I used to think, “Hell, if you want to give away a million bucks for nothing, I’ll do nothing for $500,000. You can’t pass up that deal!” No takers, though.
Look, the rich guys who liked to spend money on conservative causes were indispensable to the movement, but they just needed to be as wise about the conservative groups they invested in as they were about their business decisions. They didn’t get rich in business pouring money into bottomless pits without a strategy nor any accountability, yet that’s what they did when they handed over huge stacks of cash to folks whose only demonstrated competence was in the fine art of failure.
There was this vast array of Republican—not necessarily conservative—consultants, institutes, publications, and other scams devoted to separating rich conservatives from their dough. Most of them fought real conservatives until they saw we were winning. Then they acted like they had been with us every step of the way. I remembered who had been there from the beginning, but some donors forgot. They got hosed; I got my payback.
I tried to tell people in my circles that they needed to think about what they were doing and how they were spending their money. The movement was about more than some huckster’s new Mercedes.
Using money effectively takes thought—it’s easy to write a big check but hard to write a bunch of little ones. We made the effort. When it came to giving, we started by thinking small. The Internet as we know it was less than 20 years old when Obama was reelected, and social media was still a new thing. We were just discovering how it could work, how it could be used to link and coordinate and motivate people for action.
But a lot of wealthy donors didn’t pay attention to it—you didn’t get rich blogging or tweeting or Facebooking or Tumblring. So they didn’t see them as important. But they were important to real people—you know, the kind who actually vote?
There were zillions of regular conservatives promoting conservatism with those tools, and none of them had any money. We wondered what the most talented ones could do with a few bucks, and that guided our microgiving.
Now, you could write some guy a $750,000 check after a flashy Holo-PowerPoint presentation—well, back then it was just 2D PowerPoint, but you know what I mean—about how his software was going to revolutionize get-out-the-vote efforts and get a big, fat goose egg. On the other hand, you could get one of your minions to parcel out 10 grand at a time, which was real money to starving Internet activists, to find would-be investigative journalists to go and get video of liberals messing up.
Remember ACORN? For a small investment in a pimp suit, a couple young conservatives took out a huge arm of the Democratic Party. That pimp suit is now on display in the Stringer Hall of Modern American Political History at the Smithsonian, by the way.
How about hiring a few young attorneys? The market was saturated and young ones with a lot of energy, but not much experience, were willing to work all night for nearly nothing just to get into a courtroom. Unleashing the ambulance chasers was the modern equivalent of releasing the hounds.
You would weigh costs versus benefits in your business life, but we did it in our conservative giving. Sure, most of these microgrants didn’t generate any value. As in all areas of human endeavor, most ideas were crap. But some weren’t, and the value to the movement far exceeded our relatively paltry investment. Plus we were training these folks, letting them get experience. As they got better, they could do more damage to progressivism down the road.
See, notice how I called it an “investment”? I expected a return on investment. For the price of one big failure, a single rich guy could energize scores of young, eager conservatives who wanted to use new media to carry the fight to the enemy. Keep in mind that, unlike the consultants, these were true believers. You gave them some seed money to buy a decent laptop or a working camera, and they would more than match your money with their own sweat equity.
With them, it was like lighting a fuse. With the consultants, it was filling up their gas tank, and when the tank ran dry the car got parked in the garage. We leveraged the dedication, creativity, and initiative of these conservative activists. That was a savvy play.
Second, after thinking smaller, we started thinking bigger. We asked ourselves why we should toss another chunk of change into some obscure magazine read only by a bunch of bow tie–wearing weenies? The National Review, Weekly Standard, and American Spectator are all useful and essential, and they needed money—which we gave—but how much use was some in-house compendium of think tank fellows’ scribbling? Sure, I know I loved to catch up on what some otherwise unemployable Georgetown political science grad thought about urban housing policy. Who didn’t? Well, pretty much everyone.
The conservative movement didn’t need more venues for pointless pontificating by sexless policy nerds—that’s what we called them then, nerds. Instead, the movement needed to communicate conservative values and conservative solutions to real people who actually voted, not people who loved to sit around and trade about DC bar gossip.
We decided to dive into general interest publications, the ones real people read—especially women, who were being fed this endless stream of liberal propaganda. We made offers to buy women’s magazines like Redbook and Cosmopolitan that you would see at the supermarket checkout stands back then. They would have these ridiculous articles like “Summer Beach Bikini Secrets for the Busy Mom” or “10 Super-Sexy Ways to Please Your Man… Including One That Requires a Vacuum Cleaner!” but in between was this default liberal fluff. We wanted to insert our own conservative fluff.
The big magazines wouldn’t sell out to us because we were conservative. They should have—they’re all bankrupt now, and their names live on as websites after being auctioned by their bankruptcy trustees.
We bought some of the smaller ones whose owners weren’t as lockstep liberal and who wanted to get a few bucks out ahead of the industry’s final death throes. Others we bought through front companies to hide our identities.
I made no bones about “editorial independence”—we put solid conservatives at the wheel. Soon, you’d see things like a profile of a conservative woman politician that didn’t treat her like someone Hitler would tell to chill out.
We’d offer some practical personal safety hints for women—like how to buy the right handgun. Boy, that freaked people out, but regular women had never seen that side of things before—they came expecting recipes and celebrity gossip and got a fresh perspective, a conservative perspective, painlessly and without fanfare. Sure, the liberal political rags were in a tizzy at us usurping their dominance, but the women weren’t reading those liberal magazines!
We didn’t sell it as overt conservatism—why turn off our audience by being overt? Instead, we made huge gains off of “good government” exposés on how bureaucrats squandered the money the readers’ families paid in taxes. We’d even wedge in an occasional piece on a woman who didn’t like abortion. You’d never see that reading Woman’s Day.
We also bought men’s magazines, and we irritated some on our side by keeping the photos of sexy starlets cavorting in lingerie. Conservative men like hot women, and they’re proud of it. We just added some conservative content. Our men’s mags loved to profile hard-core studs—SEALs, football players, and that sort of thing. To that we’d add some explicit coverage of their largely conservative views—there are not a lot of progressive SEALs. Badassary and liberalism are, after all, mutually exclusive.
But why stop at magazines? We began to think even bigger. How about a video network?