One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:
-------------------------------------------
House of Representatives, U.S.
Part of Congressional Record --- Free
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA
Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va
Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957
-------------------------------------------
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.
and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement is.
White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.
Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.
Gotta also remember that all these devoted segregationists didn't get removed from positions of power or influence, nor did they change their minds about the value of segregation.
You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.
Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.
I don’t think the issue with Civil Rights legislation was the Civil War, I think the issue was equality.
As President Lyndon Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”
Racism isn’t about race at its core, it’s redirected anger from being exploited and abused by people in power. There is a reason people in power always blame “the immigrants” or “the Jews”; it’s redirection.
I am much more circumspect on the civil rights movement and the top-down legislative results over the decades. There was good and bad. And the FBI telling MLK to kill yourself was heinous, just the same as to today as the FBI coercing Brian J. Cole Jr. (jan. 6 bomber suspect).
There's a reason why the Right was up in arms about Critical Race Theory. They're currently doing everything possible to erase the past and frame the future as a White Christian country. And these people are the ones in power today.
My local school system was forcibly desegrated _less than 10 years before I was born_ [1]. You can still plainly see the impact of redlining on my city [2]. I think it goes without saying that this wasn't covered in our schools, public or private, and was something I only really understood the scope of as an adult.
I was born and raised in liberal west coast Oregon. We sure weren't taught about the racial implications of our state's history either. When Oregon was admitted to the union the state constitution prohibited blacks from living in the state. 100 years ago the Klan was big here, and even now African Americans are less than 2% of the population.
The Warmth of Other Suns is a very good book for filling some of that hole in your education. I am not sure if I wasn't taught about the Great Migration at all or was taught about it for 10 minutes but definitely did not get out of school with much understanding of this aspect of American history.
"I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm."
I mean... operation paperclip already tells you A LOT of what you need to understand about the USA for most of the 20th century. And I'm being kind because it would otherwise be unfair to most of the users of this site who were not even born then.
We, as Americans have had our “mask off” moment now and are openly declaring ourselves the preeminent empire on the planet. It’s simply that we are withdrawing from our globalist support structures due to a wide variety of forecast reasons along side that, which is confusing to many.
It was our liberal values and performance internally by the Democrats that gave our people as sort of comforting story before. We do it for the good of others we give we topple dictators etc.
I am a deeply “real politik” person and I don’t think you average right leaning American ever thought otherwise. It was somewhat ironically the hope yet no-change left Americans (who i have counted myself among) who tried to give it the thinnest veneer of responsibility.
The greatest thing we provided the world was order, for a time. That seems true of almost any mature empire.
>Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.
Its one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights - its another thing to remember that our governments were the principle violators of civil rights, just a few short decades ago. What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...
> It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover.
Not under that much cover, just the more overt part of it directed at a different demographic than the primary foci of earlier rounds of US racism (though it provided a lot of excuse for actions directed more in line with classic US racism, and set the stage for the renaissance of more classicly directed, out-and-proud racism that has characterized the Trump era.)
Because if you want to eat an animal you have to properly remove the bits of it that will make you sick and spoil the meat.
We do it to pigs and chickens and cows too. Its a very early step in the slaughtering and butchering process - usually the first step after the animal has been killed.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
The battle of the present (ICE abuse, Social media speech suppression, ..) to win the government back by the people and for the people can still be won - but it hinges all on this November.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
Never said they stopped: industry 'leaders', authoritarians, will always try to keep and expand their abusive grip over others and claw as much power from the common people as possible. The methods are always the same: distraction, disinformation, abuse. The common people's only defense is transparent institutions and limiting power/wealth in general.
See also how the robber barons of the 1930s (Rockefeller, JP Morgan, etc) already tried to overthrow the government to establish a fascist military dictatorship.
The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.
My step dad use to quote bible verses to me trying to prove Obama was the literal antichrist. Before that it was the evil Bush and his oil cronies. Now it’s Trump, in two years it will be someone else. Same as it ever was.
A slight challenge here. November is a sizable opportunity to move towards that aim. Every day after is another opportunity to live it out in your life, community, neighborhood, finances, religion, and family...
>Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
It's communism. Cold War. All there is to it. As with much other evil, this was done because the FBI feared that Big Bad Uncle Ivan will somehow gain influence over this leader and use it for leverage in the Cold War.
The same multitudes of extramarital affairs and other racy and embarrassing stuff that Dr King took part in, as a reverend, could be used by communists to blackmail him into working for them or making decisions that favour the Soviet Union. Is it far-fetched? Sure. Is it, in hindsight, paranoid and stupid? Yep. But can we say with certainty, without hindsight, that it was impossible, when you have an entire organization dedicated to rooting out hidden influence of the enemy in an existential covert global struggle?
And it wasn't all paranoia. The Soviet Union under Stalin was extremely good at infiltrating American academia, civil society and government. The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, etc. The US government went from ignoring the problem and dealing with it so incompetently actual Soviet spies were in almost cabinet-level positions, to hysterically over-reacting and ruining the lives of people like Dr King "just in case".
There's another country that has infiltrated the whole American government, and a third country that is often said to have infiltrated American academia and civil society, but we don't seem to worry about them. Why the distinction?
It's pretty good under Putin, too. Better, actually. They don't use the same narrative template, but they're picking tools with more power. It turns out it's really easy to manipulate narcissists and authoritarian followers.
It's the excuse Communists used. It's also the same excuse Fascists used. Need I remind you: national socialist German worker's party.
There seems to be great demand for a party that actually makes life better for people, so great that you can just name your party that, win an election and do anything you want to. For some reason there's very little supply of parties that actually make life better and don't just pretend they want to.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to attack black civil rights movements. They also used it to attack things that were associated with the Soviet Union, including associating black civil rights with communism and socialism, like you're doing here.
Maybe this was not about everybody and not about you?
It doesn't all hinge on this November. It hinges on all the moments where people do work to avoid fascism. Some of that happens at the polls. Some of that happens at home. Some of that happens online.
Feed people. Engage in mutual aid. Build communities. Prepare candidates. Grow networks. Then vote. Voting is the last and easiest part.
Interesting, true citizen action only revealed the FBI was the author of the blackmailing of MLK.
> On March 8, 1971, an activist group called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized a local office of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole classified documents. Parts of them exposed a secret FBI operation called COINTELPRO. Those documents were later sent to newspapers and members of the United States Congress.
Some might call this lawlessness, but in a society where the government is keeping secrets from its own constituents, this sort of actions are the only ones a citizen can realistically do to return from a lawless and corrupt government, sadly.
Shame some societies digress into this state in the first place, even bigger shame when they keep sliding deeper and deeper into it.
COINTELPRO was the physical intimidation and enforcement operation when Operation Mockingbird's total information control of corporate media failed to convince people that democracy was real. Even when both got exposed, the corporate media basically ignored Mockingbird because they were complicit.
Fast forward to today, and the only difference is they now own all the Social Media and A.I. If you want truth in journalism, support small local journalists, and ignore corporate news.
What's crazy is that most of the accusations against his moral character are true. He caused a great change to take place in the nation, but he was not an upstanding individual outside of that.
Good thing the FBI doesn't do this anymore hahaha yes we are certainly safe and they are definitely not infiltrating groups and people's minds in order to discredit and trick them into failure.....
The orgies? He shouldn't have gone to any if his wife didn't approve. But anybody that can go with their conscience in peace should have orgies more often than they have wine. "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. *Love* your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD." (Lev 19:17–18). What the priests and the FBI say is just politics :-).
Ironically this is quite common on 4chan, although so are many other much more childish things, but there is an occasional flash of someone with real knowledge using it to be a clever asshole.
I'm convinced the only reason crimeflare continues to platform them is that it must be some kind of three letter honeypot.
I think it's more that social standards of acceptability tend to continually degrade. There was a time when calling someone a scoundrel or a rascal was one of the most vile insults imaginable, potentially worth fighting to the death over, and I mean that completely literally.
I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.
So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.
the modern internet has given everyone a higher level of immunity to this kind of thing now that it's in the background everywhere at all times; the FBI would need to step up their game today
Or different tactics entirely. I've been getting ads recently saying "it's Qatar's fault". I don't understand at all what is supposed to be Qatar's fault, and I'm sure they can't say it in the ads because then it would be a lie and they could get sued, but I'm sure their target audience knows exactly what Qatar supposedly did.
I'm sure it helps, but there's definitely still way too many people [on social media] that have zero problems with publicly telling people to jump off a bridge while signing their full name with the message. Which is technically illegal in California now.
As much as I actually really love MLK's speeches, sermons, movement. I am afraid there appears to be some unfortunate truths about the man. None are perfect except God. That doesn't make the positives he did any less great, it just reminds us of the nature of humanity.
And that's not to detract from how gross it is that government abused it's power to attempt to get someone to commit suicide. Reminds me of Aaron Swartz case too.
Elsewhere in the comments here, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr (David Garrow), according to this article [1]:
"The most damaging memos describe King witnessing a rape in a hotel room. Instead of stopping it, handwritten notes in the file say he encouraged the attacker to continue."
He was a Christian minister though, and many of us value him not just for his contributions to civil rights, but to the conversation of how God wants us to treat one another.
I love my country but omg do we have so many shameful episodes. These things need to be brought out to the light of day so we can confront, admit and heal. The letter is the 2nd crime. The first crime is the tolerance of the hate behind the letter. The 3rd crime is concealing the facts till those responsible are out of the reach of justice.
I am astonished how someone could write something so despicable. Well, not entirely astonished; I've seen the works of many internet trolls and usenet flamewars, and this fits right in. But for an official organisation like the FBI to stoop to this, well, J Edgar Hoover, I guess.
I can imagine him sitting around with his buddies, taking turns reading it out loud, barely able to make it through a sentence without cracking up laughing until everybody was crying.
Sometime around 2010-2020 there were tons of spam messages arriving to gmail of type "I know and have recordings of what you were doing there you immoral filthy pervert!". Nowadays they only want to give away million dollars.
It's incredible how effective those messages are for some people. Some victims emptied their bank accounts because they were so ashamed of whatever porn they were watching and possibly afraid of legal consequences too. The amount of accounts on X that purportedly sell CSAM though telegram channels seems like an incredible opportunity for scammers beyond just normal fraud. Steal the money from the buyer first and then turn around and blackmail them for more.
I read it as regular spam message with slight laugh and without any anxiety, but if that was linked with or in response to some real payment or subscription then it would not be funny.
Apparently most of these huge spam waves originate from just one or two people which is why they're so similar. If a certain type of spam stops arriving it means that specific person got bored.
Gmail's spam filter has gotten noticeably worse in the last two months. I'm half-convinced they threw away whatever they used to be doing and just put Gemini in the loop.
Interesting angle of posing as a black man so Martin is being attacked by the in group. This is usually very effective and is essentially exactly what you see on racist forums/boards like 4chan and other more explicit supremacist boards.
MLK's entire organization was largely created and run by Stanley Levison, who was a big player in the CPUSA. He was a major financier of communist efforts in America before switching his focus to the civil rights movement.
But you won't find Levison's name on the SCLC Wikipedia page even though his personal wiki page mentions he was "instrumental in founding" it.
Being paywalled is not an issue (better than ad-ridden), but not being able to have micro transaction in a browser with one click still is mind boggling. As a creator of a browser, taking some blame for that.
I can do that. I can click on my credit card autofill and then "pay", so two clicks.
But sites won't let me do that, they want me to make an account first and they want to verify my email address and phone number which means leaving my browser and restarting the process each time I do because the browser got unloaded and the website doesn't save state. Almost all of the friction here is the fault of the website, not the payment process.
Usually I just can't make an account on a mobile device because of the browser unloading, so if it's important I do it later with my PC and if it's not important I give up entirely.
There were attempts to bring micro-transactions to the browser via W3C standards - but guess who obstructed it? Yes, the big G that's running the browser with most market-share (Chrome) and who's entire business-model it having your data so only they can be the middle man between you and ads. Imagine if people could just support what they like with one click, instead of getting dumped on with paid propaganda and disinformation so that the middle men fill their pocket.
One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:
-------------------------------------------
House of Representatives, U.S.
Part of Congressional Record --- Free
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA
Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va
Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957
-------------------------------------------
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.
and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement is.
White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.
Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.
Gotta also remember that all these devoted segregationists didn't get removed from positions of power or influence, nor did they change their minds about the value of segregation.
You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.
Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.
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I don’t think the issue with Civil Rights legislation was the Civil War, I think the issue was equality.
As President Lyndon Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”
Racism isn’t about race at its core, it’s redirected anger from being exploited and abused by people in power. There is a reason people in power always blame “the immigrants” or “the Jews”; it’s redirection.
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Honest question as I'm not American and may be missing context but what Civil Rights are black Americans having rolled back on them?
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I am much more circumspect on the civil rights movement and the top-down legislative results over the decades. There was good and bad. And the FBI telling MLK to kill yourself was heinous, just the same as to today as the FBI coercing Brian J. Cole Jr. (jan. 6 bomber suspect).
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There's a reason why the Right was up in arms about Critical Race Theory. They're currently doing everything possible to erase the past and frame the future as a White Christian country. And these people are the ones in power today.
Are you talking about Title VII in Universities?
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My local school system was forcibly desegrated _less than 10 years before I was born_ [1]. You can still plainly see the impact of redlining on my city [2]. I think it goes without saying that this wasn't covered in our schools, public or private, and was something I only really understood the scope of as an adult.
1: https://www.wlky.com/article/forced-busing-anniversary-50-lo...
2: https://www.louisville.com/redlining-louisville-dividing-lin...
I was born and raised in liberal west coast Oregon. We sure weren't taught about the racial implications of our state's history either. When Oregon was admitted to the union the state constitution prohibited blacks from living in the state. 100 years ago the Klan was big here, and even now African Americans are less than 2% of the population.
St. Louis has the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmar_Divide.
The Warmth of Other Suns is a very good book for filling some of that hole in your education. I am not sure if I wasn't taught about the Great Migration at all or was taught about it for 10 minutes but definitely did not get out of school with much understanding of this aspect of American history.
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> Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
When you are used to privilege, equality looks like oppression.
"I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm."
Sounds bucolic.
I mean... operation paperclip already tells you A LOT of what you need to understand about the USA for most of the 20th century. And I'm being kind because it would otherwise be unfair to most of the users of this site who were not even born then.
I don’t think you need to be so gentle with us.
We, as Americans have had our “mask off” moment now and are openly declaring ourselves the preeminent empire on the planet. It’s simply that we are withdrawing from our globalist support structures due to a wide variety of forecast reasons along side that, which is confusing to many.
It was our liberal values and performance internally by the Democrats that gave our people as sort of comforting story before. We do it for the good of others we give we topple dictators etc.
I am a deeply “real politik” person and I don’t think you average right leaning American ever thought otherwise. It was somewhat ironically the hope yet no-change left Americans (who i have counted myself among) who tried to give it the thinnest veneer of responsibility.
The greatest thing we provided the world was order, for a time. That seems true of almost any mature empire.
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>Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.
Its one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights - its another thing to remember that our governments were the principle violators of civil rights, just a few short decades ago. What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...
> It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover.
Not under that much cover, just the more overt part of it directed at a different demographic than the primary foci of earlier rounds of US racism (though it provided a lot of excuse for actions directed more in line with classic US racism, and set the stage for the renaissance of more classicly directed, out-and-proud racism that has characterized the Trump era.)
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> What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...
Or where they'd still like to take us. The only problem they have with Ayatollahs is that they call God by the wrong name.
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> I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave
Why gut squirrels
That isn't what was written on the letter, that was the commenter's own writing.
Because if you want to eat an animal you have to properly remove the bits of it that will make you sick and spoil the meat.
We do it to pigs and chickens and cows too. Its a very early step in the slaughtering and butchering process - usually the first step after the animal has been killed.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
The battle of the present (ICE abuse, Social media speech suppression, ..) to win the government back by the people and for the people can still be won - but it hinges all on this November.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
What makes you think they've stopped?
Well, "they" did their best to stop Bernie running.
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Never said they stopped: industry 'leaders', authoritarians, will always try to keep and expand their abusive grip over others and claw as much power from the common people as possible. The methods are always the same: distraction, disinformation, abuse. The common people's only defense is transparent institutions and limiting power/wealth in general.
See also how the robber barons of the 1930s (Rockefeller, JP Morgan, etc) already tried to overthrow the government to establish a fascist military dictatorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
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It's the most important election of our lifetime... For the fourth time in a row!
Anything to prop up the illusion of democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
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Thats what happens when you live in increasingly interesting times
The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.
My step dad use to quote bible verses to me trying to prove Obama was the literal antichrist. Before that it was the evil Bush and his oil cronies. Now it’s Trump, in two years it will be someone else. Same as it ever was.
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As long as people keep electing fascist billionaires to loot the country, the fight continues
Continuing to believe in democracy when you seem to know how the country (all countries) actually works in practice is surely just illogical.
You can't vote for anyone who'll abolish the FBI, CIA and the rest of the elite groups that actually run things
> but it hinges all on this November
A slight challenge here. November is a sizable opportunity to move towards that aim. Every day after is another opportunity to live it out in your life, community, neighborhood, finances, religion, and family...
>Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
It's communism. Cold War. All there is to it. As with much other evil, this was done because the FBI feared that Big Bad Uncle Ivan will somehow gain influence over this leader and use it for leverage in the Cold War.
The same multitudes of extramarital affairs and other racy and embarrassing stuff that Dr King took part in, as a reverend, could be used by communists to blackmail him into working for them or making decisions that favour the Soviet Union. Is it far-fetched? Sure. Is it, in hindsight, paranoid and stupid? Yep. But can we say with certainty, without hindsight, that it was impossible, when you have an entire organization dedicated to rooting out hidden influence of the enemy in an existential covert global struggle?
And it wasn't all paranoia. The Soviet Union under Stalin was extremely good at infiltrating American academia, civil society and government. The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, etc. The US government went from ignoring the problem and dealing with it so incompetently actual Soviet spies were in almost cabinet-level positions, to hysterically over-reacting and ruining the lives of people like Dr King "just in case".
There's another country that has infiltrated the whole American government, and a third country that is often said to have infiltrated American academia and civil society, but we don't seem to worry about them. Why the distinction?
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It's pretty good under Putin, too. Better, actually. They don't use the same narrative template, but they're picking tools with more power. It turns out it's really easy to manipulate narcissists and authoritarian followers.
(well, the Russian Federation, not the USSR)
>multi-coalition, working class movement
That is how Communists get their cultural revolution, you know.
It's the excuse Communists used. It's also the same excuse Fascists used. Need I remind you: national socialist German worker's party.
There seems to be great demand for a party that actually makes life better for people, so great that you can just name your party that, win an election and do anything you want to. For some reason there's very little supply of parties that actually make life better and don't just pretend they want to.
>That is how Communists get tbeir cultural revokution, you know
That is how blowhards get Red-Scares and Cold Wars, you know. And exactly the abuses OP posting is decrying.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to attack black civil rights movements. They also used it to attack things that were associated with the Soviet Union, including associating black civil rights with communism and socialism, like you're doing here.
Maybe this was not about everybody and not about you?
It doesn't all hinge on this November. It hinges on all the moments where people do work to avoid fascism. Some of that happens at the polls. Some of that happens at home. Some of that happens online.
Feed people. Engage in mutual aid. Build communities. Prepare candidates. Grow networks. Then vote. Voting is the last and easiest part.
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter
Interesting, true citizen action only revealed the FBI was the author of the blackmailing of MLK.
> On March 8, 1971, an activist group called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized a local office of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole classified documents. Parts of them exposed a secret FBI operation called COINTELPRO. Those documents were later sent to newspapers and members of the United States Congress.
Some might call this lawlessness, but in a society where the government is keeping secrets from its own constituents, this sort of actions are the only ones a citizen can realistically do to return from a lawless and corrupt government, sadly.
Shame some societies digress into this state in the first place, even bigger shame when they keep sliding deeper and deeper into it.
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COINTELPRO was the physical intimidation and enforcement operation when Operation Mockingbird's total information control of corporate media failed to convince people that democracy was real. Even when both got exposed, the corporate media basically ignored Mockingbird because they were complicit.
Fast forward to today, and the only difference is they now own all the Social Media and A.I. If you want truth in journalism, support small local journalists, and ignore corporate news.
What's crazy is that most of the accusations against his moral character are true. He caused a great change to take place in the nation, but he was not an upstanding individual outside of that.
Good thing the FBI doesn't do this anymore hahaha yes we are certainly safe and they are definitely not infiltrating groups and people's minds in order to discredit and trick them into failure.....
What is inherently immoral about having an open marriage? Did MLK go around preaching about the sanctity of monogamous marriages? No.
How were his orgies any different in moral character than the orgies the effective altruists throw?
The orgies? He shouldn't have gone to any if his wife didn't approve. But anybody that can go with their conscience in peace should have orgies more often than they have wine. "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. *Love* your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD." (Lev 19:17–18). What the priests and the FBI say is just politics :-).
>What's crazy is that most of the accusations against his moral character are true.
To be fair, it's also true that we need more people like him and fewer people like the ones on the other side.
That letter reads almost identical to internet hate comments. Wild. I guess the tactics have always been the same then.
At least now we have LLMs that can produce this kind of stuff at human-overwhelming rates, so that is progress.
> That letter reads almost identical to internet hate comments
the corners of the internet that you frequent have much more eloquent haters than the ones I'm used to
Ironically this is quite common on 4chan, although so are many other much more childish things, but there is an occasional flash of someone with real knowledge using it to be a clever asshole.
I'm convinced the only reason crimeflare continues to platform them is that it must be some kind of three letter honeypot.
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HN is one of those places, actually.
There are quite a few covert psychopaths on here that happily twist knives and hurt people.
It's just hidden under layers and layers of indirection, jargon and plausible deniability. Not unlike your standard boardroom I guess.
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What do you mean? you’re on HN.
I think it's more that social standards of acceptability tend to continually degrade. There was a time when calling someone a scoundrel or a rascal was one of the most vile insults imaginable, potentially worth fighting to the death over, and I mean that completely literally.
I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.
So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.
In modern times that would qualify you for high office...
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the modern internet has given everyone a higher level of immunity to this kind of thing now that it's in the background everywhere at all times; the FBI would need to step up their game today
Or different tactics entirely. I've been getting ads recently saying "it's Qatar's fault". I don't understand at all what is supposed to be Qatar's fault, and I'm sure they can't say it in the ads because then it would be a lie and they could get sued, but I'm sure their target audience knows exactly what Qatar supposedly did.
One commonality is the lack of restraint that anonymity can produce.
I'm sure it helps, but there's definitely still way too many people [on social media] that have zero problems with publicly telling people to jump off a bridge while signing their full name with the message. Which is technically illegal in California now.
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As much as I actually really love MLK's speeches, sermons, movement. I am afraid there appears to be some unfortunate truths about the man. None are perfect except God. That doesn't make the positives he did any less great, it just reminds us of the nature of humanity.
And that's not to detract from how gross it is that government abused it's power to attempt to get someone to commit suicide. Reminds me of Aaron Swartz case too.
I’ve never really consider sexual impropriety problematic in someone I look up to unless it’s pedophilia or rape.
Elsewhere in the comments here, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Martin Luther King Jr (David Garrow), according to this article [1]:
"The most damaging memos describe King witnessing a rape in a hotel room. Instead of stopping it, handwritten notes in the file say he encouraged the attacker to continue."
1 - https://theconversation.com/im-an-mlk-scholar-and-ill-never-...
He was a Christian minister though, and many of us value him not just for his contributions to civil rights, but to the conversation of how God wants us to treat one another.
I love my country but omg do we have so many shameful episodes. These things need to be brought out to the light of day so we can confront, admit and heal. The letter is the 2nd crime. The first crime is the tolerance of the hate behind the letter. The 3rd crime is concealing the facts till those responsible are out of the reach of justice.
And failing that the government assassinated him.
> I repeat - no person can argue successfully against facts.
In some aspects, times have changed..
I think they mean it will tarnish your legacy. Obviously lying works short term.
https://archive.ph/yGBOu
This was the linked article in original post earlier, and it got changed, right? I'm not going crazy?
This is very similar to Suchir Balaji and passive surveillance counterterrorism technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterterrorism
"Kill Yourself" is very similar in verse to "You Are Done."
Or the case where OpenAI wouldn't tell about 17 person list. Or Anthropic wont tell about CEO's wife
What is even more crazy is that people believe we are now more "civilized" than this. That nobody would do such a thing in our time.
I am astonished how someone could write something so despicable. Well, not entirely astonished; I've seen the works of many internet trolls and usenet flamewars, and this fits right in. But for an official organisation like the FBI to stoop to this, well, J Edgar Hoover, I guess.
It’s a very silly poorly written letter.
I can imagine him sitting around with his buddies, taking turns reading it out loud, barely able to make it through a sentence without cracking up laughing until everybody was crying.
Sometime around 2010-2020 there were tons of spam messages arriving to gmail of type "I know and have recordings of what you were doing there you immoral filthy pervert!". Nowadays they only want to give away million dollars.
It's incredible how effective those messages are for some people. Some victims emptied their bank accounts because they were so ashamed of whatever porn they were watching and possibly afraid of legal consequences too. The amount of accounts on X that purportedly sell CSAM though telegram channels seems like an incredible opportunity for scammers beyond just normal fraud. Steal the money from the buyer first and then turn around and blackmail them for more.
I read it as regular spam message with slight laugh and without any anxiety, but if that was linked with or in response to some real payment or subscription then it would not be funny.
Apparently most of these huge spam waves originate from just one or two people which is why they're so similar. If a certain type of spam stops arriving it means that specific person got bored.
lol I actually got a spam email the other day saying more or less exactly this!
so weird that it somehow got through the spam filter
Gmail's spam filter has gotten noticeably worse in the last two months. I'm half-convinced they threw away whatever they used to be doing and just put Gemini in the loop.
Okay, we all know now what you are doing there.
The article title seems to have changed from the earlier version, which importantly emphasised that the FBI pressured King to commit suicide.
Interesting angle of posing as a black man so Martin is being attacked by the in group. This is usually very effective and is essentially exactly what you see on racist forums/boards like 4chan and other more explicit supremacist boards.
I feel that how Epstein was suicided; they convinced him his life from now will be nightmare then just left him an opening to do it
If you look at the forensic evidence it seems more throttled with a wire by some other person.
Was there any hard proof he was a communist sympathizer or was the CIA painting him that way because he didn't support the Vietnam war?
MLK's entire organization was largely created and run by Stanley Levison, who was a big player in the CPUSA. He was a major financier of communist efforts in America before switching his focus to the civil rights movement.
But you won't find Levison's name on the SCLC Wikipedia page even though his personal wiki page mentions he was "instrumental in founding" it.
Vox is paywalled too?
Dunno. There's this https://wallhop.io/https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/12/720...
it doesn't paywall for me
Being paywalled is not an issue (better than ad-ridden), but not being able to have micro transaction in a browser with one click still is mind boggling. As a creator of a browser, taking some blame for that.
I can do that. I can click on my credit card autofill and then "pay", so two clicks.
But sites won't let me do that, they want me to make an account first and they want to verify my email address and phone number which means leaving my browser and restarting the process each time I do because the browser got unloaded and the website doesn't save state. Almost all of the friction here is the fault of the website, not the payment process.
Usually I just can't make an account on a mobile device because of the browser unloading, so if it's important I do it later with my PC and if it's not important I give up entirely.
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There were attempts to bring micro-transactions to the browser via W3C standards - but guess who obstructed it? Yes, the big G that's running the browser with most market-share (Chrome) and who's entire business-model it having your data so only they can be the middle man between you and ads. Imagine if people could just support what they like with one click, instead of getting dumped on with paid propaganda and disinformation so that the middle men fill their pocket.
Almost every adjective in that letter is a projection by the author. He/they must have been a real piece of work.
Well, there was that rape incident that MLK allegedly encouraged: https://www.standpointmag.co.uk/the-troubling-legacy-of-mart...
Apparently the audio tapes get released in 2027 so we may find out for sure then.
With 20 seconds of audio, I can make MLK Jr. say whatever you want.
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No he really did all that stuff.
https://theconversation.com/im-an-mlk-scholar-and-ill-never-...
I mean...
What do you mean?
Guess we’ll find out next year?
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What is your goal with posting these links?