Star Parker, founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), argues MLK Jr.’s original message—removing government barriers to freedom—was distorted by progressive policies like Johnson’s Great Society, feminism redefining marriage, and Roe v. Wade, which she claims deepened societal divisions. A Trump ally, she opposes DEI programs and welfare, favoring tax cuts and privatized Social Security over reparations or redistribution, insisting America can self-correct through merit and markets. Viewers debate her claims, while Peniel Joseph counters that King’s legacy demands addressing unresolved racial injustices, framing the clash as a battle over whether systemic change or individual accountability defines true progress. [Automatically generated summary]
To discuss Martin Luther King Jr.'s impact on his federal holiday honoring the civil rights leader Star Parker of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.
I think it was a little bit later in his movement, if you will.
And I'm so glad that you're having me on to discuss this very, very important topic because as a society, we've gotten way off track from what he wanted and why he came to Washington, D.C., and now has his honor over there on the mall.
When you think about where Dr. King made that I Have a Dream speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and he said, you know, America, you're a little bit away from your founding principles.
The progressive movement has hijacked Dr. King and all that he was attempting to do.
When you look at why he said he came to Washington, it was for freedom.
It was remove the governmental barrier so that we can live free as African Americans.
At that point in history, they were called Negro.
And what we saw was a moral movement.
Many of the people that were early on with Dr. King were about Christianity.
They were about making things equitable for all people living up to our Declaration.
I mean, let's look at the speech, for instance.
He called these magnificent words when you look at the Declaration and the Constitution.
He talked about sacred obligation when you think about what he was addressing in the first part of his speech.
The speech, in my opinion, is broken down into three parts.
You have the one where he talked to the country.
He said, you know what?
This is not going really well for one particular people group that are citizens of this country.
Number two, he talked to the Negro at the time.
He said, look, what we want to do, I really believe that we're getting to the place where we are going to be incorporated into this society the way that we should be.
But do not build bitterness and hatred, anger, which is where we are today.
And then the third party appealed to the country.
He said, you know what, okay, here we go.
Mostly in the country, those that believed in the fundamental principles of the country, that Judeo-Christian ethic that not only secured our country, but that was brought from the European countries.
When you think about Western culture and civilization, it comes right down to scripture.
We're a long way from the biblical truths because the progressives hijacked that movement in the 60s.
Well, when you think about the 60s, a whole lot of activities were going on at the same time.
While he was and the blacks were moving toward freedom, the country was moving away from those founding principles.
We had a feminist movement that decided that marriage was no longer important.
We had Johnson himself, when he started putting into place during that same time that blacks were saying, Let us live free, he started putting in place the great society which said government should have a bigger role in people's lives.
It started to unravel.
Five years after King's death, we saw Roe v. Wade as national law.
And while it is really a horrible opportunity for that we are now discussing even this week because the March for Life this week, but when you think about the impact on family life, in particular on black family life, so when you, when we look at what's going on today in current affairs, whether it's poverty, which is what you asked about, or whether it's who should we be as a people, should we as a society now dismantle all of that structure that came in for government involvement to fix what had broken down in our country,
we can point to that moment in history in the 60s that the progressive movements had a different agenda than where Dr. King was going.
Well, we did have a Civil Rights Act, and you're right, it was rewritten and we had it incorporated a year after Dr. King came here and made that infamous speech.
When you think about I Have a Dream, he was seeing us united as a society, not more divided.
And after his death, the progressives picked up that baton and took us in a different direction, built out hatred.
You know, there's a difference between desegregation and forced integration.
So, next thing you know, we're forcing people to do things they not necessarily wanted to do.
We're forcing people to share spaces that they don't necessarily want to share.
And then we use the arm of government and big government at that to force people to pay excessive taxation to take care of other people's lives.
We really did get lost in those 60s, and now we're correcting.
Now, we're starting to see, especially with Donald Trump and his administration, say, can we get to a place where we can reset?
Can we get to a place in our 250 years to see can America work?
So they're dismantling all of that DEI, which would grow out of that whole multiculturalism movement, which grew out of affirmative action.
These were government actions that forced people to do things that they perhaps should not have done and/or did not want to do.
Dr. King said it himself when he was talking about what he was trying to accomplish.
He said, You can't legislate morality, you regulate behavior through law.
I can't make a man love me, but I can keep them from lynching me.
So, what we've been doing as a society over the last 50 years is trying to force people to behave the way progressives think they should behave.
And yet, we have a moral outline in our Declaration of Independence that was rooted in the scriptures to say all of us can self-govern if we want to.
Star Parker with us, and if you want to ask her questions on this Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, 202-748-8000 for Democrats, Republicans, 202748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002, you can text us thoughts at 202-748-8003.
It was a year ago that you wrote this about the president in an op-ed.
You said, Common ground between the appeal of Donald Trump in 2025 and the appeal of King in 1963 is that both were about the pressing need to be faithful to the founding principles of the country.
Trump's MAGA message in 2025 is that the nation has destructively strayed from these principles.
King's message in 1963 was that the country failed and was failing to live up to those founding principles.
What do you say about that sentiment a year later in the first year of the second term of Donald Trump?
Then we're saying that we don't trust mankind to be good.
And so the same people who keep insisting that situational ethics are a good thing are the same people that are arguing that we as a society can't self-govern.
I just, I dismiss it.
And we have an opportunity to see.
Now we have an opportunity, that third part of Dr. King's speech to say, okay, it's going to be difficult.
He said it.
It was really three parts.
He said it's going to be hard.
But he appealed to his Christian brethren.
He appealed to those that really wanted a civil society and said, let's make this happen.
So now it's up to us unique individuals to see if we can make this right.
Well, I think that the society has already gauged success because we are multicultural and we are multi and we're very diverse in everything that we do and our friendships are wide.
It's a lie out of the left that we just can't seem to get along with each other.
We can't live near each other.
We can't go to school with each other.
We can't play with each other without government force.
Well, yeah, they were crying because he had gotten killed.
He had gotten killed.
They were from the Jim Crow South.
And when they left, my dad left with his bride from his high school, they never looked back and they ever mentioned it.
So I kind of grew up in an environment to get really lost.
And boy, did I get lost because when we came back the following year and every city in the country was on fire, it excited me as a 12, 13 year old.
And next thing I know, I'm in criminal activity and drug activity and sexual activity and unraveling the way that we have concentrated this type of philosophy in our urban core.
I got lost in all of that.
And it wasn't until a Christian conversion that I was able to really change my life and start living like an individual with the uniqueness that God had given me.
Because you deal with the issues of poverty, what is the approach best that the government, United States, or the government should take towards addressing poverty?
Every department here in Washington, D.C. is rooted in a philosophy that poor people can't self-govern.
We need to stop.
We need to stop pouring a trillion dollars a year into programs so people can, based on a philosophy that people can't help themselves.
Let's give opportunity.
Now, can everybody do the same thing?
We know they can't, but we should at least give people the opportunity to get out of their broken schools, get out of their broken health care, get out of their broken housing.
All of these things that government thinks that they are supposed to do for others, just get out of the way.
This is our 250th anniversary.
Let's see if we can self-govern.
Let's see if people can prosper.
Let's see if they can discover their own purposes and live.
Let's hear from Abraham, who joins us from Virginia, Republican line for Star Parker.
unidentified
Hello.
Yes, good morning.
Ms. Parker has a very positive message.
I wish that all African Americans could understand it.
Martin Luther King also said that for every dollar that goes to the poor, the poor gets 5 cents and the people who are giving it to the poor gets 95 cents.
That's the same thing that happened up in Minnesota.
So how can, and it seems like there's a lot of white liberals that continue to push these programs on black America.
How can we stop the white liberals from pushing these programs on black America, which is destroying black America?
Well, you're pointing to the progressive movement, if you will.
And sitting in the House of Representatives right across from us, there's 100 members in this progressive movement, and they're multi-ethnic.
So we can't say that this is just white liberals.
And in fact, coming out of the 60s, you saw a whole lot of black leaders at the time identifying with Cuba the same way we do today, seeing them identify with Cuba and Venezuela.
There are progressives that really believe that socialism is a good idea, that really believe that we can micromanage a pure society and utopian society.
And it's not true, but you're absolutely right.
In the investment of government to destroy people's lives, it's been a long time.
I don't know specifically that those numbers are correct, that this 95-5, but I do know that seven out of $10 that comes into Washington, D.C. goes out immediately to a person through a program, and none of them have worked.
I've said over time, we don't need to go to Cuba to see what happens when government takes over people's lives.
We can go to Camden, we can go to Compton, and now we're starting to see the unraveling because people are upset that they still don't have control of their own lives.
The reason they don't have control of their own lives is because of big government.
That's why I think that we should dismantle one size fits all programs.
Everybody knows whether you're buying a car or clothing that one size does not fit all.
And I did not say that I believe people are good.
And in fact, I believe the exact opposite.
I said that progressives have rooted their philosophy in the fact that people are basically good, but because of other things, other situations, they misbehave.
And this is inconsistent with scripture.
When it comes to African Americans who decide they want to live free, I really don't have a problem with African Americans that want to decide that they want to live free.
What I do have a problem with is African Americans who think that other African Americans should not want to live free.
What we have done over the last 50 years with the legacy of Dr. King is wrong.
And we need to be able to discuss where we got off track, even as an African American people, and why it is that we keep buying this philosophy that somebody else has to fix our problems, that the country is inherently racist and can't self-correct.
No, why you have a rule of law and why it has been built out in this wonderful country of ours and how it is built out in the Constitution is a good thing for people to live free.
The government's role is to protect our interests so that we can live free.
Just like your children, you put a fence around your house.
They can now play freely because the fence is around the house.
So I just am not going to continue to buy this philosophy of African Americans that think because I think for myself, because I built my own business, because I really like freedom and I love my country, that I should feel bad about those things, that all of a sudden I'm a sellout or whatever else it was that you called me.
I've just, I've been called some of everything.
I've been in this business 30 years.
And frankly, I appreciate how many now younger African Americans are starting to get new information about freedom.
They're four generations away from the slavery that he talked about.
And that group said, maybe we should put a little bit of our equity into Donald Trump to see, can we live free?
And I don't see any of the African Americans that supported Donald Trump in that last election saying we did wrong.
What they're seeing is an opportunity to grow and develop their lives.
Is it hard?
Of course, individualism is hard.
Freedom is very difficult, but at least you get an opportunity to try.
Yes, my great-grandfather was a slave, and our people have worked hundreds of years without being paid.
And Dr. King even said that America gave the black Americans a check that was marked NSF.
My question is, do you think that in order to make up for this as far as reparations would be federal tax exempt status for descendants of slaves?
You don't give us anything, just stop taking.
There's a book called Economic Revolution on Amazon, and that was the premise of that book, that you don't give us anything, just stop taking to help us to catch up.
Well, I think the best thing you can do for that scenario as opposed to reparations is to personalize Social Security.
If everyone had a stake in America, all of a sudden we would all grow together.
When you think about Wall Street, you're not going to burn down Wall Street if you own Wall Street.
So to that concept that you're talking, what do we do in tax benefit so that people can learn how to live free and get along with each other?
Is you connect us by having our payroll taxes go into equity, go into your own private or personal account.
I don't know that we would ever sell anything like reparations in this society, nor do I think that we should.
And in fact, I joke with my nephew often.
I say, you know, if they ever get to the debates on reparations and we're having our hearings, I'm going to go in the hearing room with his little son because his little son, I mean, which line would he get in?
He looks like the mom, and yet he has some of the features of my nephew.
So we are too complex as a society to keep talking about what others should do for us.
What we ought to do is grow up into the era that we're in right now and take our talents and build on them.
But I really do think that personalizing Social Security is something we should consider.
And in fact, you even see now Trump has Trump accounts.
Why are we trying to micromanage other people's lives?
You know what the real challenge was going back to the 60s is when we allow for family life to collapse, when no longer were the virtues inside of a household and we had heavy emphasis on getting married and settled down and then and self-correct in a household, you begin to have to have all these other kind of programs.
No, I don't agree that we should now take from me to help somebody else who's having a child pay for their life or get a start.
We all start with nothing and then we start building with that from that.
And so if you really want to help people get ahead, then we should get the government out of our education and where that money goes to these government actually funded and then union controlled schools.
You really want to start building people's lives or helping them build their lives, then allow for school choice.
All of these things connect to a philosophy of the progressives that people can't self-govern.
So it's up to us to say, can we?
Do we really know how to manage our own lives, whatever that life looks like?
And the beauty of America is where you start is not where you end.
That's why people call us exceptional.
That's why we call ourselves exceptional.
The progressives are even offended by us saying that America exceptionalism is golden.
But what does that actually mean?
It means for the first time in the history of the world, you had a country that if you're born poor, you don't have to die poor, that we were exceptional in that we were the exception to the rule.
There was no other country that was rooted in a pluribus unim where everybody gets an opportunity to grow.
Were there challenges?
Of course there were.
I mean, 20% of the people in the country when we founded our country were slaved.
And it took them 100 years to figure out what they need to do about this question, including a civil war, get to 100 years later, as Dr. King pointed out in his speech.
We're still having these challenges because you just keep insisting as a society that certain people don't qualify for just living here in the free country.
Because Dr. King didn't say the government should be responsible.
He said we've been dealt a bad hand, remove these barriers.
Jim Crow were government barriers.
It wasn't everywhere in our society, and free people were able to get along with each other.
When you start looking at what happened to get us so divided, it was all rooted in government.
That's why it fascinates me today that so many blacks keep calling for more government.
This was government.
This is not the first time we've seen the National Guard from the federal level have to go into a state.
The federal government came into the states of the South because they wouldn't behave in local law.
So I, yeah, I understand what you're saying, but I don't see, and I've not studied fully Dr. King.
In fact, many of his later years, it looked like he was being convinced that there were government programs that would help us get out of our dilemma.
But I don't see that consistency in what he believed.
He was a Christian man, and Christianity is about personal responsibility and growing with the talent that you have and the gift that you've been given.
Hey, I just wanted to say some of the rhetoric around Dr. King's beliefs and whether or not liberals are wrong and conservatives are wrong.
I think the one irate speech that I remember him giving was about the different farm grants and all the things that was used to help white immigrants and white people sustain a quality of life in this country and how he absolutely felt that was unfair or pretty much held that as the standard for all.
And I think it's a little bit of a reverse psychology to try to continue to hit liberals over the head to say that even the things that Donald Trump is doing for white America today is somehow immoral or against the American way.
I think here we are with the question again of the role of government.
When you're talking about grants and arguing over who gets a grant, you're going to have conflict.
And that conflict can break down ethnically, and it certainly did in our country.
I'm one that most of my friends think I'm more libertarian than I probably should be, that says, get the government out of these businesses.
Render to Caesar what Caesar is to God, what's God.
And when you think about personal life and decisions, this is in the God area.
This is not for Caesar to decide.
This is not for society to say, okay, I'm going to pick this winner and I'm going to pick that loser.
Government is supposed to be blind justice.
That's what Dr. King was appealing to.
It wasn't at the time.
He was fighting against excessive government.
And now, here we are, including in the African-American community with many of our leaders fighting for that same government that he was actually fighting against.
I think that safety net programs are a challenge for all of us as a society.
When you think about government's role in people's personal lives, you have to have means test.
Who qualifies?
That's why it's out of hand right now, including what we're seeing in Obamacare debates right today.
Who qualifies?
Are we going to have a threshold of $90,000 or is it $9,000?
What does each community look like to determine that a federal hand should say, you should get this, but you should pay for that?
Remove all of these barriers.
This is the role of charity.
If somebody has need in our society, then they should go into the nonprofit world.
And there's not a community in our society that there is not a nonprofit there to help in whatever that area of need is.
That should be the first recourse.
And we need to remove barriers, which including governmental barriers, which means taxation, to keep people from giving to their local charity as opposed to sending it to the government for their one-size-fits-all safety net programs.
You know, I used to live on their safety net program seven years in and out of the welfare state, three and a half years consistently.
You know what the rules were?
Don't work, don't save, don't get married, and we'll keep you enslaved to this poverty plantation.
That's the rule of our so-called safety nets.
Don't worry about it.
Get on a list for a housing project.
And while you're on that list, we're going to force businesses to do something they ought not do.
You know, this test that we're getting ready to experiment up in New York is going to be fascinating to see now a major city in our country.
Dr. King did not call us a democracy in his I Have a Dream speech.
He said we are a republic.
Now we have these progressives that are labeling themselves democratic socialists.
And what they're doing is building out the coffers of government on somebody else's experiment, monies, if you will.
So we're going to see what happens.
Money is so fungible, it moves to make more of itself because that's its nature to make more of itself.
And it's colorblind.
Money doesn't care what color you are that has it.
It's just going to go make more of itself.
So if you ruin New York City, that money is going to jump somewhere else.
And so when you think about housing and all of these other so-called safety net programs, while they are trying to take from one to give to another, the government role in giving to that other one is not where it belongs.
That's why every government housing project is in the ghetto.
That's why all of it is dilapidated.
And it's going to be fascinating to see what happens in New York as they start trying to do all this free rent and free buses and free everything.
And government dependency is ruining people's capacity.
So I built out a policy institute here in D.C. 30 years ago, and now it's grown and has a new leadership.
And Donald Easton, the pastor, is doing an incredible job to build out that concept so that we can get deeper into the hardbroken parts of our society and help people recover their own lives.
And then, yes, I write every week.
And now I'm running for Congress.
I'm actually running to get inside so that I can, you know, work on some of these areas that I really think need more attention than just progressives constantly saying, nope, can't do that.
Nope, can't do that.
When you stop believing that people have ability to live their own lives, you have problems.
And I really just think that someone needs to challenge this progressive philosophy that's now taken root in our law.
And it's stealing people's worth, dignity, and their agency.
They don't even try anymore because they think that life is stacked against them.
Well, Mike Levin, my sitting congressman, I live in Southern California in Little Beachtown, San Clemente.
We are not progressives.
We're Semperfy.
Cap Pendleton is in my district.
We're surfers.
And in fact, in 2028, we actually have the surfing of the Olympics.
And so we're very proud of that locally.
But he's a progressive.
When you think about sitting in this area, Mike Levin is a progressive.
And he's hanging out with people like Omar and Khalib and all of these philosophy, oh I see and people that are destroying the very lifestyle that we have in our society, in our my community.
We're trying to just live free.
And yet we have someone that's experimenting their ideas on us and nobody knows that he's experiencing.
When you look at what they are doing, progressives, in our law, national law today, somebody needs to challenge it.
And so when I had a realization that this was my sitting congressman, I said, oh no, I just can't do this, Lord.
And I heard in my gut, God say, then take them out.
So I filed in August last.
I was retired.
I wasn't doing anything.
So I filed.
And now I'm running.
And now I'm excited about running because there are specific areas that I want to work on, not just for my community, but for all of our society.
Because where we live, we're house poor for sure.
Most of us live in million-dollar houses, but when you can't buy gas or groceries and the way that the progressive left treats our military, and he's sitting there with Kent Pendleton, these are good guys.
And yet we're as a society spend more money on the interest of the debt, the interest of the debt, than we do on our entire Defense Department.
Well, it's interesting, Eddie, because whether you think these programs have helped people over their lifetime, and many will conclude that they do.
I remember my mom, when she got her little Social Security check for $700 a month, it was the first time she ever voted for a Republican, was George Bush, because he said she could work, because she knew she couldn't live off $700 a month.
But let's think about what happens when you put that money in the marketplace.
This is where we haven't tested ourselves.
And I think that in this 250th year, we should allow ourselves to see, can we build a free society even when it comes to how we do our seniors and our care?
Should we put that money instead in the marketplace for Social Security?
Well, absolutely.
She would not have had $700 a month.
She would have had $7,000 a month.
Now, can we just do it arbitrarily?
Of course not.
However, we should at least experiment with market-based solutions to do these things that we have insisted government do.
Medicare, oh, I'm getting my Medicare now and my Social Security.
And I'm finding out even more so how flawed these programs are and how they're not doing the benefit programs that they say they are or have the advantage that they say.
If you don't have extra resources to buy a supplemental plan, you're really in a socialist plan and you're not going to get the care that you need over time.
So I just really think that this is a reset opportunity for us to say, all right, we're looking at yesterday's programs.
No other program other than these have we still had 100 years later.
No other business.
You know, even Sachs is saying, okay, 100 years later, you know, we have to do a different model.
So I think that as a society, we should think about new models.
You wrote an op-ed, but you said this about Dr. King in the middle of May of 2016.
You said the full measure of King's legacy requires nothing less than to honestly wrestle with the hard truths that he publicly confronted a half century ago and that remain perhaps even more fiercely urgent in our own time than this.