Charlie Kirk is Right to Hate MLK Jr.
MLK Jr. Was the Enemy of Everything the GOP Stands for - and We Need to Unapologetically Embrace MLK Jr.'s Radical Democratic Socialist Alternative
Every Martin Luther King Jr. day, the nation engages in a fiction.
Most Republicans pretend that they love civil rights and MLK Jr., while most Democrats agree to pretend that the sanctified secular saint who said people should only be judged by the "content of our character" is all there was to the man.
Charlie Kirk of the right-wing Turning Point USA, which trains young MAGA conservatives to destroy our democracy, has said he will have none of that and declared war on Martin Luther King Jr., as well as on the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“MLK was awful,” Kirk says. “He said one good thing he actually didn't believe,” with Kirk referring to the “content of their character” line that he recognizes conservatives quote completely out of context of MLK’s overall beliefs.
And from the viewpoint of conservatives, MLK was awful. He was a democratic socialist who believed businesses could be told who they had to accept as customers, as employees, and as tenants. That was the core idea of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And like conservatives of the time who believed racist businesses should be able to discriminate against anyone they wished, so does Kirk - and he wants to reclaim that position for modern conservativism. As he says now, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
The attack on “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) and “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) was just the opening salvo in restoring the brand of conservatism at the heart of Jim Crow and now Trumpism. Back in 1957 William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review and the intellectual guidepost for conservatism for decades, wrote:
[Is] the White community in the South… entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race..It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
The man who wrote those words would remain the most respected intellectual in conservative circles during his lifetime. Below all conservative rhetoric, this is the ideology that justifies discrimination up to and including denying non-whites equal voting rights.
In 1964, Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater cast his vote against the Civil Rights Act passed that year, which rallied southern Democrats to begin switching to the GOP. Goldwater would in fact win only six states that fall, his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
While coded language and dog whistles would replace the plain language of Buckley’s 1957 essay and the rhetoric of southern politicians of the day, the core beliefs never changed- and Charlie Kirk has decided it’s time to move from those dog whistles back to the Goldwater-Buckley days of flat-out opposition to civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr.
The Real MLK Jr. was Woke as Hell
Some conservatives and even self-styled liberals want to portray modern civil rights activists promoting CRT or DEI initiatives as betraying the original race-neutral values promoted by the civil rights movement that MLK Jr. led.
However, MLK called out supposed race-neutral policies that led to segregation and inequality as being just as racist as southern segregation. When protests erupted in New York in 1964 over segregation in that city’s public schools, which the city’s superintendent dismissed as “natural” and “accidental,” MLK responded by saying defense of such de facto segregation reflected the “thin veneer of North’s racial self-righteousness.”
That same year, he highlighted problems of police brutality in New York and Los Angeles. He wrote, “As the nation, Negro & white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated, & usually denied.” The rhetoric of Black Lives Matter was not born in Ferguson or with George Floyd’s murder but is rooted in the movement dating back to MLK’s leadership and even earlier civil rights agitation.
Modern conservatives like Kirk are also upset that progressives talk about “decolonization,” as if this is something new. But Martin Luther King Jr. was clear that multiple evils in the United States derived from its founding as a colonial state. As he wrote in 1963:
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race…even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or feel remorse for this shameful episode.
A few years later in 1967, he broke with the Johnson administration in a famous speech at Riverside Church in Harlem where he denounced the Vietnam War as supporting colonialism.
In that speech, he described the intimate connection between racism and oppression overseas and at home:
If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over…The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit…
All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions.
This speech was not just about Vietnam or foreign policy but was ultimately a rejection of the global economic system that promoted fresh rounds of exploitation abroad and at home. As he said,
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
This is using the parable of the Good Samaritan to argue for a democratic socialism that would prevent injustices appearing in the first place.
For as MLK Jr. would argue at the board meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.” This was nothing new for MLK; he wrote to Coretta Scott King as early as 1952 that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness” and “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory.”
This view that capitalism was the root of racism and global injustice was why MLK’s last crusade was the Poor Peoples Campaign to unite the victims of capitalism to demand a fairer economic system- and in which he would ultimately die supporting a union picket line in Memphis.
The Choice is Between MLK Jr.’s Radicalism and GOP Fascism
With all that, Charlie Kirk is far more honest in his hatred of Martin Luther King Jr. than Republicans who misquote him and pretend they agree with him. MLK Jr. fought the evils of militarism, racism, and capitalism that Kirk and the billionaire funders of his organization personify.
The democratic left (both small d and capital D) should be embracing this fight over MLK Jr.’s true legacy and stop ignoring the radical divide in both his legacy and our nation.
Some liberals may think there is some political waystation between the radical democratic socialism of MLK Jr. and the fascism of the MAGA Right, but MLK argued that there is no neutral political place in a world built on oppression. His parable of the Good Samaritan is about liberals who continually applaud helping those left at the side of the road, while ignoring the evils of the system that continually add new victims.
More prosaically, bemoaning the evils of Fox News promoting MAGA fascism or the wealthy buying the Supreme Court is fruitless if your solutions never stop billionaires from having such power in the first place.
Ultimately, I am saying to some of my liberal friends; take MLK’s radicalism as seriously as Charlie Kirk does. Buying into MLK Jr’s radical democratic socialism doesn’t mean you can’t be critical of the self-defeating strategies or wrong-headed approaches of others calling themselves socialists - god knows, MLK Jr. spent a lot of his time wrangling over strategy and goals with other left activists - but it does mean abandoning the fiction that there is some way to maintain the core of our economic system while ending all the injustices it inevitably breeds.
The Right embodied by people like Charlie Kirk will keep fighting to maintain that system - and they won’t stop until the superprofits of the capitalists funding them end with a new economic and social system. As MLK said in 1967, since there was no way to separate capitalism from the rest of our injustices, the nation needed radical change:
“Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”