I hope that when I am out of the picture my kind of thinking will have heirs.

The Mantra has heirs, but Mantra Thinking requires a more general discipline. It consists of not just quoting wisdom but taking it apart.

For example, anyone who studies politics knows that when a person is trying to be candidate of his party, he must appeal to a different constituency than he does once he becomes the candidate of the party. The people who vote in a party’s primary are a very different crowd from the electorate as a whole.

The only time this reality was really discussed was when liberal Republicans built their entire careers on misinterpreting it.

But it is nonetheless a serious consideration. A pro has to run a different campaign for the nomination than he does for the general. That is why his most embarrassing moments are when opposition researchers on the other side quote remarks he made during the primaries.

But most people know this rule about politics but do not analyze it further.

If you do the Mantra Thinking, and you generalize this rule and DISSECT it, it can make the difference between victory and defeat. It applies to every movement and every cause. It is a matter of life and death to every cause.

What are chances that someone who rises to the leadership of a movement will be the right person to WIN THE BATTLE it is fighting?

The people INSIDE a movement who choose the leaders, actively or passively, are entirely different from the general population or the power group on which the whole cause depends.

I have yet to see anyone even NOTICE this vital rule outside of open electoral politics.

What about the East Tennessee meeting Derek Black is setting up?

All the National Alliance Conventions in New Orleans and the American Renaissance conventions that followed them did well because they had a lot of hellaciously good speakers. The crowed showed up to get a show, and they sure as hell did.

Many, many books were sold.

East Tennessee will be comparative flop if those are the standards. Sam Dickson is one hell of an entertainer, but what I have to say may be as dry as dust to people who come for entertainment.

I had one speech, once, in New Orleans and since then not one single convention of any kind on our side has asked me to talk.

This doesn’t give me stage fright. If you have given a lecture on basic economics to a hung over class at eight on Monday morning for years you get very hardened to it.

But I doubt Derek will read this, and I am anxious that he not compare this meeting to the rousing ones his seniors put together.

It is probable that a meeting that concentrates on what is needed for victory in the general fight will not be repeated if it is judged by the standards of meetings that were set up to entertain.

For a long time the media made a big thing of pro-life being all-Catholic.

Long before I was born, anti-Catholicism was referred to as “the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.”

Professors have an instinctive hatred of Catholicism of the same kind as people in general have a natural dislike of Jews and Anglo-Saxons have a natural dislike of the very word “French.”

Whole books had been written on this prejudice of the unprejudiced by the Tomesters. National Review had article after article pointing out that this was just plain prejudice.

I took a step that was more effective than any of those. I wrote a one-minute speech for my boss titled, “Media Picture of Pro-Life as Catholic is an Insult to Protestants.” The speech pointed out that John Ashbrook was a Baptist, and his pro-life record was indisputable.

He was insulted by the idea that only Catholics were pro-life.

You had to be an expert — PAID like me to prove it, maybe — to see how this totally befuddled an establishment that had just put out a major book showing how many congressmen were Catholic and how they voted.

The way our enemies signal defeat is by simply not bringing something up again. My particular victories were of this sort, so they were unnoticed. Only other pros wowed it.

This is another function for which respectable conservatives are absolutely invaluable. Just as a professional respectable must know exactly when he must denounce a position he once had, he must know when a subject has been lost, and therefore can be buried, by the regular media.

In another less political case I stopped a verbal freight train. It was the period when earlier human ancestors were being discovered almost every month. But every single popular article on such a new find went something like “It has been discovered that the earliest man was not in X, as has been thought, but in Y.” or, “A discovery in Y…”

The media is bad enough in its constant attempts to screw up anthropological reality, but this one was too gross to pass up. I could contradict it and my record of published Letters to the Editor is very good, but where would I put it? My point would have no authority as a letter in a standard publication. If I sent it to Science the media would never notice it.

So I sent it to Science News, which was the publication which had millions in circulation and the one that journalists use so as not to be entirely ignorant of science which is not spoon fed to them for political purposes.

I wrote one letter to Science News pointing out that every time a popular magazine reported the latest discovery it said that was “the earliest man.” I pointed out there, where popular readers would see it, and where it would have to pass scientific criticism, that if “the earliest man” has been discovered four times in the last year, a reasonably intelligent reader would expect the reporter to add the words “to date.”

When you read it, it is hard to make this couple of paragraphs into anything huge, but it was. “The earliest man” man disappeared where before it had been ubiquitous. I chose the exact length of letter the editors liked and the exact publication where it would hit home.

This one action has more effect on our specific war than the actions of the most Decorated and Suffering soldier did on the outcome of any war.

If you want to brag about it, Suffer. If you want to win a war, use targeting and wording, and take it seriously.

One of our commenters made a valid point we all expect.

But remember that a major theme of BUGS is that we are to take a SECOND LOOK at every basic.

In reply to one of my articles about the Alamo, one commenter pointed out that we have it easy, because we don’t have to be out there in the miseries of the battlefield. That is a good point, but now let’s do a Whitakerism. Let’s take a SECOND LOOK at it.

This point contradicts everything we desperately need to keep in mind.

A war is decided before the first shot is fired. It would be hard to find an instance where the actions of man in uniform, however heroic and brave and suffering, ever made the slightest difference to a war’s outcome.

As CS Lewis pointed out in his introduction to The Screwtape Letters, he thinks of all the Evils of Hell taking place, not in the Pit with the heat and the screaming, but quiet, efficient offices with thick, spotlessly clean rugs.

That, Lewis points out as I am here, is where the real, massive Evil takes place on earth.

He sees Screwtape is in the Executive Suite, not down there where the heat is with a pitchfork.

Screwtape refers to a Demon appearing as an Angel of Light as a standard parade-ground exercise.

Long before the first Medal of Honor Winner sees action, the war has been decided by men in coats and ties.

In fact the Alamo and the three hundred Spartans were necessary precisely because decisions had not been made in the Executive Suites. Texas could have been conquered while the debaters in the capitol were holding up any effective defensive action.

Exactly the same was true in ancient Greece. Athenians had stayed off the battlefield while the Persians invaded because they were celebrating a particularly important religious holiday. The Persian hordes would have conquered all of Greece if the Spartans hadn’t died to give the Executive Suite time to DECIDE.

In fact, both the Spartans and the Alamo’s defenders were perfectly aware that they had to DECIDE to die simply because they had to give the guys in a clean safe place time to make a decision. THEY certainly understood the point I am making here.

If you want to BRAG, you talk about when you had on a uniform and how you were stuck in the mud or the ice. If you want to WIN, the real fight is where it always was, with those who see the issues long before the first shot is fired, those the soldiers, who are merely filling in the diagram already drawn for them, so despise.

If you want to BRAG, slog it out in the field. If you want to get in on the REAL fight, it is right here in the air conditioning.

Get off the “I SERVED” crap of the Weakest Generation. They gave a third of the human race, now down to a fourth, to the Communists.

Their only excuse is that it was hard work.

When a particular comment reminds me of something I want to warn you against, it sounds like I am coming down on the commenter. Coaches are not known for being particularly subtle, so please take this once and for all: I am not calling for an apology from the person who made the comment. In fact, worrying about the comment itself takes away from the general point I am trying to make.

One my articles was inspired by someone asking how to answer someone who said whites were guilty of taking other people’s lands. I used this to make the point that you were generally forgetting basics.

This basic was to ignore the crap and point out the guy is justifying genocide.

In football practice if a player asks Coach about a basic he has forgotten, the coach will call everybody over and repeat his question and make the general point. In that environment he makes it very clear that he expects others to forget the same thing.

I do the same thing with a general article. This was not written to condemn the question, it was used as an opportunity to make the point generally.

The coach does NOT want to discourage his team from coming back and asking him questions. He has to assume that everybody worth having on his team is tough enough to hear the thing aired in front of everybody who can benefit.

The point was, as I said, forgetting the basics is a very usual problem of people in the heat of the fight.

I want you to understand that the BUGSER who asked the question did exactly the right thing. He came here to ask what to do.

That’s what we’re HERE for, gang.

If you care enough about the winning the game you will expect the coach to be a bit rough.

A SWARMER asked about what he should do because he spend his time posting, and didn’t have time to report each and every posting.

He then went right ahead and answered his own question. He made a report, brief and to the point, about the things he was doing.

Another SWARMER declared with exclamation points that he had tried too many points too fast and failed.

Once again, he solved his own problem. BUGS is probably the only site where pro-whites are interested in a mistake like this, rather than in some ideological obscurity.

Like the first example, this SWARMER solved his own problem: He saw his error, declared it, and went back into the fight.

I am sure you would like to believe there is some All-Knowing Leader who could do it all right if he were in your place.

My Lord, I wish there was a guy like that!

Bob Ain’t Him.

So you have the next best thing. You have a place to discuss your activities with others who are doing the same thing, and speak the same language, a language of experience.

Let me indulge in what the world drove an old guy to: Self-pity.

I spent many, many years going from site to site, from convention to Convention, trying to get people to who could talk to me in Mantra terms.

None of them ever seemed to have convinced anybody, but they had not put the slightest energy in how to do it.

I hope some of you can appreciate SWARM the way I do. Those of you who are becoming good at this, try to put yourself back into the position I was in, when there was absolutely no one to talk to about real strategy.

Ten years ago no one in the movement would have understood what the hell you are talking about in SWARM.

As Frodo asked Gandalf, why did the Evil have to come in MY time?

Bob is not Gandalf, and even Gandalf had no answer.