Earlier by Peter Brimelow: 2022: Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day? Now More Than Ever!
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, still under way, is now the holiest day of the Left’s Liturgical Year (although January 6th is coming up fast). Yet the civic religion that canonized King is rooted in myths, half-truths, and outright lies, most notably concerning what Founding Americans such as Thomas Jefferson believed about the race question. King wanted “Civil Rights,” which turn out to mean Quotas, Set-Asides and Reparations, aka Racial Socialism. Jefferson, like most Americans at the time and thereafter, wanted blacks “colonized,” aka resettled in another country. And that’s just the beginning of the problems with King and his “legacy.”
In his most famous speech, the plagiarized I Have A Dream oration at the Lincoln Monument on August 28, 1963, for instance, King advocated equalitarian pieties that he actually opposed, as I’ve explained here before. But he also included ridiculous claims about the American Founding:
So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
That “promissory note” is now a demand for racial reparations.
(By the way, I believe one of King’s speechwriters stole the phrase “I have a dream” from recently departed composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), who wrote it as a phrase running through the hit 1959 Broadway musical and 1962 film adaptation, Gypsy—"I had a dream, a wonderful dream,” etc. [Some People lyrics, YouTube]).
But as for “all men are created equal,” neither Jefferson nor any of the other Founding Fathers ever meant that to apply to blacks. Otherwise, they would have abolished slavery in the new federal Constitution. Jefferson was writing about equality before the law among whites of different social classes, in contrast to the hereditary privilege that ruled in England and Europe.
Jefferson’s thoughts on race have been either butchered or suppressed, and his remarkable life now reduced to the Sally Hemings Hoax.
Consider the Jefferson Memorial. As the remarkable but needless to say unsung Carleton Putnam pointed out sixty years ago, in a book vainly opposing the integration mania:
The Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation
See also VDARE.com's Martin Luther King Archive: 48 Items!
James Fulford writes: VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow called for a rethinking of Martin Luther King Day in 2015, arguing that MLK was a deeply flawed figure and an inappropriate role model for American whites. Now this is even more the case, because the MLK Day symbolic appeasement project has manifestly failed. as the Floyd Hoax/BLM Insurrection has shown and We propose to repeat this call until We (so to speak) Overcome.
Events have shown that this article was prescient in many ways. To quote one paragraph, below:
Many Americans unquestionably thought that, if they just made this one symbolic concession of accepting Martin Luther King Day, they would then be left alone. (They probably think the same about homosexual “marriage.”) But it hasn’t worked out that way. Martin Luther King Day has simply become a staging area for the inculcation of more white guilt, above all in the classroom.
Homosexual marriage, granted nationwide by Supreme Court fiat, has given way to the Transmania that Steve Sailer calls World War T. The inculcation of white guilt in the classroom, which was always going on, has become a nationwide political issue under the name of Critical Race Theory.
The reference to the "2027 Problem"—the date on which all of the FBI's judge-sealed records of surveillance of MLK are supposed to be released—has been slightly overtaken by events. Trump's decision to release sealed records of the JFK assassination investigation inadvertently showed that MLK had been present at an orgy involving at least one rape [The troubling legacy of Martin Luther King|Newly-revealed FBI documents portray the great civil rights leader as a sexual libertine who ‘laughed’ as a forcible rape took place, by David Garrow, StandPoint Mag, May 30, 2019 (PDF)].
As I said last year, MLK was leading a movement which used mass illegal demonstrations (the famous Selma Bridge March was in defiance of a court order) to provoke police into responding in ways the Main Stream Media could make look bad.
That makes him no better than the people leading and encouraging current rioters. There should not be a public holiday in his name.
Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day
First published here on MLK/Robert E. Lee day, 2015.
Happy Robert E. Lee Day! His January 19 birthday was once widely celebrated across the South (it still is mentionable in Alabama) but during the Second Reconstruction has been quietly suppressed to the point where even such a devoted son of the Confederacy as American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor was unaware, when I talked to him on Sunday night, that its local variant in his and Lee’s state of Virginia, Lee-Jackson Day, was supposed to be celebrated last Friday. (Not surprisingly—it seems to have been recently crudely scrubbed from Virginia’s webpage.)
But there’s a silver lining, sort of, in this tale of attempted historical lobotomy: It shows that public holidays come—and they go. Martin Luther King Day, rushed through Congress with Obamacare-style disregard of process in 1983, has been by now weighed in the balance for almost thirty years. It has inarguably (but unmentionably) been found wanting. It is time for it to go.
And in fact, I believe it will go, or at least be quietly suppressed like Robert E. Lee Day. The reasons:
It is obvious to everyone that there is a reason King’s FBI files were sealed for fifty years back in 1977, and only the Main Stream Media’s typically relentless Politically Correct air cover prevented this flagrant maneuver from discrediting the Martin Luther King Day legislation in 1983.
The problem that these sealed files pose, the MSM/ Ruling Class determination to repress it—and incidentally the unimpeachably reasonable nature of the MLK Day opponents’ position—emerged at President Ronald Reagan’s famous October 19, 1983 press conference:
[Sam Donaldson, ABC News]. Mr. President, Senator [Jesse] Helms has been saying on the Senate floor that Martin Luther King, Jr., had Communist associations, was a Communist sympathizer. Do you agree?The President. We'll know in about 35 years, won't we?
As the voice of the Historic American Nation, VDARE.com is proud to announce the creation of a print journal featuring the best material from our webzine.
You can also sign up to receive multiple copies, which serve as an excellent gift for friends and family while also helping to build our community.
We count on your support!
Sign me up to keep America American
Earlier by Peter Brimelow: 2022: Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day? Now More Than Ever!
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, still under way, is now the holiest day of the Left’s Liturgical Year (although January 6th is coming up fast). Yet the civic religion that canonized King is rooted in myths, half-truths, and outright lies, most notably concerning what Founding Americans such as Thomas Jefferson believed about the race question. King wanted “Civil Rights,” which turn out to mean Quotas, Set-Asides and Reparations, aka Racial Socialism. Jefferson, like most Americans at the time and thereafter, wanted blacks “colonized,” aka resettled in another country. And that’s just the beginning of the problems with King and his “legacy.”
In his most famous speech, the plagiarized I Have A Dream oration at the Lincoln Monument on August 28, 1963, for instance, King advocated equalitarian pieties that he actually opposed, as I’ve explained here before. But he also included ridiculous claims about the American Founding:
So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
That “promissory note” is now a demand for racial reparations.
(By the way, I believe one of King’s speechwriters stole the phrase “I have a dream” from recently departed composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), who wrote it as a phrase running through the hit 1959 Broadway musical and 1962 film adaptation, Gypsy—"I had a dream, a wonderful dream,” etc. [Some People lyrics, YouTube]).
But as for “all men are created equal,” neither Jefferson nor any of the other Founding Fathers ever meant that to apply to blacks. Otherwise, they would have abolished slavery in the new federal Constitution. Jefferson was writing about equality before the law among whites of different social classes, in contrast to the hereditary privilege that ruled in England and Europe.
Jefferson’s thoughts on race have been either butchered or suppressed, and his remarkable life now reduced to the Sally Hemings Hoax.
Consider the Jefferson Memorial. As the remarkable but needless to say unsung Carleton Putnam pointed out sixty years ago, in a book vainly opposing the integration mania:
The Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation
See also VDARE.com's Martin Luther King Archive: 48 Items!
James Fulford writes: VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow called for a rethinking of Martin Luther King Day in 2015, arguing that MLK was a deeply flawed figure and an inappropriate role model for American whites. Now this is even more the case, because the MLK Day symbolic appeasement project has manifestly failed. as the Floyd Hoax/BLM Insurrection has shown and We propose to repeat this call until We (so to speak) Overcome.
Events have shown that this article was prescient in many ways. To quote one paragraph, below:
Many Americans unquestionably thought that, if they just made this one symbolic concession of accepting Martin Luther King Day, they would then be left alone. (They probably think the same about homosexual “marriage.”) But it hasn’t worked out that way. Martin Luther King Day has simply become a staging area for the inculcation of more white guilt, above all in the classroom.
Homosexual marriage, granted nationwide by Supreme Court fiat, has given way to the Transmania that Steve Sailer calls World War T. The inculcation of white guilt in the classroom, which was always going on, has become a nationwide political issue under the name of Critical Race Theory.
The reference to the "2027 Problem"—the date on which all of the FBI's judge-sealed records of surveillance of MLK are supposed to be released—has been slightly overtaken by events. Trump's decision to release sealed records of the JFK assassination investigation inadvertently showed that MLK had been present at an orgy involving at least one rape [The troubling legacy of Martin Luther King|Newly-revealed FBI documents portray the great civil rights leader as a sexual libertine who ‘laughed’ as a forcible rape took place, by David Garrow, StandPoint Mag, May 30, 2019 (PDF)].
As I said last year, MLK was leading a movement which used mass illegal demonstrations (the famous Selma Bridge March was in defiance of a court order) to provoke police into responding in ways the Main Stream Media could make look bad.
That makes him no better than the people leading and encouraging current rioters. There should not be a public holiday in his name.
Time To Rethink Martin Luther King Day
First published here on MLK/Robert E. Lee day, 2015.
Happy Robert E. Lee Day! His January 19 birthday was once widely celebrated across the South (it still is mentionable in Alabama) but during the Second Reconstruction has been quietly suppressed to the point where even such a devoted son of the Confederacy as American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor was unaware, when I talked to him on Sunday night, that its local variant in his and Lee’s state of Virginia, Lee-Jackson Day, was supposed to be celebrated last Friday. (Not surprisingly—it seems to have been recently crudely scrubbed from Virginia’s webpage.)
But there’s a silver lining, sort of, in this tale of attempted historical lobotomy: It shows that public holidays come—and they go. Martin Luther King Day, rushed through Congress with Obamacare-style disregard of process in 1983, has been by now weighed in the balance for almost thirty years. It has inarguably (but unmentionably) been found wanting. It is time for it to go.
And in fact, I believe it will go, or at least be quietly suppressed like Robert E. Lee Day. The reasons:
It is obvious to everyone that there is a reason King’s FBI files were sealed for fifty years back in 1977, and only the Main Stream Media’s typically relentless Politically Correct air cover prevented this flagrant maneuver from discrediting the Martin Luther King Day legislation in 1983.
The problem that these sealed files pose, the MSM/ Ruling Class determination to repress it—and incidentally the unimpeachably reasonable nature of the MLK Day opponents’ position—emerged at President Ronald Reagan’s famous October 19, 1983 press conference:
[Sam Donaldson, ABC News]. Mr. President, Senator [Jesse] Helms has been saying on the Senate floor that Martin Luther King, Jr., had Communist associations, was a Communist sympathizer. Do you agree?The President. We'll know in about 35 years, won't we?
Coming up to the 38th Martin Luther King Day, it is obvious to everyone that integration has failed. The Floyd and Black Lives Matter Hoax riots last year, the ridiculous debate over Critical Race Theory, invites a question no one, least of all the worthies who run Conservatism, Inc., wants to ask: Now what? And that question occasions a look back at two remarkably honest essays, one from Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Little Rock [Dissent, Winter 1959 (PDF)], and the other from Norman Podhoretz, My Negro Problem—And Ours for Commentary [February 1963 (PDF)]. Both tacitly suggested that black-white racial problems were insoluble.
Arendt originally wrote her piece for Commentary, but the editors spiked it because her views “were at variance with the magazine’s stand on matters of discrimination and segregation.” That was rich given the atom bomb Podhoretz dropped four years later. Arendt wrote that federal intervention to desegregate Southern schools was a dangerously stupid idea, particularly President Eisenhower’s deployment of the fabled 101st Airborne to Little Rock, AR to enforce the U.S. Supreme Court’s post–Brown v. Board ruling to desegregate schools with “all deliberate speed.”
On this day in 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deploys troops from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to Arkansas to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. pic.twitter.com/Rj0FIM8z5M
— Military History Now (@MilHistNow) September 24, 2020
Though “things had quieted down temporarily,” she wrote, but “[r]ecent developments have convinced me that such hopes are futile and that the routine repetition of liberal cliches may be even more dangerous than l thought a year ago.”
“The achievement of social, economic, and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the color problem in this country instead of assuaging it,” Arendt wrote, and although this didn’t necessarily have to happen “it would be only natural if it did, and it would be very surprising if it did not.”
By “equality,” Arendt meant forced desegregation and integration. Predicting they would cause more racial trouble
[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]
The great 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift, the chap who wrote Gulliver's Travels, also wrote his own epitaph, as people sometimes do. "Here he lies," says the epitaph in Latin, "ubi sæva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit"—"where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart."
I am nothing like as much of a misanthrope as Swift, thank goodness. As Radio Derb listeners well know, I cultivate geniality. Still, I am not a total stranger to savage indignation. There are times, blessedly few and far between, when I boil and seethe with righteous anger at the stupidity and cruelty of my fellow human beings.
This is one of those times.
Savage indignation, yes. That was my reaction to the sentencing last Friday of Gregory McMichael, his son Travis, and their neighbor Roddie Bryan in the show trial over the death of Ahmaud Arbery two years ago.
The two McMichaels were both sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Bryan will be eligible for parole but only after he serves the mandatory minimum of 30 years in prison. He is 52 years old, so good luck there, guy.
These were three honest, hard-working citizens, none of whom had any criminal record. Both the McMichaels had in fact served in law enforcement. Their intentions in confronting Arbery were plain: to defend their neighborhood against a likely thief who, whether or not they knew it, did have a criminal record.
Travis McMichael shot Arbery in plain self-defense when Arbery was trying to wrestle away his gun. Gregory McMichael didn't shoot anybody—he was trying to call the police. Roddie Bryan wasn't
America’s hiring slowdown continued in December. Businesses added 199,000 workers, the smallest gain of the year, according to the widely cited Survey of Employer Payrolls. This was overwhelmed by the Immigrant Workforce Population growth (1.2 million year-over-year). Biden seized on wage growth, again ignoring that wage growth is negative when adjusted for inflation [Biden touts strong December wage increases, brushes off weak job growth, by Christina Wilkie, CNBC, January 7, 2022].
But despite the miss on headline payrolls, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate improved more than expected to 3.9%—the best level since February 2020’s 50-year low of 3.5%.
How can weak job growth coexist with sharp declines in unemployment? Labor force gurus are finally questioning the validity of the Payroll Survey, long deemed the Holy Grail of monthly job reports: "While the 199,000 gain in non-farm payrolls once again disappointed the consensus, a much larger gain in the household measure of employment and a tepid rise in participation pushed the unemployment rate back below 4%," Michael Pearce, senior U.S. economist for Capital Economics, wrote in a note on Friday [December jobs report: Payrolls rise by 199,000 as unemployment rate falls to 3.9%, by Emily McCormick, Yahoo Finance, January 13, 2022].
Mr. Pearce obviously is not a VDARE.com reader. For years, we have noted problems with the Payroll Survey. It consistently reports a total U.S. employment figure that is millions below that reported in the Survey of Households. Our contention: U.S. businesses are reluctant to acknowledge illegals on their payrolls—very much a factor in the undercount.
So no VDARE.com reader should be surprised that the December Household Survey reports a monthly employment gain of 651,000—a figure three times larger than the job growth reported in the Payroll Survey.
As the voice of the Historic American Nation, VDARE.com is proud to announce the creation of a print journal featuring the best material from our webzine.
You can also sign up to receive multiple copies, which serve as an excellent gift for friends and family while also helping to build our community.
We count on your support!
Sign me up to keep America American
