Back when junk mail genius Morris Dees was running the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC was pretty good at coming up with acronyms. For example, consider the cunning of the acronym “SPLC,” which no doubt confused some elderly donors into thinking Morris’s new 1970s operation was actually Martin Luther King’s venerable 1960s SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) or the SCLC’s youth outgrowth, the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), which featured such worthies as John Lewis, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, and Marion Barry.

But in 2019, Morris got booted out of the SPLC for his flagrant White Maleness. (He was then on his sixth wife, and I’ve been told he’s moved on to #7.) And even though Morris was already 82 then, it’s no surprise that I haven’t heard much from the SPLC ever since they dumped the old rogue. It’s been over 4 years, but they still haven’t found a black woman competent enough to be put in charge, so the SPLC’s current president and chief executive officer is named Margaret Huang, but that’s kind of embarrassing so you don’t hear much from her, or the SPLC in general anymore. The SPLC doesn’t give Ms. Huang her own web page. Instead, they put the 13 people who qualify as “Leadership” on one page in alphabetical order so Huang is listed #6.

Sure, the media and the White House still take seriously the SPLC’s blacklists of whom to hate. Nobody calls them the “scandal-plagued SPLC.” But the scandal-plagued SPLC is now just coasting on what Morris built.

In contrast, the Anti-Defamation League, which was pretty low-key up through 2015 when led by the elderly and (perhaps from a fundraising point of view) excessively reasonable Abraham Foxman, has been a ball of fire in recent years under the agitating leadership of Jonathan Greenblatt. The ADL has come on strong during the Racial Reckoning, in part because, unlike its competitors, such as the SPLC, which is floundering looking for a black boss, and the ACLU, which has a gay Puerto Rican supremo, the ADL can and does have a middle-aged straight white male Jewish dynamo in charge.

Now, the post-Dees SPLC has unveiled the acronym for its new campaign to cancel scientific skeptics of the current transgender mania: CAPTAIN.

That stands for Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.

Honest to God: “Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives” or CAPTAIN.

What they are doing with CAPTAIN is reviving one of Dees’ rare flops, an example of when the fundraising prodigy got too far out ahead of his target market. Two entire decades ago, Morris teamed up with some autogynephilic big brains like economist Donald-Deirdre McCloskey and semiconductor scientist Lynn Conway to try to cancel anyone who’d given a nice blurb to Northwestern U. psychology professor J. Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen.

Bailey had outraged McCloskey and Conway by recounting U. of Toronto clinician Ray Blanchard’s discovery that there were two types of male transsexuals: the well-known effeminate homosexual early onset ones vs. the unknown masculine heterosexual late onset fetishist autogynephilics.

So Dees teamed up with a small clique of late onset trans types to try to silence scientists spilling the beans about the fetishists. Autogynephilics tend to be high IQ, ruthless, and monomaniacal so in recent years they have proven to be the Seal Team 6 of cancel culture, with their supporting army of unhappy online teenage girls.

It showed Dees’ brilliance that he noticed 20 years ago that trans was going to make somebody a lot of money someday. So why not him now?

But, 20 years ago, Morris was just too far out ahead of his times. The media couldn’t figure out what this was supposed to be about so the SPLC’s first big trans campaign didn’t go anywhere back then. It took another decade for the New York Times to push all its chips in on trans lunacy starting in 2013.

Now, without Morris, the timeservers in charge can’t think of much to do but recycle Morris’s ancient brainstorm. Thus from the SPLC’s brand new CAPTAIN report:

Along with Zucker and Bradley, the network of established mental health practitioners focusing on gender identity in the 2000s included Dr. Ray Blanchard, Dr. Paul R. McHugh, Dr. James M. Cantor, Dr. J. Michael Bailey, and Dr. Stephen B. Levine.

Bailey’s work has been described as using transgender people as “guinea pigs” and has been likened to the experimentation on Black men undertaken at the Tuskegee Institute without their knowledge in the 1930s, reducing them to “expendable” pseudoscientific subjects.[11] Bailey has been applauded by fellow members of the Human Biodiversity Institute (HBI)—a community of “neo-eugenicists” started by Steve Sailer, a contributor to the white nationalist website VDARE.[12]

Blanchard, also a member of HBI, invented and advocated the “autogynephilia” diagnosis to explain trans identity as a form of mental disorder arising from men experiencing sexual arousal when picturing themselves as a woman.[13]

Bailey also supports the autogynephilia diagnosis, but his most notable contribution to the field, from a 2003 book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, is based largely on Zucker’s and Blanchard’s work and chronicles the experiences of Bailey’s transgender patients. Bailey’s anecdotal accounts subsequently faced complaints for violating informed consent procedures [14]—an accusation that, in part, led to the retraction of an article supporting new claims about gender identity that Bailey coauthored in 2023.[15]

C’mon, Morris in his dotage could come up with a fresher fund-raising concept than this. Trans has been Kardashian level hoi polloi nonsense since Bruce-Caitlyn Jenner in 2015.

Sure, Morris was kind of a con man, but he was a con man on a grand scale. I kind of miss the old bastard. He was a worthy adversary.

I doubt if I will miss Margaret Huang when she’s replaced by Claudine Gay.

I’m not as good at fundraising as Morris Dees. (Who is?). But it’s that time of the year so I still do it. I rely on the generosity of my readers to let me keep going rather than getting a real job.

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