Tuesday's Tremendous Absurdities: FBI Virtue Signals its Rank Hypocrisy on MLK Day
I’m going to exercise my author’s privilege to focus today’s Absurdities on a single tweet published by the corrupt goons at the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Monday, which happened to be the Martin Luther King holiday.
Here’s the tweet in question:
“On this 40th anniversary of #MLKDay as a federal holiday, the #FBI honors one of the most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights movement and reaffirms its commitment to Dr. King’s legacy of fairness and equal justice for all.”
What a steaming pile of rank hypocrisy that statement is, considering the source.
This seems like a very good time to remind readers of the FBI’s true relationship not to the memory of Martin Luther King, but to the man himself.
Across the final decade of his life, the FBI relentlessly spied on Mr. King, spread a seemingly endless array of false rumors about him, including the allegation he was a communist agent of Russia (sound familiar, Trump fans?), commissioned the publication of damaging media stories against him, and was likely involved in causing his assassination.
There is no question, for example, the FBI was well aware of alleged King assassin James Earl Ray far in advance of King’s killing in Memphis, just as the agency had kept track of Lee Harvey Oswald, and even employed him as a paid informant, for years in advance of the killing of John F. Kennedy in Dallas.
Anyone interested in learning the facts of the FBI’s true relationship with MLK and his alleged assassin can do so by reading any number of books on the subject. One I’d recommend is “The Plot to Kill King,” which was authored by Ray’s lawyer, William Pepper.
Or, to save time, you can view a fine documentary on Netflix titled “MLK/FBI" directed by Sam Pollard.
Here’s what Pollard had to say about the FBI’s hounding of MLK during his final years in a recent interview with NPR:
Pollard's documentary is based on newly declassified files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, along with restored archival footage. It shows the government's extensive targeting of King and his associates in the 1960s.
The FBI campaign against King began with wiretaps, but quickly ballooned. When wiretaps revealed that King was having extramarital affairs, the FBI shifted their focus to uncover all evidence of his infidelity by bugging and taping him in his hotel rooms and by paying informants to spy on him. Eventually, the FBI penned and sent King an anonymous letter, along with some of their tapes, suggesting that he should kill himself.
Reading the letter, Pollard was struck by the fact that it was made to sound like it was written by someone close to King.
"They were trying to make it sound like it was not only a former associate but a 'Negro' who wrote that letter," he says. "This is supposed to be the nation's police, that's supposed to be doing the right thing, and this is the lengths they'll go to destroy a human being? It's awful."
FBI Methods
They would go into these hotels before King and his associates got there and they would be let in by the management to bug those rooms and to have the rooms next door, nearby, where they could listen in to what was going on when King and his associates took those rooms.
So this was an all-out assault. And as Chuck Knox says, a former FBI agent, any time King was going to go to a new city, the agenda was FBI agents were on the move to get to those places, to start to monitor and wiretap and listen to everything that was happening within the confines of those rooms between King and his associates, members of the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
On why the filmmaker believes King's assassination was part of a larger conspiracy
Any time King and his associates went to a new city, the FBI was manned up to go in and follow him and surveil him, so how is it possible ... [for] agents constantly surveilling King in nearby hotel rooms not to be aware of someone like James Earl Ray with a rifle who's going to shoot Dr. King? It just doesn't make any sense. And Andrew Young's answer to me was that he doesn't believe [it] was James Earl Ray at all.
Obviously, somewhere in there there was some conspiracy, [which] I personally think the FBI was involved in, to take King out. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. ... And there's got to be someplace in some archive, in some files, some tape, where we will learn the actual truth.
[End]
That, dear readers, is the truth about the FBI’s relationship with Martin Luther King, all virtue-signaling to the contrary notwithstanding.
That is all.