“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” —Thomas Jefferson (1781)

In 1983, Republican President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill designating the third Monday in January a national holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was born on 15 January 1929. King, like his father and grandfather before him, was a Baptist minister. He was pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, and he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Next Monday is the official federal observance of the MLK holiday.

However, this week, there was another King in the news.

The Republican Party took swift action against one of its own, Iowa Rep. Steve King, for remarks that reflect a profound insensitivity, if not abject ignorance, to our nation’s history of racial intolerance. King, lacking any modicum of self-awareness, asked, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) stripped King of his committee assignments, stating, “We will not tolerate this type of language in the Republican Party … or in the Democrat Party as well.” He noted that King’s remarks “call into question whether he will treat all Americans equally, without regard for race and ethnicity. … Let us hope and pray earnestly that this action will lead to greater reflection and ultimately change on his part.”

In the midst of Rep. King’s condemnation by both Republicans and Democrat leaders, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called on Democrats to deal with racism within their own ranks, noting, “I hope Nancy Pelosi also takes action against all the Democrats who continue to associate with prominent anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.” That would include, among others, Demo newbie Rep. Rashida “motherf—er” Tlaib (D-MI), who recently entertained Abbas Hamideh, a man with a long history of expressing anti-Semitic views, such as, “Yes, the Nazis are still around with a different name: Zionists!”

Of note, due to conservative media attention highlighting the racist associations of those Demo leftists leading the Women’s March in DC this weekend, some Democrats have quietly declined to attend or support the confab of their largest constituency, female voters.

Fact is, Democrats have long cultivated and courted haters like Farrakhan and Hamideh and have become dependent on racial and ethnic division as the foundation of their party platform.

The Democrats’ de facto leader, Barack Obama, was himself a disciple of the Afrocentric and anti-Semitic hate spewed by “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright and other Marxist mentors promoting black supremacy. Of course, Obama got a free pass from a shamefully spineless mainstream media.

Obama, though, was merely the latest of the Demo race hustlers and their supporting cast of race-bait profiteers who, in the years since MLK’s assassination in 1968, have betrayed his dream, most recently under the disingenuous pretense that only black lives matter.

The lack of Democrats with the guts to call out the haters within their own ranks comes as no surprise, because more than half a century after MLK’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, racism is king, and “color” still trumps “character.”

Obama was elected both because of his unspoken promise to assuage the “white guilt” of his leftist patrons and because of his “color” rhetoric: “A deep distrust exists in communities of color. … There are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. … Frustrations have deep roots in many communities of color. Too many individuals, particularly young people of color, do not feel as if they are being treated fairly.”

In the five decades since MLK’s death, “color” differentiation and racial division — in fact, division of all sorts — has become the common denominator in the Democrats’ constituent-building strategy.

Long before MLK’s generation, the propagation of racial division was exposed by two of his most notable civil-rights predecessors, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

Douglass escaped slavery and became the 19th century’s most noted and articulate abolitionist. In 1855 he asserted, “I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.”

In 1876, commemorating the legacy of Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of our nation’s first centennial, Douglass noted:

“That we are here in peace today is a compliment and a credit to American civilization, and a prophecy of still greater national enlightenment and progress in the future. I refer to the past not in malice … but simply to place more distinctly in front the gratifying and glorious change which has come both to our white fellow citizens and ourselves, and to congratulate all upon the contrast between now and then, the new dispensation of freedom with its thousand blessings to both races, and the old dispensation of slavery with its ten thousand evils to both races, white and black.”

Douglass wrote of the “past, the present, and the future, with the long and dark history of our bondage behind us, and with liberty, progress, and enlightenment before us.”

But Democrats aren’t willing to put “bondage behind us,” and they refuse to focus on the “liberty, progress, and enlightenment before us,” which is where Republicans have set our nation’s sights for decades.

In 1901, King’s most notable predecessor in the fight for civil rights, Booker T. Washington, founder of the famed Tuskegee Institute, wrote in his seminal work, Up From Slavery:

“[I] resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him. … I pity from the bottom of my heart any individual who is so unfortunate as to get into the habit of holding race prejudice. … In the sight of God there is no color line, and we want to cultivate a spirit that will make us forget that there is such a line anyway.”

He added, “Great men cultivate love. … Only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.”

Washington was a critic of his contemporary, W.E.B. Du Bois, who made a practice of fomenting racial division.

In his 1911 book, My Larger Education, Washington wrote of Du Bois and other racial agitators words that are even more applicable to their present-day brethren:

“There is [a] class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. … Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.”

Washington continued:

“Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. … There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”

And that pretty much sums up today’s Democrat Party haters, those who want the patient to remain ill at all costs.

In April of 1963, Dr. King wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail about those who foment hatred, specifically those adherents to the hatred embraced by Farrakhan’s mentor, Elijah Muhammad:

“I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency. … The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. This movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil.’ … I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the ‘do-nothingism’ of the complacent nor the hatred of the black nationalist. … For there is the more excellent way of love and non-violent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.”

King is perhaps best remembered for his “I Have a Dream” speech to hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered on the Washington Mall for the August 1963 Civil Rights March. That speech was, and is today, considered one of the most pivotal masterpieces of 20th-century rhetoric.

In that speech, King declared:

“Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children. … In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. 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. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.”

He famously concluded:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that one day … the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My country 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, Land of the Pilgrims’ pride, From every mountainside, Let freedom ring.‘ When we let freedom ring … we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, We are free at last!’”

But the Democrat Party of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize recipient’s era, which simultaneously embraced freedom and bondage, has now devolved into a political machine fueled by fear, hate, and division — one that has turned the wisdom of King’s iconic words upside down.

Long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Democrats are still focusing on “color” rather than “character.” It’s as if King had said, “I have a dream that my children will be judged only by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.”

Today, more than five decades after King was murdered by a racist sociopath from Illinois, the Democrats’ so-called “Great Society” has effectively enslaved poor black Americans, and those of other ethnic backgrounds, on modern-day Democrat-controlled urban poverty plantations. The Democrats’ so-called “War on Poverty,” in which more than $22 trillion has been spent, ostensibly, to “lift up the poor,” has been an abysmal failure in human terms, but an extraordinary political success.

Democrat President Lyndon Baines Johnson, at the time he launched his populist social-welfare programs, outlined the political success he anticipated. In a conversation with two Democrat governors, Johnson said of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” While Democrats don’t use that language anymore, their objective remains to have black Americans “voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

While that may not have been the political motivation of other Great Society do-gooders, to paraphrase Virgil’s Aeneid, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Regarding the degradation of black culture, in August or 1967, King declared, “If we’re going to be truly free, we must reach down into the inner depths of our being and sign with the pen and ink of assertive manhood our own emancipation proclamation.”

Ten years after King’s death, one of his most trusted lieutenants, Jesse Jackson, declared: “Our children are living in depressed neighborhoods and are on the verge of ethical collapse. Morally weak people not only inhibit their own personal growth, but finally contribute to the politics of decadence. … A generation of people lacking the moral and physical stamina necessary to fight a protracted civilizational crisis is a dangerous to itself, its neighbors and to future generations.”

Fast forward 30 years to Barack Obama and recall that Jackson condemned Obama for suggesting, “What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. It’s the courage to raise the child that makes you a father.” Jackson used a vulgar reference to Obama, but then asserted, “What we need really is racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care.”

If Jackson had not devolved a race-bait hustler, and actually believed what he said in 1978, and now regarding “racial justice and urban policy,” he would abandon the Democrat Party.

In today’s caustic political climate, there are few Beltway Democrats who are motivated by “good intentions.” The current breed of leftists have proven to be the masters of hypocrisy, and they have successfully subjugated their black American constituency to their political will, convincing them that they’re victims and dependents and that they must rely on the state for their salvation.

As Thomas Jefferson observed, “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”

Of the current generation of race-bait agitators, Stanford economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell, whose brilliant cultural observations are informed, in part, because he was born black, observed, “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racist.’”

Black family advocate Robert Woodson, President of Woodson Foundation, references a study by Sowell on educational achievement, “Education: Assumption vs. History. The study notes the considerable academic success in predominately black schools, including Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School and Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School. Woodson notes, "These students were not the children of the elite but were sons and daughters of domestic servants and manual laborers. They achieved laudable academic successes in spite of skimpy school budgets, rundown buildings and hand-me-down textbooks, often in classrooms crowded with 40 to 50 students.”

But now, he notes: “Just 9 percent of the students at Frederick Douglass High School scored as proficient in reading and only 3 percent in math. At Booker T. Washington, the percentages are 20 in English and 18 in math.”

Again, this is the effluent of the Democrat-controlled urban poverty plantations.

Fortunately, there is growing evidence that black Americans are awakening to the Democrats’ generational charade — realizing that those politicians betrayed MLK’s grand vision of freedom and equality.

Something odd happened on the way to the midterm elections last fall. The loyalties of constituencies once assumed to be the Democrats’ exclusive and unchallenged base began to shift toward, of all people, Donald Trump.

As was the case in the 2016 presidential election, blue-collar optimism soared.

But there has also been a notable shift in support for Trump and Republicans among black Americans, who are among the major beneficiaries of the GOP’s economic policies. In recent months, that approval rating reached a record level for any Republican president — 36% — almost twice what it was in 2017. Household income among blacks is increasing, while unemployment is at a record low. (Hispanic Americans are also reaping the benefits of the Trump economy.)

Clearly, many blacks are recognizing that Democrats turned King’s dream into a nightmare.

Despite the Trump administration’s extraordinary economic record, this modest racial awakening wasn’t enough to offset the Democrat Party’s pervasive “Hate Trump” campaign theme, as relentlessly promoted by its Leftmedia propagandists. Indeed, it’s evident that perpetuating that theme, even if it means plunging the economy into recession, is paramount to the Left’s political agenda.

On July 4th, 1965, preaching at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, MLK declared, “Love is the only absolute. … I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate myself; hate is too great a burden to bear. … Hate does something to the soul that causes one to lose his objectivity. The man who hates can’t think straight; the man who hates can’t reason right; the man who hates can’t see right; the man who hates can’t walk right. And I know now that Jesus is right, that love is the way.”

Indeed, the core of Kings message was about racial harmony, as opposed to the race-bait hatred fomented by Beltway Democrats today.

One of the most outspoken detractors of the Left’s orthodoxy is King’s niece, Alveda. She was 17 at the time of her uncle’s assassination, and she recently recalled a conversation with her father, King’s younger brother Alfred, on the day MLK died.

Alveda told him, “I hate white people. They killed Uncle ML.”

Her father, also a pastor and civil-rights leader, replied, “No, white people didn’t kill my brother; white people didn’t kill your uncle. White people march with us, pray with us, go to jail with us, live with us, die with us. No, no, the devil did this. You have to forgive; you have to forgive.”

Such forgiveness is anathema to most of today’s Democrat leaders — and the black community leaders in their stable.

Alveda added, “Acts 17:26 says, ‘Of one blood God made all people, to live together on the face of the earth.’ So we can be brothers and sisters because we are one blood; we are the human race. And I believe if my uncle were here today, he’d like for us to consider ourselves as human beings, not different races. One race, colorblind.”

We should all remember that Liberty is colorblind, and that King’s legacy was founded on that immutable principle.

As for me and a hundred million grassroots Americans across our nation, we reject the politics of fear, hate, and division, and we honor Martin Luther King’s dream for Americans of every race, creed, and background.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis

Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776