How Conservatives Found Twitter and the Evolution of ‘#TCOT’ (Video)

The National Policy Institute on Twitter here.

Grassroots activist Michael Patrick Leahy explains how conservatives used social networking to organize out of the wilderness.

If you’re a follower of conservative politics and a user of the social networking tool Twitter, you’ve probably noticed the use of “#tcot,” for “top conservatives on Twitter” associated with certain posts dealing with politics.

TCOT is on those posts because of the concerted effort of Michael Patrick Leahy, the author of “Rules for Conservative Radicals,”Texas grandmother. which is a takeoff on Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” The “#hash tag” was the creation of Leahy, working with an Orange County, Calif. software engineer and a 78-year-old grandmother from Texas.

And Leahy, who is the third cousin of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., explained to a group assembled by Sandy Horwitt, author of an Alinsky biography, “Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy” at a Washington, D.C. Chinatown restaurant on Feb. 4, how he got the ball rolling on the “TCOT” concept.

“The left owned the Internet at that moment,” Leahy said, referring to the time following the 2008 presidential election. “And there was one new technology in which they didn’t own,” “I’m a technology guy who understands how to make it work. I don’t really understand how to create it, but I know how to use it. And I know potential. So I looked around and I had just gotten on Twitter – this interesting little technology. So I said maybe there’s something here on Twitter,” Leahy continued. “So I started – of course the main theme here is, ‘Oh gosh, the Left dominates the Internet. We have no hope.’”

Leahy continued by explaining his quest to find conservatives on Twitter, which began by assembling a Web site with a list of conservatives ordered by the number of followers they had.

“So on Nov. 28, I manually put a list up of 25 people who I knew were conservatives on Twitter,” Leahy explained. “I was like number five on the list, just out of curiosity. Well this is what people don’t get about the world today – how interconnected the technology is and how you can create a community of like-minded people almost instantly. So what happened is, I put this list up, and I thought, ‘Well I’ll update it tomorrow.’ No, turns out conservatives were all over Twitter, but they were lonesome. They wanted to talk to each other. So conservatives – and I ordered the list by the number of followers they had, right. So there was this prestige to being the number one top conservative on Twitter.”

And that, said Leahy, drew a lot of attention.

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How Conservatives Found Twitter and the Evolution of '#TCOT'
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