Media Matters.org-Glenn Beck's Rally Dishonors Dr. King's Dream

Dr. Martin Luther King: writesprint.net; Glenn Beck:tomdegan.blogspot.net

(Story reported by Ben Dimiero for Media Matters.org)

Fox News' Glenn Beck has spent the past several months relentlessly promoting his upcoming "Restoring Honor" rally, scheduled to take place this Saturday. Beck claims he originally wanted to schedule the rally for September 12, but decided to change the date because he didn't want to ask people to "work on the Sabbath." Instead, Beck and his event planners scheduled the rally for August 28, which coincides with the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic "I have a dream" speech -- a fact that Beck insists he only later discovered in a New York Times article.

Nonetheless, Beck seized on the supposed coincidence, which he chalked up to "divine providence." To Beck, the 8-28 rally is more than just a gathering of like-minded conservatives calling for a restoration of "honor." Instead, he views the 8-28 rally on a much grander scale. In his words, it will be a "historic" day that will mark a "turning point in America" that your "children will remember."

Beck's discussions of the rally's supposedly crucial role in American history have included frequent invocations of the civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular. According to Beck, the rally will "reclaim the civil rights movement" because "Martin Luther King's dream" has "been distorted" and "massively perverted" by progressives. In attacking the people he claims are "perverting" King's legacy (i.e. progressives), Beck has suggested that he and his followers are the "inheritors and the protectors of the civil rights movement." In Beck's words, they will "take that movement, because we were the people that did it in the first place."

Beck is completely rewriting history.

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