Mailed It

The so called Southern Poverty Law Center just settled a defamation lawsuit for $3.7 million smackers. As noted in a previous post, the SPLC may face further defamation suits. Inshallah. SPLC founder and bagman* Morris Dees is better described as a direct-mail marketing genius.

As it happens we know something about direct-mail marketing.

In the fall of 1999 we got a call back from one of our resume submissions, a direct mail marketing firm in Northern Virginia that liked the writing sample we submitted.**

We started the day after the Yankees won the 1999 World Series.

For the next year we wrote direct-mail fundraising letters for a bunch of second tier conservative organizations***

Basically, as does Dees, so did we. We wrote letters to scare the daylights out of people and get them to send money. Behold:

I'm writing you today, Mr. Flores, becuase without your $100 contribution to REDACTED Bill Clinton is going to let the UN bang down your door in the middle of the night and take away your guns...

And:

I hope your sitting down Mr. Carmichael becuase you're not going to believe what Bill Clinton is about to do. Did you know that at the end of the year Bill Clinton is going to turn the Panama Canal over to the corrupt, drug cartel dominated Panamanian government. I don't have to tell you, Mr. Carmichael, that the Panama Canal is the strategic lynchpin of our hemispheric defense. Which is why I'm hoping for your urgently needed $100 contribution to the REDACTED

Mailers usually included a four page letter at the end of which was some kind of 'involvement device', a form to fill out, an envelope, maybe a stamp. Our goal was to make the addressee feel like they had to take some kind of concrete action and that they were really participating in the fight against whomever the enemy was.

Once a person sent a check, we hit them up again and again.

If 5% of the addressees opened the mailer we were happy.

*I am begging you to file suit, Morris Dees. Begging you.
**A questionnaire on New York past and present we sent to Hillary Clinton's Senatorial campaign. Recall we are from New York. Sample: Robin Ventura is A-the Governor of Minnesota, B-a player on the NYSE, C- Third baseman for the Mets.... 
***One was involved in an important supreme court case and I'll send a free copy of the book of their choice to the person who gets it in the comments first.

The Bell Tolls for the SPLC...

Via PJM, this is a great idea:

No fewer than 60 organizations branded "hate groups" or otherwise attacked by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) are considering legal action against the left-wing smear factory, a Christian legal nonprofit leader confirmed to PJ Media on Tuesday. He suggested that the $3 million settlement and apology the SPLC gave to Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam Foundation on Monday would encourage further legal action.

Ken White at Popehat says:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has surrendered, completely and unconditionally, in the face of a threatened defamation lawsuit by British activist and politician Maajid Nawaz. That surrender includes a $3.375 million payment to Nawaz "to fund work fighting anti-Muslim bigotry and extremism" and prominent written and video apologies.

In other words Morris Dees, direct-mail fundraising pioneer and president of the SPLC knows he's screwed up royally.

Morris Dees* and his shysters have become a useful tool for the media, which likes to quote the direct-mail fundraising behemoth as the supreme arbiter of hate.

We've read a few sober, serious, and earnest conservative lawyer types who worry about the 'chilling effect' the SPLC's apology and payout will have on speech.** They miss the point entirely. 

The United States is fighting a cold civil war***. The only thing that matters is enemy scalps and the SPLC would make a nice one. We can't think of a more deserving organization.

You just can't reason with people like the SPLC.

Sue them back into the Stone Age, bounce the rubble, and then sue that.

*Go ahead and sue me Dees, I'm begging you.

**We mean that un-ironically.

***One in three chance it goes hot in the next decade.

Poverty This

Hotair tells us that the Southern Poverty Law Center has to pony-up $3.7 million big ones:

The Southern Poverty Law Center has made an apology and agreed to a $3.3 million settlement in a lawsuit over its “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists.” When the Field Guide was published in 2016 it included the name of Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim who runs the Quilliam Foundation.

Don't feel bad for the shysters at the SPLC.* They have an endowment of over $300 dollars. For them this is a  modest payoff. The SPLC is in fact, a highly successful direct mail marketing operations and its founder, Morris Dees is in the direct marketing hall of fame.

The whole direct mail marketing idea was come up with my one Richard Viguerie, who realized in the early 70s that there was no law against politicians writing people and begging them for money.

Morris Dees at the SPLC has mastered the art of direct mail fundraising, which is basically to scare the wits or out of or anger whomever is reading the letter into sending you a check.

As it happens we wrote direct mail fund raising letters for a year. They began something like this:

I'm writing you Mr. Feldercarb becuase without your donation to Americans for all things American, America will become communist.

You people think we're kidding, but that's what we wrote.

So the SPLC's hyper-excitement about Trump unleashing the next race war makes sense. How else to get little old ladies to send money?

 *Oh go ahead and sue me, Dees. I dare you.