The Annual 'Misremembering Dr. King' Editorials Roll In

(Article is about a year old but relevant for today.)

Holidays inspire patriotic clichés. Late December is when kids learn the Pentagon is a kid-friendly organization that tracks Santa Claus. On Thanksgiving, we see violence-averse presidents pardon defenseless turkeys.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is more complicated. Newspapers that during his lifetime denounced the great and complicated man “celebrate” him through an agonizing ritual.

The chief elements are usually a humiliating caricature, followed by an effort to enlist King as an ally in the current political fixations of the paper’s editorial board.

I thought the Washington Post had come up with the looniest of the “Dr. King As We Didn’t Know Him” editorials two years ago, when it wrote, “Martin Luther King Was a True Conservative.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/mlk-editorials-taibbi-783988/