There has been a rather disturbing trend among Black political activists that seemed to accelerate after Donald Trump retook the White House in January of this year. I have watched political activists who I had once regarded as intellectual pro-Black thinkers suddenly start acting as cheerleaders for practically every draconian, authoritarian and downright dictatorial policy enacted by Trump, in accordance with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf; https://www.factcheck.org/2024/09/a-guide-to-project-2025/), while demonstrating a surprising attitude of uncritical support and unabashed celebration.
National and local Black celebrities, from Judge Joe Brown to Maryland Republican political candidate Kim Klacik, partied in the White House in February to celebrate Trump’s victory. Activists who had once uncompromisingly opposed authoritarian overreach and right-wing dictatorship began cheering as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accosted people at court-mandated immigration hearings, at work on work visas, in college on student visas and on the street without warrants, uniforms or badges, in apparent blissful acceptance of the scattered cases of United States citizens being detained for their political activism as collateral damage, the price that must be paid to get the immigrants out of ‘Murica. And now, I’ve seen Black people pointing to marginal “Black MAGA” groups as evidence that Black America as a whole really supports the Trump agenda. This, for now at least, is my answer to them.
At the urging of a Sista who had posted on Facebook, I took some time away from my actual organizing work and watched the Angela Gets Answers (https://www.youtube.com/@AngelaGetsAnswers) YouTube video with Chicago Flips Red co-founder Danielle Carter-Walters (I’m a Black Woman Supporting Trump & Troops, which I’m sharing here just so you’ll know), as well as a Fox News video (Chicago resident goes after city’s ‘progressive Democratic gang’ for refusing Trump’s federal help on crime) featuring Zoe Leigh, the other co-founder of Chicago Flips Red (apparently more of an objective or a wish than an actual documented fact).
Chicago Flips Red is described by Angela Gets Answers host Angela Brown as “Black MAGA”, and she describes co-founder Danielle Carter-Walters as “an outlier, not one of the 92% of Black female voters who voted for Kamala Harris.” It seems that independent Black political organizing is embodied these days by us eschewing classical “liberal” and “moderate” politics, rejecting Pan Afrikan (Black) organizing as “divisive” and zooming right past “traditional conservative” concepts to embrace hard-right-wing MAGA ideology. This appears to be not inconsistent with the percentage of Black voters who backed Trump (some of whom I suspect have already FAFO’ed), either because of dissatisfaction with Democrats’ broken promises and weak leadership or because of Trump’s celebrity and shameless swagger which still seems to impress us for some reason. Ms. Carter-Walters states in the video that she initially faced pushback and then tapped into the concerns of some of the more conservative Black constituents about “young Black thugs” and immigrants who White racists have often successfully turned us against.
As often happens when someone pushes against the “political mainstream”, Chicago Flips Red’s Website (https://www.chicagoflipsred.com) has made claims that its members have been harassed and even threatened with violence. While I personally decry such acts of intimidation against those who disagree politically and prefer to engage such people on the merits of their positions in the hope of showing them the error of their perspectives, I must also note that such acts of intimidation, against those on the so-called “far left” (which really does not exist in the United States) or the “far right” (which we used to think didn’t exist but seems to be making a comeback thanks to hard-right ideologues such as Stephen Miller) have apparently increased since Trump took office and the accepted mode of debate has turned increasingly superficial, anti-factual, aggressive, disrespectful, xenophobic, ugly and downright violent.
As so often seems to happen, the backlash against “Vote Blue No Matter Who” and the furor over sanctuary cities (“They’re getting free everything here”, a charge usually made without evidence) was followed not by truly independent Black-led political organizing (which I could support) but by Black folks running to support a political party that actively seeks to marginalize us (elimination of essential services, hypocritical imposition of federal power on local communities — “don’t tread on me” be damned — gerrymandering, voter suppression, criminalization and mass incarceration, anti-Black History in the name of “anti-wokeness”, and now militarizing policing in largely Black and Black-led cities up to and including unleashing the actual military in direct violation of Posse Comitatus).
The efforts of mayors such as Los Angeles’s Karen Bass, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson and Baltimore’s Brandon Scott to find ways to decrease crime through empowering community and anti-violence groups (a plan which seems to be working, as crime is reported to have decreased in these cities to levels not seen in decades) stand in stark opposition to Trump’s plan to “send in the troops” in military gear brandishing automatic weapons to police the streets even though their primary training is to act in times of outright war. It should also be noted that when Trump was last in the White House, he refused to “send in the troops” in accordance with the Insurrection Act when actual insurrectionists in support of Trump attacked the Capitol building (beating police with rails, breaking windows, carrying Confederate flags, defecating in the halls, chanting “Where’s Nancy” and calling for the hanging of his own vice president) on January 6, 2021. Trump’s intended rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War as he unleashes them on America’s Black-run and largely Black-populated cities seems to make his intentions clear. But our Brothers and Sisters who have embraced the political hard right seem to be ignoring this, not too different from White citizens ignoring the racism and sexism of Trump and many in his party, as long as their specific “wish list” of eliminating crime, kicking out the immigrants and promoting “conservative values” (whatever that means) is addressed. In any case, these Black activists are of the opinion that our freedom and uplift will come from uncritically embracing the Red, White and Blue instead of building up the Red, Black and Green.
Instead of leaving one (Democrat) political plantation and choosing real freedom and Black self-determination (independent Black political organizing) which apparently is too much like hard work (so much for MAGA calling Black people “lazy”), they run to another plantation (Republicans) where we will be treated worse. Enough of this “Party of Lincoln” hogwash that so many MAGA folks love to push; the Republican Party abandoned that anti-slavery credo when southern racist Dixiecrats left Harry Truman because of his pro-civil rights policies in the 1950’s and joined the Republican Party en masse, turning what had been a mildly progressive political party into a right-wing reactionary one in support of White supremacy. The Republican Party has effectively been our political enemy ever since. Who used the “Southern Strategy” in 1968 to bring in even more White southern racists, empowered J. Edgar Hoover to launch COINTELPRO against Black organizations in the late 60’s, inundated our communities with marijuana when it was illegal in the 70’s and overthrew democratically-elected leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973 (Richard Nixon, a Republican)? Who dumped cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and supercharged the cocaine epidemic as well as mass incarceration in the 80’s (Ronald Reagan, a Republican)? Who mismanaged the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and used “weapons of mass destruction” and false media reports in 2003 to gin up support for the illegal war on Iraq, directly causing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths (George W. Bush, a Republican)? Who ignored the COVID pandemic from 2020 to 2024 and called it a “hoax”, leading to the current estimates of over 1 million deaths in the US and over 7 million worldwide (Donald Trump, a Republican)? Who inspired an insurrection on January 6, 2021 and did nothing to stop it (Trump again)? Sure, Bill Clinton (a Democrat) signed the Crime Bill and the Effective Death Penalty Act, former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (a Democrat) had called young Black males “super predators”, Joe Biden (a Democrat) had backed several onerous bills as a Senator, and even Barack Obama (a Democrat) increased drone strikes in Afghanistan, prosecuted whistleblowers and bombed Libya leading to the assassination of Muamar Gaddafi, but that only underscores my point. We keep bouncing from one oppressor to the other like a shooting gallery duck. “The Democrats ignore us and break promises to stop ignoring us, so let’s run to the Republicans who beat us and at least keep their promises to continue beating us.” Reject the Democrats because of transgender and immigrant support and run to the Republicans who strip agencies like FEMA, NOAA and the National Weather Service of critical personnel and infrastructure, wage “culture wars” against Black books, Black institutions and even the Public Broadcasting System (“Sesame Street”), invade our cities, take the regulatory chains off industrial polluters, close public services for poor people to give tax breaks to the filthy rich and eliminate inspectors general and community control boards to allow police brutality to once again run unchecked and unwatched throughout our communities. I am not saying the Democrats are good (though there are at least progressive-minded legislators like Jasmine Crockett and others, the Democratic Party supports the genocide in Gaza and opposes reparations and independent Afrikan nations too), just that the Republicans are worse. We continue to behave as though there are only two possible courses of action, so we keep running from one Massa to another. We should be building our own independent, Black-led, grassroots-responsive, non-partisan political machine but Noooooo. Apparently that would require too much reading (hence the Black book bans going unnoticed by “Black MAGA”), too much real research (as opposed to just watching Fox and a few counter-culture YouTube shows) and too much real work with real Black organizers, Black historians and Black activists, and we can’t have that, can we? As for Angela Brown, she counters her interview with Ms. Carter-Walters with a White former MAGA member in her follow-up episode, her show’s tag line is “Decoding MAGA” and “Decoding Liberals”, and she clearly recognizes that Ms. Carter-Walters is “an outlier”. So any implication that Black people are “begging” Trump to come in with the military, despite the propaganda from Fox News in their interview with Zoe Leigh, a self-described “suburb kid” originally from Albany, NY, egged on by the host (“please bring us help”, which does not mean bring in the military to turn the city into a war zone), is disingenuous at best.
I don’t know whether some people are just trying to gain political favor from whoever is in power, whether some are intoxicated by the notoriety that comes from taking a confrontational, controversial or counter-cultural position, whether some have had the bucks waved in front of their faces or whether they truly believe in what they are saying, but too many of us are apparently allured by the feeling of superiority that comes from finding an obscure position through shallow research and running with it for the likes and follows, and are addicted to political posturing and the attention and fame (however fleeting) it gives them. If that is not their motivation, then why not work with anti-imperialist, anti-racist grassroots activists to truly build the “better place” we all claim to desire for ourselves, our families, our people and humanity?