Today and tomorrow, children all over America, will likely spend some portion of the day eulogizing a modern-day saint, who has been canonized by the media.  Assemblies will be called, guest speakers will be brought in, and even others will be “mobilized” in memory of this supposedly greater-than-life hero.  Likewise, on this day (an honor not even accorded the founder of the United States) the media, on this day, will whip themselves up into a frenzy of praise for the so-called “Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.”

But like all icons of modernity, who are held to lofty heights by the sycophantic politicians and spineless media, let’s take a closer look. Who was Martin Luther King, and is there more to this man than meets the eye?

Let’s start with his titles, “Doctor” and “Reverend”.  According to many sources, King, was a habitual plagiarist.  For instance, in 1947, he delivered his first public sermon.  It is widely acknowledged today that this sermon was plagiarized from a homily by Protestant clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick entitled “Life is What You Make It”. King’s first book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” was plagiarized from numerous sources, all unattributed, according to documentation recently assembled by sympathetic King scholars Keith D. Miller, Ira G. Zepp, Jr., and David J. Garrow.  As if that weren’t enough, the four senior editors of “The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr” (available here from the University of California Press) admit that: “Judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship, [his writings] are tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism.”  Even King’s doctoral dissertation, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Harry Nelson Wieman,” for which he was awarded a doctorate in theology, contains more than fifty complete sentences plagiarized from the PhD dissertation of Dr. Jack Boozer, “The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich’s Concept of God”.

So it appears that the “Doctor Reverend King” was neither truly a doctor, nor a reverend, but neither was his real name “Martin Luther”.  Born Michael King, his name was changed by his father to “Martin Luther,” after the Protestant reformer.  He never legally changed his name. To this day, he lived and died as Michael King.  This, however, is a relatively small detail in comparison to other, more shocking details of King’s life.

Michael King, Jr: Human rights hero or fraud?

The late Samuel T. Francis, an iconoclastic columnist of the late 20th century, quotes Charles D. Brennan, the former Assistant Director of the FBI, as saying regarding King’s more intimate life was characterized by “orgiastic and adulterous escapades, some of which indicated that King could be bestial in his sexual abuse of women.”  Because King was suspected of links with communist agents (most notably Stanley Levinson), under the order of U. S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, the FBI wired King’s offices and hotel rooms from 1963 to 1968.  The tapes showed that in Las Vegas, King’s aids paid $100 each to prostitutes to join him in orgies; they also show that in New York City, an intoxicated King threatened a young White girl working for civil rights to submit to his strange sexual tastes or he would jump from the 13th floor window.  Despite the fact that this was common knowledge at the time, a federal judge ordered that this damning evidence be sealed until 2027.  It should be noted that this kind of cover-up is not insignificant.  At a time when the media posthumously maligned Osama bin Laden and Colonel Mummar Gaddafi as borderline sexual deviants, even without much evidence, the very same media goes to the utmost lengths to disguise Michael King’s awful conduct.

Today, criticism of King’s lifestyle, even if they are mutually exclusive of his worldview, are met with disdain.  At a time when almost any living or historical figure can be cast as a villain, Michael King still occupies a prominent place in the pantheon of secular religion.  In America, any time a justification for any act is needed, King’s name is invoked, much as the devoutly faithful might invoke a saint’s intercession.  Perhaps we could only expect so much from a society in which the only article of faith is absolute egalitarianism.  As Francis pointed out: “In the new nation and the new creed of which the King holiday serves as symbol, all institutions, values, heroes, and symbols that violate the dogma of equality are dethroned and must be eradicated. Those associated with the South and the Confederacy are merely the most obvious violations of the egalitarian dogma and thereform must be the first to go, but they will by no means be the last.”

However, the iconclasts are finally speaking out, and with their bold new introspection, the myths are finally coming tumbling down.