Rhetoric and Confrontation: How to Win a Public Fight
Remnant Review (Oct. 16, 2010)
I received this letter this week:
I just read your article about Ellen Brown's views on monetary economics, Cheerleader for Hitler's Economics.I agree with you in your opposition to the Greenback solution.
I also agree that Ellen's understanding of monetary economics contains some serious gaps, however, I know her personally to be a kind and gentle person.
I think if we are ever to achieve a free, equitable and harmonious society, it is essential that we not label people and lump them into categories, but conduct a civil dialog on specific points of difference. Rigid adherence to any ideology or dogma gets in the way of that.
I'm not intending to chastise you for anything, just encouraging you to apply your prodigious knowledge and intellectual powers to a collaborative process of generating solutions to our common problems.
As is the method of science, it is necessary to encourage all the express their ideas and subject them to comment and evaluation by their peers without any hint of personal attack or ideological rigidity.
Then I received this.
Ellen Brown has posted two responses to your article. In the SECOND of her responses, she addressed 31 of your 52 points, so it's not quite true to say that "She refuses to engage me on any of my 52 criticisms".The (undoubtedly correct) argument against Greenbackism needs to be put dispassionately and gently, without bluster, because Populist theory, it seems to me, always carries an emotional appeal which obfuscates clear reasoning. I realize that a man of your experience probably does not have much patience to do this, and I don't have a remedy, but I leave the suggestion with you FWIW. Kind regards, Richard
This is my response.
First, Ellen Brown is an economic ignoramus. Second, she is a faker. She thinks that accuracy is less important than selling lots of books. She said so in her responses. Third, she is the latest in a long line of Greenbacker inflationists going back well over a century. Fourth, she sells lots of books. Fifth, her ideas are dangerous. Sixth, most of her readers are simple people who cannot follow logic. Seventh, she is undermining the Tea Party. Eighth, hard-core Greenbackers are impervious to economic logic. Ninth, she will not be converted to the truth. Tenth, neither will other Greenbackers. Eleventh, my goal is to persuade fence-sitters that any reliance on her her book is dangerous. Twelfth, a rhetorically hard-nosed attack draws attention. Low-key debate doesn't. Thirteenth, my goal is to destroy her credibility, not persuade her to change her ideas. Fourteenth, I have developed skills of hard-nosed rhetoric that most people do not have. I am therefore the one to take her on. Fifteenth, no one else did . . . not in four years.
Having said all this, I think it is time for me to go into detail about how to conduct an intellectual battle.
I began reviewing books for the Riverside Press-Enterprise in 1965. I learned the use of rhetoric there. I was a hostile reviewer from time to time.
I took on Gertrude Coogan in 1965, although I did not publish this until 1973.
My first book, Marx's Religion of Revolution, was published in 1968. I was still in graduate school at the time. In those days, it was considered bad form to go public with the message that Karl Marx was a fraud. Almost no one knew the extent to which he was a fraud. They did not know that he was rich, and that he twice squandered a fortune in the stock market. He was a lifetime beggar, and he lived off of the charity of Friedrich Engels from 1844 to his death in 1883, except for those brief periods in which he was rich. None of this was known at the time, except to a few scholars, yet I did not gain a job offer from any college or university because I had exposed the truth.
When a person in academia takes on a sacred cow, meaning an academic sacred cow, he is supposed to be very gentle verbally. He is not supposed to say that the sacred cow is a fraud. He is not supposed to say that someone who has gained wide acceptance or least credibility within the academic community was a fraud from day one. He is not supposed to say that the man's ideas were completely inconsistent, that he lived a debauched life, or that he was a failure.
One person who did this was the historian Paul Johnson. He wrote a magnificent book, Intellectuals. It was a case-by-case study of intellectual sacred cows. They regarded themselves as intellectual leaders, and so did other intellectuals. In fact, almost to a man, they were incompetent in their own lives, and anyone who paid any attention to what they said revealed that he had no ability to identify a fraud. Johnson had been widely acclaimed prior to the publication of this book, but he received a lot of flak because he wrote it.
People believe that authors are to be kind, friendly, non-combative, polite, and all around good fellows when we are challenging people who are dangerous. These are people who would have recommended that critics treat Adolf Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao with great respect, and great politeness. I would have recommended that too, but only for those people who lived under the jurisdiction of those murderous moral monsters. But, for anyone outside of their jurisdiction, the correct approach would have been to identify them as the monsters that they really were.
Hitler became fair game after 1939, but Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were all treated with great respect by the academic community in their academic books until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yes, the academic critics might make a few cautious remarks about a certain degree of nondemocratic practices in the nations governed by these monsters. But it was considered extremely bad taste to mention that Stalin executed 30 million Russians. It was even worse taste to mention that Mao executed 60 million Chinese. One careful scholar who pointed out the fact that Stalin killed 20,000,000 to 30,000,000 Russians was Robert Conquest. He was not taken seriously for 30 years. Then, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when historians got into the archives, they discovered that Conquest had been remarkably accurate in his assessment. The academic community did not apologize to Conquest, nor does it ever apologize to anyone else who tells the truth, and tells him forcefully, during the period in which academia is fawning over the target of the critic.
I realized what was up by the time I was 18 years old. In my freshman year of college, I perceived what the name of the game was. We were to deal with kid gloves when discussing Communists. We could criticize them for not being democratic, but we could not criticize them for being socialists, tyrants, executioners, and intellectual lightweights. That would have called into question the obsequious behavior of our professors.
So, I learned how to use rhetoric. I learned that, in classroom situations, I had to be very judicious in pointing out the errors of moral monsters. My criticism had to be restrained verbally, and it had to based on facts that had been accepted by important scholars or important academic institutions. I was allowed to footnote other academic critics, but I was not supposed to come up with any new critical ideas of my own.
As I grew older, I found that I appreciated the writings of critics who are outside of academic. I liked John T. Flynn. I liked other conservative authors who were ready to call a spade a spade. I began to appreciate the use of ridicule, because things that are ridiculous should be ridiculed. I did not know that this concept had been articulated by Augustine in The City of God (Book 18, ch. 40). I learned that much later.
I also learned from reading him that that Karl Marx was a master of vitriolic rhetoric. That taught me something important: if you want to change the world, you would be wise not to imitate the academicians who fawned over the world-changers, but did not have the guts to put their reputations on the line and verbally go after their opponents hammer and tong.
As I developed my writing skills, I began to develop the skill of vitriolic rhetoric. Some people are real masters of this. In our day, the best ones use humor along with their savagery. Ann Coulter is a good example. Even funnier is Mark Steyn. If you want sheer humor, without any vitriolic, P. J. O'Roarke is your best example. One thing is certain, however: the targets of their rhetoric are made very uncomfortable. They are exposed as charlatans, and nobody really likes that to happen to him.
I must admit that within the academic Christian community, I have probably gained the reputation as being a vitriolic fellow. Over 20 years ago, the magazine Christianity Today did a negative article on me, Greg Bahnsen, and others associated with us. The magazine ran a cartoon of me. I was holding a long, old-fashioned pen, the kind you dip into an ink well. The cartoonist did not know was that R. J. Rushdoony actually wrote with such a pen. The cartoonist had me holding it as if I were a medieval knight, using the pen as a lance. The pen was dripping blood. I really liked that cartoon.
A public figure must learn to persuade an audience. If he wants to be in the persuasion business, he must learn what moves a particular audience in a particular setting. Sometimes this may be humor; other times it may be a sense of moral outrage. In other cases, it may be a kind of academic exercise, with lots of footnotes and no inflammatory adjectives. The goal is to win the debate. The goal is to persuade your readers or your listeners that the person you are criticizing has no legs to stand on.
When it comes to rhetoric, the old phrase, "one size fits all," is inaccurate. You must adopt specific forms of rhetoric for specific audiences in specific settings.
When someone adopts harsh rhetoric, he rarely gets criticized by people who share his opinions of the victim. He gets criticized by strangers who have been in some way favorable toward the victim. The critic is assured that the rhetorical approach that he has taken is inappropriate. It is not quite fair. It will alienate thoughtful people. In other words, the critic has just savaged the victim's leader, and the victim feels threatened or violated because someone has exposed the person he trusted or believed as a charlatan, or an incompetent, or someone who is two bricks shy of a load.
When you criticize someone with followers, the followers recognize that, if you are correct, they have been sucked in. If they had been sucked in, then they must not be too bright, or at least they were not well enough informed to form a critical judgment which would have led them to identify their leader as someone not worth following. So, a criticism of the leader produces a particular response in the followers. They feel that there has been an attack on them personally. The critic is saying, loud and clear, that anyone who has followed this particular leader is not a good judge of character, intellect, or facts. They are quite correct. This is exactly what the critic is saying.
The critic, if he is a skilled master of rhetoric, knows well in advance that he will not persuade the target of his rhetoric. He also knows that he will not persuade more than a handful of the person's followers. They have invested too much emotional capital and possibly financial capital in the opinions of their leader. They do not understand the doctrine of sunk costs. They do not understand that it is better to abandon a sinking ship. They cling to the sinking ship because to do otherwise would be to admit to themselves that they got on board the Titanic. They are not about to admit this to themselves.
Then why adopt controversial rhetoric? Because the goal is not to persuade the target, which is basically impossible, nor is it to persuade his most dedicated followers. The goal is to alert people who have not yet made up their minds about the target that the target is not worth following. The goal is to persuade people who have not yet made up their minds.
Something in the range of 10% of the people who have heard about the target have decided that the target is a twit. On the other side, about 10% of the people think that the target has not yet walked on water, but is probably capable of doing so. The 80% in the middle are the people who matter.
There is another factor to consider. If the victim feels as though he has been publicly disemboweled, it will reduce his self-confidence. A leader without self-confidence is an ineffective leader, and probably will not maintain a leadership position for much longer. If you can psychologically devastate the opponent, then harsh rhetoric is called for. The goal is to undermine the person's leadership. This undermines the person's influence. If the person is promoting something that is morally evil or intellectually undependable or in some other way dangerous to people who are likely to be influenced in the future by this person, then anything you do to expose that person, assuming you do not tell lies about person, is valid.
Let me consider a recent case in question. Over a year ago, someone cracked or leaked the e-mail files of a group of academic charlatans who were promoting global warming. They were using their positions of academic authority to destroy the careers of their opponents. They lied. They cheated. They deliberately distorted the evidence. And then, without warning, somebody got into the files, downloaded the e-mails, and went public with them.
Whoever did it first approached the mainstream media. The mainstream media were not interested. So, whoever it was then posted the information in Russia. Because of the power of the Web, the information was all over the world in a matter of hours.
The timing of this, while not deliberate, was perfect. It was three weeks before the long-planned Copenhagen global warming meeting of the United Nations. At that meeting, the politicians of the world were determined to shove down the throats of voters a world program of central economic planning designed to undermine economic growth in the industrial nations. It was a plan that had been underway since the UN's Rio de Janeiro meeting in 1992. The insiders had orchestrated this 2009 meeting for years. Then, without warning, the entire proceedings were destroyed. Nobody wanted to be associated with these people or their plans, because of ridicule. It was not just that someone had exposed the immoral behavior that these academicians had gotten away with for years. It was that the whole world was laughing at them Derisive laughter was the deciding factor.
Whoever did the break-in save the world a great deal of pain. The global warming movement is now close to dead. One hacker/leaker and one effective post of the information single-handedly derailed a plan to regulate private industry all over the world. It helped people preserve their liberties.
My favorite incident associated with that UN meeting was the person who dressed up in a polar bear suit and wandered through the assembled delegates calling for Phil Jones. "Has anyone seen Phil Jones?"
Jones was the professor who was knee-deep in the academic charade. By then, he had lost his reputation. So had a number of people associated with them. The ridicule completely undermined his self-confidence. He was out of the fight. He is still out of the fight.
Only in the rarest of circumstances does anyone get an opportunity to undermine a worldwide movement of charlatans. It was not just they were charlatans; it was not they used their positions of academic influence to undermine the careers of their opponents. This is how academia works. It seems to be polite, non-rhetorical, and willing to conduct all battles aboveboard. That has always been fraudulent, and it has been effective in the past.
I find it interesting that, at the most recent Bilderberg meeting, one of the discussion forums was on global cooling. These fellows understand a worldwide change of opinion. There are a lot more concerned about a worldwide change in opinion than they are about worldwide climate change. They are interested in centralizing political power, and they understand that fear is the best way to do this. So, they do what they can to create crises, or a sense of crisis, so as to gain political cooperation. They usually are successful in this, but they have suffered a major setback in the area of climate change. The release of the emails undermined at least 25 years of planning.
I have more experience than most people in the area of rhetorical confrontation on paper. I have honed my skills for over 45 years in the area of confrontational rhetoric. As with any other skill, you have to stay in practice if you want to retain the skill. So, every once in a while, I go after somebody who really does deserve a public thrashing.
Whenever I do, I can expect letters from mild-mannered people who have never been in a verbal battle, and who have no understanding of what it takes to win a verbal battle. They assure me that I have gone too far, that I adopted rhetoric that was inappropriate, and that I really should pull back. They assure me that this is the way to win a battle. It is likely that none of them has ever been involved in such a battle, and if they have been involved in one, they did not win it. I get these letters from people I had never heard of. I never get letters like this from anyone who has ever been involved in such a battle.
People who have no skills of writing, people who have never been involved in a battle for the minds of men, seem to think that they are highly skilled in the area of how to fight an intellectual battle. They are so confident of their skills that they write to me, a perfect stranger, and tell me how I ought to fight my battles. As you can imagine, I do not change my ways. In fact, over the years, whenever I get a letter like this, I escalate my rhetoric in the next confrontation against whoever it is that they tell me I should be gentle with.
Remember, my goal is not to persuade the target. The target is not about to change his or her public stance under fire. That would appear to be cowardice. Furthermore, the followers expect the person to defend himself or herself, and any sign of weakness will create seeds of doubt in the minds of the followers about the courage or competence of the leader. The leader is about to change his or her view I have never seen such a thing, as far as I can remember.
My goal is to isolate the person, make the person gun shy, or, if possible, to undermine the person's ability to raise funds. That is what happened to Professor Jones, and it has happened to a number of his colleagues who were involved in the suppression of information unfavorable to their interpretation of climate change. Rhetoric worked.
People who think that one size fits all, and that all confrontational rhetoric should be mild-mannered, know nothing about rhetoric. They also know nothing about the nature of intellectual battles. They really do not care about ideas. They are more concerned about process than principle. They are more concerned about procedure than content.
There are risks for anyone skilled in the rhetoric of ridicule. Ann Coulter is very smart, but she is widely regarded as a smartass. This is usually not a good position for a woman to be in. Men can get away with it, but women would be wise to restrain themselves.
At some point, if you are really good at this, you will not be taken seriously in some circles. This does not matter if you are someone like Jon Stewart. Stewart is perceived as a comedian, and only secondarily as a social critic. He is extremely smart, and he is unbelievably fast on his seat. But he does it with humor, and the humor is perceived as somewhat lighthearted. He always smiles. He looks for the laugh. It is all in good fun. But when Coulter does it, people who do not like her opinions have a tendency to dismiss or as being quick tongued but not intellectually formidable. In fact, she is intellectually formidable. But she has now created a persona as the quick-tongued Harridan, and she will have trouble escaping it. This assumes that she wants to escape. She is making a lot of money by exploiting it.
Martin Luther was the greatest master the pamphlet in the history of civilization. He was also a master of vitriolic rhetoric. The kinds of rhetoric that we see today are nothing compared to the kind of rhetoric that Luther used against the Pope. It was a life-and-death matter for Luther. He could have been burned at the stake. But he understood that he was mobilizing a civilization against what he regarded as an evil interpretation of Christianity. He was highly successful in his efforts, and so were several of his major followers. John Calvin was a master of invective. John Knox was even worse, or better, especially when writing about bloody Mary or Mary Queen of Scots. These men were not just fighting for their lives; they were fighting for the commitment of northern Europe. They were not verbal pantywaists. They could not afford to be. They knew that this was not just rarefied academic debate.
For years, I have received letters from Calvinists who tell me that my rhetoric is too harsh. I once wrote an introduction to a book, Westminster's Confession, in which I explained and illustrated Calvin's rhetoric, taken from Calvins Institutes. Anyone who has read the Institutes is well aware of just how vitriolic Calvin could be. But these Calvinists who contact me have never read the Institutes. They have read virtually nothing that Calvin ever wrote. Nevertheless, they are Calvinists, and they tell me how Calvinists ought to conduct intellectual and theological disputations.
In any worldwide historical movement, we find that the founders of the movement were masters of rhetoric. They need not have been masters of vitriolic rhetoric, but they were masters of rhetoric. They knew how to form words to persuade people. They knew how to build an organization, and they used words to do so.
Rhetoric is mandatory for persuasion. You have to decide in advance who your target audience is. You then have to decide what you want to persuade 20% of your audience to do. Then you must decide which media are available to you for achieving your goals. You use different rhetorical approaches for different audiences, for different goals, and for different media.
It takes years of practice to get good at this. Very few people are equally skilled in all of the media. Some are great speakers, while others are skilled writers. Some may be good speakers, but their speeches do not lead people to take specific action steps. Their speeches may entertain, but they do not gain lifelong commitment. It is not just the ability to write or to speak that matters. What matters is the ability to persuade people to take specific action steps.
I have had to learn rhetoric in order to build my mailing lists. I have used different forms of rhetoric in order to conduct intellectual warfare. I have attempted to persuade people by reading words on the page and also by sitting in a lecture hall. I am good at both.
If you want to get involved in a controversial cause, you must be prepared to master the skills of rhetoric. If you want to lead, you must be able to persuade. If you want to persuade, you must master rhetoric. That is what rhetoric is all about.
If your particular skills of rhetoric are more suited for one aspect of institution building than another, that focus your attention in that area. If you are not skilled at verbal confrontation, then avoid it. But if you are skilled, learn to use it in such a way that your targeted audience takes the particular step or steps that you have designed your rhetoric to achieve. Do not use rhetoric apart from a targeted audience, a targeted goal, and some plan of action for the audience.
Consider what I did to Ellen Brown. I showed clearly that she does not know what she is talking about in the fields of economic theory and economic history. Anyone who reads what she said and then compares what she said with the evidence knows very shortly that she is utterly incompetent in these fields. She is in way over her head. She does not know what she is doing.
That was not why I went after her. I went after her because, when I realized the extent of her influence, I decided that she was a serious threat to well-meaning but ill-informed conservatives. She was riding on the coat tails of Ron Paul's campaign to end the FED. She had adopted that plan before Paul became prominent, but her influence escalated dramatically after Paul began to focus on the Federal Reserve in his 2008 Republican nomination campaign.
I am the only person capable of taking her on. I do not mean that I am the only intellectual figure capable of doing so. I mean that I am the only person in the conservative movement who has read the literature of crackpot fiat money economics for a period of 45 years. No one else had ever taken on any of the writers in the field of crackpot fiat money economics. I began in 1965. I did it again when I took on Social Credit in 1993. There was no one else who would done this. There was no one else who thought it was worth doing. I did not have to master a body of literature in order to take on Ellen Brown, because I have been studying that literature for over four decades. I know all the arguments, and I know all the weak points. I was ideally equipped to take on Ellen Brown.
I boxed her in. I gave her four choices, and all of them were bad for her and good for me. She could remain silent. She could capitulate. She could rewrite her book to make all the corrections that had to be made, if my criticisms were correct. Or she could try to challenge me, point by point, in a public place.
She chose the fourth of approach. That was the worst thing that she could have done. She responded rapidly. I am now going to get 31 opportunities to show once again that she does not know what she is talking about.
She should have ignored me. She admitted on her Website that her followers recommended that she ignore me. But she is a lawyer, and lawyers are trained to respond to verbal attacks. She is not a good lawyer, and she is an incompetent economist and historian. So, she left herself vulnerable for another month of daily attacks. I become her tar baby, which is what I told her I was going to become.
I will not persuade her followers. But word will get around that I took her out. Nobody wants to get on board a visibly sinking ship. I put 52 holes in the side of her ship. I will now enlarge those holes.
The use of rhetoric, especially vitriolic rhetoric, requires documentation regarding content. The more vitriolic rhetoric, the more compelling the documentation has to be. Anyone who uses rhetoric, especially confrontational rhetoric, should never let his rhetoric get ahead of his logic and his factual support. If you use hard-nosed rhetoric, go out of your way to build your case in terms of logic and evidence. This has always been my strategy. I do my homework before I launch my verbal attack. The victim deserves this. His followers deserve this. The undecided deserve this. Finally, my followers deserve this. Nobody wants to get drawn into an intellectual battle by a leader who cannot conduct an effective campaign.
Every leader should strive to protect his followers from error. Jesus said that the sheep hear his voice. He called himself the shepherd, and he promised to protect the sheep from the wolves. This is what any leader of any movement has a moral obligation to do. Anyone who has a large number of readers who follow what he says has an obligation to them to be factual and logical. He must go out of his way to make his case in terms of external reality. Only then should indulge himself in rhetoric, and only when the outcome is worth the effort. Protecting people from error, especially dangerous error, is worth the effort.
Ellen Brown wants to hand over 100% sovereignty over money to the Congress of the United States. Now, the fact of the matter is, Congress does not want this authority. It has not wanted it ever since 1913. If the Federal Reserve were ever eliminated by Congress, the risk is that Congress will take over the functions of the Federal Reserve. This is what Ellen Brown wants done. This would be a catastrophe.
The fact of the matter is this: it will not be Congress that takes over monetary policy; it will be the executive. Congress does not have the stomach for this. Congress also is divided. There are 535 people in Congress. There is one President. Power is going to flow in the direction of the Presidency, and the thought of the President controlling the money supply is more fearful than the thought of Ben Bernanke and commercial bankers controlling the money supply.
Ellen Brown does not understand this, and neither do her followers. The Greenbackers have never understood this. The only reason why they were not worth challenging was that nobody took them seriously, and almost nobody had ever heard of them. But, because of Ron Paul's campaign to end the FED, Ellen Brown and the other Greenbacker crackpots are getting a hearing.
I was the person best equipped to take her on. It is not because she is worth the time of day, intellectually speaking. The woman is ill-equipped intellectually. I would not have bothered with her except for the fact that she really is getting a hearing. I want my articles against her to get forwarded around the Web. I want people to understand that her position is that of the welfare state Left. It does not matter what her rhetoric is; the content of her position is that of the modern welfare state. This is why she came out in favor of Hitler's economic system. She thought she was defending Hitler's welfare state. In fact, there was not much to Hitler's welfare state. There was a military machine. But she never understood this, and she still does not.
I do not know Ellen Brown. I have no desire to meet her. I have nothing against her personally. I have a great deal against her position. Positions are represented by specific individuals. If you want to take out a position, you have to take out the people who are promoting it, defending it, and financing it. You have to embarrass the leadership in order to undermine confidence in their position. Anyone who thinks that you can take on ideas without taking on the leaders who promoted those ideas is someone who knows nothing about winning intellectual and institutional battles.
One of the best aspects of Murray Rothbard's history of economic thought is that he provides biographical background of the economists he discusses. This is extremely rare. Almost all histories of economic thought focus 90% or more of their attention on the ideas of the particular economist. They do not discuss the historical setting in which the particular economist promoted his position. We are told nothing about his intellectual background, his family background, or the role he played, especially by becoming a hired gun of some special-interest group. Rothbard tells us this. This is the way to teach intellectual history. Robert Nisbet used to say that ideas do not beget ideas the way that butterflies beget butterflies. He was correct.
The conservative movement, as with any growing movement, is recruiting people on the basis of emotion, especially fear and anger. This is how any political movement begins. Political movements do not begin on the basis of non-rhetorical, nonconfrontational policies that were dreamed up in some department in a major university.
The conservative movement today is growing rapidly a cause of concern over taxes, Federal regulation of health care, and the Federal Reserve System. The best person to lead this movement is obviously Ron Paul, because he is a physician, because he has studied money and banking for 40 years, and because he wants to see taxes cut. But he is approaching 80 years old, and he is not what I would call an effective rhetorical master. So, he is not going to be the leader of the movement.
It is best that there be no leader of the movement. It should be a decentralized movement, and it should focus on local politics. So far, so good. But when somebody like Ellen Brown shows up at the Tea Party and begins to promote an idea that seems plausible to the new recruits, few of whom have any understanding of central banking, monetary theory, or the gold standard, that she becomes a threat. My goal was to reduce that threat. No, my goal was to eliminate that threat. Always shoot higher than you think you can hit.
I do not expect most people to get into a fight like this. There is no reason why most people should. But you should be able to discern good economics from bad economics. I find that this skill takes time to develop. So, in the interim, I used confrontational rhetoric along with logic and evidence to warn you about a particular movement, the Greenbackers, that has been around for a long time, and which never gets any smarter.
They were not a threat to anybody after 1908. When William Jennings Bryan lost the election for President for the third time in 1908, the Greenbackers had nowhere to go. They fanned out, and they gained few followers. Father Coughlin did recruit a lot of people, but he was not able to sustain his movement.
The Greenbackers have had no influence, so I was about the only person who paid any attention to them. When I wrote my piece on Ellen Brown, not many people in the conservative movement had heard about. Not many people had ever heard about the Greenbackers, either. So, I realized that I had an educational task in front of me.
One of the best ways to get attention is to start a fight. So, I started a fight. But it was not a fight for a fight's sake; it was a fight to alert people to a cancer in their midst. I did write the article on false flag infiltrators. But I had to be able to prove it, and I had to find the target that was a true representative of the movement that is become a threat to the conservative movement. That is why I selected Ellen Brown.
I could have selected Bill Still, who has produced an online video that is effective in presenting the Greenbackr case. I could have selected Stephen Zarlenga, but almost nobody knows about him or his book. It does no good to fight somebody who is not developing a mailing list, and who has no book or other written materials to attract new followers. It is difficult to attack a video in print. It is not an effective use of one's time to attack somebody as obscure as Zarlenga.
So, Ellen Brown became my target. For as long as she continues to respond, I will continue to respond. I will limit the response to line-by-line refutations in my department on Ellen Brown: Greenbacker. I will not inflict my battle on subscribers who are not interested in the battle. That would be a tactical error. But, for anyone who wants to find out how such a battle is conducted, that person can follow along to see how I handle Ellen Brown.
Ellen Brown is never tangled was somebody like I am. There are not many people who do this. I can understand her dismay. Her dismay has only just begun.
She will not retreat. She will not say that she was wrong, that her position is erroneous. She will not burn all copies of the book. She will not write a new book based on Austrian economic theory in her war against the Federal Reserve. She could do this, but she will not. So, she is going to have to deal with me from now on.
At some point, she will probably decide just to ignore me. I recommend that strategy to her. "If your followers do not have an opportunity to see that you cannot intellectually defend your position, you would be wise not to engage in public confrontations." But she is a lawyer, and she does not like to be humiliated in public. She is not intellectually sharp enough to understand that the Greenbacker position cannot be defended intellectually.
She thinks that Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard are tools of that hated enemy: Adam Smith. She regards the free market economic system of Adam Smith as "the English system," which she equates with the Bank of England. It does not matter that Murray Rothbard fought the Federal Reserve; Murray Rothbard was an economist, and an economist is nothing but a tool of central banking in her view. This is the position of the Greenbackers, and Ellen Brown does not deviate from this tradition.
I will receive letters from strangers who tell me that I should not be so verbally confrontational. I shall ignore these letters in the future, just as I have ignored them for at least 35 years so far. It is not just that I am too old to change; it is and I am too skilled to change. I know how these fights and got to be fought, and I have spent my career developing the skills to fight them.
A few fights are worth the trouble. Most fights are not. The battle over fiat money Greenbacks was not worth the fight until "Ellen Brown" and "web of debt" got almost 600,000 hits on Google. Ellen Brown's success on Google was the lure that drew me out of my lair. There is nothing that she can do about it now. She made the mistake of responding, and now she is trapped.
Of course, she really is not trapped. Her followers are not readers. They are not economists. They do not understand economic theory or historical research. All they understand is that they do not like the Federal Reserve System, and Ellen Brown also does not like the Federal Reserve System. They will be content to follow along, vainly hoping that she will gain influence, vainly hoping that the Federal Reserve will be dismantled because of her efforts. They have invested emotional capital in her fight, and they will stick with her, no matter what happens on my Website. But she will know.
The smart approach is Jim Wallis's approach. I have taken him on relentlessly for three years, and he has never responded. He is wise enough to know what will happen if he does respond. He knows that his followers do not come to my Website, and he knows that if he ever takes me on, he will have his head handed to him. He is skilled enough at rhetoric, and he is skilled enough as a political operative for the Left, to let me write my articles in comparative obscurity. I do not blame him one bit. It is the wise approach. Never punch a tar baby. Never jab your finger into a hornet's nest. Just avoid confrontation.
He does have a problem, however. Glenn Beck is after him. This, he cannot effectively ignore. He is stuck. He keeps trying to get Glenn Beck to debate him. Glenn Beck is smart enough not take the bait. He is content to hammer away at him and his Social Gospel ideas. This leaves Wallis without an effective way to fight back. I love it.
I think you should master the skills of rhetoric. I think you should put those skills to work for you in your career. To write good sales copy, you must master the skills of rhetoric. You must learn how to persuade people. Do not use confrontational rhetoric in order to persuade someone to buy something from you. Accentuate the positive. But, if you enjoy a good donnybrook, come back every day to see what I have to say about Ellen Brown.