Pelosi Claims Cease-Fire Advocates Doing Russia’s Bidding. Why Does This Sound So Familiar?

Please, let’s not go full Hoover again.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was interviewed Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union where she claimed, without any proof, that protesters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza were on Vladimir Putin’s payroll.

“But for them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message,” she said. “[…] Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine. It’s about Putin’s message. I think some of these — some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere.” That’s reasonably diplomatic, but then she got all tin-foily. “Some, I think, are connected to Russia. And I say that having looked at this for a long time now, as you know.”

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Ending the violence in both Israel and Gaza is not a simple proposition. However, anti-war protesters are a native US resource and don’t necessarily speak Russian. You can disagree with their position without impugning their motivations, but Pelosi impugned away.

“I don’t think they’re plants,” she said. However .. “I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.”

Pelosi isn’t so naive that she imagines the FBI would only check whether cease-fire protesters have a Venmo transaction history with Putin. (What emoji would Putin use in the “What’s this for?” box for “Russian plant”? Maybe just a plant. He’s probably literal that way.)

I disagreed with the protesters who interrupted President Joe Biden when he was speaking at Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, but even if I think that was annoying, it doesn’t mean they were under orders from Putin.

There was an article in Sunday’s New York Times about Black pastors who’d like Biden to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. Reporter Maya King writes that this is “a campaign spurred in part by their parishioners, who are increasingly distressed by the suffering of Palestinians and critical of the president’s response to it.”

“Black faith leaders are extremely disappointed in the Biden administration on this issue,” said the Rev. Timothy McDonald, the senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta, which boasts more than 1,500 members. He was one of the first pastors of more than 200 Black clergy members in Georgia, a key swing state, to sign an open letter calling for a cease-fire. “We are afraid,” Mr. McDonald said. “And we’ve talked about it — it’s going to be very hard to persuade our people to go back to the polls and vote for Biden.”

Veroyatnaya istoriya, tovarishch!

Seriously, this is an issue that Democrats ignore at our peril. Biden has spent a lot of time already in Black churches, making the case for his re-election. Black folks like Biden but they probably like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a lot more, and we all know how the FBI stalked and harassed him. That didn’t happen solely under the orders of white racists. It started in 1962 with the approval of Democratic Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and continued until Dr. King’s death in 1968. There were no right-wing conservatives in the White House during that period.

Dr. King’s non-violent philosophy obviously extended to the war on Vietnam, but while his political allies fully supported that approach in the Jim Crow South, they were less enthused about its application to open warfare abroad. Dr. King legitimately worried that he’d be smeared as a commie if he openly opposed the war, so he tempered his criticism for a while. His wife, Coretta Scott King, was more openly opposed to the war and spoke at a 1965 rally with Dr. Spock (not the Vulcan).

When Dr. King gave his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson felt that Dr. King had betrayed him after their work on civil rights legislation. The FBI provided a resentful LBJ with information about Dr. King’s anti-war activities. The language in these reports should sound familiar.

Later the same day, King gave a speech in New York attacking United States Vietnam policy. His proposed five steps for ending the Vietnam War according to news sources are similar to Hanoi's demands. They also parallel the Communist Party line.

The FBI also considered a plot to set up Dr. King with its own plant: A journalist would ask him certain questions that “could be linked to show that King’s current policies remarkably parallel communist efforts. This would cause extreme embarrassment to King. Further, it is felt that since the position and paths taken by King and his group closely parallel that advocated by the Communist Party, this fact should be made known to the public.”

Monday, Pelosi’s team clarified her remarks, but the statement released wasn’t exactly reassuring:

“As Speaker Pelosi said on CNN, we have to focus on stopping the suffering in Gaza, and she will continue demanding that all hostages be freed now … Informed by three decades on the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Pelosi is acutely aware of how foreign adversaries meddle in American politics to sow division and impact our elections, and she wants to see further investigation ahead of the 2024 election."

Going full Hoover on folks, especially people of color, doesn’t seem like the best move.

[FBI File / New York Times / NPR]

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