Skip to main content

June 23 radio show on Urban Legends and Conspiracy Theories

We were back on the air! XM 169 had some technical upgrades last week.

Here's the
clip of the June 23 show. My co-host Eliot Morgan and I focused on urban legends, conspiracy theories, and rumors. To be clear, when you consider history, there are some good reasons for blacks to be suspicious of the various levels of government (as all people should be suspicious of government). But does the reality of Scotsboro, Tuskegee, and COINTELPRO mean that we must also believe that:

Ø Church’s Chicken or Kentucky Fried Chicken have been injected with an ingredient to sterilize black men.
Ø Nike and Reebok use their profits to support the Klan?
Ø That rich clothing designers don’t want to sell clothing to black women because they believe that black women have big hips.
Ø The first U.S. president was black.
Ø Memorandum 46—the "confidential" memo allegedly written by Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor.

As I mentioned on the radio yesterday, I'm posting the time line that I've constructed related to Memorandum 46. Of course I'm more than willing to add dates and information to this:

DATE: 1978—March 17
ACTIVITY:
Memorandum 46 distributed among top administration officials.
SOURCE: Linked on the Internet by typically leftist organizations.
NOTE: If this memo was so top secret, why was it given a Memorandum # that was in sequence with other Memoranda that they knew could be declassified?

DATE: 1980—September 12
ACTIVITY: “The first confirmed surfacing of this forgery was on September 12, 1980, when it was hand-delivered by an unknown individual to a radio station in Washington, DC.”
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1

DATE: 1980—September 16
ACTIVITY: A N.Y. journalist gave a copy of the forged memorandum to a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations.
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1

DATE: 1980—September 17
ACTIVITY: Jerry Funk sends a memo to Jody Powell and Al Friendly labeling the Memorandum as a forgery.
SOURCE: On
Jimmy Carter’s Website

DATE: 1980—September 18
ACTIVITY: Memorandum published in the Sun Reporter
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1
NOTES: My best guess is that the
Sun Reporter is a black newspaper in California. I called, but they had no recollection of the article and don't have in-house archives. I did a search through the Washington Afro-American from September-November 1980, but couldn't come across any articles mentioning Memorandum 46.

DATE: 1980-81
ACTIVITY: Appeared in Soviet publications, including Red Star and Moscow News as well as in a TASS item, and also in Zambia and Mozambican media. The memorandum was also circulated in South Africa.
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1

DATE: 1981, November
ACTIVITY: A leftist newspaper in the Netherlands, Volkskrant, published an article about Memorandum 46.
SOURCE: 1982 Congressional Hearings, page 111. H 431-1
NOTES: This was the last known public appearance of the Memo until the year 2000.

DATE: 1982, July 13, 14
ACTIVITY: Soviet Active Measures: Hearings before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session.
Hearings were declassified in 1983.
NOTES: The CIA reported on suspected forgeries—more than 100 pages of suspected forgeries were submitted by John McMahon, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence

§ Forgery of “U.S. war plans”
§ Forgery of Chou En-Lai testament
§ Forgery of Islamabad
§ Use of map of Austria in disinformation
§ Use of map of Afghanistan in disinformation
§ Forgery of President Reagan’s letter to the King of Spain
§ Forgery of NATO letter
§ Forgery of cablegrams
§ Forgery of Presidential Review Memorandum
§ Forgery of State Department letter
§ Forgery of Haig-Luns letter
§ Use of map of Cuba in disinformation
§ Forgery of Commerce Department document
§ Forgery of U.S. business form letter
§ Forgery of Department of Defense news release

DATE: 1992, September 17
ACTIVITY: Jimmy Carter Library Processing Note
These documents were taken from Staff-Offices, Special Assistant to the President, Louis Martin’s file, box 66, folder Miscellaneous [1]. This is not PRM-46
SOURCE: On
Jimmy Carter’s Website

DATE: 2000, November 7
ACTIVITY:
Graves v. Cohen, 99-4476; Affirmed; N.D. Ohio
SOURCE: 238 F. 3d 421
NOTE: This was a lawsuit filed trying to prove that AIDS was created in a laboratory by the U.S. government.
Note: The case was dismissed as “delusional and fantastic.”

DATE: 2001, June 4
ACTIVITY: Graves v. Rumsfeld, 00-9587 C.A. 6th Cir
SOURCE: 532 US 1072
NOTES: The Supreme Court in no way “certified” this document. The court refused to hear the case.

DATE: 2001, September 2
ACTIVITY: Rep. Cynthia McKinney
presents a copy of Memorandum 46 to Mary Robinson, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. McKinney also mentioned Memorandum 46 in speeches.
SOURCE: Internet links embedded directly above
NOTES: I have no doubt that government officials engage in conspiracies. As I mentioned above, because of things that the government has done, people are willing to believe any and everything.

DATE: 2005
ACTIVITY: Talk-show host Joe Madison presented Memorandum 46 at the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual gathering.
Dr. Sharon T. Freeman said that she wanted to include Memorandum 46 in a book she was writing.
SOURCE:
Congressional Black Caucus Website

CJL

Popular posts from this blog

Scam? Yo Momma!

Note: This was originally posted shortly after Jesse Lee Peterson's book was published, reposted in 2005, and now because of a fight between black customers and a Korean merchant in Dallas, Texas. Scam? Yo Momma! During the summer of 2002 I was an observer to a dispute between the Asian owners of a Chinese takeout and some of their black customers in Washington, D.C. The month-long boycott began when a local activist accused a cook at a Chinese takeout of attempting to cook a piece of chicken he had allegedly dropped on the floor. Despite the best efforts of human rights activist Dick Gregory, popular talk-show host Joe Madison, and Rev. Walter Fauntroy, the protestors were unable to coax any media to report on the protest. On some days there were, by my unofficial count, as many as 100 people chanting songs and marching. But one key person was missing: Rev. Jesse Jackson. It was important to the foot soldiers at the boycott that someone from the media report on...

Get rid of that watermelon!

Part 1: When I was a youngster I used to collect Confederate money, posters and photographs with caricatures of blacks, and "No blacks allowed signs." I loved the money because it was a reminder of how far the sorry Confederacy had fallen. I had one poster of a dark-skinned black boy munching on a watermelon. I would look at that small poster and wonder, "What in the world is wrong with anyone wanting to eat watermelon?" Yes, white people, I'm talking to you. Your parents, grandparents, and other ancestors who thought making fun of blacks for eating watermelon were crazy ! Even people who say that nothing has changed in race relations must acknowledge that the many stereotypes of blacks are no longer prevalent. But then, there are also some ready to remind us of days-gone-by by debunking stuff that doesn't need to be debunked today. According to the Washington Post: The sound you just heard was yet another racial stereotype going kersplat ! Some ...

Thank God for the Atom Bomb

Paul Tibbets , the pilot who dropped the first A-bomb on Japan in 1945, just died at the age of 92. I agree that the dropping of the A-bombs was a proper and effective way to end WWII. The best defense I've read is Paul Fussell's "Thank God for the Atom Bomb." A couple of random thoughts about Paul Tibbets . 1) His certainty is striking. It is now so hip to be a moderate or wishy -washy. The media in particular seems to enjoy stories about American soldiers torn over the need to obey orders to fight. Tibbets would be loved today if he had expressed anguish over what he had done. In today's climate, he might even be Time Magazine's Man of the Year if he dropped the bomb in an ocean rather than obeying orders to drop it on the enemy--except that the environmentalists might then protest glorifying such an environmental hater.. 2) Soldiers who actually do their jobs—that is, eliminate the enemy—seem to play second fiddle to soldiers who get captured and must be...

Park Jin welcoming remarks to FSI (and Casey Lartigue)

  National Assembly member Park Jin makes the welcoming remarks at FSI's conference featuring North Korean diplomats. Park Jin | Greeting message to FSI and Casey Lartigue mention - YouTube

From nothing to something super special (2023-02-10)

FSI has moved into a better institutional neighborhood where we are the poorest in the area. In August 2022, I was elected as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Freedom Speakers International (FSI) and in January 2023 FSI achieved incorporation status in South Korea. This has meant that FSI must upgrade operations and structure and I am the one, as chairman and co-president, who will be blamed if it doesn’t happen. I really should not be the chairman, for a variety of reasons, but anyway I am. Eunkoo and I are not the typical executives of a growing organization. In addition to being mainly responsible for building and fundraising for the organization, we are the hands-on leaders who are constantly in contact with North Korean refugee speakers. We look forward to the day we can afford staff to handle many tasks. Until then we can expect to continue having more days like yesterday, even on Eunkoo’s birthday. 2023-02-10 Meeting #1: planning We started Eunkoo’s birthday with a planning...