In this episode Krystle and Aleta discuss Stephanie McAfee's Diary of a Mad Fat Girl.
A note on this episode- At the time Aleta and I recorded our review, we were under the impression that the organization that Mrs. Peacock refers to, “Cointel Pro,” was a made up device from the author.
After stumbling upon a thread in social media, our naiveté on the subject came to light.
Cointel Pro was in fact a real organization created in the 1950s by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, to surveillance African American Civil Rights Activists, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, over 80% of the members in the Black Panther Party, and activists who are now Congressional Representatives that are in office today.
In the Church Committee Hearing in the 1970s, the actions of the organization were deemed unconstitutional and the committee (and public, which had not known of the organization before) condemned them.
We felt we would be remiss if we did not shed light on this fact, as we were in the dark too and feel that our listeners deserve to know the truth- We speculate that the author may have used the organization as a plot device to explain why this minor character had access to security cameras all along the city, but we are not blind nor deaf to the current events happening across the US today.
