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Posted today:
melconway.com/Home/ENpropo...

Postscript: A pdf of this thread is at melconway.com/Home/ENpropo... .

D. A Question
What will it take for our political leadership to:
1. Accept the possibility of innovation, then
2. Act on it?
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3. The release of a few Republicans from the Enforcement Network, with luck, enough to change some votes before November.
28/29

What might emerge from this?
1. Confirming information that there is indeed an Enforcement Network controlling the behaviors of almost all Republican Members of Congress.
2. The beginning of a system for learning about, then at least partially disabling, that network.
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1. Produce a beneficial effect,
2. At low risk,
3. Quickly (ideally in months, before November),
4. While gathering useful information for the next step.
This is the basic Minimum Viable Product approach to product development.
26/29

I have been developing a theory of this disease for several years. It is incomplete. I am not advocating that theory here. What I proposed in the letter to Leader Jeffries is a bare-minimum prototype designed to:
25/29

C. How Our Thinking Must Change
The first thing we must do is:
Acknowledge that we have no theory to describe this disease;
Then, acknowledge that we must do *something*.
24/29

3. Our disease has captured part of our immune process itself (to oversimplify: the Republican Congress). In this sense it has aspects of a parasite as well as of an infection.
23/29

2. In spite of the talk of “regulation”, we barely understand the mechanisms behind the perverse effects of social networking, so we don’t know how to control them effectively.
22/29

Our disease process now has developed, and is giving us multiple problems.
1. We have no microscope-equivalent instrumentation and don’t even understand the extent of the direct-to-citizen communication network.
21/29

The Internet Research Agency, Cambridge Analytica, and others have turbocharged the disease process, exploiting the massively greater connectivity of social media such as Facebook and private communication groups such as 4Chan and Telegram.
20/29

In this Internet era both overwhelming volume and direct attack are occurring at rates previously unavailable to an adversary, because of the high volume of direct-to-citizen connectivity of social media.
19/29

Like our immune systems, our Bill of Rights is meant to, and usually does, limit damage of this direct-to-citizen process. Unless it doesn’t, possibly because our defenses are overwhelmed by volume or, in the case of authoritarianism, direct attack like censorship.
18/29

That’s OK, and it’s not new. We have a name for one long-existing part of this disease process: propaganda. It was engineered to a fine degree in the 1930’s by Josef Goebbels using media that transcended the legal concepts of the day: newspapers and radio.
17/29

Hence, Articles I, II, and III.

But now our body politic has adversaries that, like bacteria, are operating on another level outside the health model to which we have been constrained.
16/29

In politics, we have well-established models of health (e.g., constitutional republics). Any interventions for restoring departures from a desired norm (e.g., elections, judicial processes, impeachment) occur all at the same level in the model.
15/29

But the invention of the microscope showed doctors that underneath the *manifestation* of a disease lies a completely different disease *process*, usually occurring on a much smaller scale, involving unseen entities such as bacteria and, later, viruses.
14/29

When the thinking-on-two-levels revolution happened in the field of Medicine, we named it the “germ theory of disease”. Before that we had interventions like exorcism and bleeding. If we had notions about the causes of disease, they were not directly accessible.
13/29

Maybe that’s OK normally. But our current level of danger requires that today we be willing to be open to new concepts.

Such an acceptance of conceptual novelty happened two centuries ago in the field of Medicine. It has yet to happen in political thought.
12/29

B. Why The Opportunity Was MIssed
Yet the proposal is being ignored. Why? Most likely, in my view, because it’s too different from what its readers see on a day-to-day basis.

Indeed, it’s radically different: understanding it requires thinking simultaneously on two levels.
11/29

Please read the letter. There can be disagreement about the proposal’s odds of success, but given the balance of votes in both Houses and the possibility of an effect before the election, there is a strong case for seeing it as a high-reward opportunity not to be ignored.
10/29

I have so far received no response to any of the above.

On April 8, 2026 I made a formal submission to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s official contact form and included this text, which includes a link to the pdf:
melconway.com/Home/ENpropo...

So far there has been no response.
9/29

Following that, on March 23, I sent this email to two members of Leader Jeffries’s staff, with a pdf of the proposal letter as an attachment:
melconway.com/Home/ENpropo...

A few days later I posted a paper copy of the letter to Leader Jeffries.
8/29

On the same date I made a formal submission to Leader Jeffries’s official contact form, including this text, which includes a link to the pdf, and I requested a reply:
melconway.com/Home/ENpropo...
7/29

(The proposal is based on a strategy I’ve been exploring the last few years. It is not conventional political action; rather, as described in the letter, it’s more a form of legal asymmetric warfare.)
6/29

The letter puts forth a proposal that, if effectively executed, offers a chance of freeing up a few Republicans in Congress to vote their consciences BEFORE THE FALL ELECTION.
5/29

A. The Missed Opportunity:
On March 18, 2026 I drafted a proposal for political action to Leader Hakeem Jeffries; on the same date I posted an unsigned pdf of the letter on my website. You can read it here:
melconway.com/Home/ENpropo...
4/29

I’ll break the story up into these four parts:
A. The Missed Opportunity
B. Why The Opportunity Was MIssed
C. How Our Thinking Must Change
D. A Question
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