#preferred seating

You’ve probably noticed a certain group of African Americans wearing ‘Blacks for Trump’ shirts who get placed in high profile seating near Trump at his Nuremberg-style rallies.

The Grio explains what ‘Blacks for Trump’ is really about.

Early origins of the phrase are explored in a report by The Washington Post, which credits a man of many names, known as “Michael the Black Man” to most, for sparking online conversations back in 2017 by appearing in crowds at several of Donald Trump’s rallies holding “BLACKS FOR TRUMP” signs and wearing clothing proclaiming that “TRUMP & Republicans Are Not Racist.”

The Post describes Michael — also known as Michael Symonette, Mikael Israel and Maurice Woodside — as a “radical fringe activist from Miami” and former member of a “violent” Black supremacist cult, who additionally runs multiple conspiracy websites and has criticized public figures ranging from Barack Obama to Oprah Winfrey.

Despite Trump trying to make it look like black people love him, he used the occasion of his recent Arizona rally to try to spark white outrage by claiming falsely that whites are being discriminated against by healthcare authorities.

Standing before an estimated crowd of over 20,000 supporters in attendance at the “Save America Rally” in Florence, Trump declared: “The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.”

That’s kind of strange for Trump to mention – considering the huge number of Republican anti-vaxxers. Perhaps Trump calculated that anti-vaxxers in his audience never tried to get vaccinated in the first place and therefore would not know how fucking easy it is for whites or anybody else to get vaccinated in the US. In NYC you can even get vaccinated at some subway stations.

But anyway...

Maurice Symonette (AKA: Maurice Woodside, Michael Symonette, Michael the Black Man, etc.)  is the organizer of ‘Blacks for Trump’. Miami New Times did a profile on him in 2018.

Five Times an Ex-Member of Murderous Miami Cult Has Popped Up at Trump Rallies

He's none other than Michael the Black Man, also known as Maurice Woodside or Michael Symonette, who has made waves in Miami in recent years with protests against the Democratic Party and rallies for the GOP.

He's also a former member of the murderous Yahweh ben Yahweh cult, which was led by the charismatic preacher Hulon Mitchell Jr., who was charged by the feds in 1990 with conspiracy in killings that included a gruesome beheading in the Everglades.

Michael, along with 15 other Yahweh followers, was charged for allegedly conspiring in two murders; his brother, who was also in the cult, told jurors that Michael had helped beat one man who was later killed and stuck a sharpened stick into another man's eyeball. But jurors found Michael (and six other Yahweh followers) innocent. They sent Mitchell away for 20 years in the federal pen.

In the years that followed, Michael changed his last name to Symonette, made a career as a musician, started a radio station in Miami, and then reinvented himself as Michael the Black Man, an anti-gay, anti-liberal preacher with a golden instinct for getting on TV at GOP events.

So a homophobic troll who was previously involved in a cult beheading and an eye gouging in Florida is now a MAGA fanatic who follows Trump around the US to attend his rallies. Sounds normal for Republicans.

#BlacksForTrump was trending at Twitter. It will probably get a bump when more people see the footage from his Saturday rally in Texas. My favorite post there was made by @cjgproduxions.