THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

I was astonished that Ventura discussed the Green Movement as a way of making money. Introducing that idea, that "idealism" is an industry, was what I introduced in my first book in 1976. Today you cannot believe how totally naive EVERYBODY was about that in 1976.

Left or right, everybody took it for granted that the only profit motive was in the military-industrial complex. The right accused the left of many things, but NEVER of greed.

A third of a century later, Ventura can use this concept of the Greens as a money and power force without any surprise on anybody's part.

You would be astonished how this was greeted in 1976. As I said, it was the first time conservative commentators counted the NEA delegates to the Democratic Convention and saw them as financially interested in government decisions.

You could say that was my first mantra. The more I think about it now, the more I realize how similar it was to our mantra now. I was all by myself pushing it.

When the book came out, a lot of people, like the commentators at the conventions, were clearly aware of it for the first time. It was used all over the place. It was successful.

Then they went back to what they had been saying all along, exactly like the pros in the BNP or in the American movement forget our mantra.

It is one thing to be a professional and use the good old philosophy stuff, but something that hits hard can get you into trouble, precisely because it hits hard.

It is hard ball, and our side does not play hard ball. The left struck out at our New Right, a name they gave us to distinguish us from

Buckley's squishes, in a way they screamed about nobody else.

As I said, when our crowd came into Washington in 1981, the media didn't know any of us. At the 1980 Republican Convention a network followed an old liberal Republican around as he said he didn't know anybody.

But to the press, this just showed WE were out of step. Six months later, they still didn't know people who were taking over.

If you watched Return to the Future you will see that they had a cafe there that had Reagan and Khomeini arguing. Today all we talk about is Iran and Afghanistan. When I got into Stormfront, all they talked about was Iran. Today nobody REMEMBERS Khomeini.

While the whole right devoted itself to Khomeini and the Permanent Meat Shortage, I concentrated on the basic point that the more someone talks about Idealism, the more it is a cover for a bid for power and money. Buckley kept arguing respectfully with the left, saying they were just too darned Idealistic.

He was wildly proud to be allowed to associate with liberal icons like John Kenneth Galbraith.

It doesn't surprise me that it was Ventura who took my point on. He is a Minnesotan and a dedicated liberal. His Republican idol was Lowell Wicker, almost the last unabashed major liberal in the GOP. But he also got elected, so he knows what good staff work looks like. In a whole generation I hit this point so much that one wonders why my first book says such obvious things.

No one is allowed to ask it in the media, but I am sure a lot of people wonder how the Green can AFFORD those enormously expensive ships they send out against the Japanese.

Idealists for the poor don't spent months and years in costly boats with radar fighting a naval cold war.

But the vast sums of money the left has are one of what I call Public Secrets. The left is supported entirely by huge money donations.

But no one will note the fact that Ventura did not get ANY of the unbelieving reaction I did in 1976 when I accused Buckley's beloved liberals of going after power and money.

The ground has been sowed.

We are sowing ground now. When the crop comes up, it will be in an altered form and it will probably not be our professionals who reap the benefit. They will still be saying what they are saying now.

But when you get my age, you will get a lot more satisfaction from having planted the deep roots nobody races to you than in being one more repeater of lengthy doctrines everybody has heard a million times before.

In the real world, you can either have your name remembered or your IDEAS remembered. Very, very few can have both. I get the same satisfaction out of watching an offshoot like Ventura's Green Conspiracy that others get from having their names mentioned.

Most people want to be called by thrilled people who are honored to know them. The one time my picture appeared on the front page of the New York Times, I got all sorts of call congratulating me. I honestly could not have cared less, but it was a thrill for THEM.

Here again, there is a tradeoff. You can have fame OR power. Power is INFLUENCING the way the world goes. If you don't this stuff for a living it is very easy to confuse fame with power.

Money, fame and power tend to be described by the media as being in the same place. They report on fame, so they naturally try to make the famous powerful, just as a historian tries to trace everything to the Middle East where there are lots of records from dead civilizations.

I keep telling you that you should always ask WHY a piece of information was produced. In the professional media or in professional history, any place or any time, the least important motivation is abstract truth.