By Selwyn Duke
If you're an avid reader of news and commentary, you've no doubt heard of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). It masquerades as a "civil rights" organization — along with so many other pretenders — and it is perhaps the richest civil-rights con-job organization in the country. I know, you probably thought the ACLU was the crème de la phlegm, but the SPLC is its eviler twin. It was founded by Morris Dees, the mercenary lawyer who never saw a poor, downtrodden person he didn't want to help (except for the vast majority, off whose cases he can't make money) and whose claim to fame is that he broke some Klan groups about 15 or 20 years ago by suing them into oblivion.
Anyway, however good a litigator Dees may be, such abilities pale in comparison to his skill in hate-and-pass-the-plate marketing. This is what I call his technique, which is to scare his cross-dressing donors in NYC and San Francisco with warnings about the rise of hate groups so that these marks will open the vault and fill his coffers to overflowing. Thus does Dees love sensationalist stories featuring Swastikas, Klan rallies, bomb threats and all those other passions of a certain segment of the population. The problem is, though, that since this segment is only about .00001 percent of the population, Dees always needs new bogeymen. And now he has found me.
I have made it onto the SPLC's "HATEWATCH" page, where a Dees lapdog named Larry Keller has targeted my recent piece on the Rush Limbaugh/NFL controversy. What has their panties in a bunch? It's that I characterized the attack on Limbaugh as a lynching. Apparently, the left wants to turn "lynch" into another politically incorrect term, one that can be used to refer to the criminal hanging of a black person and nothing else anytime, anywhere by anybody. I suppose we have to forget about horse thieves in the old west and civil-rights lawyers tod . . . . Oh, never mind, I was confusing fantasy with reality.
Here is an excerpt from Keller's piece:
. . . Selwyn equates a grotesque and terrifying death at the end of a rope
with robust debate over Limbaugh’s views, which Selwyn claims “are in
fact very mainstream.”. . . Considering Duke’s other conclusions about the Limbaugh brouhaha, his
lynching hyperbole isn’t surprising. A frequent guest on hate-radio
host Michael Savage’s show and other far-right venues, Duke wrote in
the same article that Sen. Joseph McCarthy was “one of the most
maligned men in American history.” Limbaugh, he contends, is a victim
of a new McCarthyism in which “closet communists” are quick to call
their foes racists.
So let's see if we can figure out what Keller's problem is. Perhaps he has never heard of metaphorical language. I mean, I know it's not the stuff of Dees' legal briefs, where the party in the first part really needs his help and the party in the second part has to pay him gobs of money. Regardless, it does exist. And when people say that someone was "crucified" by the media, I, a devout Catholic, don't get all bent out of shape.
But perhaps Keller's real problem is a bit different. You see, in August I exposed him as a propagandist who was engaging in fear-mongering about the threat of bigoted "right-wing" militias (the study I focused on was his handiwork).
Whatever the case, does the left want to gradually make all words verboten? Perhaps we'll reach a point where we'll be reduced to communicating with grunts, clicks and ape-like gesticulation, which, incidentally, would suit the liberal agenda just fine. After all, their ideas, if we can call them that, are based on emotion anyway. So the less people can communicate, the greater chance they have of communicating their message.
As for the SPLC, it should worry less about hate and more about greed. I mean, there's a reason why some call its founder Morris "Sleaze" Dees. Not that I would ever join these critics in their characterization.
I just call him "Ka-ching."
And to understand Ka-ching's true nature, I strongly urge you to read the great exposé, "The Church of Morris Dees" by Ken Silverstein. It's a great, great piece about a bad, bad man. Here is an excerpt:
Dees's compensation alone amounts to one quarter the annual budget of
the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, which handles
several dozen death-penalty cases a year. "You are a fraud and a
conman," the Southern Center's director, Stephen Bright, wrote in a
1996 letter to Dees, and proceeded to list his many reasons for
thinking so, which included "your failure to respond to the most
desperate needs of the poor and powerless despite your millions upon
millions, your fund-raising techniques, the fact that you spend so
much, accomplish so little, and promote yourself so shamelessly."
To really put this in perspective, consider this: Ka-ching's whole legal staff quit in protest in 1986 because of his preference for making money over actually helping the people about whom he claims to care. And this really is striking. I mean, liberals aren't exactly known for being fonts of moral clarity. So how sleazy do you have to be to inspire a whole team of liberal lawyers to resign in protest?
But 1986 was a long time ago, and Ka-ching has either honed his hiring criteria or is simply benefitting from an even more degraded left. After all, he does seem to be retaining staff now.
Are you listening, Larry Keller?
© 2009 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved.
selwynduke.com 
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