Here's a puzzle: Why haven't progressives demanded that J. Edgar Hoover's name be sandblasted off the FBI building in D.C.?

Today's FBI has become the mirror image of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's founder who politicized the agency as his personal police force.  

 

Progressives have demanded all kinds of removals--from statues of Washington and Lincoln on down--for every imagined offensive and deviation from moral precepts imposed by the woke. Yet, progressive have been mysteriously silent about why this honorarium to Hoover should remain.

The entrance to the FBI headquarters building in Washington D.C. is proudly displayed with the name of the agency's founder--J. Edgar Hoover. If there ever was someone who violated contemporary progressive rules in spades it was Hoover. 

Sure, he couldn't own slaves, but his secret activities assaulted some of those very laws that the FBI was supposed in enforce. You can get a taste of them here, in History.com. A summary (to list them all would be too longish.) would include his spying and keeping a dossier on Rev. Martin Luther King, Jk, Hoover believed King was a communist and a threat to national security, but more likely  was a threat to Hoover's rigid, right-wing beliefs. Hoover didn't keep King's dossier in his desk, but distributed to the media (to which I can personally attest). 

He compiled a long list of civil rights offenses and used the agency's investigators to blackmail officials  and others he didn't like. For example, he recorded details of President John F. Kennedy's extra-marital affairs.

His power was so complete that he died in office, without ever being subjected to the statuary 10-year-term limit. No one had the guts to confront this autocrat. 

So where are the progressives? If statues of Lincoln meet the woke's cancellation standards, surely Hoover should stand near the head of the line of the deserving to be rubbed out. Or maybe the Hoover-like corruption of the FBI mirrors the corruption and politicization that mars the agency today. Practices that fed the progressive agenda.

In Hoover-like practice, the FBI today is headed by political loyalists who have engineered campaigns to discredit the likes of Donald Trump and parents who want to exercise their right to raise their children as they wish. And a lot more. 

The latest example has been the trial of Igor Danchenko of lying to the FBI. He was acquitted, but durning the trial the FBI's politicization and corruption was on full display. 

Here's a taste of what was revealed as reported by the New York Post:

"Despite Danchenko’s acquittal, the trial produced a series of revelations about the FBI — including testimony from a bureau analyst that it had offered Christopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who compiled the dossier, $1 million in October 2016 to make its outrageous claims against Trump stick.

"Court documents filed by Durham last month also indicated the FBI employed Danchenko as a paid confidential source for more than three-and-a-half years — hiring him even as he was being investigated for his role in compiling the dossier. 

"In court testimony last week, Danchenko’s FBI handler revealed the Russian national was paid more than $200,000 for his source work — including up to $3,000 for conducting a single meeting. The handler, Kevin Helson, added that he had requested Danchenko receive a $346,000 farewell payment when the bureau dropped him as a source in October 2020. That request was denied."

Now, FBI whistleblowers are turning up to detail just how corrupt the agency as become

There is hardly any question that Democrats, Hilary Clinton's campaign and other partisans have corrupted the FBI, at least at the leadership level, to defeat Trump's 2020 election and when that failed to launch a years-long, false campaign to discredit the former president.

I have no interest in defending Trump, who should be occupying a loony bin. But the FBI campaign--now established as fact--to use against Democrats' political enemies is no less a corruption of a government agency that is as corrupt as it was under Hoover.

Could that be the explanation of why Hoover has escaped the attention of progressives? Do they want to do anything that would demonstrate to today's Americans just how politically corrupt the FBI can become?

I have no other explanation than the possibility that progressives are so ignorant of history that they don't know that history can repeat itself.