DAVID FENTON - Founder of Fenton Communications, Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator

"The activists need to pay attention to mass awareness. Political change is a function of gaining political power through mass awareness, mass mobilization, and mass unification. And we're in a period on the left right now, which has happened in history before, where there's a lot of internal focus about the fairness of the processes within NGOs and activist organizations. And the legacy of racism in these organizations and gender and identity issues, all of which are essential and important and valid, but those are not the pathways to mass awareness and mass unity. If you overemphasize those kinds of issues, it's a kind of sectarianism, which is the opposite of how you unify people to get political power. If you don't assemble majority support - majority sentiment doesn't mean everybody - it means majority, then you can't take power. And if you can't get power, guess what? You can't help the vulnerable. You can't help the oppressed. This is, like most things in life, a question of balance. If you overfocus on the legitimate feelings and plight of subgroups of the population, by necessity, you won't establish what Reverend Jesse Jackson used to call the Rainbow Coalition. And without the Rainbow Coalition, you don't win. So, what I hope is that the scientists and the activist community can pay as much attention to cognitive science as they do to climate science. And then we'll get somewhere definitely."