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Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

Your comment reminds me of a post I read on a popular police forum about J Edgar Hoover (the infamous Director of the FBI for half a century). He created a professionalized police / intelligence force, but he also abused the rights of many citizens and elected political officials with that force. Supposedly he even used it to blackmail some of the Congressmen who were legally obligated to oversee his department.

And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.

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Too bad the congressmen he blackmailed didn't know he was gay. At the time, that would have been powerful information.

It's important to understand that the FBI's power was very asymmetric.

J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.

A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.

I mean, he did try to blackmail MLK into suicide. Even if it wasn't his personal doing, the letter was found in his confidential files.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter

Right, but if you ask J Edgar Hoover supporters, MLK was an adulterer and a Socialist / Communist agitating the American populace (during a time when mass protests and riots were spreading like wildfire). The thing is, there is some truth in those claims.

Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.

That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.

I think everything you wrote is correct except "It was a different time."

Yes and no.

We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.

I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.

Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.

We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

I will, however, completely agree that the time of Nixon's presidency is remarkably similar to Trump's terms.

Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.

There have also been a number of pols trying to whitewash Nixon recently. (I believe including the VP but I'll need to dig up a source.)

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/politics/jd-vance-richard-nix...

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