Another robotic conservative

Gosh, is Michelle Malkin clueless, thoughtless, and useless. In her column today, “MLK’s unfinished legacy and the fight for school choice,” she bemoans the fact that we have not truly followed Martin Luther King’s non-discriminatory vision, and argues that we need to follow it. She’s been writing about liberal politics for how many years now, and she still doesn’t understand that King after 1964 ceased being a right-liberal demanding equality under the law and became a left-liberal demanding the very things President Obama is now demanding: substantive equality among unequal things, and the use of massive social engineering to force such equality on society. Like every other brainless mainstream conservative, Malkin insists that conservatives are the true followers of King. No. Obama is the true follower of King.

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JC in Houston writes:

Malkin is clueless on another issue she writes about in her column. She states that:

I’ve said before that one of the areas of American life where Martin Luther King’s vision remains unfulfilled is public education. Teachers’ unions and government school protectionists have stood in the schoolhouse door, blocking innovation, competition, and parental choice—leaving minority children and their families to languish in some of the country’s worst schools.

Those schools are the worst—and the minority children there are “languishing”—precisely BECAUSE OF the minority children who attend them.

LA replies:

Absolutely. Thank you for pointing that out. I was focused on the “King legacy” aspect of the paragraph and missed her standard, unforgivably mindless mainstream-conservative notion that the reason blacks perform badly in school is that the schools are bad.

Roger G. writes:

You write: “King after 1964 ceased being a right-liberal.”

Before 1964, and I think long before. As we have discussed, on C-Span or PBS I once heard a (very brief, unfortunately) portion of a 1959 interview of King by a heavily Southern-accented university professor. It was chilling. Just one of King’s points was that if racially different people wouldn’t live together willingly, they must be forced. In the tone of his voice was the implacable, horrible, innocent purity of a Khmer Rouge, incorruptible and self-sacrificing, joyously slaughtering one third of his countrymen to achieve earthly paradise.

I have searched the Internet for this interview, without success.

I think the mighty Shrewsbury had King nailed. In his reasonable-sounding persona, King was careful to go only as far as his mainstream white audience would accept at the time, but would have gone much, much further if he could have. Remember his very early Communist training.

Ed H. writes:

I cannot understand how school choice is going to save American education unless it allows the parent the choice to send the child to a segregated school. Under the cherished King legacy, I assume that such free choice will be extended to blacks as well as whites, and if blacks are allowed to choose to send their dysfunctional, truant, gangsta clothed, rapping, sexually precocious and mentally deficient progeny to any school they want simply by presenting a government “voucher” at the door then all we have created is a roving destruction squad that will shift from school to school, moving on only after every wall has been covered with graffiti, every window broken, every gullible girl impregnated and every teacher left a burnt-out and cynical shell. It will be the Paul Kersey doctrine of “manifest destruction” but with total mobility provided by the U.S. taxpayer. Maybe Michelle Malkin can comment on this.

LA writes:

Of course. Giving blacks the ability to attend any school they want, including high-quality, private schools, will lead to the destruction of those schools. This argument has been made by a handful of race-realist conservatives, including me, for twenty years (as well as being made, sotto voce, by local white parents who keep rejecting school choice when it is proposed in their towns), but it has made no impression on the mainstream conservatives.

You should send your comment, perhaps moderating some of the language, to Malkin, and see if she replies. But, as I’ve said, she is a non-reflective person who couldn’t recognize a concept if it hit her in the head. Her entire modus operandi is to attack liberals and shout rah-rah America. To my knowledge she has never written a single thoughtful piece about what liberalism means and what conservatism means. All that her conservatism consists of is that she hates liberalism and loves America, no matter how liberal and anti-American America becomes.

For example, she worships the U.S. military, and approves of everything it does, even when, as in Afghanistan, it has been accommodating and empowering our sharia-observant, jihadist enemies.

January 22

Sage McLaughlin writes:

It also should be remarked that Malkin is an extraordinarily unpleasant, abrasive personality. She is loved on the right, as is Sean Hannity, for her “fighting spirit,” which really just comes down to the fact that she is extremely aggressive and hostile in TV debates. But in that respect she is of course just an example of the extreme coarseness and partisan vapidity of professional pundits. She is capable of channeling the boiling rage of many rank-and-file GOP partisans, not only in her vocal tone, but in her eyes, which appear at any moment ready to fire flaming daggers at her opponents, or whoever happens to be standing nearby.

In both form and content, her whole act is anything but conservative. She does not represent any kind of a way back to civilized public life—just as her endless screeching about how conservatives are the real liberals in this country doesn’t represent any kind of way back to intellectual coherence on the mainstream right. And let’s face it, where would she be if so many of the immature and clueless College Republican types did not think she was “hot”?

LA replies:

I’m not quite as negative about her as you are. I have appreciated her for some things, for example, her uncompromising denunciations of John McCain (whom I have described as “the worst man in America”). She also was one of the tiny handful of mainstream conservatives who criticized the disgusting and dishonest book by Brian Anderson of the Manhattan Institute, South Park Conservatives. But essentially and for the most part she is as you describe her, a red-hot torch who just attacks, attacks, attacks and doesn’t provide any intellectual framework for her attacks and and doesn’t seem to stand for anything.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 21, 2013 07:11 PM | Send