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Comment by thelock85 | Hacker News Reader

Extending your comparison, do you believe the conservative activists and organizers of the 50s and 60s knew of the FBI’s campaign against MLK and others, but were perfectly okay because it served their political interests? Because it seems that you are saying liberal activists and organizers of today are co-signing the FBI’s psychops for political gain. If true that seems fringe, not mainstream but I could be wrong.

Also from a political organizing perspective, it’s advantageous for anyone critical of the FBI to talk about their actions of the past, as a way to bring more attention to what they are doing today. A partisan argument does the exact opposite.

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Back in those days, I assume the population had no clue. But the conservative establishment in government certainly did. I was a Democrat in the 80's, 90's, and 00's. I'd like to think that I would have been one in the 50's given all that was going on.

Today, of course, I'm a committed independent because of the unfortunate path the Dems have taken.

> Because it seems that you are saying liberal activists and organizers of today are co-signing the FBI’s psychops for political gain. If true that seems fringe, not mainstream but I could be wrong.

Most of what I've seen from the political left since the Twitter files and the removal of Trump from Twitter has been justification for censorship and heavy handed actions from federal agencies. Doesn't seem fringe at all. The principled position of civil liberties, free speech, etc, is all but extinct among mainstream Democrats.

As for your last point, I agree. But that's very much not the argument GP was making.

That’s fair. I guess I would think of Twitter echo chambers —full of bots & coordinated algorithm manipulators— as fringe in comparison to what most liberal-minded people I know care about. The predictable response online isn’t as prevalent in-person in my experiences. But to each their own.

Twitter shapes the national conversation. I'm talking about verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, not bots.

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