Dennis King

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William Dennis King (born 1941) is an American investigative journalist who currently focuses on web-based advocacy journalism. He is the author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989) and Get the Facts on Anyone (1999), which is listed as a resource in The Reporter's Handbook published by Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Contents 1 King's early life 2 Professional life 2.1 Allegations of harassment 2.2 Recent conflict with LaRouche 2.3 King's book on LaRouche 3 Publications 4 References 5 Further reading

[edit] King's early life

In 1965, King graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During the 1960s, he was active in the Progressive Labor Party.

[edit] Professional life

King specializes in analyzing political and religious sects. Beginning in 1977, he began investigating Fred Newman and the International Workers Party. ^[1]

He is known as a critic of the LaRouche movement, and is the author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, first published in 1989. He has worked with investigative journalists Chip Berlet and Russ Bellant in researching alleged illegal activities and bigotry within the LaRouche organization.^[2]

[edit] Allegations of harassment

In a deposition in the early 1980s, LaRouche said King was with the "dope lobby" and that LaRouche's supporters had been "monitoring" him since 1979. "We have watched this little scoundrel because he is a major security threat to my life," said LaRouche. When asked by The Washington Post about harassment by LaRouche supporters, King pointed to affidavits he had submitted in federal court cases. The affidavits alleged various acts of harassment including a large number of anonymous phone threats to King and to his relatives, several including death threats against King. In response, Jeffrey Steinberg, the security chief of the LaRouche organization, denied that the group harassed King but said King has urged people to harass LaRouche.^[3]

In a 1989 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, King said:

They went after me nonstop through 1984. I'd say there were at least 1,000 hang-up phone calls. Sometimes they would tell me they were going to beat out my brains with a baseball bat. They called up my girlfriend and told her she could find me in the basement refrigeration unit. They followed me around the streets. Someone smashed up the office of Our Town, the paper in which I first published the LaRouche stories, then poured acid over the wreckage....

They found out where my father, a man in his 80s, lived and went after him with poison pen letters and threatening phone calls. They passed out leaflets in my apartment building accusing me of all sorts of sexual and political misdeeds. LaRouche even bought time on a local Manhattan radio station, and every half hour his voice would come on and warn everyone that Dennis King...was a drug pusher.^[4]

[edit] Recent conflict with LaRouche

In July 2007, King published on his website an article blaming LaRouche for triggering the suicide of Kenneth Kronberg, a longtime member of the LaRouche organization.^[5] LaRouche responded with a statement on the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee website titled "Is Dennis King Planning Suicide?" The statement quoted LaRouche as saying that "Dennis would do almost anything, even suicide, just to get attention from those influentials who have become bored by news of his continued existence," adding that King "is an empty carcass without a soul" and that he is "not going to send flowers" to King's funeral. ^[6]

[edit] King's book on LaRouche

King has received public attention from his book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. According to Publishers Weekly:

• A Trotskyist in the 1940s, four-time presidential candidate, head of the National Democratic Policy Committee, right-wing extremist Lyndon LaRouche was recently convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges. King, a journalist who has unveiled the workings of the LaRouche cult almost singlehandedly over the years, here produces a courageous, hard-hitting expose. The LaRouchians raised over $200 million in loans and donations from the public, despite what the author describes as the sect's "classic fascist" ideology, anti-Semitism, brain-washing, smear tactics and fanatical support of the Star Wars defense system and military build-up. According to King, LaRouche's eccentric posturing (he claimed the Queen of England was a drug pusher and branded Henry Kissinger a communist agent) was useful cover--a pose to distract the media while LaRouche forged bonds with the Reagan administration, the CIA, the National Security Council, the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups, Teamster bosses and crime lords, among others. King charges that the major media looked the other way, adopting a "see-no-evil" policy that allowed LaRouche to flourish.^[7]

Authors Laird Wilcox, John George, and Daniel Pipes, have discussed claims by Dennis King that there are coded references in LaRouche's writings. Wilcox and George write that "Dennis King goes to considerable lengths to paint LaRouche as a neo-Nazi, even engaging in a little conspiracy-mongering of his own. King maintains, for example, that words like "British" were really code words for 'Jew.'"^[8] Daniel Pipes writes that "Dennis King insists that [LaRouche's] references to the British as the ultimate conspirators are really `code language' to refer to Jews. In fact, these are references to the British."^[9] A review of King's book in the New York Times concluded that "...in trying to see Mr. LaRouche as a would-be Fuhrer, Mr. King may be trying to tie together the whole unruly package with too neat a ribbon. A number of loose ends hang out, not least of which is the fact that many members of Mr. LaRouche's inner circle are Jewish."[1]

Pipes, however, also alleges that "LaRouche places a British-Jewish alliance at the center of his conspiracism."^[10] The New York Times, Washington Post, and other major newspapers and magazines, have also alleged anti-Semitism on the part of LaRouche.

The Encyclopedia Judaica interprets the title of one LaRouche publication, "Children of Satan," to be a form of "masked anti-Semitism." An entry in the encyclopedia includes this passage: "A series of LaRouchite pamphlets calls the neoconservative movement the "Children of Satan," which links Jewish neo-conservatives to the historic rhetoric of the blood libel. In a twisted irony, the pamphlets imply the neoconservatives are the real neo-Nazis." The entry refers to the "notorious" antisemitism of LaRouche.^[11]

A review in Library Journal, for example, asserts that LaRouche is an antisemite, among other things:

• In this portrait of LaRouche and his followers, journalist King provides a case study of the development of a radical movement. He discusses LaRouche's childhood, which helped to shape LaRouche's particular world view, as well as LaRouche's strange odyssey from left-wing Marxist to right-wing leader of the reactionary National Democratic Policy Committee. King examines the bizarre coalitions--the Ku Klux Klan and black civil rights groups, for example--that LaRouche has managed to form and galvanize into political action. LaRouche has also managed to maintain ties to such disparate figures as Manuel Noriega and Teamsters' boss Jackie Presser. This is a riveting narrative about a man who would say or do anything to gain personal power and who seems to have used his blatant anti-Semitism to successfully entice followers. ^[12]

[edit] Publications

• King, Dennis (1995) Get the Facts on Anyone; third edition, June 1999, Arco Publishing, ISBN 0-02-862821-7
• King, Dennis (1989) Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-23880-0

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Dennis King's LaRouche Watch website
• Dennis King's weblog