In this episode of The Jenny Beth Show, Morton Blackwell, President of The Leadership Institute, shares his decades of experience in building and sustaining a powerful conservative movement. He discusses the critical role of structured training, youth engagement, and grassroots efforts in achieving political success. Blackwell highlights how training over 310,000 activists has shaped conservative victories and emphasizes the importance of collaboration among conservative groups. His insights provide a roadmap for growing conservative influence in modern politics.
In this episode of The Jenny Beth Show, Morton Blackwell, President of The Leadership Institute, shares his decades of experience in building and sustaining a powerful conservative movement. He discusses the critical role of structured training, youth engagement, and grassroots efforts in achieving political success. Blackwell highlights how training over 310,000 activists has shaped conservative victories and emphasizes the importance of collaboration among conservative groups. His insights provide a roadmap for growing conservative influence in modern politics.
Twitter/X: @MortonBlackwell | @LeadershipInst | @jennybethm
Website: www.leadershipinstitute.org
Morton Blackwell (00:00):
I aim to build a movement, not an empire. And that is why I am very happy to cooperate with other conservative organizations and help them. So the Leadership Institute has just grown extraordinarily. I founded it in 1979. We have now trained over 310,000 people.
Narrator (00:25):
Keeping our Republic is on the line, and it requires Patriots with great passion, dedication, and eternal vigilance to preserve our freedoms. Jenny Beth Martin is the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. She's an author, a filmmaker, and one of time magazine's most influential people in the world. But the title she's most proud of is Mom To Her Boy, girl Twins. She has been at the forefront fighting to protect America's core principles for more than a decade. Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show.
Jenny Beth Martin (00:58):
Have you ever wondered what it takes to shape the future of political activism in America? Today I'm joined by Morton Blackwell, a man who has trained more political activists than perhaps anyone in the conservative movement, is the founder and president of The Leadership Institute. Morton has spent decades equipping conservatives for success in politics, government, and the media. In this episode, we'll delve into Morton's early years from his time as the youngest delegate for Barry Goldwater in 1964 to organizing the national youth effort for Ronald Reagan in 1980. We'll explore his experiences working in the Reagan White House and his pivotal role in fostering the next generation of conservative leaders. Stay tuned to hear insights from a man whose lifetime of dedication and strategic prowess continues to shape American politics. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Morton. I'm just very excited about this interview with you.
Morton Blackwell (01:56):
I'm very pleased to be with you. I've known you since you were a Spark plug, starting the incredible efforts of 29 and 2010 with the Tea Party Patriots.
Jenny Beth Martin (02:11):
We were just talking before we got started recording about the new Reagan movie, and you were a delegate for Reagan long before he actually became the nominee. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Morton Blackwell (02:26):
Well, yes, like most conservatives, I was really impressed by Reagan's speech at the end of the 64 campaign, which was televised nationwide and brought in an avalanche of money so that the Goldwater campaign, which lost the election, wound up with millions of dollars that they hadn't spent by the time of the election. And people began to consider Reagan for public office. It took some persuading, but California businessmen persuaded him to become a candidate for governor in 1966. And in 1968 there was a boomlet for Reagan and a number of states elected Reagan delegates and alternates to the Republican National Convention. And I was elected a Reagan alternate from Louisiana where I then lived in 1968 to the convention in Miami Beach.
Jenny Beth Martin (03:29):
And prior to that convention in 1968, you were also a delegate. Right. In 1964, the youngest delegate,
Morton Blackwell (03:36):
I was the youngest elected delegate for Bargo Water in 1964. And it's interesting today there are national convention delegates who are 17 years old who are going to turn 18 before election day, but it was unusual in those days to be a delegate or even a member of a state central committee unless you had gray hair or none. So at 24, I was Reagan's youngest Goldwater's youngest leg of delegate.
Jenny Beth Martin (04:12):
That is so wonderful. And you have been active, well, you had to be active in politics before that to be elected a delegate, right. So how long have you been active in politics? How old were you when you got started?
Morton Blackwell (04:28):
Well, my first serious interest in politics was sparked by a column in Newsweek in October of 1958. The columnist that I admired named Raymond Moley wrote in his column in October of 58 that the most important senate race in that off presidential election year was the effort of the labor union bosses to defeat a freshman senator from Arizona named Barry Goldwater. And I had seen the name before, but I'd never paid attention. I started paying attention and the more I heard, the more I liked. In 1960, there were a lot of delegates for Goldwater elected Goldwater. At the end of the roll call, he asked all the delegates who had voted for him to vote for Nixon. He said, conservatives, our time will come. We should all get behind Nixon. Well, frankly, I was never a great fan of Richard Nixon, but Goldwater said it. So I supported Nixon for president.
Morton Blackwell (05:46):
We started a little students for Nixon and Lodge Club at Louisiana State University. We didn't know beans about how to organize activities, but we did the best we could. And that started me off. And in 1961, early in the year, a friend of mine at LSU got a packet of material just produced by a new group called Young Americans for Freedom about how you organize a student group. And we took that packet and their sample constitution and created a conservative student club at LSU. And in the fall of 61, we chartered with young Americans for Freedom. Early in 62, I co-founded a college Republican club in at LSU. And later on in the late spring of 62, I was elected college Republican state chairman of Louisiana. Not as impressive as you might think because it was a convention composed of four delegates and a friend of mine and I ran against each other and it tied two to two on three ballots and we flipped a coin and I won and became college Republican state chairman and served for two years. And I worked hard at it. We went from three tiny clubs with a combined membership of under a hundred. Two years later we had 15 college Republican clubs in Louisiana, some of them including LSU, with hundreds of members.
Jenny Beth Martin (07:38):
That's very exciting. And so when you first started with the Nixon Club, you didn't know anything about organizing and then Young Americas for Freedom or YAF as some people know them. And today, Scott Walker is the chairman I believe, of YAF.
Morton Blackwell (07:57):
He's head of the Young Americas Foundation today, young Americans for Freedom is a project of Young Americas Foundation
Jenny Beth Martin (08:04):
Foundation. Okay. So that organization and then we will talk about in a few minutes, everything that you've done have this long lasting legacy of training young people on how to become active.
Morton Blackwell (08:20):
Well, as state College Republican chairman, I had clubs out there and I wanted them to succeed and I had to learn how to organize students myself. And I learned by trial and error mostly there weren't any examples around as how to do it. And in 1965, the year after I had finished being state chairman by an extraordinary combination of the newly elected college Republican national chairman who was Tom kin of Texas, invited me to come to Washington to be executive director of the College Republican National Committee. And up until then, I hadn't figured out any way that I might possibly get a salary working in politics. I was a conservative activist. I read enormous numbers of fundamental conservative books. And here the opportunity opened up and I drove up here and I served as executive director of the National College Republicans off and on from the summer of 65 through the November, 1970 elections, five and a half years. And I served as national executive director under four consecutive college Republican national chairman.
Jenny Beth Martin (09:51):
Wow, that's very exciting. And you were able to really coach them, I'm sure a lot because you had done it. So
Morton Blackwell (09:58):
Was I learned it. And my greatest learning experience was when I was doing field work for the college Republicans. I spent some time in Kentucky in 67 when they had a governor's race going. I drew up a plan to give to the college Republican state chairman of Kentucky about how to run what I called a mass based youth effort for Louis Nunn, the Republican nominee for governor. And the state chairman asked the national chairman to lend me to Kentucky for the balance of the campaign. That's what happened. And I put together a different kind of youth effort, which really was mass based with thousands and thousands of members quickly recruited, and they did a lot of good work. And Louis Nunn, who was behind in every single poll up until election day, but creeping forward, he won with 51.2% of the vote and people credited the big youth effort that I had organized.
Morton Blackwell (11:03):
So I started in 68 the next year training youth organizers, and I did that through the College Republicans in 19 68, 69 and 70. My first training of youth organizers was in the early summer of 68, 20 people in the class. Many of them went out to be youth coordinators. A young man from Kentucky that I trained in 68 was that year, the youth organizer in Kentucky for the Republican candidate for Senate, a man named Marlo Cook and Cook won and he hired his youth coordinator on his senate staff and he worked there for six years and then went back home to Louisville, Kentucky and built his career. And that young man was named Mitch McConnell.
Jenny Beth Martin (12:02):
Wow, that's amazing. And I bet you have so many different stories about the people who you have gone on to train, who have gone on to do something. I've gone through Ally training and did that before the Tea Party movement got started. And I think part of the reason that I was prepared to be able, all of a sudden the movement gets started and we had the tax aid protest, and my goal was to take that moment in time and turn it into a movement. I had no earthly idea how to do that, but
Morton Blackwell (12:38):
Well, you'll recall Jenny Beth that once you had begun organizing your Tea Party Patriots group that I called you and I said, I'm in the business of training at s how to be effective and I want to help your organization and I'm prepared to come and do training for as many of your grassroots people as we can recruit. And we've been doing it ever since.
Jenny Beth Martin (13:06):
That's right. That's absolutely right. And I wanted to take advantage of that because I'd gone through training with you and then what was called Coverdale Leadership Training in Georgia and in the Coverdale leadership training, it's now called Republican Leadership Training or something in Georgia. It was named after the former senator who's now dead, Paul Coverdale.
Morton Blackwell (13:30):
He was a great man. Coverdale is one of the few politicians that I know of who actually turned out better once elected. So many of 'em disappoint us. They do. But Coverdale was a man who the longer he served here, the higher his regard by conservative movement activists all around the country, his death was a great loss.
Jenny Beth Martin (13:58):
It was a great loss. And he and Newt both understood the importance of training people and making sure they were building a field team. And because I'd gone through that training and through I training and through Go Pack training, even though I wasn't running for office, I knew it was my congressman. So we wound up having Go pack training in Georgia when this movement started. I was prepared and ready to be able to help figure out how we turn it to help all these groups. And when you reached out, it was such a good thing because people needed that training. They had this passion and this love for the country and anger about what was happening for the country, but they didn't know what to do with it. And sort of like how you said they didn't know beans about organizing, a lot of them didn't know beans about organizing and needed that training.
Morton Blackwell (14:48):
Well, every type of activity that you enter into is different. There's a different vocabulary, there are different rules, there are different ways to be effective, and we don't have time to make all the mistakes and learn lessons the hard way. It certainly makes sense for conservatives to study the techniques of how to win. And some of them are counterintuitive
Jenny Beth Martin (15:21):
And elaborate on that. How are they counterintuitive?
Morton Blackwell (15:25):
Well, my favorite example is fundraising letters. If you get a room full of conservatives and you ask them, which would be more successful, a very good short letter or a very good long letter, and the majority will say, well, I would rather read a very good short letter. Well, the truth is the trial and error and testing and testing has demonstrated absolutely that in almost every case, a good long letter will be more financially successful for you than a good short letter. But unless you've been told that by somebody, the only way you to learn it is by the school of hard knocks.
Jenny Beth Martin (16:13):
And when you're doing fundraising and mailing things, that can be an expensive lesson to learn. You
Morton Blackwell (16:17):
Got it.
Jenny Beth Martin (16:21):
How so you went on, you came to Washington dc you worked for the College Republicans as the executive director for five different presidents,
Morton Blackwell (16:33):
Four different presidents. Presidents over five and a half years. And then I left in November, 1970, and my salary off and on for five and a half years was little or nothing. Sometimes it was little, sometimes it was nothing. I enjoyed every minute of it. Literally I sometimes went to bed with unable to afford my minimum supper, which was a can of Vienna sausage. But when I left college Republicans, I had developed a reputation. I had developed this training program that trained youth organizers who went out and helped win campaigns all across the country. And I was hired in early 71 by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, the biggest conservative think tank in DC at the time. And I was their director of computer projects, not because I was expert in computers, but because they had a program for identifying conservative college professors and getting data on them.
Morton Blackwell (17:44):
And they were recommending conservative professors to the Nixon administration for jobs. And I had just finished five and a half years. I'd worked with people in every state and lots of college people, and if I didn't know somebody on a campus, I knew somebody who knew somebody on a campus. So I went to work for them and it was a fine job. I worked with them for a year and a half, and in May, my friend Lee Edwards introduced me to his friend Richard Vry. All three of us had arrived in DC in 1965. I had known Lee because he would come and lecture to college Republican groups about public relations for me. And I also provided college Republican volunteers for all the major rallies and things that he organized. Lee's a terrific guy.
Morton Blackwell (18:49):
He is not a tall in stature, but he is a towering hero of public relations. And so the New York Times, ones called Lee Edwards, the voice of the Silent Majority, and he set up a luncheon with Richard Vry who had built already a massive direct mail operation and had a fabulous reputation. Richard Vry did not attend conservative meetings. He was a recluse. He went to work early and worked late, and he didn't go to any of those meetings. He was rumored to have behind his desk a giant faucet that he could turn on and money would pour into the treasury of any group he would take on as a client. But I'd not met him. We'd been to the same town, had the same principles. He had been active in the Goldwater campaign, as had Lee and I, and we hit it off well with lunch Lee Edwards and Richard and I. Two weeks later he said, Morton, I want you to come back to the Mayflower Hotel and have another lunch with me. And he offered me a job and he said, Morton, I've decided to go public as a conservative leader and I want you to come help me build a conservative movement. I'll teach you fundraising and you can be my political assistant as we start to seriously build a mass based conservative movement. I took the job and worked for Richard for seven years.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:32):
And what did you do for Richard?
Morton Blackwell (20:33):
Well, just what he promised. He promised that he would teach me direct mail fundraising, which he did, and I helped him organize innumerable meetings of people who were already conservative leaders or who had the potential to be conservative leaders. We concluded that what the conservative movement needed was to dramatically increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists. And that meant helping existing groups recruit a whole lot more members than donors. And it also required the creation of many new conservative groups. And truthfully, some leaders of existing conservative groups were not happy about the sudden springing up of other conservative organizations. But people like Paul Wyrick and Ed Fuller put together the Heritage Foundation. They put together the House Republican Study Committee, the Senate Steering Committee Wick was particularly prolific. He helped create Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, many, many other organizations. And through the seventies, the number of conservative organizations multiplied the number of big conservative organizations multiplied.
Morton Blackwell (22:07):
We wound up recruiting a theologically conservative pastor who had a national television program, Dr. Jerry Falwell and why went down with a group of friends of mine to Lynchburg, talked with Jerry Falwell and said we were hoping that he would lead a national conservative Christian group. And he said to Dr. Falwell, I believe there is a moral majority out there ready to organize. And a couple of minutes later, Falwell said, well, I like that. I think I'll use that. He said, Paul said, what do you mean? He said, moral majority, that's what I'm going to call my organization. And Falwell started involving conservative Christians in politics. And up until that time, young people can't maybe even conceive of it. But up until that time, most theologically conservative pastors thought the politics and the public policy process was not part of their calling. And yet Falwell became enormously famous. I think they were probably more people in the United States who could name the pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church than could name a Catholic Cardinal. And other theologically conservative religious broadcasters noticed that lightning did not strike Jerry Falwell and it was successful and it was good. And so in the latter part of the seventies there arose what was called the religious right, huge, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who worked theologically conservative became active and that enabled us to nominate and elect Ronald Reagan.
Jenny Beth Martin (24:11):
And how did that help nominate and elect him?
Morton Blackwell (24:15):
Well, in political contests over time, the winner, the winning side is determined by which side has the greatest number of effective activists and leaders. You don't win just because your heart is pure. You don't win by being able to prove that you are right. If one side has a greater number of effective activists than the other side over a continued period of time, then that side is going to win. And if you are on the side that doesn't study how to win and doesn't increase your activists, then you're going to lose no matter how right you are.
Jenny Beth Martin (25:01):
That is such an important lesson for people to understand. Sometimes they get behind a candidate or a cause and they know that that is a right cause and they just want the answer and they want the solution and they want it right this second. Well,
Morton Blackwell (25:16):
They think, if I can prove that I am right, then eventually I'm going to win because I'm right. And victory will fall into my deserving hands like a ripe fruit off of a tree because I'm right. Well, that is not the real nature of politics. If you believe your side deserves to win, then you owe it to your philosophy to study how to win, how to organize, how to communicate, how to raise funds, all the thousands of skills that are necessary to win in government politics and the news media.
Jenny Beth Martin (25:55):
And I want to come back to Reagan and we'll do that in a few minutes, but let's keep talking about what you were just talking about. You have made it really your life mission since you were in college, to train people on all of those aspects of it so they understand what skills they need to win.
Morton Blackwell (26:15):
Absolutely. I aim to build a movement, not an empire. And that is why I am very happy to cooperate with other conservative organizations and help them in various ways. New organizations come up and just like I did with Tea Party Patriots, I call 'em up and say, we can help you. You have wonderful committed activists. Let us teach them how to be. And many of 'em say yes. And so the Leadership Institute has just grown extraordinarily. I founded it in 1979. We have now trained over 310,000 people.
Jenny Beth Martin (27:01):
That's amazing. Morton.
Morton Blackwell (27:04):
Last year we did more than 2000 separate training programs. We have over 2,600 active conservative or libertarian local club, local campus clubs. We have a powerful website that exposes leftist abuses and bias on campus. Last year we had over 8 million viewers on that, and it's working wonderfully both programmatically and financially. The Leadership Institute is currently in our greatest period of growth. Last year we trained 31,000 people, which was 107% of the number we trained the previous year.
Jenny Beth Martin (27:58):
And that's 10% of the total number you've ever trained. That's
Morton Blackwell (28:02):
Right.
Jenny Beth Martin (28:03):
That's amazing actually, when you think of it that way, that 10% from starting in 1979 all the way through the end of 2023.
Morton Blackwell (28:12):
Yeah. Well, last year alone, we trained more people than we did in the first 22 years of the Leadership Institute. And we've been able to attract a growing number of supporters. Last year we acquired 63,000 new donors with an average first gift of over $70.
Jenny Beth Martin (28:38):
Congratulations.
Morton Blackwell (28:40):
And our revenue is growing rapidly. 2020, it was 23 million. The annual revenue the next year was 30 million. The next year it was 39 million. And last year we had a total revenue of $42 million.
Jenny Beth Martin (28:55):
That is wonderful. And I think there's something really important for people to understand if they're just getting started, your growth is phenomenal and the numbers 41 million in a year is something you should be so proud of. But it took years to get to that point and it took tireless dedication to a cause that you knew was worthy and you became the expert at it and you were willing to train as many people as possible and not say all of it is mine. You wanted to help other people grow and you did that consistently over years.
Morton Blackwell (29:35):
Well, when I decided years ago that we were going to do a fundraising school teaching direct mail, my staff questioned that we were already noted for success in direct mail. And some of my staff said, but Morton, if we teach other groups what we know about direct mail, then they're going to go out and send letters to the same base of conservative donors and they'll be competitors. And I said, repeat for me please. What I've taught you is the mission of the Leadership Institute, which is to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in government politics and the news media. And if we teach good conservative groups how to be more effective, then they're going to go out and increase the number and effectiveness of the conservative activists and leaders. I confess I went home and told my wife what we were doing because you you're going to teach it. Well that's alright. And then she froze and she says, Morton, are you going to teach telemarketing? She says, if you teach telemarketing, I'm going to divorce you.
Jenny Beth Martin (30:49):
No, why did she say that? She
Morton Blackwell (30:51):
Hated telephone marketing and she got over that. She didn't divorce me. But we teach the whole broad spectrum. We have a comprehensive school of fundraising that's four days long, which covers every major element of fundraising
Jenny Beth Martin (31:12):
And it's a little bit by a little bit by a little bit building over time, on and on and on and not giving up. And you have seen amazing wins. You were a delegate for Reagan in the sixties. You went on to see him become president, but you also have seen presidents who certainly are not conservative, not even Republican, and you just kept going. Even with all the defeat that you've seen, you kept going. What kind of advice do you give to people who are just starting out? Well,
Morton Blackwell (31:44):
In 65 when I came to DC to be executive director of the National College Republicans, every time I drove by the White House, I thought that's where Lyndon Johnson lives. He's the enemy.
Morton Blackwell (32:02):
And it turns out that eventually in 1981 I got hired onto Ronald Reagan's White House staff and I was working in the building. So you have to keep your perspective on this and it's not ordained that you're going to win every time and you've got to keep your eye on the ball. And when you lose, you got to have to figure out what did you do that you could have done better and what did you fail to do? And you accumulate knowledge and you accumulate donors frankly, even though we try in our schools to emphasize the importance of taking good care of your donors, quite frankly, most groups with a broad base of donors do not treat their donors very well. And my staff here me all the time, I say I want us to treat our donors better than any other group treats their donors. And I drill that into my staff's minds and I'm not sure that we do that, but we certainly try and that has helped us grow.
Jenny Beth Martin (33:24):
How do you take care of your donors?
Morton Blackwell (33:28):
Well, you have to be as personal as you can with the donors on a thing. As simple as writing a thank you note. There are some groups, and they're not big groups, but there are some groups that don't even bother to thank their donors. And there are other groups which have a printed thank you note and they write and there are blanks in it and it's a dear and you write in the name, thank you very much for your contribution of, and you add that. And then there's a printed signature on this thank you note. No, that's wrong. Some people wait weeks before they thank their donors. We have a rule here and almost always we adhere to that rule if when we get a contributions come in one day and sometimes we can have a thousand or 3000 donors if there's been a big mailing. Our rule is my staff doesn't leave the office until after they have put into the computer the data relating to every new contribution so that the next day these donors are mailed a personalized thank you letter thanking them for their contribution. And most groups certainly don't do that.
Jenny Beth Martin (35:12):
I think that is right and it makes me think I need to go make sure we're doing all of our thank yous right with our organization when we started. So we were very, very fortunate because we had a lot of donors who responded to direct mail initially. And I will admit that it was so many and we didn't have the infrastructure we were learning. I knew how to organize small groups and how to be active. What I didn't know was how to do fundraising and how to thank people and all of the infrastructure related to that. And we've had to go back and reestablish relationships with donors, but we are making sure we're much better about it now than we were when we began. We learned a lot of hard lessons and it's amazing how much just a small touch, like a thank you, how much difference that makes to people.
Morton Blackwell (36:07):
For people who give more than just a few dollars, somebody gives you $50 or a hundred dollars, it is probably worthwhile for you to call that donor. And if a donor gives you a big donation, for sure you want to call them. And donors are frequently called by people who are asking for money and they cringe at that. But if they've just sent a thousand dollars into an organization and then three days later they get a telephone call for the organization, they can be pretty sure that the group isn't going to be asking them for money. So they'll get on the phone and you can then thank them promptly. So personal business with donors are important. One of the things that we have found in recent years is that it has proved very effective to us financially to increase the number of development officers that we have so that we go out and meet with more donors than we used to do and it pays off. And some of our largest donors are people who started off with $25 or $50 gifts and then two or three or five years later they give you a gift for a hundred thousand dollars even though you may not have had any idea that they could afford to give such a gift.
Jenny Beth Martin (37:47):
And you've had people who've left you in their will as well, right?
Morton Blackwell (37:51):
Absolutely. Absolutely. We're very good at that. Last week we received a legacy gifts from a person who had only contributed by mail and not very often, and the gift was $1.9 million, but they've been getting our newsletters, they've had personal contacts, we have telephone town halls, we invite the donors to call in and I'll talk with donors and answer questions that it's a lot to be done. And any organization that wants to be very successful financially needs to be trained on what works and what doesn't work with respect to fundraising. So I invite you to people who are listening to contact the leadership institute and find out what our schedule of training programs is. We do charge but tuition at these schools, but our tuition coming in is currently less than 1% of our total revenue.
Jenny Beth Martin (39:05):
And I've seen, and I'm sure that you've seen that when you're doing events, if somebody pays a little bit of money, it helps them mentally be committed to what they're doing.
Morton Blackwell (39:18):
They take it seriously. People instinctively think if it's free, maybe it isn't worth anything. And so if you charge 'em $25 and offer them free lunch at the event, people may come.
Jenny Beth Martin (39:36):
That's right. I want to go back to something you were just saying about that. I've noticed as well how some groups get very bothered when new groups pop up instead of embracing the fact that we are growing as a conservative movement. It is as if they're afraid of the friendly competition and we are capitalists, we are supposed to competition and understand that competition can help you be better
Morton Blackwell (40:04):
And competition improves the quality of what everybody is doing.
Jenny Beth Martin (40:11):
I think that is exactly right. And also even if they're doing something that is very, very similar to what you're doing when we're fighting such a massive government overreach, it is just so large. There's no way that even with all the groups across the entire country, whether they're small campus groups or national groups or somewhere in between state level, county level, whatever it may be, there still aren't enough of us to compete with the federal government and the growth of the federal government and then the seat and local governments on top of that.
Morton Blackwell (40:50):
Well that is true. It is difficult. However, I think it is certainly true that conservative groups which are funded by voluntary contributions are more efficient in the use of their funds than a government bureaucrat might be.
Jenny Beth Martin (41:08):
Absolutely. That is true. And it's good that we have more groups coming up. I'm
Morton Blackwell (41:15):
All for it. Last week we had a school, we hold about three times a year. I call it the conservative organizational entrepreneur. And it's specifically for people who have in their mind that they want to start their own group. So we come and give them a two day intensive course on what to do and what to avoid in building your own organization.
Jenny Beth Martin (41:42):
I think that's a really good idea and they need that and we need them to start. So it's very exciting. And as I was saying, I went through a lot of training before the movement started and I am constantly reading and trying to learn more because I think I can always improve. My daughter is active on her campus and she started a conservative club in high school and she got material from Leadership Institute from YAF and from Turning Point USA, she's been through training with Leadership Institute. You do weekend trainings for students and she did one down, I think it was in West Palm Beach and she arrived on a Thursday, a nice
Morton Blackwell (42:34):
Location.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:35):
It is a nice location. And she said, well, and there was a scholarship, so if you're active Leadership Institute has scholarships available especially for students
Morton Blackwell (42:45):
Made possible by donors who appreciate what we're doing.
Jenny Beth Martin (42:50):
And she went to that and she said, mom, we start at seven o'clock in the morning and we are not finishing until 10 o'clock at night. And I said, well, that's what a scholarship does. They're making sure you learn
Morton Blackwell (43:01):
And well when she winds up and she probably already has working in campaigns, campaign hours are at least that bad,
Jenny Beth Martin (43:10):
At least sometimes. I know that during campaign season there's going to be several all-nighters during the campaign season and I just buckle up and prepare for it. Exactly. Right.
Morton Blackwell (43:24):
But don't you think some of the lefties stay awake late at night working? Of
Jenny Beth Martin (43:29):
Course they do. Of course they do. And one of the trainings that she did, she did it before the Dobbs decision came out and she wound up being in front of the Supreme Court with students for Life when the Dobbs decision came out. And I noticed that her social media feed, she posted a photo and it was a momentous day and she posted a photo and she was getting trolled online. And some of the students who had been through the training with her through your training who were not there, jumped in and were helping defend her social media while she was there. And I just thought that was amazing. And it's that pulling people together like that, you're training them and you're building a network and they're able to support each other across the entire country.
Morton Blackwell (44:14):
It helps to work in concert.
Jenny Beth Martin (44:18):
It really does us You mentioned that you have a lot of groups that you're active on campuses. Yes, you do. Even so tell people about that. They may not be aware.
Morton Blackwell (44:31):
Alright, well, what we're doing on campus does not really lend itself to a lot of publicity because I decided many years ago that it was important to increase the number of conservative groups on campus. And there are campuses that have eight or 10 different groups that could be called conservative or libertarian. But I said I have for five and a half years, the latter half of the sixties in 1970 I was executive director of the College Republicans and it's a membership organization which have clubs and the clubs have in a given club and in a state federation and certainly in the national organization there are political fights and credentials, battles and feuds within the organization. And I said, I've been through that for five and a half years with the college Republicans and we increased the number of college Republicans while I was there from 450 to 911 clubs. But I said, I don't want to have the job of supervising these clubs. So here's what our plan is. Every year we do training and we train about 70 people and then hire perhaps the 25 best of them to start off when school begins in the fall.
Morton Blackwell (46:11):
They visited campuses most often campuses that have no conservative or libertarian student groups in their hundreds of 'em still in the country. So they identify by various means a card table on the sidewalk, talking to students who walk by their online ways to find students. We find conservative or libertarian students, we invite them to come to a meeting and we've reserved a place and tell 'em where and when the meeting is going to be and when they come and there may be 50 70 people if our field staff are doing their jobs and we tell them that we're here to help them start one or more conservative groups on campus. And we say we do not have leadership institute clubs on a campus. There are 16 national organizations that have are conservative or libertarian that have campus chapters. And we pass out packets to all the students who have come and here's the 16 groups.
Morton Blackwell (47:30):
And we ask that you all talk with each other and come up with subsets of you who want to start a club of one of these national groups. You give us your contact information, we'll send it to the national group. Oh, brilliant. And they'll almost certainly take you on as a new chapter, some of the groups that are founded as a result of this field work, decide not to affiliate with any group. Those are few, but there are a number of 'em. They'll say We want to have the East Kansas State Conservative Club and they want to be independent of anybody else, but we feed hundreds of new groups to these national organizations. Many of these groups take advantage of our training programs about fundraising or communications or political activity, but it works extraordinarily well. And each new group gives an opportunity for leadership to develop in that group.
Morton Blackwell (48:43):
And we can use these groups as a pool to recruit for all the 55 different types of training programs that we offer. So it works well. It also keeps us with wonderful relations with almost all of these 16 groups. They love us because who else is out there beside their own staff, organizing new groups for them. So it works very well. And we now have over 2,600 of them. And in my experience, there are some groups that exaggerate what they have on the ground. Leadership Institute prints up a directory by state and then by campus and then by group on campus. And this directory includes the name of the head of the group mailing address and phone number. That's
Jenny Beth Martin (49:36):
Smart. And you don't have to exaggerate. You have, I mean other groups shouldn't be exaggerating anyway, but
Morton Blackwell (49:45):
They do do one group, and I won't mention it, and it's not one of these 16 groups, and frankly it's not a college group, but one group that I got two fundraising letters from last year, and it's a group that I have been associated with in the past, and they claimed that they had a hundred thousand members and they claimed a certain number of clubs that they had. And when you divided the number of members by the number of clubs was easy, simple to do. You could do it in your head. They were claiming that each of their clubs has 600 members. Well, I know this organization, if they have three clubs in the whole nation that has 600 members, I'd be surprised. But people lie about it. It's a human thing to exaggerate, one of the things that is a clue that somebody is blowing smoke at you is if they claim a hundred thousand members, I mean 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 is that realistic? Highly unlikely. There's a group that has exactly a hundred thousand members. That's why we print up a directory of, so when I say I have 2,600 groups, I could go up to my desk and hand you a directory of these clubs and you could call 'em and they're actually there.
Jenny Beth Martin (51:34):
And it makes a huge difference because when you are able to keep up with that information and you're reaching out to the people who have groups and you're in communication with them, you can be more effective. And
Morton Blackwell (51:44):
It helps you in so many ways. I go visit a donor in Missouri and I tell 'em how many clubs we have in Missouri and they say, oh, well that is very nice. And I said, here, let me show you. And I had them the directory, we opened it up to Missouri and there are dozens of clubs in the state and I give them the directory and I invite them if they're interested in a particular campus to call the club leader and that local campus. For them credibility is extremely important. A lot of people have been burned by groups making false claims. And so when they find a group that can verify what their claims, they think more highly of them.
Jenny Beth Martin (52:38):
Morton, this is such a fascinating conversation. I want to be able to be sure that we can get all of it in. So I think we're going to break this into two podcasts and we'll be back with the second podcast very soon.
Morton Blackwell (52:50):
Wonderful.
Narrator (52:51):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin, produced by Kevin Mohan and directed by Luke Livingston. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.
Jenny Beth Martin (53:11):
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