Transcript: How Morton Blackwell Built the Conservative Movement — Leave Us Alone Podcast, Ep. 11
Grover Norquist: [00:00:00] And this is Grover Norquist. We’re here for the Leave Us Alone podcast. I’m joined by James and Mike, and a little bit later on gonna be interviewing Morton Blackwell, one of the titans of the conservative movement, who over decades has built, a huge, serious, powerful training program for young and active conservatives, and in a discussion of what it means to be an entrepreneur in the conservative movement and what other people are, are doing or could do.
We’re gonna talk a little bit about. The big, beautiful tax cut about all sorts of new high tech stuff and crypto and, and we’re gonna be introducing a new program entitled, or a new piece of the program, part of the program titled Government Did What the Government Did, what? With the outrage at the end of that because it’s stupid things the government did that you need to know about.
And we’ll [00:01:00] be doing this until we run out of ’em. Uh, probably may take us a while. So, uh, Mike, can you start us off on a discussion of where we are with a big, beautiful bill? Is it past yet?
Mike Palicz: Sure. So just a reminder, kind of our update on the reconciliation. One big, beautiful bill as it has been dubbed which contains the president’s tax agenda.
Border security energy provisions, uh, as well as defense spending. Essentially one big, beautiful bill that entitles much of the president’s agenda. We have passed that out of the house now and it is in the Senate now where they expect to make some slight changes today as leader, uh, John Thune said.
Uh, but largely, you know, we’re, we’re probably a little bit more than halfway there. The timeline that they’ve put forward for passage of this bill has been July 4th. I think that’s probably slightly ambitious, but realistically before August recess. And just to remind folks of, you know, kind of what are the broad strokes of the tax provisions in this bill.
It’s making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent [00:02:00] and building upon them. So we see things like the standard deduction, which essentially the zero rate that individuals are paying on taxes. That’s increased to $32,000 for households in this family. So,
Grover Norquist: so a married couple can make $32,000 and the feds don’t steal any of it.
Mike Palicz: Correct. So every American, the first $32,000, unless they
Grover Norquist: drink,
Mike Palicz: unless they drink
Grover Norquist: beer,
Mike Palicz: right, right. Except for excise taxes. Yeah. But the first $32,000 of income you have is not being charged with federal income taxes. They also then adjust for inflation to slightly boost everyone up. Recovery essentially for the Biden years where we suffered inflation.
But point being. Across the board, every income level tax cut, delivering on the president’s key tax campaign promise that he would cut taxes for every income level. Unlike Kamala Harris who said not for high income people. Exactly. Any talk of raising a new millionaire’s tax is defeated. Dead president’s rejected that.
Republicans in Congress have rejected that not happening. We’re very glad [00:03:00] to see that. We also have the. Increase in the child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $2,500. Girl, we talked about this before. Crucially, it does not in include the refundability portion of it, which is essentially the difference of how Republicans and Democrats see the child tax credit.
If you wanna expand a little bit about. What refundability in the tax code means.
Grover Norquist: Well, refundability means if you don’t have $2,000 liability, but you have a kid, you think the $2,000 tax credit would be written to you as a check. It’d be spending, when you say something’s refundable, it turns into spending.
Mike Palicz: Yeah, and that’s exactly right. And I think politically the danger always here too that we’ve seen before is if Republicans come out and say. We’ll send a larger, a larger check to families. Oh, yes, of course you, you will never outbid what the Democrat offer it
Grover Norquist: during the campaign. JD Vance, vice presidential candidate at the time said, once I.
Well, I think we should have a $5,000 per child tax [00:04:00] credit fully refundable. So everybody gets a $5,000 check per child. And how long did it take before Kamala Harris, the Democrat gets up and says six? We’ll do six, I think not even 24 hours. You cannot outbid the left in quote unquote taxing the rich, and you can’t outbid the left in spending money and any effort to do that, just.
Changes the goalposts and now the reasonable spending limit is what the Republican said, and it and anything higher than that, the Democrats say we’re better. And the same thing with tax increases. Just no, no Republican should be recommending newer additional spending increases or
Mike Palicz: tax hikes. And of course, on, on the policy side of things.
It’s never pro-family policy to make families more dependent on government checks, right? That’s not what our outcome here is. What we wanna do is tear down government barriers, deregulate the economy, and let people keep more of their own money, which is what we see the approach in this Trump bill is, which is [00:05:00] they don’t increase the refundable portion of child tax credit, but they do increase the child tax credit overall, bumping it from $2,000 per child to $2,500 without touching.
The refundability a spending portion of the credit.
Grover Norquist: Yeah. And the Democrats want the universal basic income where everybody gets a check from the government and if you make the tax credit refundable, you’re halfway all the way there.
Mike Palicz: So now Grover, those are some of the just very broad strokes. Yeah.
Key elements of this bill. The one area where the bill is not perfect is the on the pro-growth provisions, the cost recovery provisions of this. Things like expensing for businesses r and d, expensing interest deductibility. A little bit more in the weeds in the tax policy policy itself, but all critical provisions of the 2017 tax cuts.
We’ve seen new studies coming out from places like the tax foundation saying the difference between the house bill, which has a temporary extension of five years versus permanency. This is a full point [00:06:00] of GDP growth for the economy. Can you tell us a little bit more about how important. These provisions are, and do we expect the Senate to make any changes here?
Grover Norquist: Well, we’ll start off with the good news. The Senate will make sure that those three provisions, expensing provisions, are going to be permanent. They’ve said so in writing, and the house leadership and the Senate leadership have known this for a long time. For whatever reason, they decided to let it go when it passed the house.
To as just a four year extension. But they did so knowing, and all the Republicans understood that the Senate would fix this. Now, maybe I’m guessing the Senate needs to feel they’re doing something and you can’t, because the Senate, the House of Talks so long, it’d be very easy for the House to have taken every single good idea, including the ones that came from the Senate and then hand it to the Senate.
And then how does the Senate explain to people at home that they work for a living? So you really do need the Senate to have added some things. I, I don’t know that that’s the plan, but if I was organizing it, I would say, okay, here are really good ideas. Half of them go to the house, [00:07:00] half of them go to the Senate.
So everybody knows you’re both necessary.
James Erwin: I don’t know if I’ll get in trouble for saying this in a recorded setting, but one of Speaker Johnson’s great talent seems to be allowing other people to think that they’ve done something brilliant when it was his idea and his generosity in letting the credit spread around is actually one of the.
Tools that he’s been using to get everybody on board with this package.
Grover Norquist: Yeah. So it’s a dirty trick treating people with respect and encouraging their ideas.
James Erwin: Yeah. And, and you know, praising them for coming up with it when they do the right thing. Yeah, yeah.
Grover Norquist: That’s right.
I think you referenced the letter that leader Thune, senate Finance Chair, Mike Repo. How many
Grover Norquist: guys signed that?
Mike Palicz: I think it was essentially the Senate Finance and Leadership. In, in the Senate sent a letter about in February, I believe, to Trump saying, yep, lot their red line in the sand. They will not sign any bill that does not make the pro-growth provisions permanent.
That’s been their, their number one goal, rightfully so, I believe from the beginning, and the point I missed earlier too, is in addition, you know what that GDP growth, that extra [00:08:00] point of growth you get from permanency versus what we have in the bill right now, key, what that means is increased wages for households.
More money in people’s pocket. That’s a pay raise for every American if we get these provisions made permanent.
Grover Norquist: And if you, as you get pro-growth policies, and uh, this is where Kevin has said, the Economist for the White House says, if you grow at 3% a year, instead of one and a half percent, I. A year, and you do that for 10 years, which is very doable.
And, and we ought to do that with this bill. And the people have looked at it, say, we should get that level of increased growth, go from one point a half to 3%. That brings in $4 trillion more money over a decade. So if you think the bill, quote unquote costs 4.5 trillion, that basically pays for itself through growth alone.
Some of the guys on our team who. Wanna focus on spending, and I’m all for reducing every spending effort that you can get done. But what really matters is economic growth.
Mike Palicz: Yeah, that’s [00:09:00] exactly right. And I think that’s a question too, when you get to pro-growth tax policy, it’s not a question of whether or not it pays for itself, but a question of when it pays for itself.
Grover Norquist: Why would you fail to do something that creates jobs and opportunity and higher wages?
Mike Palicz: And then, and then I think PO potentially what we’re alluding here to today. Should note, we had a tweet come out from Elon Musk here within the last hour noting as, as Elon has just recently left the administration, uh, his formal role this week he came out with criticism of against the bill today.
I. Specifically kind of citing this idea that the bill doesn’t do enough to reduce deficits. Grover, what’s, do you think that’s a fair characterization of the bill?
Grover Norquist: Well, I would’ve thought that Elon Musk would be a little more sympathetic to the idea that there’s only so much you can do. He went in and looked at a bunch of waste in government, found a lot of it, and then.
In the matter of, you know, a hundred days people are mad at him ’cause it didn’t translate from, I can see it to a bill passed by the house where their republicans have like a three or four vote margin [00:10:00] and passed the Senate, which. Would require 60 votes in most cases. And the president signs it. This doesn’t happen that quickly, and you don’t have 218 Republicans agreeing on every, every bad thing that Elon Musk found and saw.
So he’s frustrated that every good idea of his didn’t. Happen and so that’s one of the real problems. We have both, but people say the same thing about the president. How come the president didn’t make all the changes? How come the House and Senate didn’t make all the changes? It is a very difficult, cumbersome job.
You have to get the whole government to do anything, and that’s a good idea generally because the governments tend to make things bigger, and we want that to be difficult and for the whole country to be watching it. But it does mean it’s slower sometimes about making things smaller.
Mike Palicz: Yeah, and I think that’s right.
And no we’ve put out here before too, right? What this bill actually is. We have currently about $1.4 trillion in reduced spending
Grover Norquist: in this bill. Yes, that’s right there. That’s real. That’s good [00:11:00] stuff.
Mike Palicz: And approaching about $3.7 trillion in tax policy. That’s for continuation of our current tax code, along with the, some of the additional tax cuts the president campaigned on.
But the biggest chunk of that come is just coming from. Extending current policy, which we’ve made the point before, we should be viewing this on a current policy baseline. Yep. Because if we don’t extend the Trump tax cuts, that is automatic tax increases by about $4.6 trillion on every income level in America.
Something every Republican, every conservative, of course, wants to avoid. And we shouldn’t be in the business of, we don’t address the deficit by sending more money out of the private sector to the government. That’s not a conservative one. That’s not smaller government. It’s not free markets. Nope, not at all.
James Erwin: And I believe if you netted out the tax policy in terms of what’s like, actually new, not what we’re currently dealing with, uh, it’s about a $200 billion addition to the deficit. And so it’s, we’re talking about a net [00:12:00] spending cut. This is a net deficit reduction. As long as you are not pretending that there’s going to be this giant tax increase, no one would allow to happen, uh, in a couple of years this year.
Yeah.
Mike Palicz: The, the work requirements we’re talking about instituting on Medicaid, I think are the most important welfare reform we’ve made in, in over the last decade, and it’s a
Grover Norquist: model for other welfare programs that need to be reformed also.
Mike Palicz: And this is, I think the frustration of, if you break apart parts of the, the one big beautiful bill here, theoretically.
Every Republican in Congress should be supporting extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Every Republican in Congress should be supporting repeal of the inflation reduction Act. Biden’s main legislative, you know, accomplishment here that we never got at Obamacare. The way we’re repealing Biden, Biden administration’s key policy here and rolling back that disastrous policy, every Republican should be supporting work requirements for Medicaid.
So really it’s frustrating here that there’d be really any objection.
Grover Norquist: And, and the fact that it’s not perfect is not a real criticism, [00:13:00] it’s just an observation. Nothing is going to be perfect. Nothing is gonna solve all the world’s problems in any one day or any one decade. And Gingrich is pointing out the other day.
We need to always refer to it as the Obama Biden years, because it was 12 years of unified government in terms of they basically agreed. Completely on what they were trying to do, pushing in the wrong direction. And we need to overcome undo and all of the works of Biden and Obama. It’s not good enough to just fix the Biden stuff ’cause there’s eight years of Obama stuff that needs to go as well.
James Erwin: And again, we’re still talking about a deficit reduction of over a trillion dollars. And if that’s not good enough for you as a starting point, then. I mean, I don’t really know what to tell you. Like what,
Grover Norquist: and this is the first of four years and there’ll be two other reconciliation packages in the next 12 months.
There’ll be one in the fall of this year, and there’ll be one in early spring of 26. And we saw this in the [00:14:00] Biden
Mike Palicz: administration, right? When in Biden’s, first term off in his, in his term, in office. His first Congress. Yeah. They came out, they used a reconciliation bill to do their $1.9 trillion. COVID Fake spending Bill.
Yeah. State Bill. And then they came back into the inflation reduction Act in August of 2022. So we saw Democrats use reconciliation twice. Yes. To To the Grover’s point. This isn’t necessarily Republicans only bite at the Apple.
Grover Norquist: Now you got two more.
James Erwin: As a matter of fact, next week the leadership is going to bring a rescissions package, which we often talk about reconciliation as the main way.
You can circumvent the filibuster, but there’s actually a couple of other mechanisms and doing rescissions, which have almost never been done, but this is in, this is in law. You can also circumvent the filibuster or get past it. If the president submits a package of spending cuts of this all came in under budget, you can remove the appropriation for this.
Now. That’s what they’re trying to do to some of the initial Doge findings. So we’re talking and that’s, it’s almost $10 billion they’re gonna vote on next week.
Grover Norquist: Yeah, that’s a good start. And, and it’s
James Erwin: npr. So, and look,
Mike Palicz: people, it’s my favorite. People are never [00:15:00] really interested in the process arguments of your thing, but there are certain things you’re only able to do that you can’t do in reconciliation.
Reconciliation has to address mandatory spending, not. Discretionary spending, that’s for the appropriations process, but can be addressed in something like a rescissions package with the administration is also, or working on several Yeah. Different packages right now. And then we also have, you know, when it comes to what the president campaigned on, when it comes to something like no tax on social security.
Well, social security has special rules that require, uh, that you can’t do it through reconciliation. You need to have more than just the 50 plus, you know, vice president vote. That reconciliation has. So what they’ve done in this bill is they have a new deduction, $4,000 deduction created for seniors meant to kind of scratch the itch of the, what the president wants to do on policy, but they physically, you know, legally can’t do through reconciliation that no tax on social security, for example.
So there, there people have to understand, the public has to understand [00:16:00] there is a limitation on what we’re able to do in reconciliation.
James Erwin: And this is, this is all about when you don’t have 60 so votes in the senate. What are the ways you can get around that reconciliation can only touch mandatory Rescissions can only touch discretionary.
You can’t really touch social security at all. So this is what we’re left with and they’re, they’re doing as much as they can. And getting a trillion dollars in mandatory spending, more than a trillion dollars out of the deficit. Pretty substantial.
Mike Palicz: And I think just to put on little things here, what we’re doing, we’re talking about a nearly a trillion dollars in savings for Medicaid reforms right now.
Putting in good policy like work requirements, the simple idea that if you’re an able-bodied person, you should be working period, let alone working to qualify for taxpayer provided healthcare.
Grover Norquist: Absolutely. What else we got?
James Erwin: Well, we have, uh, you mentioned high tech. There’s two tech telecom updates I want to give very quickly.
Uh, we’ll start with the Senate. This is also financial services matter. In the next couple days, the Senate is going to be voting on the Genius Act, which we’ve talked about a couple times on the podcast [00:17:00] here. Grover, you coined the, uh, very stable genius because the house version is the Stable Act and the Senate version is the Genius Act.
And these are bills to allow banks to start issuing stable coins. So these are. Cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the US dollar. They could be pegged to gold. There are different types, but these are supposed to be about the ones that are pegged to our currency. And the people who are using these are not the same as the people who are interested in Bitcoin necessarily because they’re not looking for the same anonymity, they’re not looking for the same security of transactions.
They’re looking to deal in dollars, but do so in a more frictionless manner. So cryptocurrency is great for facilitating more online commerce in that way. The votes are gonna start. Possibly any minute Now as we’re recording this there will be votes on amendments. Two of the amendments are potential poison pills that could, that could kill the, the Genius Act.
And we’ve also been talking about, yes, these are the credit card price controls. So there’s the Marshall Amendment, which is the Durban Marshall Credit Card Competition Act, is what it’s called. This would ban interchange fees. It would disrupt all of these payment schedules [00:18:00] that credit card networks have already negotiated with the stores and force them to renegotiate.
They would basically. Take away all the funding that the credit card companies use to provide reward programs for their customers and provide network security. So this is an amendment that is not germane at all to stable coins would be terrible policy if passed and would likely be a poison pill if adopted.
The other one, the Holly Bill, is his. This is the Hawley Amendment. This is his bill, uh, with Senator Bernie Sanders, who is, uh, a socialist that belongs to neither party, supposedly from Vermont. And this is a national price control on interest rates. This is something that has been discredited for four decades now.
The, uh, no,
Grover Norquist: about 2000 years.
James Erwin: Well, sorry. That’s it. That’s on credit cards specifically. It’s been discredited for four decades since Congress repealed Regulation Q back in 1986, or faced it out between 1980 and 1986, which was, so there’s a lot of very good academic writing. There’s a lot of, uh, legislative research.
Uh, there’s a [00:19:00] strong public record on how price cap or caps on interest rates that are too low do not help. Low income Americans, Senator, they make it harder to get Senator Credit. Senator, Senator
Grover Norquist: Holly elected as a Republican who is gonna be for tax cuts and right to work and be a Reagan Republican.
Yes. Is now promoting. Price control.
James Erwin: Price control’s on credit. Yes. So that it’ll be harder for people who don’t have good credit scores to get credit cards, basically.
Mike Palicz: Wow. I think Did Holly also just come out against the right to work?
James Erwin: Yeah, he, he reversed himself in right to work after getting a whopping five grand from one of the unions.
What a cheap date. What a cheap
Grover Norquist: date.
James Erwin: But anyway, those votes are gonna be happening in the next 24 to 48 hours on those amendments. So anybody listening, uh, who values your credit card call your senator, urge them to vote no on those two amendments, the Marshall Amendment and the Hawley Amendment. And while you’re at it tomorrow morning go to Real Clear Markets and you will find my latest op-ed about those two amendments [00:20:00] explaining exactly why they are terrible, excellent.
And that should be live on Wednesday. Sounds good. Alright, and while you’re there, yes. Else, while you’re on your computer, you might take a moment to rate and review. Leave us Alone on your favorite podcast platform. It helps us reach more listeners who care about freedom. And don’t forget to share this episode with friends who value Liberty.
I.
Grover Norquist: Now
James Erwin: back
Grover Norquist: to the discussion. What else do we need to go or do we, I have an interview coming up. I, I think we
Mike Palicz: have now it, it is time for our new segment on the show. Ooh. Ooh. Somebody got new segment. Yes. This is the government did what, where we highlight a stupid thing the federal government is doing and this is this like
Grover Norquist: the Abbott and Costella routine where they, okay, go ahead.
What, who, so what we’re gonna highlight
Mike Palicz: this week is, un unsurprisingly where we would start would be the IRS. Which that’s really not fair. That’s what we see. We like to bring to light in October of 2024. Now, folks might remember that when the, it’s like making
Grover Norquist: fun of handicap
Mike Palicz: people.
Grover Norquist: It’s not, it’s not nice going after the IRS.
Go ahead. Do it anyway. Do it [00:21:00] anyway.
Mike Palicz: When the Biden IRS they funneled $80 billion in new funding for enforcement for the express purpose of how much. $80 billion to the IRS and they said we’re gonna actually go out and from that we’re gonna raise a net of 120. So we’re gonna shake loose $200 billion from the private sector, from increased enforcement.
Grover Norquist: I thought we clawed some of that back.
Mike Palicz: Now. We have we’ve clawed back, I believe, over over $20 billion of the IRS enforcement funding through, uh, Republican negotiated debt limit deals. Which has been great, a good conservative one that we had while Biden was still in office, uh, which speaks to the how deeply unpopular this idea was.
But if you can remember again and again, the Biden administration told folks we’re only going after people earning over $400,000. We’re not going after small, individually owned businesses. We’re going after large corporations. That’s who’s in our crosshairs here. Well, in October of 2024, right before the election.
The Biden [00:22:00] administration at the IRS created the new pass through compliance unit. Grover if that’s not about the scariest thing you’ve heard, uh, which, which of course had the express purpose of going after small, individually owned businesses and most
Grover Norquist: pass throughs, meaning not corporations, but subchapter s companies that are, that pay their taxes with a personal income tax.
Most of those are small or at least started small and medium.
Mike Palicz: Yeah. And, and this is of course, the idea. Why do they target small businesses? Because they don’t have the same resources at their disposal
Grover Norquist: and they’re Republicans and,
Mike Palicz: and of course if they’re small businesses, you’re far more likely to be voting Republicans, so they’re going after what they view as the other team.
Grover Norquist: Yeah, you have to have a market cap of 2 billion before you become a democrat.
Mike Palicz: But I think here what you have is they’re going after small businesses because these are the people who can’t afford to fight back. Yep. And I think that’s obviously, if you’re gonna go out and sell the public that, well, the IRS needs all this new enforcement money for the IRS, but we’re only going after large corporations.
And then [00:23:00] you create the pass through compliance unit. I think it pretty much speaks to who you’re targeting.
Grover Norquist: You go and take a look at what small businesses are writing checks to Republican, congressmen, and state legislators. Then you get one of those local pretend press people that get subsidies, like from the state of New York.
Okay. And they put in an article saying, we think this guy did something wrong. Then the IRS says, well, just looking at the independent press seems we should go look at this guy. And then you can just. Go after him and, uh, sit in his office and makes life miserable and cost him any number of dollars with lawyers until perhaps he starts donating to Democrats.
James Erwin: And here, I thought it was the HR department that flipped these companies, but Yes, that’s right.
Mike Palicz: This is something that’s certainly in the cross airs of the Trump administration, both the Treasury Department and the IRS. We at a TR let a letter. Friday of last week, urging the Trump IRS to revoke this Biden era pass through unit.
Uh, something the administration should get rid of. Does it take a law as quickly as possible? Does law, does it take
Grover Norquist: a law or can they do it by [00:24:00] executive? Executive action? Oh, good. Alright. I vote yes. Well, we are going to move on to the interview, uh, with Morton Blackwell and, um, I’m gonna ask him about what does it take to be an entrepreneur in politics?
’cause he set up, uh, the Leadership Institute, which did not exist. And he left a job at the White House and a job with Richard Rory. Real jobs with real pay and so on to do something that had never been done before and might not work. He turned it into a great success, both for the movement and, uh, from, for his creation of a lasting structure that has changed the world, has really changed the world.
Martin Blackwell. Hey, and this is Grover Norquist with the Leave Us Alone Podcast. We often have governors who have just voted to pass a law to get rid of their income tax over time, or school choice champions and the state legislature who are about to [00:25:00] do that. Today’s a little bit different.
We’re gonna be talking with Morton Blackwell, who runs the Leadership Institute and who over. Decades has been an entrepreneur, not someone who took a existing position in an existing, part of the conservative movement. But who created that which was not there before as entrepreneurs do in the private sector, in economics.
And so Morton, I’d like to Morton goes, was the youngest Republican delegate at the Goldwater 64 convention. He was active in youth politics. He worked for President Reagan. And. At one point, he looked around and said, I see something that isn’t being done. And that’s the beginning of the Leadership Institute.
Morton. Could you give a little more fill in on, on what you were doing when you had sort of normal jobs? Or, I mean, working at the White House isn’t normal, but it’s, it’s, people do it. [00:26:00] It it’s there. You don’t invent the job at the White House that, that you had doing outreach, but your decision to.
Become an entrepreneur and how that played out.
Morton Blackwell: Well, Grover, I had a, a long, uh, record of, of activity. I decided in 1960 that I wanted to be a Goldwater delegate to the 64 convention, and so I was active in the Republican party in Louisiana, active as a college student. We formed a conservative student group.
I founded a college Republican club, the third one in the state. I got elected college Republican state chairman at a convention that had four delegates, two from LSU and two from New Orleans. And Wow. And it was tied two to two on three ballots, and finally my friend Bill Tet and I flipped a coin and I won.
And that that was the [00:27:00] means by which I became known. To Republicans all across Louisiana because as college Republican state chairman, I had a wide field in front of me. There were colleges all over the state that did not have college Republican clubs. And so I worked for two years in my, not so copious spare time tra traveling around the state, uh, recruiting local Republican students.
And by the time my term was up, we went from three small clubs to 15 clubs. Uh, some of ’em with hundreds of members. And then I, I had managed to get elected to the state central committee, uh, in 1963. And in 64 I was elected young Republican state chairman, but we’d had a good race in early 64.
And I had organized the student activity for our Republican candidate for governor who [00:28:00] carried almost every major city, but lost the rural areas badly. But as college Republican state chairman, I had become active at the national level. And in 1965, to my surprise, I was offered the job of executive director of the College Republican National Committee a position which, uh, you held subsequently.
Yes, I. Hot footed it from Baton Rouge, Louisiana up to DC and for five and a half years, off and on, I was executive director of the National College Republicans. And all the time I was learning, I was having the responsibility of teaching college Republicans how to be more effective. And there were several things that I, that.
They could be taught and, and I taught them. But in 67, I took a leave of absence from the college Republicans and ran the youth effort for the Republican candidate for [00:29:00] governor in Kentucky judge Louis Nunn. And I put together for him a new kind of youth effort, uh, which involved not just. Recruiting from membership tables, card tables besides sidewalks, but we made a c organized effort to survey.
As many students as we, as we could, and the vast majority of students, we did survey by treating a campus like a Republican county organization, would treat a precinct organization and it worked and it was, we called it, I called it a mass based youth effort. In 68, I began to train people to be youth coordinators.
And I, I trained 20 people and in my very fir, very first school more than half of them became youth organizers. One of those that I trained at my first school was Mitch McConnell.
Grover Norquist: [00:30:00] That was a good idea.
Morton Blackwell: I trained youth coordinators for, uh, Richard Oglevy, running for Governor of Illinois for Ed Gurney, running for the Senate in Florida for Arch Moore, running for governor of West Virginia and others.
And it turned out that I could train people how to organize mass space efforts like I had done in 67. And so. I ran this training program through College Republicans in 68, 69, and 70. I left college Republicans and they decided that they weren’t going to continue my training program. So in 71 I organized a political action committee.
I was employed elsewhere, and this was a volunteer activity on my part, but I continued training youth organizers through the seventies. Uh, in 1979, friends of mine persuaded me that I should start an [00:31:00] educational foundation because I could raise more money and do more training with an educational foundation than I could with the political action committee.
I. And so I organized the Leadership Institute in 1979. But I continued the training program, which I’d done first week College Republicans, and then with my political action committee. And it turned out that it was possible to raise more money to do training with the 5 0 1 3 group. And, and so I did that even when I.
On the Reagan White House staff, I still continued as head of the Leadership Institute and did a number of trainings each year, the three years I was there. In 1984, early in the year I decided to leave the White House staff. Become full-time head of the Leadership Institute, [00:32:00] figuring that I knew enough how to raise funds and run an organization that I could become an organizational entrepreneur.
And it was a leap that was obvious. Actually, uh, risky. It wasn’t, I wasn’t sure I could build an organization that could pay me enough to, uh, pay the mortgage and put food on my family’s table, but it turned out that it worked very well. And when I left the White House staff, they ended of January of 84.
I’ve been an organizational entrepreneur ever since. At the time, my leadership institute had one staffer and I joined the staffer and we began to grow. And it’s grown consecutively year by year. I had known since the early seventies that. [00:33:00] The real nature of politics is not that being right in the sense of being correct is sufficient to win that, uh, you don’t win just because your heart is pure.
Like Sir Gala had now the winner in political contest over time is determined by the number and the effectiveness of the activists on the respective sides, and the number of activists and leaders on a given side. Is, uh, determined by the technology that they, they knew, that they used. And this was news to a lot of people like me who had been Goldwater Republicans because most of us really believed what was the Goldwater campaign’s main theme.
And, and that was in your heart, you know, he’s right. Well, that’s not enough to win. You’ve got to get out and increase the number and effectiveness of. Your activists and leaders back in 70 [00:34:00] two. I went to work for Richard Vry, worked for him for seven years, and he hired me away from the Enter American Enterprise Institute saying, Morton, I want you to come help me build a conservative movement.
And he offered me a little more money than the, than American Enterprise Institute was paying. And years later, I confessed to Richard Vi that if he’d offered less money, I’d have taken the job anyhow. Because building the conservative movement was what I really, I. Wanted to do. And so with the knowledge of fundraising, I had learned from Richard Vickery, we were able to build up the Leadership Institute and constant growth sometimes over the last several years really.
Spectacular, uh, growth. Three years ago, we trained 15,000 students. Two years ago, we trained 31,000 students, and last year, 2024, leadership, nstitute [00:35:00] trains, 43,000 people. I have a, a large staff. We send out field representatives to college campuses, recruit people, help them to start whatever kind of.
Conservative club they might like, and we also recruit people from these groups. There are currently over 3040 active conservative or libertarian student groups, uh, that are affiliated with the leadership institutes campus leadership. So it’s grown and, and grown and it has been the. The formation of larger numbers of groups by people who wanted to be organiz, get what I would call organizational entrepreneurs that has, has built the conservative movement.
A lot of people try to build organizations. Not everybody succeeds, but, but some have succeeded mightily. [00:36:00]
Grover Norquist: Morton, when you do training you have training for how to run a youth campaign. Oncologists and but you have more than one training program. How many, how do you, we have, we’re now
Morton Blackwell: teaching, we’re now teaching Grover 58 different types of training, different types of training schools.
We don’t cover every conceivable kind of technique that could be used. Successfully in politics, but we covered the major ones and lots of our graduates are doing extremely well. Many are heads of organizations. We have, after the 22 elections, we had 28 members of the House of Representatives who were graduates of the institute and three US senators after the 24 elections.
We now have 37 graduates who are members of the House of Representatives. And four, uh, US Senators uh, and large numbers of [00:37:00] conservative organizations are headed by people that I have trained. And I, uh, say immodestly, that one of them is Grover Norquist, who, who took my training some, some years ago.
And you suddenly built a, a strong network effectively.
Grover Norquist: Well, um, yes, and I. Uh, I’ve taken more than one of your courses. My brother took one on how to join the State Department, how to win, what do you call it? Pass the state department’s test. I. And, uh, make yourself available as a, uh, possible some person to work at the State Department.
Well,
Morton Blackwell: he, and he, he wound up acting Secretary of Defense at one point, didn’t he?
Grover Norquist: He did, indeed. He was the number two guy, and then briefly at the end of Trump’s administration, he was the number one guy there during which time there were no casualties and no worse, he tells me. So that was a three weeks of, of peace in the world.
As that went on. Martin, as you look around, you [00:38:00] see elected officials who, you know, vote correctly, uh, who perhaps are like those Goldwater supporters who said I am I, I’m pure. I understand free markets. I understand the nature of communism. I’m politically sound. Now I’m done for the day. I’ll show up and vote, but, but don’t take that and change the world.
They’ve got their own vote. They’re pretty good. Maybe they convince a spouse to go along with them. They’re elected officials who do the same thing. They show up, they vote. And congress, state legislature, governors, uh, senators, and then there’s some that are entrepreneurial. I was wondering if, as you look at elected officials.
Which elected officials, state, federal, have you seen that are kind of like Morton Blackwell in that they build a structure beyond their office?
Morton Blackwell: Well, there are a number of good conservative members of Congress who have got, who obtained a, an excellent understanding [00:39:00] of the importance of creating and building grassroots organizations conservative organizations of all types groups.
Free enterprise, limited government, strong national defense and traditional values. And there were senators who were willing to help by doing fundraising letters, by speaking at events for, uh, nascent conservative organizations. In the early days of the movement, I would say the towering leader in terms of elected official who was trying to build conservative grassroots would be Senator Jesse Helms.
Uh, in, in, in that same era. Congressman Tom De Delay and Dick Army. Uh, were very active in helping a wide range of other groups. Congressman Ron Paul and his son, Senator Ron Paul. Both were extremely helpful in, in supporting a number of groups when support from an elected [00:40:00] official would help. Another great.
The senator who, who was very helpful back in the seventies, was Senator Jim McClure of Idaho, who was uh, very helpful indeed in starting groups. These were people who. Signed fundraising letters and then served on, on letterheads as advisory committee members and were willing to take action on occasion to help conservative organizations grow.
Grover Norquist: Okay. There aren’t other Morton Blackwells, but as you look out who has built structures, I’m thinking you’re on the, have been on the board of the national, uh, right to work committee and the creation of that. Institution alone seems to me. To have been very, very powerful. I’m wondering if you could explain to some of the folks on the audience who you see creating some of the institutions that they may take for granted now, whether it’s the Heritage Foundation or uh [00:41:00] Right to Work the people who made that happen outta nothing.
Morton Blackwell: Well, right To Work was founded back in the 1960s and one of the local leaders was Reed Larson, who became president of National Right to Work. And that’s an example of an existing organization, which under the leadership of Freed Larson, who was very much movement oriented, uh, grew, I mean, spectacularly in 1972, the National Right to Work Committee had.
25,000 donors and, and members, and, and that was thought of as one of the best, most outstanding, remarkable, uh, conservative organizations. But through the 1970s it grew so that by 1979, national Right to work grew from 25,000 members to 1.8 million members. And it was a matter of, [00:42:00] of understanding the importance of studying the skills, how to organize, how to communicate, how to raise funds how to influence the legislative process.
I mean, there, there are many things which are. Which are skilled, but they are philosophically neutral skills. Things that work as well for the conservatives as for the left and conservatives through the seventies developed this understanding that you owe it to your philosophy to study how to win. You just can’t say, look at me, I’m right.
I can prove I’m right. And. You do that and you will find that victory does not fall into your deserving hands, like ripe fruit off of a tree. You what it takes is study and studying. Philosophically neutral skills is often felt by intellectual people to be beneath their dignity. [00:43:00] And so, so they disdain from learning things that have no inherent philosophical content, like the techniques of fundraising or the techniques of, of organization or communication, but it’s those skills which can, which properly applied, increase the number and the effectiveness of the activists on our side.
Grover Norquist: In Europe, the KA and Sartre would write. Books in French and the world, at least in France, paid attention. I’m not sure. I’m, I’m, I’m agreeing with you here, that public intellectuals in a commercial republic, like the United States Command troops command can, can write a great essay or a book and people get out and vote correctly, that there’s a need for the structures that.
The movement building structures, the movement friendly structures that have an office and people in them, and [00:44:00] voting lists and other structures where you communicate with people at the right time, with the right message. Reading books is important again, yes, absolutely. Hayek and and so on. Were all very important, but the book just sits there unless somebody does something with it.
Morton Blackwell: That’s true in my view. As a conservative movement activist, and I presume to say leader, I believe that the most desirable thing is to increase the number of people on our side. Who are philosophically sound technologically proficient and movement oriented. There are some people who are organizational entrepreneurs who will tell donors that theirs is the only group that’s worth supporting.
Uh, so just give money to us. Don’t ’cause we’re the only ones that are effective. That’s not true. [00:45:00] There are are a number of effective organizations, and I think it’s important that people who were, who were successful leaders in building their own organizations take steps to be part of a, of a movement is greater than themselves.
I mean, the, the big difference, uh, that happened in the 1970s is that the number and effectiveness of conservative activists grew because many new organizations. Were created on the right, and a good number of them were really spectacularly successful. Some of them were in terms of numbers, small indeed.
But conservatives got organized in the house and the Senate. Paul Wyrick and Ed Fuller were instrumental in getting both the House Republican Study Committee founded and the Senate Steering Committee found founded. The House Republican Study Committee is not, [00:46:00] I. The, at the center of Conservative organization in the House Now State Senate Steering Committee still is at the center of conservative organization there.
So you need to have a wide range of organizations led by people who are prepared to cooperate with each other. You don’t have to agree on everything. You organize all the people who favor the right to keep and bear arms, some of those people are not gonna be in favor of other conservative issues.
But if, but if, if a, uh, pro Second Amendment organization develops a large membership of people for whom. The right to keep bear arms is the most important thing. It doesn’t matter. Then when a campaign comes, what other issue leaders might say. If you’re primarily a gun rights person, then your vote’s gonna be determined largely by the advice that [00:47:00] you’re given from leaders of organizations that you support.
That you’re a member of. So you’ll never get an election where, where everybody votes for a candidate for the same reason. And people have different reasons to support for candidates and the more organized groups that are. Focusing on electing somebody who broadly shares conservative principles, the more likely conser, likely conservatives are to win.
And that, and, and that’s what happened. The, the, uh, the number of people who. Could easily be defined as conservative and active in politics. Dramatically grew to the seventies, to the point where in 1980 we were enabled, enabled us to elect, uh, Ronald Reagan for president. But it, it was a long process.
It doesn’t happen overnight. Takes building, training, [00:48:00] recruiting people, organizing them, training them, and then getting them to work effectively in government politics and the news media
Grover Norquist: in the movement. I, I remember Phyllis Laffy years ago saying, everybody’s allowed to vote for my candidate for their own reason.
And the her point being, I don’t. Entirely care why you’re voting for Reagan. Bring your own reason to the table. And as you say, somebody might be voting on the Second Amendment. They wanna vote for Reagan for that reason. Others for national defense. Others for what would be now school choice, uh, homeschooling low taxes, property rights,
Morton Blackwell: And, and, and the bright to life and traditional moral issues that, that, that motivates a lot of people.
Grover Norquist: And if you are voting on one of the, if the candidate stands in the middle of the circle and says, I’m with you on your gun rights. I’m with you on pro-life. I’m with you on family issues. I’m with you on leaving school choice and so on, and low taxes, they can win the [00:49:00] votes. If everybody, not everybody voting has to agree on some 10 point plan.
Morton Blackwell: They Right. But, but it, it takes people to get active Yes. In these various areas. O one of the big changes that’s been made in our society is the legitimation and the extraordinary growth of homeschooling. And largely that’s the, uh, the result of, of one person who founded the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, Mike Ferris of Virginia.
And at the time he started, it was illegal in many places to homeschool. Children, but he found homeschool parents and recruited them, organized them, and now it’s legal in every state. We, we saw that with concealed curry to homeschool people. And those people take advice from people like Mike Ferris ’cause he has led them in a cause that’s important to [00:50:00] them.
Grover Norquist: And Mike Ferris like other. Competent, successful conservative leaders such as yourself also looks side to side and, and is aware of where all the other leaders and structures in the conservative movement are. Not that everybody who votes because of pro-life has to care about seven other issues. But if you’re gonna be a leader, you do need to be aware of all the reasons people are voting, not just the ones where the people that you’re talking to directly.
And also make, just make sure that your coalition and other people’s coalition. Every time you can avoid it. No stepping on toes. There’s almost always a way that’s, that, that’s correct. To make the government smaller so it’s less annoying to everybody and each of the groups feels comfortable with it, rather than Please subsidize my, my program.
Which, uh, gets you enemies grove.
Morton Blackwell: What, what, what has, what has proved to be the winning, uh, coalition for, uh. A victory for people who are on the [00:51:00] conservative li Libertarian side has been a commitment to one or more of limited government, free enterprise, strong national defense and traditional values.
And you, you’re, you’re never gonna be able to get. An election where everybody who votes for a candidate agrees with everybody else. That’s a fantasy could, it could never happen. You have to have people who are willing and and capable of working in coordination with others, uh, to. Forward a common agenda.
Grover Norquist: Morton Blackwell, thank you very, very much. I’m hopeful we can do this again, we can invite you back to the Leave us Alone podcast ’cause I had a couple questions including without naming names, who is some of the people who’ve had the best intentions and the worst outcomes that we can, can learn from.
But let’s hold that for [00:52:00] another time. I appreciate this very much. I have learned so much from you over the years, and I hope. People at home listen to this podcast and listen to it again. And if you have friends, relatives, children who want to become active leaders at the local level, the state level at the national level, and it’s Morton Blackwell zone, you can start at one and end up at the other.
This is, this is an essay, a, a series of conversations that Wharton just had that is quite instructive for any person looking to be active in politics. Wharton Blackwell. Thank you very, very much. Thank you Grove. And that’s it for today’s episode of Leave Us Alone. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this discussion valuable, please rate, review and or share the podcast.
It helps us reach more Freedom loving listeners, we’ll be back next time with more insights on protecting your liberty. Until then, I’m Grover Norquist reminding you to cherish your freedom and keep pushing for a government that simply leaves us alone.
