Joan Blades

Joan Blades co-founded MoveOn and is associated with MomsRising.

What the 1998 Page Actually Was

The campaign that became MoveOn survives in an Internet Archive capture of 12 December 1998, a week before the House voted to impeach. It is worth describing precisely, because it is the ancestor of an enormous amount of what followed.

The whole thing is one sentence: “The Congress must immediately Censure President Clinton and Move On to pressing issues facing the country.” Around it: a sign-up form; a button to email an individual petition to your own representatives; a printable paper petition; a call for volunteers; a bumper sticker. The site claimed “Over 300,000 petitions signed.”

And a line describing its own distribution, which no modern campaign could write: “This campaign is based solely on word of mouth.”

MoveOn’s Own Account

MoveOn’s history page records that in its first couple of years it “launched a historic online petition and established MoveOn Political Action”, and that it “redefined the landscape of political fundraising while helping to elect four new senators and five new House members in the 2000 election.”

The same page names both founders: “When tech entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd created an online petition about the Clinton impeachment in 1998 and emailed it to friends, they didn’t expect what came next. Within days, their petition to ‘Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation’ had hundreds of thousands of signatures.” It gives the year but no day-level founding date.

MomsRising

MomsRising Together is a 501(c)(4) in Bellevue, Washington, with an IRS ruling date of May 2007, running on revenue between roughly $3.9 million and$12.5 million across the tax years 2021 to 2023. A related education fund is separately registered.

Digital Political Impact

• Co-founded the campaign that established the template for online political organizing: one demand, a form, forwarding to your own representatives, and distribution by the participants themselves
• The 1998 page shows the whole model already assembled, years before the platforms that are now assumed to be necessary for it
• Her later work took the same form into a different issue area through a paired (c)(4) and (c)(3) structure

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit: her birth year; the audience placeholder describing MoveOn’s “multi-million member email list”; the September 1998 day-level founding date, which MoveOn’s own page does not give; and her role in founding MomsRising, which the IRS records do not establish. The affiliations are retained in frontmatter from the previous version.

The identity of her co-founder was also removed in that pass, on the stated ground that MoveOn’s own page does not name him. That was wrong, and it has been restored: front.moveon.org/a-short-history/ names “tech entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd” in its opening paragraph. The earlier audit appears to have checked a different MoveOn page. Corrected during the batch B pass, when the parallel wes-boyd audit found the same page from the other direction.