01-24-2021, 10:21 PM
[b]DRUM RAPER INSTINCT[/b]
Last week’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day was not necessarily the most joyous in the 21 years since the holiday was first officially observed by all states (and the 38 years since President Reagan signed the holiday into law). With so many millions of Americans locked down due to the pandemic, or unemployed due to the lockdowns, what’s the value of a three-day weekend?
Last week’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day was not necessarily the most joyous in the 21 years since the holiday was first officially observed by all states (and the 38 years since President Reagan signed the holiday into law). With so many millions of Americans locked down due to the pandemic, or unemployed due to the lockdowns, what’s the value of a three-day weekend?
Still, people in the U.S. might want to start appreciating the holiday a bit more over the next few years…because it just might have an expiration date of 2027. That’s the year the “rape tape” is due to be released to the public.
On Jan. 5, 1964, FBI agents, as part of an organized campaign of surveillance and harassment of MLK, recorded something exceptionally unpleasant in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. King had been summoned by Baltimore preacher Logan Kearse to the Willard Hotel. There, Pastor Kearse raped a woman after she resisted his advances, as King (in the words of an FBI agent who summarized the recording for his bosses) “looked on, laughed and offered advise [sic].”
Sometimes a guy needs the kind of advice Dear Abby just can’t provide.
The audiotape of the incident totally exists. However, in 1977 a federal judge ordered it sealed for fifty years, because Jimmy Carter wanted to make sure he was long dead before that shit got out (jokes on you, Jimmy—you may actually still be alive in 2027, you rabbit-killing Methuselah).
So, in six years, the nation will likely hear the dulcet sounds of MLK cheering a rape…unless Kamala Harris uses her newfound status to discreetly replace the tape with an old Tupac recording (it’s not that Harris is disturbed by MLK’s role in a rape; it’s more that she’s outraged that a woman would resist the opportunity to sleep with an influential man).
The ticking clock on the release of the rape tape was not lost on filmmaker Sam Pollard, whose new documentary film [i]MLK/FBI[/i] opened last week to coincide with the holiday. Pollard’s movie details the FBI’s clandestine war against the civil rights leader. And while the film roundly—and justifiably—condemns J. Edgar Hoover’s less-than-honorable tactics against King, when the topic of the rape recording comes up—and kudos to Pollard for at least [i]bringing it up[/i]—the filmmaker runs a rather ineffective interference, claiming that the FBI agent’s notes “might” be misleading, and to give credence to the accusations without “hard evidence” would be to assist the FBI in “sullying” King’s memory.
Pollard has exactly six more years until he’ll have to come up with a better defense. Ditto the media. In their reviews of Pollard’s film, [i]The Atlantic[/i], the AP, and NPR avoided mentioning the rape accusation entirely. Yahoo News mentioned it, but purposely distorted the charge, claiming that MLK “witnessed a rape and didn’t intervene to stop it” (no mention of the “looking on, laughing, and offering advice” part). Sky News preemptively declared “pictures or it didn’t happen,” stating that since the “proof” will be “audio only,” it can’t be accepted as proof at all (an optimistic take…“rape advice” will likely be pretty damning audio).
Knowing that a significant number of his readers lack functioning frontal lobes, [i]The Guardian[/i]’s Peter Bradshaw wrote, “There was even a suggestion that King was present at a rape. But wait. Where is the proof here?”
In the National Archives, mate. For six more years.
The big question is, when the tape is finally released, and if it lives up to the FBI’s description, will MLK be canceled? An ironic possibility: With leftist American blacks becoming increasingly violent and radicalized, and with the GOP increasingly catering to “moderate” blacks, 2027 may produce the spectacle of leftist blacks damning MLK as an Uncle Tom and joining with feminists to cancel him, while establishment conservatives defend him as a flawed but honorable man.
As always, the GOP will lose that fight (the GOP loses all racial battles; that’s just a law of the universe), but as a consolation prize, if states begin to cease celebrating MLK’s birth, conservatives could fill the vacuum by appropriating January 15th for an even worse human being who was born on that date—Ben Shapiro.