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Glenn Beck decided to repeat his asking-black-conservatives-dumb-white-guy-questions show with a new round, this time evidently focused on Harry Reid's remarks. Unlike the last time, there weren't any open embarrassments, except for the moment when Beck agreed that poor people are "like a domesticated animal [that] never learns to hunt."

But again, Beck hijacked the words of Martin Luther King Jr. He opened up the show with a King quote written on a chalkboard.

And it really is shameless. Conservatives nowadays love to claim King as one of their own. And it's a complete joke -- because when King was alive, conservatives were the people he had to combat.

Rick Perlstein described this some time back:

When Martin Luther King was buried in Atlanta, the live television coverage lasted seven and a half hours. President Johnson announced a national day of mourning: "Together, a nation united and a nation caring and a nation concerned and a nation that thinks more of the nation's interests than we do of any individual self-interest or political interest--that nation can and shall and will overcome." Richard Nixon called King "a great leader--a man determined that the American Negro should win his rightful place alongside all others in our nation." Even one of King's most beastly political enemies, Mississippi Representative William Colmer, chairman of the House rules committee, honored the president's call to unity by terming the murder "a dastardly act."

Others demurred. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond wrote his constituents, "[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case." Another, even more prominent conservative said it was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break."

That was Ronald Reagan, the governor of California, arguing that King had it coming. King was the man who taught people they could choose which laws they'd break--in his soaring exegesis on St. Thomas Aquinas from that Birmingham jail in 1963: "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong."

That's not what you hear from conservatives today, of course. What you get now are convoluted and fantastical tributes arguing that, properly understood, Martin Luther King was actually one of them--or would have been, had he lived. But, if we are going to have a holiday to honor history, we might as well honor history. We might as well recover the true story. Conservatives--both Democrats and Republicans--hated King's doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism.

I lived in a conservative town in a conservative state at the time, and I remember how deeply and viscerally people hated Martin Luther King when he was alive. And for years after his death, conservatives fought his legacy. They opposed a national holiday in his honor (Jesse Helms, that conservative icon, launched a filibuster against the proposal). Even today, many conservatives believe the old Bircherite smears that King was a Communist.

I thought Beck had a phobia about Communists. After all, the allegations that King had "Communist ties" are about as well grounded as Beck's own charges that Van Jones was a "self-proclaimed Communist."

But I guess when they make for handy stage props for phony discussions about race with a carefully selected audience -- shows which rapidly devolve into whinefests by black conservatives about being pegged as sellouts -- he'll look the other way.

Now, I dunno about sellouts. But anyone who thinks "conservative values" were anything but a hindrance to the black community for most of this country's history is just plain ignorant.

Especially if you know anything about what Martin Luther King Jr. actually stood for when he was alive -- and who his enemies were. They were conservatives. And for them to try to claim his mantle now is a travesty and a joke.

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It is hard to explain to white people like Glenn Beck why their "innocent" questions about race actually just reveal their ignorance and their false assumptions about people of other races and the nature of race relations.

But Beck is so blitheringly un-self-aware that he decided to give it a go anyway yesterday on his Fox News show. As you might expect, it was a serial embarrassment.

Beck, you see, was careful to hand-select his audience, people "the media claim don't think exist" -- black conservatives! Not that he ever actually explains this to the viewing audience -- you have to figure that out for yourselves as the show goes along, like the moment when he asks the audience if they think we're headed toward socialism (they all raise their hands) or are accused of being not "black enough" if they are conservative (again, a unanimous show of hands).

And it let Beck lead exchanges like this, with Beck regular Charles Payne and talk-show host Lisa Fritsch:

Beck: How many people here identify themselves as African Americans? (About a third raise their hands) OK -- Why?

Payne: It's interchangeable.

Beck: But wait, wait. Why not identify yourself as Americans?

Fritsch: Well, people can look at you and tell you're black. You can't escape that.

Beck: Yeah, but I don't identify myself as white, or a white American.

Will Brown of the New York Republican Community Coalition points out, adroitly, that "African American" is an "evolution" from the "N word" -- and certainly is preferable. Moreover, it wasn't black people who invented the "N word" or the segregation from enjoying the full fruits of American citizenship it represented -- it was white people. "African American" represents the recognition of their dignity and their rights as Americans.

But this point sails right over Beck's head, because he's too ignorant to appreciate the implications. Had Beck even a smidgen of American history, particularly pertaining to civil rights, he'd know that white Americans for most of the decades of the past century used the word "American" and "real American" almost exclusively to refer to white people -- and that this motif lingers even today (see, e.g., Sarah Palin's references to "real Americans" during the campaign -- speaking before small-town, all-white audiences).

This historical and cultural ignorance just kept manifesting itself:

Beck: Because one of the problems that I have -- and I have to tell you, as a white guy, as a white guy, I'm just being real honest with you, as a white guy, I think white people are uncomfortable sometimes saying, 'You know what, Martin Luther King' -- and then quoting Martin Luther King, because, it's almost as if society says -- 'No no no! That's our guy! Not your guy!' And it shouldn't be that way. And so Martin Luther King, wasn't the dream that we're all judged by the content of our character?

Beck doesn't understand why it's idiotic of white people to quote King -- namely, King was speaking in defense of black people whose civil rights had been systematically and violently denied for over a century, and his words were spoken in that context. They weren't intended to be spoken in defense of advantaged white people who want an excuse to keep stereotyping black people.

The black conservative talkers he had on weren't a whole lot better. Perhaps the most outrageously ahistorical remark came from Fritsch:

Fritsch: The only way black people were ever able to triumph is because of conservative values, which is directly linked to Christianity. Had we been liberals, during the Civil Rights movement, nobody would have done anything!

Um, Ms. Fritsch, you need to avail yourself some history books too. It was conservatives who argued for maintaining slavery before the Civil War. It was conservatives who insisted after the war that blacks be denied the full rights of citizenship, and who erected the system of Jim Crow, who led rope-bearing lynch mobs that crucified thousands of black people. It was conservatives who erected "No Black After Sundown" signs at the city borders of thousands of American towns.

And most of all, it was conservatives who fought the Civil Rights movement tooth and nail. And it was only from the ceaseless efforts of liberals -- many of them indeed Christian liberals -- in opposition to conservatives, many of them Christian conservatives -- that anything was in fact achieved during that era. Somehow, you've managed to get your history completely upside down.

This idiocy reached its apotheosis, though, when Beck played for his audience that audio tape of black Detroiters turning out for welfare assistance funds, originally promoted by Rush Limbaugh, which was nothing more than a nakedly racist bit of ugly stereotyping on the part of the radio talker, Ken Rogulski, who produced it. As King Crimson observed:

The conservo-talk reporter cherry picked through the audio booty until he found the absolute best soundbite that would most perfectly frame the city as one filled with Obama-fawning morons, black Sambos, and greedy welfare grabbers - precisely, as Limbaugh would later argue, the kind of rank idiots who would vote for someone like America's first black president.

And if you listen to the woman making the "Obama money" remarks, you can hear that she's cracking humorously on the humorless, stereotype-dependent white guy asking. He -- and Beck and Limbaugh, by extension -- are the butt of the joke and they don't even know it.

Well, we actually know where Beck thinks this talk comes from:

Beck: All right. These are the people who have been abused by the system. They've been taught they needed the government. They've been taught to be slaves, and their master is Washington! Both parties!

For some reason, those weren't the words he used yesterday. Hmmm. Wonder why not, don't you?

This is just vintage Beck, gorging himself on dumbass white stereotypes of black people and then fobbing himself off as just a colorblind white guy. As we noted before, this is his way of race-baiting:

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Geraldo Rivera sent one of his Fox crews out to cover last week's "Uni-Tea" event in Philly -- you know, the one that was pretty much a total disaster in terms of turnout and meeting the objective, which was to demonstrate how non-racist the Tea Party really is.

Pretty hard to make that case when nearly all of the 200 or so who showed up were lily-white, as even Geraldo's reporter suggests. What he neglected to mention, however, was how puny the turnout was. Maybe the black turnout was so poor because Andrew Breitbart was a headliner. And maybe the general turnout was so light because most of the speakers were refugees from one of those excruciating Glenn Beck "let's talk about race with black conservatives" episodes.

Their schtick, which is getting a bit shopworn by now, was duly stenographed by the AP:

The black members said the racism that has been attributed to the tea party movement came from outsiders who infiltrated the groups to discredit their work and it should be rejected.

"These people do not oppose Barack Obama because of his skin color. They oppose him because of his policies," said Lloyd Marcus, a spokesman for the group.

Simon Maloy notes, of course, that the whole "infiltrator" paranoia among Tea Partiers is pretty hilarious. It's gotten to where all a real infiltrator has to do is show up and start accusing other Tea Partiers of being infiltrators.

Eric Boehlert observes that events like this actually point to a movement in state of decay:

Optimistic organizers, who boasted that their website had attracted 2 million hits during the run-up to the big rally, predicted a crowd of 3,000-4,000 people for the Philadelphia event. And they had every reason to be confident. After all, right-wing celebrity Andrew Breitbart, fresh off his Shirley Sherrod star turn, was scheduled to speak at the event, which was held on a gorgeous summer day in downtown Philadelphia on Independence Mall, where throngs of tourists would already be milling around. So it made sense, as Talking Points Memo reported, that organizers had 1,500 bottles of water on ice to hand out for the throngs who descended on the rally to cheer the Tea Party message.

But how many people actually showed up last Saturday for the national Tea Party rally? One local report put the number at 300. That’s right, 300, or less than one-tenth of the expected turnout. In fact, it’s possible more people showed up in Philadelphia last week to commemorate the opening of the new Apple computer store than showed up at the nationally promoted Tea Party rally featuring Andrew Breitbart.

Oh, and if those black folks want to find some racism? All they have to do is head over to the Tea Party Nation website and log onto the forums, where they can discuss the "Horrors of Illegal Immigration":

[H/t Jamie]

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