of the point. This place was designed for sharing. I’m betting not a single person visits the Color Factory without posting (stunning) images on social – most often Instagram.

The @colorfactoryco museum is designed for sharing on social, says @soloportfolio. Read more > Click To Tweet

After my daughter alerted me to it, I spotted fantastic pictures of @amywhiggins in a Day-Glo yellow ball pit. I didn’t need to see an ad or sponsored social content to know that on my next trip to San Francisco, I’m booking a ticket.

Plenty of brands have noted this concept even before the Color Factory opened its doors and tried to design what I’ll call “selfie moments.” I’ll venture to say most are weirdly gratuitous selfie moments … and that’s OK because it’s in keeping with the brand.

The Cheetos Museum wasn’t intended to be a transcendent experience. Cheetos invited people to submit pictures of their most interestingly shaped puffed cheese snacks. (Kind of like a modern version of finding the likeness of the Virgin Mary in an everyday object.) Winners were displayed in a museum-worthy temporary space in New York’s Times Square, but an online museum also memorialized the curled cheese crunchies.

Or consider the air-freshener brand Glade’s Museum of Feelings, a pop-up show that saturated all your senses with lights, textures, and smells. (I’d call it the precursor to the Color Factory.)

These are fleeting experiences for brands to create a short-lived memory or brand association. They are passing campaigns from brands thinking more about advertising and less about longer-term relationships.

What is it about pop-up experiences that deliver something a little more meaningful? Maybe an experience that transcends the selfie moment and has more staying power?

In recent months, I’ve spotted some amazing examples of brands that aim to capitalize on the selfie moment, but do so in a way that’s true to the brand and not quite as cheesy or fleeting as the Cheetos Museum.

Brands can aim to capitalize on selfie moment in a way that’s true to brand and not fleeting. @soloportfolio Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Brand Museums: How Companies Tell Their Stories

State Street Global Advisors

We all know about this example: The Fearless Girl statue. Images of the Fearless Girl were splashed across media sites and social media channels from its debut. State Street handled the launch particularly well – unveiling it on the International Day of the Woman and not wading into the inevitable controversy that followed. (Some people thought the global bank’s honoring women was disingenuous; plenty of people defended the statue as a creative and bold statement, meaning State Street didn’t have to argue much on its own behalf.)

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How 3 Serious Brands Engage Humanly on Social Media

Maria’s Field of Hope

I found out about Maria’s Field of Hope on social media, where all my Cleveland-based friends were suddenly posting images of their families posing in endless fields of sunflowers. Like any mildly curious individual, I searched on Google for Maria’s Field of Hope and found out it was launched by the Prayers from Maria Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to funding global research into gliomas, a form of childhood brain tumors. The first field of sunflowers was planted in 2014 to draw attention to the lack of funding for childhood cancer, but the arresting images of sunflowers spread via social have pushed the foundation’s message much farther than typical social media messaging could have achieved.

GE

GE won a lot of attention a few years ago for its pop-up garages, essentially maker spaces for those curious about new manufacturing technologies such as laser cutting, 3D printing, and CNC mills. But GE has a long history of bringing its ideas and passions to life in the real world. GE hosted a campus bus tour – part of its Balance the Equation movement, which aims to attract more women to work in the STEM fields. The bus tour stopped at a half-dozen campuses and helped students set up professional social media profiles on sites like LinkedIn. Chief Marketing Officer Linda Boff told CCO magazine, “You may expect LinkedIn to show up on campus and teach kids how to update their social profiles … but we work really hard to bring the brand to life in ways that people can feel and touch.” In other words, it’s less about creating a moment, and much more about creating a deeper relationship.

You need to work really hard to bring your brand to life in ways that people can feel & touch. @lindaboff Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How GE Gives Recruiting Content a Personality Lift

Land O’ Lakes

One of my favorite examples is the Crop Adventure from Land O’ Lakes (the butter people). The museum experience is built into an existing destination: Fair Oaks Farm, the largest agri-tourism destination in the United States. Land O’ Lakes partnered with Fair Oaks Farms in Indiana to build a 12,000-square-foot Crop Adventure exhibit that highlights how high-tech tools like drones will play a part in modern farming. Land O’ Lakes CEO Chris Vilsack explained to local media, “I hope that when young people go through it the first reaction is, ‘I didn’t know that, I want to know more … I want to be the scientist, I want to be the farmer. I want to be in the new economy that is displayed here.’” The Crop Adventure destination is part of a bigger push by Land O’ Lakes to be a leader in the conversation about modern farming; its hallmark event, Fields of the Future, aims to raise awareness about the complex challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050.

Adidas

High on my list of uplifting live experiences is adidas’ Brooklyn Farm Studio – one of three global creative spaces from the athletic brand. This example isn’t for a public audience but for creative talent inside adidas who are designing the next generation of footwear. It’s part maker lab and part gorgeous, industrial-styled meeting space. A blog post about the lab explains, “When two people connect in the MakerLab, collaborate, learn from each other and then pass their experience on to another person … That’s the magic spark. From there, it’s a ripple effect until a whole community of creators, artists, and thinkers are igniting new dialogues and perspectives. This is the key to innovation.”

Why does the Creative Farm make my list? It’s not exactly a selfie-machine. I love this idea because it capitalizes on the network effect of the social graph, but it’s focused inward on a single brand’s culture and knowledge sharing. The Farm Studio (as well as adidas’ other hubs in Germany and Portland, Oregon) is intended to be a creative collaboration space, but even more, it’s designed to create a ripple effect of knowledge sharing and culture transfer across the organization … much like the Color Factory images spread virally across Instagram. In this case, however, the shareable experience is less about imagery (though there are some amazing images coming out of the Farm Studio) and more about ideas.

How will you create interactive, memorable, and shareable experiences beyond those you serve up on a screen? This is the question every brand – not just consumer-facing brands – should be grappling with.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Adidas Creates Moments of Relevance

Want to experience a content marketing selfie opportunity? Attend an upcoming CMI Master Class this year. Check out the dates and cities for the rest of 2017.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How Brands Use Pop-Up Experiences to Make a Lasting Impression appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/10/brands-pop-up-experiences/

[tortuga-aak]

The Hallmark Channel is defying every trend in media by owning Christmas

Hallmark Channel

Starting this weekend, the Hallmark Channel is rolling out 33 original Christmas movies. These movies have helped it defy industry trends that are hurting rival networks.

The company's formula allows it to crank out movies in three weeks for roughly $2 million each.

Most of the films are shot in the summer: "I’ve gotten used to being really hot and sweating in my boots," says Lacy Chabert, a recurring star.

Advertisers and viewers are drawn in because they know exactly what they're going to get.

Roger left his big New York City newspaper job to head back to his Vermont hometown to take over the family newspaper right smack in the middle of the Christmas season.

Once there, he and his high-school rival, Samantha, now the anchor for the local news station, wound up chasing the biggest story of the year: What will happen to the town's Christmas-tree farm, which is set to be razed by developers? Will they save the farm, get the big story, and keep from falling for each other? Find out on "Christmas Scoop," starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Jennie Garth.

OK, this isn't a real movie. But if you've ever heard of the Hallmark Channel, you can picture the whole thing.

The cable network is set to release the first of 33 original Christmas movies — most featuring a pair of recognizable TV stars meeting cute near the mistletoe — this weekend — before we're even done with Halloween.

Hallmark, it seems, has never stopped saying Merry Christmas, and it's how the network, owned by Crown Media, is defying every trend in the media business. It has milked the Christmas stories to consistently deliver strong live ratings (meaning people watch when the movies are broadcast, not later, say, over the internet), while its rivals grapple with cable cord-cutting and competition from streaming services. If you aren't familiar, here are two examples of the kinds of films we're talking about:

2015's "A Crown for Christmas" starring Danica McKellar ("The Wonder Years") as a recently fired New York exec who ends up working for, and falling for, a prince during Christmas.

2016's "A Wish for Christmas" starring Lacey Chabert ("Mean Girls") as a woman granted a wish by Santa Claus, a wish that expires in 48 hours.

"Their movies are as comforting as programming can be. You can grab a blanket, enjoy a glass of wine, and know the movie will have a happy ending," said Brad Krevoy, a producer who has worked on theatrical movies such as "Dumb and Dumber" and "Threesome."

Very traditional media

Hallmark

People are canceling cable subscriptions and ditching live TV for Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming apps.

Cable networks are striving to produce original prestige series at a time when there are upwards of 500 on the air. At the same time, mid-tier cable networks are struggling, and some, like Esquire, have disappeared. Everyone in media is trying to figure out where they fit on Facebook and Snapchat.

Not Hallmark.

"It's weird," said director Ron Oliver, who's worked on numerous Hallmark projects and logged time on Nickelodeon's "Goosebumps" in the 1990s. "With Hallmark, you actually turn on the TV at 8 p.m. and watch collectively. It speaks to a real need."

In 2016, Hallmark movies attracted over 2 million live viewers, though by November and December those numbers spiked to 4 million, according to Nielsen. The rating record was set by Candace Cameron Bure’s "Christmas Under Wraps," in 2014, and it actually just added a third cable network, Hallmark Drama, on top of its core network and Hallmark Movies and Mysteries – all part of the Crown Media Family Networks division of Hallmark Cards. Crown Media president and CEO Bill Abbot chalks the success up to a commitment to the formula.

"The business has been so driven by trying to hit the home run, trying to replicate the success of 'The Walking Dead,'" he said. "Hits are very hard to find. That's a very risky strategy. And it's detrimental to the cable industry.

"People don’t know what they are going to get from original channels," Abbot added. "That’s what’s driving a lot of the decline in audience."

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Taking back Christmas

The original cable Christmas movie wasn't Hallmark's baby. Rather in the mid-1990s, ABC Family kicked off the craze with its "25 Days of Christmas" franchise. That led to classics such as 2007's "Holiday in Handcuffs" featuring Melissa Joan Hart taking Mario Lopez hostage while he steals her heart— of course at Christmas time.

Though the Hallmark channel launched in 2001, Crown Media had made TV movies for decades for networks like CBS. But around 2011, as ABC Family (now called Freeform) leaned into targeting teens, Crown went after Christmas in a bigger way.

"We did look at what '25 Days of Christmas' had become in people's minds and said, 'Wait a minute. We have a brand and a hundred-year legacy,'" Michelle Vicary, EVP of programming & network program publicity, Crown Media Family Networks, said. "We should lean into that as much as we can and do more of it."

It started paying off immediately. Now Hallmark produces movies tied to Valentine's Day, fall harvest season, June weddings, and summer holidays. But starting October 27, it's pretty much all Christmas movies for the rest of the year.

"People started to say things to us, like, 'I turn in on right after Halloween and don’t turn it off until New Year's," Vicary said.

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“In this day and age, with the multitude of programs, the notion of a strict adherence to one’s brand – that's friendly, inviting, and welcoming — is a huge plus," said Bruce Vinokour, a television agent at the Creative Artists Agency.

A feel-good Blumhouse

How exactly will Hallmark make 87 original movies this year, including 33 Christmas movies?

The company is known for being disciplined and deliberate. Hallmark typically shoots movies over about three weeks for $2 million — the price of some individual TV episodes or, as Oliver put it, "the catering budget for Transformers." The network is almost like the Yuletide version of the much-admired low-budget horror studio Blumhouse.

Most movies are shot in Canada, where Hallmark gets tax breaks and other benefits from using local production crews. Vancouver is the biggest outlet, given its wintry milieu, though Hallmark has made movies in Toronto, Montreal, and, in some cases, Romania.

The timing is often tight. Actress Lacey Chabert said she shot a movie last summer that aired four weeks later.

When Business Insider talked to director Ron Oliver in mid-October, he was in postproduction on "The Christmas Train" (Danny Glover, Dermot Mulroney), which is scheduled to run in late November. Oliver was still writing "Reindeer Games," which he's shooting in November for a December airdate.

"It's literally down to the wire," he said. "But I always remind people: They shot 'Casablanca' in 18 days."

Hallmark

Christmas is good business

Kagan, a media-research group within S&P Global Market Intelligence, estimated that Hallmark reeled in $431.3 million in revenue between advertising and affiliate fees from cable distributors. That's up from less than $300 million in 2012.

To put that in context, Lifetime's revenue is roughly double that of Hallmark's, but net operating revenue from 2012 to 2016 has remained relatively flat, $876.4 million to $875.4 million, Kagan estimates.

Advertisers have noticed Hallmark's ascendancy.

"If you look at cable in general, there are ratings declines all over the place. And every fourth quarter they are growing. It's kind of incredible," said Keri Feeley, SVP and group partner of integrated investment at the ad-buying firm UM.

Marketers are particularly drawn to Hallmark because the content is considered safe. And for viewers, "They always find actors that remind you of your childhood," said Feeley.

Familiar faces

Hallmark Channel

There's something of a debate over who is the record holder for most Hallmark Christmas movie appearances — between Candace Cameron Bure (who became a star on "Full House"), Lori Loughlin (also from "Full House"), and Lacey Chabert ("Party of Five" and "Mean Girls"). Though Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper from "The Wonder Years") is coming on strong, said Vicary.

"It's tough to say," Vicary said. "Lori Loughlin owned August."

Chabert did her first Hallmark movie in 2010: "Elevator Girl" (a guy and a girl get stuck in an elevator). Her first Christmas movie was "Matchmaker Santa," and she estimates she's done eight or nine since.

"The way their company works is a family and it mirrors their product," she told Business Insider. "They really care about what they’re putting out."

Still, Chabert said that the shooting schedule is like "boot camp" in that you "eat, breath, and sleep the movie."

"It's intense — it’s hard to make a movie in 15 days. They know what they are doing," she told Business Insider.

Chabert said that for whatever reason, most of her Christmas movies have been shot in the summer. "That's fine by me," she said. "I’ve gotten used to being really hot and sweating in my boots."

Make it snow

One thing that can't be different: "You have to have snow," Vicary said. That's nonnegotiable.

Visual-effects expert Luc Benning has worked on several Hallmark projects. There are a few ways to make snow happen, even in August. Options include using:

snow blankets (which look like car-seat cushions, Benning says)

fire-retardant foam (increasingly popular)

a papier-mâché-like product called a Krendl (tough to clean up)

crushed limestone (increasingly popular out West)

ice shavings from ice blocks

snow from the machines that ski slopes use (extremely heavy)

"The past couple of years Hallmark’s really liked the look of the foam," said Benning, who often works on four and five Hallmark movies back to back. A snow budget might run a Christmas production about $50,000, he said.

Hallmark

Then there's the snow needed for actor close-ups. Sometimes, that means soapy bubbles.

Oliver said he was shooting a scene with Candace Cameron Bure that was supposed to be during a blizzard. So he used a machine that blew soapy bubbles into the air that looked like snow during close-up shots. "He hair was literally concrete," said Oliver. "And she had soap in her mouth."

Plus, because of the noise that the machine made, the actress had to reshoot her dialogue later "with the same emotion and cadence," he said. Oliver has a way of helping his actors deal: stops at the Shameful Tiki Room bar in Vancouver.

Christmas future

As Hallmark pushes its original output to the limit, the question will become, how do you not run out of ideas?

One way to keep things moving is by doing sequels: "Finding Father Christmas" in 2016 has led to this year's "Engaging Father Christmas" (and eventually "Marrying Father Christmas").

"My biggest challenge is finding good scripts and good writers," Abbot added. To help, the company has launched a book division that will serve as something of a farm team for future movies.

Meanwhile, programming chief Vicary said she's already talking to her team about projects for Christmas 2018.

For his part, Oliver said he's often wondered if he'll ever end up Christmas'd out. But then he gets together with his family and gets right back into the spirit. "I always have this huge meltdown on Christmas Eve," he said. "But I love it. It's really about the core idea of people getting together. Underneath it all, we do know the importance of it."

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https://newrepublic.com/article/152638/escape-trump-cult

tRump is a cult. If you or someone you know is brainwashed by the tRump cult, seek help from a clinician trained in deprogramming. Key features include irrational subservience to tRump and morbid investment of one's personal identity in tRump. https://t.co/Sybnk5Q4QN #MAGA-cult

Millions of Americans are blindly devoted to their Dear Leader. What will it take for them to snap out of it?

By ALEXANDER Hurst | Published December 13, 2018 | New Republic | Posted June 18, 2019 |

ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH MEYER

On December 20, 1954, some 62 years before Donald Trump would be sworn in as president of the United States, Dorothy Martin and dozens of her followers crowded into her home in Chicago to await the apocalypse. The group believed that Martin, a housewife, had received a message from a planet named Clarion that the world would end in a great flood beginning at midnight, and that they, the faithful, would be rescued by an alien spacecraft.

Unbeknownst to the other “Seekers,” three of their group—Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter—were not there to be saved, but to observe. Psychologists from elite institutions, they had infiltrated the pseudo-cult to study Festinger’s recently elaborated theory of “cognitive dissonance.” The theory predicted that when people with strongly held beliefs were presented with contrary evidence, rather than change their minds they would seek comfort and “cognitive consonance” by convincing others to support their erroneous views.

Festinger’s prediction was right. When neither the apocalypse nor the UFO arrived, the group began proselytizing about how God had rewarded the Earth with salvation because of their vigil. His subsequent book, When Prophecy Fails, became a standard sociology reference for examining cognitive dissonance, religious prophecy, and cult-like behavior. What the three researchers probably never predicted, though, was that over half a century later Festinger’s theory would be applicable to roughly 25 percent of the population of the United States and one of its two major political parties. Nor could they have foreseen that the country’s salvation might well depend on its ability to deprogram the Trump cult’s acolytes—an effort that would require a level of sympathetic engagement on the part of nonbelievers that they have yet to display.

Personality cults are a hallmark of populist-autocratic politics. The names of the various leaders are practically synonymous with their movements: Le Pen, Farage, Duterte, Orbán, Erdogan, Chávez, Bolsonaro, Putin. Or if we were to dip farther back into history: Castro, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin. Like religious cult leaders, demagogues understand the importance of setting up an in-group/out-group dynamic as a means of establishing their followers’ identity as members of a besieged collective.

Trump, like the populist authoritarians before and around him, has also understood (or, at least, instinctually grasped) how indispensable his own individual persona is to his ultimate goal of grasping and maintaining power. Amidst his string of business failures, Trump’s singular talent has been that of any con man: the incredible ability to cultivate a public image. Of course, Trump did not build his cult of followers—his in-group—ex nihilo; in many ways, the stage was set for his entrance. America had already split into two political identities by the time he announced his campaign for president in 2015, not just in terms of the information we consume, but down to the brands we prefer and the stores we frequent. And so with particularly American bombast and a reality TV star’s penchant for manipulating the media, Trump tore pages from the us-against-them playbook of the European far right and presented them to a segment of the American public already primed to receive it with religious fervor.

Amidst his string of business failures, Trump’s singular talent has been that of any con man: the incredible ability to cultivate a public image.

In an interview with Pacific Standard, Janja Lalich, a sociologist who specializes in cults, identified four characteristics of a totalistic cult and applied them to Trumpism: an all-encompassing belief system, extreme devotion to the leader, reluctance to acknowledge criticism of the group or its leader, and a disdain for nonmembers. Eileen Barker, another sociologist of cults, has written that, together, cult leaders and followers create and maintain their movement by proclaiming shared beliefs and identifying themselves as a distinguishable unit; behaving in ways that reinforce the group as a social entity, like closing themselves off to conflicting information; and stoking division and fear of enemies, real or perceived.

Does Trump tick off the boxes? The hatchet job he has made of Republican ideology and the sway he holds over what is now his party suggest he does not lack for devotion. His nearly 90 percent approval rating among Republicans is the more remarkable for his having shifted Republican views on a range of issues, from trade, to NATO, to Putin, to even the NFL. Then there are the endless rallies that smack of a noxious sort of revivalism, complete with a loyalty “pledge”during the 2016 campaign; a steady stream of sycophantic fealty (at least in public) from aides in the administration and its congressional Republican allies; and an almost universal unwillingness by Republican congressional leadership to check or thwart Trump’s worst instincts in any substantive way.

As for disdain, or disgust even, for nonmembers, who include “globalists,” immigrants, urbanites, Muslims, Jews, and people of color? “I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate / He stirred up that bloodroot of human hearts,” Woody Guthrie sang in 1950 about Fred Trump’s discriminatory housing practices. Those words could just as easily apply to Fred’s son Donald, as The New York Times details, about his birtherism, his view that dark-skinned immigrants come from “shithole countries,” his frequent classification of black people as uppity and ungrateful, his denigration of Native Americans, his incorporation of white nationalist thought into his administration, his equivocation over neo-Nazis. The “lock her up!” chants of his rallies are less about Hillary Clinton individually, and more about who belongs and who doesn’t, and what place exists for those who don’t. In perhaps the pettiest form of their disdain, Trump’s supporters engage in “rolling coal”—the practice of tricking out diesel engines to send huge plumes of smoke into the atmosphere—to “own the libs.”

Trump sold his believers an engrossing tale of “American carnage” that he alone could fix, then isolated them in a media universe where reality exists only through Trump-tinted glasses, attacking all other sources of information as “fake news.” In the most polarized media landscape in the wealthy world, Republicans place their trust almost solely in Fox News, seeing nearly all other outlets as biased. In that context, the effect of a president who lies an average of ten times a day is the total blurring of fact and fiction, reality and myth, trust and cynicism. It is a world where, in the words of Rudy Giuliani, truth is no longer truth. “Who could really know?” Trump said of claims that Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “It is what it is.”

Reason rarely defeats emotion—or, as Catherine Fieschi, an expert on political extremism, told me, gut instinct. If it did, right-wing populist movements from Brexit to Bolsonaro would be on the retreat, not in the advance. Those caught in the web of Trumpism do not see the deception that surrounds them. And if scandals too numerous to list have not dented faith in Trump, those holding out for an apocalyptic moment of reckoning that suddenly drops the curtain—the Russia investigation, or his taxes—will only be disappointed. In all likelihood, the idea that Trump is a crook has been “priced in.”

When presented with his actual record, which has often fallen short of what he promised on the campaign trail, Trump supporters time and again have displayed either disbelief or indifference. As a Trump supporter explicitly stated in reference to the president’s many, many lies, “I don’t care if he sprouts a third dick up there.” What actually is doesn’t matter; what does is that Trump reflects back to his supporters a general feeling of what ought to be, a general truthiness in their guts.

Those caught in the web of Trumpism do not see the deception that surrounds them.

Amidst the frenetic pace of disgrace and outrage, Trump’s support remains stable among too large a chunk of the American public to just ignore. Trump, who insisted on the presence of voter fraud by the millions in an election he ultimately won, and a coterie of prominent Republicans spent the week after the 2018 midterms delegitimizing the very notion of counting all the votes in key races in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. Trump’s claim that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still retain the loyalty of his followers is jokingly referred to as the truest thing he’s ever said, but it’s less funny that 52 percent of them would hypothetically support postponing the 2020 election if he proposed it. What happens when a man who has already promoted political violence, and whose most hardcore supporters have shown their willingness for such violence, finds on election night two years from now that he has just narrowly lost? Do any of us truly believe that Donald J. Trump and his followers will simply slink away quietly into the night?

So, how do we get those caught up in the cult of Trump to leave it?

Daryl Davis has played the blues for over 30 years, including with the likes of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s also spent 30 years talking to Klansmen, over 200 of whom have quit the KKK as a result of their conversations, handing over their robes to Davis—who is black. “When two enemies are talking, they’re not fighting,” Davis told NPR in 2017. “I didn’t convert anybody,” he explained. “They saw the light and converted themselves.”

Davis’s success is more than a cute, feel-good story. It involved the real-world application of techniques that scholars advocate employing to help individuals leave cults. A 2011 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that, “Factors associated with leaving street gangs, religious cults, right-wing extremist groups, and organized crime groups” included positive social ties and an organic disillusionment with the group’s beliefs or ideology. As psychologists Rod and Linda Dubrow-Marshall write in The Conversation, it’s extremely difficult for people to admit they are wrong, and it’s crucial for them to arrive at that realization on their own.

The debate over how to deal with Trump’s anti-democratic following has largely avoided the question of engaging it directly. These days there is no shortage of articles and books dealing with radical-right populism, despots, democratic backsliding, and the tactics that authoritarian leaders deploy. Dozens of experts have pointed out that liberal democratic institutions need constant attention and reinforcement in order to be effective bulwarks. But most of the solutions on offer are institutional in nature: maintaining the independence of the judiciary, thwarting a would-be autocrat’s attempts to grab hold of the levers of justice, maintaining a legislative check on executive authority, enshrining political norms more clearly into constitutions.

In their 2011 book, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Post-Communist Countries, Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik conclude that democratization in Eastern European nations like Croatia owed much to assistance from transnational pro-democracy networks, civil society, and energetic election campaigns run by a united opposition. In some ways this analysis offers us a modicum of hope: Trump, despite his desires, commands far less power over the political system than did any of the autocrats that Bunce and Wolchik studied, and the United States enjoys many of the elements they cite as critical, like robust civil society, energetic elections, and a mostly unified opposition. But at the same time, the very things responsible for the success of democratic transition are under near constant assault from Trump and his Republican abettors.

The very things responsible for the success of democratic transition are under near constant assault from Trump and his Republican abettors.

Democracy, especially liberal democracy, has always been dependent on the trust and belief of the self-governed. It is one thing to implement tangible measures to prevent the decay of bedrock institutions, and when it comes to voting rights, elections, the courts, and restraints on executive power, we know what these measures should look like. It’s another, far tougher thing to figure out how to maintain the legitimacy of these same institutions—and how to restore it once lost.

Javier Corrales, a political science professor at Amherst College and expert on the Chavez regime, has written that one lesson from Venezuela’s experience is for the opposition to avoid fragmentation within the broader electorate and, when possible, polarization. When it comes to Trump, he told me that rather than pursuing impeachment, which could backfire by polarizing institutions and the general environment even more, “the opposition needs to focus on strengthening institutions of checks and balances, and embracing and defending policies that produce majoritarian consensus rather than just cater to the base. The more defections they can get from voters that would otherwise side with the illiberal president, the better. If the opposition can get the other side to split, they win.”

When it comes to helping individuals leave cult-like groups, many sociologists agree: Positive social factors are more effective than negative sanctions. Lalich counsel's using dialogue to ask questions and reinforce doubts, rather than “to harp” or criticize. Testimonials from former cult members can be particularly helpful in fueling disillusionment, she says.

On a nationwide scale, this would probably look a lot like a field called “conflict transformation.” John Paul Lederach, professor emeritus at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, laid out the basics of conflict transformation in his 1998 book, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. He argued that outsiders should work with mid-level members of the community who could simultaneously engage ordinary people and their leaders. He also called for an “elicitive approach” whereby solutions were developed by people themselves, in accordance with their own specific cultural contexts.

Of the places in the world where conflict transformation has worked, Northern Ireland probably most approximates the United States, in the sense that it was part of a wealthy nation with a democratic tradition (though in the 1980s, Northern Ireland was in a far worse situation of political division and communitarian violence).

Maria Power, a researcher in conflict transformation studies at Oxford, sees strategies from Northern Ireland that could be deployed on the other side of the Atlantic. She cited the example of dialogue-building between Unionist and Republican women, who faced much tougher obstacles to reconciliation since they were “risking their lives” every time they met in East Belfast during The Troubles. She said that the peace effort in Northern Ireland hinged on incredibly tough, person-to-person groundwork carried out by dozens of organizations and ecumenical groups. She emphasized above all the importance of investing effort and time into building trust, first within, and then later between, identity groups.

Power said that conflict transformation in the United States would likely involve local, grassroots community development in the areas that Trump likes to hold rallies. “I don’t mean that progressives should go to these communities and start knocking on doors,” she explained, “that would be the worst thing that could happen to exacerbate tensions. I mean that there should be a focus on real community development in these areas.”

Individuals would be led through a “single identity dialogue,” a safe-space where someone who has gained the community’s trust can guide them through discussion of their identity, why they feel threatened, and why they feel the need to otherize those they see as different. This does presume some legitimacy to their fears; as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, among others, has written convincingly, Trumpism is not primarily a story of globalism’s dispossessed, but rather one of identity politics. But there is reality, and there is perception, and the truth is that Trump voters perceive themselves as victims who have been culturally dislocated, disdained, and in danger of being left behind.

Power said that, in the mid-1980s, Northern Ireland had some 300 of these single-identity groups. She added that there was a tough balance to strike between allowing people “to become comfortable enough with their own place in society that other people don’t seem to be a threat,” and “dripping” in truth in such a way that avoided a reinforcement of their existing beliefs.

Only once that step had been undertaken on a local level were people able to have cross-community conversation, and eventually to engage with each other through social action projects—schemes to bring people together, not over political discussion, but in tasks beneficial to their communities. Power lamented that overall this is quite a long-term process, perhaps even a generational one.

That sentiment was echoed by Emma Elfversson, who researches peace and conflict at Sweden’s Uppsala University. Elfversson told me that because trust in the state and institutions is often crucial to reconciliation, democratic backsliding in the U.S. is worrying. “Important work to overcome divides is done at the grassroots level—through NGOs, religious initiatives, social service programs, schools, at the workplace, etc.,” she said, adding, “Civil society organizations that cut across identity borders can promote reconciliation and reduce conflict.”

The problem for the modern left is that none of this is emotionally satisfying. It’s just hard, hard work.

Such an approach might seem fuzzy to those who seek to buttress qualitative observations with hard data, but there are concrete examples of places where community-based peace building has been effective. Fieschi thinks that the way to short-circuit populism is to create an environment where people can think. “Populism encourages every fiber of your being not to think,” she told me. “In fact, it pretty much posits that if you have to think you’re not to be trusted. We need to create those spaces and times that offer the opportunity to exercise agency, to think things through.”

The problem for the modern left is that none of this is emotionally satisfying. It’s just hard, hard work. Push too hard, and you risk fostering even greater resentment and reaction. But let people off the hook, and the myths they perpetuate about race and national identity might never get punctured.

Above all, it also rings as profoundly unfair. Why should a group that still enjoys the momentum of historic privilege, and is still afforded outsize political weight, be handheld through an era of demographic change? And why should minority groups, who continue to suffer from oppression, be the ones to extend that hand?

American politics, as Alexis de Tocqueville once observed, has often had a religious character to it, with the nation itself exalted in a messianic way. After the end of the Vietnam War, Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, two researchers of cults, wrote, “There is a recurrent sequence in American history in which sectarian (and sometimes rather authoritarian) religions emerge and elicit tremendous hostility.” The decline of Cold War orthodoxy after Vietnam, the two noted, had produced a crisis in American civil religion, resulting in “the proliferation of cults as well as the growth of anticult demonology.”

We can understand Donald Trump’s rise as a civil religion giving way to its cultic expression. Con man, cult leader, populist politician: Trump is all of these, rolled into one. He has become all-encompassing, even to nonbelievers. We all feel the fatigue of merely existing in the Trump era, the rapid-fire assault on all of our political and social senses. We want immediate solutions to the Trump problem. We want to beat reason into his followers, until they recognize how wrong they are, or at the very least, submit. We want to blame them—justifiably—for perpetuating his sham.

I want these things. I want them in my gut. But I also know that the cult’s pull is so powerful that it risks destroying its opponents, by eliciting a counterproductive reaction to it. If we want to bring members of the Trump cult back into the mainstream of American life—and there will be plenty of those who say we should move on without them—resistance means not only resisting the lure of the cult and exposing its lies, but also resisting the temptation to punish its followers.

“When the cultic behavior is on a national scale, [breaking it up] is going to take a national movement,” Lalich says. Such an approach promises no immediate gratification. But it also might be the only way to move forward, rather than continue a dangerous downward spiral. Andrés Miguel Rondón, a Venezuelan economist who fled to Spain, wrote this of his own country’s experience of being caught up in an authoritarian’s fraudulent promises: “[W]hat can really win them over is not to prove that you are right. It is to show that you care. Only then will they believe what you say.”