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Social Media Outreach

Gary Ghirardi

In this digital age, we are now firmly in an ongoing and evolving time where social media communications is an essential communication framework for current and succeeding generations in technologically developed countries.

For those groups doing counter-recruitment and youth demilitarization activism, it is an essential tool to communicate with youth inside and outside the school environment. The military has and will invest billions in their outreach to youth on multiple social media platforms as well as making their presence strongly felt in the online gaming channels. These platforms are becoming a powerful resource of both indoctrinating youth into a military ethos that normalizes war and provides all the military services an additional means of expanding their recruitment efforts to reach youth.

Groups that are doing Truth in Recruitment and Counter-recruitment outreach inside of public schools are going to have to implement limited human and financial resources to expand their online presence in order to stay relevant with the times and to increase their opportunities for communication with current generations of youth.

This will be a struggle for activist organizations that cannot hope to match the online footprint of the military recruitment budget and need to consider other opportunities to increase their visibility and messaging. Those opportunities will need to include coordinated campaigning on strategic themes during times of the year when military recruiters are most actively recruiting.

The following section of Social Media Campaign Resources are designed by categories most relevant to counter-recruitment practice and are used by the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth for their own campaigns directed at the groups doing counter-recruitment in the communities regionally and nationally. These resources also include images and video shorts that can be directed at youth by your groups that the military targets for recruitment that are designed to initiate reaction and education to provide an alternative narrative.

Together, in concerted campaigning, we can have a greater visibility and influence some youth considering joining into military service to explore peaceful alternatives for their futures.

Use them on your social media channels in your news feeds and announcements and in your general online outreach.

Social Media Resources by Category or Campaign:

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Revised 03/06/2021

Peace Churches in the Orbit of Youth Demilitarization Activism

Gary Ghirardi

Gary Ghirardi / NNOMY – In my years working as a communications consultant to counter-recruitment organizations, now approaching twenty years for the summer of 2021, I have experienced personally and observed the organizing and activism of groups formed by historical peace churches make prolonged and concerted efforts to intervene against the militarization of our youth by departments of defense.

The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth itself is a creation, in part, as a project of the American Friends Service Committee’s National Youth & Militarism Program¹, a Quaker organization that helped organize NNOMY as a network at a conference in Philadelphia in 2003 along with ten other national and regional peace organizations.

In the intervening years, that network grew at its peak in 2011 to over 140 groups nationally and regionally. In recent (post Obama) years the focus of as many as 65% of these groups has shifted to other issues while at the same time the programs of the military in our public schools have expanded.

One of the historic peace churches most active in direct counter-recruiting activism is the Church of the Brethren and their organization, On Earth Peace² which organized the Stop Recruiting Kids campaign with its expansive social media campaign on multiple platforms. On Earth Peace also sits on the NNOMY steering committee as an observing member.

Other historic peace church contributors that have made efforts to intervene against the militarization of youth have been Quaker member groups such as War Resisters’ International in London and Truth in Recruitment in California. These efforts have been some of the strongest representatives of the push-back on programs of the Department of Defense in the United States and the Ministry of Defence in Britain designed to recruit youth into military service.

Supreme Court asked to review Constitutionality of current male-only draft registration requirement

Edward Hasbrouck

Español / Edward Hasbrouck / Resisters.info - On January 8, 2021 the National Coalition For Men, a men’s rights organization represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Constitutionality — now that women are allowed in all military combat assignments — of the law which requires men but not women to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft.

Read below for my FAQ about what this does and doesn’t mean, and what happens next. (Click here for links to the Supreme Court docket, pleadings, press releases, and additional commentary and analysis.)

I’ve been tracking this case up and down through the lower courts since 2015, and I attended the oral argument last year before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that led to the ruling that the Supreme Court is now being asked to review.

I’m actually a footnote (note 3, p. 4) to the petition for certiorari filed today with the Supreme Court, which cites my Web site about the draft as the authoritative source of one of the Department of Defense documents I obtained in response to my Freedom Of Information Act requests to the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (NCMNPS). Apparently this document isn’t available from the DoD, the NCMNPS (which removed many files from its Web site before it shut down), or any other government source. The NCMNPS summarily and improperly “closed” almost all of my outstanding FOIA requests and appeals just before it disbanded, and designated most of its records to be immediately destroyed. I managed to get all of the NCMNPS records transferred to the National Archives, which is also threatening to destroy most of those records, but has released some additional files.