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It seems the media has varying standards of "journalistic ethics" depending upon the subject.
1 posted on 05/30/2019 10:08:54 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

Reporters got their hands out in these days of Fake News. Milk that Pulitzer Prize for all it’s worth.

Martin is not here to defend himself. So this is nothing more than sensationalizing unverified scandal schemes, no different than circulating two Russian whores urinated on a future President.

And why now? Because this sh*t sells and it steers the news cycle away from the pending arrest of Cardinal Comey.


53 posted on 05/30/2019 11:07:57 AM PDT by Hostage (Article V)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia
The news of his infidelities in motel rooms being recorded by the FBI is decades old. But these details are newly published.

One thing I heard years ago is that J. Edgar used to curry favor with LBJ by coming over to the White House with edited "Best Excerpts" tapes of MLK's sex romps, and the two would listen together and ROTFL.

54 posted on 05/30/2019 11:17:04 AM PDT by CardCarryingMember.VastRightWC ("Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt" - Pr. Herbert Hoover)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia
The AJC declined to run the piece because it was based on information that would in some cases be impossible to independently verify, said AJC editor Kevin Riley.

Right. As if they hold back anti-Trump stories that are "impossible to independently verify".

58 posted on 05/30/2019 11:31:40 AM PDT by libertylover (Democrats hated Lincoln too.)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia
In a previous life, Ralph Abernathy was the guest speaker at a function I was attending. Either by luck or design, he ended up at the same dinner table I was sharing with a roughly equal number of black and white attendees.

He gave a nice polite speech, but when he sat down for the meal with us, he spoke a bit more "off the cuff" so to speak. It was clear from the conversation that he cared little for Jesse Jackson and admired MLK. However, he told us, MLK had a weakness for women and a need to get laid as pervasive as JFK's. Because he was quite famous, he had little need to solicit opportunities. Unlike JFK, Dr. Abernathy was unable to protect him from the rumors floating about at the time because MLK wouldn't show much discretion.

He said that those who ran in MLK's circle were totally unprepared for his assassination in the way it happened because they always felt it would be an angry husband or boyfriend gone berserk.

59 posted on 05/30/2019 11:32:16 AM PDT by Vigilanteman (The politicized state destroys all aspects of civil society, human kindness and private charity.)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

“””The details about orgies and a rape witnessed by King are recounted in FBI memos that were released last year”””


The AJC also has had the past year to look into those records. Gee, I wonder why they had no interest in taking a peek to see if there was anything in the files regarding MLK.

I suspect it was well known among ‘those who know’ that the files contained major negatives about MLK.


69 posted on 05/30/2019 11:46:57 AM PDT by Presbyterian Reporter
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To: rightwingintelligentsia
Racist! Racist! Racist!
Sure, you believe the FBI when they slander Dr. King but you call them liars and traitors when they do the same to Orange Man
Racist! Racist! Racist!
71 posted on 05/30/2019 11:50:39 AM PDT by MrBambaLaMamba (When everything is digital, after the EMP it's back to the Dark Ages)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

2027 is when the entire MLK file is scheduled for release, although there is a move afoot to release it early. His statues and holiday should be removed because this won’t be a pretty picture.


73 posted on 05/30/2019 12:30:53 PM PDT by kenmcg (tHE WHOLE)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

The AJC is a pinko commie rag.


80 posted on 05/30/2019 2:03:46 PM PDT by Georgia Girl 2 (The only purpose of a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should never have dropped)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

So... I need clarification... Will the AJC conduct a “white-wash” or a “black-wash” of the story??


83 posted on 05/30/2019 2:44:03 PM PDT by SuperLuminal (Where is Sam Adams now that we desperately need him)
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

For the record. this article is dated January 2018
https://redice.tv/news/the-truth-about-martin-luther-king-jr

The Truth About Martin Luther King, Jr.
Spencer J. Quinn, Counter-Currents, 15 January 2018

In November of 2017, President Trump instructed the National Archives to release hundreds of previously-sealed documents which pertained to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Included among these documents were two FBI files which, curiously enough, have little to do with the Kennedy assassination but could have great bearing on the current struggles of the Dissident Right. In Part 1 of this series, we covered the May 1967 FBI report entitled “Racial Violence Potential in the United States This Summer.” ...the second document, “Martin Luther King, Jr., an Analysis,” dated March 12, 1968, just three weeks before King’s assassination.

It always hurts to see one’s icons destroyed. Those icons are really what link a person to a greater humanity and whatever lies beyond it. It’s as if through an icon a person can channel an identity which signifies something much greater than himself. Icons can pull people into their orbits and inspire love and awe. People derive meaning and self-worth through them. Icons can also compete. Different groups may share an icon, or their incompatible icons may prevent them from coexisting. But in all cases, serious epigones prostrate themselves before their icons. It’s sort of like kissing the ring of a mafia boss. It’s done for protection. If you’re going to get to me, first you have to get through him.

In releasing the FBI’s 20-page analysis of Martin Luther King, President Trump recently took a serious swing at one of the Left’s most precious icons. The information in it is quite damning, and it hits King’s legacy from several directions. If people on the Right take up where Trump left off by internalizing the document and by going on the offensive with it against the Left, King’s potency as an icon will be greatly reduced. It sort of reminds me of how Sean Hannity would often mention Chappaquiddick whenever the topic of Ted Kennedy came up on his show. It was his way of shaming his opponents for supporting an icon that was not only all too human, but at times even less than that.

For students of the Civil Rights Movement, the FBI’s analysis may not reveal very much new information about King (although there is some). King’s heyday is still well within living memory, and contemporaneous knowledge and rumor surrounding the man has had a way of trickling up to the present day, especially within conservative and rightist circles. The major knocks against him are that he plagiarized his doctoral thesis in systematic theology at Boston University in the mid-1950s, that he frequently engaged in extramarital sex, and that he was closely linked to the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). The FBI file addresses these last two issues, in some cases down to niggling detail, and leads one to conclude that Martin Luther King was little more than a sex addict and a shill for the Communist Party.

The sexual indiscretions harm King’s legacy, of course, but in the near-fifty years since his death, King’s friends and admirers have successfully whitewashed a good deal of it. [snip]

“Adultery,” “affairs,” “liaisons,” “infidelities,” “incidental couplings.”“weakness for women,”“difficult time with temptation.”“a form of anxiety reduction” which caused him a great deal of “painful and at times overwhelming guilt.” The whitewashing of King’s prodigious sexual appetites goes on to this day. CNN called the document’s .... “insinuations and assertions about King’s personal life” and describes King’s behavior as “extramarital affairs and other sexual improprieties.” CNN then quotes the current director of the MLK Institute who accuses the authors of the document (or perhaps Trump himself) of attempting to “damage Martin Luther King’s reputation.”

In the eyes of the Left, Martin Luther King, Jr. is a victim who is as innocent as he could possibly be and still be guilty. Given the Left’s overall tolerance of sexual promiscuity and deviancy, this means he’s not really guilty at all. At least not until the National Archives releases the FBI surveillance tapes and transcripts to the public in 2027.

“King’s Personal Conduct,” it states that in February 1968, while running a “workshop” on urban leadership in Miami, King hired prostitutes with funds from the Ford Foundation. He then engaged in binge drinking and group sex acts which the FBI describes as “deviating from the normal.” The FBI also relates how King participated in another “drunken sex orgy” in Washington, DC back in 1964. The sex acts were both “natural and unnatural” according to the FBI and were performed “for the entertainment of onlookers.”

In the 1960s, this was the pattern for King, who, according to the FBI, “has continued to carry on his sexual aberrations secretly while holding himself out to public view as a moral leader of religious conviction.”


85 posted on 05/31/2019 3:42:57 PM PDT by Beautiful_Gracious_Skies
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To: rightwingintelligentsia

Thanks for adding this AdmSmith.

Why was J. Edgar Hoover watching MLK and why did AG Bobby Kennedy authorize this surveillance?

New revelations from secret FBI files show that the civil rights icon had the morals of a goat – and that he had a troubling relationship with Kremlin agents.

Few stories are guaranteed to get liberals in a greater lather than the 1960s surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr. by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That the FBI, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover – the notorious micromanager who was possibly gay and maybe even partly black himself – conducted years of secret surveillance on the civil rights icon has been a sore point with progressives for decades.

What the Bureau reputedly discovered about King, especially his extramarital activities with a string of lovers, hardly seemed to comport with the clergyman’s saintly public image. Neither was it exactly a secret that MLK’s private life verged on the sordid, since members of the martyred minister’s inner circle have previously gone on record about his weakness for women.

Nevertheless, what David Garrow published this week has produced great gnashing of teeth, not least because the author is an esteemed left-liberal historian and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a celebrated biography of King. If Professor Garrow has an ideological motive, it’s hardly anti-King, which only makes his findings more painful.

First, let it be noted that Garrow ran his explosive piece in Standpoint, a center-right British magazine, after it was turned down by several mainstream media outlets which didn’t want to touch a story this hot. And hot indeed it is, including details of King’s cavorting with north of 40 women not his wife, as well as seductions of parishioners, full-blown orgies, plus an apparent illegitimate daughter. Worst of all, King reportedly watched and cracked jokes while witnessing the rape of a church-going lady by a friend and fellow man of the cloth. In any age this is shocking stuff, and never more than in the #MeToo era.

Garrow uncovered this unpleasant account in FBI files while diligently researching in the National Archives. In 1977, a Federal court ordered the Bureau’s wiretap recordings of King to be held under seal for 50 years, but some transcripts, once classified, wound up in the archives, thanks to post-Cold War declassifications, where Garrow found them while digging in the files – something which previous historians failed to do.

There can be no doubt of their authenticity. Garrow’s opponents are now coming out of the woodwork and smearing him for telling unpalatable truths, attempting to cast doubt on the archives. The notion that veteran FBI agents would fabricate secret wiretap transcripts which they knew were likely to wind up on the desk of the obsessively detailed-oriented Mr. Hoover is patently absurd.

While King’s revolting sexual conduct is getting all the media attention, that’s not the important part of this story, historically speaking. Garrow’s report includes details about the FBI’s infamous Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which in the 1960s and early 1970s surveilled and employed dirty tricks against radical groups which Hoover assessed as threats to national security. These FBI operations against student radicals and various minority groups like the Black Panthers have generated a great deal of polemical literature. That COINTELPRO’s greatest success was breaking the back of the Ku Klux Klan is less frequently noted.

The FBI has long been criticized for surveilling King, who over the half-century since his assassination has become a secular saint complete with his own Federal holiday (an honor bestowed on no other American). On the Left, it’s an article of faith that Hoover’s motivation for spying on MLK was prejudice, even racism, pure and simple.

Garrow’s account makes clear that was not the case. Hoover’s reason for ordering the Bureau to closely watch King beginning in 1963 was fear of Kremlin influence on the civil rights leader. The essence of this story has been known for decades. Hoover worried about Stanley Levison, a left-wing attorney who entered King’s orbit in late 1956, quickly becoming MLK’s closest confidant. Levison served as all-purpose consigliere to King and authored some of the civil rights leader’s most famous speeches.

Hoover fretted about the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) infiltrating the civil rights movement, particularly because the FBI knew that the party had secret members, known only to CPUSA leadership, who were employed to clandestinely influence non-communist groups. Worse, the Bureau knew that Stanley Levison was one such secret CPUSA member.

They knew this thanks to Jack and Morris Childs, two brothers who joined the party as youths and rose high up, including serving as Soviet spies (any line between the CPUSA and Soviet intelligence existed in theory, not in fact). However, by the 1950s the Childs brothers had flipped and become FBI moles inside the party, passing the Bureau reams of information about the CPUSA’s inner workings as the cornerstone of Operation SOLO, which became one of the FBI’s great Cold War successes.

The Childs told the FBI about Levison’s secret party ties, so the Bureau began watching Levison. They discovered that he was meeting with Viktor Lesiovsky, a Soviet diplomat assigned to the United Nations in New York, who rose to become special assistant to the UN secretary general, but the FBI knew that Lesiovsky was really a KGB officer.

This rang enough alarm bells within the Bureau that Hoover informed President John F. Kennedy about counterintelligence concerns regarding King’s inner circle; these concerns were endorsed by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother. This led to a White House meeting on June 22, 1963, during which the president asked King to sever ties with Levison, whom Kennedy termed a “Kremlin agent.” This was the very height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union nearly had a nuclear war between each other a few months before, yet King ultimately refused to part with Levison, who remained MLK’s top adviser until his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968. It was King’s unwillingness to cut ties with Levison which led Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to authorize full FBI surveillance of the civil rights leader shortly before President Kennedy’s own assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Garrow adds important detail to this story, including the fact that the FBI was aware of Levison’s role as a major CPUSA bagman. Between 1957 and 1962, Bureau files reveal, Levison gave the party an astonishing $76,500 ($650,000 in 2019). Since Levison was not a wealthy man, this funding can be assumed to have come from the Kremlin in some fashion, since communist parties overseas were funded by the KGB through various clandestine methods.

More troubling still is Garrow’s revelation from FBI files that Levison gifted his new friend King with $10,000 in cash during 1957-58, an amount equivalent to $87,000 today. The Bureau learned of this donation from the IRS, leading Hoover to exasperation. Given Levison’s Kremlin connections, there is reasonable suspicion that this cash came from the KGB too. Which makes the FBI’s apparent failure to inform the White House about Levison’s role as CPUSA bagman, including payments to King, rather difficult to explain.

Garrow concludes his piece with the assessment that what he learned from FBI files about King “poses so fundamental a challenge to his historical stature as to require the most complete and extensive review possible.” Given the vituperative criticism that Garrow has gotten for publishing his findings, there’s no reason to think that historians and journalists will be eager to dig deeper into the archives about King’s secret life. However, Garrow makes clear that J. Edgar Hoover was right to have grave counterintelligence concerns about the civil rights leader and his secret connections to the Soviet Union. Given high public interest in the clandestine role of Moscow’s spies in American politics, thanks to Donald J. Trump, the role of Stanley Levison, a known Kremlin agent, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inner circle now merits dispassionate examination by experts, not partisans.


86 posted on 06/01/2019 9:31:47 AM PDT by Beautiful_Gracious_Skies
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