On New Year’s Eve, I learned FEMA’s “Dirty Little Secret.”
It was the title of a fascinating email, one that had somehow dodged my spam filter. The message was suffused with breathless concern about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s recent order of “420 million survival meals;” such provisions are apparently “the #1 most critical item in a crisis.” You see, “FEMA knows that if you control the food supply, then you control the people.”
Normally, such paranoid ramblings merit nothing more than a quick delete and a sad shake of the head. But the New Year’s note stood out because of the source. I was being alerted to FEMA’s nefarious plot by no less than National Review, the nation’s most important conservative magazine.
“Please find this special message from our sponsoring advertiser Food4Patriots,” the publication wrote. “This important support affords us the continuing means to provide you with National Review’s distinctly conservative and always exceptional news and commentary. We encourage you to patronize our sponsors.”
Since being added to National Review’s subscriber list, I had received four emails from the venerable publication selling me on Food4Patriots’ plan to “make darn sure your family won’t go hungry or get herded into a FEMA camp” by purchasing the dehydrated food they’re hawking. Indeed, Food4Patriots is deeply ensconced in the conservative movement, placing its ads in both more mainstream outlets (Fox News, Townhall.com) and fringier sites (Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, RedState, WorldNetDaily).
Food4Patriots is a lucrative enterprise. Its parent company, Reboot Marketing, took in $11.8 million in 2012, an astonishing 1,428 percent increase over its 2009 revenue.
But the company’s skyrocketing revenues came on the back of some (arguably) really shady practices. In fact, when I wrote National Review’s editor and publisher to give them a heads up about what I learned about the company, they promptly suspended future Food4Patriots ads.
Who Is Frank Bates?
“Communist food brainwashing,” Frank Bates solemnly warns us, “is infecting America.”
Bates is the pitchman for Food4Patriots; when you click the link in National Review’s email, you’re immediately directed to a crudely animated infomercial breaking down the brainwashing threat. Frank’s biography is one of the first things you learn in the shockingly long presentation (full thing’s on YouTube here). Bates is a resident of a small town outside of Nashville, where he lives with his wife Michelle and 2 kids. He lost his job a few years ago and since then, teaching people how to live free of both big government and big business has been his passion.
“Promise to keep this information to yourself and close family and friends ONLY,” Bates asks. “I don’t know how long it’ll be online, so watch it while you can” — before FEMA takes Frank’s video, and perhaps Frank himself, out of the picture.
CREDIT: Reboot Marketing
You must act quickly — the video repeatedly hammers home, for a number of questionable reasons, that time is running out — to secure your stock of preserved “survival foods,” available in 72 hour, one month, and three month packages. Their “unique” low heat dehydration method ensures the food will be safe for 25 years, plenty of time after the “coming food crisis” created by “food mobs” of “freeloading people embracing the idea of a few hard working patriots supplying all the food and the labor, and the rest sitting back and getting a handout.”
Pairing survivalist panic to more mainstream conservative tropes is Frank’s calling card, pervading his pitches for the other products in the 4Patriots line. Power4Patriots reveals “the dirty little secret that president [sic] Obama and the big energy monopolies have been trying to bury.” There’s a “cover-up,” a “conspiracy that runs all the way to the top” to make “power rates skyrocket.” Moreover, “thanks to the shaky state the liberals have put our country in, our government isn’t ready to handle the situations that are coming our way…Ask anyone who lived through Hurricane Katrina!” The solution is to buy Power4Patriots’ books, videos, and “CD-ROMs,” which will teach you how to cut your power and heating bills by “up to” 75 percent.
Likewise, Frank’s SurvivalSeeds4Patriots missive warns that “the frightened hordes clear out the grocery stores in hours and people [will] get more and more desperate” in the crisis “about to hit the US.” Save yourself by purchasing Frank’s “painstakingly researched” personal plant seed vault.
The glue that ties all of this together is Frank’s personal story. He and his family were victimized by the business that fired him, by the terrifying power costs in their former Northeastern home, and by the shadowy forces that bent Frank’s knee in the direction of Obama and FEMA. Bates’ testimonial — up from dependence, through three neat products — is the beating heart of the 4Patriots brand’s public image.
Except there’s no evidence that he exists.
The Anatomy Of A Racket
I jumped through a lot of hoops to try to find Frank Bates. I tracked the only public image ever identified as Bates back to its source, a now-deleted stock photo taken by an Austria-based photographer named Kemter. I used a variety of tools to track down contact information for anyone in the Nashville area named Frank Bates, and found no one by that name connected to the 4Patriots brand. The customer service operator at the end of Reboot’s public line said “they didn’t give us” Frank’s contact information.
But when I checked the domain registration on every 4Patriots site, as well as FrankBates.net, I found the only ones that didn’t direct you back to the company’s main phone line were either anonymous or registered to someone named Allen Baler. Baler, is listed as the principal of Power4Patriots by the Nashville Better Business Bureau. He’s the founder of Reboot Marketing, the company that operates all of the 4Patriots product lines.
It was researching Allen Baler that finally led me to the real story behind the 4Patriots empire.
Digital marketer Allen Baler, digitized
“Our philosophy is one man, one laptop, one million bucks,” Baler said during a 2011 chat with one of his marketing bros. “I just love the freedom of being able to make a nice income, to make a nice business and just be, basically, myself.” Or Frank Bates, whichever works.
Baler’s no longer a lone wolf: he brought his wife on as a partner, and hired several additional employees to help expand Reboot’s business.
None of them are named Frank Bates, of course. You get the sense that someone with Bates’ true believer zeal would probably feel out of place at Reboot, which Baler founded on a lark to make a few extra bucks. Bored after 12 years at the “kind-of corporatey” job he got after graduating from Harvard in 1994, he started “foolin’ around at night after work” with something called affiliate marketing.
The industry works like this: someone has a product, someone else finds websites or ad networks willing to host ads for that product for a price, and then the host makes a little extra money for every sale the ads they put up generate. Affiliate ads are generally “tailored to particular viewers to drive traffic to the seller’s website,” David Vladeck, former Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, explained. “The point of it is to make sure the consumer ends up on the landing page of the seller.” It’s a roughly $4 billion industry in the United States alone.
Baler started dabbling in this field in his free time after work. His first foray — a campaign he refers to as “How To Train Your Pug Dog” — got noticed by his boss, who told him to choose between making cheapo pug training videos and his “multiple six figures” salary. Baler chose pugs.
The key to Baler’s successful move into affiliate marketing was something called Clickbank. Clickbank offers thousands of products, often some kind of informational guide, which affiliate marketers can pay for the right to market. The site accepts a wide variety of products in all kinds of niches,” so affiliate marketers, almost always sales people rather than experts in the industry they’re marketing for, may not be able to tell if what they’re hawking is actually good (in an email, Clickbank said that they use a “product review process” that “aligns with industry standards.”) From a financial point of view, it doesn’t matter: producers sell their “books,” affiliate marketers have something to market, and Clickbank gets a cut of the sales plus flat fees for using the service.
The 4Patriots empire grew out of Baler’s ClickBank experiments. His first really successful Clickbank campaign was Earth4Energy, a guide to going off-grid that he found on Clickbank — and one that many other Clickbank marketers hawk in various guises. If you look at the site, it’s basically identical to Power4Patriots, only with a different voice and different persona delivering the sales pitch.
Initially, Reboot Marketing ran sites like FlatBellySolutionHardCopy.com and Ultimate-Tattoo-Bible.com alongside its energy product. But in 2011, Baler experienced a revelation:
In the conservative news space, there’s a company called Newsmax, which is definitely worth checking out. It’s a very large website and newsletter company and, this tends to be a more expensive buy to do emails and banner ads, anywhere from several thousand up to ten thousand for one drop. But they have a very large list of kind of affluent, conservative men who surprisingly like to buy a lot of stuff online.
These “fifty year old dude[s] looking to lose some weight” — his description of his customer base — became Baler’s “niche,” as affiliate marketers say. Power4Patriots was born at the end of 2011, and it proved so successful that he added SurvivalSeeds4Patriots in 2012. He filed paperwork listing the non-4Patriots side of his business as “inactive” near the end of that year, and Food4Patriots came to life in early 2013. Baler doesn’t appear to have looked back since.
Food4Patriots and SurvivalSeeds4Patriots expand the business beyond Clickbank-style infoguides. Baler buys kits from My Patriot Supply, a preserved food and seed company, and then sells them for about three times the original price. For instance, the Reboot 3 Month package is listed on My Patriot Supply for $183.54; the Food4Patriots 3-month supply will run you a cool $497. All Baler does is drench someone else’s stuff in paranoid anti-Obama finery and advertise it around the conservative mediasphere using a likely fictional life story.
Baler’s looking to expand. Reboot posted an ad several weeks ago for a new copy writer, presumably to pen Frank Bates fan-fiction. They’re looking for someone who can “understand the world of our prospect” — that is, “55+ years old conservatives in ‘red’ states with a strong sense of self-reliance.”
“God bless,” Baler chuckled in one of his interviews, “they are buying.”
read rest at http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/01/30/3134851/conservatives-food4patriots/
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