On Martin Luther King Day, school board member, Brett Reese, will broadcast some very hateful and anti- Martin Luther King material many will consider "hate radio." Calling Dr, King a "plastic god," a "s*xual degenerate" and "an America hating communist" is just part of his radio's station holiday broadcast.
Brett Reese is a member of Greeley, Colorado and owner of local radio station KELS-FM 104.7. He already has a reputation around town for being disagreeable with other school board members and this is not his first time to broadcast the five minute editorial against Martin Luther King Day and the man himself.
After Reese walked out of a school board meeting last week, the board passed a resolution supporting the holiday and calling the editorial "inflammatory and detrimental to our district and community." Brett Reese claims he has lost sponsors over the broadcasts, but says he can operate indefinitely without sponsors.
Using excuses that are currently favored by many conservatives and racists, Reese told reporters, “I support the idea of being able to talk about historical facts. If these facts are out there, then we should be able to talk about them. There should not be a taboo on an honest discussion of history.”
Reese claims he received the editorial in a letter from an anonymous source. Much of its content seems to come from 1960's FBI reports ordered by J, Edgar Hoover specifically to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King. The whole editorial appears verbatim on a website with links to a white supremacist group.
The fact anyone would want to bring such garbage on Martin Luther King Day reeks of racism. No attempts to legitimize it as just a discussion of the issues can remove that. It appears to have become increasingly popular to try and legitimize bigotry by using an "innocent exchange of ideas" as the excuse. They must be so ignorant of what racism really is, they think this approach would work.
The only African American principal in Reese's school district, Bryan Wright, did put the Martin Luther King Day vs. embarrassing facts issue in perspective. He said, "To assume somebody is perfect because they're famous is misleading. What makes us special is that we're allowed to do something great despite our shortcomings." To allow people to do good things despite their shortcomings is truly American.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Monday, January 17th 2011 at 10:21PM
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