Topics and Tips

What is Astroturf?

Those who wish to manipulate your opinions and your decisions can be very clever. It happens on a world-wide scale, on a national scale, on a state-wide scale, and, yes, even on a local scale.

The only difference are the stakes involved. The stakes are always represented to the manipulators as money. The goals are always to separate you from your money. It's easier convincing you to give the manipulators your money than it is to force you to give to them. Does that sound like fraud to you? That's because it is. The manipulators have no moral conscience. Even if they may believe that they are doing it for a good cause, it's still fraud. The result is always theft.

In the video below, Sharyl Attkisson, who worked as a correspondent and investigative reporter for CBS News for 20 years, gives you the low-down. The video is only 11 minutes long. I'm starting at the point where she defines Astroturf. This segment is only 40 seconds long.

"What is Astroturf? It's a perversion of grassroots, as in fake grassroots. Astroturf is when political, corporate, or other special interests disguise themselves and publish blogs, start Facebook and Twitter accounts, publish ads, letters to the editor, or simply post comments online to try to fool you into thinking an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. The whole point of Astroturf is to try to give the impression of widespread support for or against an agenda when there's not. Astroturf seeks to manipulate you into changing your opinion by making you feel as if you're an outlier when you're not."
Sharyl Attkisson¹ at TEDx, February 6, 2015.

In the context of this web site, Astroturf is the school facilities bond industry who finance every single school bond measure in the state. There are big players and small players, national players, state-wide players, and local players. Their common goal is to separate you from your money by persuading you to vote for an unnecessary bond measure. They're too impatient to wait for the district to put aside the money, as it should be doing. They want the money now. That requires that you vote yourself into debt.

The means by which the school facilities bond industry manipulates you is through the Yes on Measure X committee. It doesn't matter the actual name of the committee. The committee sending all the mailers and handing out all the flyers is always the Astroturf committee. Most voters don't have the time to investigate who's behind the huge (relatively) amount of money being spent on the campaign. An investigation will always uncover the culprits, who don't live in your district.

¹   Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. She is currently writing a book entitled Stonewalled (Harper Collins), which addresses the unseen influences of corporations and special interests on the information and images the public receives every day in the news and elsewhere.