News flash, courtesy of The Daily Wire: the US Civil Rights movement strategically planned many of its most famous protests, including Rosa Parks’s defiant refusal to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. As part of a broader reassessment of the movement, Matt Walsh, the Wire’s self-described “theocratic fascist”, presented this well-known bit of history as if he’d uncovered some huge, long-hidden truth.

The attack on Parks, one suspects, has to do with The Daily Wire bidding desperately to maintain hard-Right audiences that are increasingly drifting to edgier voices. Given the publication’s other red lines, questioning the Civil Rights legacy, and thus flirting with soft racism, is all they’ve got.

“The Rosa Parks story you were taught in school was fake,” Walsh gravely intoned. “This was not just some woman on her way from work. Civil Rights leaders thought that Parks would make a sympathetic face for their lawsuit and then told her, a long-time NAACP volunteer, to create a situation where she’d get arrested.” This, Walsh charged, amounted to “playacting”.

As online observers shot back, the “official” story isn’t fake. The high-school story on which I was reared — in rural Utah, of all places — didn’t hide the ball on Parks’s activist background or the role of the wider Civil Rights movement in creating a confrontation that would lead to a constitutional challenge to de jure racial apartheid in the American South.

Meanwhile, the fact that there was planning involved doesn’t turn Parks’s case into “playacting.” There really were laws on the books relegating black people to the back of the bus. Parks really did break one such ordinance in 1955, and she really was arrested. Walsh’s inaccurate assertion about “playacting” serves to cast doubt on the evils of segregation and Jim Crow, even if he might disavow such intent.

Of course, we should be able to interrogate civic pieties. But Walsh’s ersatz investigative revelation — suggesting that “they” hid the truth from us and playing down the reality of racial discrimination — isn’t about disinterested inquiry. The intent is to attack the authentic achievements of the Civil Rights movement by questioning its necessity. If Parks had to playact, then maybe coercive racial separation wasn’t so bad.

There’s also a business aspect at work here. Much has been made of The Daily Wire and its founder, Ben Shapiro, losing Generation-Z audiences, in part because there are even more hardline Right-wing voices that don’t shy away from overt racism. The Daily Wire, by contrast, is still tied to certain old-school Republican pieties: support for Donald Trump and hawkish foreign policy, for instance. Unable or unwilling to cross those lines, the likes of Walsh must repackage old anti-civil-rights talking points for a new age.

It’s pretty sad-sack stuff. Meanwhile, outside the online Right, Rosa Parks is often named as the most influential woman in US history. It’s that legacy of moral courage which will endure.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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