Martin Luther King Jr Was Not Woke

We’re all familiar with civil rights legend Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream‘ speech. One day, he dreamed, his children would be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. It’s a great speech. It’s a great philosophy.

While many of us came up not only learning about King’s dream, but in many ways living it, one wonders if, after the last year, we aren’t currently living in King’s nightmare.

The philosophy promoted by Dr. King is one of equality, freedom, justice, and love. He rejected violence, embraced peaceful protest, and argued that voting was the foundation of political action. King was so serious about remaining peaceful that those that marched with King were instructed to not fight back, if attacked. If you fought back, King’s group would kick you out. The distaste for violence and the optics of violence was that important.

In 2021, this is a philosophy utterly rejected by the Left.

Today’s Woke Left embraces violence — violence is speech, if committed by disgruntled ‘Identity X.’ Protests have been deemed ineffective unless they reject peace is pursuit of Woke justice — No Justice, No Peace.

This means buildings burn, and opposing voices are physically silenced. Instead of resisting police enforcement of Jim Crow laws by mere peaceful civil disobedience — subjecting oneself to beatings, fire hoses, and worse — the Woke resistance has become offensive in nature, targeting police for harassment at best, assassination at worst.

Indeed, the most twisted and tortured element in King’s nightmare is the main plot line of Woke philosophy (Critical Theory); race is not erased, it is magnified and brought into central focus.

Contents of character are meaningless in the face of one’s identity. Identity makes one, either the oppressed or oppressor. Being black or brown, or gay or trans, or, God forbid, being straight and white, is a defining feature of your existence. Where King offered lessons on the godliness of Love and forgiveness, the Woke preach hate and vengeance.

Nothing could be scarier to those who fought for, and continue to defend, the full and consistent implementation of the Individualism at the heart of the American idea. The collectivism offered by the Woke is the antithesis of that idea, of American individualism. The forcing of this dehumanizing philosophy upon society is anathema to human prosperity precisely because it is built upon an immoral foundation that rejects the sovereignty of the individual in favor of collective damnation.

As far as we had come since King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, it is remarkable how quickly it has descended into a nightmare. And we won’t be able to fully wake up until the Woke cultural revolution is exposed for what it is — Evil.