Breitbart Rule 6: Ubiquity is key

It is one thing to own the narrative. It is another to KEEP the narrative going. And for that you might need a little help. Hence, Rule 6 in Andrew Breitbart’s Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.

6.) Ubiquity is key: As a capitalist and as a web publisher, pageviews are a desired commodity. But when playing for political or cultural keeps, impact matters most. And, when ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBC and the dailies are working against you and ignoring you, ubiquity is a key weapon That means developing relationships with like-minded allies or even enemies and news junkies and allowing them to share in the good fortune of a good scoop.

While the crux of a story can be weaponized and launched on one of my websites, there are often peripheral angles that can be developed elsewhere with a separate but related media life of their own. For instance, the acorn story was unbelievably complex. A key component of exposing the scandal was a detailed analysis of ACORN's structure and its past scandals. I knew legal minds were needed to weigh in on these aspects. Patrick Frey, who runs the indispensable Patterico website, created a parallel line of attack, not just against ACORN, but against its myriad defenders, who lied and misdirected to try to kill the story. The ACORN story couldn't have been the success it was without others - talk radio and alternative news outlets that were invested in the story and could deliver scoops of their own. So I planted scoops with what business school types would call my "competitors," and I watched the story explode, my pageviews would go through the roof, and my brand flourish. Sometimes the best ideas are counterintuitive.

I love living in Los Angeles and not DC, because in DC there are too many fighting over too little ground for their own fifteen minutes. The scarcity mentality is strangling the growth of the conservative movement. From outside DC, I can see that ubiquity is about growing the pie for everyone, spreading the stories, the channels of distribution, the resources around so that the entire movement can benefit, because our chunk of the public square gets bigger and bigger each time we break something huge.

While we all have different viewpoints or perspectives as to what conservatism is, one thing to remember is that we are all in the same fight. That is what the Left does, and they succeed by coming together for a common purpose. The problem is that conservatives are so divided that it gives the Left a chance to gain the edge on the narrative. Note what Andrew had said: “developing relationships with like-minded allies or even enemies and news junkies and allowing them to share in the good fortune of a good scoop.” That means spread it around. If you find something newsworthy, it does not help to keep it to yourself. Rather, post it on your social media tools and get the word out there. In next week’s editorial I will go more into how to engage in social media as Andrew has it as his Rule 7, but developing relationships with like-minded people who are also news junkies can allow them to share in the fortune of a good scoop is key.

One of my good friends who likes to share in the fortune of a good story is Patricia Baber, who used to be my co-host on this very show. She is one who hunts down stories on relatively unknown sites and put them out on Twitter, then it gets picked up by her followers and spreads to others. I even do the same thing when I do my news aggregates on my rant blog. But on that I do not take all the credit for it but rather give credit to Robert Stacy McCain of The Other McCain who has a blog entry entitled "How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog.” In fact, Stacy has Rule 2 which he calls the “Full Metal Jacket Reach-Around" where he says:

Reciprocal linkage is the essential lubricant that makes the blogosphere purr with contentment. If somebody's throwing you traffic, you should either (a) give them a link-back update, or at a minimum (b) keep them in mind for future linkage. Because you don't want to end up on the wrong end of a kharmic unbalance in the 'sphere, where you're always taking and never giving.

The Other McCain has a whole plethora of articles and the like to link to on your own blogs and also on Social Media outlets. I know I usually do it, but the past couple weeks I had slacked off because of certain things away from the computer. However, I am making a concerted effort to go back to doing it. The key is, will you be ubiquitous or will you be a loner in this war?

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Rundown for April 13, 2013

Join Rick Bulow and Daniel Richardson (filling in as producer for Justin Kendall) as they review the week in news. Today they will Melissa Harris-Perry’s comment about the kids belonging to the community, as well as Obama releasing his budget which many say is a 2014 election ploy. Also, Senator Mitch McConnell (Republican Minority Leader from Kentucky) had his office wiretapped and a Democrat had implicated a progressive activist group behind it. All that and much more including your calls and Schmuck of the Week.

Join us for the fun and frivolity that is Red, Right, and Blue at 1:30 PM Eastern, 12:30 PM Central. I will be in the chatroom at http://www.ownthenarrative.com 30 minutes early going over some last-minute show prep and also answering any questions on the show. If you want to engage the conversation, there are three ways to do it:

• Call 832-699-0449
• Skype in to OTNNetwork
• If you are on Twitter but unable to access the chatroom, you can use the hashtag #RedRightBlue and #OTNN and I will read your tweets on the air.

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Hell, tell a liberal. With all that happened this week, you know I am going to go off on a major rant that you do not want to miss.

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Rule 5: Control your own story – don’t let the Complex do it

Just as Andrew Breitbart did not let the Complex use its PC Lexicon to control him and shape the narrative, he then went one step further and did not let the Complex control whatever story he had. I present to you, Rule 5 in his Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.

5.) Control your own story - don't let the Complex do it: A one-and-done story isn't worth anything. One fact can be posted on the Internet and flushed down the memory hole faster than anyone can imagine. How many incredible pieces of journalistic revelation have been lost because they weren't properly presented to the public?

Serialization is good. Van Jones was taken down by Glenn Beck because Beck had the goods - and because he revealed them piece by piece. He got Jones and his defenders to come out of the closet and attack him. Then he calmly laid his cards on the table, one by one.

It's the same strategy I saw Arianna pursue during the Larry Lawrence scandal. People came out of the woodwork to attack her as a scurrilous human being slandering a dead war hero. And she smiled and let them come at her. Then she put her evidence into the public eye bit by bit, keeping the story alive. Feeding the media is like training a dog - you can't throw an entire steak to a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over and over again until it learns its lesson. That's what Arianna did.

It's the same thing Drudge did with Lewinsky. He broke the story in pieces rather than in a long essay laying out all the facts, and he didn't let the media's cries for him to reveal all his information control his decision-making process. Instead, he controlled the media.

The important thing to remember here is that the media are like a leech hanging on the back of the news makers, and the news makers have every right and ability to feed that leech little by little instead of letting it suck them dry all at once. Keep your story alive by planning its release down to the minutest level.

The main thing to remember is this: we need to OWN THE NARRATIVE at every single opportunity. I am of the belief that owning the narrative is not just a fancy saying or something that can be focused on for an hour or so a day or even a week. Rather, owning the narrative is a way of life, one that lives with us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Owning the narrative has been a part of my life ever since Andrew died, and it will remain in me until I take that eternal celestial dirt nap.

During the 2012 election I had dealt with the third party supporters, as I had mentioned last week, and every time they said something which mentioned Romney and Obama being the same I just calmly said they are not and showed them links a little at a time. In fact, one person even called me Rick “The Narrative” Bulow because when he would ask me what I am doing, I told him that I am calmly owning the narrative.

When Marco Rubio was mentioned on Romney’s VP short list and the birthers came out of the woodwork saying he is not eligible, I had calmly said that he is, and debunked their articles a little at a time with certain links of my own. And in fact just recently I had seen a thread on a site which mentioned a paper from the Congressional Research Service on natural born citizenship and presidential eligibility. Now what is funny about it is that I had brought up that paper in another thread on the same site and got bashed for it. So I had waded in and mentioned a couple of things about eligibility, and wound up getting banned from the entire site. Am I upset about it? Yes I am; however, one thing I did not do when I commented was let them own and control the narrative. The only way the Complex can own and control the narrative after being confronted with facts is to shut you up. And online, apparently that means banning someone from sites.

If we want to win in 2014 and then in 2016, we have to own the narrative, whatever it may be, at all costs. Remember that owning the narrative is not just a fancy saying but a way of life.

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Rundown for April 6, 2013

Join Rick Bulow as he goes through the week in news. Today he will be discussing the failure of the border with Mexico. Even Ed Henry got into it with White House Spokesman Jay Carney during a press conference. There is also the ongoing battle between America and Common Core/CSCOPE. This time, it is with homeschooling. Also, with WrestleMania 29 just under 36 hours away, he will give his picks on the matches, specifically focusing on the Heavyweight Championship between champion Alberto Del Rio and challenger Jack Swagger since Swagger is proclaiming that if he wins there will be a “new” America. All this and more including your calls and the ever popular “Schmuck of the Week” coming up today.

Join us for the fun and frivolity that is Red, Right, and Blue at 1:30 PM Eastern, 12:30 PM Central. I will be in the chatroom at http://www.ownthenarrative.com 30 minutes early going over some last-minute show prep and also answering any questions on the show. If you want to engage the conversation, there are three ways to do it:

• Call 832-699-0449
• Skype in to OTNNetwork
• If you are on Twitter but unable to access the chatroom, you can use the hashtag #RedRightBlue and #OTNN and I will read your tweets on the air.

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Hell, tell a Liberal. Every second on Red, Right, and Blue is intriguing because you just never know what I will say or do next.

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Breitbart Rule 4: Don't let the Complex use its PC lexicon to characterize you and shape the narrative

Andrew Breitbart was a lightning rod to the left, and he reveled in it so much that he made it Rule 4 in his Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries:

4.) Don't let the Complex use its PC lexicon to characterize you and shape the narrative: If you've got a big story, the Complex will do what it always dies: attack you personally using the PC lexicon. You immediately become a racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic nativist. Don't let them do it. The fact is this: if you refuse to buy into their lexicon, if you refuse to back down in the face of those intimidation tactics, they can't harm you. You're Neo in the hallway with Agent Smith after he figures out that the Complex is a sham - the spoon isn't bending, he's bending. Once it hits him that he's not bound by the rules of the game, he can literally stop bullets. You can stop their bullets because their bullets aren't real.
Leftist assassins like Max Blumenthal, a one-trick hit man, have tried to label me and many of my allies as racists. I don't let them get away with it. I don't just call them out. I make sure that my righteous indignation registers on the Richter scale. I don't pull out my record on civil rights or my black friends. I simply point out that what they're doing is pure Alinsky and that it has no basis in fact or reality, and that they're showing themselves to be racists in their own right by citing race every time they meet someone with whom they disagree.
While I was at the 2010 CPAC, I was confronted by Daryle Jenkins of the One People's Project based on my defense of James O'Keefe - he had been slandered online as a racist by Blumenthal because he had attended a conference at the Georgetown Law Center that included racist Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire of NATIONAL REVIEW (who ripped into Taylor for his racism during the forum), and African-American conservative Kevin Martin. At the event, O'Keefe sided with Derbyshire and Martin against Taylor.
Anyway, here's how the incident went down:

Andrew Breitbart v. Daryle Jenkins at CPAC 2010

Breitbart: Max Blumenthal is a political hit man. What he does is he rapes the reputation of people mercilessly. He makes scurrilous, unsupportable accusations against people and he smears them using the political correctness he learned so well in the post-modern academy and the politics of personal destruction he learned firsthand from his father, Sid "Vicious" Blumenthal. He destroys people. He isolates threats to the reign of the far left and the reign of his father's cabal of Clinton/Podesta and the organized left. He's a vicious guy. He falsely slandered James O'Keefe as a racist, we disproved it -
Jenkins: How did you disprove it, sir?
Breitbart: I'm being interviewed right here.
Jenkins: I'm the one who put that story out there first.
Breitbart: Well, then, you suck.
Jenkins: You're lying. You're lying ... He was at that white supremacist forum.
Breitbart: It wasn't a white supremacist forum.
Jenkins: Yes it was!
Breitbart: Then why was Kevin Martin there?

At this point, Jenkins started pointing his finger inches from my face and moving his face close to mine. It then devolved into a series of accusations regarding details of the event. Finally, Jenkins got to his point:

Breitbart: Are you accusing me of being a white supremacist?
Jenkins: I'm accusing you of being a racist, yes I am.
Breitbart: Okay, have a nice day, buddy. Will somebody please take this guy out of here? You punk.

That was it. Jenkins walked away.
The key to the conversation was that I didn't start defending myself against his baseless charge of racism. I dismissed it out of hand as ridiculous because it was ridiculous. He was a punk for leveling that kind of charge without any basis whatsoever. I don't let my enemies characterize me without any evidence, and you shouldn't let them characterize you. Name-calling is their best strategy, and if you don't lend it credence, and instead force them to back up their charges with specifics, you win. Revel in the name calling - it means you've got them reduced to their lowest, basest tactic, and the one that carries the least weight if you refuse to abide by their definition of you.

There had been many times I was called racist or un-American for posting articles against Obama. The reason (according to those who called me racist) is because I do not like Obama because he is black. As Martin Luther King Jr. said during his famous “I have a Dream” speech, there should be a day when people are judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character. And judging on Obama’s past, it is clear that the content of his character is bad for America. However, many people only see skin color and as such they do not see the content of the character.
Currently I am battling many who say Marco Rubio (and now even Ted Cruz) are not eligible for president because they are not a natural-born citizen, and have even been accused of being an O-bot or an Obama supporter. Those people are even accusing me of using Saul Alinsky tactics. I tell them to back up their claim and some of them do, but on the majority many are held silent because they realized they had been forced to using low, base tactics to back up their claims.
When I am called names because I do not support Obama or any liberal for that matter, I calmly (at first) let them know that they have no specific claim to back up their charge. Then I move on to saying that they really have no claim if they resort to name-calling. Then and only then do we win and put the Complex on their heels, thereby owning the narrative which they tried to shape on us.

Rundown for March 30, 2013

Join Rick Bulow and Producer Justin Kendall (the one who keeps everything in perfect order at Own The Narrative) as they go through the week in news. Today they will welcome Sam Wurzelbacher (aka Joe The Plumber) to the show. Joe has started a PAC called Joe 4 America to combat Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Super PAC. Joe is also giving away an AR-15 and he will be talking about why he is doing that as well as what he has coming up in the future. All that and more including your calls and Schmuck of the Week.

Come join us today at 1:30 PM Eastern, 12:30 PM Central. I will enter the chatroom at http://www.ownthenarrative.com/live 30 minutes early for a little last minute show prep and also a meet and greet with the listeners who enter the chatroom. If you want to engage the conversation, there are three ways to do so:

• Call 832-699-0449
• Skype into OTNNetwork
• If you are do not want to enter the chatroom and you are on Twitter, use the hashtags #RedRightBlue and #OTNN. I will read them on the air.

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Hell, tell a Liberal. This is going to be one episode that is going to be huge with Joe The Plumber as guest.

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Breitbart Rule 3: Be open about your secrets

One of the things that Andrew had mentioned in his Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries is to put everything out in the open. In fact, that is his third rule

3.) Be open about your secrets: If you're going to go out in public, be absolutely open about what you've done in the past. Take a page from Barack Obama, who revealed in his probably Ayers-ghostwritten autobiography that he had done a lot of blow, and hung out with commies and assorted lowlifes. Once it was out there, there wasn't much that the right could do with it - he'd already admitted it.

By way of contrast, take a look at Mark Foley. If he'd admitted he was gay right off the bat, the left wouldn't have had much to pillory him with. The left never gets cited for hypocrisy (see Clinton, Bill), but the right is cited with it all the time because we actually have standards. That means we have to out ourselves before the left does it for us. In this book, I've already admitted to libertine sensibilities that were taken to absurd heights during my collegiate stint in New Orleans. I am not a puritan. Frankly, John Waters's movies and Johnny Knoxville's Jackass series are more up my alley than Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. The days of the left forcing us into a small, monolithic, and monochromatic box are over, and we have to fight their caricature of us.

Actually, George W. Bush did the same thing during the 2000 election. "When I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid," he said. Once he had come clean, the Left was stuck - they couldn't do anything.

Hypocrisy is such a powerful argument for the left because it appeals directly to the emotional heart of politics: one standard for you, another for me. It's no wonder Alinsky relied heavily on his rule 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. We have more rules than they do with regard for morality, which means we have to live up to them more often. But mistakes in the past don't need to be skeletons waiting to come out of the closet. If you've made mistakes, reveal them at the first available opportunity. Embrace those mistakes. Don't talk about how you regret them - talk about how you lived through them and how they made you who you are today. Embracing your mistakes makes you invulnerable to their slings.

Just don't screw up badly now.

One thing to remember is that we are all human and we all make mistakes. What we do not do is embrace and move on from them. The liberals have concealed their mistakes and moved on from them, though if it were a conservative or a Republican that committed those same mistakes, they would be strung up by their shorthairs over it. THAT is the main difference between them and us. What they do is lie about it and cover it up then when they do come up a year or a decade later they always deny it OR they pull a Hillary and say “What difference does it make NOW?” What we should do is embrace the mistakes and put them out there in the open and say “yes I did this. However, I learned from it and grew into a better person because of it.” Liberals are kind of like the bully who picks on others in school because they are insecure in themselves OR they feel that if they cannot be happy then none else can be happy. Conservatives are kind of like that child who got straight A’s but if there is one blemish on their record they admit it and then move on from it. The slings and the barbs from the bully liberals will be rendered useless once we embrace our blemishes and move on to better ourselves.

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