Tiota Sram on Nostr: Always worth repeating on this day that the FBI spied on MLK in a ...

Always worth repeating on this day that the FBI spied on MLK in a government-sanctioned effort to derail the civil rights movement, and they attempted to blackmail him by sending evidence of his infidelity to his wife.

Hopefully, you already knew that, but it's worth thinking about a bit more... did a judge sign a warrant to blackmail King? Almost certainly not (though judges probably did approve the wiretapping). Was the blackmail attempt a punishment as a result of criminal proceedings? Obviously not. So the FBI just... decided to target a private citizen for arbitrary extralegal harassment, then went ahead and did it. All because this man was (checks notes)... leading a peaceful protest movement for civil rights?

America is a pretty messed-up place, and if you're paying attention, you can see that the roots of that behavior haven't really changed, even if conditions are better in some ways. Things like child separation at the border under Trump, or the brutal suppression tactics against the Atlanta Forest Defenders, or similar suppression of Water Protectors at Standing Rock: the state and police departments in particular constantly bend or simply outright ignore the laws they're supposed to enforce, and they do it for the worst reasons imaginable, which usually boil down to defending their monopoly on power and/or defending the profits of planet-destroying corporations (two sides of the same coin).