Publisher’s Note: Happy MLK Day 2023. Beautiful list of LEADERSHIP LESSONS from MLK’s life and career. To the matter at hand… After 3 books and close to 40 years of research, US lawyer and civil rights activist William Pepper now has conclusively proved that MLK was not assassinated by “lone gunman” James Earl Ray, but by a conspiracy (yes, a conspiracy) involving the Memphis PD, “Dixie Mafia,” FBI, and President LBJ. This inconvenient truth, unknown to most Americans and ignored by the vast majority of US “news” outlets who diligently work to craft public memory, and thus, collective “reality,” is best understood in the larger context of 21st century US imperial realities, and it helps explain why Martin Luther King ultimately may have moved towards political decentralism if he had not been gunned down in his prime. The Truth is always difficult and complex, and emerges slowly over years of painstaking research driven by the relentless asking of questions and vigorous public dialogue and debate, and the Truth is rarely popular, with Truth Tellers like MLK being systematically targeted by the Status Quo perpetuating Powers-That-Be.

To wit. The US “is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King remarked in an incendiary speech that catalyzed political tensions across the United States. The most compelling US national political reality of the past four years is not Donald Trump’s turbulent presidency. Rather, it is the fact that POTUS DJT has amplified the same US imperial policies amplified by POTUS BHO for eight years before him, and that BOTH major political parties – the globalist DS/Democratic party and the nationalist Republican party – are carrying out the SAME imperial US policies that threaten not only ordinary US citizens, but the world as a whole, bringing home the Empire to roost here in the United States. And now Biden. MLK’s intertwined trio – racism, materialism, and militarism – are alive and well in the 21st century U.S. of Empire. During the mid-20th century, the civil rights movement relied on the federal government to ultimately do the right thing to protect civil and voting rights through federal laws for ALL Americans. But what of the 21st century? We increasingly live in what MLK called a “thing-oriented society.” Citizens of all colors in the United States are systematically being denied their rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” by new WHO/CDC viral protocols that are stripping Sovereign Humans of their autonomy and pitting US against one another, against the backdrop of two decades of national digital “Electile Dysfunction” that have turned over our US electoral system to proprietary for-profit corporate interests. One wonders if MLK, if he were alive today, might have advocated for a more decentralized approach to a more compassionate world. Would Martin, in short, have become a peaceable secessionist? “The arc of the moral universe is long,” King famously observed, “but it bends towards justice.” And, we would argue, decentralization. Happy MLK Day 2023. Free Vermont, and long live the UNtied States.