Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were a tiny band of idiots who traveled the country protesting gay rights at military funerals for some damn reason. The mainstream media reported constantly on their stupid antics as a means to smear, by implication, any Republican opposition to any liberal culture war issue. The national media is always looking for such a group to puff up in importance as a designated hate object to smear Republicans and promote cohesion among the Democratic Paarty’s fractious factions.
That’s what the national media tried to do with the Covington Catholic kids: Conjure up a hate group of Otherness representing strains of thought (Catholic orthodoxy, Trump supporters) that threaten the goals of the Democratic Party, no matter that they were teenagers. ironically, there was a group at the Lincoln Monument that day whose beliefs and actions recall the Westboro Baptist Church, but it wasn’t the Covington kids.
Andrew Sullivan, who watched all the videos of the incident so you don’t have to, has the scoop:
What I saw was extraordinary bigotry, threats of violence, hideous misogyny, disgusting racism, foul homophobia, and anti-Catholicism — not by the demonized schoolboys, but by grown men with a bullhorn, a small group of self-styled Black Hebrew Israelites. They’re a fringe sect — but an extremely aggressive one — known for inflammatory bigotry in public. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group: “strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.” They scream abuse at gays, women, white people, Jews, interracial couples, in the crudest of language. In their public display of bigotry, they’re at the same level as the Westboro Baptist sect: shockingly obscene. They were the instigators of the entire affair.
And yet the elite media seemed eager to downplay their role, referring to them only in passing, noting briefly that they were known to be anti-Semitic and anti-gay. After several days, the New York Times ran a news analysis on the group by John Eligon that reads like a press release from the sect: “They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.” He notes that “they group people based on what they call nations, believing that there are 12 tribes among God’s chosen people. White people are not among those tribes, they believe, and will therefore be servants when Christ returns to Earth.” Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bunch of people preaching the enslavement of another race in public on speakers in the most inflammatory language imaginable.
Eligon actually writes: “Whatever tensions are sparked by Hebrew Israelite teaching, some adherents chalk that up to people being unwilling to accept uncomfortable doctrine.” The Washington Post ran a Style section headline about “the calculated art of making people uncomfortable.” In a news story entirely about the Black Israelites, the Washington Post did not quote a single thing they had said on the tape, gave a respectful account of their theology, and only mentioned their status as a “hate group” in the 24th paragraph, and put the term in scare quotes. Vox managed to write an explainer that also did not include a single example of any of the actual insults hurled at the Covington kids. Countless near-treatises were written parsing the layers of bigotry inside a silent schoolboy’s smirk.
Here’s what I saw on the full tape: a small group of aggressive, hateful men using a bullhorn to broadcast the crudest of racial slurs, backed up by recitations of Bible verses. I saw a young Native American woman make the mistake of engaging them. When she stood her ground, she was suddenly interrupted: “You’re out of order. Where’s your husband? Where’s your husband? Let me speak to him.” On the tape, you can hear the commentary from another member of the Black Israelites: “You see this? This is the problem, Israel. It’s always our women coming up with their loud mouth, thinking they can run and bogart things, thinking they can come and distract things with their loud-ass mouth, because they’re not used to dealing with real men. You think we’re supposed to bow down to your damn emotions when you come around here and run your mouth and distract what we’re doing instead of coming here with order … She’s coming around here being wicked.”
Wait, there’s more. Hollering through a bullhorn at a group of Native Americans, the speaker boomed: “You ain’t no child of God. You are the Indian. You are a blue-eyed demon. That’s the last Mohican.” Then: “You’re still worshipping totem poles. You out of your mind! You have to repent. You worship the buffalo. You worship the eagle. You worship the phoenix. These are the idols you’ve been worshipping. A damn buffalo ain’t gonna save you. You worship the creations and not the creator … That’s why you’re drunkards in the casinos and the damn plantation.” Another: “Dumb-ass niggers. Bunch of demons. You’re a bunch of Uncle Tomahawks.” They snarled the word “savages” at Native Americans. The yelling was deafening, aggressive, vile, and threatening. But an inscrutable smile by a white teen was enough for some elite liberals to urge punching a schoolboy in the face.
Here is how the Black Israelites verbally assaulted the schoolboys: “Bring your cracker ass up here. Dirty ass crackers, your day coming. We can give a hell about your police. No one’s playing with these dusty-ass crackers.” Another: “Don’t get too close or your ass gonna get punished … You crackers are some slithery ass bastards. You better keep your distance.” And this, surveying the scene: “I see you, a bunch of incest babies … Babies made out of incest. If you’re the great damn nation, get rid of the lice on your back. … You’re a bunch of hyenas. You outnumber us but you keep your distance. You couldn’t touch us if you wanted to. You worship blasphemy.”
So not only are these “Black Hebrew Israelites” as poisonous as the Westboro Baptist Church, they’re demonstrably more so, adding racism, sexism and anti-American Indian animus ala mode on top of Westboro’s anti-gay pie. Yet where’s the endless coverage of Black Hebrew Israelite nastiness that the Westboro Baptist Church received for their professional irritant demonstrations? Nowhere. And we all know the reason why: As black people, their Democratic coalition and Victimhood Identity Politics standing puts them beyond criticism. They won’t be demonized for their lunatic beliefs because that demonization isn’t helpful in smearing the Republican Party, Catholics or Trump supporters. It’s the same reason Louis Farrakhan and Nation of Islam don’t get regular coverage of their lunatic beliefs. As Sullivan says in that essay: “This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it….Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism.”
Though numbers are hard to come by, Black Hebrew Israelites probably outnumber the Westboro Baptist Church, who seemed to have a maximum membership of 40 people, by some 2-4 orders of magnitude. According to Wikiedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, there are multiple locations of multiple churches: Commandment Keepers, African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, Church of the Living God, Church of God and Saints of Christ (with supposedly 50 tabernacles), Orthodox Church of God and Saints of Christ, Church of God in Jesus Christ, Nation of Yahweh (which supposedly has “supporters in over 1,300 cities within the U.S. and 16 foreign countries,”) etc., though it’s unclear how accurate these numbers are, or how many adhere to the most poisonous black supremacist biblical interpretation.
For a taste of their beliefs, you can check out Nation of Yahweh’s website, which looks like it was built by the leader’s cousin after a semester of website design from a community college in the Geocities era, complete with Flash plugins and long PDFs on theology that cite the dictionary. Here’s just a little taste:
What does it mean to have an indifference to matters that are spiritual? Indifferent coming from the definition of worldly, the adjective form of indifference in the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, copyright 2004, on page 727 is tantamount to, “having or showing no interest, concern, or feeling.” Matter in the Synonym Finder by J.I Rodale, copyright 1978, on page 714, is synonymous to subject and topic; while on page 1145, spiritual is the same as godly, righteous, moral, and good.
I know I want to get my theology from freshman Comp 301 essays filled with obvious padding to make the word count.
But don’t expect any exposes of crazy Black Hebrew Israelite belief from the MSM anytime soon. That woudn’t be useful. It wouldn’t help advance the narrative…