January 21, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
MLK DAY 2019 – With a Few Other Comments About those Catholic Students
with MAGA Hats
Friends,
My original intent this morning had been to
write something detailed, lengthy and caustic about the widely-reported
incident involving those Catholic students from Covington, Kentucky, wearing MAGA
hats who had attended the March for Life rally in Washington DC, January 18. Yesterday as I caught a bit of news on the local NBC affiliate,
WRAL, there was news anchor, Ken Smith, describing how “pro-life Catholic
teenagers with Make America Great Hats” taunted and “threatened” an “elderly native
American” Vietnam War veteran. And later in the day an interview with the native
American [i.e., Indian], Nathan Phillips, surfaced in which he criticized just
how “hateful” America had become during—of course—the past two years.
But that didn’t prevent the Mainstream Media, including the
virulently anti-Trump Neoconservative writer/publicist Bill Kristol and his
friends at what was once many years ago a “conservative” magazine, National Review, from joining the crowd
of baying online hyenas and demanding that the students with the MAGA hats be
disciplined and condemned, maybe expelled from school, and that, yes, Donald
Trump must condemn them, too:
If some kid wearing a McCain 2008 cap had
been filmed behaving this way, John McCain would have already called Mr.
Phillips to express regret. And he would have used the occasion to remind his
supporters they should treat others with respect. Will Trump do anything like
this? https://t.co/eKy2ZYhg7f — Bill Kristol
(@BillKristol) January 19, 2019
This morning the whole narrative
is falling apart—a tissue of lies and disinformation, another case of Leftist
and Progressivist attempts to disauthorize and destroy anyone who stands in the
way of their goal of destroying of what is left of the American republic (and impeaching
the president AND suppressing his voters)…but I wager you will NOT get a
correction on WRAL from Ken Smith: while their Web site this morning carries
additional information from the students correcting that story, their report is
written in such a way as to continue to impugn those students while furthering
the Progressivist agenda [https://www.wral.com/students-seen-mocking-native-americans-could-face-expulsion/18136669/].
In our society, in America of 2019, nothing can stand in the way of The Agenda, not innocence, and certainly
not truth. The older rules of justice and right do not apply, even for young
teenagers—especially if they are pro-life and, most egregiously, wear MAGA
hats.
But this incident is being covered and will develop as time
goes on.
*************
So, today, it being January 21 and an official Federal holiday,
I re-issue a longish research essay I originally published in THE UNZ REVIEW on
January 16, 2018. It was intended as a strong cautionary note on the ongoing and
mindless canonization of Martin Luther King Jr. (whose birth date is January
15), and whose symbolic, political and cultural uses in completing the
revolutionary transformation and destruction of the United States cannot be
overstated. From the far frenzied Left to the dominant “conservative movement
inc.” [the “Big Con,” as my friend Dr.
Jack Kerwick calls them], King is now the salutary, untouchable, indeed, indisputably
holy and magical American talisman—an Icon—whose legacy cannot and must not be questioned.
To do so, of course, means you are by definition a “racist,” a “bigot,”
probably a “fascist,” as well. And from the usual Progressivist voices to
almost the entirety of the pundits on FOX (can you find an exception?) and in
the Establishment “Big Con” media, King is the newest Founding Father who
confirms the imposed narrative that “America was founded on the ‘proposition’
of Equality.” The problem, however, is that this historical template is false,
undone by a serious and thorough examination of history and the documentation
available. But it is used by both the Progressivists AND the elitist BigCon
advocates—whose philosophy emits from the same essential foundations, only
differing in variations of application—to advance an agenda that in the end heads
irreversibly Left.
I will continue to run this piece each MLK Day as a reminder
and challenge to think again, more critically and historically, about what this
day actually means and continues to become.
Martin
Luther King Day and the Perversion of American History
For the past thirty-five years
(officially since 1986) the third Monday in January has been celebrated as a
federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day. Federal and state offices and many
businesses either close or go on limited schedules. We are awash with public
observances, parades, prayer breakfasts, stepped-up school projects for our
unwary and intellectually-abused children, and gobs and gobs of over-the-top
television “specials” and movies, all geared to tell us—to shout it in our
faces, if we don’t pay strict attention—that King was some sort of superhuman,
semi-divine civil rights leader who brought the promise of equality to millions
of Americans, a kind of modern St. John the Baptist ushering in the Millenium.
And that he stands just below Jesus Christ in the pantheon of revered and
adored historical personages…and in some ways, perhaps above Jesus
Christ in the minds of many of his present-day devotees and epigones.
It seems to do no good to issue
a demurrer to this veritable religious “cult of Dr. King.” There are, indeed,
numerous “Christian” churches that now “celebrate” this day just as if it were
a major feast in the Christian calendar. In short, Martin Luther King has
received de facto canonization religiously and in the public
mind as no other person in American history.
Mention the fact that King may
have plagiarized as much as 40 % of his Boston University Ph.D. dissertation
[cf. Theodore Pappas, Plagiarism and the Culture War: The Writings of
Martin Luther King, Jr, and Other Prominent Americans, 1998 and Martin
Luther King Jr Plagiarism Story, 1994], or that he worked closely with
known Communists throughout his life, or that he advocated American defeat in Vietnam
while praising Ho Chi Minh, or that he implicitly countenanced violence and
Marxism, especially later in his life [cf., Congressional Record,
129, no. 130 (October 3, 1983): S13452-S13461]—mention any of these accusations
confirmed begrudgingly by his establishment biographers David Garrow and Taylor
Branch, or mention his even-by-current-standards violent “rough sex” escapades
(which apparently involved even under-agers) [cf., Cooper Sterling, January 13,
2018, at: http://www.vdare.com/articles/fake-news-washington-post-evades-martin-luther-kings-communist-links?content=for%20Church%20Ministers.%E2%80%9D ]—and you immediately get labeled a “racist” and condemned
by not just the zealous King flame-keepers on the Left, but by such “racially
acceptable” Neoconservatives like James Kirchick and Dinesh D’Souza who
supposedly are on the Right.
Indeed, in some ways
Establishment “conservatives” such as Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry (National
Review), D’Souza, Glenn Beck, the talking heads on Fox and the furious
scribblers at The Weekly Standard, and many others, not only
eagerly buy into this narrative, they now have converted King into a
full-fledged, card-carrying member of “Conservatism Inc.”—the (contemporary)
“conservative movement,” a “plaster saint” iconized as literally no one else in
our history.
Celebrating King becomes a
means for these ersatz conservatives to demonstrate their “civil rights” and
“egalitarian” bona fides. The Neocons, with their philosophical and
ideological origins over on the Trotskyite Left of the 1930s and 1940s, when
they made their pilgrimage towards conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s brought
with them a fervent believe in a globalist New World Order egalitarianism that
characterized Trotskyite Marxist ideology, and the determination to redefine
and re-orient the traditional American Rightwing, and to re-write, as well,
American history.
Thus, the purges of the old
conservative movement in the 1980s and 1990s—there was no room for Southern
conservatives like Mel Bradford, no room for traditionalist Catholics like
Frederick Wilhelmsen or Brent Bozell Sr., no room for paleo-libertarians like
Murray Rothbard, no room for Old Right anti-egalitarians like Paul Gottfried,
and no room for “America Firsters” like Pat Buchanan…And those traditional
conservatives who were too significant in the “pantheon of greats,” like a
Russell Kirk, they attempted to simply whitewash and give them new, cleaned up
images and identities (part and parcel of their “rewriting” of conservatism).
Thus, Kirk’s opposition to the civil rights bills of the 1960s and 1970s, his
staunch arguments against egalitarianism, his willingness to debate cognitive
disparities between the races (publishing, for example, reviews of Dr. Audrey
M. Shuey’s study, The Testing of Negro Intelligence, in his
publication, The University Bookman—I know, as I was there in
Mecosta when it happened) are all swept under the carpet or carefully ignored.
In this, in fact, the dominant
Neocons have joined with their cousins on the “farther Left,” to the point that
Bush consultant guru and Fox pundit, Karl Rove, could boast that hardcore
Marxist/Communist historian Eric Foner (who lamented the collapse of Soviet
Communism) was his favorite historian (when examining Reconstruction) [See Dr.
Paul Gottfried’s incisive critique of Foner and those “conservatives” who have
praised him, “Guilt Trip,” The American Conservative,” May 4, 2009,
pp. 21-23].
King Day has become, then, for
the Conservative Movement an opportunity for it to beat its chest, brag about
its commitment to civil rights and the American “dream”, the unrealized idea of
equality (that is, to distort and re-write the history of the American
Founding), and to protect its left flank against the ever increasing charges
that it could be, just might be, maybe is—“racist.”
And for the “farther Left,”
that catapulting cultural Marxist juggernaut that continues to move the societal
and political goalposts to the Left, King Day becomes as a major ideological
blitzkrieg, a weaponized cudgel used to strike down and silence anyone,
anywhere, who might offer the slightest dissent to the latest barbarity and
latest “advance” in civil rights, now expanded to include not just everything
“racial,” but also same sex marriage, transgenderism and abortion on demand.
Martin Luther King–that deeply and irredeemably flawed and fraudulent figure
imposed upon us and our consciousness—has become an icon, a totem, who serves
in martyred death the purposes of continuing Revolution.
The heavily-documented
literature detailing the real Martin Luther King is abundant and remains
uncontroverted and basically uncontested. During the debates over establishing
a national “King Day” in the mid-1980s, Senators Jesse Helms and John East
(both North Carolinians) led the opposition, supplying the Congress and the
nation, and anyone with eyes to read, full accounts of the “King legacy,” from
his close association and collaboration with the Communist Party USA to his
advocacy of violence and support for the Communists in North Vietnam, to
implicit support for Marxist revolution domestically. Ironically, it was Robert
Woodson, a noted black Republican, who highlighted in a lecture given to honor the “conservative virtues of Dr.
Martin Luther King” at the Heritage
Foundation on November 5, 1993, the difficulties in getting black advocates of
the older generation to respect King’s role as a Civil Rights leader. According
to Woodson, as quoted in an excellent essay by Paul Gottfried,
“when Dr. King tried to bring the Civil Rights movement together
with the [Marxist] peace movement, it
was Carl Rowan who characterized King as a Communist, not Ronald Reagan.
I remember being on the dais of the NAACP banquet in Darby, Pennsylvania when
Roy Wilkins soundly castigated King for this position.” [Paul Gottfried, “The Cult of St. Martin Luther King – A Loyalty
Test for Careerist Conservatives?” January 16, 2012, at: http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-cult-of-st-martin-luther-king-a-loyalty-test-for-careerist-conservatives ] (emphasis added)
But not only that, behind the
scenes there were voluminous secretly-made FBI recordings and accounts of
King’s violent sexual escapades, often times with more than two or three others
involved in such “rough sex” trysts; and of his near total hypocrisy when
discussing civil rights and other prominent civil rights leaders. It is, to put
it mildly, a sorry record, scandalous even by today’s standards…Indeed, King
makes Harvey Weinstein look like a meek choirboy in comparison.
But you won’t hear any of that
mentioned by the falling-all-over-itself Mainstream Media or the media mavens
on Fox. In fact, such comments will get you exiled to the far reaches of the
Gobi Desert and labeled a “racist,” quicker that my cocker spaniel gobbles down
his kibble.
Rather than rehash and restate
all the various accusations, backed up with substantial and overwhelming
documentation, let me offer something of an annotated bibliography and history
of MLK Day. Almost all the material is now available and accessible online,
including material from the Congressional Record.
First, essential to
understanding the background of just how we got King Day, the late Dr. Samuel
Francis’s account is critical. Originally written to preface the publication of
voluminous testimony and documentation placed in the Congressional
Record by Senator Helms, Francis’s essay and the Helms’ dossier were
eventually published in book form (I have a published copy, but I’m unsure if
you can still find it on Amazon). A few years back Dr. Francis’s introduction
and his detailed background essay and the lengthy Congressional Record material
(which he prepared for Helms) were put online. For a complete understanding of
King’s association and cooperation with American Communists and his endorsement
of Vietnamese Communism, as well as his putative endorsement of Marxism here in
the United States while condemning the free enterprise system, these two items
are essential reading:
To fully understand the serious
plagiarism charges leveled against King and the academic and
politically-correct skullduggery that surrounded Boston University’s decision
not to rescind his doctoral degree, Theodore Pappas’s two detailed studies,
cited above, offer fascinating and scandalously revealing details. But other
writers, also, upon cursory examination, have found numerous other instances of
his plagiarism.
Remember the “I Have a Dream”
speech? Well, as Jim Goad wrote in Takimag back in 2012:
“…the immortalized in MLK’s “I
Have a Dream” speech in the part where he beseeches God…to “Let freedom ring
from the Stone Mountain of Georgia.” King stole that passage about Stone Mountain from a 1952 oratory
delivered by another black preacher at the Republican National Convention. He
also allegedly plagiarized parts of the first public sermon he ever delivered
back in 1947.” [Jim Goad, “I’m So Bored with MLK,” Takimag, January
16, 2012, at: http://takimag.com/article/im_so_bored_with_mlk#axzz54AHOhapO]
But, say the Neocon scribblers
at National Review and the pundits on
Fox, wasn’t King really a conservative at heart, an old-fashioned black Baptist
who believed in the tenets of traditional Christianity? Shouldn’t we simply overlook
these all-too-human foibles?
To answer that Dr. Jack Kerwick
penned an essay several years ago that addresses these futile attempts to
sanitize and “conservatize” King on the part of “conservatism inc.,” in its
efforts to shore up its leftward flank and, through sanctifying him, to defend
the template of egalitarianism as central to the American Founding.
I take the liberty of quoting
Kerwick at length:
“In honor of African-American History month, let’s take a quiz. In
each of the following statements, a famous African-American is quoted. Identify
that person among these answer choices: (a) Jesse Jackson; (b) Jeremiah Wright;
(c) Al Sharpton; (d) Louis Farrakhan; (e)Barack Hussein Obama; and (f) Martin
Luther King, Jr.
(1)George Washington was undoubtedly valorous. “But to the end of
his days he maintained a posture of exclusionism toward the slave,” and he “was
a fourth-generation slaveholder.” Washington “only allowed” blacks “to enter
the Continental Army because His Majesty’s Crown was attempting to recruit”
blacks “to the British Cause.”
(2)The black American is “the child of two cultures—Africa
and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness
all too many” blacks “seek to embrace only one side of their natures.” Blacks in
America are “Afro-American [.]”
(3) “Colonialism could not have been perpetuated if the Christian
Church had really taken a stand against it.” For example, “the vicious system
of apartheid in South Africa” had among “its chief defenders…the Dutch Reformed
Protestant Church.”
(4) “If the Church does not participate actively in the struggle
for peace and for economic and racial justice” future generations will look
back upon it as “one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.”
(5) President Lyndon Baines Johnson had a “comprehensive grasp” of
the problems of poverty and civil rights that he faced. He had “sincerity,”
“realism,” and “wisdom” in how he approached them.
(6) Blacks, like everyone else, have “a right to expect the
resources of the American trade union movement to be used in assuring” them “of
a proper place in American society.” Young blacks especially “need to think of
union careers as earnestly as they do of business careers and professions.”
(7) America maintains “a continued alliance…with racism and
exploitation throughout the world.”
(8) Both Marxism and “traditional capitalism” are partially true
and partially false. The former may fail to “see the truth in individual
enterprise,” but the latter fails to “see the truth in collectiveenterprise.”
(9) Communism was “a judgment on” the “failure” of “Western
nations…to make democracy real and to follow through on the revolutions that we
initiated.”
(10) The “potential explosiveness of our world situation is much
more attributable [than anything else] to disillusionment with promises of
Christianity and technology.”
(11) America “is still behind European nations in
all forms of social legislation.”
(12) “Our children are still taught to respect the violence which
reduced a red-skinned people [the American Indian] of an earlier culture into a
few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.”
(13) “The misery of the poor in Africa and Asia” is the “result of
years of [Western] exploitation and underdevelopment.”
(14) “We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are
poor primarily because we have exploited them through political or economic
colonialism. Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her
modern economic imperialism.”
(15) If there is to be “peace on earth,” people’s “loyalties must
transcend” not only “race,” “tribe,” and “class,” but “nation.” This “means
[that] we must develop a world perspective.”
(16) “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is
that we now have the resources to get rid of it.” What this implies is that the
time is now “for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must
use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the
unschooled, and feed the unfed.”
(17) The United Nations is to be applauded, for it is the product
of “the fear of war.”
(18) Since “the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates
even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good,” those “who
sincerely feel that disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an
abominable waste of time” are sorely mistaken.
(19) “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money
on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.”
(20) America “must not only radically readjust its attitude
toward” blacks; it “must incorporate in its planning some compensatory
compensation [“Affirmative Action”] from the handicaps [blacks] inherited from
the past.”
(21) What’s necessary for combating poverty is “a broad-based and
gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege
of denial.”
(22) Because America was “born in genocide,” “racial hatred,” and
“racial supremacy,” nothing less than “a reconstruction of the entire society,
a revolution of values” is demanded. After all, “a nation that put as many
Japanese in a concentration camp as” America did during World War II will think
nothing of putting “black people in a concentration camp” as well.
(23) America needs a “revolution of values”—i.e. “socialism.”
(24) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of
1965 were “at best surface changes.” Only a “redistribution of economic power”
could rectify the injustices inherent in “the system” of “capitalism.”
(25) The Vietnam War was “senseless,” “unjust,” and “racist [.]”
In truth, it is America that is “the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today [.]”
*Bonus Question: Which of the foregoing famous African-Americans
said this about Ronald Reagan?
“That a one-time “Hollywood performer” who lacked “distinction
even as an actor” could “become a leading war hawk candidate for the
presidency” had to have been due to a most “melancholy turn of events [.]” In
fact, “only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis” could explain it.
If you selected “(f),” Martin Luther King, Jr., as your answer to
ALL these questions, then you achieved a perfect score! That’s right: Though
some word tenses were changed so as not to date the quotation in question and
give away the answer, the hard truth of the matter is that, contrary to what
contemporary “conservative” commentators [in the GOP and on Fox News] would
have you believe, King was obviously about as much of a conservative, to say
nothing of a “Reagan conservative,” as any of the other famous black Americans
mentioned at the beginning of this article. His statements, in fact, reveal a
man of the hard left, and certainly to the left of Barack Obama. “The truth,”
as Friedrich Nietzsche so simply, yet powerfully, put it, “is hard.” [Dr. Jack Kerwick, February 2015, http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/attheintersectionoffaithandculture/2015/02/a-pop-quiz-for-african-american-history-month.html]
Finally, I should also mention Peter
Brimelow’s superb essay that offers additional insight on the King Day holiday
and which summarizes much of the information, ideological uses, and controversy
surrounding the day. It was originally published in 2015, but he has
republished it each year to coincide with this annual national paroxysm: “
‘Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day’–The 2017 Edition,” at: http://www.vdare.com/articles/time-to-rethink-martin-luther-king-day-the-2017-edition]
I can think of no better
summation of the real meaning of King Day and its bare-knuckled ideological use
to deconstruct, dissolve and obliterate American traditions and heritage than
to cite, again, Sam Francis:
“[T]he true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize
the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to
delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions—not simply
those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free
market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system
that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and
expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of
wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor
of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a
charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning
of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he
defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of
Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to
pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions
and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality—racial, cultural,
national, economic, political, and social—must be overcome and discarded.
“By placing King—and therefore his own radical ideology of social
transformation and reconstruction—into the central pantheon of American
history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process
of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by
placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also
serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda
that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the
new dogma as a defining—perhaps the defining—icon of the American political
order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have
little ground to resist that agenda.” [January 16, 2006, at: https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/samuel_francis_on_martin_luther_king_jr_day]
I will not be celebrating this
day; rather, it is for me a mournful reminder of what has happened and is
happening to this country.
Dr. Boyd D. Cathey is the retired State Registrar of the North Carolina Division of
Archives and History. He holds an MA degree in American history from the
University of Virginia (where he was a Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and a PhD
degree in history and political theory from the Catholic University of Navarra,
Pamplona, Spain (where he was a Richard M. Weaver Fellow). In 1971-1972 he
served as assistant to the late Dr. Russell Kirk. He has taught university
level courses in Argentine and in the United States, and has published works in
French, Spanish and Italian.
