[Pelham]

Every great movement starts as a crusade, becomes a business, and ends as a scam.

Phyllis Schlafly was a conservative from the time of Barry Goldwater, when that was a very lonely place to be. Conservatives organized with newsletters and small circulation magazines. It was a crusade that ultimately elected Ronald Reagan.

After Reagan got elected everyone wanted to get in on the action and call themselves “conservative”. There was money and power in being part of Conservatism, Inc. and all sorts of opportunists showed up. Even National Review, once the flagship of conservative magazines, transformed itself as the old crusaders retired and the new Conservatism, Inc. crowd took charge.

Well now we are even farther down the road, and the business of Conservatism, Inc. is well into the scam portion of the timeline. And our ambitious and opportunistic open borders boy wonder Marco Rubio is the perfect exemplar of scam stage multicultural no borders “conservatism.” Sic transit gloria mundi.

[Theodore R.]

Schlafly ran for Congress in 1952 and again in 1970, both in IL. She was with the Taft forces I believe too. She returned to her native MO when her husband died.

[poconopundit]

Every great movement starts as a crusade, becomes a business, and ends as a scam.

...Very good point.

Actually I have been thinking about breaking this mold in the conservative blog arena.

I am planning to start a blogazine for "citizen commentators" like myself.   My theory is that if a conservative gets elected in November, a lot of commentators on the GOPe and liberal side of the house will have lost an audience.   And fresh voices will be needed to fill the gap and help keep the conservative revolution move forward.

But more than that, I find I personally enjoy this kind of writing.

Here's the skeleton of my plan.  Curious to hear people's comments:

• I'm an independent full time editor and industry analyst in the IT world today, but I would like to establish a part-time biz commentating on conservative and life/culture issues.   Hope to imitate in some modest way my hero H.L. Mencken (if anyone really can mimic that genius).
  
  
• My idea is post my own stories, but also reach out selectively to people on FR and elsewhere to contribute and in that case I would be their editor.
  
  
• My thought is to accept no political advertising or Google click-bait (which I hate), but make this a business venture by advertising my own paid writing services to businesses.  This is what I do in the tech industry today, so I figure I can attract business people to hire me for writing gigs and full-blown marketing communications.
  
  
• For the time being I plan to use a pseudo name on this blogazine and the other writers can either do that or be out in the open.
  
  
• My plan would be to exclude political hit pieces.  That's covered very well on FR and the wider media.  My thought is to focus on more scholarly discussions of conservative issues -- and even re-publishing or interpreting the great conservative thinkers of which there are many.   It would be cool to interview people too.   Summarizing and interpreting the thoughts of those who have come before us is not really done very much.
  
  
• Maybe I could post some of the articles on Free Republic first and then republish on my own website later on, though I'm not sure if FR approves of doing this or not.  I've noticed that the few stories I have posted on FR tend to get picked up on Google which shows how excellent FR's reach is. .

So these are my thoughts.  Interested to hear any devil's advocate advice etc.  Maybe someone has done something similar?

Thanks.