 I'd like to first of all thank the doctors Hapa for inviting me back to do this again. I was thinking earlier that Joe Biden had said that it was the Russians fault for all the inflation in America and now Dr. Hapa has confirmed that it is indeed the Russians fault. So we can say that Hapa and Biden are, you know, right, right together. Yeah. So this will be, I've got this terribly sweet spot in between Sean Gabb and lunch and mine will be, my talk will be a little bit different. It's called Movements Become Rackets and it was inspired by a gentleman that I studied under Murray Rothbart and few people in the room maybe had the pleasure of meeting Murray or working with Murray but he wrote a memo to F.A. Harper and George Reich, a resh, entitled What Is To Be Done and a few of us know George. George, we used to call George to buy coins from George when he worked for Bert Blumert. So it is indeed a small world but my story with Movements Become Rackets begins not with what Murray talked about which we'll get to later but I want to start with the one of our favorite organizations of people in this room I'm sure the Southern Poverty Law Center. Now, Maurice Dees was a super salesman and a master fundraiser and he's the gentleman started Southern Poverty Law Center. He viewed civil rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible northern liberals out of their money. He told a reporter we just run our business like a business. Whatever you're selling cakes or causes it's all the same. So while he was studying at the University of Alabama in late 1950s and oh by the way a few of you will remember a certain year when a certain couple were married at this certain conference and there was a gentleman here by the name of John Denson who actually went to law school with Maurice Dees and he told me he confirmed all of what I'm about to tell you is that during law school Dees sold Holy Reese birthday cakes, published a student telephone directory, dabbled in real estate. He was just a I don't know how much law he learned but he certainly was a very entrepreneurial force at the University of Alabama Law School. So upon graduating in 1960, Dees teamed up with another gentleman named Miller Fuller and he went on to form Habitat for Humanity. But first they opened a direct mail business in Montgomery. They sold doormats, tractor seat cushions. I don't know when the last time you bought a tractor seat cushion but cookbooks. And he said he's quoted to say and Morris and I from the first day of our partnership shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. So in 1971, Dees opened the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama and he was already colorful and controversial in that part of the state. He volunteered to raise money for George McGovern and this was his first break. During that presidential campaign with McGovern's blessing, he was given a mail list of 700,000 people and that was to help launch the Southern Poverty Law Center direct mail operations. Having been somewhat in the business, I can tell you having a big mail mailing list is the key to raising a lot of money. But you may you may think Southern Poverty Law Center, now that means these guys are now they're helping poor people out who are having trouble in the legal system, right? Well, that didn't raise much money. So they abandoned the whole property law thing to raise money off fighting the Ku Klux Klan and getting money from liberals up north. So they dropped the Southern the Poverty Center. They stayed in the south, forgot poverty and went into the hate business, essentially. Now the center had accumulated an endowment topping $120 million and they paid leverage salaries to high-ranking staffers and while at the same time spending far less than most non-profit groups on the work that it claimed to do. At the same time, D's, he started earning a reputation for hitting on young female staffers. That is a hint for things to come throughout this presentation hitting on young female staffers. So in fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center College used to tell jokes that about when they would they would go by the center's Maya Len designed memorial to Southern Rights martyrs. They cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King etched in black marble until justice rolls down like waters, except they would say in their deepest voices until justice rolls down like dollars. Now Law Center was had a way of turning idealists into cynics like most liberals their view of the SL or the SPLC before they arrived to been shaped by the often cited listings of U.S. hate groups that Southern Poverty Law used to put out its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan nations and a stream of direct mail please for money to keep the good work going. The Mailers in particular painted a vivid picture of scrappy band of intrepid lawyers and hate group monitors working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. But this all took place in downtown Montgomery, Alabama. In this modernist glass and steel building that James Howard Kunstner who you may have read if you read Lerocwell.com he later called it the Darth Vader building which made social justice look despotic he said and of course there was security everywhere and in fact one veteran staffer told a writer for the New Yorker who worked there briefly a guy named Bob Mosier, well honey welcome to Bob Poverty Palace she called it I can guarantee you that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live. Now Mosier wrote in the New Yorker after he'd worked at SPLC the work could be meaningful and gratifying but it was hard for many of us not to feel like we'd become pawns in what was in many respects a highly profitable scam and as profitable it was it was before well when Donna and Melania came gliding down that escalator in 2015 the money really started rolling in because as you know everybody knows when Donald took office it was you know Hada Palooza in you know United States and it opened up the gusher of donations for the Southern Poverty Law Center they raised $50 million in 2016 they took in $132 million in 2017 and the new money pushed the Center's endowment past $450 million which is more than the total assets of the American Civil Liberties Union and in 2019 they employed an all-time high of 350 staffers now having been in Montgomery, Alabama in the afternoon I can tell you that seems like the whole downtown area it's 350 people but none of this is slackened it's constant drive for more money if you're outraged about the path of president that the path President Trump is taking I urge you to join us to fight against the mainstreaming of hate said one of their direct mail appeals signed by Morris D's in 2018 please join our fight today with the gift of 25 35 or a hundred dollars to help us working together we can push back against these bigots unfortunately at age 82 the we2 movement caught up with Morris D's and he got canned for he continued to hit on female staff members but the work goes on the annual hate group list of which there are some groups that people in this room would know about in fact in 2018 I had included a thousand and twenty organizations in the United States both large and small and this list remains a valuable resources for journalists and it's a master stroke of D's marketing talent each year when the Center publishes the mainstream outlets write about the rising tide of hate in the United States that have been discovered by the Southern Poverty Law Center attorneys and so the money just keeps rolling in well it's not just the left that has this going on we've got it on the right maybe you've heard of Hillsdale College maybe some people in the room have sent money to Hillsdale College they send out this Empress thing and you know everybody got one and the guy that really got that geared up was guy named George Roach the third he's considered one of the great fundraisers in the history of political ideologies he raised millions to build modern facilities provide ample student aid to any of Hillsdale's 1200 students who needed it and if you didn't see Roach on campus everybody knew they understood he was out raising money to beat back the liberal devils lurking outside of Hillsdale's gates it's very charismatic he was considered a conservative celebrity and a hero to the movement fact William Muth Buckley called Hillsdale the most prominent conservative college in the country but one Hillsdale professor said this man is a phony and a fraud and a Roach family member explains he's not the type of person that everybody thinks he is he's kind of like Jekyll and Hyde he also had a reputation for and this is a direct quote a reputation for from for possessing a free range phallus rumor to have visited students and college employees a free range phallus a senior level employee who marveled at Roach's fundraising skilled claims to have fled Hillsdale because he suspected Roach was put into moves on his wife Roach was considered downright ruthless by those who were unfortunate enough to cross him now ultimately George Roach the third he shocked Hillsdale by divorcing his wife of 44 years she had cancer got divorced he remarried in just five months and that's where the story gets really interesting his daughter-in-law Lisa was married to George the fourth who was a professor at Hillsdale so this was all a big family business so to speak she was very disturbed by the presence of a new woman in her father-in-law's life Roach was hospitalized with complications from diabetes and he was and his distraught daughter-in-law Lisa threatened to kill herself in a phone call conversation with him so the older Roach's secretary interrupted a class taught by the younger Roach his son and told him what was going on so the younger Roach George the fourth rushed to his wife Lisa she's obviously upset she didn't care what her husband thought she insisted to go in to see her father-in-law who was in the hospital where in front of him George the third his son George the fourth and his new wife she blurted out that she and her father-in-law had been having an affair for 19 years which the son then asked the father George the fourth asked George the third is she telling the truth or she having some sort of breakdown and the younger Roach said his father didn't say a word I could tell by looking at him that she was telling the truth I saw that look in his eyes he was caught Lisa the upset daughter-in-law as you remember returned to her campus house after the confession armed herself with a 38 caliber handgun she walked out her backyard and through the college's Arbiterne to a stone gazebo and killed herself now Hillsdale's trustees they thought George walked on water I mean in in other words he could do whatever the hell he wanted as long as he didn't embarrass the school but having a 19 year affair with your daughter-in-law and having her commit suicide when became public that was too much for them to take but Roach had hauled in nearly 325 million dollars by the time he had resigned he increased Hillsdale's endowment from four million dollars to 184 million dollars students and their parents were worried the scandal might cause donations to drop that it was crimp Hillsdale's future hasn't really happened Roach resigned after the lever suicide and a remember a member of the Roach family said that the elder Roach is golden parachute was three million dollars of course these days Hillsdale's making news by cozying up to Florida governor Ron DeSantis their Christian school has been described as a citadel of American conservatism Donald Trump has connections there Ted Cruz and Clarence Thomas have given commencement addresses and the school has started a series of leadership seminars that sound like right wing Ted talks Hillsdale is also a champion of what it calls patriotic education and that brings us to what Murray Rothbard was writing about and this memo has been reprinted in a book called strictly confidential published by the Mises Institute and it's probably all still strictly confidential because we can barely give the book away so but so you can probably get it cheap somewhere but there's some fascinating things in there so Murray was writing a memo to Baldy Harper and George Reich and he was talking about fee founder Leonard Reed which I'm sure you've maybe heard of if you've been in the freedom movement for very long he was handsome charismatic but in Rothbard's words Reed was hardly appreciative of scholarship or of the conditions of free inquiry and research Reed stifled the scholarly and creative productivity of anyone on his staff instead the fee founder increasingly pitched fee publications toward housewives rather than scholars which immediately tossed away the importance of the pyramid of influence from intellectual to mass so speaking of housewives mr. Reed who again was remembered as a giant in the libertarian movement is also known for his prurient interest in housewives Brian Dougherty wrote in radicals for capitalism Sean you don't need to take notes Brian Dougherty wrote in rattles for capitalism that reads sexual exploits were allegedly on par with will chamberlands now I realize there's very few here from the states but will was a very famous basketball player they called him wilted still kind of now realize what the still man anyway wilt reportedly bedded 10,000 different women so the idea that Leonard Reed is in the same ballpark as will chamberland is incredible now Murray was a little more delicate he was telling Harper and Reich quote pure libertarian thought was not only discouraged by Reed but bitterly attacked and Dorothy explained that Reed just wanted to offer his own way of understanding the freedom philosophy in more of a preacher rather than teacher sort of way and in this in this regard the approach attracted businessmen who could proselytize to their employees but what Reed did best was raise money while catering to what Rothbard called the high school of liberty now Murray wrote to Harper and Reich it is the thesis of this memorandum that the problem of tactics and strategy for advancement of libertarian individualist costs is of critical crossroads a crossroads in the historical development of the stream of thought transcending even the important problems of establishing a possible libertarian Institute or of deciding how to rechannel educational funds from various blind allies into which they have fallen the fee literature and sticking to general that general general alities and low-grade generalities that that fell between two stools and therefore has lost influence among both intellectuals and among the mass base now Rothbard was in his mid 30s when he wrote this and he's more concerned with such thinking in the Harper Rush memo he wrote the danger is less apparent and more insidious for it is the danger of the hardcore libertarian being swamped by a growing mass of conservative and right-wing thinkers Reed rationalized the processes of one of training libertarians and then sending them off to do better things thus functioning as a high school of liberty he thus ignores the fact that it could have been a lot more wrote Murray Rothbard wrote that fee served only as a gateway to the libertarian movement and not a libertarian center let alone scholars forming a libertarian cadre Rothbard also addressed the influence of the right the transformation led by the theoreticians of the national review has transformed the right from a movement that at least roughly believe first of all in individual liberty and its corollary civil liberties domestically and peace and isolation in or in foreign affairs into movement that on the whole is opposed to individual liberty a movement that in fact glorifies total war and the suppression of civil liberties it also glorifies monarchy imperialism polite racism and a unity of church and state unquote now from fees launched in March 1946 to the early 1980s Leonard Reed generated a million dollars a year from some of America's biggest businessmen now a million dollars a year doesn't sound like much but if you inflation adjusted that means in 46 he raised the equivalent of 13.8 million dollars 1980 had been 3.4 million dollars and you can kind of in your head fill in the blanks in between and it added up to a whole lot of money that Leonard Reed was able to raise creating content for as Murray says for housewives more Rothbard finished the section of the memo entitled the decline of fee with another danger with the history of fee and other right-wing organization tells us the tendency for the fellow who can obtain money to be in control of policy and the corollary tendency to begin to trim the output of the organization to what will attract the money when the latter happens the gathering of money becomes the end not the means and the organization organization begins to take on the dimension of a racket Morris D's George Roche Leonard Reed provided proved that Murray was right movements ultimately become rackets thank you