My time in Washington was the high point of direct mail as a new phenomenon. It also shows why so many people who came into professional political action at that time are so news oriented.
When you get a direct mail appeal and toss it away the first thing you wonder is how they AFFORD these things? Few get opened and even fewer bring in money.
Those who send these out are looking for a House List, a group of people who are interested in their particular cause and are willing to give money to support it. So you are on a huge number of lists which show your interest in a subject.
I have at least half a dozen mass mailings from McGovern asking for money for SPLC. That is because I show an interest in race.
Once you get a House List, you may rent it out for the use of others. A pro-life group will let a libertarian group try out its list because they are also anti-liberal.
House Lists for direct mail vary in size from a few hundred to a million in the case of groups like the NRA.
Direct mail was a breakthrough for anti-liberals because liberals had little use for this and did not develop it. The left is funded by limousine liberals, government contracts, and taking over large private endowments. Their money comes in huge chunks.
Direct mail is the ultimate bourgeois tactic.
So how do you get a House List? You try House Lists on causes overlapping with your own. No matter how big the House list is, you rent three to five thousand random addresses on it to test it. Since you need at least a one percent return, the size of the sample that is statistically significant has no relation to the total list.
If a list tests out and you get the minimum return from it you need to almost cover the costs of mailing, you rent the whole list. If you get a good return, you mail it again. The point is that you are looking for people who respond to YOUR message, and that becomes YOUR House List.
You mail your House List several times a year, telling them what you are doing and asking for more money to do it with. Liberals do not make such regular reports to their field hands. Direct mail became famous when it was discovered to be the only major asset anti-liberals had.
In my time, a House List address was worth about fifty bucks, discounting the amount you would get by mailing for donations over and over. You would rent it for two or three cents a name, for people to test it for their own purposes and to mail it if their test paid off.
And this House List becomes an asset. Almost every activist you heard of back then had one or two organizations that were his basic source of income. That’s how we kept people in Washington while liberals got them jobs at Ford Foundations they had taken over.
None of this is a revelation. As Paul Weyrich pointed out in my New Rights Papers in 1982, if reporters ask about how the groups are financed, he just said “It’s in your press kits, guys.”
In order to do a new mailing, which is your bread and butter, you have to come up with something that is going on in the news. The reason it is in the news is because it excites people and it is being talked about.
Contrast this with the Mantra. Here is what will change the real future but you are well aware of how hard it is for anybody obsessed with the latest news to be concerned about the real war.
The reason people who are really deeply concerned don’t make it to the top in a movement is exactly the same reason that Futurology has nothing to do with the future. Those who get in the limelight are interested in what is interesting here and now for fundraisers, just as futurologists are interested in the limitless potential of wind power because that is what the Politically Correct grant-givers want to talk about.
A lot of this political stuff is really just common-sense mechanics.
END OF ARTICLE
#1 by Dave on 06/15/2010 - 9:56 am
It is just amazing how hard it is to apprehend something simple.
The real issue in politics is what people give their loyalty to.
The lesson of BUGS is that if you give your loyalty to words, to ideology, to religion, to intellectual conceptions of any kind, your loyalty is misplaced.
Your loyalty must be given to something very specific, and that is the flesh and blood reality of your own people, and their posterity and descent. This is to be loyal to a real society, not an invented and artificial one.
The power of authentic loyalty cannot be overstated. Every other conception of politics pales before it. Everything that competitively challenges it necessarily falls before it. Authentic loyalty cannot be overcome.
It is a simple as anything can be, yet its very simplicity makes it elusive. But that is the way real power works. It lies there at your feet, only to be picked up, as easy as anything can be, yet you have to see it.
It is so easy not to see it.
That is why the WORD, the TEXT, and Mommy Professor are so dominant.
But once you do see it, you are home free, you are in power. And you have the Word, the TEXT, and Mommy Professor by the throat. And they have no riposte, they are rendered impotent, and weapons are made useless in their hands.
Now that’s power. It is what power really is. And power is the real lesson of BUGS.
#2 by shari on 06/15/2010 - 11:03 am
Authentic loyalty is the kind I admire. I don’t know if I can say this very well,but I wonder if “authentic loyalty” is a trait that is white racial, as well. It goes with reguarding others as INDIVIDUAL and not being “racially conscious”. It’s the loyalty that has been attacked and hammered at.
#3 by Simmons on 06/15/2010 - 11:48 am
The Mantra is the ultimate fund raiser, bar none.
First mail out to the AmRen crowd, CoCofCC et al about “Genocide of Whites” in big letters, then back this up with the Mantra points one by one.
Grab the attention of the news and jewsers and their little pet causes become subordinate to the “issue” of GENOCIDE against whites.
Grab our 1/2 of 1% and then watch the anti-white money makers SPLC, ADL the Mommy Prof camps go wild, mail again to our people with the proof that our enemies have just provided, and repeat.
One day Bob is emeritus of the Ford foundation, Mommy prof is dressed up for meth head Bubba down in Angola (the prison), and more importantly all those news and jewsers were with us from the beginning and doing our work.
#4 by backbaygrouch on 06/16/2010 - 6:16 am
It is important to understand the process of building a House List as Bob describes. It is commonly not understood by candidates. Too often they become ensnared in the grasp of direct mailers. The limited time frame of a campaign means that less than half way into the process the campaign is over and lost because 95% of that money raised went to expenses. It can run higher.
If you become involved in a campaign construct your own list from local resources such as .our benefactors lists, various professional, educational and business directories, permitted donor lists, [those not permitted only if you are good at detecting salting], and, when appropriate, the stud book.
#5 by Alan B on 06/17/2010 - 9:38 pm
Politics in America, the D vs R racket is a fools religion. Each party can rely on a predictable percentage of loyal letter worshiping fools to make it to the polls every election. I once joked that a Tunip could win an established parties nomination if it was sold like a winner to the drooling idiots.
Race is all that matters and all that ailes the White Race today is political in nature and anti white.