'it's worth emphasizing just how grotesque is Beck's attempt to co-opt a landmark anniversary of the civil rights movement. Beck has been anything but shy about his intentions. On May 26, he told his radio audience, "We will reclaim the civil rights moment. We are on the right side of history."
This from a man who once called Jesse Jackson "the stinking king of the race lords."
Had Beck been a public figure at the time of King's famous speech, there is little doubt on "which side of history" he would have stood: the same side as every other far-rightwing Mormon. Had they been contemporaries, Beck would have condemned King as a "progressive cockroach" surrounded by communists, or as an outright communist himself. We know this not only because he has imported such tactics into the present. We know this because his Mormon heroes were viciously anti-civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.
Beck has repeatedly, respectfully, and recently played audio of men like Ezra Taft Benson, a Mormon apostle who thought the civil rights movement was a dastardly communist plot. Benson also wrote the foreward to a book of race hate whose cover illustration featured the severed, bloody head of an African American.,
Just when you think you've heard the ultimate foolishness to come out of this huckster, side-show freak's 7-sided mouth, along comes this.
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