As you may have heard, Glenn Beck is headlining his “Restoring Honor” event near the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
No two people could be more opposite: King sought to unite the nation with nonviolence, compassion, and dialogue in the face of racist oppression and hate. Beck egomaniacally wraps himself in the flag to recklessly use inflammatory demagoguery to smear people who he believes are unworthy of being Americans, especially President Obama.
Their own words show how far apart their visions are in inspiring a better tomorrow for Americans.
King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and in his Nobel lecture on Dec. 11 talked about the promise and progress embodied in the Civil Rights Act. King preached nonviolence and love as the tools for peace in the global family. Violence is an immoral all-destructive force that abandons brotherhood and understanding, he said.
Beck famously said on Fox News last year that the nation’s first biracial president is racist with “a deep-seated hatred of white people or the white culture.”
Meanwhile, King argued that his movement means
“we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.”
Beck has also said the NAACP, the Justice Department, and others “need a race war” to rip people apart to achieve their means. He has many times loosely used “slavery” to criticize the administration and progressives, and has tried to tie Obama with the Black Panther Party, calling it part of Obama’s “army of thugs.” (How honorable.)
King said in his Nobel lecture that a symbol of the nation’s strides since Brown v. Board of Education a decade earlier was the crushing defeat of Sen. Barry Goldwater - a Civil Rights Act opponent - in that year’s presidential election.
“Another indication that progress is being made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed great maturity by overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous Fascist path.”
Beck’s incendiary rhetoric is not limited to paranoid rants alone; despicable allusions to violence are also common. He joked about poisoning the speaker of the House and compared himself to “Israeli Nazi hunters” by saying, “To the day I die, I am going to be a progressive hunter.” In one April 2009 show, Beck poured “gasoline” on a Fox News staffer representing an “average American” while mocking Obama and saying, “President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?”
In his letter from a Birmingham, Alabama, jail in 1963, King was dismayed by the inaction and indifference of “white moderates” and churches that may have opposed Jim Crow but disagreed with King’s movement; critics branded him an extremist. “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?” he concluded.
A few weeks after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Beck scorned both victims of 9/11 and Katrina because of what he saw as selfishness. “You know it took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims’ families? … And when I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, ‘Oh shut up!’ I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining.” He felt it was unfair that New Orleans and those who stayed behind garnered all the attention. “And that’s all we’re hearing about, are the people in New Orleans. Those are the only ones we’re seeing on television are the scumbags.” (Beck insisted he only meant some, not all, victims for both tragedies.)
On the anniversary of such a proud American event, will Beck change course and stop inciting division? We know what King would have done. He addressed the rise of militancy in some black communities arguing that blacks and whites must stand together.
“In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrong deeds,” King said. “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.”
