Tucker Carlson explains how the FBI and CIA conducted a coup to take out President Richard Nixon with help from journalist Bob Woodward. 🤔

Richard Nixon from the Persona series is a Hoxhaist!

Days before Salvador Allende’s confirmation as Chile’s president in 1970, US President Richard Nixon met with a rightwing Chilean media mogul to discuss blocking the socialist leader’s path to the presidency, newly declassified documents have revealed. The documents, published in a new Spanish edition of the Pinochet files by archivist and writer Peter Kornbluh, include Nixon’s agenda for 15 September 1970, which shows a meeting in the Oval Office with Agustín Edwards, the owner of the conservative El Mercurio media group. A day earlier, Edwards had met CIA director Richard Helms. Notes from that conversation detail the media baron’s observations on various members of the military, prompting Nixon to request a “gameplan” for a coup that would prevent Allende’s inauguration. Allende had won a slender victory over rival Jorge Alessandri in presidential elections, but with no clear majority, the electoral system at the time required congress to ratify the candidate who would form a government. In secret, and with the support of President Nixon’s White House, a plan was hatched for the military to seize power, dissolve congress and block Allende’s inauguration. Alongside munitions and payments, Edwards conveyed the military’s demands for “clear and specific guarantees” as well as “assurances they would not be abandoned and ostracized”, according to a memorandum entitled “Conversation with Agustín Edwards, Owner of El Mercurio Chilean Newspaper Chain, 18 September 1970”, which had previously been heavily redacted. “It is incredible that, 50 years later, we’re still learning key details of how the US were trying to block, thwart, undermine and destabilise the first elected socialist president in Chile,” said Kornbluh.

The politics in Lancer the mech pilot TTRPG seems center left to me. A good way to explain what's going on in that game's universe is with this overly long metaphor:

Imagine an alternate history where Nixon somehow beat JFK Jr to the white house, and once in office he lets Kissinger go nuts setting fascists up on an accelerated schedule. That's what Union's Second Committee was like. Then Tricky Dick procedes to nuke Vietnam a couple times. That's the Hercynia Crisis and that FTL Piston weapon launch. JFK and company ride the shock and horror of approaching nuclear war into office on the promise of de-escalation and enforcing civil rights, and they deliver. That's the coup that formed Union's Third Committee. Kissinger, Nixon, and the entire pentagon/raytheon corp take over NASA in Cape Canaveral, Florida where they form a tolerated corporatocracy in exile. That's basically Harrison Armory on the planet Ras Shamra. Now a United liberal-leftist front of America is actively trying to tear down dictatorships around the world that Kissinger set up (he got assassinated at some point in this time line) and replace them with socialist democracies. That is Union's Justice/Human-Rights Department and a few other government branches. So far they've had some success although people are pointing out that it's a bit hypocritical that the liberators are using weapons from corporate conservative states where civil rights are discretely curtailed. That's what's driving political discourse in 5016u in Union's legislative body, the Central Committee and it's myriad political parties.

So yeah Lancer's political intergalactic landscape is a bit like modern day? Except also cthulhu is giving out reality-breaking tech to militant civil rights advocates and random civilians? That's what HORUS basically is, btw.

Now that I've written this out, it would make for a good american alt-history with mechs campaign in Lancer...

Today is a good day to remember Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected President of Chile, who died in September 1973. Allende most likely shot himself in the La Moneda Presidential Palace in Santiago when he could no longer fight off the forces of General Augusto Pinochet as they executed a violent coup heavily supported by the United States and Henry Kissinger. Pinochet then ruled Chile as an American-supported "anti-communist" military dictator for nearly two decades in which tens of thousands of Chileans were killed, jailed, or simply disappeared.

Allende, a socialist, was popularly elected as Chile's President with promises to strengthen democracy in Latin America and institute significant economic, education, and health reforms in order to dramatically improve the social welfare of the Chilean people. Some American leaders, like Henry Kissinger, saw him as a potential threat -- a South American version of Fidel Castro -- and the CIA begin laying the groundwork for eventual regime change.

The biggest problem with Allende, in Kissinger's mind, was the very fact that he was freely and democratically elected. In a memo to President Nixon that is still somewhat shocking to read, Kissinger wrote that "Allende was elected legally...He has legitimacy in the eyes of Chileans and most of the world; there is nothing we can do to deny him that legitimacy or claim he does not have it." Kissinger then reminds Nixon that "We are strongly on record in support of self-determination and respect for free election; you are firmly on record for non-intervention in the internal affairs of this hemisphere and of accepting nations 'as they are.'" Then he spends several pages outlining ways in which to undermine, delegitimize, and potentially eliminate "the Problem." After all, as Kissinger wrote shortly before Allende was elected, "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

I drew Richard Nixon x George Washington ship art.

He's just sitting there... ✨menacingly✨

Please enjoy meeting our resident Slowly Melting Wax Nixon Head, he lives in the California History Room and he does not have eyes.

#DARKNIXON

i think these belong here

Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling despised Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty.

"What I consider Mayor Yorty wouldn't be publishable even in the Daily Bruin,” said Rod Serling. “Mayor Yorty and I have done everything but engage in letters to the editor of the LA Times. That's usually the ultimate in combat play. But Mayor Yorty knows where I stand. I'm sure he could care less. I find him, number one, a demagogue, number two, unprincipled, number three, well, now we get into the four-letter Anglo-Saxon words … I find him a totally unwholesome individual. I think he's an asset to to no one.”

Mayor Sam Yorty said in 1974, “The Watergate mess was blown out of proportion and this country is going to miss President Nixon and his administration.”

Lincoln Continental for Secret Service use, 1968. From the press release: The cars are equipped with 11-inch-wide running boards and with assist handles and bars for agents standing on the running boards. An 11-inch-wide retractable platform and assist bar extend across the rear. The rear doors of the four-door convertibles have been redesigned into two sections to allow agents to enter the moving car from the running boards through a 15-inch-wide walk-through. Below: a similar car in use by Richard and Pat Nixon

source: Alden Jewell on Flickr