Politics & Power Quote by Louis Stokes

Stokes’s sentence reads like a pressure valve being opened in real time: a calm acknowledgement (“Well that’s true”) followed by a rapid widening of stakes until the room is filled with menace. The intent isn’t lyrical; it’s procedural power delivered as moral necessity. He’s naming the combustible mix at the heart of late-20th-century governance: when official records become the object of conspiracy claims, the danger isn’t only what’s in the files but what happens to public legitimacy when people believe the state is curating reality.

The subtext is an institutional warning. Stokes isn’t endorsing the conspiratorial reading so much as treating the accusation itself as a national-security problem. He frames “concealed from the American people” as the injury and “cannot be tolerated” as the remedy, a deliberately blunt phrase that signals oversight muscle: subpoenas, hearings, document releases, reforms. It’s Congress asserting that secrecy without credible explanation becomes political rot.

Context matters because Stokes spent years inside investigations where the record was the battlefield: the House Select Committee on Assassinations, CIA oversight, the perpetual tug-of-war between classified information and democratic accountability. His language anticipates a modern loop we now take for granted: suspicion feeds secrecy; secrecy feeds suspicion. By calling it “dangerous,” he’s pointing to how conspiracy narratives can metastasize into distrust of elections, courts, and basic civic facts. The rhetorical move is savvy: he shifts the focus from whether a conspiracy is true to how the government must respond when people think it might be. That’s not paranoia; it’s triage.