Two Elements That Started a Movement

23 March 2020 - #PardonFlynnNow Analysis Focus on @TamaraLeigh_llc's extraordinary Twitter stylings.

Preparing for this thread, I attempted to take in Tamara's magnum opus below. Truth is, extracting all she has packed in would take many, many hours.

2) In the limited time I was able to invest, I did attempt to take careful notes, even while I suffered a rapid state of overwhelm. I have no idea how she does it, but Tamara crams in more information into less space than just about anyone, ever. Phenomenal.

3) Looking over my chaotic notes, I was able to pull out, count them, 12 interconnected stories. Amazingly, I was either directly or more often indirectly involved, myself, in each of those 12 tales. Being me, telling those stories would end up as a book. Maybe more than one.

4) Yet Tamara is able to crunch them all down, with visual impact, into just 21 tweets. So, rather than try to tell any of those stories, I decided to just focus on Tamara, herself. Well, Tamara and her Twitter mastery. To tell that story, I'll begin in the middle.

5) Two years ago, 2018, Tamara's Twitter account of over 75,000 followers was taken down and never given back by Twitter Jack. I don't know how many years it took Tamara to build that following, but I do know that it was indeed years that it took. Think about that. Years stolen.

6) Why did that happen? My belief is that it was due to the exact Twitter prowess, on the exact case Tamara maps out in her 21-tweet thread on @GenFlynn. Let's follow out my theory there. In February 2018, the Nunes Report was released, and I knew it was a game changer.

7) Although my Twitter account dates back to 2009, I had never done anything with it, and had, I don't recall exactly, maybe a couple hundred followers or so when the Nunes Report was released. Again, February 2018. Something snapped in me. I had to take action.

8) In a bit below, I'll tell you more about the story of my friendship with Tamara, which began during the 2016 campaign season. What I am happy to share here is that, when I had to take action due to the Nunes Report, Tamara was the one person to go to.

9) Back in 2016, when I was doing absolutely nothing on Twitter, Tamara attempted to persuade me that Twitter was where the action was. I was deaf to her on that point back then, a bit overwhelmed - more than a bit - with my own missions elsewhere.

10) But she was far more persuasive than I realized, as I never forget her impassioned certainty. I had dabbled in social media for some several years at that point, but had no such passion. Her clarity stuck in my mind. I knew that she understood Twitter. Of that I was certain.

11) As Tamara mentions in her thread, she and I created the #ClearFlynnNow movement, and I must also mention @JoshuaMacias and my incredible wife, @KateScopelliti. Both Josh and Kate gave critically necessary support to our mission. Together, we were, I brag, unstoppable.

12) Unstoppable? There were two elements to my theory, that drove our movement. One was that Gen Flynn was loved as no other person in the MAGA Movement. He is the real deal, and his leadership is unlike any other. The second element came from the Nunes Report.

13) The Nunes Report showed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, both that Gen Flynn was 100% innocent, and that he had been - as Tamara puts it - ambushed by swamp tactics. With those two pieces in place, a mission had to be engaged. We had to Clear Flynn...NOW!

14) If you're interested in all the details, you'll want to head over to the website Tamara has created for our ongoing mission. They're all there, including the analysis and mission design that @KateScopelliti and I documented, and that Tamara posted.

15) Not only did we employ extensive testing of our message and memes in support of that message, we shared our methods in public, documenting every step of our mission work. And, beyond even our own high expectations, the mission succeeded.

16) By success, I mean that millions of people signed on in hopes of procuring Gen Flynn's clearance. No, he was not cleared, back then, and still is not to this day. So, how can we claim success? We'll go slowly here. If you haven't yet, you must read Tamara's full thread.

17) We always knew that a social media movement had limitations. It has, of course, no legal power. It has no center, no authority in control. It is a thing of chaos. But, there is order in that chaos in the following way. It gives voice to millions who have no voice otherwise.

18) There are millions and millions of supporters furiously angry that their leader has been gagged, persecuted, and almost erased. Make no mistake. Stalin was the great eraser of his opponents. He literally wrote them out of history. That is what the left wishes for Gen Flynn.

19) What Tamara, Kate, Joshua and I knew was that our millions, the MAGA millions who supported Gen Flynn, would never allow that erasure if just given a means by which to express their voice. And technology, and Twitter, provided the means.

20) Jeopardy moment. A thing that brings millions of voices into perfect alignment, expressing their thoughts, emotions, passions and furious desire within the context of social media. What is a hashtag?

21) I won't tell the story of how our movement shifted from #ClearFlynnNow to #PardonFlynnNow. It did, and this was the right evolution. The important thing is that we were right about the millions of supporters, and their need for a unifying message.

22) I'm not quite sure how I knew that a hashtag had that kind of power back in 2018, as I'd never been involved in any such endeavor previously. But, what I did know is that I, on my own, had zero reach. I also knew that Tamara had phenomenal reach.

23) Not only did Tamara have her own massive following, she was a master of another component of the Twitter universe, DM rooms. Tamara participated in some unknown number of these rooms. Do you know what they are? Back then, I sure didn't.

24) Do you know what shadow banning is? Back then, I sure didn't. Twitter has - as in now well established - anti-conservative political policies. They suppress the voices of conservatives as much as they possibly can. How? Allow me just one example. Queuing.

25) If it were done honestly, your tweets would simply go out to all your followers the instant you post them. Twitter manages this differently if you're a conservative voice. Instead of propagating your tweet as it does all others, it puts your tweet into a queue and ages it.

26) The theory is simple. A tweet is a right now thing. The more you age it, the less it will propagate. So, you don't just wipe it out, you simply make it wait, so that time makes its effect weaker, time lowers its reach. Conservative DM rooms are a countermeasure against this.

27) A room can have up to 50 members. If the rules of the room allow, say, 1 tweet per day that each of the other 49 members will retweet; and, if you're in more than one such room, you can then break Twitter's unconstitutional shadow banning. Your tweet is jailbroken.

28) I knew absolutely, positively NOTHING, not one thing about these things back in 2018. Tamara was my teacher, and remains my teacher to this day. Now let's talk just a bit about Joshua and Kate. Joshua, while not my teacher - he's not a good teacher - is a social media master.

29) Beyond that, Joshua is one of the great leaders within the veteran community. I met him at roughly the same time I met Tamara, back in 2016 when I first got involved in political volunteerism. Joshua organizes events, especially for veterans. And he is mighty in social media.

30) Joshua lent our movement access to the vetarn community who adore Gen Flynn. Phenomenal as Tamara's reach is, she doesn't have the access to the entire world of veterans the way Joshua does. And, oh my, did the veterans ever sign on for #ClearFlynnNow!

31) And Kate is more than just my muse and the love of my life. She is a better analyst, and massively better writer than I am, or ever will be. Kate lent her analytical and writerly abilities to our mission so that, well, it was rightly targeted and well written.

32) What happened to Tamara's account? My theory was, and remains, that Twitter knew exactly who Tamara was, and was shadow banning and opposing her work all along. But, when the #ClearFlynnNow movement attained such stunning success, they decided to take her down.

33) Tamara had to grieve her loss, and she did. Grief, by the way, and grieving, is an underrated thing. You must find your way to acceptance of your loss, and the emotions in between are hellacious. Tamara had to grieve, and she did. And then, she started over again.

34) I checked yesterday, and her account is at 28,700 followers as I recall. This is just over 1/3 of her previous account's following. My bet is that it has taken her dramatically less time to get to this number than it did the first time.

35) And finally, that brings me back to her Twitter art, itself. I've already mentioned the extraordinary quantity of information presented in the most compact, smallest amount of space. Let's look at two other aspects of her art, now.

36) Knowing, as she does, the architecture of a tweet, she is somehow - I swear its magic - able to expand a tweet's size beyond what anyone else I've ever seen can do. Her tweets are GIGANTIC, each of them. I won't even guess how she does it.

37) And last, her tweets are lovely. They are visually beautiful. They pull you in and make you feel at home, as if you owned a great masterpiece and were sitting there, gazing into it. Each tweet is unique, yet all of them express her signature capabilities. Honor must be given.

38) I realize that our story from 2016 will have to come another day. We must end, today, with a return to Gen Flynn and America's great need for him. The term I always use to reflect the relationship between them is that Gen Flynn and Trump enjoy a public friendship.

39) When you consider the injustice that @SidneyPowell1 has documented and is fighting, there can be no question left as to the complete and utter corruption, the two-tiered system of law in this nation today. I put forward that its primary goal for Gen Flynn is silence.

40) Linger with me here. I have learned in life that whatever my strengths may be, when I am alone I cannot get much done. But, if I have a friend, such as Tamara here at Twitter, together, we can create an extraordinary movement. So also with Trump and Flynn.

41) It is my honest belief, from the bottom of my heart, that Gen Flynn's contribution was irreplaceable in the 2016 campaign. Count the veterans' votes. Trump won over 5,000,000 more votes in '16 than Romney did in '12. Contemplate that. How did that happen?

42) To be absolutely certain, Trump has a natural bond and extraordinary love for the veterans. That accounts, alone, for much of that 5 million increase, of course. But, it doesn't account for all of it. Gen Flynn is the most beloved, the most revered voice in the veteran world.

43) It is yet another part of the story that Joshua, Kate and I worked with all we had in 2016, to analyze the data of where the greatest concentrations of veterans were, in key swing states, and that Gen Flynn gave his all in rallying those votes. The other side knows this.

44) Looking forward to November 2020, the 18 million veterans' votes are again in play. The other side knows that Trump must get those votes or he will lose. It is that black and white. And they know Flynn's power to rally those votes.

45) Consider, of the countless reasons the other side MUST keep Flynn silent, this one alone is sufficient to account for their 3-year + long attack on him. Allow me one more example. #Coronavirus. There is no man in America more qualified to help Trump over this crisis. No one.

46) To be a public friendship, that friendship must, logically, be recognized by the public. That, my friends, is for me the greatest power of Tamara's thread. It documents the extent to which the other side has gone to erase that friendship, to neuter and disempower it.

47) So I say, let us rise up again. Let us center on the #PardonFlynnNow hashtag and put that forth in millions of tweets. Your tweet can be as simple as: Please, Mr. @POTUS, #PardonFlynnNow by a #PardonOfInnocence

48) We must also, I put forward, push Tamara's great thread forward with all the force and reach we can. Every interested Trump voter and Flynn supporter should have access to Tamara's thread. Let's talk about tactics.

49) First, like and retweet every tweet posted in her thread. Second, follow my lead. Retweet with comment the very first tweet. Express yourself. Speak your mind. It might be one retweet with comment. Or, like me, it might be an entire thread of your own. Don't hold back!

50) Friend @TamaraLeigh_llc. I thank you for all you do, all you have sacrificed and given for our nation. You are a hero. Your reach is vastly greater than you know. Honor to you. Keep up the great work. We need it now. We always will.