0:03 - Introduction to Martin Luther King Jr.
2:31 - The Plagiarism Controversy
5:18 - Nonviolence and Government Power
8:20 - The Call for Reparations
9:32 - Personal Life and Infidelities
12:30 - Political Affiliations and Economic Views
17:08 - Economic Illiteracy Explored
21:07 - Connections to Communism
23:31 - The Expansion of State Power
29:26 - Illegitimacy and Social Issues
In this episode, I delve into the complex and often controversial legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., a pivotal figure in the American civil rights movement. King was not only a gifted orator but also a deeply flawed individual whose life and actions invite a nuanced examination. I address how painting historical figures as infallible icons can demotivate us from striving towards excellence in our own lives. It is essential to recognize King’s humanity, including his failings, to better understand the potential for flawed individuals to achieve greatness.
One of the more surprising revelations about King is his history of plagiarism. While scholars reviewing King’s writings in the late 1980s uncovered extensive instances of plagiarism, these discrepancies seemed to escape scrutiny during his lifetime, even from his academic mentors. This raises questions about the integrity of his accolades, as a significant portion of his doctoral dissertation and several of his speeches contained plagiarized material. Despite this, calls to revoke his doctorate were dismissed, illustrating a contradiction between his public persona and private misdeeds.
I also analyze King's stance on government intervention in social issues. While widely regarded as an advocate for nonviolent change, King’s reliance on state power to address racial injustices reveals a deeper inconsistency. Supporters of King often highlight his vision of a society where individuals are judged by their character rather than the color of their skin. However, it is essential to consider his endorsement of policies like affirmative action and reparations, which suggest a complicated relationship with the concept of nonviolence and individual meritocracy.
Delving into King’s personal life, I discuss the allegations of extramarital affairs and his behavior that came to light through FBI surveillance. These revelations call into question King’s moral authority as a leader who preached fidelity and integrity. The juxtaposition of his public ideals against his private actions raises significant ethical concerns, particularly for a man who aspired to guide others toward moral and social justice.
While examining King’s economic beliefs, I highlight his misconceptions about capitalism and automation. His critiques often reveal an economic illiteracy that undermined the principles of free markets, which have historically been shown to alleviate poverty and promote prosperity. Instead of recognizing the benefits of automation and innovation, King viewed them as threats to job security and economic equity.
I critique King’s associations with communism and the leftist movements of his time, noting that while he was never an outspoken communist, his circle included individuals who were. I discuss the implications of this alignment, especially given the historical context of communism as a significant threat to freedom and democracy during the Cold War era. These relationships underscore the necessity of critically assessing the influences within any social movement, especially when they carry the potential for far-reaching societal impacts.
The episode concludes by reflecting on how King’s legacy has been used to justify the expansion of state power, often at the expense of individual liberties and community self-sufficiency. I argue that this expansion of state authority frequently perpetuates the very issues it seeks to resolve, illustrating the paradox of invoking state power in the name of social justice. As we reflect on King’s contributions and contradictions, it becomes vital to recognize the ongoing struggle for genuine nonviolence, which begins with rejecting coercive state solutions in favor of individual accountability and grassroots action.
[0:00] Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. I hope you're doing well.
[0:03] These are some interesting facts about Martin Luther King Jr., the staggeringly gifted orator who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the 1950s through the 1960s until his untimely assassination. I think it's important to look at the full-rounded humanity of a great leader. One of the things that happens that really demotivates us to achieve excellence in our lives is we think that these people are these lofty gods with no failings or flaws. And I think it's important to put them in human perspective so we feel that we flawed specimens can also achieve great things despite perhaps a multitude of sins. So I hope you'll be patient with me. This is very interesting stuff. I will, as usual, provide all of the notes below. The sources will be in the description bar of the video and in the notes of the podcast, but feel free for about 10,000 of you to demand why I don't provide notes. So.
[1:11] Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarist. This is interesting. So, while gathering, and he got a, he was a reverend, and he was also, he got a doctorate in philosophy in theology, which is like getting a doctorate of science in superstition. So while gathering and collating King's writings for publication in the late 1980s, the editors of Stanford University's Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project discovered extensive, extensive plagiaries in his academic papers, including his 1955 dissertation for his doctoral degree at Boston University. All these instances of plagiarism had escaped detection during his lifetime, even by his dissertation supervisors at Boston. He started plagiarizing as an undergraduate when Boston University founded a commission to look into it. They found that 45% of the first part and 21% of the second part of his dissertation was stolen, copied. This is fraud. This is counterfeiting. But they insisted that no thought should be given to revoking Dr. King's doctoral degree. Now in addition to his dissertation and some of his books many of his major speeches including the I have a dream speech were plagiarized or at least part of them are plagiarized.
[2:31] And I will put the links for all this below is this important yeah I think it's it's actually quite important he was a liar with regards to some very very important stuff he constantly he was doctor, reverend, you know, he was Dr. Martin, so he put the doctor, but he had obtained it fraudulently. You know, he was very much against honor and privilege, but he lied and cheated and counterfeited and misrepresented and stole in order to gain his academic credentials and then hid this. You know, you could make mistakes. We've all made mistakes. We can even make grievous moral errors and then we can say later on, you know, I got to confess, I did something wrong, but he knew about all of this. Obviously, he had a multi-year plagiarism history and did not reveal it, kept it hidden for his whole life, as of course did those who followed him. So, if somebody's dishonest about that, and refuse to acknowledge it, can they really be classed among the prime moral instructors of mankind?
[3:37] Now, people on the right have, to some degree, co-opted Martin Luther based upon the line in the I Have a Dream speech, wherein he says, you know, we should judge people not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. It's a good line, and I, of course, I agree with that. That sounds entirely right to me. But, you know, one line does not a philosophy make, and he was a big fan of quotas and racial set-asides. And so, in his book, Where Do We Go From Here?, he said that, quote, a society that has done something special against a Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis. So, he expressed support for quotas. He threatened boycotts of businesses that he felt were not hiring enough blacks. Now, the reason that I'm talking about this is that he is known, as was Mahatma Gandhi, for an advocate of nonviolence, nonviolent social change.
[4:45] Yeah, well, there's a little bit of a problem with that, in that the government has a lot, of guns, and the government has a lot of police, and a lot of prison cells, and if you don't obey the law, then men with guns will knock not so politely at your house, and drag you away, and try you, and if you are found guilty of breaking those laws, they will throw you in prison, where terrible things will happen to you with spoons and forks and other men's naughty bits.
[5:19] So it's kind of hard for me to get to the place where I can say, ah, this man who proposed government laws, government coercion, government violence to solve complex social, racial, and economic problems, this man is really into nonviolence. Like, you're not into nonviolence if you pay someone to do your violence for you. And the state, as Barack Obama has so memorably stated, is a monopoly of violence. It's an agency of coercion. So it's kind of tough to say that somebody is nonviolent when they want the government to point the guns for them.
[6:02] He also was a big fan of reparations for slavery. He wrote, he said, no amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. So he wanted billions and billions of dollars to be taken again at gunpoint from people who'd never owned slaves and given to people who never were slaves. Without a time machine and a robot army, you cannot go back and solve the problem of slavery. And I believe that's probably Schwarzenegger's next movie after the next one.
[6:51] So again, this is the initiation of force. It is the forcible confiscation of wealth from one section of society to be paid to another, where the section of society that's taken from is not the victimizers, and the people it's going to are not the current victims. Were there after effects of slavery? Of course, massive after effects of slavery, which we'll get to in a second. So, not a man who is into nonviolence. And, you know, just touching this very briefly, I mean, one of the great tragedies of social activism is that social activists almost always, the first thing they think is, let's have a protest, let's have a march, let's go to Washington, let's get Congress people involved, let's get a law, there ought to be a law. That's what people say. And it's unbelievably tragic. Because 99 times out of 100, the conditions that they wish to be remedied are caused by the state, are caused by the state. Who enforced slavery? Not Whitey. The state, right? It was the state that.
[8:00] Picked up the slaves who ran away. If slave owners had to pay for people to go and find the slaves who ran away, it all had to be socialized, collectivized, right? In a place like Brazil, they ended slavery just by saying, we're not going to catch the slaves anymore, and slavery was ended. They just started paying people. Once the government stops doing your dirty work, virtue inevitably flourishes.
[8:21] And so it's really tragic, of course, that somebody who'd suffered so much from government racism, which is what slavery was, would then say, oh, you know, it'd be great to solve this problem. The state, because it's really been our friend. Jim Crow laws with the state, Two Fists was the state. Rosa Parks, you know, the communist trained activist who sat on the, like moved to the front of the bus from the back.
[8:50] Well, the bus company didn't want to put her in the back. It was a law. The government had a law that said you had, the blacks had to go in the back. Why on earth would the bus company, who liked serving the poor, and blacks were disproportionately poor in this place and time, why on earth would the bus company want to annoy the blacks by putting them in the back? They're the best customers. No, it was a government law. So again, everyone thinks it was a protest against racism, and it was a protest against government laws. Bull Connor was a government employee. So it's really tough to maintain these horrible injustices without state power, and yet the moment that people want to overturn these injustices, what do they want? More state power! Anyway.
[9:33] FBI surveillance showed that King had dozens of extramarital affairs. Now, a lot of these records were sealed. They apparently are going to be unsealed in 2027. Several agents who watched Martin Luther King observed him engaged in many questionable acts, including buying prostitutes with SCLC money. Ralph Abernathy, who King called the best friend I have in the world, substantiated many of these charges in his autobiography, and the walls came tumbling. Down. In 1964, in a true move of staggering cosmic Old Testament scumbaggery, the FBI sent an audio tape of Martin Luther King, one of his sexual encounters, to his wife, Coretta Scott, where it sat for six weeks unopened, and then she opened it, played the tape, and, called her husband, caused huge problems in the marriage. The FBI apparently also sent a note saying you should commit suicide or we're going to reveal you as whatever, right?
[10:33] Now, there's a few things to be said about this, I think, that are important, which is, if you want to be a moralizer for mankind, you really should keep your own house in order. Martin Luther King was a minister, a deeply religious man, although when he was younger, he was quite skeptical of the communist, sorry, of the, excuse me, he was quite skeptical of Christianity. But he was religious, he believed in the Ten Commandments, he was married in the eyes of God. He made vows to God himself to stay true and faithful to his wife and to not have affairs. And he had dozens of affairs, at least that are known of. And there are apparently some quite salacious audiotapes of him saying extraordinary things during the act of sexual congress. And.
[11:16] This is sort of important. I mean, if you really want to be the moral instructor for mankind, you might want to think about keeping your vows to God and your wife about your fidelity, or at least not openly hiding and being guilt-ridden and all of that about your infidelities. Another thing that's interesting about this is, we'll get to this in a sec, Martin Luther King was a lefty, for the most part. And I mean, he started out apparently as a Republican. And then when Barry Goldwater, who was like the Ron Paul of the 60s, when he opposed the Civil Rights Act, as did Reagan and some other conservatives, because of the expansion of government power, not because they were against civil rights, he then switched over to the Democrat Party. And um he was kind of on the left uh he'd surrounded himself with communists and we'll get to that which is important i know communist doesn't sound like a scary word these days you know what's in a cheryl crow song right my friend the communist uh and but but in the day back in the day even before my time it was uh they were the the the far worse than al-qaeda of their day.
[12:28] And so, yeah, I think we'll sort of get to that.
[12:31] But Martin Luther King had all these affairs, and this has really been covered up, as was his plagiarism. This was released, the news of it was released in for more than a year to a year and a half, right? Again, the largely left-wing media sat on this and didn't report it. And now they kind of cover up and don't report on his multiple affairs.
[12:52] Why is that? I mean, if you compare this to Clarence Thomas, right, a conservative judge who Anita Hill accused of sexual harassment at work because he said, who put a pubic hair on my Coke can or something like that. Well, that's nothing compared to Martin Luther King's endless gangbanks that occurred. And yet the left obviously covers up all of Martin Luther's stuff and then goes straight to Clarence Thomas, even though he's a black man. And Herman McCain was supposed to have had these affairs because he wrote something nice in someone's book. No proof of it whatsoever. But then he was kicked out of the presidential race for fears of sexual harassment, sexual inappropriateness, maybe even having affairs. Oh, isn't that terrible? None of this, as far as I know, substantiated. But then Martin Luther King, who's on the left, gets all the, you know, get out of pussy free cards and is not really talked about. But this is kind of important for a minister to openly break his vows to God and wife repeatedly is significant. And I mean, his defense was, he said, look, I'm on the road 27, 28 days a month. Fucking is a good stress reliever, in my words. Sorry, his words, not mine. But that only raises questions about his...
[14:14] Dedications as a father. He had four kids and didn't really seem to take a huge amount of interest in their upbringing. Certainly did not provide for them, despite winning the equivalent of $400,000 as a peace prize. I think he was the youngest man ever at the age of 35 to get a Nobel Peace Prize. And didn't provide for his kids. He died without a will, even though he'd had an assassination attempt once before and was continually talking about how he was going to die. He died interstate or without a will, which has caused nothing but fighting and conflict since. and he had no money left over despite all his books and his speeches and all that. He donated the $400,000 straight to the civil rights, which is, you know, nice and I guess well and good, but, you know, maybe your kids could actually get an education because, you know, charity begins at home. And like most people on the left, there's this chronic economic illiteracy. And by economic illiteracy, I don't mean that he was not a big fan of Milton Friedman. I mean, you can be economically literate and still on the left. It's just kind of really rare. And so he said, why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?
[15:26] I mean, where would you even begin to unravel the economic illiteracy? He said, why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water? These are questions that must be asked, yes, but only by idiots, or at least economic idiots um go drink some seawater and see how potable it is go drink some pond water or stuff you can suck up with a straw from a moose track and see how many bacteria you can invite into your ecosystem uh so yeah you gotta make it potable you gotta transport it you gotta i mean of course you have to pay bills well there's two-thirds water crazy and um.
[16:04] It, I mean, yeah, seems like he was a sex addict. Recently released interviews with Jackie Kennedy. She knew about it. Jackie confided how her brother-in-law, Bobby Kennedy, had told her the FBI had recorded King trying to arrange a sex party on the night before the March on Washington in August 1963. She said, I can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man's terrible. Bobby had told her the King was calling up all these girls and arranging for a party of men and women. I mean, a sort of orgy. And um of course she knew something about sex addicts being married to john f kennedy uh you know no woman could pick up a pencil safely around that guy and um he was um back to the economic illiteracy he was against automation because he felt that automation destroyed jobs and he said when machines and computers profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. So the problem is computers.
[17:09] I mean, easy peasy. I mean, if you want to get rid of joblessness, just outlaw farm machinery, and everyone has to go pick their crops by hand, there will be no unemployment and very few people left, because most people will starve to death. So okay so let's talk a little bit about the lefty stuff uh.
[17:30] He never openly said he was a Marxist. Let's be fair. Let's be fair. Privately, according to a number of people, he did say that he was a Marxist. That is what people say. This is what he did say. He said, I always look at Marx with a yes and a no. And there were some things that Karl Marx did that were very good. Some very good things. As that preacher repetition. If you read him, you can see that this man had a great passion for social justice. But Karl Marx got messed up. First, because he didn't stick with that Jesus. that he had read about. But secondly, because he didn't even stick with Hegel. Now, this is where I leave Brother Marx and move on towards the kingdom of brotherhood. I am simply saying that God never intended for some of his children to live in inordinate, superfluous wealth, while others live in abject, deadening poverty.
[18:18] In another article about Martin Luther King, Robert Clegg of National Review, applauds King for speaking out against the oppression of communism. To gain the support of many liberal whites. In the early years, King did make a few mild denunciations of communism. He also claimed in a 65 Playboy interview, I think he was the interview, not the pinup, that there are, quote, as many communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida. This was a bald-faced lie. Though King was never a communist, was always critical of the Soviet Union, he had knowingly surrounded himself with communists. His closest advisor, Stanley Levison, was a communist, a Jewish communist? Can't be. As was his assistant Jack O'Dell. Robert and later John F. Kennedy repeatedly warned him to stop associating himself with communists, but he never did. He frequently spoke in front of communist front groups like the National Lawyers Guild and the Lawyers for Democratic Action. He even attended seminars at the Highlander Folk School, not, you know, cross-sword dancing, but a communist front which taught communist tactics, where Rosa Parks also apparently studied and so on. Now.
[19:29] It's hard in this day and age to understand what an unbelievable threat communism was to the planet. Worse than Nazism. The death count for communism is far higher than Nazism, and it was very active, and there were literally hundreds of communist spies in the State Department in the U.S., FDR's closest advisor at the Yalta conference was a communist. This is staggering. You know, the House um...
[20:00] McCarthyism and so on didn't come out of nowhere, right? That there was great fears and great realities that communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. Government and were significantly affecting domestic policy and foreign policy and so on. Now, for you young folks, it's important to understand what, I mean, communism was far more dangerous to America and to the West than Al-Qaeda could ever conceivably be, could ever conceivably be. And if you can imagine there being a public figure, sympathetic public figure in America, who was surrounded by open members of Al Qaeda, and promoting open members, taking advice and being photographed with, and who had attended Al Qaeda training camps and so on, this would be inconceivable, right? You can't surround yourself with Al Qaeda, take advice from Al Qaeda operatives, attend Al Qaeda training camps. And be sympathetically portrayed in the American media. But communism is a different matter, and we'll go into that. Why? Another time.
[21:07] But he didn't openly identify as being a communist, but he certainly was a socialist, a democratic socialist, as he called it. And that's quite important.
[21:22] So he was very much for the forced redistribution of wealth, which is again an act of violence, an act of coercion. He wanted to unite blacks and poor whites in a sort of labor movement which was strongly socialist and so on. So this was.
[21:40] A very large problem in socialism. National socialism was Nazism. That's why you don't call it National Socialism, which is its correct name. You call it Nazism so that the word socialism isn't revealed to you for what it is. Just, if you want to, for fun, you know, shits and giggles, you can go and look up the party platform of the Communist Party. You can look up the party platform of the National Socialists of the Nazi Party, and you can just see how successful free market, classical liberalism has been in fighting the twin evils, triple evils of fascism, socialism, and communism. But he was sympathetic to communists, he employed communists, he took advice from communists, he was surrounded by communists in many ways. And this is why he was under surveillance, because this was some very dangerous stuff for America at the time. There are strong arguments to be made that the advice that FDR received at the Ulta conference was instrumental in losing the entire Eastern Bloc to communism for another 40-plus years.
[22:46] Surrendering hundreds of millions of people into totalitarianism was brutal, and a communist infiltration in the United States government was instrumental in helping the fumble under the Democrats that lost China to communism. So, it was massive, massive catastrophes. And it was an extraordinarily dangerous time, and communism was an unbelievably murderous virus all throughout the world. And those who didn't die often envied the dead.
[23:16] So, was he anti-violence? No, he was not anti-violence. He just wanted the state to do the violence for him. And was he economically illiterate? No, but he kept talking about economic affairs, which meant that he did not know the limits of his own capacities.
[23:32] He was a plagiarist. He lied about getting his doctorate, and he lied to get his doctorate and hid that information. And um the the the prediction from people who say that violence doesn't solve problems is that if you use the government to try and solve some complex social problem then, you will end up with that problem getting worse now in the short run it may look better it may appear better and it may in fact get better in the short run but in the long run you're in big coercion, right?
[24:10] I'm trying to think of a good example, like sort of an abstract example that would make sense. So if you have a toothache and you take heroin for your toothache, your toothache is like, whoa, I feel better. I feel great. In fact, I've never felt better. And I speak in a Scottish accent. I don't know why. But your toothache is just getting worse. And when the heroin wears off, you know, it will be really, really bad. If you can steal for a living, and it sure beats working in the short run, but in the long run, it's not going to do you a whole lot of good. And you can not deal with personal problems, and you can drink instead, and in the short run, that seems like a good idea, but in the long run, it works out pretty badly.
[24:51] So, the argument would be that since Martin Luther King and the majority of black leaders were pro-state power, right? There are some exceptions, Walter Sowell and so on, but the majority of the black leaders were pro-state power. We're going to use the power of the state to achieve our goals and to make things better. And this is fundamentally why he is still revered and praised, despite his extraordinary personal failings, and again, despite being a staggeringly God-given talent of an orator. It's because he was an excuse to expand state power. He was an excuse to... You know that there's just an excuse to expand state power for one simple, obvious reason, which is state power is necessary to help blacks do better. So, we're going to put in massive amounts of state power to help blacks do better. And then what happens? Well, blacks end up doing worse. Is that power taken away? No, because the calls of racism have achieved what is wanted, which is an expansion of state power. And the fact that it doesn't solve the problem in the long run and only makes it work doesn't matter because the problem is only the excuse for the expansion of state power. Remember the war on poverty?
[26:15] In the 1960s, LBJ's Great Society, the War on Poverty. Poverty is in many ways worse now than it was when this all started. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the rate of poverty in America was declining one percentage point every single year. The government was in grave danger of running out of victims whose cause it could triumph and whose supposed abject victimhood it could wave in front of people and get them to surrender even more economic and political rights.
[26:43] So, the market was solving the problem of poverty in a way that was completely unprecedented until we saw the recent amazing staggering 100 million plus successes of getting people out of poverty in increasingly free market India and China, the greatest end of poverty the world has ever seen. You don't really hear much about it because that's less state power and the media and academics and all of that are pro-state power for a variety of reasons we can get into another time. So racism was just this thing which was like, oh, okay, well, I can't really say, well, I just want more power. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create this situation where I'm going to say there's this terrible problem in society and only the state can solve it. And therefore, if you're against the expansion of state power, you must be against solving this problem, right? And we hear this all the time, right? If you are against the EPA, like the Environmental Protection agency because it's a huge grab of state power over property rights put in by, remember, that ultra-conservative Nixon in the 70s.
[27:46] If you're against the EPA, well, you must not care about the environment. If you're against welfare, you must not care about the poor. If you're against Obamacare, you must not care that people get better. And if you are against quotas or affirmative action or all of this stuff, then you must be racist. It's what happens when people don't have arguments. They just resort to false dichotomy ad hominems, right? I mean, this is the way of the world until we get smart enough to stop doing stupid things for ourselves as a species. So, racism just happened to be the thing in the 60s. Did it really solve the problems? I mean, you know, blacks got better for a while, and again, I'll put links to this below, and now blacks have been doing a lot worse. And is anyone talking about reversing these policies now that blacks are doing worse again? No, of course not, because the purpose of the expansion of state power has been achieved.
[28:35] I mean, with global warming, which could be anthropogenic and certainly could be, you You know, of course, in catastrophes, you only ever hear about expansion of state power, right? I mean, there's a solution that's been proposed by Bjorn Lomborg, costs about 100 million bucks, called cloud whitening, where you get a bunch of automated vessels out there in the ocean, spraying up saltwater into clouds to reflect the sunlight back. It's been validated by a wide variety of scientists. It's nothing in terms of cost compared to how much has been spent researching global warming. But you never hear about it, because if the problem is solved, then the expansion of state power has to stop. So the problem is not supposed to be solved any more than the problem of poverty or healthcare. I mean, Obamacare is like the 112 billionth intervention in the healthcare industry by the government. The purpose is to expand power. It's never to solve the problem. The problem is just a mask, and it's a way of beating people up who are skeptical of the expansion of state power.
[29:27] But it could be that I digress.
[29:34] Illegitimacy has always been a problem in black society, and at least since the 1950s. But it's much worse now, right? So in 1950, only 16% of black kids were born outside of marriage, only 16%. In 2010, that's 73%, right? From 16% to 73%. That is pretty bad, very bad. In the early 1960s, it had gone from 16% to 20%. There was only two to three percent of white kids were born outside of wedlock. And it's, you know, almost three quarters by 2010, and three tenths of white births are occurring outside of marriage. That is, that's catastrophic. You know, being born to a single mom is the single worst predictor for a kid's future outcome. What was the unemployment rate for blacks in 1954? It was 10 percent for black men. In 2012, it was 17%.
[30:37] How many blacks had spent time in prison in 1974? Nine percent. How many blacks spent time in prison in 2010? Sixteen percent. Almost double.
[30:47] Just wretched. And this is what happens, you know, you, you plant a demon seed, you raise a flower of fire, as the song goes, and when you reach for the power of the state, you almost permanently and almost inevitably destroy whatever progress you claim to be interested in solving. I can say, I would really like this woman to go out with me, but if I put a bag of chloroform over her head and throw it into the back of a windows-less van, she is driving around with me, but she ain't going to wake up liking me a whole lot. So, violence may appear to solve problems, especially the coercion of the state. It may appear to solve problems in the short run, but the expansion of state power that comes from people who want to use the state to solve problems always ends up disrupting and destroying societies in the long run. And thus, we really become that which we despise in the absence of reason. A true commitment to nonviolence, a true commitment to nonviolence, you know, starts with not spanking, starts with not aggressing against your children and in your personal relationships flows outwards from there. And a true commitment to nonviolence means steering clear, steering wide, running in the exact screaming opposite direction from the endless armaments of suicidal state power.
[32:15] Happy Martin Luther King Day.
Support the show, using a variety of donation methods
Support the show
