A fear-salesman makes a big score. Plus: The MLK smears

Quick question: We have every reason to believe that Trump will try to fire Robert Mueller. No rational president would make that move, but Trump is no rational president: He's a cornered animal.

If -- when -- he slashes out, what's our plan? Do we have a plan?

Civil war? From a Kurt Eichenwald tweet:

For some reason, the nutty right thinks a civil war is starting on Saturday. Hope not. I have tickets for a comedy show that night.

The new civil war meme derives from the latest anti-Antifa horseshit, spewed by a tenth-rate right-wing conspiracy maniac.

According to a vocal group of conspiracy mongers who dwell on the fringes of the internet, millions of antifa soldiers will commit mass decapitations of white parents and raid the houses of innocent gun-owning citizens this Saturday to launch a second American civil war.

The looming threat of a bloody Nov. 4 assault on everything that the ultra-right holds dear has been elevated beyond paranoid rumblings. Various permutations of the myth have now gained traction among notorious institutions such as Alex Jones’s InfoWars, which is also reporting news of nationwide riots leading to a civil war, and the John Birch Society, which is advising that people have buckets of water and sand ready to put out fires from antifa. Even the Gateway Pundit, a White House-credentialed pro-Trump blog, has helped spread the rumors of antifa beheadings.

The maniacs have transformed a planned protest by the Revolutionary Communist Party into a fantasia involving Antifa. I've seen no evidence that Antifa has anything to do with any of this.

I am quite familiar with the RCP, a hilarious cult of personality centered around "Buffalo Bob" Avakian, who pretended to be the American version of Mao. The RCP-ers were a perpetually annoying presence at UCLA during my years there. Even back then -- when I wasn't as political as I later became -- I suspected the RCP of being a Republican front group, since everything they did bolstered Reaganism on campus.

The right-wing fear-monger who spread this "Civil War II" nonsense made so much money from his viral YouTube video that he bought a freakin' Lamborghini. What the hell? How is that possible? Everyone knows that the YouTube "adpocalypse" has reduced the likelihood of making big money from videos, precisely because many advertisers don't want their products associated with controversial content. Even in the pre-adpocalypse days, a million video views would fetch a YouTuber a measly thousand bucks (or thereabouts).

King, sex orgies and Joan Baez? I haven't talked about the latest JFK assassination releases heretofore. Frankly, I had planned to avoid the topic altogether, at least for a while. But this report from 1968 is getting a lot of attention and requires a response.

Written shortly before the King assassination, the twenty-page document claims that King was a Communist, that he secretly intended to use violence, that his top advisers were Soviet agents, and that The Nation magazine was a nest of commie spies. The report also claims that King took part in a night-long orgy during which an "unnatural act" took place, that King had an affair with Joan Baez, that he had an illegitimate child, that he presided over a homosexual soiree, that he drank heavily, and that he was just about the worst person ever.

Although this document has an FBI cover sheet, there is no listed author and no indication of the department or office which produced the text -- information invariably found on every legitimate FBI document. Stylistically, the pages are not formatted like any actual FBI document I've ever seen. For one thing, FBI agents were trained to spell the names of individuals in all caps, LIKE THIS.

For another thing, actual FBI documents from this time period always name sources of information, although these names are often redacted in the versions released to the public. I've never seen a genuine FBI report of any length in which most of the sourcing is anonymous. In this text, however, nearly all of the really juicy claims stem from unnamed persons.

Why? Why on earth would the FBI hide that information in a document labeled "SECRET" on every page?

To understand this document, you have to put it in context. J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed collecting "reports" from people outside the Bureau who told him what he wanted to hear about his opponents. Hoover was in covert contact with a poisonous individual named Frank Capell, who wrote a bizarre book claiming that Marilyn Monroe was killed by the commies. (I used to have a copy of this rarity. If memory serves, it had a stapled red cover and was typewritten, as opposed to being typeset.)

Capell -- who (I'm told) had subterranean links to James Angleton -- was part of a right-wing intelligence ring which somehow maintained several offices in New York City, as well as offices elsewhere. I don't know who funded this operation, but they were basically in the business of peddling smears. From Wikipedia's entry on Capell:

In 1964, when Thomas Kuchel was campaigning against Barry Goldwater, there circulated a "vicious document" that purported to be an affidavit signed by a Los Angeles Police Department officer saying that in 1949 he had arrested Kuchel. The document said the arrest was for drunkenness while Kuchel had been in the midst of a sex act.

Sound familiar? Kuchel successfully sued for libel. I suspect, but cannot prove, that Capell's smears-for-$$ operation had a hand in the MLK document now being publicized.

J. Edgar Hoover quietly distributed anti-King smears behind the scenes. According to Curt Gentry's bio, one recipient of Hoover's "confidential" MLK material was President Johnson. According to Anthony Summers' bio, the FBI Director also tried to shop these sex-and-Communism rumors to various newspapermen -- none of whom wanted to touch the stuff -- and to Pope Pius VI. Hoover also tried to convince RFK that King had privately disrespected the late President Kennedy; RFK didn't bite.

According to the Summers book, Hoover's aide Cartha DeLoach handed LBJ a "transcript" of King's alleged orgy. It is possible that Summers was told a slightly skewed version of the truth, and that what his book calls a "transcript" is actually the document now under discussion. The DeLoach document had an audio accompaniment -- a tape of alleged "orgy" sounds. Perhaps the audio was real; I am more inclined to believe that this tape was every bit as fake as the "evidence" against Kuchel.

Although it is possible that a few of the allegations in the newly-released document have some basis in fact, this text is best understood as a collection of rumors, smears, and malign speculation. Baez is still alive and may be willing to comment on the claimed affair between her and King. Even if she offers verification, we need not conclude that any of the other claims are factual. I am quite sure that The Nation was not a nest of Soviet spies.