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Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

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Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

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Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / MLK Day Preparations Open Thread: Toxic Seepage Alert

MLK Day Preparations Open Thread: Toxic Seepage Alert

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Charlie Kirk, who first came to national attention prancing around a college quad clad only in a diaper, finds a new way to monetize his humiliation fetish for the benefit of his GOP sugar daddies. Per Wired — “How Charlie Kirk Plans to Discredit Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act”:

… In December 2023, speaking before a group of students and teachers at America Fest, a political convention organized by Turning Point USA, Kirk struck a different tone.

“MLK was awful,” Kirk said. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”

For decades, conservatives have pointed to King and his idea that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” as a model for equality.

“For a while, Dr. King’s stock was very much on the rise in conservative circles and the Republican Party,” says John Wood Jr., a Republican activist. “It’s been understood on the right that even though Dr. King wasn’t really one of us politically, he was still a ‘good liberal.’”

For Kirk, the shift on King wasn’t an offhand remark, but a glimpse into his broader strategy to discredit the civil rights leader and the landmark legislation most associated with King: the Civil Rights Act of 1964…

Turning Point USA, founded in 2012 by an 18-year-old Kirk to organize conservative students on college campuses, has grown into an ideological force in right-wing politics. America Fest, which took place at a convention center in downtown Phoenix, featured speeches by right-wing heavyweights Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, and US representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. Nearly 20,000 people attended the four-day event, according to Kirk.

Closely aligned with Donald Trump, the group has been seen as a way to replace the modern Republican establishment with younger people more aligned with the 45th US president and reactionary politics…

“We’re gonna be hitting him next week,” Kirk said on his podcast this week. “Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it’s MLK Day. We’re gonna do the thing you’re not supposed to do. We’re gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr. You better tune in next week. Blake has already been preparing. It’s gonna be great.”

Blake is an apparent reference to Blake Neff, a producer of The Charlie Kirk Show. In 2020, Neff resigned from his job at Fox News as Tucker Carlson’s top writer after CNN revealed he had been making racist posts under a pseudonym. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott called Neff’s posts “abhorrent.”

Neff has also been publicly laying the groundwork for rewriting the history on King, attempting to link him to violent unrest after the passing of the Civil Rights Act. “Martin Luther King Jr. gets praised for being a peaceful activist,” Neff said on Jack Posobiec’s Human Events Daily podcast in December. “But what they always end up glossing over is actually in the mid ’60s and late ’60s, civil rights activism becomes a very violent thing.” …

The ragged remnants of the Permanent Republican Party have been insufficiently compliant with the wishes of Our New Oligarchs, and the middle-aged right-wing pundits are fleeing (to backwoods Maine, or Hungary, or their basements) rather than standing strong. So the hardcore Oligarchs are prepping the MAGA cultists of their puppet to defend a full RETVRN to the white-man fantasies glories of the Fifties — the 1850s. It’s not gonna work, but they can surely make a lot of peoples’ lives miserable on their way down the sewer drain of history… and that’s most of what they want, in any case.

Reader Interactions

59Comments

  1. 1.

    Harrison Wesley

    Despicable.  There are probably better words, but I can’t think of one at the moment.  And this is just the kind of nasty, mindless shit that the White-Booted Pudding Tickler will glom onto when he returns in disgrace from the icy plains of the Midwest.

  2. 2.

    Suzanne

    This would be hilarious if Witchfinder General Sam Alito didn’t think the exact same thing.

    How long until they repeal this one, too?

  3. 3.

    Mousebumples

    Open thread, so I’m going off topic –

    I believe in Love!

    Excited about the potential in this young Green Bay Packers roster, in the post Rodgers era. And my inner fanatic looooves watching the Cowboys lose. Especially after all those horrific 90s losses.

    #GoPackGo 🧀

  4. 4.

    Gin & Tonic

    I can read English fairly well, but I just don’t understand about half of those Tweets. It’s like listening to cricket commentary.

  5. 5.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    finds a new way to monetize his humiliation fetish

    A healthier expression of Charlie Kirk’s humiliation fetish would be more therapeutic and less cynically hate mongering for money.

    I’d offer to show him the way, but his sorry ass ain’t worth my time.

  12. 12.

    RSA

    Charlie Kirk is just 30? Wow. He looks a decade older to me. Take note, movement conservatives…

  13. 13.

    eclare

    @RSA:

    All of them have aged poorly.  Kellyanne Conway is only about two years older than I am, I was shocked when I found out.

  16. 16.

    ColoradoGuy

    Open advocacy for slavery is not far away, maybe two or three years at this rate. After women lose their vote in the Red states.

  18. 18.

    HumboldtBlue

    All that is missing is the hood.

    And torches. Hoods and torches.

    And white robes. Hoods and torches and white robes.

  21. 21.

    waspuppet

    “MLK was awful,” Kirk said. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”

    That’s conservatism in three sentences right there. Absolute classical racism combined with the Trumpian domestic-abuse dynamic embodied in “He didn’t actually believe it.”

    He knows the conservative old guard is dying off and they want to make sure the younger set are carrying on the traditions. There’s a lot of money in it, too.

  25. 25.

    Mai Naem mobile

    I can’t believe the polls between Biden and TFG are close. I can’t believe TFG appears to be running away with the GOP nomination. I just honestly cannot believe that people have memory holed Nov 2019-Jan, 2021.  I can’t believe people will vote for a guy with 90+ serious charges against him. Even if you like the guy, don’t you go with somebody with less baggage? The world of US politics has just gone bonkers.

  27. 27.

    Evan

    A part of me is pleased that at least they aren’t pretending King was on their side anymore. It was always pretty sickening.

  28. 28.

    mvr

    I think the article’s use of “strategy” and “heavyweights” to describe what Kirk is up to and the figures with whom he appeared was a stretch or perhaps irony too subtle for my literal mind.

  29. 29.

    Mike in NC

    There is no bottom to the modern Trumpubican Party. They waited 50 years for this piece of shit to show up.

  30. 30.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Evan: A part of me is pleased that at least they aren’t pretending King was on their side anymore. It was always pretty sickening.

    He didn’t mean all that -> He actually agreed with us -> He was wrong and the legacy of his generations’ activists should be destroyed

    Every specious argument Republicans make manages to evolve as a clear understanding of the failings of its older form become clear to the public. Once sufficient arguments fail, they collapse under their own weight and supernova. This results in every prior argument reemerfing alongside a heartt “because fuck you, I can obtain power.”

  32. 32.

    Spanky

    @Gin & Tonic: Thank god it wasn’t just me. Though I’ve noticed a decline in my reading comprehension with advancing years, I didn’t think it had gotten that bad.

  33. 33.

    Citizen Alan

    @ColoradoGuy: Mike Huckabee has already noted on his radio show that the 13th Amendment permits slavery as a criminal punishment, so he doesn’t understand why we can’t lease convicts out to private businesses for the duration of their sentences.

  36. 36.

    NotMax

    Not to sound like a broken record, but the jurassic dude above has been trolling with similar begging stories for decades across many, many blogs. Do not engage.

  41. 41.

    karen marie

    “For a while, Dr. King’s stock was very much on the rise in conservative circles and the Republican Party,” says John Wood Jr., a Republican activist. “It’s been understood on the right that even though Dr. King wasn’t really one of us politically, he was still a ‘good liberal.’”

    Mr. Wood was drunk when he said this, right?

    Apparently nobody has told Mr. Wood that Republicans have been trying to claim that MLK was a member of their party for decades.

    Was he still an infant in 2016?

  42. 42.

    Lyrebird

    @Anne Laurie: ​And may Murphy bless you for it! ETA: there’s no way I could do what you do, and I appreciate the warning.
    Rancid bile source is probably someone Dr. King would be honored to be distrusted by. ETA: certainly not surprised.

    @Evan:
      agreed!​

  43. 43.

    karen marie

    From Heather Cox Richardson’s January 14, 2024 Letters From An American:

    Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

    Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, folks.

  49. 49.

    Leto

    OT question: wtf is up with Trumpov’s white hat? All the shit stains are super excited about it, but I’m out of the loop as to the meaning of it.

  51. 51.

    Jim Appleton

    If the content of your character mainly malappropriates a powerful call for equality to mean “your emphasis on my skin color is racist,” you know and understand how deeply you value inequality.

  52. 52.

    Ruckus

    @Harrison Wesley:

    There are better words but they all only have 4 letters and while we are free to use them here it doesn’t really seem that they accurately describe the level of drivel that comes out of many/most conservative verbal orifices, which in their cases is the outlet end of the throat.

  54. 54.

    Joey Maloney

    @Tony G: I think that was the last time any Republican was dumb enough to do an interview with Rachel Maddow. She had Rand on her show and absolutely pinned him to the wall on this. It was just brutal, and a thing of beauty to watch.

  55. 55.

    wjca

    @Leto: wtf is up with Trumpov’s white hat?

    Well, they needed a way to show who was in charge, and should be blindly followed, vs who were the marks followers.  They wanted something patriotic.  The mob already had red hats.  And naturally blue was unthinkable.  So white was it.

  56. 56.

    Shalimar

    @jurassicpork: I do sympathize, but as NotMax says, you have been coming here asking for money for a long time.  This is a very giving community.  It helps people all the time.  But I never see you here except when you need money.  Most people don’t recognize you as part of that community.  Hopefully you can find help from somewhere.

  57. 57.

    NotMax

    @Jackie

    Until such time, while I don’t follow every thread, I’ll continue repeating warnings about him whenever I do see him pop up.

  58. 58.

    NotMax

    @Shalimar

    While he may have been around earlier, I can date his same stunts/scams back to 2004 (because looked it up) when another blog in which first encountered them initially went online.

  59. 59.

    Miss Bianca

    Any of these Confederate wanna-be thugs wanting to go back to the 1850s should actually *read* about the 1850s first. Just sayin’.

    (taking a quick break from reading about the 1850s, personally!)

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