Showing posts with label AR-15S. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AR-15S. Show all posts

Friday, April 5, 2024

Informed Comment daily updates (04/05/2024)

 


The Story of Arab-Jews Instills Hope

The Story of Arab-Jews Instills Hope

Reflections on Avi Shlaim, Three Worlds : Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, London: Oneworld, 2023, 324 pp. During my stay in (Iran ) in 2016, I heard from several Muslims that Jews are good businessmen because they are trustworthy, and their word weighs more than a notarized contract. I recalled these comments when I read about […]

Marjorie Taylor Greene only Cares about some Murders, and not those committed by Far Right with AR-15s

Marjorie Taylor Greene only Cares about some Murders, and not those committed by Far Right with AR-15s

( Tomdispatch.com ) – “Say her name!” Marjorie Taylor Greene shouted from the House floor during President Biden’s State of the Union Address. The same slogan was on the T-shirt she wore under her red jacket, which had a pin with a picture of the person whose name she was referring to — a pin she’d […]

Iran-US secret Backchannel Talks Suggest that for Both Sides Pragmatism beats Ideology

Iran-US secret Backchannel Talks Suggest that for Both Sides Pragmatism beats Ideology

By Shabnam Holliday, University of Plymouth | – (The Conversation) – Recent revelations that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the US have held secret talks as a way of resolving months of attacks by Tehran-backed Houthi rebels on shipping in the Red Sea have raised eyebrows. Surely the two countries have been implacable foes […]

Old posts you may have missed

Israel’s Lavender Murderbot is Programmed to Kill up to a Third of all Palestinian Civilians in Gaza

The Gaza War at Six Months: Top 5 Recommendations for Ending the Fighting and Ensuring Human Security

Erdoğan’s streak came to a screeching Halt as Turkey’s economy pays the price for Years of Policy Mistakes

Was Israel’s Strike on Iranian Embassy in Damascus an attempt to draw the US into the War?

Epic Fail: The New Junta in Niger Tells the United States to Pack up its War and Go Home

Texas’ Gov. Abbott: Stop Weaponizing “Antisemitism” to Harass Campus Critics of Israeli Policy

Chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen Accuses Israel of “Targeted Attack” on 7 of its Aid Workers





Sunday, January 21, 2024

UVALDE

 

Sunday, August 7, 2022

Trump vows to end public schooling in awful speech

 

OD Action:

It's Our Democracy!
Demand Congress enshrine abortion protections into law!

Today's Top Stories:

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Crowd cheers as Trump calls for the abolition of the Department of Education

The disgraced ex-president told a crowd of rapt CPAC convention-goers that the entire Dept. of Education should be abolished if bureaucrats continue insisting that actual American history be taught.

Take Action: Tell Congress to force political groups to disclose their wealthy backers!


Democrats’ transformational climate, health care, and economic investment package clears major Senate hurdle
Democrats outmaneuvered Mitch McConnell once again to advance a sweeping climate and investment bill, bringing long-stalled elements of President Biden's agenda one step closer to reality.

Take Action: Tell Congress to expel the Republicans who plotted with Trump!


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Fox News is praying you don't know this

No Dem Left Behind: Our economy is on top of the world


Secret Service delivers agents' phone numbers to House 1/6 committee
The move is an unusual step amid heightened scrutiny of the agency's cooperation with the congressional panel investigating Donald Trump's violent insurrection last year.


Pentagon denies DC request for National Guard help as GOP governors ship busloads of migrants to nation's capital
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey are framing their dehumanizing political stunt as a voluntary free ride — paid for by state taxpayers, of course — that gets migrants closer to family or support networks, but DC Mayor Muriel Bowser dismissed that characterization, saying that the asylum-seekers are being “tricked" and have no clue what to do next.


Take Action: Demand Congress rebuff Trump's SCOTUS and take climate change action NOW!


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Feds arrest Ohio man for allegedly mailing poop to Rep. Jim Jordan

While admittedly gross and definitely not okay, perhaps it's simply a misunderstood return-to-sender scenario — Jordan has been delivering nothing but bullshit to his constituents since taking office in 2007.


Take Action: Tell the Senate to legalize marijuana and pass the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act!


Trump on his White House doctor: "He loved looking at my body"
The 76-year-old, narcissistic man-child told CPAC convention goers that Dr. Ronny Jackson, now a US congressman, liked being the White House physician because he enjoyed gazing upon Trump's "strong and powerful" body. Nope, not weird at all. Totally normal thing to say out loud to thousands of people.


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Democrats pull out HUGE 11th hour surprise

No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen: Wow!


Marjorie Taylor Greene prayed over a convicted Capitol insurrectionist who spent a day crying in a mock prison cell at CPAC
No word yet on whether Greene plans to pray over any of the 140 police officers injured during Trump's violent insurrection 19 months ago.


Alabama town disbands police department over racist text
A vile, racist joke sent via text by an unnamed officer prompted town officials in Vincent to disband their police department and fire the police chief and assistant chief. The Shelby County Sheriff's Office condemned the fired cops' actions and said it stands with the city “in providing emergency law enforcement related service to the citizens (of Vincent) at this time.”


North Carolina county stocks AR-15s in all schools to "enhance" security and discourage school shootings
What could possibly go wrong?


America, the beautiful?

In a world gone mad

Hope...



Sunday Funnies

Sunday Funny
Sunday Funny
Sunday Funny
Sunday Funny

PS — Please don't forget to sign the petition demanding Congress enshrine abortion protections into law, and be sure to follow OD Action on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.


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Sunday, May 29, 2022

RSN: FOCUS: AR-15s Were Made to Explode Human Bodies. In Uvalde, the Bodies Belonged to Children.

 

 

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28 April 22

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A paratrooper holding an AR-15 crouches behind rocks while leading a patrol northeast of Saigon, Vietnam, June 5, 1967. (photo: AP)
FOCUS: AR-15s Were Made to Explode Human Bodies. In Uvalde, the Bodies Belonged to Children.
Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept
Hussain writes: "Parents awaiting word on their kids were asked by police to provide DNA samples to help identify the children."

Parents awaiting word on their kids were asked by police to provide DNA samples to help identify the children.

As parents waited in anguish for news about their children following the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, they received a chilling request from police. Officers asked for DNA samples from parents to help establish the identities of the children who had been killed in the massacre, the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

The request pointed to the obvious, horrifying conclusion that many of the children who had been killed were so grievously injured that it was likely impossible to identify their bodies.

How we got here should be obvious: the AR-15 rifle.

Much has been made of how easily the killer, Salvador Ramos, strode into a store and bought two AR-15s the week before the attack, an apparent birthday gift to himself. Anyone paying attention gets that the ease of purchase for such weapons — which are frequently used in mass killings — is an indication of how deep the gun problem in America runs.

It cannot be emphasized enough, however, exactly what the AR-15 is: It is a weapon of war. It was made to blow humans apart. It is successful in doing just that. The requests for DNA tests in Uvalde stand as a testament to the gun’s success, but the conclusion that the weapon excelled at blowing people apart was well documented by the U.S. military itself during early field tests.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. conducted a survey into the impact of the AR-15 and its use on the battlefield. To put it bluntly, the survey found that the weapon, chambered with same .223 caliber rounds that Ramos used in Uvalde, was exceedingly good at killing human beings.

A copy of the survey, which was published in a Gawker story by my now-colleague Sam Biddle in 2016, shows that Viet Cong fighters hit with the weapon were frequently decapitated and dismembered, many looking as though they had “exploded.” A field report documented how an AR-15 had blown up a man’s head and turned another’s torso into “one big hole.” The weapon was lauded by soldiers on the battlefield for its effectiveness at killing adversaries and even cutting through dense jungle forest.

Some of the reports on Viet Cong soldiers killed with the weapon read like a matter-of-fact recounting from a horror film: “Chest wound from right to left, destroyed the thoracic cavity,” said the description of one AR-15-inflicted wound. “Stomach wound, which caused the abdominal cavity to explode,” said another.

Though it has become available domestically in the years since, the weapon was made for war — no matter what the National Rifle Association says — and was noted even at the time as being a significant escalation in the lethality of rifles.

It is hard to comprehend a weapon like this being used against small children in an elementary school. The impact of the AR-15, a tool designed not just for killing but for ripping apart adult human bodies in the most extreme manner, being turned on the small, delicate limbs and organs of young children does not need to be imagined. The parents waiting outside the school in Uvalde for news of their loved ones who were asked for DNA tests were being clued into something horrifying about the types of weapons floating around American society, so easily available that even a disturbed 18-year-old could get his hands on them.

In the aftermath of mass shootings targeting children, it is sometimes suggested that the public should be allowed to see the bodies. The impact of seeing actual flesh-and-blood children killed by assault rifles might shake the sensibilities of Americans enough that they enact serious changes to gun control laws that would make it less likely that AR-15s would be used again for such massacres.

Public aside, however, the reality is that the government has known for a long time what these weapons do. It has been sending AR-15s to wars abroad for decades and has documented in graphic detail the exploded and mangled corpses left behind. That such knowledge exists, and yet AR-15s are still commercially available for use by civilians in this country, tells you all you need to know about what pro-gun politicians are willing to tolerate.

The horrifying reality, which we all know, is that there will be another Uvalde sooner or later. The AR-15 is a demon that was unleashed on foreigners during wartime and has now returned as a demon to victimize innocent Americans, including the most innocent among us. A machine designed for the mass killing and maiming of other people — a design that had nothing to do with hunting or sportsmanship — should not be on American streets. At the minimum, no one in public life should be allowed to deny what it really does.



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Sunday, April 4, 2021

RSN: FOCUS: Graeme Wood | A Black Army Rises to Fight the Racist Right

 

 

Reader Supported News
04 April 21

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FOCUS: Graeme Wood | A Black Army Rises to Fight the Racist Right
Grandmaster Jay. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)
Graeme Wood, The Atlantic
Wood writes: "It has a militarylike structure, fields an army of hundreds of heavily armed men and women, subscribes to esoteric racist doctrines, opposes Black Lives Matter, and follows a leader who thinks we live in a period of apocalyptic tribulation signaled by the movements of celestial bodies."

A man calling himself Grandmaster Jay has raised a disciplined, heavily armed militia. It has yet to fire a shot at its enemies, but it’s prepared for war.

hen Grandmaster Jay walked into Million’s Crab, a seafood joint in suburban Cincinnati, the waitstaff looked alarmed. Million’s Crab is a family restaurant, and on that placid November evening, Jay—the supreme commander of the Not Fucking Around Coalition—was wearing body armor rated to take a pistol round directly to the chest. Dressed from mask to shoes in black, he was four hours late to our meeting, and remorseless. “My time is scarce,” he said, making aggressive eye contact. Indeed, of the two of us, I was the one who felt sheepish, not because I was wasting his time but because it occurred to me that while I waited, I could have warned the servers that my dining companion was often armed and that he might look as if he had just stepped out of The Matrix. He sat across from me, in front of a platter of scallops and shrimp that had been hot when I’d ordered it for him an hour before, when the kitchen was closing. I offered him a plastic bib, which he declined. He wouldn’t eat any food, but he requested a San Pellegrino or, in its absence, filtered tap water.

Grandmaster Jay’s group, the NFAC, is a Black militia whose goals, other than to abjure Fucking Around, are obscure. It has a militarylike structure, fields an army of hundreds of heavily armed men and women, subscribes to esoteric racist doctrines, opposes Black Lives Matter, and follows a leader who thinks we live in a period of apocalyptic tribulation signaled by the movements of celestial bodies. Its modus operandi is to deploy a more fearsome Black militia wherever white militias dare to appear. Eventually, it intends to establish a racially pure country called the United Black Kemetic Nation. (“Kemet,” Jay explained, “is the original name of Egypt, which means ‘land of the Blacks.’”) A patch on Grandmaster Jay’s body armor bore the new nation’s initials, UBKN.

The NFAC leader’s real name is John Fitzgerald Johnson. He is a former soldier, a failed political candidate, a hip-hop DJ, a rambling egotist, and a prolific self-promoter. His life sometimes seems like a long disinformation campaign about itself. The alternate versions of Jay do not seem to cohere into a single person. “I’ve lived five different lives,” he told me, enigmatically. “Like a Rubik’s Cube.”

“We’re not going to dig into who I am,” he said. “You won’t get that from me.” He said he wasn’t from the Midwest. But I knew he lived near Cincinnati: I had staked out his apartment that afternoon. Even facts as straightforward as his age are not simple to determine. Some sources say he is as young as 50, others as old as 59. He is lithe enough to pass for being in his mid-40s. The best evidence—including court records—suggests that he turned 57 in December. (That might explain his given name: He would have been born just nine days after the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.) One hint that he is no longer a young man is a light smattering of age spots across his nose.

Jay claims that the NFAC first appeared publicly when nine white supremacists came to Dayton, Ohio, in May 2019. No one seems to have noticed the coalition then, amid some 600 other counterprotesters. In 2020, however, it showed up in larger numbers (Jay claims thousands, but hundreds seems more realistic) at protests over Confederate monuments and over the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia; at protests over the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky; and at protests over the police shooting of Trayford Pellerin in Lafayette, Louisiana.

In Louisville, just two hours from where Jay and I sat, the NFAC first revealed the extent of its capabilities. On his YouTube channel, Jay posted a video of his troops in formation, and local news stations ran aerial shots. The men and women are ragtag and amateur, and their uniforms are not, well, uniform. One man has a Texas-flag patch Velcroed to his body armor; a woman taps the trigger guard of her AR-15 with a three-inch yellow fingernail. But my goodness, the weaponry—AR-15s galore, sniper rifles with scopes and bipods, high-capacity magazines, and enough “tactical” clothing to resupply an Army-surplus store. They look like World War II partisans meeting their clandestine commander for the first time. They stand in neat, spaced columns. I counted 28 rows of seven before I stopped counting. (By contrast, aerial photos suggest that the white militiamen present that day could have fit in a small school bus.) When Jay orders his people into motion, they go.

So far, that is all they do. They do not bicker with other protesters, carry signs, or explain themselves. “We don’t come to sing,” Jay told a reporter from Newsweek. “We don’t come to chant.” Instead they stand, like a praetorian guard for some unseen emperor. In this laconic way, they distinguish themselves from two groups they loathe or deride: white militias (the camo-bedecked guys who show up at the same demonstrations and, sometimes, at the behest of the president, try to topple American democracy) and Black Lives Matter, whose activists tend toward nonviolence. “That movement accomplished nothing,” Jay told me, just “a lot of singing, a lot of hand-holding, a lot of sentiments and praise.”

Compare the NFAC’s military-style discipline, Jay said, with white militias. On January 6, at the U.S. Capitol, the insurrectionists included militia members from the groups the NFAC has arrayed itself against. Unlike the NFAC, they were flagrantly breaking the law and, for a time at least, getting away with it. “If the NFAC had done what these folks did,” Jay said, “they’d still be bringing the body bags” out of the Capitol. (If he is wrong, it’s only because a Black militia that attempted to storm Congress would have been fired upon by law enforcement long before it penetrated the Capitol.) “White people decided to act up and show us their true colors,” Jay said. In his view, January 6 demonstrated that the NFAC is an appropriate response to a country shameless in its hypocrisy: If a disorderly white militia can sack the Capitol and get away with it, on what basis could one object to an orderly Black militia that obeys the law?

One objection to such a militia is that it is avowedly racist. Jay described its recruiting strategy: “You must be Black,” he said. “If you’re biracial, your father must be Black.” The other criteria relate to recruits’ ability to arm themselves without attracting the attention of law enforcement. “Military experience is preferred,” Jay said, and would-be coalition members must have their own AR-style rifle. “We’re not a shotgun organization.” Anyone without a concealed-carry permit must have the clean record necessary to get one. In one of Jay’s videos, he tells his followers that he intends to meet “each and every last one of you face-to-face,” to conduct an interrogation to “screen out fakes, wannabes, snakes, and spiders.” Jay says he will swear people in after they have “put your life on the line” by standing armed in an NFAC formation, in a situation where other armed groups might start trouble.

This is the worry of those who monitor domestic extremist threats: If you recruit an army, equip it to fight, and range it as infantry across from other armed groups, one shot could ignite a skirmish and perhaps turn downtown Louisville into Baghdad for an afternoon. Public order is the hostage of the most radical gunman present. Jay posted a video from Louisville showing white militia members expressing concern that the NFAC would annihilate them. “There’s no cover there,” one laments to a police officer. “NFAC shows up and decide they want to wipe us all out—we’re gone in seconds.”

“These are volatile situations,” Amy Iandiorio, an investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told me when I asked her about the NFAC. The coalition is “larger than the older [white] militias. They are a lightning rod that attracts opposing groups, and that’s a recipe for conflict.”

“We have a zero-incident record,” Jay boasted, mostly accurately. “We’ve never destroyed a piece of property, or had our people arrested for anything.” So far, the NFAC’s only known casualties have been its own members, after a woman in formation sent herself and two others to the hospital when she fired her weapon seemingly by accident. (Right-wingers, gun enthusiasts, and ex-military types on social media ridicule Jay for his and his followers’ poor weapons discipline.)

Jay’s own record is blemished with accusations of violence (he denies them), and amid his long sermons about “racial maturity” and spiritual self-awareness, he sometimes makes alarming threats. In one video, as alleged in a criminal complaint against him, he tells his followers to burn government officials’ homes and murder their children. He also advises them to destroy police body cameras if they assault cops, to remove evidence.

Jay is contesting these allegations in court. Even if true, such threats hardly compare with the actual storming of the Capitol. Yet it is rarely good news when you learn that a sectarian racist is raising an army, stockpiling weapons, demanding total loyalty, and suggesting that he is a “messiah.” Jay speaks prophetically, and sometimes apocalyptically. Followers of his teachings, he said, “would be the first to tell you … nothing that I have predicted has not come true.” In October, on YouTube, he told his soldiers, “At this point, I don’t think I’ll be joining you all too much longer. Just remember that when I’m gone, these will be your instructional videos.”

In early December, the FBI raided his apartment and arrested him on charges that, during a September demonstration in Louisville, he pointed a rifle at federal agents, blinding them with its mounted light. Jay told me that all the allegations against him are “bullshit.” By bringing them up, federal prosecutors are trying to “character assassinate” him. “I’m a student of history,” he said. “Anytime someone starts to galvanize people, it’s the same process”: character assassination, then financial assassination through mounting legal bills, then imprisonment, exile, or outright murder. Jay is now out on bail. His social-media accounts are frozen, and he faces a possible 20-year sentence—which may or may not be a deterrent, if he thinks his end is near anyway.

The filtered water must have lowered his inhibitions, because over the next two hours Jay became more garrulous. His story, and the purpose of Not Fucking Around, became a little more clear, and a little less.

He grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and New York City. According to Pentagon records, he joined the military in 1989. At some point he got married, though he refused to say more about his domestic life. He told me that he spent four years in the Army in Germany, where he revised his racial self-understanding. “I saw that I had been socialized to believe that I was second-class, that there was something criminal inherent about me,” he said. In Germany, Jay was “treated with the utmost respect,” and he said he enjoyed a reprieve from the American racial hierarchy. When he met Americans overseas, they tended to interact with one another more as compatriots in exile than as the race enemies they might have been at home.

He visited Auschwitz, he said, and was indelibly influenced by what he saw. In our conversation, though, he made no direct reference to the mass murder of Jews and others, or to the lessons of totalitarian fascism. Instead, he mentioned that he was impressed by postwar Germany’s decision to outlaw Holocaust denial and the glorification of Nazism. The United States, he thinks, has failed to show the same backbone in reckoning with its crimes against Black people. He considers Germany’s “a genuine effort by society to restore and repair those people who were the victims of this Holocaust.”

Like so much else about Jay, this passion for European Jewry presents a contradiction: Elsewhere, he has quoted Hitler approvingly and suggested that the Jews of Europe—“those people running around calling themselves the Jews”—are imposters. He has also seemed to flirt with Holocaust denial. (A sample lyric from one of his hip-hop songs: “They call you racist if you proud of your folks / But they be muting you now if you forget about the Holocaust!”)

Jay’s videos repeat several themes popular among anti-Semitic segments of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a religious movement known for noisy proselytizing and elaborate conspiracy theories. One way to understand the NFAC is to imagine what a paramilitary wing of the Black Hebrew Israelites would be like. (Jay denied all charges of anti-Semitism but refused to answer when I asked directly whether he thought Jews died in large numbers in the Holocaust. “I’ve visited the death camps. I’ve studied the documents. I’ve seen for myself,” he said. “I don’t have to justify my experiences in my position to anyone.”)

Jay’s military career, like most things about him, is strange. After basic training, the Army assigns every soldier a military occupational specialty, or MOS: 11B is an infantryman, 94S is a Patriot system repairer, 12K is a plumber. Most soldiers have just one MOS over the course of their career; once the Army trains a soldier, why go through the expense of training him again? “I had five MOSs,” Jay said. This is like majoring in five different subjects in college—not technically against the rules, but rare and implausible. He named four but refused to identify the fifth. Later, Jay said he had only two MOSs.

Meanwhile, Jay acquired a record of violence. According to the affidavit in support of his indictment in Louisville, he was arrested in 1995 for punching a woman in the face, and for menacing a man with a 20-gauge shotgun. He left the Army in 1997 but despised civilian life. (He told his YouTube audience that he hated it: “You all were the most uncivilized, undisciplined people I had ever seen.”) He reenlisted in July 1998, but a year later he faced a court martial for another offense. He was busted down to the lowest rank—private—and drummed out of the Army with an “other than honorable” discharge.

In August 2003, according to the affidavit, Jay entered Fort Bragg and “threatened to kill his wife” (who was also a soldier) and her platoon sergeant at a recognition ceremony. Somehow, after all of this, Jay reenlisted that December, this time as an Army reservist. He attained the rank of sergeant, went absent without leave just over a year later, then escaped court martial by getting out of the Army a third time, again under other-than-honorable conditions, and again reduced to private. Despite these travails—or because of them—Jay modeled the NFAC on the military in which he had served. It’s an extremely top-down, chain-of-command organization, perfect for people who like to take orders, or give them. The NFAC is this private’s chance to be a general.

After his final discharge, Jay disappeared for several years. He later claimed to have worked as the “director of a global cloud-integration practice and solutions architect.” He tried a career as a hip-hop DJ, which took an embarrassing turn when stars including Grandmaster Flash and DJ Jazzy Jeff accused him of plagiarism and résumé exaggeration. Jay said the accusations were a misunderstanding, but he also suggested to me, in a peculiar and indirect way, that he had made certain mistakes. “When they finally admit that we have the capability to time travel,” he said, “I would love to see one of us go back and meet ourselves five years ago, or 10 years ago. You would sit that person down and have a word with him.”

Jay reappeared in 2015 as an ally of the movement he now denigrates, Black Lives Matter. “I was caught up in all that—I, too, was waving signs and chanting,” he said. He showed up during uprisings following various outrages, such as the murder of nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist. He led a crowd of tens of thousands across the Arthur Ravenel Bridge to protest the mass shooting. After the murder of Walter Scott by a North Charleston police officer, he appeared at the side of Scott’s family. “I was there to escort Walter Scott’s mother into the funeral.” He said he was an ordained minister at the time. Photos from the funeral show Jay wearing an Anglican-style clerical collar and holding Judy Scott’s left arm. (At some point, he repudiated the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. “It’s not Black lives that matter anymore,” he tells a crowd in an undated video. “All lives!”)

In 2016, he emerged again, wearing a dark business suit with a black tie, pocket square, and large wristwatch. His website, onlywecanfixus.com, advertised a bid for the White House on an independent ticket. His platform consisted of mostly liberal platitudes, with an emphasis on diversity, police reform, support for veterans, and action on climate change—“almost indistinguishable,” he said, from Bernie Sanders’s. He lost to Donald Trump and concluded, like most independent candidates, that America had rigged politics against him.

The only way to win was to play a different game. On August 21, 2017, he witnessed the total eclipse of the sun while standing outside the city hall of Carbondale, Illinois. He swooned during the eclipse, felt a wave of energy, and began preaching the ideas of the NFAC soon after. He said that the NFAC “was born out of the atmosphere created by Donald Trump,” not out of a spiritual revelation. But the transformation does not appear coincidental. From that point on, he was “spitting knowledge” on social media, much of it about alien spacecraft (“visitors”) and odd phenomena he noticed in the sky. He also said he had a health scare. “I was supposed to be dead two years ago,” he told his followers. “But I’m not. I’m still here because I was cured in a way that defies medicine and changed my entire brain structure.” He began eating differently, and drinking “alkaline water” to “reactivate” his pineal gland and scrub his system of impurities that were impeding “higher abilities.” His drink order—San Pellegrino or filtered tap water—had spiritual implications.

Few paid attention until Jay showed up with dozens of armed followers in Georgia last year, and phrased his new beliefs in a militant idiom. Laws, he told me, are “just paper,” and it is only reasonable that Black people arm and train themselves to act as “an immediate bulwark against the continued human-rights abuses” perpetrated against them. “Too much talking. Time for the action,” he said.

Tommie Shelby, a professor of African American studies and philosophy at Harvard, noted that these ideas have precursors in Black political thought. Armed self-defense has been around at least since Cyril Briggs, who founded the African Blood Brotherhood in 1919. During the period after the First World War, when white mobs were shooting Black people and burning their businesses, many Black people considered peaceful protests (such as those organized by the NAACP) inadequate. Four decades later, the activist Robert F. Williams wrote the classic text of Black armed resistance, Negroes With Guns, which argues that violence against Black people calls for violence by Black people. The tradition of armed resistance persisted even as the civil-rights movement succeeded by rejecting this fearful symmetry: Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis showed that Black people without guns were much more formidable.

Jay said he does not admire or imitate any Black activists from previous generations—he protested when I suggested a comparison to the Black Panthers, whose aesthetic the NFAC has obviously ripped off—but was quick to defend the Jamaican political thinker and activist Marcus Garvey, who called for Black self-sufficiency and attempted to found a homeland for Black people. When I mentioned W. E. B. Du Bois, Jay cut me off to condemn Du Bois as a “bourgeois” and “an enemy to the movement Marcus Garvey started … If [Du Bois] was alive today, he would eat his words.”

Like Garvey’s, Jay’s rhetoric calls for Black self-reliance and segregation from white people. His goal, he said, is “for the Black race to come into its own—which it has not”—and to “mature as a race,” first by building “racial esteem.” He said Black people have been like “the guy who sleeps on your couch that doesn’t go home until you have to throw the couch out with him.” If they get armed, and get serious, they will no longer “have to blame the non-melanated” for their failure. Ultimately, Jay calls for “descendants of the Portuguese and Atlantic slave trade” to separate themselves from others and create a Black ethnostate.

The United Black Kemetic Nation, he said, would have the full recognition of international law. “What we’re talking [about] here is a legal action that takes us from being freed slaves and descendants of slaves in a country that classifies us by color and denigrates us by race to a place where we are citizens of our own country,” he said. The location of this new country is negotiable, and as a model he considered Wyoming, because of its cheap land. But Jay told me that when he floated Wyoming to his followers, their response was: “Hell no—nobody wants to go to Wyoming.” (Shelby notes that the desire to establish a Black homeland on American territory likewise has a long history, showing up in Harry Haywood’s book Negro Liberation in the 1940s and the Republic of New Afrika movement in the ’60s and ’70s.)

As Jay browsed real estate, he also made overseas allies, he said, in Black-liberation movements in Africa and Europe. “These people are screaming our name while they’re resisting," he said, although no such screams have been independently documented. He claimed to have enlisted the Niger Delta Avengers, a militant group that has been blowing up pipelines and other infrastructure in Nigeria, as part of his coalition, which will eventually be the “military backbone” of the UBKN.

To demonstrate its power, Jay said, the NFAC aims to assemble, in one place, “a million legal [Black] gun owners,” to show that the United Black Kemetic Nation can defend itself. Part of the process of creating a new country (under a treaty known as the Montevideo Convention) is demonstrating that enough people are eager to live there permanently and can administer the new state. That includes defending it. Jay said, “If I assemble 1 million legal guns, I have the fifth-largest ground army on the planet. I think that’s a pretty significant indication … There are 57 million of us here. All I want is 1 [million].” (According to the Census Bureau, 47 million Americans identify as Black or Black and another race. Because of Jay’s patrilineal theory of race, he would presumably recognize a smaller number still.)

How can you get even 1 million armed followers if just a few years ago you were a failed DJ and now you believe that San Pellegrino will give you preternatural mental powers? These do not sound like promising beginnings for a modern Simón Bolívar or Toussaint L’Ouverture.

But Jay has loyal followers, maybe in spite of these eccentricities, and maybe because of them. Most people do not think it sensible to channel their justified rage by buying an AR-15 and joining a cultlike paramilitary organization. Nor do most Americans—let alone most Black Americans—want to establish a racially pure state, even somewhere other than Wyoming. But the desire for action of some kind, acknowledging that Black people are uniquely menaced, is to be expected. Watching a mob storm the Capitol with a Confederate battle flag should freak out any American who hates racism, and inspire such a person to seek a radical cure for a deep political sickness. Jay offers a remedy prepackaged and ready to deliver. Unfortunately, Jay’s answer—create a parallel, quasi-fascist race army with its own flag and homeland—strikes me as a particularly bad case of becoming that which you hate.

The NFAC also appears to have tapped into a kind of modish authoritarian magical thinking. Plenty of Trump supporters believed that their man had a mystical ability to outwit his opponents and bend previously unbendable laws of politics. He could say anything, do anything, and somehow survive. (Many still believe this.) In Jay, NFAC followers have a leader who conjured an army ex nihilo, announced a Black uprising in multiple American cities, and somehow got away with it for months. (I wonder how many of them regard Jay’s fraudulent past the way Trump supporters regard the former president’s—i.e., if such a clown could get this far, he must have divine favor.) Jay has terrible ideas, and in ordinary circumstances most people would identify them as crazy and reject them. In 2020 and its aftermath, however, there is a greater-than-usual demand for someone who seems to have at least a little skill at propitiating the angry gods.

Surely, though, there must be limits to what Jay’s followers can accept. At one point in our conversation, I thought I might have detected such a limit. We’d spent an hour talking some sense, and a lot of nonsense; now the restaurant staff presented me with the bill and a doggie bag, and exiled us to the parking lot. We sat in Jay’s SUV, which soon filled with pleasant Cajun aromas from the scallops. At that point, for the first time, the conversation flowed more naturally. Jay had run out of boilerplate.

“You mentioned time travel and you mentioned alien spacecraft,” I said. “Do you know anything about these things?”

Jay paused. “I’m not at liberty to discuss those.” I asked if he felt obliged to oaths of secrecy sworn to the U.S. military that had twice expelled him from its ranks. He said yes, but I pressed him to continue.

“Very interesting,” Jay said, speaking slowly and deliberately for the first time since his performance that night had begun. “Someone asked me the other day, they said, ‘How is it that you’ve managed to do in six months what other people have not been able to do for 60 years?’ … I would simply say that knowing the future doesn’t help. Unless you have a deep, personal, hands-on experience with the past.”

“A lot of times when people talk about time travel, they always run into the paradigm ‘If you change something in the past, then you’ll screw up your present.’” Jay shook his head. “Think of it in terms of alternate paths.” He said that by “stepping off this timeline into another timeline,” you create a new reality. “Yes, you can screw up things in that timeline. But when you return to your timeline, nothing has changed!” He continued. “There is no set future. There are multiple futures depending on the timeline that you set in motion.” He said one cannot really change the past—just mint a new timeline.

“Twenty-twenty is a great example. You all are living in an alternate timeline. Everything’s upside down; the world a year ago is completely 180 degrees from where you are now … and people are just blundering through it without realizing that you’re living in an alternate timeline. How did we get here? That’s the kicker. You figure that part out, you’ll figure out everything that I’m talking about.”

I thanked Jay for his time, and he thanked me for mine. A month later, the police raided his apartment. Among the small armory of assault rifles, they also found a prodigious amount of marijuana.

After Jay’s arrest in December, he ordered his followers into a “stand-down position.” The militias that the NFAC opposes, such as the Oath Keepers, were active during December and January—and because of their presence at the storming of the Capitol, they now feel the heat of law enforcement. On January 6, the NFAC had no presence in Washington: The District of Columbia does not allow open carry of weapons. When I talked with him in February, Jay gloated about his enemies’ legal jeopardy, with some justification. “The U.S. government is going around cleaning up all of those other organizations,” he said. “We’re watching.” This strategic stand-down was not entirely voluntary, of course. By arresting Jay, the government took him out of circulation as a militia leader. He won't be able to post instructional videos for some time, because of the social-media ban that was a condition of his bail. The cops took his rifles too.

Jay would not accept a foot soldier who showed up for inspection unarmed. Ironically, though, the government’s confiscation of his weapons has proved at least one of Jay’s prophecies. Jay previously argued that Black people, exercising their constitutional rights to speak and pack heat, would be treated differently from white people doing the same. The crime he is now charged with is a real one—pointing guns at cops is illegal and wrong—but poor muzzle discipline and poor judgment are universal at armed protests, and I suspect that other armed protesters have performed equally negligent acts and gotten little more than a dirty look and a chewing out from the cops. Right-wing militias stormed Michigan’s capitol and were not arrested.

Jay’s disarming has occasioned a shift in his emphasis, if not tone. When I spoke with him after January 6, he still slipped into periodic fits of rage at the impertinence of my questions, but he stressed that the NFAC is “peaceful” and wants to “open up a dialogue and stabilize the situation.”

But Jay did not raise a militia by cultivating a tranquil persona, and the NFAC members who heeded his call at his craziest moments will not wait forever for him to revoke his stand-down order and recover his insanity. They joined a group that promised to take a bite out of the Earth and reserve it for Black people. They expected to be led by a commander who preaches radical separatism, and who will swagger with an AR-15 in public and boast that his snipers can bisect a white militiaman’s head from 1,000 yards away. Jay told me that he already had to vet his recruits carefully. “Some people come to change the world,” he said, “and some come to end it all.” The latter, he implied, are unwelcome in the NFAC and have to be screened out. The NFAC has room for only one messiah. But even those who originally joined with peaceful intent can become jaded, given enough time, injustice, and absentee leadership.

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