Right idea, wrong reason.
The cancel culture that has declared war on American history, popular culture, and great white men of significance has now trained its sights on former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who was the driving force of the bureau he helped to found and that he would go on to lead for 37 years until his death in 1972.
Hoover instilled fear in both friend and foe alike for his predilection for surveillance and the compiling of files containing blackmail material that he could draw upon whenever he deemed it to be necessary.
Hardly the great man that he is portrayed as by hagiographic media stories that gloss over his innate fascism, Hoover’s true legacy is that he created an American version of the fearsome Nazi secret police organization the Gestapo as recent events should make crystal clear.
But it isn’t Hoover’s cunning ruthlessness that has led to Black Lives Matter activist Democrats looking to strip his name from FBI headquarters, but rather that he was a racist (yawn) and a newly released movie has inspired House Dems who should have more important things to do with their time to propose legislation for the scrubbing of his name from the building that opened in 1975, three years after J. Edgar went to his great reward.
Spearheading the bill to cancel Hoover is Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen, the creepy hysteric whose physical appearance is directly out of central casting as a backwoods pederast for a Sling Blade sequel along with several others looking to catch the “woke” lightning in a bottle.
Cohen was stirred to action over the film “Judas and the Black Messiah “ that debuted at the ultra-liberal Sundance Film Festival last month and is currently running on HBO Max as well as in theaters. The plot centers on the 1960s FBI setup of communist and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton who was killed during a police raid on his Chicago apartment in 1969, an incident that many believe was a planned assassination.
Hampton was caught up in the Hoover and the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program in which political groups that were considered to be subversive were surveilled, infiltrated, and entrapped by the feds.
‘Judas And The Black Messiah’ Inspires Congressman To Reintroduce Bill To Strip J. Edgar Hoover’s Name From FBI Building https://t.co/vybKuegsMb
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) March 8, 2021
Via Deadline Hollywood, “‘Judas And The Black Messiah’ Inspires Congressman To Reintroduce Bill To Strip J. Edgar Hoover’s Name From FBI Building”:
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) said that he had no contact with the team behind Judas and the Black Messiah before he and other lawmakers reintroduced a bill to strip J. Edgar Hoover’s name from the FBI building.
“The movie is a clear depiction of his efforts to impede the civil rights movement,” Cohen said in an interview.
Award season typically sees a smattering of topical movies screened before lawmakers in D.C. or at the White House, but that hasn’t happened this year due to Covid-19 restrictions. Cohen said he watched the movie about three weeks ago and, inspired by it, called his staff the next day to work on reintroducing the legislation.
The movie tells the story of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), who served as an FBI informant to help silence him. The movie had its premiere at Sundance’s virtual film festival before debuting in theaters and on HBO Max last month. Hampton was killed in a police raid in 1969. Martin Sheen plays Hoover in the movie.
In introducing the bill late last month, Cohen said that Hoover “doesn’t deserve the honor and recognition of having the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency headquarters named for him. The civil rights we enjoy today are in spite of J. Edgar Hoover, not because of him.” The bill has about a dozen co-sponsors.
Cohen said that he has gotten some attacks from Republicans who say that this latest effort is another version of “cancel culture.” Five months after Hoover’s death in 1972, Congress designated the Brutalist structure in D.C. as the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
There is also the matter of Hoover’s raging homosexuality and according to some accounts, his trangenderism.
In his 1993 book Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Anthony Summers dishes the dirt that Hoover was in attendance at one of the parties arranged by notorious political fixer Roy Cohn that featured underage boys in wild sex orgies conducted in Suite 233 at New York’s Plaza hotel in 1958, a possible blackmail sting.
According to a United Press International review of Summers’ book after its publication:
Hoover’s folly was compounded by being involved in at least two orgies at the Plaza Hotel by the late attorney Roy Cohn and Lewis S. Rosensteil, the Schenley liquor mogul and benefactor of Brandeis University who had ties to to both Costello and Lansky, the book asserts, quoting Rosensteil’s fourth wife, Susan.
Mrs. Rosensteil claims to have attended the orgies with her husband in 1958. On the first occasion Hoover, whom Mrs. Rosensteil had met and recognized, was wearing ‘a fluffly black dress, very fluffy, with flounces, and lace stockings and high heels, and a black curly wig.’
‘He had makeup on, and false eyelashes. It was a very short skirt and he was sitting there in the living room of the suite with his legs crossed. Roy introduced him as ‘Mary.”
On the second occasion, Hoover was wearing a similar dress but in red with a black feather boa around his neck ‘like an old flapper, like you see on old tintypes,’ Rosensteil said.
Young boys joined the party and engaged in sexual activities with Hoover, Cohn, and her husband, according to Rosensteil, who said Hoover had one of the boys read from the Bible while the other played with him.
Summer’s book was so explosive and damaging to the false image of Hoover, that the establishment media quickly moved to do everything that it could to discredit it but the knowledge that the man had a closet full of skeletons is well known.
Hoover’s inability to keep his homosexual impulses under control and his failure to keep his sleazy dalliances discreet also led to the Mafia and other mobsters including Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky obtaining blackmail material on the director himself which was then used as leverage to keep the FBI from cracking down hard on organized crime lest J. Edgar be outed as a pervert and closet queen.
In a 2011 article written by Summers for the UK Guardian after the release of the Clint Eastwood biopic “J. Edgar,” the author wrote:
Hoover himself, it is now clear, had contacts with organised criminals or their associates in circumstances that made it possible – likely even – that they learned of his sexual proclivities. More than one top mobster claimed the outfit had a hold on Hoover. Meyer Lansky, the syndicate’s co-founder, was said to have “pictures of Hoover in some kind of gay situation” and an associate quoted Lansky as claiming, “I fixed that sonofabitch.” Carmine Lombardozzi, who was known as “the Italian Meyer Lansky”, said: “J Edgar Hoover was in our pocket.”
Hoover’s death was greeted with relief by many including then-President Richard M. Nixon who according to Summers said upon receiving the news: “Jesus Christ! That old cocksucker!”
While there is indeed ample evidence that Hoover may have disliked black people, especially his vendetta with slain civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. who he tried to push to commit suicide, Hoover’s homosexuality/transgenderism and his running interference for the mob is the real reason why he deserves to be canceled.
Given the dark history of its founder, the FBI along with its political surveillance – including on the Trump transition team in 2016 – is the textbook example of the fruit of a poison tree and the entire Bureau should be ripped out by the roots.