Hey Chuck Woolery And Friends – You’re The Reason I Often Find Myself Wanting To Punch Some Fellow “Conservatives” In The Face

First of all, hope you had a happy Thanksgiving,everyone!  I hope your bellies are still full and your hearts are even fuller.  I hope that you’ve been surrounded by those that you love in the past 24+ hours, and if you haven’t – I hope that you’ve at least been able to connect digitally with your favorite people and told them that you’re thankful for them – and why.

It’s my favorite holiday of the year for the very reason Thanksgiving exists – gratitude.  Because listen, y’all – gratitude can fuel dreams and the biggest machines.  In fact, I’m a firm believer that this very site is built on a foundation of gratitude – a gratefulness for everything we were taught to revere as sacred growing up – God, country, family.  On a personal level, Mock and I are extremely grateful people, and I’m certain that shared trait is one of the reasons we were destined to be friends, frankly.  Yes, we’re huge dorks.  But two, we are gracious.  We’re probably overly grateful for things that other people may view as little things in a heartless, cutthroat business that is politics and (holy crap, don’t get me started on the soulless) media.  In fact, we’ve been taken advantage of more times than I’d like to count over the past decade because of our Midwestern (“sure, we’ll help you out and then get promptly sh*t on!”) hearts.

Fast forward to yesterday.  The Chick squad has been holding down the fort over the past few days, because I made the trek from Indiana to Texas with my family last weekend.  Full disclosure here – I got away and unplugged a little after having to put our beloved dog Jeb down last Friday.  If you’ve been a reader here for a while, you know how I am about my dogs.  They’re like my second tier of children.  Our Great Dane Jeb was an angel on earth.  And his too-soon death was devastating for me and my family.  I just needed a few days to do my thing.

Anywho – praise be for the Chicks – we always have each others’ backs, and I’m also grateful for their love, support, and friendship.

So, I’m back after a heckuva lot of time on highways and when I checked in Thanksgiving morning to let the Chicks know that I’m back in the saddle raring to go (after some pumpkin pie of course), Mock was completely beside herself.  Because unexpected drama.  Apparently, someone was taking our posts and making money off them.

Not again.

Just to get everyone up to speed, this is not a new thing for us.  It’s happened before.  So-called “conservatives” across the Internet have been known to lift our posts these past few years, in their entirety, put them on their websites, and then they’ll pretend that the content is theirs, while giving us no real credit, insufficient credit, and worst of all, not even a link back.  Because they can make money off OUR work.  They’re lazy sacks of crap.  And then they turn around and call themselves “conservative.”

Sigh.

Now, we’ve called folks like this out on social media and called their B.S. and we’ve contacted their hosting companies to try to shut them down.  It’ll work temporarily, but they usually do it again.  Others (as is the case of new culprit) will say something LAME AS CRAP like “first reported by Chicks on the Right” at the bottom of the post.  WITHOUT AN ACTUAL WORKING LINK.

But guess who this person is?  Seriously.  Take a guess.

Let’s Talk About Creepy Uncle Joe, Shall We? https://t.co/avTIDt5ypP pic.twitter.com/N4EL3iF9um

— Chuck Woolery (@chuckwoolery) November 23, 2017

Yep.  Chuck Woolery.  Y’all remember him from such shows as Love Connection.  He apparently made a lot of those Connections, as he’s on wife number four (according to Wikipedia, anyway).  And listen – I know that divorces are expensive, but daaaaamn, Chuck, that’s no reason to start lifting other people’s writing and trying to make a buck off it.  Come on now.

And this whole lifting-people’s-original-work is a problem for so many reasons.  First of all, you’re worth like 15 million dollars, dude.  Put your hand in your pocket and HIRE SOME FREAKING WRITERS.  If two shleps from Indiana can work their butts off for almost a decade to do that, SO CAN YOU.  For crying out loud.  Get some skin in the game like the rest of us bottom-ladder-dwellers.

Second of all, if you won’t put in that work?  Then don’t call yourself a conservative.  Because no.  It’s embarrassing. Conservatives believe in hard work, not helping yourselves to other people’s stuff just because you feel entitled.

We went after him on Twitter, of course:

This is our post. It was ripped off word for word.

— Chicks On The Right (@chicksonright) November 23, 2017

And people responded:

I’m not sure if they just did it but you are cited at the end now.

— Kimberly Shumaker (@kimshu22) November 23, 2017

I didn’t realize it was a non clickable link. You are totally right to be angry, pure theft is not ok. I hope they actually will listen to you. Wonder how many other people they have don’t that to?

— Kimberly Shumaker (@kimshu22) November 23, 2017

But a lot of people don’t understand the whole clickable-link thing.  Because at the END of our completely-copied-word-for-word-posts, they’re including our name and a NON-CLICKABLE LINK.  And just so we’re all clear, they never asked us permission to do this (you know – the whole “let me just re-publish your content and not provide a link-back to you).  Also, they are doing this with a bunch of other sites.  There isn’t a speck of original content out there that we can see, aside from their podcasts.

https://twitter.com/PurpleDragon333/status/933557138114433024

No.  We weren’t.  They say, AND I QUOTE HERE: “(First reported by Chicks On The Right)  https://chicksonright.com/2017/11/22/lets-talk-creepy-uncle-joe-shall/  (November 22, 2017)”

No…they said, "First reported by". That's NOT credit. They didn't report it…they WROTE IT. It's original content. Not something they reported. And he doesn't get to share it on HIS site. You tweet the link to THEIRS!

— Trish Kagerbauer (@missionary2moms) November 23, 2017

Right on, Trish.

Conservatism, my a$$.

And then this chick had to go and pipe in, like she knows what in the hizzell she’s talking about. She insisted that Chuck and his sidekick Mark are remarkable guys and surely wouldn’t do what we claimed -even though everyone with two eyes can see that they are:

https://twitter.com/PurpleDragon333/status/933793231208435712

Jan must’ve really been a fan of Love Connection.  And she’s apparently never started or run a business.

But bless her heart, though.

https://twitter.com/PurpleDragon333/status/933813153900752896

Heaven does know, Jan.  It does.  And you kiiiinda don’t.

Mock reached out to @MarkYoungTruth, who is listed on the offending website as Chuck’s business partner of sorts.   I had not heard of him until today and I’m unsure if he has ever had a Love Connection.  He responded to Mock that he was sorry and would remove our posts from the site:

I am told only this week. You however are free to repurpose any of our original content on our site you wish. Just give attribution the same as we do. Our goal is the message not the credit.

— Dr. Mark Young (@MarkYoungTruth) November 23, 2017

Your goal is not the message.  If it were, you would provide a link back to every source you’re lifting, and not pocketing the revenues for yourselves. And wow, gee, we can take your (other lifted) stuff?  Maybe the non-lifted masthead?

Thank you but no.  We aren’t in the business of stealing from others.

So far, I’m up to 30 posts that we have written – posts that OUR WRITERS HAVE WRITTEN (these are writers that we have to pay, mind you) –  that they’ve taken from our site.  And we’re just one of several sites that they lift from regularly.  They’ve been taking posts from our site since November 6th.  Theirs is apparently a business model that MANY sites use now, y’all.  It’s a way to make money without ACTUALLY DOING ACTUAL WORK.  The Woolerys and Youngs of the world will say “Oh we just want to get the info out there!”  In actuality, though, this model negatively affects businesses like ours (and others they’re lifting from), because it’s stealing.  Plain and simple. There’s really no getting around that.

Let me break this down in other terms.  We made a widget.  They came into our company, took our Actual Widget (which happens to be words, but it’s our original widget-of-words nontheless).  They’re selling our widget, and then they’re saying to everyone, “Oh, we just want everyone to EXPERIENCE YOUR ACTUAL WIDGET!”  So they put a little disclaimer on the widget, but they don’t tell you how to easily get to our factory where our widgets are made.  It’s much easier for people to just buy the widgets from them, after all.

No.  No.  And no.

Make your own original widget, Chuck and friends.  Sell that.  We do.  We have for the better part of a decade.  And it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.  And a helluva lot of early mornings, working lunch hours, working vacations, long nights, and days when we thought we were going to give up.  But didn’t.  And now there are soooooo many people trying to do the same thing – only they’re doing a bastardized version of it. They’re pretending to do what we do, but they’re bypassing the writing part.  They’re just stealing other sites’ posts instead and saying that they’re some sort of “blog,”  trying to “get the information out there.”

They’re not.  They’re diluting the message.  They’re hurting the good sites.  The ones who actually do the work and have been doing it for the past decade.  Paving the way for yahoos like this, frankly.

We started and own a business.  And then turned it into a successful brand, social media outlets, a radio show, a book deal, a column, and speaking engagements, and TV appearances.  We have no idea what will come next, but we know that it’ll be original, for sure.  Because we would never do it any other way.  Nor should other conservatives.  I can’t imagine taking someone else’s widget, slapping it on my site, making money off it, hurting other conservatives’ bottom line, and then somehow calling THAT conservative.

Because here’s the thing – the Internet and social media are saturated with sites like these, and it’s making sites like ours have to fight to stay afloat these days, truth be told.  And why?  Because we’re competing AGAINST OUR OWN FREAKING CONTENT NOW. It’s part of the reason why Facebook is starting to crack down on conservative sites.

Go figure.

It’s funny, because here Mock and I are, two shleps from Indiana, who started a business from nothing.  In addition to our other full-time jobs, in our spare time.  And we knew nothing about this political/internet world, yet even we knew that there are rules to follow. We knew that you need to WORK.

And at the very least, do people have no freaking manners anymore?  Do conservatives?

https://twitter.com/Im_A_Human/status/933768772409729024

Stuff like this is precisely why we started the makeover almost a decade ago, y’all.  And this is why I get sick to my stomach when I see sites like this trying to make money off sites like OURS.  And you can go right ahead and come at me and say – “Daisy, how is this different than being an aggregate page?  Isn’t that what YOUUUU are?”  People have barked that at us before – in this context, actually.  In fact, we’ve helped launch careers of the very people who have said that to us. Check any post we do.  You will always find sources that are linked, and quotes around words/passages that aren’t ours. Along with our commentary.

We are, and always will be, different.  First off, we were some of the first pioneers of this genre back in ’09, we’re women-owned, women-run, and we’ll always consider ourselves the girls who sit at the table in the corner of the lunchroom who write our own, original, kickass content.  Read our site, for crying out loud.  Sit and read it.  You’ll need to settle in with some snacks, because it’s going to take you a while.  We give our own spin on the news ‘o the day.  And we always will.  We have our own distinct personalities, as do our new Chicklets.  Our look is unique.  Our brand is unique.  Our collective voice is unique.  There is nothing like us on the Internet, and it’s why we have prevailed for the past decade.  It’s why people stay loyal to us in a sea of so many who have tried to copy what we do.  We have built something that so many out there haven’t – an actual community.  We’re like the female cockroaches of political blogging.  We’ve never been popular with the “in” crowd at CPAC or with establishment Republicans, frankly, and we’re totally OK with that.  Because we’re everyday women. We’re everyday right-wingers trying to figure out where we belong in the conservative landscape.  We’re you.  And you.  And you over there.  That’s why we’ve resonated with people over the years – we’re not spitting out the news to folks.  We’re having conversations with you – our community – about the news.  We’ve been doing that since day one, and we don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

And we’ve built our community on a foundation of gratitude, y’all. We followed the rules, we’ve done it with a sense of graciousness for every opportunity that’s been thrown our way, and we continue to do it every day.  We take nothing for granted.  We’re grateful for each other.  We’re grateful for you.

Our words?  They’re OUR FREAKING WORDS.  We’re very protective of them, just like we’re protective of our brand and our community.

So still, as of Friday morning, our posts in their entirety continue to appear on Chuck and Mark’s site where they continue to make Chuck and Mark money — money they’ve essentially stolen from us. And there are clowns on Twitter angry at US for not keeping this story private.  Why on earth would we NOT want to expose the tactics of Chuck and Mark? They should absolutely be exposed AT A MINIMUM.  And if we must explore further options to make this content theft stop, we will. That’s the “blunt force truth.”

In the meantime, we will continue to do what we do, staying true to ourselves and our mission, and not taking this kind of crap without a fight.

Onward!