THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Back in 1974, a far leftist of the Marxist The Nation Magazine wrote a book called "Middle American Radicals" (MARs). He abruptly decided that America's REAL potential revolutionaries were not the standard ghetto classes but the WALLACE voter types.

I ex and I met with this man in DC. His name was Donald I. Warren. His book was covered by The Nation at http://www.thenation.com/archive/detail/11120221.

The Nation saw Warren was right in 1980 when that "Wallace vote" everybody despised became "Reagan Democrats" who everybody knew all along were the key to conservative success in the 1980 election. What kind of Big Money and Secret Conspiracy was behind the destruction of their beloved Soviet Empire?

Like today's fanatical anti-Semites and Jews, both Communists and anti-Communists had one conviction: Communists were an unstoppable power. The John Birch Society said the whole world was run from Moscow.

On the right, there was the massive weeping that "All is Lost!"

Sound familiar?

The only real counter to Communist World Conquest said the Birchers and other anti-Communists, was to concentrate on EXPOSING them to the world. We simply could not do anything if the media stayed in leftist hands.

Sound familiar?

The reason we met with Donald I. Warren was because his sudden realization was stated in the very first lines of his book. It began with the joint march of thousands of working people who paid for and organized their own charter buses from Boston, West Virginia and Louisville.

What made it special was not just that they organized themselves at the REAL grassroots and were not herded in by the standard well-financed leftist outfits, but, more important, it was a JOINT march.

Some were anti-busing, some were protesting filthy textbooks. But they were UNITED in a march against the Education Establishment.

Warren did not know that the people who conceived the idea, got that whole march going, and did ALL the publicity consisted of three people, two of whom were sitting at the table in DC with him.

The Populist Forum, me, my ex and a former newspaper man, had been denounced by the Communist World as "a heavily financed right-wing group." We never had a bank account. We never even incorporated. We did it all free.

You can read about us in my New Right Papers. We had already gone to Boston many times and did their press work. Same for West Virginia. Same for Louisville.

We had a magic formula. These were REALLY grassroots, REALLY working people. What they desperately needed was a political strategist and writer, a public relations, and a legal secretary like my wife to organize us.

The magic formula was this:

Our PR man would call up leaders in this movement and say, "What do YOU need?" Not "We are the John Birch Society and you can become part of our movement?"

And we DELIVERED. Suddenly they had people on THEIR side who could handle their Mommy Professor-trained critics and who CAREFULLY said ONLY what THEY wanted said. Every piece I wrote was thoroughly checked out by THEM first, though a lot of them just asked me to speak for them after a little experience with us. We held press conferences and insisted that THEY be the panel, not US.

We soon got calls from all over the place. I conceived the Independent Truckers' strike that blocked all the main bridges into Washington, and my press man rode with them. Soon my PR man was riding with Independent Truckers who were delivering supplies to the Farmers' Strike. The last time I was in West Virginia the van we were going to the airport with had to take a guy to the emergency room on the way because he had dislocated his fist on a man who walked by his picket sign.

And on and on and on.

So all I had to do was come with the joint march idea, and it happened.

Remember, all this time all three of us had, to say the least, full-time jobs.

No one else, right or left got what we were doing or offered any help. But we did not promote OURSELVES after the first couple of actions. The word got around. DOZENS of important protests the press had ignored rung my phone off the hook. We finally simply had to stop.

In other words, the entire MARs group got into contact with each other about US. We didn't theorize at them, we got in there. There is one rule nobody seems to understand:

In order for the word to spread, you have to have something THEY want to spread the word ABOUT.

THEN I wrote my first book about "Wallace Democrats."

THEN I became so famous a leader of the conservative-"Wallace vote" strategy that National Review had one senior editor write a rave review of my book called "READ THIS ONE!" and another senior editor write a cover article denouncing me, with Pat Buchanan, Kevin Phillips and their own co-founder and publisher as my toadies.

After our strategy worked in 1980, everybody at National Review said they had always been with us.

While the John Birch Society was EXPOSING THE ENEMY for thirty years, we were actually bringing them down in places the media had ignored.

Reagan would have lost the nomination AGAIN in 1980 if we hadn't laid the PRACTICAL framework.

This demonstrates how differently we may look at things. You probably see our blog as small. To me it a Titan compared to the tiny team with which I helped bring down the Soviet Empire.

A bullet in the right place can do more than a hydrogen bomb delivered randomly.