The Federalist Knows Who's Just Like MLK, And It Is Trump And The Insurrectionists

This is not as clever as The Federalist thinks it is.

Yesterday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and we all know what that means: Republicans completely misrepresenting everything the man ever did and said in a desperate attempt to align themselves with him and, by extension, goodness in general.

Traditionally this is done via the repetition of the one and only thing he was ever known to say about racism, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." In Republicans' practice, this usually is taken to refer to white people's character, vis-à-vis the ways in which they benefit from white privilege. They used to do it by trying to claim he was a Republican, but it seems like they've given up on that in recent years.

This year, The Federalist has taken a new tack. Tristan Justice — the notably ridiculous Federalist writer we last encountered when he was cursing Victoria's Secret for ditching the "Angels" in favor of women of varying body types — started out with a reasonable request:  This MLK Day, Remember How The FBI Targeted Him. Justice even said some actually true things about Dr. King and the fact that the FBI and the NSA did horrible things to him. Also pretty much every other government agency out there, and many others not affiliated with any government agency.

In fact, I almost had hope we were going to get through a whole Federalist article full of actual facts and reasonable statements. It seemed like it was just going to read like your average high school history paper based off of a Wikipedia article .

Alas, it was not to be.

The story of the FBI being weaponized to routinely investigate political opponents with virtually no accountability is continuing to replay itself decades later.

After agency operatives orchestrated a years-long witch hunt to undermine former President Donald Trump as a puppet of Russia, the FBI is now being used to target political dissidents to the Biden regime.

On Tuesday, FBI officials revealed to Senate lawmakers that the bureau is creating a new “ Domestic Terror Unit ,” inspired by the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. The same officials in the same hearing repeatedly refused to disclose how many agency informants were involved in the violence hysterically branded by Democrats as an “ insurrection .” Agency officials also refused to offer details on its military-style raids conducted on Jan. 6 defendants.

Meanwhile, officials have colluded with the House Democrats’ Select Committee on Jan. 6 to bar genuine oversight of the executive agency or probe security failures amid the Capitol unrest.

So the theory here, to be clear, is as follows:

1. The FBI investigated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2. The FBI also investigated Donald Trump and the January 6 insurrectionists.

3. Therefore, Donald Trump and the insurrectionists are just like Martin Luther King and also this is the FBI doing the exact same thing it was doing in the 1950s and 60s to left-wing activists.

This would be a logical conclusion to make if these were the only three things ever investigated by the FBI. Alas, they are not. Using similar logic, I could say Trump kidnapped the Lindbergh baby or was D.B. Cooper or the Unabomber. And he's certainly not smart enough to have been the Unabomber. But the FBI investigated all of them, so they must all be the same!

I am hardly the world's biggest fan of the feebs, but even I don't think I'd go so far as to say "The FBI has investigated people who are good, therefore everyone the FBI investigates is good."

Additionally, COINTELPRO (J. Edgar Hoover's program meant to undermine King, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, other civil rights activists, anti-war protesters, environmentalist groups, Native American groups, women's rights activists, socialist groups, and others) also sought to undermine the Ku Klux Klan. That doesn't make "the Klan" the same as Martin Luther King either. That is not how anything works.

It also seems pertinent to note that Dr. King's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom did not make it to the inside of the Capitol building. I think we can safely say that if it had, we never would have heard from any of the people who breached the door ever again.

If conservatives want to align themselves with goodness, if they'd like to align themselves with anti-racism, hell, if they'd like to align themselves with anyone other than Lester Maddox and J. Edgar Hoover, then I highly recommend they start trying to be good people who do good things now, rather than desperately trying to compare themselves to people who did good things in the past.

[ The Federalist ]

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