When Liberals Attack, Lie and Play the Race Card

If you thought that NBC getting caught doctoring an audio to make George Zimmerman look like a bigot or Dan Rather losing his job for peddling forged documents about G.W. Bush would inspire some soul searching among the Left, think again.

Instead, they’re much like the Satan character in Needful Things, who, blithely dismissing his moral failures as tactical ones, said, “This is not my best work, not by a long shot. …(B)ut what the hell? I'll be back. …We’ll make headlines.” And now the Left is making headlines attacking me — along with executive director of Gun Owners of America Larry Pratt. At issue is an interview Pratt conducted with me on his January 4 radio show, during which we touched on the subject of (gasp!) race. Specifically, we talked about how African immigrants tend to have a traditionalist mindset and good work ethic. Let’s start with the salvos sent my way. Here’s how David Edwards at Raw Story reported praise I directed at African Catholic Priests:

“American Thinker writer Selwyn Duke told Pratt…in a shocked tone that he had discovered that the best Catholic priests were from Africa. “Africa! Intelligent men with PhDs,” Duke noted.

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Shocked? Hardly. The priest who put me through RCIA (adult religious education) 18 years ago was an African, and since then I’ve had the pleasure of meeting numerous African priests who to a man have been orthodox and principled. And it’s hard to be shocked by what to you is old news. My tone was one of admiration and emphasis. Picking up on Raw Story, some pretty raw hosts at The Young Turks seized on my priest praise as well. Ana Kasparian said that Pratt and I “are extremely offensive” after, bright bulb that she is, she mistook my comments for Pratt’s, which means that he’s getting credit for my offensiveness. Then, after she and co-host John Iadarola bemoaned generalizations and with the assumption that acquaintance with intelligent African priests was as new to me as puberty is to them, Iadarola said, “I love when conservatives have the world revealed to them.” Kids say the darndest things. Moving on to what Pratt actually did say, the New York Daily News called his comments “bizarre” and reported:

"Generally, the African from Africa is a very pro-American person, a very happy person," he told American Thinker writer Selwyn Duke during Gun Owners News Hour. "I know several. And they always just happy with a joke, pleasant smile on their face," Pratt continued. "And they clearly don't identify with the surliness that's all too frequently the attitude of their fellow African-Americans here," he added.

(By the way, since the Daily News referred to me as just “Selwyn” elsewhere in its piece, I’ll say that I had no idea we were on a first-name basis. But I’ll be by to write my column and pick up my first check in the morning.) The media also took issue with Pratt’s later comment, “These [African immigrants] are folks that stand apart and hopefully they can approach some of their fellow blacks and say, ‘Hey, buddy, you got this all wrong, let me explain to you how the world really works.’” Obviously, the old-girls club on the left has its panties in a bunch because distinctions were drawn between groups of blacks. You see, the high priests of pablum decree that we must view all blacks as a monolith uniformly opposed to — and persecuted by — big bad whitey; he, in turn, is to be viewed as uniformly privileged and oppressive, unless he happens to be in the media, in which case he’s too dumb to oppress anybody. Correct me if I’m wrong, however, but one thing separating different groups is that they’re, well, different. If there weren’t differences among them, we couldn’t distinguish between them and then wouldn’t even be able to identify them as “groups.” (Oops, sorry, did I just descend into white male linear logic there?) As to these differences, the font of rightist thought Bowling Green State University reported on research by presumably racist African-immigrant professor Dr. Kefa M. Otiso and wrote:

His study shows that, overall, African immigrants perform better than the rest of the U.S. population in education and employment. “Many African immigrants are successful because of their good work ethic, focus and a drive to succeed that is honed by the limited socioeconomic opportunities of their native African countries,” Otiso said.

The same is true of Indian immigrants, which is why Hindus in America have the highest average income of any group — immigrant or native born. Given this, wouldn’t it be good if black Americans (as well as many others) took a leaf out of these immigrants’ book, as Pratt suggested? But I guess the Left would rather black Americans faltered. After all, it would be a lot harder to con them into voting Bolshecrat and to play the race card if they were successful. Rounding out the attacks was People for the (un)American Way’s Right Wing Watch. After reporting on my Pratt interview and falsely accusing me of misrepresentation, their Brian Tashman shifted the propaganda gears and wrote the following about a recent column of mine, “Selwyn Duke is proposing the U.S. copy the dissolution of Yugoslavia and break up over gay rights.” Actually, no, I’m not. What I did was use conservative “evolution” on faux marriage to illustrate a certain phenomenon and then make a wider point. But wider points are lost on narrower people. You see, it’s not as if leftists are simply normal human beings who just so happen to have a penchant for destroying marriage. It’s that traditionalists are from Mars, liberals are from planet Dum-dum. But read my column yourself and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, that liberals lie is nothing new; the only question in a given case is whether it mainly is to others or themselves. But the end result is that we have low-info journalists disgorging low-truth work and now, more than ever, working for a low-readership media.