Rob: Oh, I go there. That's terri--okay. Keep
going.
Frederick: Let's see. They own a chain
of--
Rob: I don't stay there but I've been there
for conferences.
Frederick: I've been there as well.
There used to be a cable television studio in there. Well, the last time I was
there, you walk into the hotel lobby and it's full of Koreans and that alone
might not be surprising but you go into the newsstands, concession stand at the
hotel, just like any other, and you find The
New York Times, The Daily News
and The Unification News, which is
the churches monthly newspaper. But yes, vast real estate business and media
holdings, Japanese restaurants, health food stores, all kinds of stuff; fishing
fleets, Gloucester in Bayou La Batre, Alabama; they basically have taken over a
good deal of the shrimping industry in the Gulf. It's enormous.
Rob: It's amazing. And how have they
influenced our culture? How have they influenced, as you said, the development
of the American Conservative Movement since the 60s?
Frederick: Well, I mentioned Richard
Viguerie in my quote and people don't know who is. He was really the inventor
of political direct mail long before there was the internet and online
fund-raising took over. We still get pieces of mail--people in the political
world, but the story goes after the Berry Goldwater campaign for President in
1964, Viguerie personally went down to the Congress where they kept records of
these things, and hand-wrote out every contributor to the Goldwater campaign,
and that was the basis of his direct mail fundraising list. His first and major
client was something called the Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation, which was a
joint project. It's hard to say whether there was really difference to make it
joint, but between the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon and the Korean
Central Intelligence Agency. So, they were building a constituency in the
United States via direct mail for the Korean part of the Cold War at the time.
The Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation did a
lot of propaganda in the United States, but they also had broadcasting
operations run by the KCIA out of South Korea that beamed into China and North
Korea and into Vietnam, and of course the Vietnam War was going big at the
time. So, Viguerie was right there working with the Moon organization from
their earliest days in the United States, and building his business off of
that. That's just Viguerie. It's hard for people to appreciate just how
important Viguerie was.
Rob: I know Viguerie was one of the main
movers and shakers and funders--not just direct by donation, but by using the
power of direct mail and the technologies and the tools and resources that he
had to raise money for the Conservative Movement for decades.
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