Every now and then I get profoundly upset with the lies that the conservative establishment tells itself and others.

For example, when I hear ad nauseam that the party of Chuck Schumer and Jasmine Crockett is really a continuation of the party of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, which then morphed into the Klan on the way to becoming the property of today’s woke Democrats, I must wonder about our Republican dignitaries. If their interpretation of reality is intended to get black voters to support the “party of Lincoln and Martin Luther King (who was supposedly a Republican)” this strategy, as Carl Horowitz shows in a recent article in Chronicles, is simply not working. An overwhelming majority of black voters continue to vote for the “neo-Confederate” party, just as the bizarre comparisons made by other establishment conservatives between defiant leftist governors opposing ICE and the Confederacy have not shamed Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker or Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson into complying with the Feds.

Of course, I don’t believe these very loose historical analogies are being circulated by what claims to be the right out of a serious effort to woo black voters. As far as I can figure it, the conservative establishment feels a pressing need to demonstrate to humanity that it is not a nest of white racists. That, we know, is how black leaders and the mainstream media depict them. But this charge, Republicans assure us, is not true. It is the other party that is racist, and which flaunts its racism. The other national party supposedly abounds in dead ringers for those folks who once sipped mint juleps while their slaves worked the fields. After all, what are DEI and the “welfare plantation” that Democrats have imposed on blacks but a return to antebellum slavery under a different name?  

Hardly a straggler in embracing the Republican war against racism and slavery, in 2020 the editor of National Review called for pulling down the 500-600 remaining statues of General Robert E. Lee from their pedestals in various town squares. Why let BLM get the jump in fighting white racism when conservative activists can lead the way—particularly since we now know that the Democratic Party is really the party that carries on the traditions of the Confederacy?

An equally obvious effect of Republican conservatives trying to prove they are not racist is the construction of an extravagant cult around Martin Luther King Jr. This cult has assumed gigantic proportions, and includes the transformation of the civil rights icon into both a Christian saint and wise conservative philosopher. Conservative celebrities routinely quote King as a dedicated opponent of racial quotas, although King demonstrably and demonstratively advocated for quotas to make up for past discrimination against blacks.

The excesses of this cult found a recent expression in the New York Post, when the feature story there on Oct. 25 explained how the New York Attorney General Letitia James, facing charges of mortgage fraud, supposedly outrageously appropriated King’s text:  “In remarks following her arraignment, the 67-year old shamelessly ripped off Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ as she vowed ‘not to be deterred’ in her legal battle.” The lines that James “ripped off” and which were a “conscious callback to MLK’s line” were: “I believe that justice will rain down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

These words were not composed by Martin Luther King, and James (however despicable she may be in other respects) did not plagiarize King, except by leaving his introductory phrase “I believe” in the quotation. The passage quoted is among the most famous in Hebrew prophetic writings and came from Amos (5:24). The Post writer who failed to mention that fact was not telling his reader the real source of the quotation, possibly because he didn’t know it or because he couldn’t imagine that not only James but also King himself borrowed the rhetoric. This omission would be comparable to attributing the statement “To be or not to be that is the question” to a particular politician without acknowledging that the line came originally from Shakespeare.

Allow me to assume two things about the Post employee, until proved wrong. One, I doubt he reads the Bible very much or cares about the original source for the statement he ascribes to King. Two, he knows that his employers would like him to treat King as a mortal deity, and therefore Tish James, who is morally unworthy to quote King, could only have “shamelessly appropriated” his lofty lines, an act, by the way, with which King was himself all too familiar.

Finally, I’m noticing the paper in which James was attacked for her alleged misappropriation has printed letters recently expressing shock that such a blasphemy could occur in this country. “More Boomer stupidity,” I heard myself saying aloud as I read through these letters, which were undoubtedly selected to confirm the paper’s misrepresenting the origin of the lines that King as well as James borrowed.