From grassroots organizations to advocacy groups, we seed the narratives and gather the audience you desire. When your strategy demands paid protest, we organize and bring it to life. //

We develop, recruit, manage, and execute on your high-level objectives. Our trained operatives can lead entire crowds or simply steer events in your favor.

DEMONSTRATIONS

We demand action of our operatives on the ground and provide them in-person support. Create the scenes that will sway public opinion and perception without any guesswork.

By taking every precaution, keeping our clients secret, and only hiring the best individuals, we can ensure that all actions will appear genuine to media and public observers.

are strategists mobilizing millennials across the globe with seeded audiences and desirable messages. With absolute discretion a top priority, our operatives create convincing scenes that become the building blocks of massive movements. When you need the appearance of outrage, we are able to deliver it at scale while keeping your reputation intact.

Riots and arson that followed protests of George Floyd's death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color. //

The riots and arson that followed protests of Floyd’s death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color. Destruction from the south side’s Lake Street to West Broadway Avenue in north Minneapolis has hit immigrant- and minority-owned businesses already struggling amid the pandemic-induced shutdown.

Now, ethnically diverse neighborhoods are grappling with the loss of jobs, services, and investments.

Riots may excite the keyboard revolutionary, but they won’t bring racial equality. The opposite, in fact. Not only are the anarchists who burn and loot stores subjecting many of their neighbors to a dehumanizing experience, they are destroying poor and minority neighborhoods.

Big businesses might be able to afford to fix the smashed windows and ransacked supply room, but family-owned ones are going to struggle.

Chain stores have insurance, but the individuals and smaller manufacturers who depend on them for their livelihoods also are threatened.

The big stores themselves will be paying higher insurance rates, and some of them may decide to never come back to these poorer neighborhoods.

Sometime in the last decade, when these narrow-minded leftists hit critical mass inside and outside academia, their abstract argument that anti-progressive speech is tantamount to bigotry and violence became an unstoppable force. //

The culture does not merely belong to the Left—it belongs to the far Left. The far Left openly believes it is essential to deplatform dissent. Their refusal to meaningfully engage counterarguments is obviously crippling the American Left and its institutions on an intellectual level.

The debate about whether social media companies should have protection from liability misses a larger question about their role in American society. //

But I don’t need to be an expert in liability law to know this: social media are corrosive to our civic life, and social media companies like Twitter are largely unaccountable for their actions in that regard. Without question, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube have harmed democratic life in America, eroded our civic values, and exacerbated divisions and distrust between citizens. If they all disappeared tomorrow, the country would be better off.

Consider for a moment the disconnect between what social media promised us and what we actually got. The big idea was that making everyone more connected virtually would bring us closer together in reality, that a digital commons would increase empathy and build real community. //

The future is uncertain, but the present state of affairs is not. Let’s admit what we all know: Twitter and the other tech giants are a cancer on our body politick. We owe them nothing, certainly not special protection from liability. Let them figure out how to operate like the traditional publishers they have decided to be—and if they can’t, let them die.

When Hollywood makes the right's point for them?

Or, "how to make our kids better citizens in one simple class." //

I do believe in the social snowball effect, where little things become major social issues. I find it impossible to believe that the growing number of young men and women who can’t cook for themselves and can’t take care of their own finances and clothing is unrelated to the decreasing academic performance of our students and, on a larger scale, the general apathy toward work in our society. Ignorance of these skills is the biggest barrier to being able to carry oneself as an adult, and we should be doing what we can both in school and out to make sure they have those skills.

So, yeah, make home economics a bigger part of the high school experience again. Give kids the opportunity to learn basic life skills, rather than equations they’ll never use and how to write fictional stories for three weeks and never do again. Give them something they need. Make them better citizens by the end of the year, rather, than drones who can recite something that only fits in that one class.

A nineteenth-century humorist once warned that a bigger problem than knowing little is “to know so many things that ain’t so.” Well, Americans know “many things that ain’t so” about cohabitation and marriage.

A new Pew Research Center study shows Americans both cohabitate (“live with an unmarried partner”) and find cohabitation acceptable more than before. But other research shows this is unwise. Here is what the Pew Research Center found.

More young adults have cohabited than have married. Pew’s analysis in the summer of 2019 of the National Survey of Family Growth found that, for the first time ever, the percentage of American adults aged 18-44 who have ever cohabited with a partner (59 percent) exceeded the percentage of those who have ever married (50 percent).

It should be noted, however, that the current living arrangements of adults of all ages still show a strong preference for marriage: 53 percent of American adults are currently married, while only 7 percent of adults are currently cohabiting (although cohabitation has risen from only 3 percent in 1995). These findings may either reflect that many people cohabit first and then marry, or that cohabiting relationships are less stable and thus much shorter than marriages.

I am sure people are behind these decisions, but I am also sure they know that stuff like this gets clicks. Clicks generate traffic. Traffic generates revenue. Hate clicks generate the most traffic and so the most revenue. News sites are now specializing in outrageous content that gets the most clicks and that most often is caused by hate clicks.

Those hate clicks then get shared online, fed into algorithms, and recirculated to increase the hate and increase the traffic. Clickbait headlines compound the issue and for good measure outrageous videos and cute puppies pile on too.

I have been thinking a lot about all of this after seeing two separate and unrelated, but very connected, pieces this past Friday. The first is this katherine Miller essay at BuzzFeed on how the 2010s broke our sense of time. The second is the Georgetown University Battleground survey where in a majority of voters think we are headed towards a civil war. In fact, the average voter thinks we are two-thirds of the way to the “edge” of a civil war.

We no longer live chronologically online. We live algorithmically. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest of the internet now shows us content in a timeline designed to increase our interaction and increase our clicks. It has taken us out of chronology.The algorithm feeds the fire. The screens we are connected to make it worse. Teen suicide has started climbing significantly since the introduction of the iPhone — that moment we can precisely calculate the nation’s screen time addiction truly began. It was not long after that the nation started living in perpetual angst. People used the blame the twenty-four hour news cycle, but now we have the algorithmic news cycle where news from two years ago can become part of the twenty-hours to drive more anxiety and outrage.

None of this is healthy for society and social media companies do have to share some of the burden for taking us out of chronology and putting us into algorithms designed not truly to show us new and interesting stuff, but instead designed to keep us on sites and in services.

Add to all of this the decreasing tolerance for grace and the situation is spiraling chaotically towards violence. Each of us is now defined by the worst thing we have done, which is helpfully recirculated by others on social media. There is no need to improve or grow up because we will never be credited with improvement or growing up when one person with a social media audience can tie us back to the worst thing we have done. College athletes are now routinely destroyed for things they did as teenagers.

There is, of course, a cure for this, but it is one no one has incentive to provide when everyone and everything is now anchored in the digital. Perhaps Northern California can get a taste of it as it goes dark.

Get offline and into your community. Scripture says to seek the welfare of the city in which you are in exile and there you will find your welfare. But too few are doing that because the city has no algorithm. It has something worse — physical human beings. We would all rather stay online in digital communities we have created filled with user names and avatars that look and think like us and share the same interests and feelings. The same algorithms fuel our angst, worries, fears, and occasional hopes.

Unplugging, however, may be our only hope. Our Facebook friend is not going to bring us dinner when we are sick or water our flowers when we are gone. The actual, live human being next door to us just might.
Progressives and conservatives need to get offline, spend way more time in their own communities, and both must decide to be okay with the other’s community looking and behaving differently, but behaving chronologically.

They chose one, they got seven. Others. //

When New Yorkers voted on the one woman to honor, the overwhelming winner was Catholic Saint Frances Cabrini. //

On March 31, 1889, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, a tiny, frail nun, daughter of a Lombard farmer, arrived in New York with six’ members of the order she had formed, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Pope Leo XIII had sent her to work among the Italian immigrants who were finding neither a welcome nor prosperity in the New World, and worse, in the eyes of the Church, were losing their faith and piety. //

She was an American after America’s heart, and in 1909, in her 59th year, she became a U.S. citizen.

Those in charge declined to include her.

Frances is the patron saint of immigrants.

A study published in the American Psychologist suggests there are more Good Samaritans out there than we might think.

After studying hundreds of incidents captured on CCTV around the world, the researchers conclude the so-called bystander effect - that people will not usually help a stranger in distress - may not tell the whole story.

New research from Science: "Civic honesty around the globe":

Abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets. In virtually all countries citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Both non-experts and professional economists were unable to predict this result. Additional data suggest our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.

I am surprised, too.

The human brain can’t contend with the vastness of online shopping. //

The global-manufacturing apparatus now has the capacity to churn out near-endless stuff. The industry’s output has ballooned 75 percent since 2007 to $35 trillion, according to one analysis, and millions of livelihoods depend on its continued growth. //

But in the arms race to sell as many sandwich bags or beach towels as possible, a problem has become clear: Variety isn’t infinitely valuable. //

For a relatively new class of consumer-products start-ups, there’s another method entirely. Instead of making sense of a sea of existing stuff, these companies claim to disrupt stuff as Americans know it. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things, and an ability to opt out of the stuff rat race. //

The presence of so much stuff in America might be more valuable if it were more evenly distributed, but stuff’s creators tend to focus their energy on those who already have plenty. As options have expanded for people with disposable income, the opportunity to buy even basic things such as fresh food or quality diapers has contracted for much of America’s lower classes. //

There may be no way to opt out of stuff by buying into the right thing.

The blending of words and phrases to express new thoughts, like the blending of sounds to create music, provide examples of a productive process in which we generate novel experiences by rearranging recognisable parts into previously unencountered wholes, and it is this process that makes blending fundamental in our creative ingenuity.

The greater the number of elements, the harder it is to achieve overall balance and harmony, where all the parts make a contribution and no one element dominates the others. It may surprise you to learn that in a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky there can be as many as 30 single malts in the blend, mixed together with grain whisky.

What is more astonishing still is that from year to year the blenders must attempt to reproduce the sought-after flavour of Black Label even though the malt whiskies they use to blend are in a different condition each year - and even when some of those malts may be unavailable. This is the skill of the blender: to aim at the same thing each time while ingredients change from year to year.

It is the same story with champagne. Veuve Clicquot's Yellow Label wine is a blend of more than 450 wines, made from different grapes - Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier - picked from different vineyards, combined with reserve wines made in previous years that have evolved with time.

This famous blend depends on place, time and type of grape variety, to which are added the carbonated bubbles produced by a second fermentation of the wines in the bottle, making champagne perhaps the ultimate blended product.

The secrets of blending are built up through a lifetime of experience. Perfumers know when two aromas will stay separate and when they will fuse to become a single new based on the proportions we combine. These combinations of notes, known as an "accord" - the French word for chord - which in turn becomes yet another ingredient to go into the blend.

The art is knowing which mixtures are likely to work, which combinations of scents will fuse - and not confuse.

The urge to blend has been opposed by an equally strong urge for purity. There are passionate advocates of single-leaf teas, single-cask malt whiskies and single-vineyard champagnes, who argue that only here will we find true quality.

The thinking behind the straining for purity is all about origins. The direct line back to a single source ensures that nothing has been lost or adulterated. Unfortunately, we sometimes encounter the same line of thought when it comes to the mixing of races or cultures. Opposed to this is cosmopolitanism, which says it doesn't matter where we come from, it's all about fitting in. Is this the right view?

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is suspicious of the search for purity and he points out that hardly any of the things we care about in the domain of culture fit that model.

"Shakespeare wouldn't have been very interesting if he'd said, 'I can't write a play about Hamlet because he's a Dane,'" he says.

By itself, memorizing five lines of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address is not going to end homelessness in Tarrant County or anywhere else. The amount of pride and accomplishment on those students’ faces after their successful recitations cannot, however, be overstated. The image of four homeless women learning Lincoln’s address in the park where they sleep is incredible.

Education is a tool meant to enable human beings to live fully human lives. Each lesson is a step upward. Many of these students can fit their possessions into a grocery sack and cannot keep a library of books, but memorization allows them to carry the good, true, and beautiful things they have learned wherever they go. Because they are doing the work to remember crucial pieces of their country’s history, they now have one more tool in their journey out of homelessness.