Direct mail has been a money- and rage-raising medium for the right wing for more than 50 years. And unlike RW radio, TV or social media, direct mail mostly flies under the radar, because most of the millions who get it rarely share it, and when they do, it’s only with those who they’re sure agree with them.
My mom is still on their lists, more than five years after she died, and since I own her home and longtime address, this liberal still gets a trickle of RW mail (down from daily five years ago, more than a year after they last got a response).
So now that the Republicans have a national trifecta, and Muslim/commie/terrorist/Antichrist Barack Hussein Obama is no longer the go-to boogeyman for the direct mail grifters, I wondered what they would come up with to rouse their rabble.
Rick Santorum’s Patriot Voices grift had one improbable, and naturally fact-free, answer this week — “Stop the War on Fox” by signing two meaningless petitions and sending Santorum money (which he asks for five times).
Scary lies, below.
Santorum’s grift is “launching a massive nationwide grassroots ”STOP THE WAR ON FOX campaign” with its first post-Obama letter, because somehow the “radical liberals at Media Matters,” the “Big Government/Liberal Media axis of power,” and “radical liberals (again, scarily) in Congress” are scheming to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine “to silence conservative outlets like Fox News.”
First Big Lie in that — triply-out-of-power Democrats cannot possibly reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, and when they were doubly-in-power in 1993-94 and 2009-10, they never even brought it up,
Second Big Lie — the Fairness Doctrine, which from 1949 until it was killed by Reagan in 1987 required broadcasters to “present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced” in return for their free broadcast licenses, ONLY applied to broadcasters, not to cable TV channels, which is what Fox “News” is.
Whatever, it’s pretty weak tea compared to the literally apocalyptic anti-Obama screeds that used to litter the mailbox, and were probably quite profitable.
Aside from the natural attrition of the old, white, conservative audience for RW mail, it seems it will be difficult for the RW mail grifters to come up with suitably scary “campaigns” to raise more than the mailing and consultant costs in the next four years.