Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic words still ring true today, more than 50 years after his tragic assassination. Judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. He preached nonviolent resistance, a warning political extremists should heed today.
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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Content of Character
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Matt Kibbe
Matt Kibbe is President at Free the People, an educational foundation using video storytelling to turn on the next generation to the values of personal liberty and peaceful cooperation. He is also co-founder and partner at Fight the Power Productions, a video and strategic communications company. Kibbe is the host of BlazeTV’s Kibbe on Liberty, a popular podcast that insists that you think for yourself.
Dubbed “the scribe” by the New York Daily News, Kibbe is the author three books, most recently the #2 New York Times bestseller Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.
He was senior advisor for a Rand Paul Presidential Super PAC in 2016, and later co-founded AlternativePAC to promote libertarian values.
In 2004 Kibbe founded FreedomWorks, a national grassroots advocacy organization, and served as President until his departure in 2015. Steve Forbes said: “Kibbe has been to FreedomWorks what Steve Jobs was to Apple.”
An economist by training, Kibbe did graduate work at George Mason University and received his B.A. from Grove City College. He serves at the whim of his awesome wife Terry, and their three objectivist cats, Roark, Ragnar and Rearden. Kibbe is a fanatical DeadHead, drinker of craft beer and whisky, and collector of obscure books on Austrian economics.
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Yes, he preached equality, but our systems don’t act with equality in mind. “After all, if equality were simply a matter of codification, Jim Crow never would have happened… The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s was a multifaceted effort by a group of people that were sick of legal and extralegal mistreatment by its government and the white-dominated society from whence that government came. The symptoms of that mistreatment took many forms, and one of the most prominent was citizen abuse by law enforcement.” (Source: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/how-equal-rights-black-americans-still-arent-equal-enough) Dr. King was an astounding man. It takes a certain level of tenacity and courage to maintain that position when you and your community are being physically abused, fire hosed, and even killed by the very people who are supposed to be protecting you (law enforcement). Yet, he still committed to non-violence even in the face of egregious and oppressive government systems. That’s not equality. That’s not freedom. Simply preaching equality doesn’t inherently make our systems equal.