Spoiled tech bros need a history lesson.
There's a tendency among the media class to hyper-fixate on potential government abuses like online surveillance or content moderation that almost exclusively impact the media class.
Oh my god, the new Twitter Files just dropped, and guess what, the FBI used to be an upstanding institution devoted to Constitutional rights. Thus spake Matt Taibbi on Twitter:
Once we had a standard in this country that the FBI had to at least have some indication of possible crime to initiate investigations. No longer. They can “pre-assess” at will, with no chargeable crime in sight, and people like you are fine with it.
“Here, here!” Elon Musk tweeted in response to a call by David Sacks for a new Church Commission to investigate the FBI’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
We need a new Church Commission to investigate why the FBI and Intelligence Community are engaged in social media censorship, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden story.
I’m all for more C-SPAN content. But you know what the FBI did in the halcyon days of yore? A ton of crazy shit. But I’d like to focus on the worst one: plotting and carrying out a conspiracy to murder 21-year-old Fred Hampton.
The Black Panthers, like the FBI, were not a perfect institution. But the Illinois chapter, led by Hampton, kind of was. Hampton forged an alliance of Black Panthers, Young Patriots (poor white trash that had migrated to Chicago from the South) and the Young Lords, a Latino gang.
There’s a video of Black Panther Bobby Lee speaking at a meeting of the Young Patriots. He notes all the things poor whites and poor Blacks had in common, from poverty to police abuse. The Young Patriots eventually stopped displaying the confederate flag out of respect for the Black Panthers.
They banded together to protect members from the cops, fight against police brutality, run health care clinics, feed the homeless and poor kids, and connect people with legal help if they were dealing with abusive landlords or police.
It was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s worst nightmare. He’d worried that a “Black Messiah” would create an interracial alliance. So the FBI plotted with the Chicago police to murder Hampton.
At about 4:45 a.m., the Cook County police department burst into the Panther headquarters. They shot 18-year-old Mark Clark, who was on security detail, in the chest, killing him instantly. They sprayed close to 100 rounds as they swept through the apartment, heading for Hampton’s room, where he was sleeping with his pregnant fiancée. His fiancée and another man heard the gunshots and tried to wake Hampton up, but they couldn’t. The police charged into Hampton’s room, dragging his fiancée and the other man out.
“He’s still alive,” they overheard an officer say. They said they heard two shots, and a second officer said, “He’s good and dead now.” They’d shot Hampton point blank in the head.
Years later, it was revealed that Hampton’s bodyguard, William O’Neal secretly worked for the FBI. He’d been coerced into becoming an informant in exchange for getting criminal charges dropped. O’Neal had given the cops a map of the apartment that helped them locate Hampton in the predawn raid. It’s long been suspected, but not confirmed, that O’Neal had also drugged Hampton ahead of the raid. Years later, O’Neal killed himself.
But, you know, the FBI wanted to suppress Hunter Biden doing cocaine.
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