A conservative social media influencer sparked outrage last week after spreading a ridiculous conspiracy theory on TikTok, claiming that iconic civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. “was a completely made-up character created by the FBI.”
The person behind the now-viral video is a woman known as @iamvantnguyen on TikTok, who based her theory on soon-to-be-released FBI documents following President Donald Trump’s executive order to declassify all restricted files related to King’s assassination by James Earl Ray in 1968.
“I know I’m gonna get so much hate for this, but you cannot deny this is not the truth, because this is coming directly from the unclassified files that President Trump released,” she stated in the footage with pages of FBI records wallpapered behind her.
“This is directly from the FBI website that is vault.fbi.gov, this is where the unclassified document on Martin Luther King Jr, his image and his assassination is uploaded just in the first five pages,” she said confidently as if she had uncovered the holy grail to America’s ongoing race issues, outrageously suggesting that King was not a real person.
In her argument, the woman claims that the FBI created King in order to control the narrative surrounding the civil rights movement and to neutralize King as a threat. She then asserts that these files suggested a plot to promote King as the “chosen” leader of the movement through manipulation by the FBI and the media.
The woman’s reference to the FBI’s surveillance and campaign against King — while factual and documented — distorted the facts to suggest that the agency created King’s public persona, which is a gross oversimplification of history.
“It completely reveals how Martin Luther King Jr was selected to be the activist leader, and how they pushed it through mainstream media news to create their narrative,” she claimed. “It states right there in the middle. I know it’s kind of hard to read because the files are old. It says Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to neutralize him as an effective civil rights leader. And it also says this and other testimony describing this FBI counterintelligence campaign against King reach the public through the news media.”
She then insinuated that the FBI’s counterintelligence efforts were part of a grand media conspiracy to “program” the public into believing a false narrative — but her argument ignored the complexities of the civil rights movement, King’s role, and the FBI’s genuine efforts to undermine him.
“Hold on, so create a narrative, hire an actor and then use mainstream media to program it to become the truth. This is just more confirmation that this has been their playbook the entire time. If you’re not following me, I encourage you to follow me, because I am going to continue to record short series to break it all down for you guys,” she said.
The woman spoke as though she were speaking facts, but her framing attempted to turn a well-documented historical reality into a sensationalized conspiracy theory, diverting attention away from the true struggle for racial justice and the FBI’s actual role in attempting to discredit Black leaders.
The argument amounted to an emotional response based more on conspiracy-driven rhetoric than on a careful and balanced examination of the facts.
“She’s so wrong it’s painful to watch…,” one X user wrote. “Anything to destroy his legacy,” another person wrote.
“She’s an idiot she clearly didn’t understand what the hell she just was reading,” one person wrote.
In ordering the release of previously classified documents, Trump not only declassified files related to King but also made available information concerning the murders of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, a Democratic presidential candidate, who was killed in 1968 just months after King’s assassination.
The Jan. 23 executive order gives intelligence officials two weeks to develop a plan for releasing the remaining JFK files to the public, with 45 days allocated for the release of files related to RFK and MLK.
Before now, widespread conspiracy theories claimed that the delayed release of these files hinted at a larger, shadowy plot — one that some even tied to the Illuminati, a long-standing conspiracy about a secretive, elite group that supposedly controls world events from behind the scenes. The group is often depicted as a shadow government with Manchurian Candidate figures standing as pawns to fulfill a sinister agenda.
Author Gerald Posner, who wrote “Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” expects the remaining MLK files to reveal “how much the FBI tried to not protect King, but spy on him,” according to a report by Time magazine.
For years, the agency’s infamous director, J. Edgar Hoover, had King under illegal surveillance, convinced he was part of a communist plot, a suspicion fueled by Cold War paranoia.
Posner said he was more concerned that the files might expose damaging details about King, as rumors of his infidelity have circulated for years, with some reports even claiming he went to bed with his mistress the night before his assassination.
“Those files would be just personally embarrassing, and there’s no reason to release them,” Posner told Time. Following Trump’s executive order, King’s family released a statement requesting access to the MLK files before they are made public, but it’s not clear if the Trump administration honored the request as the files on social media suggested they had been posted online within a couple days of Trump signing the order to release them.
According to a memo from the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, King and his group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were targeted to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement.” The confidential readout called King a “very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism, has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.”
From December 1963 until his assassination in 1968, the FBI waged an aggressive campaign to “neutralize” King as a civil rights leader, according to UNREDACTED: The National Security Archive Blog.
From 1963 to 1968, the FBI launched a sweeping surveillance operation against King, using wiretaps, microphones, and other tactics to gather information on his activities. Authorized by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, wiretaps were placed on King’s home and SCLC headquarters, with some of his advisers also targeted. The FBI even planted microphones in King’s hotel rooms 16 times, all in an effort to discredit him and his associates.
