Posted on November 12, 2024
Donations spotlight: Help Other 98% hold the line against misinformation, one meme at a time
Note from the CREDO Mobile team: This November, the Other 98% is among three amazing groups that will receive a share of our monthly grant. Funding from the CREDO Mobile community will be vital to the nonprofit as it uses meme warfare and savvy boots-on-the-ground actions to challenge the billionaires and corporations that have hijacked our democracy and fights like hell for an America that works for the other 98% of us.
Read this important blog post about the Other 98%, then visit CREDODonations.com and cast your vote to help send much-needed grant money to the group to assist its efforts—and the efforts of our other outstanding November grantees.
The Other 98% is a netroots powerhouse that specializes in winning the battle of the story. Even if you haven’t seen our name on Facebook or other social media platforms, you’ve probably come across our memes. From the Koch brothers to Martin Shkreli to Project 2025, Other98 has been spotlighting shadowy villains and elevating the people who heroically stand in their way since 2010. Today, we reach anywhere from 2 million to 10 million people every single day with compelling narratives designed to educate and mobilize support for solutions to the most critical issues of our time.
Our organization was founded, in part, as a response to our serious concern about the Tea Party: a faux populist, faux grassroots “movement” that coopted the language and symbols of working-class activism and paired it with racist, misogynist dog whistles and outright lies designed to undermine the genuine grassroots populist movement springing up in the wake of the 2008 recession and subsequent bailout of big banks.
We were worried that this group’s promotion of blatant doublespeak, condensed into nastily simple memes (recall that the racist “birther” meme was popularized by none other than Donald Trump), would pose an existential threat to our democracy.
And we were right. Nearly 15 years later, lies and deception have been fully embraced as a legitimate political strategy by regressive politicians and their billionaire backers. “Lock her up,” “Build the wall,” “They’re eating the cats and dogs”—the Trump era has been defined by poisonous, dangerous memes that perpetuate and entrench fear, apathy, cruelty and civic disengagement.
Today, we’re witnessing a snowballing feedback loop of distrust in our democratic institutions, leading to political demoralization and low civic engagement. Low engagement creates disappointing results, which further erodes trust. When even progressive lawmakers fail to deliver on a whole range of campaign promises they made to voters, it creates the impression that there is no one fighting for regular people, which disincentives civic engagement even further. But if voters check out and stop making cohesive, tangible demands, the cycle will only continue.
Not too proud to meme
We wish we hadn’t been right about what the Tea Party symbolized but we are heartened by the fact that we were right about something else too: the best weapon against a bad meme is a good one. As the New York Times pointed out in 2018, “If the goal is to build a movement that is effective in opposing attacks on democratic ideals and a free press, the left can’t be too proud to meme.”
Other98 overpowers and drowns out toxic memes by elevating progressive ideas to “everybody knows” status. By this we mean narratives so powerful and prevalent that they become simple common knowledge. “Everybody knows” that airplane food is bad and “everybody knows” that there is too much money in politics. We know the American people—despite what our elected officials might have us believe—are largely in support of, for example, commonsense gun control laws, investing in renewable energy and making the 1% pay their fair share of taxes. Our job is to highlight the solutions to these issues in a way that resonates deeply enough for people to share them with their friends and family. When these messages are validated through networks of trust, people take ownership of them as their own thoughts and feelings, and change becomes not only possible but inevitable.
Connecting with millions of voters
Our organization is unique in that we’re both wildly viral on social media and also deeply rooted in grassroots organizing spaces. Other98 team members worked on the ground of some of the biggest movement moments of the past decade, from Occupy Wall Street to Standing Rock to the protests against Trump’s Muslim ban, and we’re extremely proud of the role we played in bringing global attention to those stories and so many more.
We’re also very proud of the work we did in the leadup to this election. Our top-15 Project 2025 posts have reached over 10 million people, all without paid promotion of any kind. This means that the millions of voters who are encountering these memes are connecting with them enough to feel compelled to share them in turn.
We are writing this post in mid-October. The election may be over by the time you see it. Two very different roads lay ahead of us. But one fact will remain no matter who wins: we have to find a solution to this crisis of public trust. It’s one thing to disagree on solutions to a problem but it’s a whole other thing to disagree about the nature of reality itself. Work like ours helps stem the tide of disinformation and build public consensus for progressive solutions to the biggest challenges facing our planet, from climate chaos to white nationalism. This work is difficult to explain and even harder to fund, so we are deeply grateful to the CREDO Mobile team and its community for its generous support. Thank you!
To learn more, please visit Other98.com.