"It is already evident that Trump, who can no longer run for reëlection trumpeting economic achievement, will likely pivot and campaign, like George Wallace and Richard Nixon, in 1968..."

"... on 'law and order': his own autocratic, self-serving version of law and order.... He encourages armed protesters in Michigan who stormed the statehouse because the governor had the temerity to shut down non-essential businesses and require people to wear masks in public. He hints, via Twitter, that his maga supporters should come out on the streets. Four years ago, Trump raised fear in the country by portraying a dystopian world of 'American carnage,' even as crime had been declining for years. Division is his talent. Who, really, is the agitator here?... Urban riots, [Martin Luther King, Jr.] said, using the language of the day, 'may be deplored, but . . . they are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest.' Even looting, he insisted, is an act of catharsis, a form of 'shocking' the white community 'by abusing property rights.' Then King quoted Victor Hugo to deepen his point: 'If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.'"

Writes David Remnick in "An American Uprising/Who, really, is the agitator here?" (The New Yorker).

There's a lot to talk about there, but let me highlight one thing: Why did Remnick specify that MLK was "using the language of the day"? What is that supposed to mean? Anyone speaking is probably "using the language of the day." One might, alternatively, have your own idiosyncratic style of speech or adopt an old-fashioned form of expression or be on the cutting edge of some emerging new way of speaking. If anything, MLK deployed an old-fashioned form of expression: Biblical. But it's strange to qualify the statement you're about to quote by telling readers it was "the language of the day."

I sift through the quote looking for what could have prompted this speed bump on the way to the big quote Remnick wanted to deliver. Is it something about "deplored"? It catches our attention, perhaps, because Hillary Clinton hurt herself badly by calling various people "deplorable," but MLK didn't call people deplorable. He called the riots deplorable ("may be deplored"). Is it "insurrections"? Is it "rioters"? It seems that Remnick wants to defend MLK over something that will strike readers today as wrong, but I don't know what it is.

There's much more that can be said about the MLK quote and how it can apply today. Is the "white community" supposed to absorb the looting as an educational shock to complacent love of our property rights? Note that "white community" and "catharsis" are paraphrasing by Remnick and not part of the "language of the day" used by King. Here's the verbatim quote by King:

“Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking.”

If the verbatim quote had been used, the qualifier "using the language of the day" would have easily been understood as an explanation for King's use of the word "Negro." Perhaps some editor cut up the quote and used paraphrase to protect New Yorker readers King's word "Negro" and then failed to take out the other protection, the qualifier "using the language of the day," stranding that phrase where it did not belong.

ADDED: I spent some time looking for the Victor Hugo quote. I googled the text — "If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness" — and I easily discovered that it's from "Les Miserables," so I got the full English text of the novel — which I'd read in French in high school — and searched for "darkness." There's a lot of "darkness" in that text — 100? 200? — but I did not find the quote in question. I used another method — searching for the quote in "books" and finding a translation that used "darkness" and finding some other words that would get me to the right spot in the full text I wanted to use. In my translation — at Project Gutenberg — the word is translated as "shadow."

The quote appears in near the beginning of the book, and it's spoken by the character the Bishop. The Bishop is hospitable to the hero Jean Valjean, but Valjean steals his silverware. The "he" in this passage is the Bishop. I'll boldface the part that King quoted (in a different translation):

Being, as he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner, he had none of the asperities of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal of distinctness, and without the frown of the ferociously virtuous, a doctrine which may be summed up as follows:—

“Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it, check it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity. There may be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in prayer.

“To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err, fall, sin if you will, but be upright.

“The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream of the angel. All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.”

When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry very quickly, “Oh! oh!” he said, with a smile; “to all appearance, this is a great crime which all the world commits. These are hypocrisies which have taken fright, and are in haste to make protest and to put themselves under shelter.”

He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of human society rest. He said, “The faults of women, of children, of the feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands, the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise.”

He said, moreover, “Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow.”

It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.