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FOCUS: Why the Trope of Black-Asian Conflict in the Face of Anti-Asian Violence Dismisses Solidarity Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58952"><span class="small">Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang, The Brookings Institution</span></a>   
Sunday, 04 April 2021 11:47

Excerpt: "Recent survey shows that more than three out of four Asian Americans worry about experiencing hate crimes, harassment, and discrimination because of COVID-19. Among Chinese and Asian Indians, the figures are even higher at 84 percent and 80 percent, respectively."

A rally for Black, Brown, and Asian solidarity. (photo: Brookings Institution)
A rally for Black, Brown, and Asian solidarity. (photo: Brookings Institution)


Why the Trope of Black-Asian Conflict in the Face of Anti-Asian Violence Dismisses Solidarity

By Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang, The Brookings Institution

04 April 21

 

recent survey shows that more than three out of four Asian Americans worry about experiencing hate crimes, harassment, and discrimination because of COVID-19. Among Chinese and Asian Indians, the figures are even higher at 84 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

These findings may be unsurprising in light of shocking video footage of anti-Asian violence that has recently gone viral. Viewers of these videos witnessed perpetrators shoving elderly men and women to the ground, assaulting Asian American men and women in the face, and stabbing an Asian American man in the back with an 8-inch knife. Asian-owned businesses like New York’s Xi’an Famous Foods, already under financial stress because of the pandemic, are also struggling to keep their employees safe. The spate of unprovoked attacks elicited a rallying cry that something must be done. For Asian Americans, however, this cry is a year overdue.

Since March of last year, there have been over 3,000 self-reported incidents of anti-Asian violence from 47 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from stabbings and beatings, to verbal harassment and bullying, to being spit on and shunned. While being spit on is offensive, in the time of coronavirus, it is also potentially lethal.

Democratic lawmakers, led by Rep. Grace Meng, D-N.Y. and Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said they would introduce new anti-hate crime legislation to address a rise in hate incidents directed at Asian Americans. The bill would create a new position at the Department of Justice to facilitate the review of hate crimes and provide oversight of hate crimes related to COVID-19.

The Trope of Black-Asian Conflict

These senseless acts of anti-Asian violence have finally garnered the national attention they deserve, but they have also invoked anti-Black sentiment and reignited the trope of Black-Asian conflict. Because some of the video-taped perpetrators appear to have been Black, some observers immediately reduced anti-Asian violence to Black-Asian conflict. This is not the first time that the trope has been weaponized. Black-Asian conflict—and Black-Korean conflict more specifically—became the popular frame of the LA riots in 1992.

The trope failed to capture the reality of Black-Korean relations three decades ago, and it fails to capture the reality of anti-Asian bias today. A recent study finds that in fact, Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor of xenophobic views of COVID-19, and the effect of Christian nationalism is greater among white respondents, compared to Black respondents. Moreover, Black Americans have also experienced high levels of racial discrimination since the pandemic began. Hence, not only does the frame of two minoritized groups in conflict ignore the role of white national populism, but it also absolves the history and systems of inequality that positioned them there.

Recognizing both the pitfalls of the frame and the need to address it after the 1992 riots, African American and Korean American leaders worked toward interracial solidarity and restorative justice through local churches and community organizations. A critical first step was educating both communities about their respective histories, including shared experiences of colonization, oppression, discrimination, and resistance. For Korean immigrant business owners who had little understanding of the brutal history of US race relations, education and experience in Black neighborhoods ushered in a new manner of empathy.

The fruits of decades of community organizing, education, and empathy are reflected in Korean Americans’ racial attitudes about discrimination, civil rights, and restorative justice. Among Asian groups, Korean Americans hold some of the most progressive attitudes on these fronts. For example, more than nine in ten Korean Americans believe that there is at least some discrimination against Black people in our society today. Seventy percent also agree that the government should do more to protect the civil rights of Black Americans, and 67 percent agree that local governments should shift spending from law enforcement to programs. But even among Asian Americans more generally, many recognize commonalities with Black Americans; new research shows that half of Asian Americans across ten different national-origin groups feel they have “something” or “a lot” in common with Black Americans when it comes to government, political power, and representation.

Empathy and Justice Beyond Just Us

As we enter the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing signs that all Americans—especially Black and Asian Americans—are reimagining what community safety, interracial solidarity, and restorative justice could look like. Though arrests have increased in neighborhoods with a greater share of Asian residents since the pandemic, increased arrests have not ceased incidents of anti-Asian hate. Working directly with residents, Asian American advocates and community leaders are calling for non-carceral solutions to anti-Asian violence. Hundreds of Americans have volunteered to escort elderly Asian Americans to help them feel safe, and hundreds more gathered last month at rallies in Oakland and New York to protest anti-Asian violence.

At these rallies, Black and Asian American communities came together not only to show solidarity, but also to rebut the hollow claim that anti-Asian violence is a manifestation of Black-Asian conflict. Such real-world solidarity provides further support for recent studies showing that Black Americans are more likely than white or Hispanic Americans to recognize racism toward Asian Americans, and that Asian Americans who experience discrimination are more likely to recognize political commonality with Black Americans.

COVID-related anti-Asian bias is not inevitable. While “China virus” rhetoric has been linked to violence and hostility, new research shows that priming Americans about the coronavirus did not increase anger among the majority of Americans toward Asian Americans. But anger among a minority has invoked fear among the majority of Asian Americans. Anti-Asian violence is real, but so too are the public acts of interracial solidarity that receive far less attention. Both reflect the moment in which we live today, but the latter is a reminder of what is possible when we imagine empathy and justice that goes beyond just us.

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FOCUS: A Black Army Rises to Fight the Racist Right Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58950"><span class="small">Graeme Wood, The Atlantic</span></a>   
Sunday, 04 April 2021 10:44

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."

Grandmaster Jay. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)
Grandmaster Jay. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)


A Black Army Rises to Fight the Racist Right

By Graeme Wood, The Atlantic

04 April 21


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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Soldier Says She Was Sexually Assaulted by 22 Troops at Oklahoma Base Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58947"><span class="small">Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Cole, The Intercept</span></a>   
Sunday, 04 April 2021 08:25

Excerpt: "The army is investigating a possible series of sexual assaults of a female soldier at the Army training base in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a commander at the base told press yesterday."

Entrance to Fort Sill, a training post for the U.S. Army, in Oklahoma in 2014. (photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP)
Entrance to Fort Sill, a training post for the U.S. Army, in Oklahoma in 2014. (photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP)


Soldier Says She Was Sexually Assaulted by 22 Troops at Oklahoma Base

By Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Cole, The Intercept

04 April 21


“Brass is already calling this Fort Hood 2.0,” a military official said of the investigation now underway at Fort Sill. “It was a dark day at work today.”

he Army is investigating a possible series of sexual assaults of a female soldier at the Army training base in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a commander at the base told press yesterday. The investigation, according to a military official with direct knowledge, is scrutinizing allegations of multiple assaults against the soldier by 22 service members. Video of one incident under investigation involving several drill sergeants was circulating at the base and was obtained by Army investigators, the official said.

The soldier, who was a trainee at the time of the alleged assaults, formally reported them on March 27. The alleged incidents at times involved groups of assailants, the military official said, and the woman’s report identified seven of the 22 members she said assaulted her. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

“I heard the term ‘sex ring’ thrown around, which is not one you love to hear,” the official said, reflecting concerns that the assaults may have been coordinated.

Colonel Cathy Wilkinson, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army, denied investigators have obtained a video, but declined to answer follow-up questions. “Investigators do not have any such video,” Wilkinson said in a statement to The Intercept.

The unit implicated in the assault is the 1-78 Field Artillery Battalion. The Defense Department is removing multiple unit drill sergeants as a result of the investigation, which is being conducted by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. Stars and Stripes reported that “multiple” personnel at Fort Sill were suspended this week following a sexual assault report filed by a soldier in training, but did not specify the exact number. According to Maj. Gen. Ken Kamper, at Fort Sill, the service members under scrutiny were part of a cadre that trains incoming troops.

Reports of sexual assault in the military have gone up dramatically in recent years, rising 38 percent from 2016 to 2018 and by 10 percent between 2018 and 2019. More than 20,000 service members reported being sexually assaulted in 2018, according to Defense Department figures.

Last year, 20-year-old Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén was murdered at Fort Hood, Texas, by another service member after Guillén told family and friends that she had been sexually harassed by superiors. An Army investigation, released in December, found a culture “permissive of sexual harassment and sexual assault” at the base — and that female troops were “vulnerable and preyed upon, but fearful to report and be ostracized and re-victimized.” In December, The Intercept reported that Fort Hood soldiers were unsurprised by the report and skeptical that there would be any significant changes. These soldiers described a “toxic leadership” culture at Fort Hood.

“It’s been bad historically but brass is already calling this Fort Hood 2.0,” the official said on Thursday evening. “It was a dark day at work today.”

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The Powerful New Financial Argument for Fossil-Fuel Divestment Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>   
Saturday, 03 April 2021 12:52

Excerpt: "A report by BlackRock, the world's largest investment house, shows that those who have divested have profited not only morally but also financially."

Protesters have argued that you shouldn't try to profit off the end of the world. New analysis shows that, in any event, you won't. (photo: David Grossman/Alamy)
Protesters have argued that you shouldn't try to profit off the end of the world. New analysis shows that, in any event, you won't. (photo: David Grossman/Alamy)


The Powerful New Financial Argument for Fossil-Fuel Divestment

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

03 April 21


A report by BlackRock, the world’s largest investment house, shows that those who have divested have profited not only morally but also financially.

n a few months, a small British financial think tank will mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of a landmark research report that helped launch the global fossil-fuel-divestment movement. As that celebration takes place, another seminal report—this one obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the world’s largest investment house—closes the loop on one of the key arguments of that decade-long fight. It definitively shows that the firms that joined that divestment effort have profited not only morally but also financially.

The original report, from the London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative, found something stark: the world’s fossil-fuel companies had five times more carbon in their reserves than scientists thought we could burn and stay within any sane temperature target. The numbers meant that, if those companies carried out their business plans, the planet would overheat. At the time, I discussed the report with Naomi Klein, who, like me, had been a college student when divestment campaigns helped undercut corporate support for apartheid, and to us this seemed a similar fight; indeed, efforts were already under way at a few scattered places like Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania. In July, 2012, I published an article in Rolling Stone calling for a broader, large-scale campaign, and, over the next few years, helped organize roadshows here and abroad. Today, portfolios and endowments have committed to divest nearly fifteen trillion dollars; the most recent converts, the University of Michigan and Amherst College, made the pledge in the last week.

No one really pushed back against the core idea behind the campaign—the numbers were clear—but two reasonable questions were asked. One was, would divestment achieve tangible results? The idea was that, at the least, it would tarnish the fossil-fuel industry, and would, eventually, help constrain its ability to raise investment money. That’s been borne out over time: as the stock picker Jim Cramer put it on CNBC a year ago, “I’m done with fossil fuels. . . . They’re just done.” He continued, “You’re seeing divestiture by a lot of different funds. It’s going to be a parade. It’s going to be a parade that says, ‘Look, these are tobacco, and we’re not going to own them.’ ”

The second question was: Would investors lose money? Early proponents such as the investor Tom Steyer argued that, because fossil fuel threatened the planet, it would come under increased regulatory pressure, even as a new generation of engineers would be devising ways to provide cleaner and cheaper energy using wind and sun and batteries. The fossil-fuel industry fought back—the Independent Petroleum Association of America, for instance, set up a Web site crowded with research papers from a few academics arguing that divestment would be a costly financial mistake. One report claimed that “the loss from divestment is due to the simple fact that a divested portfolio is suboptimally diversified, as it excludes one of the most important sectors of the economy.”

As the decade wore on, and more investors took the divestment plunge, that argument faltered: the philanthropic Rockefeller Brothers Fund said that divestment had not adversely affected their returns, and the investment-fund guru Jeremy Grantham published data showing that excluding any single sector of the economy had no real effect on long-term financial returns. But the Rockefeller Brothers and Grantham were active participants in the fight against global warming, so perhaps, the fossil-fuel industry suggested, motivated reasoning was influencing their conclusions.

The latest findings are making that charge difficult to sustain. For one thing, they come from the research arm of BlackRock, a company that has been under fire from activists for its longtime refusal to do much about climate. (The company’s stance has slowly begun to shift. Last January, Larry Fink, its C.E.O., released a letter to clients saying that climate risk would lead them to “reassess core assumptions about modern finance.”) BlackRock carried out the research over the past year for two major clients, the New York City teachers’ and public employees’ retirement funds, which were considering divestment and wanted to know the financial risk involved. Bernard Tuchman, a retiree in New York City and a member of Divest NY, a nonprofit advocacy group, used public-records requests to obtain BlackRock’s findings from the city late last month. Tuchman then shared them with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonprofit that studies the energy transition.

In places, BlackRock’s findings are redacted, so as not to show the size of particular holdings, but the conclusions are clear: after examining “divestment actions by hundreds of funds worldwide,” the BlackRock analysts concluded that the portfolios “experienced no negative financial impacts from divesting from fossil fuels. In fact, they found evidence of modest improvement in fund return.” The report’s executive summary states that “no investors found negative performance from divestment; rather, neutral to positive results.” In the conclusion to the report, the BlackRock team used a phrase beloved by investors: divested portfolios “outperformed their benchmarks.”

In a statement, the investment firm downplayed that language, saying, “BlackRock did not make a recommendation for TRS to divest from fossil fuel reserves. The research was meant to help TRS determine a path forward to meet their stated divestment goals.” But Tom Sanzillo—I.E.E.F.A.’s director of financial analysis, and a former New York State first deputy comptroller who oversaw a hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar pension fund—said in an interview that BlackRock’s findings were clear. “Any investment fund looking to protect itself against losses from coal, oil, and gas companies now has the largest investment house in the world showing them why, how, and when to protect themselves, the economy, and the planet.” In short, the financial debate about divestment is as settled as the ethical one—you shouldn’t try to profit off the end of the world and, in any event, you won’t.

These findings will gradually filter out into the world’s markets, doubtless pushing more investors to divest. But its impact will be more immediate if its author—BlackRock—takes its own findings seriously and acts on them. BlackRock handles more money than any firm in the world, mostly in the form of passive investments—it basically buys some of everything on the index. But, given the climate emergency, it would be awfully useful if, over a few years, BlackRock eliminated the big fossil-fuel companies from those indexes, something they could certainly do. And, given its own research findings, doing so would make more money for their clients—the pensioners whose money they invest.

BlackRock could accomplish even more than that. It is the biggest asset manager on earth, with about eight trillion dollars in its digital vaults. It also leases its Aladdin software system to other big financial organizations; last year, the Financial Times called Aladdin the “technology hub of modern finance.” BlackRock stopped revealing how much money sat on its system in 2017, when the figure topped twenty trillion dollars. Now, with stock prices soaring, the Financial Times reported that public documents from just a third of Aladdin’s clients show assets topping twenty-one trillion. Casey Harrell, who works with Australia’s Sunrise Project, an N.G.O. that urges asset managers to divest, believes that the BlackRock system likely directs at least twenty-five trillion in assets. “BlackRock’s own research explains the financial rationale for divestment,” Harrell told me. “BlackRock should be bold and proactively offer this as a core piece of its financial advice.”

What would happen if the world’s largest investment firm issued that advice and its clients followed it? Fifteen trillion dollars plus twenty-five trillion is a lot of money. It’s roughly twice the size of the current U.S. economy. It’s almost half the size of the total world economy. It would show that a report issued by a small London think tank a decade ago had turned the financial world’s view of climate upside down.

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FOCUS: Far-Right Militias Are Still Using Facebook to Recruit and Organize Print
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>   
Saturday, 03 April 2021 12:11

Reich writes: "Facebook has had far too many opportunities to properly crack down on extremists, and each time they've failed. It needs to be broken up yesterday, and Mark Zuckerberg held accountable."

Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)


Far-Right Militias Are Still Using Facebook to Recruit and Organize

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page

03 April 21

 

acebook has had far too many opportunities to properly crack down on extremists, and each time they’ve failed. It needs to be broken up yesterday, and Mark Zuckerberg held accountable.

Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his show InfoWars have been banned on Facebook for nearly two years. But in the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, content from his websites and associates amassed over 1.1 million interactions across the platform. The posts pushed baseless claims that the election was stolen, promoted the January 6th rally, and used militaristic and violent language throughout — like referring to Washington, D.C. as “occupied enemy territory” and exhorting people to travel there to “take our country back.” Facebook did label a majority of the posts with a fact check label — but some of them were labeled with an unrelated fact check regarding COVID vaccines.

And even after the January 6th insurrection, far-right militias are still using the platform to recruit and organize. These groups and individuals know how to exploit the myriad loopholes in Facebook’s moderation policy, and the rest of us are paying the price.

What do you think?

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