In one of his most famous quotes, Winston Churchill described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Today’s America could be described as a country led by a plagiarist, with the help of another plagiarist, which celebrates a holiday in honor of a third plagiarist: Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, and Martin Luther King.

That Martin Luther King was an inveterate plagiarist is beyond doubt. As Theodore Pappas, formerly of Chronicles and now of Encyclopædia Britannica estimated in his 1994 book The Martin Luther King, Jr., Plagiarism Story (published by The Rockford Institute) that 2/3 of “Dr.” King’s dissertation was plagiarized—45% of the first half and 21% of the second. But that is only half the scandal. The first public revelation of King’s plagiarism came back in 1989 with the publication of an article in the London Sunday Telegraph. Needless to say, the American mainstream media, even in those less politically-correct days conveniently ignored it. Only in January of 1991, thanks to an article in Chronicles (“A Doctor in Spite of Himself: The Strange Career of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Dissertation”), did the American public find out about the plagiarism of America’s secular saint. The dissertation was not the only thing King plagiarized. Far from it. His famous “I Have a Dream” speech was “borrowed” from Archibald Carey Jr.’s address to the GOP convention in 1952.

The revelations in Chronicles led to feral attacks on Theodore Pappas by the Establishment, described by Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media:

For his role in bringing this to the public’s attention, Pappas says he received three death threats, one left hook to the jaw and 40 rejections from 40 publishers in 40 months. This is quite a record.

And unsurprisingly, the mainstream media, including the “conservative”, “rightwing” Wall Street Journal joined efforts to suppress the truth about “Dr.” King’s dissertation.

The Wall Street Journal, considered by some a conservative newspaper, heard the story was breaking and ran its own piece—a whitewash of the charges against King. Even the Journal‘s editorial page tried to suppress the significance of the story by insisting that it had to be covered in a “carefully modulated” manner.

Writing in the New Republic magazine, Charles Babington would later reveal that the Washington Post, the New York Times and the New Republic itself all had known the facts about King’s plagiarism but refused to publish them. The Times eventually did cover the issue but in a subsequent editorial suggested that the plagiarism was somehow comparable to a politician using a ghost writer for speeches.

Then there was King’s pathological philandering; his demand for a “minimum guaranteed income” from the federal government; unabashed advocacy of big government socialism; and close associations with leading communists. The fact that he is the only person with a national American holiday established in his honor speaks volumes about modern American society. Even in the old Soviet Union, there were no holidays in honor of the birthdays of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. As Yakov Smirnov used to say: “America, what a country!”