Valuetainment - January 14, 2026


“MLK’s Communist Ties” - How Stanley Levison CREATED Martin Luther King

Topics
Stanley Levison and SCLC
Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Stanley Levison Martin Luther King Clarence B. Jones Coretta Scott King John F. Kennedy R. F. Kennedy Mencius Moldbug George Floyd David Garrow Jack O'Dell McCarthyism Stalin
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Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

157.1

Word count

1,401

Sentence count

103

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of Mythology, we take a deep dive into the life and career of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the people who helped him achieve his goals. We talk about how he was a communist, who he worked with, and who influenced him.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Here's another fun story that your researchers can bring up easily.
00:00:04.380 Do you know the name Stanley Levison?
00:00:05.980 No.
00:00:06.820 So Stanley Levison was, until 1956, I think he was not, it was not an official title,
00:00:15.960 but he was basically the CFO of the Communist Party USA.
00:00:21.020 He kind of ran its financial operations.
00:00:23.740 And in 56, or 55, really, he realizes that the writing is on the wall for being a minion of Stalin.
00:00:33.880 It's like McCarthyism has happened.
00:00:35.960 It's like, you know, it's just Hungary has happened. 0.94
00:00:40.500 Like, it's just not, it's not the vibe.
00:00:43.920 It's not the thing.
00:00:44.580 So Levison does this interesting thing where he decides to revive a cause of the Communist Party from the 1930s.
00:00:56.400 And he finds a black minister with a somewhat dodgy PhD and creates a movement and an organization 1.00
00:01:07.700 and writes all of his speeches and manages his whole organization. 0.71
00:01:12.020 Absolutely.
00:01:13.800 This organization is called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
00:01:17.400 The preacher is Martin Luther King.
00:01:19.500 And the funniest thing, here's a fun thing that you can do with Wikipedia.
00:01:23.840 If you go to, you know, Stanley Levison's page, you will see that it says that Stanley Levison was influential in creating the SCLC.
00:01:33.320 Go to the SCLC's page.
00:01:36.620 No mention.
00:01:37.540 Nothing.
00:01:38.020 He's not on the page.
00:01:39.120 He's not on the page.
00:01:39.780 Um, and, and, and so like, this is the.
00:01:44.300 That's what was instrumental in all the activities of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
00:01:47.260 the organization established by Dr. King and other Southern black preachers to further the cause of civil rights.
00:01:52.280 He had initially been introduced.
00:01:54.300 Go to the SCLC page.
00:01:55.680 Go to the SCLC.
00:01:58.100 Search for Levison.
00:01:58.980 Why not?
00:02:04.800 Man, you know, like, you've seen the Truman Show.
00:02:07.860 You're like, what does that car come around every, every hour?
00:02:10.720 You know?
00:02:12.760 So, but what, what does this mean to, to, to a, to a guy like you?
00:02:16.700 How do you process this information?
00:02:18.240 So, what did they use, did they use MLK to?
00:02:22.640 It's, it's, no, it's just that it's like, you know, when you see an organization, you know, government, a non-government, you know, you can never be sure that it is what it says it is.
00:02:39.980 And so, you know, basically for, you know, even now, like, it's like we accept all these sort of lies without question.
00:02:49.120 We see a politician reading a speech and we're like, well, we didn't know he, he, he didn't really write that speech.
00:02:54.540 Maybe he helped edit it a little bit.
00:02:56.260 Maybe he marked it up, but he's reading someone else's speech.
00:02:59.260 You know, you're saying I have a dream was written by him.
00:03:02.420 No, no, no, no, he didn't write his own speeches.
00:03:05.560 This is common.
00:03:06.380 This is well-known history.
00:03:07.260 So, I have a dream speech wasn't written by Martin Luther King.
00:03:10.400 No, he didn't write his own speeches.
00:03:11.940 He might have written a letter from a Birmingham jail because he was actually in the Birmingham jail, but I'm not, you know, completely confident of that.
00:03:18.780 If he wrote a letter from a Birmingham jail, he was plagiarizing his own speechwriters.
00:03:23.560 You know, and he, Stanley was one of the speechwriters?
00:03:25.760 Yes.
00:03:26.540 Go back, Rob, on the, on the previous, go back one page on the, oh, right there.
00:03:32.480 Martin Luther King said I have a dream speech, but it was collaborative effort on key contributions from his lawyer and speechwriters,
00:03:36.520 Clarence B. Jones, businessman Stanley Leveson.
00:03:39.280 Businessman Stanley Leveson.
00:03:40.160 Yeah, businessman, not communist, and other advisors who drafted, provided input, and king himself.
00:03:44.320 I think Jones is also a communist, you know.
00:03:45.880 Clarence is also a communist?
00:03:46.860 But, well, you know, I don't know the first time.
00:03:49.520 I just want to read you one more thing because while you were speaking, I read this one part.
00:03:53.160 Go back on the previous page.
00:03:54.840 Go to the RFK site.
00:03:56.180 It's like five sentences from the bottom.
00:03:58.040 In 1963, following the revelation of Dr. King's circle, that Attorney General Bobby Ken, R. F. Kennedy, and then John F. Kennedy had pressured Dr. King in person to break with Leveson and Jack O'Dell.
00:04:11.640 Also communist.
00:04:13.200 Also communist?
00:04:14.100 Yeah.
00:04:14.600 But Leveson continued to advise Dr. King privately until Dr. King's assassination in April of 68.
00:04:21.460 And afterwards, Leveson continued to work with Dr. King's wife, Coretta Scott King, the Poor People's Campaign in D.C. that took place from May 12 to July.
00:04:28.980 Of course, he's actually the CEO, right?
00:04:31.840 And, like, he's actually the CEO, right?
00:04:34.520 So MLK's communist ties to Leveson.
00:04:37.220 Yeah, but it was, you know, the thing is, if you pull back to the bigger picture, basically, even the term civil rights, so basically what you had was in the 30s with cases like, for example, the Scottsboro Boys, which was George Floyd in the 1930s, you know, you had this basically black nationalism and black liberation, huge, huge cause of the Communist Party in the 20s and 30s.
00:05:06.140 If you look up the phrase of self-determination in the Black Belt, for example, that's a 1920s-era communist slogan.
00:05:15.060 And they actually imagined having black SSRs in, like, Alabama, like, Soviets, actually parts of the Soviet Union.
00:05:24.560 And, like, you know, because the Soviet Union was intended to be a world government, of course, right?
00:05:30.400 You know, and it wasn't Russian.
00:05:33.020 It was started in Russia.
00:05:36.220 And, you know, not really by Russians either, right?
00:05:40.140 And so you have all of these things that are basically, you know, 20th century stories, which when you look at them with a 21st century historical view and you're trying to find the reality rather than the narrative, you basically see that the reality is, like, very, very different from the narrative.
00:06:05.600 It's like FDR being in a wheelchair.
00:06:07.120 So what Leveson was doing was simply basically taking a Communist Party initiative from the 20s and 30s and laundering it as what we now call the Civil Rights Movement, right?
00:06:20.140 So completely just no question of this history.
00:06:25.580 It's, like, all the details are kind of readily acknowledged.
00:06:29.280 If you look at, like, David Garrow's King biography, you know, it's all going to be in there, right?
00:06:35.280 You know, and you can actually tell the truth about it now.
00:06:39.460 Maybe not quite in the way that I'm telling it because I'm telling it in a way that makes it sensational because I believe it actually is sensational, right?
00:06:49.080 And it's kind of amazing what happened here.
00:06:52.120 It's kind of wild, and it's sort of, like, of course, when we see these other regimes of the 20th century, we sort of expect them to be Orwellian.
00:07:00.760 We expect people to not understand what's going on in their own country.
00:07:04.480 But, like, you know, the reality is, like, what is America in the 1960s?
00:07:08.280 It's basically three TV stations, ABC, CBS, and NBC, plus for the ruling class NPR and PBS.
00:07:16.080 And it is a very controlled, very tightly organized broadcast media environment.
00:07:23.580 If you look at basically during both World Wars, you'll see what we call, and conservatives call the MSM, is actually a government agency.
00:07:32.420 So in World War II, it's the Office of War Information, OWI.
00:07:36.760 OWI is basically the mainstream media as a government agency.
00:07:41.580 World War I, it's the Committee on Public Information, the CPI.
00:07:45.280 You know, insane, wild propaganda stuff.
00:07:48.140 You ever take a look at, like, you know, World War I propaganda, and you're just like, this is propaganda for 11-year-olds.
00:07:56.240 Like, this is incredibly simplistic, incredibly crude.
00:07:59.760 Like, why are we fighting in Germany? 1.00
00:08:01.700 The Hun is going to come rape your sister with his spiked helmet, right? 0.95
00:08:05.220 You know, and it's like, you look at the reality of the diplomatic, you know, machinations, you know, behind that, which are easily as complicated as anything going on in Washington today. 0.98
00:08:16.120 And you're just like, actually, this is for children.
00:08:18.700 Hi there.
00:08:19.780 I'm Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a.
00:08:21.860 Menchus Moldbug, and I've created a profile on this fascinating site, Manect, which allows anyone to put in a few dimes and ask me about anything.
00:08:36.220 And I'll take questions on anything that isn't personal.
00:08:39.480 I have many opinions on history, politics, science, economics, and all kinds of interesting things.
00:08:48.100 And if you have a good and interesting question, why not ask it?
00:08:52.400 I might well answer it.
00:08:53.340 Thank you very much.