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Conservative activist and Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk has a lot of opinions on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 2015, Kirk called him a “hero.”
In 2022, MLK was a “civil rights icon.”
In December 2023, speaking before a group of students and teachers at America Fest, a political convention organized by Turning Point USA, Kirk struck a different tone. “MLK was awful,” Kirk said. “He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe.”
For decades, conservatives have pointed to King and his idea that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” as a model for equality.
“For a while, Dr. King’s stock was very much on the rise in conservative circles and the Republican Party,” says John Wood Jr., a Republican activist. “It’s been understood on the right that even though Dr. King wasn’t really one of us politically, he was still a ‘good liberal.’”
For Kirk, the shift on King wasn’t an offhand remark, but a glimpse into his broader strategy to discredit the civil rights leader and the landmark legislation most associated with King: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said at America Fest. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
Turning Point USA, founded in 2012 by an 18-year-old Kirk to organize conservative students on college campuses, has grown into an ideological force in right-wing politics. America Fest, which took place at a convention center in downtown Phoenix, featured speeches by right-wing heavyweights Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, and US representative Matt Gaetz of Florida. Nearly 20,000 people attended the four-day event, according to Kirk.
Closely aligned with Donald Trump, the group has been seen as a way to replace the modern Republican establishment with younger people more aligned with the 45th US president and reactionary politics.
Kirk argues that the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, ushered in a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion. He illustrated how the law has gone wrong when responding to a question from a student who said they became the subject of a Title IX investigation after posting an Instagram story mocking transgender people. Title IX, which was passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, bans schools that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex. King was assassinated four years prior, in 1968.
“The courts have been really weak on this,” Kirk told the America Fest crowd. “Federal courts just yield to the Civil Rights Act as if it's the actual American Constitution.” The law is ultimately a way to “re-found the county” and “a way to get rid of the First Amendment,” according to Kirk.
Kirk’s attempt to discredit civil rights law is an example of how “the fringe moves to the center at the speed of light” in right-wing politics, says public policy scholar Jonathan Rauch.
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“If they're going to say the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the death of the Constitution and freedom in America, then that's going to be extremely divisive, because a lot of people are going to say, ‘Well, if that isn't racist, I don't know what is,’” Rauch says. “This is the federal law that ended segregation.”
“King supported the Civil Rights Act and was an architect of it,” Rauch adds. “I guess if you're gonna go down this road, you have to say King was wrong and maybe King was a bad person.”
Kirk’s comments at America Fest were merely a preview of his attacks on King. He recently said that he plans to release content to discredit MLK on January 15, King’s birthday, which is a US federal holiday honoring King.
“We're gonna be hitting him next week,” Kirk said on his podcast this week. “Yeah, on the day of the Iowa caucus, it's MLK Day. We're gonna do the thing you're not supposed to do. We're gonna tell the truth about MLK Jr. You better tune in next week. Blake has already been preparing. It's gonna be great.”
Blake is an apparent reference to Blake Neff, a producer of The Charlie Kirk Show. In 2020, Neff resigned from his job at Fox News as Tucker Carlson’s top writer after CNN revealed he had been making racist posts under a pseudonym. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott called Neff’s posts “abhorrent.”
Neff has also been publicly laying the groundwork for rewriting the history on King, attempting to link him to violent unrest after the passing of the Civil Rights Act. “Martin Luther King Jr. gets praised for being a peaceful activist,” Neff said on Jack Posobiec’s Human Events Daily podcast in December. “But what they always end up glossing over is actually in the mid '60s and late '60s, civil rights activism becomes a very violent thing." A spokesperson for TPUSA, Andrew Kolvet, said that Americans have been fed a “fake history.”“A core part of this fake history of America is the elevation of MLK into a saint, whose entire being is beyond reproach and above question,” Kolvet said in an emailed statement. “This sanctified version of MLK strips away his actual views and ignores his actual actions. The real MLK was a complicated person.”
The attacks on King show how Turning Point USA has become more willing to indulge on more extreme issues that can alienate voters, according to Nick Surgey, executive director of watchdog group Documented, who has researched Turning Point USA for years. “A decade ago, when he was launching TPUSA, Kirk avoided hot-button issues like race or abortion,” Surgey says. “He now seems totally unrestrained. He's increasingly radical and is aligning himself with people like Blake Neff who exist in a particular subculture on the right. This is not dog-whistle politics, it's blatant and intended to cause outrage. That's really the point.”
Even for Kirk and Turning Point USA, the attacks on King represent a dramatic shift. The group has profited from the use of King’s image. Turning Point USA’s website sold a $55 T-shirt with MLK's name and stickers of King that say “Let freedom ring.” After an inquiry from WIRED, both products were removed from TPUSA's store.
“These guys are very good at moving the Overton window,” Rauch, the scholar, says. “That's what they do. They push and push and get things into the dialog that, until the day before yesterday, were unthinkable.”
