“Charlie Kirk said Martin Luther King was a bad man and that desegregation laws were a mistake. Do we agree with him?” commented one of my Ph.D. classmates on my tribute to Kirk.
The unhinged reactions from self-anointed intelligentsia to the assassination of an American hero and a Christian martyr range from disingenuous platitudes to smirky spins to outright celebration. Debating these positions, all of which pivot the focus away from a much-deserved condemnation of political violence, on their merits, will be a worthy pursuit in itself. But for the time being, let’s entertain my former classmate’s question at face value and examine the surge of “whataboutism” implied in similar statements of “Kirk said so and so, and somehow that made his slaying less bad or even justifiable.”
Was Martin Luther King Jr. a bad man? Certainly, for the left, whose cosmic visions turn thorny questions and complex issues into moral absolutes, any answer other than a resounding “no” is unacceptable. In their make-believe universe of zero-sum power vis-à-vis oppression and endless injustices, any words and thoughts that deviate from bestowing King a God-like status shall be treated as heresy. By logical extension, ill-fate falling on their political, ideological, and spiritual opponents should be cheered or at least excused, especially when there is evidence of these opponents speaking about the fallible nature of flesh-and-blood human beings, including King.
For the record, this is a quick summary of Kirk’s stance on King:
While he was alive most people disliked him, yet today he is the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century.
He was just a man. And a very flawed one at that.
The sharp comments, emblematic of Kirk’s straight-shooter style, were certainly not reason enough to discount and legitimize his killing. In fact, King’s own wife, Coretta Scott King, admitted that her husband was “no saint” and contended with questions on King’s infidelity in her memoir. Out of all mainstream media platforms, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on this memoir:
‘Martin didn’t want me to buy these window curtains,’ Coretta told me during a 1983 conversation in the living room of that home, where she continued to live. King’s belief that he was unworthy of many of the tributes that came his way fueled an ascetic desire to which his only exceptions were rich food, good suits, menthol cigarettes, hard liquor (eventually), and extramarital sex … No one can master the full documentary record of King’s life without acknowledging that he had various special women friends in cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Louisville.
While King’s contributions to the Civil Rights Movement cannot be overstated, acknowledging the inconvenient facts of his personal life is essential to understanding the full complexity of the individual.
As a matter of fact, glaring gaps between public virtues and private vices have marked not just King. Karl Marx was a heavy drinker and smoker, whose inability to manage personal finances squandered family wealth and reduced his family’s living to squalid conditions. Marx also cheated on his wife and called his opponent, German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, a “Jewish n[****]r.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a central figure in the Enlightenment and author of a seminal text on child-rearing, abandoned all five of his own children soon after their births. When Rousseau managed to track them down in his later life, they had all passed away. In the immediate years following the Glorious Revolution, English politician Edward Stephens observed the persistence of public corruption and private vices, such as debauchery and impiety, in English high society, despite the revolutionary victory of ridding the nation of popery. Stephens criticized King Charles II for indulging in vice and infecting the country by evil example.
[RELATED: Character, Grace, and Martin Luther King, Jr.]
These may be extreme examples of reputed individuals’ personal failings at walking the talk. Sadly, a walk-talk gap plagues far too many public figures whose lofty ideals misalign with questionable actions and choices in their private dealings. In the marketplace of ideas, rational and reasonable beings should have the discipline and restraint to acknowledge one’s private life and still see a person’s public virtues.
On the contrary, open discussion and civic discourse are relegated to symbolic status when supposedly well-educated folks take quick offense at fact-based criticism of historical figures whom they idolize. Any speech distasteful to the self-anointed, no matter how truthful or meritorious, is treated as hate speech. Living in this cosmic space of moral absolutes, self-anointed warriors gradually lose the ability to differentiate between character indictment and objective analysis.
It is with the same amount of fervor that they have engaged in posthumous character assassinations of a God-fearing man, who actually walked his talk.
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Image: “Charlie Kirk” by Gage Skidmore on Flickr
I certainly don’t count myself a “Leftist.” I learned with horror of his shooting and death from my phone at a scientific meeting. Actually, nobody mentioned it, even when we retired for drinks.
It is entirely appropriate to raise the question of his opinions about the civil rights laws.
I was familiar with Kirk years ago with his “Professor Watch” which in fact led to multiple people becoming fear for their lives. To me, this was as bad as when students shouted down people on campuses, including the actual physical assault on Charles Murray.
I decided when I learned of “Professor Watch” that Kirk, whoever he was, was a nasty piece of work.
His assassination, I condemn, for all kinds of reasons. But St. Charlie he wasn’t.
How many Leftists are there? 3 million? 30 million? How many have applauded his assassination?
Well first, academia changed on September 10th the way that aviation changed on September 11th — assassination on college campi wasn’t something that we used to have to worry about, now we do. It’s going to change how honorary degrees are presented at graduation, and it’s going to change your “science” conferences.
You may rank high enough to be “in the bubble” but the cute grad students in the short skirts won’t be — when you realize that the range on a good sniper rifle is over a mile, there aren’t going to be open air events anymore, etc.
In a free society, it is legitimate to debate the effectiveness of and the
Constitutionality of the Civil Rights Laws without being labeled a segregationist. I think they are unConstitutional — just like the Income Tax was — and that a Constitutional Amendment (just like the 16th Amendment) is the way they should have gone. That’s a 10th Amendment issue, not advocacy of bigotry.
There is also a case similar to the one that Ruth Bader Ginsburg made about abortion — in 1973, half the states, in which 3/4 of the women lived, had legalized abortion. That Roe was unnecessary — as Dobbs has shown.
Southern cities were electing Black mayors in the ’70s — they did this without Federal laws — and the case can be made that a market solution (i.e. boycotts and bad press) would have been more effective.
As to “Professor Watch”, that was something that the Deans should have already been doing — for example, I had a professor who once proudly told me that no male student had ever passed her class the first time, and that I should be planning to take it a second time in order to pass. A functioning academy would police that (and countless other examples) — and all Kirk really was doing was saying “avoid these professors.”
Similar conversations don’t routinely occur in faculty lounges? The children of professors don’t hear which nut cases to avoid? And this put professors in fear of their lives?
Bullshyte…
The article highlights a troubling divide between public ideals and private actions, especially concerning corruption and virtue. Its concerning that idolized figures arent held accountable for hypocrisy, and open discourse is stifled by the label of hate speech.MIM
OK, let’s take Joe Biden and just what he did to Robert Bork:
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/517743-joe-biden-the-father-of-borking/
Bork was mild compared to Justices Sotomayer and Brown Jackson (not to be confused with the late Justice Jackson, Bork was a legitimate legal scholar like Justice Kagan.
And then there is Ted Kennedy and waitress sandwiches, etc.
Or how B. Hussain Obama got his Senate seat.
And then “Landslide” Lyndon Johnson, who made Richard Nixon look like a Boy Scout by comparison. Or Jack Kennedy’s “Murder, Inc.” in the Caribbean — it was LBJ who described it as such.
News Flash: Our heroes were human….
Let us also not forget that King plagiarized his BU dissertation, something that was accidentally discovered by a (Black) King biographer who (as a teenager) had attended King’s “I have a dream” rally in DC.
Memory is that BU resolved the matter by saying that as both King and all the members of his committee were deceased, there was no one able to defend the dissertation and hence nothing BU could do but let it stand.
And the statistic I like to cite is that in Victorian London, every tenth building was a house of prostitution. So much for Victorian morals…
And as to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it was unconstitutional. The Heart of Atlanta Motel and Ollie’s Diner (Katzenbach v. McClung) cases involved violations of the 5th Amendment “Taking” clause — the government was “taking” the ownership right of a private person to rent motel rooms to or sell meals to whomever he desired.
It was the same issue as with the Income Tax — Congress didn’t have the right to do it and the solution thus was to amend the Constitution, i.e. the 16th Amendment which authorizes an income tax. And the Civil Rights Act should have been a Constitutional amendment and not some twisted interpretation of a Congressional power to regulate interstate commerce.
Both the income tax and civil rights act were needed — but both should have been Constitutional amendments. That’s a fact.
And the other thing people often forget is why Dr. King was in Memphis in 1968 — to support the Garbagemen’s Strike. And of those who do know that, few know what the strike was about — two garbagemen (Echol Cole and Robert Walker) had been grotesquely crushed to death by a defective truck. (I never understood why the driver couldn’t have simply shut off the truck — or if the ignition switch was broken, yank loose an ignition wire. These were gasoline engines and stopping the engine would stop the hydraulics.)
This was pre-OSHA, and Dr. King was supporting worker safety.