This article is a response to the violence we are witnessing on the streets of Minneapolis. by listening the relevancy of Dr. King in this moment.

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In the US, where, if you, the reader hadn't noticed, prices are down, according to Trump, and the US is a beacon for other nations, cardinals are asking, what is the "moral role" of a country in "confronting evil around the world"?

There's love for Venezuela's oil. Not the people, mind you. But the oil! There's Maria Corina Machado handing her Nobel Prize for Peace to Trump. She's for the people; she's for Trump! Me, me, me, Mr. Trump! See me!

A moral role? The current president is a felon!

At Davos, 2026, the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney suggested Canada and the world, for that matter, knew all about the US's moral role.

For decades, Carney explains, Canada prospered under "rules-based international order." He continues, "we joined institutions, praised its principles, and benefited from its predictability." All the while, however, Canada knew that "the international rules-based order" was false. That is, Canada played the strongest is the mightiest game. "That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically," we knew. Also, we knew that "international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accursed or victim."

Fiction, but a useful fiction.

The US hasn't always been so humanitarian bent, Carney suggests, unless kicking and screaming, and even then, equality was another matter. In fact, the US initiated strong trade values, but for the benefit of the rich, Carney points out. "We placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals and we largely avoided calling out the "gap" between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works."

To be clear and direct, Carney adds, we're talking about a "transition." In fact, "we are in the midst of a rupture" not a transition. The series of crises in "finance, health, energy, and geopolitics laid bare the risks of extreme global integration." In short, you can't ''live within the lie' of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

It was a fiction, this US hegemony that worked for some, leaving others confronting the inequality and the so-called "moral role" of the US.

Addressing clergy, Episcopalian Archbishop Rob Hirschfeld of New Hampshire issued a warning. We live in a world where video of Renee Nicole Good's shooting by ICE agent Jonathan Ross is a video, for the authoritarians of a "domestic terrorist." She's on video telling Ross, and she's smiling, "'I'm not mad at you.'" Everyone looking at the video sees the mother of three and the award-winning poet focus her attention on not hitting cars passing her and turning the wheel of her SUV away from Ross and any other ICE agent.

Everyone sees that Ross has his cellphone out, and he's walking around her SUV, taking pictures. He stops at the front edge of her SUV and, pulling out his gun, he fires! Fires at her face! Two bullets also hit her chest! Everyone hears him call Good a "'b*tch,'" and we saw Ross walk away, passing the cellphone camera of a neighbor. This is a fellow human being seemingly without a moral role as a man who just shot someone, and he's not in jail. He's not a "domestic terrorist." He's a man who was, according to the authoritarian Department of Justice (DOJ), did what he did to protect the citizens of Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was murdered.

The DOJ won't investigate! So much for the "moral role" of the US. Although it tells us much about that "gap," doesn't it?

As of January 9, 2026, ICE has arrested 352,590, and, of that number, the agency has detained 68, 990. Some 352,380 have been deported. Along with Good, Keith Porter, celebrating the new year, dies in front of his home. Doors to homes have been broken into, cars broken into. People carted out in nightwear in Minnesota-cold weather. Citizens, too, have been detained and punched and choked and detained. Door to door! Businesses and homes! Citizens!

And the man who is working to end democracy and establish an authoritarian state here in the US, tells a world audience at Davos that freedom respected is in the US.

Get your papers in order, Archbishop Hirschfeld tells the clergy. Truthdig writes that "ICE" is an enemy of some consequence! It's "paramilitary!'" Some 1200 hired now with more to come, vows Trump. So the archbishop warns his clergy: we are entering "a new era of martyrdom." Get your papers in order!

Inequality! Inequality in foreign affairs and inequality at home, at the foundation of this nation!

Dr. Martin Luther King recognized the falsity of the "rules-based order" and how it perpetuate prosperity for some and not others. He spoke out against the "gap," and, in 1967, before clergy at Riverside Church, he argued that he couldn't remain silent any longer. The clergy seated before King had come together too to say that "'a time comes when silence is betrayal.'" But, King adds, it won't be an easy task to oppose the government. Yet, he states, we must. We must respond to a new "spirit" rising among us." We must see beyond the "darkness that seems so close around us."

It's not just that at home we must fight the violence of inequality. We must not "limit our vision to certain rights for black people" without affirming the "conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear." Quoting Langston Hughes, "America never was America to me." But then, America, the land of the brave and free hasn't shared that bravery or freedom. Being "committed to the life and health of America" isn't enough, King said. Addressing what it means to receive a Nobel Prize for Peace, King offered a pledge to work harder "before 'the brotherhood of man.'"

King would begin by speaking out for "the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy." There is no document, he adds, that would make these human being any less our brothers and sisters. Our children! Our future!

Its was the Vietnamese then. It was the Vietnamese watching as we poisoned their water, King states. As we killed a million acres of their crops, they watched. "They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees." American firepower killed a million of them by 1967, King states. They see the homeless, and children "degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food" And they see, siblings selling their "sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers."

Here is a "gap" as wide as the one we've watched grow in Gaza. At home, with ICE agents in masks and Nazi-style attire, we are witness to a worship of what Imani Perry, professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, calls the god of the Master being called upon by the authoritarian regime to oversee the permanency of white supremacy. The god of the Master rules the "gap" between rhetoric and reality. The god of the Master speaks to those who worship him, urging a belief in the cruelty. Above all, the god of the Master insists on profits at the expense of those made weak and vulnerable.

It shouldn't be difficult to recognize America's "moral role" in Vietnam and now in Gaza has been about the sustaining the violence of white supremacy.

In 1967, King urged America to turn away from its "present ways," to "atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam." The war in Vietnam must end. All wars must end. Military encroachment in Guatemala and Peru, in Thailand and Cambodia should be. There is South Africa still in an apartheid state. There will be one war after another, one conflict, one threat against a weaker people is there isn't "a significant and profound change in American life and policy."

America is "thing-oriented" rather than "people-oriented," King states. We are very much a thing-oriented country today. When the authoritarian regime in Washington looks at Venezuela, it doesn't see the people; instead, it sees oil. Profits. Profits from oil. The rhetoric speaks of selling oil "for the people" of Venezuela, but this is mythical, for the reality is, as Carney notes, knowable. Always has been! We know what the authoritarian regime's plans are for Gaza. We knew when the citizens were denied food and water and thousand died. Children died!

American values have always settled for supporting dictators, undemocratic leaders, royalty, and aristocrats while speaking of a populous agenda at home breading a MAGA population still waiting for the Epstein files and the lower cost of eggs. On the other hand, King states, the "contrast between poverty and wealth" should be "glaring" if we had "a true revolution of values." Similar to the days of a raging war in Vietnam, where Americans were busy "burning human beings with napalm," we are busy hunting down Brown and Black immigrants, ridding our institutions of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion policies, and removing all references to the genocide of American Indigenous and the enslavement of African Americans. ICE is even capturing, once again, Indigenous people, asking to see their "papers"!

Have we gone beyond the Civil Rights era? Beyond fascism?

KKK. Dark roads in Mississippi where Black and white allies, activists/protesters, are disappeared. Children are kidnapped from homes and tortured in barns. Black and white allies are spit upon, pushed, and dogs and water holes rip their skins. Picnics attended by lynchers, after church services. Church services where bombs incinerate Black children. Houses and business set ablaze. Whole towns of Black politicians, lawyers, editors, ordinary citizens forced to run or die from a bullet fired by a vigilante, sometimes masked.

The 20^th Century, for some of us, looks and feels similar to this moment in the 21^st Century. There was fascism then and there's fascism now. No law saved the captured. Indigenous, Blacks, or immigrant south of the US border"

And so when we hear King, we should hear him as if he stood before us today: "We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man [and woman] of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his [or her] convictions, but we must all protest."

What produces the "gap" is still with us. It needs closing if America is to be considered a leader with a "moral role" on the world's stage.

We've never been there yet!

Authors Bio:

Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.