Back when Black History Month was coming to a close , the pundits who had adopted derision of Trump into their non-stop editorial spin, seemed intent on homogenizing his encounters with any and all Black people as an unmitigated failure — even premeditated and unvarnished bigotry. The plain fact is that Black history month is always unwieldy until uncomfortable —when chewed up into doggerel by our opportunist punditry. Still, I’d rather listen to any right-wing assassin dismantle the merits of the month, than have to suffer the Chinese water torture of the uber-left white male as they smugly wrap themselves up in the sacrifices of others, as to levy accusations of racism against challengers.

The disdain I have towards those liberals who would use my well-being as moral shield in their platform phalanx may be deep-seated and reactionary , but it is not an original thought by any measure. The commercialization of Malcolm X did more destruction to his legacy than Hoover could have possibly dreamed. Grinding the sharpened blade of this point into dust, allowing post-ironic white leftists in America feel they could don a By Any Means Necessary shirt without a hint of fear.

Don’t get me wrong, I am no separatist , however, I recognize the internal anger that drove not only Malcolm Little, but Wallace Fard from their mixed-heritage promise of “passing,” into becoming hated and venerated black militants. To fully understand the impact any message might have on you, it is necessary to study it—something I believe all conservatives would benefit from in Malcolm X’s writing. Liberals have claimed the iconic figure as part of their movement through the osmosis of tokenism. The man would have hated this —and liberals for that matter. Don’t believe me? Here he is on the subject himself:

The white liberals aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a fraction of white people that are jockeying for power…They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro…The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative.

So that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the white liberal. The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros, and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.

Is this an old clip from Bill O'Rei… I mean, Bill Maher? No. It’s Malcolm X more than 50 years ago, not only delivering some painful truths about liberals and the Black community ,  but spot-on political analysis of the nation as a whole. It’s hard to say where Malcolm X would find himself in our current political spectrum —his embracing of Islam would be the primary source of modern consternation. But damned if I haven’t heard conservatives say the same exact thing about the 9/11 attacks in this era of Conservative Populism; perhaps his most known by white Americans—one they saw as a brazen lack of sympathy due to Malcolm X’s refusal to capitulate on the truth of language. Especially when it pertained to the violence inherent and interwoven into the fabric of this Nation: Chickens coming home to roost.

As for maintaining his embracing of Islam, I have my doubts. At least in the terms of NOI upon his return from pilgrimage to Mecca. After his world travels and close to his death, he began to distance himself from Elijah Muhammad and The Nation of Islam — his intellect coming to shed those labels, just as he did of his former identities of pimp and drug-dealer. Nonetheless, Elijah required an adversarial raconteur, one adversarial and provocative; he was not concerned about the plight of his people, at least not like he was the swell of his wallet. Truly the Don King of civil rights, after the assassination, Elijah quickly crowned his new pupil, Farrakhan, jester-prince of a movement they dove-tailed away from the activism of Fard and Malcolm X — into their circus calliope of profiteering.

Malcolm X himself was not occupied with riches and fame — he identified these traits early-on from the perspective of his prison cell as a cancer on the fulfillment of character. He distanced himself not so much from Christianity but specifically the Chicago, Detroit and Harlem centers of black Christianity. Never one to mince words, Malcolm X saw it as a force unable to galvanize the community into individualistic self-care. And one corrupted by the probings of fame — Pastors and Deacons he once admired were womanizing and perpetuating what he bemoaned as the “corrosive assault on female character and moral center.” Malcolm X, aside from his abandonment of Christianity, was every bit the model of Social and Fiscal Conservatism. Traditionalist about the cornerstone of marriage and the necessity of male and female role models in the black family — this message’s patriarchal underpinnings too often overshadow the vastly more important economic fundamentalism he extrapolated into his lectures of financial investment and fidelity in self and community.

A lesson we can, and should always remind ourselves.

The man was honest about his feelings and spoke them plainly — especially when they were controversial. He did not do this in our modern scope of opportunist punditry in the search of a quick buck; and he accurately predicted his own assassination — saying the shine of being antagonistic had worn off. An eerily prescient prognosticator about his and America’s future in this world.