Brett Reese, a school board member in Greeley-Evans district six, said from now on he’s wearing his pistol to board meetings. He said he’s receiving death threats in response to the white-nationalist anti-Martin Luther King Jr. message he has been broadcasting in his day job as a disc jockey at Greeley’s 104.7 “The Pirate” radio station.
Reese has been playing the five-minute anti-King message for three years. The text of the message is the same as the text posted at MarinLutherKing.org, a site hosted by white-power group Stormfront. Although the text of the message has been circling the Web for years, Reese told the Greeley Tribune that he received it as a letter from a listener and he had no idea it was being pushed by white nationalists. The Stormfront homepage today is playing up a “latest David Duke video” and announces at the top of the page “We are a community of White Nationalists.”
Reese owns and manages “The Pirate” and said he’s not taking down the message because he believes it encourages critical thinking. He said he’s a big fan of the civil rights movement; he just doesn’t think Martin Luther King Jr as a man is worthy of the status the country has granted him.
“I don’t think I did the wrong thing in talking about the man because I do have so much respect for the movement.”
Reese reads the anti-MLK message with a sort of theatrically soft-pedaled didactic air. It is rife with political buzzwords. King is surrounded by “liberal judges” “liberal professors” “leftists” and “communists.” King’s alleged plagiarisms feature prominently in the message as does his alleged abusive and “degenerate” sex life. There’s almost nothing about the movement King led and his great success in doing so.
“Well friends, [King] is not a legitimate reverend, he is not a bona fide PhD, and his name isn’t really ‘Martin Luther King, Jr.'” Reese tells the Pirate Radio audience. “What’s left? Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.”
Listen to the message here.
At least one parent in the school district is calling out Reese as a liar.
Melissa Jones told the Tribune that Reese takes no ownership of the material even though he is, in effect, pushing it at the station, reading the first-person letter himself. Jones makes the point that, in asking listeners to fact-check the material, Reese is suggesting that he has already done some fact-checking on the material. It’s hard to believe that in three years Reese never heard that Stormfront was a racist group, she said.
Reese can’t carry his .45-caliber onto school grounds but he can take it to meetings at the district administrative building.
