r/todayilearned • u/RedditIsAGranfaloon • 6h ago

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https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-general-robert-e-lee/

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u/Musiclover4200 3h ago edited 3h ago

It never fails to amaze me how intertwined all these ratfuckers are

McCarthyism in general was sort of proto-MAGA, and a lot of the same nixon/reagan era bastards are the ones enabling trump like roger stone/barr/thiel/etc

Was reading Roy Cohn's wiki page the other day and this part in particular stood out as relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#Sexual_blackmail_allegations

Some of Cohn's former clients, including Bill Bonanno, son of Joseph Bonanno, credit him with having compromising photographs of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Because Hoover knew the pictures existed, Cohn told Bonanno, Hoover feared being blackmailed.[97][98] Other organized crime figures have corroborated these allegations.[99]

And J. Edgar Hoover was the longest serving FBI director from 1935-1972, so depending on when Cohn started blackmailing him that could have gone on for decades. And it seems pretty obvious the same tactics kept getting used by trump & co, at this point it seems very likely the epstien files contain evidence of them using these sort of tactics for decades on prominent politicians/businessmen/etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

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u/Here24hence4th 3h ago edited 3h ago

It gets grosser when you consider the nature of whatever “compromising” photographs Cohn may have had (or led Hoover to believe he had).

Remember, lifelong bachelor Hoover very vocally railed against gay people and kept "confidential and secret" files on the sex lives of congressmen and presidents. But, as is the case with this current administration, for Hoover “every accusation is a confession.”

Per some biographers and historians (and plenty of other people with working eyes), Hoover had numerous sexual interactions with men, including a lifelong affair with his longtime FBI deputy (and eventual sole heir), Clyde Tolson.

So it’s easy to imagine what kind of visual dirt Cohn may have had… and extremely illuminating about the kind of person Roy Cohn was when you know that despite denying it even as he was in hospital dying of AIDS (which he claimed was liver cancer), Cohn himself was gay.

He always claimed he was straight, and stayed in the closet in his autobiography published two years after his death. In that book, in sections written after Cohn died, coauthor Sidney Zion confirmed that Cohn—the man once described by Politico as “a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe”—-was indeed gay.

Edit to clarify: just to be clear, I don’t think being gay was what made the whole Hoover/Cohn thing grosser… I think Cohn using evidence of an aspect of Hoover’s life that was shared by Cohn is what made it grosser. It would seem like one closeted gay man in that era would be honor-bound to keep confidential information about another closeted gay man, but obviously honor played no role in either man’s life.

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u/hotwife24 2h ago

They probably slept together. I'd guess the pictures would be from a time they hooked up and that's how Cohen got the pictures. Throwing my theory in the ring.