WARNING: Reading This May Be Risky for Your Freedom

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Opinion / National — REAL POWER.TV

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” — The Usual Suspects, 1995

Do not sleep on the fact that Black people could be ICE’s next target. Don’t get too comfortable. Some surmise that today’s immigrant raids are a dress rehearsal for the confrontation with Black people. Yes, Black people could be sent to detention centers, as Artificial Intelligence makes workers obsolete and racial tensions heighten. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” released in September 2025, and the July 20, 2026 U.S. State Department report “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” read together, provide the rationale for such detentions. ICE actions serve as the precedent. The history of Deep State actions against Black people serves as the confirmation.

Understand that the Deep State is real and is not a friend of Black people. The Deep State, in the form of America’s national security apparatus — the FBI, the CIA, Army Intelligence, and now ICE and Homeland Security — has been an important tool for ensuring that the aspirations of African Americans are kept within the boundaries authorized by the government.

The FBI seems to have begun by watching Black people. Two of the earliest targets of the Bureau’s domestic surveillance, then operating under another name, were Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Marcus Garvey. Paul Robeson was perhaps the best-known Negro — we were Negroes then — in the world in the 1940s and 1950s, and the FBI targeted him for using that popularity to advocate for African American causes. Some researchers have alleged that the CIA poisoned Robeson in the early 1960s through the MKUltra program; the claim remains unproven, but he was never the same afterward.

Perhaps the most significant erasure from public history is the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program — COINTELPRO. Its effect on the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s was substantial. Yet perhaps the only popular film that prominently features it is the 2021 feature Judas and the Black Messiah, the story of the 1969 assassination of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. The film shows how the FBI identified Hampton as a real threat — a man with the potential to lead a Black revolt, the Black Messiah, their words and not mine — and hired an informant who became his bodyguard and set him up. The raid was carried out by officers under the Cook County State’s Attorney, Edward Hanrahan, with assistance from the FBI. There were successful civil suits. Neither office was ever held criminally liable.

Then, in 1971, activists calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and walked out with the documents that exposed COINTELPRO. Among them was a March 1968 COINTELPRO directive from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover — citing Malcolm X, under surveillance before his murder, as the example — instructing Bureau offices to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” African American organizations and leaders, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.

The revelation led to a Senate investigation under Idaho Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee found much more, and in the end the program was “reformed” rather than shut down. At various times since, the FBI has been discovered engaging in the same activity under a different name. The last was the Bureau’s “Black Identity Extremist” assessment — dated August 2017, leaked that October, and retired in July 2019. It was always the same. The FBI is called out, but nothing really changes.

Stay woke — woke as Black people used it back in the day, when it meant stay versed in history, stay politically astute, stay alert to threats to the people. Do not confuse that with how the term has been appropriated recently.

During an August 1975 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Frank Church was asked about the intelligence agencies’ abuses and surveillance capabilities. He offered this warning:

If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny. There would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

That was 1975. Could anyone in that room have imagined what the technology is capable of today? So all that is needed is a tyrant. Where might one find one?

From the shelf of “Books Negroes Are Not Allowed to Read” comes Samuel F. Yette’s 1971 book The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America. The liner notes: “The black man is obsolete in today’s white America. Technocratic and scientific advancements have made his traditionally inferior occupations superfluous.” Manufacturing was declining then. That was infinitesimal compared to what AI promises. So how does America address that problem?

Yette’s answer: a return to the Jim Crow policies of the past, or the removal of African Americans from their homes and communities. It sounds far-fetched. But Yette cites a poll conducted for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence — a body President Johnson created by executive order in 1968 — that asked white Americans to consider this:

“Imagine that the government has just arrested and imprisoned many of the Negroes in your community even though there had been no trouble.”

Forget the results. The curious thing is the question. Think about what has to be true for a presidential commission to write that sentence and put it in front of white citizens. Somebody in 1968 believed there would come a time when Negroes were arrested and imprisoned for no reason at all.

Now put those warnings against the two directives issued in the past year. The Cuba report resurrects the Red Scare tactics of the Cold War. In one chapter it links Black activism and named Black activists to what it identifies as Cuba’s intent to foment revolution in America. Any Black person not slavishly obedient to the administration’s definition of good behavior could face consequences. These documents don’t hand anyone a detention power — but together they build the predicate for one: the label, the lineage, and the investigative mandate. That is how it always starts.

This process must be slowed, and the first move is to bring attention to the documents themselves. The problem is that most people do not know they exist. If Trump succeeds in his effort to control the media — his allies owning key outlets, selected speech defined as criminal, and a stooge at the FCC — Gil Scott-Heron may be proved a prophet, but instead of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” it will be Trump’s counterrevolution that goes unreported.

This is a warning, and I have no solution, but we must remain unified. Any division based on class, socialist versus capitalist, man versus woman, religion, even cool versus uncool, must be set aside. We know how the establishment exploited divisions in the 1970s.

Finally, in our time-honored tradition, and with some minor lyrical modification to that old gospel hymn: MY EYES ARE ON THE EAGLE, ’CAUSE I KNOW IT’S WATCHING ME.

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End Notes

1. Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn, “Did the CIA Poison Paul Robeson?” CounterPunch, April 1, 1999.
2. Flint Taylor, “The Assassination of Fred Hampton: 47 Years Later,” Truthout, December 4, 2016. truthout.org
3. FBI Vault, COINTELPRO — Black Extremists, Part One. vault.fbi.gov
4. “The Intelligence Gathering Debate,” Senator Frank Church on NBC’s Meet the Press, August 17, 1975. NBCUniversal Archives. youtube.com
5. Samuel F. Yette, The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America (New York: Putnam, 1971), 259.
6. The White House, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” (NSPM-7), September 25, 2025. whitehouse.gov
7. U.S. Department of State, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” July 20, 2026. state.gov

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