My political specialty, which no one else seem to be able to do, was getting into grassroots movements of working people, the ones later called Reagan Democrats.

Truck Roy is too young to know about my work with the Independent Truckers, when we shut the whole Washington, DC area down. He is an actual, honest-to-Betsy Trucker, so he knows ABOUT that. I personally got it going, but, as Ben Franklin advised, I let others have the “credit.”

It was easy to do. I did the press releases. But by then I was already famous among grass-roots protestors.

I was happy to note that a Stormfronter who is a member of the Electrical Workers International HAD heard of my work with them in Louisville, where he resides.

Pretty good for something I did almost three decades ago.

Conservatives were always talking about REACHING The Working People. They would ask me what The Secret was. I told them, “We found out what they needed and provided it.”

They KEPT asking me what the Secret was. Then they would meet with each other and talk about Reaching the Working People.

Then they would once again ask me what the Secret was.

The Communist Daily World, organ of the CPUSA, denounced my Populist Forum as a huge, heavily financed organization. Part of the huge right-wing conspiracy, you know. There were three of us, and we had no budget. The CPUSA always claimed it Spoke For the Working Class, but they didn’t know any more actual working stiffs than conservatives did.

Our Secret was safe from THEM.

The conservatives would ask me once again what the Secret was. Then they would go back and meet on the question of How to Reach the Working Class.

Does this begin to sound familiar? Does it make it clear to you why I am not exactly stupefied by the fact that I keep winning battles in front of them and people see me do it and then never follow my example?

Well, I had learned the why of this before I started getting into the grassroots revolts of working folk.

My formula was, “Find out what they need and provide it.”

Provide what?

Well, the problem was that the people who wrote and spoke for a living couldn’t reach the grassroots protests of working people against things like offensive textbooks and busing.

What WAS this unbridgeable gap? It was the fact that they didn’t know any working people and the working people didn’t know any people who were on their side and who could write and speak professionally.

So our press man would call up grassroot groups and ask if they could use us three people who spoke and wrote for a living. Once they found out we really would, we got more calls than we could handle. In other words, if the gap is between people who can do public relations and working people, you can bridge it by offering your work TO the working people because it is just what they need.

Find out what they need and provide it.

I got some writing money from National Review and a couple of other conservative publications, but we never charged a nickel and we never had a budget.

Conservative money was going into financing huge conventions dedicated to discussing How to Reach the Working People. At one I happened to attend, a woman I met had just attended a large seminar discussing — guess what? — my own first book.

I didn’t know about that seminar or the many others like it, though there were a lot of them at those Seminars about Reaching the Working Class Protests.

It never occurred to me that the convention-holders, who knew I was there, would even consider having ME address the group at all. Have you ever heard of a group that had seminars on a book in a place where they knew the author was and didn’t ask him to sit in?

The point I am making is that I not only didn’t resent it, I would have be flabbergasted if they had asked me to be there. They were raising money on DISCUSSIONS on how to Reach the Working People, not on someone who was DOING it.

Does any of this begin to sound familiar, Mantra-Folk?