Exposing a right-wing grifter's lies about Malcolm X
Did Malcolm X really reveal his conservatism by "endorsing" Goldwater over Johnson?
There is a long tradition of right-wing hacks trying to appropriate the legacies of MLK and Malcolm X, voicing their own depravities through their image and all the dignity and honor associated with it so as to make it more palatable. You regularly hear about “the conservative MLK”, and “the Malcolm X who hated liberals and Democrats”, typically through some ms paint created jpg of an out of context quote with Malcolm or MLK looming next to it, as if to say: “Look, here is this revered Black Leader agreeing with my deranged far right lunacy. I win.”
I don’t want to expend too much time on this derangement here, but want to point out one particular example of it I came across just now. It’s a good case study on how these lies are concocted, and the shameless hackery of those who are responsible.
So there’s this guy advertising himself as the Asian Candace Owens, writes for the Bari Weiss rag and the CIA-NED Tablet Mag (more about them via one of their editors here), does the whole anti-“woke” free speech absolutism heterodox enlightened centrist shtick that his idol Bari turned into a multi-million dollar grift. You know the type: Coleman Hughes, the already mentioned Owens, “I’m the Asian who is not with the wokes”, they eat that stuff up on the right and this one’s really angling for that niche.
Anyway, I came across this post of his:
To repeat, “Malcolm was a deeply conservative man that [sic] would hate wokeness.” Ventriloquizing his own asinine irrelevant culture war idiocy through the mouth of Malcolm X, and he’s not even embarrassed. Why would he be? These people have no shame, they only care about the grift, building their personal brand, and what better way than going with the classic “I am actually speaking for Malcolm/MLK.”
I won’t link to his diatribe, but one part of it reveals the true depths of this person’s depravity. He says:
By the time of that speech, Malcolm had already left the Nation of Islam. In 1964, he endorsed ultraconservative Barry Goldwater for president over Lyndon B. Johnson. Decades after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, Malcolm’s predictions have come true: black voters continue to mostly vote Democrat while black households' material conditions have not improved.
Pay attention to the way he phrases Malcolm’s position on the 1964 election. He endorsed Barry Goldwater over Johnson. That’s it. Proof provided: Malcolm was indeed a deeply conservative man who would hate wokeness. Lib cultural Marxists owned.
Except he’s lying. Yes, it is true that Malcolm preferred Goldwater over Johnson, but the reason he stated for his preference wasn’t because he loved Goldwater and admired his far right conservative views. It was actually the opposite: Malcolm knew that Goldwater was worse than Johnson for the black community and the world at large, and this very fact would reveal the hollowness and corrupt nature of the entire US capitalist imperialist racist system. In other words, he was making the critique that the revolutionary left has made consistently about liberals, that their function is to superficially cover over this depraved system and thereby help prolong it. To use Malcolm’s own phrasing, Goldwater was the wolf to Johnson’s fox: the latter wins and maintains power through deception, and thereby is able to pacify the black community, whereas the former doesn’t bother with this pretense and violently attacks without any hesitation. This, Malcolm hoped, would wake up the black community and the working class more generally out of its liberal slumber and pacification, and join the fight, join the class struggle against the capitalist, imperialist system. The New York Times reported on Malcolm’s position at the time.
Anyone even slightly familiar with Malcolm’s life and works knows this about his metaphor of conservatives and liberals as the wolf and fox respectively. They also know that Malcolm never wavered from his view that right-wing conservatives were the clearest, explicit expression of the pathologies of racism, exploitation, imperialism and fascism in the United States. The problem with liberals was that they were too much like them—that they posed as friends of the working class, of the black community, as they did the wolf’s work. To quote Malcolm: ‘If Senator Goldwater became President, the Negro would know he had to fight harder and would be more positive in his demands, more aggressive in his protests.”
What hacks like that Asian Candace Owens wannabe want to do is not only legitimize their own derangement by voicing it through the mouth of Malcolm, but also to hide the real Malcolm from view. The Malcolm who devoted his life to exposing and mercilessly opposing exactly those kinds of cretins—who when he was alive did their best to get him killed. That’s what they’re doing now too by erasing and replacing his actual principles and beliefs with their own grotesque pathologies.
For more of the real Malcolm see this extensive thread of clips.
And here are some excerpts from Malcolm’s last speech before he was assassinated.
Thank you for this.
This is similar to when conservatives and former progressives use Cesar Chavez as a wedge to argue against immigration despite him evolving on the issue.
https://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Politics/cesar-chavezs-complex-history-immigration/story?id=19083496