I am glad more and more right wingers, even if still fringe, are finally starting to understand (if still very poorly) that MLK would have despised them and everything they stood for. Then they drop the mask and start talking like 60s Dixiecrats, loud enough for others to hear.
I, for one, encourage them to continue to “smear” one of the most beloved (if whitewashed) figures in America as a commie, which although isn’t accurate is far closer to what he actually was. It might help people get a clue and read more into the Civil Rights Movement’s history. Part of what helped me in my ideological development was learning how the US’s social advances came in spite of the “liberal democratic” system, and socialists/communists were fighting for these causes before it became fashionable for liberals to do the same.
Marx had the same journey.
How was Marx ever held in a declawed, sanitized image the way MLK is? At best, Critical Theory is very popular in academia and it has its foundations in Marxism, but it’s pretty far removed from the radical political project Marx proposed. To the point I once mentioned Das Kapital to a professor who was giving us a chapter on Horkheimer and Adorno but she had no clue what Das Kapital was. It’s even worse outside academia. To most normies, Marx was a brutal dictator just like Lenin and his predecessor Stalin, if they’ve even heard the name. MLK, for better or worse (mostly worse), has basically been canonized as the only good example for Black activism and nonviolence is presented as the only viable path for justice. One has been relegated to being mentioned in passing, hastily glossed over; the other completely stripped of his radical character, but is at least widely celebrated.
In the 20s, when social democrats spend great efforts to portray Marx as a reformist. During the Cold War capitalists went back to reviling him.