Educate the Masses? Why Thomas Jefferson got it wrong and what we can do about it... (Target The Enforcers)

The notion of educating the masses in order to secure liberty certainly sounds good. I used to believe in it. But after watching the Ron Paul movement attempt to do just that (myself included) for well over a decade, I now think Thomas Jefferson only had it part right.

The problem is the "masses" are indeed massive.

In the United States the voting population is 218 million. I think a few million voted for Ron Paul between his campaigns? Whatever the number was, it was a drop in the bucket.

The reality is educating the masses is a gargantuan task. Especially when you're fighting against a well oiled propaganda machine every step of the way.

Target The Enforcers

There is a specific group of people that we can target that are just a few million in size.

They are the enforcers, and without them, tyranny cannot exist.

Without order followers the Hitlers, Stalin's and Mao's of the world would have been impotent and long forgotten, never having left their mark.

So, what if people who wanted to spread and share the ideas of liberty, who are probably a few million in size, shifted all (or nearly all) of their energy towards targeting the enforcers (only) with the message of liberty? What would happen?

What if the police no longer believed in the drug war?
What if IRS agents no longer believed in the income tax?
What if BLM agents didn't believe the Federal Government could own land?
What if EPA agents understood that nothing is better for the environment than private property rights?
What if the military stood staunchly against American empire?

By shifting our focus to the enforcers our task reduces from having to influence 218 million to only a few million, and that is actually a manageable task!

How Do We Do It?

I remember during the Ron Paul days that people took it upon themselves to spread the message (to the masses) any way they saw fit, and I'm sure we all remember the amazing ideas that came out of that time and all of the amazing energy that came with it.

Whether you were a Constitutionalist, an Anarchist or somewhere in between, we all found a way to come together and as a result the message of liberty never burned so brightly in our lifetimes as it did during those years.

So in terms of reaching the enforcers with the message of liberty, I think we should all do it however we want to.

We can approach them on the street and give them flyers or CD's with liberty videos in them, or business cards to web pages with constitutional information, and on and on.

Having said this there are some exciting new ways we can spread liberty directly to people in government who carry a gun.

A Perfect Example

The Free State Project is a perfect example of the power of internet marketing, which is truly different than mediums like TV, radio or newspapers.

Before the Free State Project used Facebook advertising, pledges to move to New Hampshire we're coming in at about 1K per year. At the time their Facebook advertising campaign began, people were predicting it would take a few more years for the FSP to reach their goal.

What happened after the FSP started using highly targeted Facebook ads?

They reached their goal in a matter of a few months.

How Does Internet Advertising Work?

When you log into Facebook the first thing you see is your news feed. This is where all of the things your friends have posted are shown to you.

Sometimes, there will also be an ad in your newsfeed, only the ad looks exactly like the content that your friends have posted. It shows up in your feed and you often don't even recognize that it's an ad.

When an ad does show up in your feed, it shows up because that advertiser is targeting people like you. Put another way, the advertiser is targeting people who are interested in "Subject X".

For example, I just checked and found that PoliceOne.com is a targetable interest on Facebook and there are between 700K and 800K active users who are interested in this website.

With Facebook advertising, we can put a message directly in front of the people we want to (and only those people).

This kind of targeting means your ads are more powerful while costing much less than old school advertising mediums (in fact you can set your budget to be as low as $1 per day and still reach thousands of people per month!).

What would happen if every time a cop logged into Facebook they saw some message that re-framed the drug war as an anti-american and unconstitutional set of laws?

Slowly but surely, more and more cops would start to understand the evils of the drug war and how it has and continues to harm the society that THEY live in.

What content do we use?

This is where things start to get really interesting....

When you run an ad in Facebook, you get a lot of feedback on your ads. They tell you how many clicks you received, your click through ratio (clicks to views), the cost per click and much more.

So you could try five different pieces of content and based on the feedback data you receive from Facebook, you can tell which content is engaging the audience the most. That means that you can start to understand the mind of the audience you are trying to target.

Sun Tzu, author of "The Art of War", wrote that if you know your enemy and you know yourself you will always win in battle. So as we develop our understanding of how to speak to the enforcers in a way they will understand and engage with, we gain a major advantage for our efforts.

What comes next?

I think if we're going to do this, it should be very decentralized.

If I could have my way I would love to see many different people running their own ads and then sharing their experiences and results here on Steemit, hashtag #targetenforcers .

And I would also love to see people come up with offline ways to target the police, etc. with the message of liberty.

And so for now I'll just leave it at this, because right now I think what is most important is to hear what you think of the idea.

Do you like this approach? Do you think it is achievable? Will you run your own Facebook ads? Or would you go about the task in some other way?

I'm going to start my own advertising campaign shortly and I will post my results and updates here, so please feel free to follow me @trevorlyman

Thanks for listening and thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts!

UPDATE: I've created a group on Facebook for those that aren't on Steemit yet, although I do encourage you to join Steemit if you can! It's a great idea/site!

The group is here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1797419003812843/