Organized Conservative Resistance Alliance

By John Ballard

Medical people speak of vital signs, meaning temperature, pulse and respiration. If any of these goes missing or out of control, life itself is in danger.
In the same manner, public opinion now has another vital sign in the form of Twitter analytics.
This post is a Twitter pulse check.

I am indebted to the now forgotten tweeter who linked the Neoformix blog. I liked the graphic but never intended to write about it in a post. Go take a look at this fascinating piece of work.

I collected all the public tweets containing 'Obama' during 2009. There were over 5 million recorded during the course of the year. I've done some analysis on a sample containing every 20th tweet. This first graph simply shows the distribution over the course of the year of the number of times the name 'Obama' was used. The curve has a big peak during the inauguration, a few smaller ones in February and March and is then remarkably level for the rest of the year.





This set of graphs shows other words that were used frequently in the tweets about Obama and that had distributions with a high concentration near specific dates during the year. When ordered by the peak date for each graph they give an interesting graphical narrative of Obama-related events during 2009.

Got that? 

Good.

After you scan the list and pick your memory bank to see how many of the terms you can match with last year's events, look down toward the bottom of the list and notice that some terms don't appear until later in the year, for example Somali, iranelection, sotomayor and swineflu. The list is neatly arranged in order of peaks, which is handy, with the lines tracking the months of the year.

Look down about August and find #ocra. This is a new term for me. (Hashtags and such are still fresh on my plate and I have a hard time keeping up. I still use the urban dictionary to look up everyday abbreviations. Thanks to a new grandchild it was only yesterday I learned about Yo, Gaba-gaba.)

As you can tell, I'm just an old guy trying to keep up with the kids. So for all you bright young folks who already know about #ocra, please overlook my ignorance when I had to look up the term and discovered the Organized Conservative Resistance Alliance.

What I discovered is that a core group of bright, articulate politically Conservative thinkers, beginning about twenty weeks ago, set into motion a cohesive, rapidly-growing, populist appeal that is gaining followers faster than Progressives are fleeing the Obama bandwagon. I should say "seems to be" because I have no data to support what I am speculating about. But I'm smart enough to know that when videos like the one I saw last week, charts like the one linked here and a manifesto as clear and well-written as this are popping up... the Tea Party is no longer retrograde.

Organized Conservative Resistance Alliance
A Statement of Principles, Goals, and Methodology

To the Left: Before I begin, it is an unfortunate fact of political life in the United States today that you must immediately express in no uncertain terms that you are not an �extremist� if you use the word Conservative.

So, let me assure you of a few things:

1. We do not advocate violence and we soundly renounce and repudiate any who do.


2.  We are not racists. This is the first thing that those on the Left of the political scale always throw at Conservative groups, and especially now that we have our first African-American President. We, like so many Americans, celebrate the fact that America has moved so far from the horrible days of slavery that we can have an African-American President. Disagreeing with his policies is not tantamount to racism. We will not even address this spurious charge from here on unless someone who uses our name behaves in a racist manner, in which case we will denounce such words and/or actions.


3. We do not want the President to fail. We do, however want his present policies to fail because we believe they are bad for America.


4. We are not aligned with any political party and we have no sponsors of any kind. We do not explicitly support or endorse any business or corporation. Obviously, we will not deny that the principles of Conservatism have traditionally been the paradigm of the Republican Party, and that most will probably lean towards Republicans over Democrats, but it is the ideas that matter, not the names.


5.  We are not advocating anything illegal, immoral, or even disrespectful towards policy makers. It is possible that Alinsky methods could be used against those that use them against us, but we would prefer not to.


6. We are not conspiracy theorists, although we do not try to limit the free exchange of ideas of any kind.


7. We are willing to engage you on policy, but trolls will be blocked, mocked, and/or ridiculed into submission. In our experience, the Left rarely wishes to engage on actual policy and fact checking.


8. On a topical subject: we are not against people having access to healthcare nor are we just opposed to the Administration�s policies just because they are Democrats. We believe improvements can be made to the current system, but that it the limitation of the free market that is causing most of the problems.

There follows a bunch of Tea Party boilerplate: ...all of The Constitution MUST be obeyed or changed according to the methodology of Article V....repeat of the First, Second, Fourth and Tenth Amendments...government is the servant of the people, and not the other way around. Governments place is to provide protection of the nation through our military (the finest in the history of the planet)...It is not the place of Government to provide funds for people to abort what is scientifically referred to as a fetus, but is in reality a human being....we are absolutely opposed to Socialism or any steps towards the Socialization of America...individualism and not collectivism....illegal immigration is illegal, and our immigration laws should be obeyed and enforced...

Etcetera.
You get the idea.

The point is this: we ignore or laugh at these people at our peril.  There is a fear afoot in America today not unlike the Red Scare of the Fifties. At this stage we do not have a Joe McCarthy -- not someone with the power to destroy lives and reputations such as he did -- but I see a crop of McCarthy wannabes and a swelling population of angry, ignorant, fired-up citizens ready and willing to follow such a person.

The ascendancy of Sara Palin no longer strikes me as either amusing or benign. Scan the list of words again and notice Socialism and Socialist. Like several others (party, Kenya, taxes) they are used throughout the year.

There is bread in the water and big fish are coming to the surface to eat the smaller ones.

This OCRA bunch is using Saul Alinsky as their springboard. He was (like you-know-who) a community organizer in the thirties whose foundational beliefs are described as Marxist or neo-Marxist. So he was. So were a lot of his contemporaries who did, in fact join various causes for principles in which they believed, not because they wanted to rule the world but because they aimed to fight racial discrimination, exploitation of the poor or other injustices. But these historical revisionists are lacing together the old Red Scare with a twisted vision of faith that is but a few steps away from the tactics so carefully opposed by the opening lines of the manifesto quoted above. This is nothing less than an echo of the extremism threatening the security of the country. All that is missing is a cadre of true believers willing to die for a cause.

I have two suggestions.
Quit grinning.
And think of ways to thwart moves by smart people who know how to control and direct ignorance.
If the health care fight has taught no other lesson, it is that with the right leadership great numbers of ignorant people can be led by their noses. 

Don't believe it? Check out a couple of links...

http://twubs.com/ocra

http://www.twibes.com/group/OCRA

You Tube now has an online library ready to be put to use. We're not talking one or two crazy videos. This is a real library of paranoid resources. 

Check out the video America Rising.  It's only been up a week and it's spreading fast. Numerous copies are going viral via various You Tube channels. (I would say look for it in email, but email often runs a year or more behind Web-based content. But with the right content that can change in a flash.)

Forget me. Do your own homework. And if I turn out to be the voice of one who cried "wolf" too often, I can live with that. But I would rather cry "wolf" once too often than to remain silent when one comes stalking.