Something's wrong. There's too much buzz going on around the internet about crisis actors, bussing in Antifa dressed in MAGA hats, bringing in sniper towers. The left has a plan to manage the Monday rally to their benefit. So you need to outfox and outmaneuver them. Change your plan!
I know some VA organizers, or people who can reach the organizers, must read here, so please do something like this:
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Cancel the rally, loudly and publicly, citing concerns about the threat to public safety from government use of force and Antifa. Get that narrative out there. Announce that anyone in Richmond on Monday does not represent you.
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Instead change to something else like simultaneous county-level rallies, another city, perhaps a different day. Move your key speakers there so it's clear that's where the rally is.
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Use your organizing structure to circulate private messages among your members and use that to do things like:
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Have everyone show up in jackets or suits. Everyone. Have members bring extras and set up fitting areas, get everyone suited up. It's hard to sell the message that a mob of people in dress clothes are a public threat.
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Enforce credentialing. Don't allow public attendance, just attendance of your members. Make out-of-state visitors show an NRA or other gun group membership to be permitted in, or pass a quick interview about gun culture, etc. Weed out plants.
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Decide on a credentialing symbol, like a specific flag sticker, and have everyone who has passed through credentialing given the prearranged symbol to wear.
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Live post to the internet to show your numbers on a wide variety of platforms.
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Do something to be countable. Have all attendees make a donation to something your opponents hate, like a gun group or (even better) Trump 2020, so the President can talk about how much money the VA dems raised for him and thus amplify your message. Try to get as many individual donations as possible, even if it's just for $1.
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Pass out lots of signs like "Hands off guns! Voting Republican in 2020" to connect the numbers to upcoming election results and tell VA leadership they are living on borrowed time and have to move carefully if they want to keep any power in the future.
Turn their plotting into an opportunity and suck the oxygen out of whatever nefarious scheme the left has cooked up.
That's why I said "loudly cancel" not reschedule. But then you actually reschedule. Here's why, look at the news cycle:
End result perception-wise: Gun owners appear responsible, numerous, stand against tyranny, although maybe with some internal disagreement about organization. VA state government appears tyrannical and/or irresponsible and linked to Antifa, which appears as thugs. That's a pretty good outcome.
okay, that is a pretty great plan to capture optics.
on the flip side... cancelling shows you can be intimidated and charges pantifa as well, wouldn't you agree? then what happens when antifa starts threatening trump rallies? what about the rescheduled rally? these fools are immune to facts and driven by Soros etc. i think the best bet is to have a strong showing and put down the traitors quickly. that will send the message we are not going to bow to them; they must change or it will be them on the ground.
if we can turn this to federal jurisdiction, we can activate the reserves to ensure nationwide protection and move forward with other plans. bussing in antifa for violence already is reason enough for martial law and military activation.
I like the way you think.
".....cancelling shows you can be intimidated and charges pantifa as well, wouldn't you agree? then what happens when antifa starts threatening trump rallies?....." There's a difference. This looks like a setup. Trump rallies do not.
It does somewhat, in the short term. But I'm trying to learn from our President that when you have the real force, you can choose timing/venue to your advantage. When Iran attacked our drone, we had an attack being spun up, but he didn't like the feel of the response and instead cancelled it, loudly and publicly. In the short term maybe Iran felt empowered but most observers thought "That's good restraint" and he reserved the right to respond at a later time in a way he though best. Some time later, when Iran launched attacks on our embassies, he vaporized the general responsible and his henchmen, only. So like him we know we can respond, but we can be smart about the manner and type or response. What we really want to do is something they don't expect. So if they have a plan for dealing with a huge rally on Monday in Richmond, let's not do that, and instead figure out what they least expect and want us to do and do that instead.
I agree, but this is a different kind of enemy we can't just kill any time from remote. these are American guerillas.
imagine this: you are the boss of a company that is going to hold an internal event. you decide on a time, place, content. the place cancels on you, so you have to move to a different venue on a different day. how many emails does it take to communicate the change of plans to all employees, and to retain the content? can you see?
Agreed, a last minute change is hard. But we have social media now and that helps a lot. If the organizers decide to make a hard shift like cancel (but then later reschedule), there's still time to get the word out (at least re. the media narrative).
Anyway, the main point isn't to do it exactly this way, it's to change the plan to something that isn't what the left is planning for. The details are up to the organizers.