The Campus Project has it’s ducks all in a row

Friend:

(Yes, there was no Smith’s Report in February. I expect the benefits of this lapse in scheduling to become substantially evident in the April issue of SR.)

The Campus Project has its ducks all in a row. The first ads are running in student newspapers. Students are flyering at two campuses where the ad was rejected. The log-ons to the CODOH Web-site are increasing in number. The site itself is growing and is increasingly well designed. New volunteers have associated themselves with the Project. A big controversy over (of course) pornography and now revisionism has hit the Internet and the press. And, happily, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (of course) is attempting once more to mislead media about where its interests lie in this controversy. The more things change, the more they stay the same, to coin a phrase.

I'm not speculating any longer, not working in the dark. I know now how things work on the campus, what to expect, both the good and the bad. I know how it works with media, what needs to be accomplished to get its attention and how to use it when I get it. I no longer have to invent the wheel all over again with each new academic year. And now the Project is sustainable in a way it has never been before.

We have a permanent presence now where students, faculty, administration, the great middle class of ordinary Americans, and the running-dog media can always find us. We're on the Internet, we have our own World Wide Web site, which in effect is a publishing site, and unless some earth shattering disaster takes place, we're there for good. I'm not going to have to invent something to take the place of the Internet and our WWW site at the start of the next academic year. It's there now, it will be there then, and will be there the year after and the year after. We're on our way to becoming an institution and the universities and colleges, and the media and The Lobby are all going to have to deal with us.

I've been through it now with the vagaries of the campus thought police, the work-a-day fragility of faculty idealism with regard to intellectual freedom, and the administration's concerns over risking an interruption of corporate funding over something so uninteresting as a free press for students. I'm not going to get very many surprises down the road, and those I do get are not going to be very disappointing. With respect to the Campus Project, I've left disappointment behind.

Below is the modest but crafty (heh, heh) ad that is running in the Daily Californian at University of California at Berkeley, the Titan News at California State University at Fullerton, and in the Eccentric Monthly, the independent newspaper which is distributed to Virginia Tech, Radford University, Roanoke College, New River Community College and Hollins College, all in central Virgina. As of this writing the ad is submitted to 16 additional campuses and may be running in a couple of them by the time you have this in your hand. The ad is submitted to run one day each week for five or six weeks, which gives me time to judge what is happening on campus. (If you live in the vicinity of any of the above campuses, please monitor the papers involved and send me clippings of any reaction to publication of the ad that appears. Don't think the other guy will do it. He's not going to do it!

The ad manager for the Independent at Northeastern University in Chicago said the paper would run the ad but the next day when our man Bill Christianson picked up a copy of the paper the ad wasn't in it. He called the paper and found that the editor had pulled the ad at the last moment because the Independent didn't want to associate itself with what it now judged to be anti-Jewish propaganda. One always wants to know who got to the editor in these situations but it's difficult to get to the bottom of them without spending a lot of time on the telephone which, with the time constraints on me, is impossible.

The very best news is that now when we create a story in the media, we don't disappear with that day's edition of the newspaper, or that night's televised news broadcast or talk show. We're there all the time, week days and week ends. Day and night. Any professor, any reporter, no matter how scared he or she might be, can retreat to the privacy, even the secrecy, of his office and call up the CODOH Web-site and read materials available very few places, and in some cases no other place at all. And he will find out about the Institute for Historical Review as well, and Ernst Zündel's Web site. We're not up there in a vacuum. We reference all those who should be referenced.

Even after the tremendous loses in key support I suffered during the last half of 1994. I can run the above ad, on average, for $12 to $18 per insertion. If I run it initially one time each week for five weeks, that's $60 to $90 – total – creating a presence on that campus for five weeks! It's not only the people who will see the ad itself, but those who will hear about it through word of mouth. And hear about it – and hear about it. And each person who visits the site can download (copy) anything and everything that's there – Free! A real reward waits for everyone who goes to the CODOH Website.

When I tentatively started up the Campus Project in 1989 / 90 with small classified ads announcing access to revisionist scholarship, I could offer a PO Box and flyers announcing revisionist books which were available for sale. I knew right away, from the near hysterical reaction of the Other Side, that I was on to something. Then in April 91 I ran the first full page ad in the Daily Northwestern at Evanston Illinois. That's when the Project began to take giant steps forward and we began getting with the Project.

The down side was that, for me, it was tremendously expensive. It was the most successful revisionist media project we had seen in the U.S. of A., but I had to raise an awful lot of money, considering my very limited resources, to carry it out. I could spend as much as $1,400 (U. Georgia) and even $1,700 (U. Texas) to run a full page ad, which would cause a wonderful hullabaloo with revisionism and revisionist headlines in the news some days for weeks on end, after which I would typically have no further access to the paper where the ad had run. At the same time, those who read the ad had no way to understand how much revisionist research lay behind it. Those who were familiar with revisionist research had no simple or immediate way to get such information to others on campus so that a meaningful debate could proceed.

All that is changed now. $1,700 would run the ad I'm using now every week for a year and ten months! Today, when a student reads the ad and notes the Web address, he can go to it and download everything there, including papers regarding the “gas chambers” by Fritz Berg, Robert Faurisson, Andrew Allen, James J. Martin, David Cole, Carlo Mattogno, Carlos Porter and others. Now there can be an immediate pay-off when our ad is read.

That's not to say there won't be problems. In SR 28 (November 95) I reported on how the idea of this particular ad and ad campaign came to me while standing at the bar in the Main Street Diner here in Visalia and how the ad was already running in the Diamondback at the University of Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. I was happy. After the ad ran twice, advertising called to say that there had been too many complaints about it and it had been pulled. The fellow who called said the ad was causing too much “pain” on the university campus. He then dropped an aside about how he had personally lost relatives in the Holocaust.

There will be many rejections along the way, some papers which chose to publish will get in trouble with The Lobby and will decide to pull the ad which they had previously contracted to run, but in the big picture it isn't going to matter. Plenty of schools will run the ad, the other side will not be able to just let it slide, they'll make a fuss, they'll do it the wrong way (there is no right way), and the media will pick up on the story. This time we have the whole world cornered between a modest advertisement in student newspapers and the CODOH Web-site on the Internet.

One campus where the ad was rejected is Pierce College in Tacoma Washington. The editor of the Pioneer called to say that there had been racial incidents at the campus and if they ran a revisionist ad the community might think there were skinheads or nazis at Pierce as well as racists. The editorial board had decided to reject the ad for being “unsuitable.” But this time we have people on the ground there. A student at Pierce who found me through the Internet has volunteered to help. He has friends. That makes all the difference. Now he and his friends are flyering the campus with our response to the action of the editorial board. We don't know what will come of it. One thing we do know is that the story isn't finished at Pierce until we say it's finished.