Adam Brandon is the Vice-President of Communications at Freedom Works, and he joins us again. Adam, welcome back to OTM.
ADAM BRANDON: Thanks very much. I appreciate being here.
BOB GARFIELD: Last time we spoke, you said everybody was reading Saul Alinsky. Is that still your playbook?
ADAM BRANDON: Mm-hmm. Well, one of the main tenets of Saul Alinsky is how people without money influence politics, and that’s kind of where we're at right now. We've got plenty of people. We just don't have huge resources to dump into supporting our issues.
BOB GARFIELD: So, is your goal at any given town hall event to influence the congressperson who is being shouted down or to get on YouTube with the episode, or just what?
ADAM BRANDON: There have been some rumors that we are actually advocating people getting into verbal fights and disrupting these town halls, and we have no part of any of that. But we are looking for people to be the first ones to the microphones to ask the difficult questions, to start stirring up some debate. But these videos that you’re seeing coming out of these town halls, you know, they're definitely agitated, they're definitely intense, but this is nothing compared to a high school football game.
BOB GARFIELD: A lot has been said about astro-turfing, as opposed to genuine grassroots movements.
ADAM BRANDON: Mm-hmm [AFFIRMATIVE]
BOB GARFIELD: Are you astro-turfing in the sense of deploying people to these meetings to create a confrontation, or do you consider this to be organic and genuine?
ADAM BRANDON: I mean, if this is astro-turfing, everything that MoveOn.org is doing is astro-turfing. The Boston Tea Party back in, you know, the 1770s would be astro-turfing. We're doing basic organizing, and that is just trying to get people together, especially connecting them online, getting them materials, such as talking points, and telling them where and when they show up to town halls. A lot of these people have never done anything like this. I guess astro-turfing, I would consider, is if someone was actually paying people to show up to pretend to be passionate on an issue. We haven't paid anyone, and these people are plenty passionate on their issues.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so in a perfect world for Freedom Works, word of these town hall episodes get around via YouTube and cable news and so forth, and all across the country people see this and go, I'm going to go to my congressman’s town hall meeting and give him a piece of my mind. That’s the perfect world.
ADAM BRANDON: Correct.
BOB GARFIELD: Hell for you would be people to see all of this same stuff and go, what a bunch of jerks. You know, they want us to take them seriously? They're shrill, they're rude. They're agitators, the kind we hate when they're on the left. We don't want to see ‘em on the right.
ADAM BRANDON: Mm-hmm. Well, I would agree with that. That’s why we're telling people to be respectful. But you definitely have to have an edge in today’s world, and one of my criticisms sometimes of the tea party movements is, you know, at times they've gotten too rah-rah with too much patriotic flag wearing, when we're generally upset and we have grievances. So I have no problem with some anger entering into some of this, some of this anger, some of this passion.
BOB GARFIELD: So, on balance, so far, would you say this has created backlash or [LAUGHS], I don't know, frontlash?
ADAM BRANDON: [LAUGHS] I tell you the best thing that’s happened to us is that a lot of left wing bloggers have been putting stuff up making us look like we're the 500-foot monster just tramping down all across America. And as soon as they do that, we see our Web traffic go up and we see our signups go up even higher.
BOB GARFIELD: Well Adam, once again, thank you so much for joining us.
ADAM BRANDON: Thanks a lot.
BOB GARFIELD: Adam Brandon is the vice-president for communications at Freedom Works.
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER] Coming up, we speak to a soldier turned journalist turned soldier who’s caught in a war of conflicting loyalties. This is On the Media from NPR.