DIRECT MAIL

see DM2 for newer

promoted primary 12/17 b/c of :

TPMMuckraker

The Latest In Conservative Direct Mail: Impeach Obama!

Ryan J. Reilly | October 14, 2010, 1:16PM

From an Obama impeachment mailer

Obama Impeachment, The Conservative Caucus

"This might be our last chance to save freedom in America."

That's the message a piece of direct mail sent out by the National Campaign for an Impeachment Inquiry, a project of The Conservative Caucus, which is calling -- as their name would suggest -- for the impeachment of President Barack Obama.

Why you ask? Well, for one, there's "ObamaCare," which TCC brands as an effort to "control the people." Also, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro like Obama and his "march of America toward Socialism, or worse."

The flyer, obtained by TPMMuckraker, includes a "national ballot of 5,000,000 registered voters" on "Whether Congress Should Launch An Impeachment Inquiry Into President Barack Hussein Obama's Assault On Our Constitution."

"The purpose of this survey of 5,000,000 registered voters is to show pro-freedom, pro-Constitutional members of Congress that there is broad public support for the new Congress to conduct a full Inquiry into whether President Barack Hussein Obama has kept his oath of office to faithfully 'protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America'," the flyer reads. Cited in the survey are Fox News' Judge Andrew Napolitano and Sen. Jim DeMint.

"We certainly will not get any action on Impeachment from the current Congress -- now controlled by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid," reads the piece of direct mail. "But we should demand an Impeachment Inquiry as one of the first orders of business of the new Congress. We must begin our campaign to educate voters and mobilize public support for an Impeachment Inquiry now, before the election of the new Congress.

Here are some highlights:

"Fidel Castro is not the only Communist dictator to applaud Obama's march of America toward Socialism, or worse. The America-hating Communist dictator of Venezuela Hugo Chavez noted in a speech that Obama is to the Left of him and Chavez's good friend, Fidel Castro. Chavez even calls President Obama 'Comrade Obama!'" (page 13).
"ObamaCare sets up 159 new government agencies -- and builds an enormousness Soviet-style bureaucratic government administrative apparatus." (page 13)
Obama is "refusing to enforce the law concerning homosexuals in the military." (page 16).
"President Obama is rapidly consolidating his power and destroying our Constitutional Republic." (page 16).

So how can you stop Obama's march to towards socialism? By answering their "Rescue Liberty Call-to-Action" by donating money to help fund the direct mail campaign, of course!

The Board of Directors includes Chairman Howard Phillips, a three-time presidential candidate who served in the Nixon administration; Secretary Matthew L. Chancey, who is a member of a group that equates "homosexuals, pedophiles, bestials and rapists"; and Treasurer Darrell Castle, who is a member of the conservative Constitution Party. Other members of the board include James Clymer, the current chair of the Constitution Party; Dr. William Campbell Douglass II, a doctor who has written against Obamacare; Maj. F. Andy Messing, who founded the conservative think tank National Defense Council Foundation that, among other things, defended the apartheid state of Rhodesia; and Marc Morano, who runs a climate change skeptic website according to the document.

A secretary said that Phillips wasn't available for an interview on Thursday.

Check out the full mailer here. Additional reporting by David Taintor.

Viguerie's stance should be no surprise to those who have been following him recently as he promotes his re-launch of the Republican Party by purging what he calls "big-government Republicans" from the helm of his Web site, ConservativeHQ.com. The one-time heavy hitter of the GOP emerged from the 1970s to become that era's Karl Rove, credited for creating the once-influential direct-mail campaigns for the political world.

2000 -Republican Karl Rove is at the heart of George Bush's vicious smear campaign against fellow Republican John McCain in the South Carolina primary, claiming McCain was a stoolie while a P.O.W. in Vietnam and now emotionally unstable. Rove is also credited with a coordinated stealth campaign of push polling which asks South Carolina voters: "If you knew John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child would you be more or less likely to vote for him?" This was followed up with direct mail and church parking lot flyers to convince voters McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter was actually his illegitimate daughter and that his wife was a drug addict. A Bush operative also stole McCain's email lists and directly emails McCain's closest supporters with scandal and lies. Ironically Karl Rove's mentor Lee Atwater, was the political strategist for Strom Thurman, U.S. Senator from South Carolina, who actually did have an illegitimate African American daughter.

W&B offered whole pkg 26

LAT says threat, war 27

1st use of direct mail (cf old bldg so if sj), targetted auds ) eg boy scouts)

Going dirty: the art of negative campaigning

By David Mark 2009

helms

direct mail really scary: cannibalism, wifeswapping and infanticide and death panels 106

Kerry swift boat direct mail said he

"conspired with enemy" 218

Response Dynamics co loosely linked to brooks bros, Norquist

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/groups/conservative-action-project

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_marketing

http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/xqm4aa00/pdf;jsessionid=741C8B52CE31256F8E4A489A9540C03E.tobacco04 1983

ctr to jrnlism methods

combine fact and emotion (formula, used by all)

note slide to more fear below:

The fear merchants

"Fright mail' fund-raisers targeting elderly with scare tactics?

Diana Walsh, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

OAKLAD - Every day, the letters arrive by the fistful in Faye Shelby's mailbox.

One warns that her Social Security is in jeopardy. Another worries that Medicare soon will collapse. Yet another says, "You won't believe what Bill Clinton has in store for Washington."

In one four-month period last year, Shelby was besieged by 700 mailings, some marked "Urgent!" "PERSONAL" or

"Jury Duty Notice." All of them aimed at one thing: a piece of her checkbook.

The letters so distressed Shelby, who is 86 and lives in a senior center, that she often sat up nights, fretting over which crisis most deserved her help. Fearful that her benefits might expire, she regularly responded with small donations.

"I didn't know that I could just turn them down," Shelby said. "I was thinking it was something I had to do. . . . I thought if I didn't correspond about Social Security, I wouldn't get my checks."

Shelby is one of millions of seniors nationwide targeted by so-called "fright mail," computer-generated by self-proclaimed public policy organizations in mostly legal but controversial campaigns to raise cash.

"Seniors are a top target of these folks . . ." said Greg Marchildon, spokesman for the American Association of Retired Persons. "There are seniors who receive volumes of mail that say if you don't give me $25, $50 or $100, the sky is going to fall down. (Many solicitors) are far more interested in scaring these seniors than they are in providing them with the facts. Their common strategy is to use very open-ended and misleading language. . . . What you end up with is frightened and scared older Americans who are giving away their money to organizations that aren't going to provide them with important services or information."

No one can say for sure how big the industry is, how much mail is sent to seniors and how generous the response. But consumer groups and authorities say complaints are on the rise.

"In recent weeks we have had a growing number of inquiries about groups soliciting on behalf of senior-related issues like Social Security and Medicare," said Bennett Weiner, a vice president at the Council of Better Business Bureaus in Arlington, Va.

Most of the letters ring with hyperbolic, anti-government zealotry.

In an appeal to Shelby, the National Retirement Security Task Force based in Washington, D.C., wrote, "The liberal monster is primed to rip your Social Security to shreds."

Thirteen days later, another letter arrived: "A SOCIAL

SECURITY CRISIS IS UPON US. SOCIAL SECURITY IS GOING

BANKRUPT. . . ."

The National Center for Public Policy Research, likewise in Washington, offers an equally dire situation:

"I only hope that I am not too late. All I have is my faith that you will trust me enough to send your vital $75 today."

The uses of bugbears <

Frequently, the groups create villains for their fund-raising appeals. In past years it was Ted Kennedy. Currently popular targets of vitriol are Bill and Hillary Clinton, linked to everything from drug dealers to murder to endangering programs for the elderly.

Amy Moritz Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, says that emotional pitches get results, and insists that would-be donors don't want the details.

"It's just that you're competing with a lot of other organizations. People seem to respond better to emotion than they do with letters that have lots and lots of facts," said Moritz, who said her letters were written by a direct-mail firm, Response Dynamics, but read by her before they were sent. "You have to give something that is light enough that people will be willing to read it upon receipt. . . . If they don't read it right at that moment, all the studies show they never will."

She said the center used to write explicit letters about her plans for the donations, but the pleas went unanswered.

No apology <

Moritz Ridenour is unapologetic about the mailings.

"We assume most people are capable of taking care of themselves, and if there is something they have a desire about, they will let us know," she said.

The appeals often are packaged with "open me" gimmicks:

*A delivery marked "EXPRESS" is fourth-class bulk mail from the American Federation of Senior Citizens.

*An envelope that says Jury Duty Notice is a pitch from the Coalition of Politically Active Christians.

*Another with what appears to be a handwritten address is a computer-generated plea for money from the American Federation of Senior Citizens.

*Other clear plastic envelopes reveal coins, dollar bills and stamps inside.

"They come up with what they consider glitzy packaging so people will open it because most people who get junk mail will place it straight into recycling," said Belinda Johns, a deputy attorney general for the state of California.

Disposable income <

She and other experts say seniors become targets because they may have more time, more interest in public policy, more disposable income and sometimes more susceptibility to scare tactics.

Johns, who is in charge of prosecuting marketing fraud, says there is little her office can do. Because the groups don't promise to spend revenues on particular programs, she says, they are doing nothing illegal.

"They are smarter to say, "Help me fight,' instead of saying, "I'm going to use the money for this specific purpose,' because that puts it into a restricted trust," Johns said.

U.S. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Hayward, who for years has been trying to warn the public about fright mail, says many of the groups do nothing to influence legislation.

"They are greedy and frighten seniors unnecessarily," he said. Many "are doing nothing to change the laws. . . . Their whole point is to get a mailing list and make money. They spend the least amount of money on lobbying of any groups I know."

A question of fraud <

In a letter to the U.S. Postal Service, Stark recently asked inspectors to investigate whether mailings by the nonprofit United Seniors Association and the Seniors Coalition amounted to fraud when they suggested that Medicare benefits for seniors were in jeopardy. But Stark says short of class-action suits against the groups, little can be done to stop them.

"You can keep calling attention to them, and you can keep waiting for them to step over the bounds and hope that the Fourth Estate calls attention to their practices, but I don't know if ridicule is enough to stop people like this," Stark said. "It's one of the prices we pay for the freedom of democracy. . . . It's a tenuous legal argument that frightening senior citizens is not allowable under the First Amendment."

Fund-raising groups of all kinds build lists largely through other lists.

Consumers end up on mailing lists after making donations to causes, purchasing goods by telephone or mail or subscribing to magazines.

Proliferating lists <

Mailing lists are like cells dividing, growing wildly as they are sold or rented. Consumers who respond are tagged with what "fright mail" experts term "gold stars" and attached to "sucker" or "mooch" lists.

Shelby says she doesn't care much for politics, isn't concerned about particular legislation and admires just one politician: Ronald Reagan, whose picture sits on her bookshelf along with photos of her daughter and grandson.

Her first political contact came in the early 1980s when her son-in-law asked her to donate to Pete Wilson's senate campaign. The donation landed her on several lists, but it wasn't until the last few years that the volume of mail began to grow.

When the letters first started arriving, Shelby was flattered to get attention from important people. But during the 1996 election, the flurries of mail turned to a blizzard.

Request to stop ignored <

Even after her family wrote asking solicitations to stop, eight to 10 letters a day continued to pour in. In four months last year, her mail box was deluged with 685 letters from 78 organizations - nearly half from Response Dynamics, a direct-mail house in Fredericksburg, Va., that mailing on behalf of more than a half dozen organizations. Response Dynamics did not return phone calls from a reporter.

A return of just a couple of percent on a direct-mail solicitation can generate profits, said Marsha Goldberger, director of ethics and consumer affairs in the Direct Marketing Association's Washington office.

A child of the Depression, Shelby spends almost nothing on herself. She is a self-described "cheerful giver," donating to her church, the Red Cross and veterans groups.

She says she responded to the barrage of fright mailings because she felt she had no choice.

"I went along with it too long," she said. "I was thinking it was something I had to do."

Spokeswoman Pam Reims says the Social Security Administration frequently hears from seniors frightened that their benefits will be cut off if they don't answer direct-mail pitches with contributions.

"We are concerned that people feel they are under duress to make a contribution," Reims said. "It's one thing to do it voluntarily, to get politically active on any topic - that's what we're about in this country. It's another thing if they feel like if they don't do it, that something is going to happen to their benefits."

Although her donations ranged from just $5 to $100, Shelby gave to a variety of organizations, winding up on dozens of mailing lists that reused her name repeatedly.

Point of exhaustion <

The daily flood of mail left Shelby exhausted and worried.

After dinner she would climb into bed with mail piled around, trying to decide whether and how much to give.

"I'm just worn out staying awake at night reading that stuff," she said.

Her family didn't discover the problem until an anti-Clinton group told her to use a courier rather than the Postal Service to deliver a contribution. According to Shelby, the group said that liberals were tampering with their mailbox.

Daniel Langan, spokesman for the National Charities Information Bureau, a New York City-based watchdog group, said organizations that resorted to desperate appeals frequently spent more money on mail than on programs or lobbying.

No organization sought Shelby's money more insistently than the National Center for Public Policy Research, which sent her 160 letters in just four months in 1977. Many described the organization's dangerously low budget.

Right-wing radio connection <

But according to tax reports filed in 1995, the center, which sends out tip sheets to 1,200 radio talk show hosts twice a week offering a right-wing perspective on issues in Washington, spent more than 77 percent of the more than $2.3 million it collected on fund-raising. At the time, the organization had a staff of five, according to Moritz Ridenour.

The Council of Better Business Bureaus standards for charitable solicitations said fund-raising costs should not exceed 35 percent of the contributions raised.

Moritz Ridenour said her organization's fund-raising costs had been high at the time because it was trying to expand its mailing list and to raise money in a non-election year, which tends to be better for political organizations not linked to candidates.

She said her organization always tabulated mailers under fund-raising costs, while other groups claimed a portion of their mailers as education or program costs.

"We just allocate it all for fund-raising, which probably makes it look bad, but at least people know if they look at it that it's part of the fund-raising program," she said. "It's overly honest rather than the other way around."

Four different letterheads<

Moritz Ridenour said her organization sent donors up to a dozen major pitches a month. The appeals are sent on four different letterheads.

She said anyone receiving more than a dozen solicitations in a month probably was on mailing lists the National Center has "rented" from other organizations, which she said were outside her control. When lists are rented, a group pays to use the list but for proprietary reasons isn't allowed to look at individual names or cross reference for duplications on their own lists.

Eighteen of the letters Shelby received last year came from former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole on behalf of a group called Americans for a Balanced Budget in Washington.

A spokeswoman for Dole acknowledged that campaign workers had approved the use of his name in 1995 and 1996 in exchange for mailing lists. But she said the group continued to send appeals in 1997 without authorization.

"This is a common practice in campaigns," Dole press secretary Joyce Campbell said in explaining the swap.

"But they certainly didn't have blanket approval for all of these letters to go out (in 1997). Sen. Dole was quite appalled that an elderly woman became the target of this kind of campaign."

Tony Zagotta, president of Americans for a Balanced Budget, said there was no time frame when the deal was struck with Dole. Nonetheless, he said his office was no longer using Dole's name and would send letters of apology to recipients of earlier mailings.

Shelby's daughter, Nancy Shelby of San Francisco, has spent nearly 10 months trying to stem the flood of mail. She said that "fright mail" undermined the elderly's trust in government and sense of security.

"The audacity of manipulating old people in this way without any kind of sanction . . . is morally wrong," she said. "Anything that makes (the organizations) look like a government office and puts their views out there as though they were official is wrong. . . . These groups are using people like my mother for financial gain and for power. It's appalling." <

This article appeared on page A -of the Examiner

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/1998/02/08/NEWS3642.dtl#ixzz19Fi0V5d4}:

The Long Con

Mail-order conservatism

RICK PERLSTEIN

....

he history of that movement echoes with the sonorous names of long-dead Austrian economists, of indefatigable door-knocking cadres, of soaring perorations on a nation finally poised to realize its rendezvous with destiny. Search high and low, however, and there’s no mention of oilfields in the placenta. Nor anything about, say, the massive intersection between the culture of “network” or “multilevel” marketing—where ordinary folks try to get rich via pyramid schemes that leave their neighbors holding the bag—and the institutions of both evangelical Christianity and Mitt Romney’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And yet this stuff is as important to understanding the conservative ascendancy as are the internecine organizational and ideological struggles that make up its official history—if not, indeed, more so. The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.

Those tactics gelled in the seventies—though they were rooted, like all things right-wing and infrastructural, in the movement that led to Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination in 1964. In 1961 Richard Viguerie, a kid from Houston whose heroes, he once told me, were “the two Macs”—Joe McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur—took a job as executive director for the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). The organization was itself something of a con, a front for the ideological ambitions of the grownups runningNational Review. And fittingly enough, the middle-aged man who ran the operation, Marvin Liebman, was something of a P. T. Barnum figure, famous on the right for selling the claim that he had amassed no less than a million signatures on petitions opposing the People’s Republic of China’s entry into the United Nations. (He said they were in a warehouse in New Jersey. No one ever saw the warehouse.) The first thing Liebman told Viguerie was that YAF had two thousand paid members but that in public, he should always claim there were twenty-five thousand. (Viguerie told me this personally. I found no evidence he saw anything to be ashamed of.) And the first thing that Liebman showed Viguerie was the automated “Robotype” machine he used to send out automated fundraising pitches. Viguerie’s eyes widened; he had found his life’s calling.

Following the Goldwater defeat, Viguerie went into business for himself. He famously visited the Clerk of the House of Representatives, where the identities of those who donated fifty dollars or more to a presidential campaign then by law reposed. First alone, and then with a small army of “Kelly Girls” (as he put it to me in 1996), he started copying down the names and addresses in longhand until some nervous bureaucrat told him to cease and desist.

By then, though, it was too late: Viguerie had captured some 12,500 addresses of the most ardent right-wingers in the nation. “And that list,” he wrote in his 2004 book, America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Over America, “was my treasure trove, as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox, as I started The Viguerie Company and began raising money for conservative clients.”

Fort Knox: an interesting image. Isn’t that what proverbial con men are always claiming to sell?

The lists got bigger, the technology better (“Where are my names?” he nervously asked, studying the surface of the first computer tape containing his trove): twenty-five million names by 1980, destination for some one hundred million mail pieces a year, dispatched by some three hundred employees in boiler rooms running twenty-four hours a day. The Viguerie Company’s marketing genius was that as it continued metastasizing, it remained, in financial terms, a hermetic positive feedback loop. It brought the message of the New Right to the masses, but it kept nearly all the revenue streams locked down in Viguerie’s proprietary control. Here was a key to the hustle: typically, only 10 to 15 percent of the haul went to the intended beneficiaries. The rest went back to Viguerie’s company. In one too-perfect example, Viguerie raised $802,028 for a client seeking to distribute Bibles in Asia—who paid $889,255 for the service.

Others joined the bonanza. Lee Edwards, a YAF founder who today works a nifty grift as “Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought” at the Heritage Foundation writing credulous hagiographies of conservative movement figures and institutions (including, funnily enough, the Heritage Foundation), cofounded something called “Friends of the FBI.” This operation’s chief come-on was a mass mailing of letters signed by the star of TV’s The FBI, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., purportedly to aid the families of fallen officers. The group raised $400,000 in four months—until Zimbalist abruptly withdrew his support. The TV star said he’d looked at the organization’s books and seen how much was going to the fundraisers—and claimed he’d been the victim of “fraud and misrepresentation.”

In 1977, Democratic Congressman Charles H. Wilson of California proposed timid regulations to inform donors exactly how much of their money was going to the cause they thought they were supporting. The Heritage Foundation raced forth with an “issues bulletin” announcing that any such rule changes would subject “church leaders” to “vicious” attacks, and would “increase the paperwork on every Christian organization . . . inevitably lessening the funds each charity can use for its stated purpose.” (Christianity itself being the obvious target of this Democratic subterfuge of “reform.”) And just to give the cause the imprimatur of elected office, a favorite congressman of the Christian Right, John Conlan of Arizona (“He’s never been honest,” Barry Goldwater once said about him), was drafted to explain that the high overhead of direct-mail campaigns was a boon to the charity-customers: it represented start-up—“prospecting”—costs that would permit organizations to raise yet more money down the line. (“Defends charities against Big Government,” read the caption beneath a picture of Conlan inConservative Digest—the magazine Richard Viguerie published.)

Here’s the thing, though: as is the case with most garden-variety pyramid schemes, the supposed start-up costs never seemed to stop. And conservative groups that finally decoupled their causes from Viguerie’s firm found their fundraising costs falling to less than fifty cents on the dollar. Viguerie would point out his clients didn’t feel ripped off. At that, maybe some were in on the con, too—for instance, his client Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti-smut group, took in an estimated $2.3 million over a two-year period, with more than 80 percent going to Viguerie’s company; the group’s principal was future S&L fraudster Charles Keating.

It all became too much for Marvin Liebman, the Dr. Frankenstein who had placed the business model in Viguerie’s palpitating hands. Liebman told conservative apostate Alan Crawford, author of the valuable 1980 exposéThunder on the Right, that Viguerie and company “rape the public.” Another source familiar with the conservative direct-mail industry wondered to Crawford, “How anyone of any sensitivity can bear to read those letters scrawled by little old women on Social Security who are giving up a dollar they cannot afford to part with . . . without feeling bad is unbelievable.”

Such qualms clearly did not carry the day—and now the practice is apparently too true to the heart of conservatism to die. In 2007, the Washington Postreported on the lucrative fundraising sideline worked up by syndicated columnist Linda Chavez. George W. Bush had nominated Chavez to be his first secretary of labor, but then backpedaled after reports that she had lied about an undocumented worker living in her house. Among the prime red-meat entries on her résumé is a book called Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics. And while Chavez probably wouldn’t have brought much reliable wisdom to the task of regulating organized labor, it’s quite clear from the Post report that she had mastered the art of the shakedown. In her direct-mail career, she had “used phone banks and direct-mail solicitations to raise tens of millions of dollars, founding several political action committees with bankable names: the Republican Issues Committee, the Latino Alliance, Stop Union Political Abuse and the Pro-Life Campaign Committee. Their solicitations promise direct action in the ‘fight to save unborn lives,’ a vigorous struggle against ‘big labor bosses’ and a crippling of ‘liberal politics in the country.’” But true to the Viguerie model, less than 1 percent of the money that Chavez’s groups raised went to actual political activity. The rest went either back into further fundraising pitches or into salaries and perks for Chavez and her relatives. “I guess you could call it the family business,” Chavez told the Post. I guess you could.

Waging Culture War for Fun and Profit

But the New Right’s business model was dishonest in more than its revenue structure. Its very message—the alarmist vision of White Protestant Civilization Besieged that propelled fundraising pitch after fundraising pitch—was confabulatory too. The typical ploy ran a little something like this, from Heritage Foundation founderPaul Weyrich’s Free Congress Research and Education Foundation:

Dear Friend:

Do you believe that children should have the right to sue their parents for being “forced” to

attend church?

Should children be eligible for minimum wage if they are being asked to do household

chores?

Do you believe that children should have the right to choose their own family?

As incredible as they might sound, these are just a few of the new “children’s rights laws” that could become a reality under a new United Nations program if fully implemented by the Carter administration.

If radical anti-family forces have their way, this UN sponsored program is likely to become an all-out assault on our traditional family structure.

Following the standard scare-mongering playbook of the fundraising Right, Weyrich launched his appeal with some horrifying eventuality that sounded both entirely specific and hair-raisingly imminent (“all-out assault on our traditional family structure”—or, in the case of a 1976 pitch signed by Senator Jesse Helms,taxpayer-supported “grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior”; or, to take one from not too long ago, the white-slavery style claim that “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood”). Closer inspection reveals the looming horror to be built on a non-falsifiable foundation (“could become”; “is likely to become”). This conditional prospect, which might prove discouraging to a skeptically minded mark, is all the more useful to reach those inclined to divide the moral universe in two—between the realm of the wicked, populated by secretive, conspiratorial elites, and the realm of the normal, orderly, safe, and sane.

Weyrich’s letter concludes by proposing an entirely specific, real-world remedy: slaying the wicked can easily be hastened for the low, low price of a $5, $10, or $25 contribution from you, the humble citizen-warrior.

These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.

Dishonesty is demanded by the alarmist fundraising appeal because the real world doesn’t work anything like this. The distance from observable reality is rhetorically required; indeed, that you haven’t quite seen anything resembling any of this in your everyday life is a kind of evidence all by itself. It just goes to show how diabolical the enemy has become. He is unseen; but the redeemer, the hero who tells you the tale, can see the innermost details of the most baleful conspiracies. Trust him. Send him your money. Surrender your will—and the monster shall be banished for good.

Scaling Up

This method highlights the fundamental workings of all grassroots conservative political appeals, be they spurious claims of Barack Obama’s Islamic devotion, the supposed explosion of taxpayer-supported welfare fraud, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And, in an intersection that is utterly crucial, this same theology of fear is how a certain sort of commercial appeal—a snake-oil-selling one—works as well. This is where the retail political lying practiced by Romney links up with the universe in which 23-cent miracle cures exist (absent the hero’s intervention) just out of reach, thanks to the conspiracy of some powerful cabal—a cabal that, wouldn’t you know it in these late-model hustles, perfectly resembles the ur-villain of the conservative mind: liberals.

In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains.

Dear Fellow Conservative,

Do you know which special interest has given more money to the Obama and Clinton campaigns than any other?

If you guessed “trial lawyers”—well, okay, that’s too easy. But can you guess which special interest came in second?

Labor unions? Nope. The Green Lobby? Nope. AARP? Wrong, again. NEA? Nyet.

Give up? Okay, here’s the answer: Wall Street.

That’s right. According to CNNMoney.com, Wall Street securities and investment firms have given over $35 million to Democratic candidates this election cycle. . . . If you’ve been wondering why the financial industry has been in meltdown—and taking your 401(k) or investment portfolio down with it—now you know.

Let’s face it: The former frat boys who populate Wall Street today understand economics about as well as the pinko professors whose courses they snored through. . . . Trusting them with your money is like trusting Bill Clinton to babysit your underage niece.

But I know someone you can trust to manage your investments. . . . His name is Dr. Mark Skousen—that’s “Dr.” as in “Ph.D. in Economics and Monetary History,” something you don’t get by playing Beer Pong with your frat buddies. For the past 28 years, subscribers to his investment newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies, have profited enormously from his uncanny ability to predict major market trends before they happen. . . .

For instance: In the early ’80s, Dr. Skousen predicted that “Reaganomics will work” and said “a long decade of profits is coming.” . . .

The “bottom line,” as they say? Don’t let the Democrats run the country. And don’t let Wall Street frat boys manage your investments. Do it yourself, with the genuinely expert guidance of freedom-loving economist Mark Skousen in Forecasts & Strategies.

Click here to learn more.

That letter is signed by Ann Coulter—and, truth be told, it reads like she wrote it. It is a perfect portrait of the nether region of the right-wing con, figure (politics) trading places with ground (commerce) a dizzying dozen times over in the space of just these several paragraphs. There is the bizarre linguistic operation that turns “liberal” (or, in Coulterese, “pinko”) into a merely opportunistic synonym for “stuff you don’t like.” There’s the sloganeering alchemy that conflates political and economic magical thinking (“freedom”!). There’s shorthand invocation of Reagan hagiography. And then, presto: The suggestible readers on the receiving end of Coulter’s come-on are meant to realize that they are holding the abracadabra solution to every human dilemma (vote out the Democrats—oh, and also, subscribe to Mark Skousen’s newsletter for investors, while you’re at it).

There’s a kind of mystic wingnut great-circle-of-life aura to this stuff. Mark Skousen, a Mormon, is the nephew of W. Cleon Skousen, author of the legendarily bizarre Birchite tract The Naked Communist, which claimed to have exposed the secret forty-five-point plan by which the Soviet Union hoped to take over the United States government. (Among the sinister aims laid out in the document: gain control of all student newspapers; “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”) Upon its publication in 1958 (it was republished in 2007 as an ebook), the president of the Church of Latter-day Saints, David O. McKay, recommended that all members read it. Mark Skousen is also author of a book called Investing in One Lesson, which cribs its title from the libertarian tract Economics in One Lesson, distributed free by conservative organizations in the millions in the fifties, sixties, and seventies (Reagan was a fan). He founded an annual Las Vegas convention called “FreedomFest”—2012 keynoters: Steve Forbes, Grover Norquist, Charles Murray, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey—which advertises itself as “the world’s largest gathering of right-wing minds.” This event points to another signal facet of the conservative movement’s long con: convincing its acolytes that they are the true intellectuals, that anyone to their left is the merest cognitive pretender. (“Will this 3 Minute Video Change Your Life?” you can read on FreedomFest’s website. Because three-minute videos are how intellectuals roll. Click here to learn more.)

The oilfield in the placenta is another perfect mélange of right-wing ideology and a right-wing money con. It begins with a signal ideological lie: that stem-cell research represents an outrage against the right to life (but the cultivation of embryos for in vitro fertilization does not). It then pulls the mark along with the right-wing fantasy that energy independence is only one miraculous technological breakthrough away (but the development of already existing alternative energy sources doesn’t count as one of those breakthroughs). It all makes its own sort of internally coherent sense when you consider the salesman: James Dale Davidson is a founder of the National Taxpayers Union, a Richard Mellon Scaife–funded enterprise that gave Grover Norquist his start as a professional conservative.Davidson himself is a producer of Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster. “There is overwhelming evidence that Foster was murdered,” he told the Washington Post. “They obviously have reasons they don’t want this to come out . . . obviously there’s something big they’re trying to protect.”

Of course, the childlike appeals won’t work their full magic without the invocation of the conservative movement’s childlike heroes. The Gipper appears in another splendid specimen received by Human Events readers—which is appropriate, because Human Events is where Reagan himself got a lot of the made-up stuff he spouted across his entire political career. “When President Ronald Reagan got cancer during his presidency,” this one begins, “the great German doctor Hans Nieper, M.D., treated him. It would have been frontpage news if it hadn’t been hushed up at the time.” (“German doctors ‘cook’ cancer out of your body while you nap!”) “Many American cancer patients lose their hair and their vitality. But Reagan kept his famous pompadour hairstyle. He also kept his warm smile and vigorous style.” (“CLICK HERE to request German Cancer Breathrough: A Guide to Top German Alternative Clinics.”) “Reagan lived for another 19 years. He died at age 93, and not from cancer.” (“Fortunately, as a journalist I’m protected by the First Amendment. I can tell you the truth without having to risk persecution from the authorities.”)

Miracle cures, get-rich-quick schemes, murderous liberals, the mystic magic mirage of a world without taxes, those weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden somewhere in the Syrian desert—only connect.

Untruth and Consequences

And what of Willard M. Romney’s part in the game? There’s a lot going on with Romney’s lying, not all of it related to his conservative identity; he was making things up as a habit, after all, back when he was a Massachusetts moderate. To a certain extent, Romney’s lies are explicable in just the way a lot of pundits are explaining them. When you’ve been all over the map ideologically, and you’re selling yourself to a party now built on extremist ideological purity, it takes a lot of tale-telling to cover your back. But that doesn’t explain one overlooked proviso: these lies are as transparent to his Republican colleagues as they are to any other sentient being. Nor does it account for a still more curious fact—for all the objections that conservatives have aired over Romney’s suspect purity in these last months, not one prominent conservative has made Romney’s dishonesty part of the brief against him.

It’s time, in other words, to consider whether Romney’s fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts—but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant onAmerican Idol is supposed to sound.

In part the New York Times had it right, for as much as it’s worth: Romney’s prevarications are evidence of simple political hucksterism—“short, utterly false sound bites,” repeated “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” But the Times misses the bigger picture. Each constituent lie is an instance pointing to a larger, elaborately constructed “truth,” the one central to the right-wing appeal for generations: that liberalism is a species of madness—an esoteric cult of out-of-touch, Europe-besotted ivory tower elites—and conservatism is the creed of regular Americans and vouchsafes the eternal prosperity, security, and moral excellence of God’s chosen nation, which was doing just fine before Bolsheviks started gumming up the works.....