OPINION: But unlike the FBI’s sinister actions during the civil rights era, which were mostly done in secret, the raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property—reportedly to retrieve documents related to nuclear weapons—was legal and appears to be completely justified.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
The right’s hysterical hissy fit in the aftermath of the FBI’s unprecedented (yet completely legal) raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property would be just plain ironic if it were not also disturbing. Their rhetoric—including conflating agents with the Democratic Party and going so far as to allege that evidence against the former president has been planted—has already led to one violent attack on an FBI field office in Ohio and that could be just the beginning of a nationwide reactionary uprising against federal law enforcement.
The alleged assailant, a Jan. 6 insurrectionist identified as Ricky Shiffer, reportedly called for his fellow MAGA minions to take up arms in a domestic battle against the government on social media prior to the attack. But this is no longer just fringe talk. In the wake of the FBI raid, actual elected officials like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have called for the FBI to be defunded, while others have engaged in all sorts of wild, unsubstantiated speculation about the FBI’s motives and tactics.
Of course, if anyone has a right to be skeptical of the FBI, it’s Black Americans. For decades, the FBI served as one of the most vindictive and, sadly, effective tools in dismantling and undermining efforts of the civil rights movement. There’s a reason they’re the villain in virtually every cinematic retelling of the era. They were officially sanctioned to disrupt the lives and denigrate the activism of MLK, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, just to name a few.
Most of these activities took place under the decades-long leadership of FBI head honcho J. Edgar Hoover, a man with a well-documented penchant for virulent racism and a creepy preoccupation with the sex life of Dr. King in particular. By many historical accounts, Hoover became obsessed with and terrified by the notion of a “Black Messiah” who would stir up and activate the Black population of this country to demand equal justice and rights under the law. Hoover’s tenure and reach at the bureau were so long that this theory was applied to everyone from Marcus Garvey to Fred Hampton.
This history is not lost on African-Americans, not only because it has been vividly recreated in films like Selma and Judas and the Black Messiah, but also because many of us lived with it and still do. The Black Lives Matter movement, in particular, certainly has not viewed law enforcement on the state and federal levels as an ally. Even though the FBI never mentioned BLM by name, it is widely believed that it was one of the groups the FBI had in mind when it released a report warning about the threat posed by “Black Identity Extremists” back in 2017.
But, demonstrating its sense of humor in a brilliant bit of trolling, BLM’s official social media accounts called out the likes of Rep. Greene and suspected pedophile Rep. Matt Gaetz for suddenly appearing to be aligned with their values now that their king—Donald Trump—appears to be the subject of FBI investigations.
But we should all take a collective deep breath here since the historical antagonism between Black Americans and the FBI could not be more different than the scrutiny Donald Trump now appears to be facing.
For starters, much of the sinister actions of the FBI during the height of the civil rights movement were done in relative secrecy. Hoover founded his own internal intelligence unit— today!
The post Oh, the irony: The right attacks the FBI, the same agency with a history of targeting Black movements appeared first on TheGrio.
