The Dr. King’s Legacy logical fallacy

As the Black Lives Matter movement has risen to national prominence, so has the number of people spluttering the Dr. King’s Legacy logical fallacy, which runs a little like this:

Here now, cease that [form of protest] immediately, you scallywags. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would not approve! [Insert random quote from the Birmingham jail letter, the speech he gave during The March for Jobs and Freedom, or favorite MLK factoid.]

Logical fallacies often overlap, but this one is a Russian nesting doll of the things. Assertion. Appeal to authority and emotion. No True Scotsman. Cherry picking.

What am I forgetting? Because there’s often a strong implication that anyone who would do anything that wouldn’t meet with Dr. King’s approval is a bad black person, ad hominem, although it could be another form of appeal to feels.

I wish people wouldn’t do this. Here’s a hot, fresh sample of why:

For a white guy to speculate about how Martin Luther King, Jr. would have felt about “Black Lives Matter” is foolhardy indeed.

And that’s where the column ends. Just kidding.

Someone should (and undoubtedly will) tell me to “check my privilege” and put me in the racist corner with a dunce cap, probably one wired for electro-shock therapy.

Praise Anoia, he has established the real victim of racism. The suspense was killing me.

But Martin Luther King Day is a national holiday for all of us to celebrate, so I am going to go for it – and, not just because, once upon a time, I was a civil rights worker.

No Mr. Simon, you’re also a whiny, clapped out dickhead with all the wit and charm of a liver spot. Unsupported, I rarely find “Things I did a half century ago,” to be a compelling argument. It can be a precursor to an interesting discussion, or bullshit. In this case, we have the lede and the fact that the author used to be liberal but then Chappaquiddick O.J. Simpson was acquitted, which makes bullshit a dead cert.

That was 1966, fifty years ago now, when I was living in a Sumter, South Carolina, house belonging to the very MLK’s cousin the mortician for that small city’s black population who was extremely gracious to my then-wife and me.

[…]

You may already suspect I believe Dr. King would not have taken so kindly to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, that he more likely would have avowed, unlike the cowardly Martin O’Malley, that “All Lives Matter.” If you don’t agree with that, consider these words from King’s most famous speech …

When this happens I prefer instead to consider how many people seem to think King was born, wrote a letter in jail, gave a speech and died. Also, how funny it would be if these people were afflicted with a short, violent bout of diarrhea every time they mentioned King’s name.

But Simon goes on, because having gone to all of the trouble of pulling it out of his pants, he sees no reason not to give it a quick buff and shine. He calls King an integrationist, in contrast to Black Lives Matter activists:

…people are separatists. They are not the sons and daughters of MLK. They are the sons and daughters of Stokely Carmichael and, to some extent, even Huey P. Newton.

I’m honestly shocked by this sentence. In that it doesn’t mention the ne plus ultra of brown boogie men, Malcolm X. However, to prove the Carmichael and Long in their DNA, he offers the treatment of someone the readers of BVD Media really care about.

“Black and white together, we shall not be moved….” Remember that, from the Mavis Staples song? I did, when I watched the BLM activists push the hapless Bernie Sanders off stage at one of his campaign speeches.

I assume he means Netroots, but I’m not 100% certain because I don’t see how that incident is proof of separatism. And because it’s followed by a warm, yellow stream of consciousness.

Bernie undoubtedly sang it when he was young. He couldn’t stay with the message. These days a lot of people can’t. Afraid to be branded racist, they acquiesce to racism.

What is the message? What is the frequency? What is Mr. Simon smoking? I don’t know. But he concludes by unveiling the real villain, and it wasn’t Prof. Plum in the library with a lead pipe:

When Barack Obama came into office, almost everyone – myself included, although I didn’t vote for him – wanted him to succeed as the first black president.

As evidenced in June 2009 when Mr. Simon wrote “WikiIslam defines [taqiyya] as ‘sanctified hypocrisy.’ That is Barak Obama to a T.”

He didn’t. Ironically, he became the principal father of the “Black Lives Matter” movement that first surfaced as a hashtag on the acquittal of the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman for the murder of Obama’s putative son Trayvon Martin.

Now in the time of Death Panels, did Obama beget a child upon Cullors and Tometi. The child was named BlackLives Matter and it grew to be a giant.

Martin Luther King’s dream, which was on the verge of becoming a reality, as much of a reality as one could hope for in an imperfect world, was set immeasurably back. On this MLK Day, we should all consider how to reverse that.

And lo, wielding the sword Separatism, BlackLives Matter destroyed Dr. King’s Dream Fantastic just as it was coming to fruition. Then came the Prophet Simon who lifted the shattered Dream in his hands and cried ‘Let’s get back to the days when a white man could kill a black person without people making such a fuss! It’s what Dr. King would have wanted!’

And that’s why people should avoid the Dr. King’s Legacy logical fallacy. It makes anyone using it sound moronic and gives normal people the creeps.