Inspired, the following morning he wrote an open letter to Fjordman, a year after trying to reach him on Gates of Vienna. This time he posted it in the comment section of document.no.
Fjordman,
I’ve now worked full-time for over three years on a solution-oriented work (compendium written in English). I have tried to concentrate on areas a little to one side of your main focus. A lot of the information I have gathered is not known to most people, including you.
If you email me at year2083@gmail.com I will send an electronic copy when I have finished it.
Two days later he received a reply.
Hello, this is Fjordman. You wanted to get hold of me?
Anders B answered straight away:
The book is ready but it will take a few months to prepare the practicalities for dispatch, will send it partially electronically. Defeating Eurabia is brilliant but it’s going to take time for books like these to penetrate the censorship effectively. I’ve chosen free distribution as a counter strategy.
There was silence from Fjordman.
Wenche, on the other hand, heard plenty about ‘the fjord man’, as she called him. Every day over dinner she got a little update. The words he used to describe the fjord man were ‘clever’, ‘my idol’, ‘such a good writer’. Hans Rustad was also part of the dinner talk. But Anders’s mother grasped the fact that the fjord man was number one. The one called Hans was a bit more cautious than the fjord man.
But sometimes she felt she’d had enough of Doomsday.
‘Can’t we just be satisfied with the way things are?’
Red or blue?
Would the Labour Party continue its mismanagement of the country?
A week after Anders’s debut on document.no, at nine o’clock on election-day morning, Anders suggested that the powers of good pool their resources to create a national newspaper to ‘wake Norwegians out of their coma’. On his thread, lots of contributors suggested likely collaborators in the project. Names and organisations were tossed out and then shot down. Anders gave an impression of tolerance and readiness to compromise.
‘We’re not in a position to pick and choose our partners,’ he wrote.
Just as in his days on the Progress Party Youth forum, when he was keen to form a youth politics platfrom on the right wing, he now envisaged a community of varying shades of opinion, but all pulling in roughly the same direction.
‘I know lots of people in the Progress Party and some of those with influence want to develop Progress, the party’s paper. I also know of some culturally conservative investors. How about working to consolidate Progress with document.no + get funding from strategic investors? Call the paper Conservative,’ he wrote at 11 a.m.
At half past he added a PS: ‘I can also help by bringing in some funding for the project from my lodge.’
As the polling stations closed that evening, the project appeared to be up and running. He wrote that he could set up a meeting with Trygve Hegnar, founder of the business and investment magazine Kapital, and Geir Mo, General Secretary of the Progress Party, to present this solution to them. ‘This election and the coverage given to it show us definitively that we can’t go on without a national mouthpiece.’
By the time the polling stations had been closed for an hour and a half Anders had drawn up a business plan, which he put on the site’s discussion area. There was Strategy no. 1, which he called the lowbrow model. It would have standard news, a few financial items and plenty of ‘lowbrow features’, like sex and pin-up girls. The problem with that was that you would lose a large number of conservative, Christian readers. Strategy no. 2, which he estimated would generate circulation of about a third that of no. 1, would have a good deal of financial content and minimal ‘lowbrow features’. And then there was Strategy no. 3, a hybrid of 1 and 2. With a substantial amount of financial content he was convinced it had the potential to poach a lot of readers from the business papers.
‘The main aim is an increase in political influence by means of unofficial support for the Progress Party and the Conservatives,’ he declared.
At midnight he saw the result of the election. It was depressing.
Fifteen hundred kilometres further north, Anders Kristiansen was jubilant. ‘Four more years!’ He had dipped into his savings so he could stay at a hotel in Tromsø and join Labour’s election-night vigil. They’d done it! Viljar was up in Svalbard with his parents and younger brother, Torje; the Sæbø family was celebrating in Salangen. The Norwegian people had spoken and wanted the red–green coalition of Jens Stoltenberg to carry on.
The three comrades had not cast votes themselves. Viljar and Anders were still only sixteen. Simon had just turned seventeen. But next time, at the 2011 elections, they would finally be old enough to vote!
‘Norwegian journalists won their war against the Progress Party,’ Anders B wrote that night. ‘They were able to bring down the vote by 6 per cent after four weeks of concerted warfare.’ It was the media’s blockade of news about the Muslim riots in France, Britain and Sweden that ‘set the seal on our fate and cost the right-wing parties election victory’.
He nonetheless awoke the next day with his fighting spirit undampened and wrote an email to Hans Rustad about the need for a culturally conservative newspaper. Within the hour he had a reply from his role model.
‘There is no doubt that your analysis is correct. If we are to win the election in 2013, we need more effective media. This puts the Progress Party at a real disadvantage. It gets pushed around and there’s no third force to mobilise,’ wrote Rustad.
Anders replied at once that the first thing he would do was ‘to arrange a meeting between myself and Geir Mo’, to discuss the Progress Party’s view of the matter.
Months passed and he heard nothing from the General Secretary of the Progress Party. Nor did he ever quite bring himself to contact the editor of Kapital. He did not approach any of the investors he had boasted that he could contact so easily, nor was his lodge ever informed of his newspaper initiative. The only thing he did was to ask a print shop how much it would cost to print a glossy monthly magazine.
In November he started ‘email farming’. Via Facebook accounts, he issued invitations to cultural conservatives and critics of immigration all over the world to become his friend. It was time-consuming, because there was a limit to how many invitations one could send per day. Fifty friend requests went out from each account every day.
About half accepted.
He had set up his profiles in such a way that it would be quite natural for cultural conservatives to accept his invitation. But he steered clear of any who seemed too extreme and deleted all those who had dubious symbols on their websites. He did not want any neo-Nazis as friends.
It was people’s email addresses he wanted. After a few months, he had a database of eight thousand addresses.
Only at the end of January 2010 did he receive an answer from the Progress Party; a rejection from the parliamentary group. They wished him the best of luck with his newspaper project, but could not promise anything beyond giving interviews.
Anders wrote to Hans Rustad in disappointment. He also informed him that his book was finished.