MLK Worship Gives Us DEI

Charlie Kirk is right to take on the civil rights idol

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk plans to take on multicultural America’s most sacred idol: Martin Luther King Jr. The idea naturally inspired a wave of media condemnation of Kirk ahead of the MLK holiday. It’s rare for any public figure to criticize King. Kirk himself praised MLK as a “hero” in years past.

But the TPUSA chief is now “redpilled” on the civil rights activist and his legacy. This is a very positive development. It’s essential that more conservatives critique MLK. The diversity, equity, and inclusion framework is imposed on America in large part due to King’s efforts and our nation’s worship of him. From the civil rights regime to reparations, MLK stands for America’s anti-white mania. 

Conservatives try to boil King down to just one sentence: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." To most of the American Right, this statement rebukes affirmative action and anti-white racism. Conservatives claim this proves that MLK was committed to colorblindness. That’s not true at all, as Charlie Kirk now knows. MLK shared the same beliefs as the average DEI commissar.

King’s chief contribution was to push for the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Both were supposedly enacted to eradicate white supremacy from America. Instead, they’ve degraded the republic, curtailed liberty, and enlarged the power of the federal bureaucracy. As the work of Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania shows, the Civil Rights Act has been used to end freedom of association, curtail freedom of speech, mandate racial quotas in hiring and university admissions, usher in the tyranny of human resource departments, and made “diversity” the highest goal in American life. The Civil Right Act made the idea of a “colorblind” meritocracy impossible. Affirmative action and DEI are the spawn of it.

The Voting Rights Act is now imposing racial quotas on states. Thanks to this law, courts are ordering southern states to create multiple black majority districts. This tramples on states’ rights and cements America’s racial spoils system. It’s the complete opposite of colorblindness.

King would be thrilled with these results.

But the black leader wasn’t content with the two legislative acts. He wanted America to go much further. He in fact demanded reparations. In King’s 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait, he wrote:

No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest. I am proposing, therefore, that, just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.

In his last sermon, King preached that America owes blacks financial compensation for the past:

There are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself … But they never stop to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years.

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly, suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And … you don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

In another 1968 speech, King said America owes a financial debt to blacks and said his people were coming to Washington to “get our check.”

 

That planned protest was the Poor People’s Campaign, which sought to unite blacks, Hispanics, and Amerindians together to demand white America redistribute its wealth. His racial socialism was fully in-line with the anti-white coalition of the modern Left.  Unite everyone against whitey was his mission at the end of his life. He would feel right at home with the Squad.

MLK embraced the core tenets of DEI. In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here?, he wrote: “The doctrine of white supremacy was imbedded in every textbook and preached in practically every pulpit. It became a structural part of the culture.” That is, word for word, what DEI apparatchiks say to condemn America’s “systemic racism” and argue the nation was built on the foundations of white supremacy. 

In one of his last essays, King called for “radical change” to America: “Justice for black people will not flow into this society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory… White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society.” 

He definitely didn’t call for colorblind conservatism, to say the least.

Along with his toxic ideology, there were many of the personal failings of King. MLK, like Claudine Gay, was a plagiarist. He, like Bill Clinton, was a serial philanderer. He, like many leftists of his own era, had close associations with communists. And, like 2020’s mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrations, many of his protests descended into violence. He was no saint. But none of these facts have dampened the Right’s enthusiasm for King, likely because boomers aren’t even aware of them. 

Leftists and black activists love to cite MLK’s words to prove he was just like them. One such example is a Los Angeles Times column that declared: “King was a critical race theorist before there was a name for it.” They are right to make these claims. The only thing conservatives can counter with is the one sentence from the “I Have A Dream” speech. The mainstream media makes mincemeat of that retort, leaving Americans with the impression that they should follow his ideas to their logical conclusion.

The primary reason that conservatives try to adopt MLK as their own is because he arguably stands as the most revered figure in American history. 

Gallup found in 2011 that 94 percent of Americans have a favorable view of King. That stands in stark contrast to 1966 figures that found 64 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of the black leader. Ninety-five percent of Americans say MLK was an important figure in US history. A 2022 YouTube survey showed that 77 percent of Americans believe that MLK should have public monuments. Only Abraham Lincoln scored as high of a level of support. More Americans believe MLK should be publicly honored than George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Christopher Columbus. Unlike these white men, MLK’s alleged achievements are never qualified by his failures. It’s a privilege unique to him. 

We can’t be a great America if we honor MLK more than Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Columbus. It’s critical to change conservatives’ minds on this topic. Some may argue that there’s a pragmatic case to carry on the MLK worship. They argue the Right can still quote him to defeat the anti-white Left and weaponize his popularity for our own purposes. But that’s a mistake. 

We can never truly get rid of affirmative action, DEI, and mandated white guilt if MLK is America’s most beloved historical figure. It’s better to go against what’s popular to deliver the cold, hard truth to conservatives. Reducing MLK’s popularity is more important than scoring cheap points against libs–especially when those libs can deliver MLK’s actual opinions right back at you.

Charlie Kirk is doing a great thing by attacking King. More conservatives should follow his lead.   

King embodies the multiracial Americanism that seeks to replace the historic American nation through racial quotas, 1619 Project history, reparations, and a host of other ills.  His true beliefs inspired the radical transformation of America. An America that worships MLK is an America hostile to white interests.

It’s time for the Right to do the hard but necessary thing of turning against Martin Luther King. We will only have a great America when Andrew Jackson and Christopher Columbus are more popular than the plagiarizing adulterer.