The Black Grifters of MAGA
They claim to be representatives of a new wave of black conservatism. In reality, they are nothing more than opportunistic charlatans.
Grifters.
Whether or not you’re familiar with the term, odds are that you know of one.
But what exactly is a grifter?
Think of a grifter as a swindler with a powerful megaphone and a bombastic voice. Like a swindler, a grifter is really good at finessing people out of their money.
However, grifters are more than just your run-of-the-mill con artists participating in some kind of knife or cosmetics selling pyramid scheme.
Grifters are influencers (not necessarily in the Instagram sense of the word, although many grifters do leverage social media to achieve their goals), people that can amass a large, captivate audience by playing to some strong emotions or confirming whatever preconceived bias their audience has.
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Today, many grifters can be found within the pseudoscientific halls of Alternative Medicine University peddling things ranging from seemingly innocuous vaginal jade eggs to outright dangerous bleach concoctions touted as a cure for autism, cancer, HIV/AIDS, etc.
However, thanks to the rise of Donald Trump and the paranoid anti-establishment ramblings of the Tea Party, there lies a new type of grifter: the MAGA Grifter.
As the name suggests, MAGA Grifters specialize in the art of selling stuff by preaching to the choir of the most die hard Trump supporters. Their aim is not to engage in meaningful debate to convince people of the virtues of the current president.
Rather, the objective of the MAGA Grifter is to turn a profit by selling MAGA-themed apparel, writing books that extol the virtues of ultraconservatism, or charging speaker fees at expensive dinners or private events. Like their muse in the White House, these grifters play to some of the most fallacious beliefs and conspiracy theories that can be found within the most devout corners of Camp Trump 2020.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of MAGA Grifters that one could expect to encounter are white.
Most, but not all of them.
I’m talking about the rare but very loud species that is the Black MAGA Grifter.
In October 2018, Kanye West made headlines for a rather bizarre meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, where he mostly talked at the President in a hardly coherent monologue that even seemed to throw the President off. Kanye received tons of flack for this meeting, with plenty of people juxtaposing his praise of the sitting president with his bold comments on Former President W. Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
But Kanye’s appearance did more than just confuse fans and give people across the United States something to talk about for a few days: it also emboldened a small group of Black American grifters to capitalize on one of the most prominent black men in the United States being an outspoken supporter of Trump.
I’m talking about the rare but very loud species that is the Black MAGA Grifter.
For the most part, there are not many Black MAGA Grifters out there, with Trump’s low (14%) support from the black community providing the opposite of fertile ground for these folks to thrive in amongst the black community. Fortunately for this group, the little support that they receive from the black community is supplemented by several magnitudes of white ultraconservatives and MAGA diehards eager to have their most static social beliefs validated by a black person.
Tokenism in action.
While doing some digging and sacrificing my mental health for an article I wrote on the attempts to vilify Ahmaud Arbery, I repeatedly came across several of these figures hard at work pandering to their base as they attempted to paint Ahmaud as something more insidious than an innocent jogger.
And sure enough, these grifters are back at it again in the wake of yet another widely condemned killing of a black man, George Floyd.
Normally, I opine that the best way to get rid of a grifter is to just ignore them. After all, grifters thirst for attention like crops in a draught, well aware that less attention equals less new customers.
The problem with this particular brand of grifter, however, is their self-characterization as champions of black conservatism that grants them an undeserved seat at the table.
Capitalizing on the lack of a loud black conservative presence within the mainstream, Black MAGA Grifters position themselves as filling this purported void.
When you scratch the surface of their vitriol and have an understanding of the intricacies of grifterdom, however, it becomes clear that these individuals are not advocates of black issues or even genuine conservatism, but are instead self-serving, money-chasing individuals that have no issue with the potential harm caused by pandering to their ultraconservative audience.
One obvious example of a Black MAGA Grifter is Bryson Gray, a 28-year old rapper who is better recognized by his oversized foam MAGA hats as opposed to his contributions to hip hop. Politically fluid like many other political grifters out there, Gray went from backing Bernie Sanders to releasing an album that can best be described as a love letter to all things MAGA and socially conservative, with titles including Pro Life Pro God Pro Trump, Save the Babies, and Maga Christmas.
Like other grifters, Gray has a a very high opinion of himself and likes to play up his relatively scant influence, promoting himself on Twitter as a professional liberal tear maker. Further solidifying his title is a habit of exaggerating or straight-up lying, as exemplified by a tweet in which he claimed that Billboard emailed him about his album almost making the charts. The validity of this claim seems rather unlikely when you look at his response to this same tweet in which he “shares” the email (I find it unlikely that Billboard would include a frowny-face in an official email).
To his credit, unlike other Black MAGA Grifters, Gray has never really claimed to be an advocate of black issues. This may be a good thing for his image, considering that he seems to have a friendly relationship with Nicholas Fuentes, a sneering 21-year old white supremacist that extolled the “tidal wave of white identity” following 2017’s Unite the Right Rally.
Perusing a handful of Gray’s Tweets, it doesn’t take long to realize that he is just in it for the check, with his comical caricature only being relevant to the more devout corners of MAGA World that are willing to buy an album rife with uninspiring bars and boring rhyme schemes.
Less blatantly ridiculous, slightly better known, and more toxic is Brandon Tatum, an ex-Arizonan police officer that gained some modicum of national spotlight following a longwinded car-monologue in which he expressed his disdain for the NFL national anthem protests, equating the kneeling NFL players to emotional children.
Riding this wave, Tatum spends his days making commentary videos with click-baity titles — The PEOPLE Have Had ENOUGH, Ahmaud Arbery’s Case is OUT OF CONTROL, TRUMP is the most PRO GOD PRESIDENT — that open up with a soundbite followed by a dramatic horn and two direct plugs — text & verbal — to his self titled online store. Here, one can purchase $30 MAGA-themed hats, mugs with Trump’s face superimposed on a heavily tattooed muscular body that fetishizes an appearance that his audience would most likely find threatening on a black person, and, most recently and very ironically, face masks and coverings embroidered with various nods to Trump.
When not recording monologues, he takes to Twitter to pander to his predominantly white ultraconservative audience by creating posts that play to the dark imaginations of the more racists corners of the white community, such as the made-up epidemic of black-on-white crime so espoused by white supremacists.
Unlike Gray, however, Tatum has at times spun himself as a supporter of the black community, providing some of that Cosby-esque tough love that he believes the community needs. That said, claims of having the best interests in mind for one’s race are hollow when you perpetuate the narrative of the criminalistic black man and dabble in police apologia.
Tatum’s anti-black rhetoric is not a new concept for the ultraconservative communities of the US. But what is relatively new is having a black man with a near 300k+ Twitter regurgitating and validating these ideas.
Case in point, following the slaying of Ahmaud Arbery, Tatum stepped up his pandering with a string of posts and commentary videos in which he attempts to “prove” that Ahmaud was committing a felony, one that justified the use of deadly force against him no less. Given the disturbing elements of this case that transcended racial lines, Tatum received pushback from black and white people as they pointed out the blatant flaws in his analysis (as a former patrol officer, one would expect or hope that Tatum would have an excellent grasp of legalese that would not be so widely refuted). Some went even further by calling him out for attempting to justify Ahmaud’s slaying.
Despite the negative feedback, Tatum couldn’t let it rest: within the last two weeks, he shared police body cam footage of a 2017 — several years before that fateful February 2020 day — encounter with Ahamud, claiming that he seem [sic] like a [sic] irate hot head.
Ironic, considering that Tatum’s videos often involve him yelling into a camera. When paired with a very unflattering outburst on an Instagram Live conversation with several other purported black conservatives, including Bryson Gray and two hoteps, a most problematic group, Tatum’s characterization of Ahmaud and other black victims of violence as angry thugs is hypocrisy at its finest.
Tatum’s anti-black rhetoric is not a new concept for the ultraconservative communities of the US. But what is relatively new is having a black man with a near 300k+ Twitter following regurgitating and validating these ideas. To his ultraconservative white audience, Tatum provides them with “proof” that they do not harbor racists views, since they can point to Tatum’s high decibel rantings as evidence that structural and individualized racism is not the real problem affecting the black community.
And for what purpose? Just to sell some overpriced, tacky MAGA-themed merchandise?
Tatum is problematic, but no conversation concerning Black MAGA Grifters is complete without studying the archbishop of aggressively paranoid black ultraconservatism: Candace Owens.
With over 2-million Twitter followers, guest appearances on Fox News, participation on a few Congressional panels, and even being invited as a speaker at the White House, Owens, has a growing platform as a voice for black conservatism.
Like Tatum, Owens is a fan of clickbait, ALL CAPS TWEETS, and charged rhetoric. She often equates Black Democrats to being slaves on a plantation, a term that she uses in the subtitle of her still-unreleased book, Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation. And like Gray, she exudes a grossly exaggerated sense of self: her pinned Tweet from nearly a year ago advertising the aforementioned book claims that after 2 years of fighting and challenging the status quo — I finally wrote it. The book Democrats don’t want Minorities to read.
I’m sure Democratic lawmakers around the country quiver at the thought of the political fallout that will come from a book written by a purveyor of QAnon and pro-Trump conspiracy theories (assuming that it ever gets released).
Like other ultraconservatives, Owens dabbles in the frequent disparaging of Black America, having referred to black culture as “a joke” and takes any and every chance to throw a straw-man into the ring in order to downplay or subtly justify racialized killings of black people. Not even two hours after news broke of Floyd’s murder, Owens had spun the incident as some kind of Democrat election fodder.
And like other ultraconservatives, Owens is quick to dismiss any national conversation regarding racial disparities as leftist “race bait” and tends to promote the trite “color-blind” rhetoric so favored by racist apologists.
That is, until so called “race baiting” is convenient for her.
During a congressional panel on white supremacy, she was quick to baselessly accuse Representative Ted Lieu as someone that believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety after he played a recording of her comments characterizing Hitler as not a dangerous nationalist, but a problematic globalist. Of course, this view is in direct opposition to the widely accepted historical understanding that Hitler was a nationalist for the books.
With views and tactics like this, it should come to no surprise that Owens’ following is predominantly white, though she’d most likely chalk this up to something about black people not wanting to take any criticism. That, or something about black people being bought out by the Democrats. Perhaps a bit of both.
Unlike the other two grifters discussed in this piece, however, Owen’s grifting is somewhat more subtle, thanks largely in part to the increasing attention she receives as a beacon of black conservatism, having even created a movement (with Brandon Tatum as a co-founder, no less), Blexit, to encourage black Americans to leave the Democratic party and cast their support behind Republicans. The movement has even seen some success as a trending topic on Twitter, although like other heavily pro-Republican/anti-Democrat Twitter movements, it seems to have gotten a boost from Russian trolls: The Daily Beast found that 16% of Blexit tweets were from known Russian troll accounts.
Despite her misplaced reputation as a black conservative figurehead, there are signs pointing to her being nothing more than another opportunistic MAGA Grifter.
Today, Owens presents herself as a die-hard Trump supporting Republican, but she didn’t begin her career that way. In fact, she was quite the opposite as the CEO of an online publication that included a Trump-bashing blog that went as low as to jab at his penis size. She had even more choice words for her now Republican base: …in a 2015 column for the site lambasting conservative Republicans, Owens wrote that it was “good news” that the “Republican Tea Party … will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope).”
Now, to be fair, opinions can change and political philosophies can healthily shift over the course of one’s life. That said, one should always be skeptical of the sincerity of someone who became a conservative overnight (or had any sort of an “overnight” political conversion for that matter).
Effectively, her Republican advocacy boils down to “Republicans good because Democrats bad.”
Questionable ideological loyalty aside, she has a habit of making gross exaggerations and outright lies.
Remember Kanye West? Kanye shouted-out Owens as someone to pay attention to; there’s even a photo of them together. But being the opportunistic charlatan that she is, Owens extrapolated this praise to boldly claim that Kanye had endorsed her Blexit movement and designed the logo. Kanye denied this, noting that he did not design anything and simply put Owens in touch with a designer that he had worked with in the past. In this same tweet, Kanye said that he “never wanted any association with Blexit” and went as far as to say that he’s been used to support messages that he does not believe in.
There are plenty of other instances of Owens lying and exaggerating, but just as telling as her mistruths is her lack of substance. She advocates that black people should vote Republican — appropriating the vey real conversation over what the Democratic Party has done for its black constituents — but she has never really given a good, substantive argument for why black people should put their faith in Republican lawmakers. She’s quick to point out past errors of the Democratic Party — as well as peddling baseless conspiracy theories such as claiming that the mail bombs targeting Obama and Clinton were sent by “leftists”— but has seldom, if ever, gone into detail as to what the Republicans bring to the table for the black community.
Effectively, her Republican advocacy boils down to “Republicans good because Democrats bad.”
The website for her beloved Blexit is also starved for details. Despite laying out several good areas to address (criminal justice reform, promotion of entrepreneurship), the website notably lacks any detail as to how these issues will be tackled. The “Movement” tab just has a short paragraph loosely describing what will be done to achieve the vision followed by another newsletter sign-up field.
Not lacking on the website is a highlight reel showing Owens — as well as Tatum and Ann Coulter, a subscriber to the white genocide conspiracy theory among other eyebrow raising beliefs — speaking to an audience of mostly white young adults.
And rest assured, for the “Donate” tab is up and running just fine.
Digging in, it becomes clear that Owens is less of a staunch political advocate and more of an opportunistic blood hound. Only thing is, she isn’t out here selling some MAGA coopted product like Gray or Tatum. So, how does she make her money?
Why, none other than the privilege of having her talk at you, of course.
With the low end of speaker fees ranging from $500-$2,500 per talk, there can be a lot money made in pandering. Considering that she has supposedly appeared at over 60-American universities, 2020’s CPAC and however many private events, there is quite a bit of money to be made as evidenced by the $40,000 she raked-in over a 9-month period by pandering to her white ultraconservative audience.
All at the light expense of reinforcing harmful narratives and stereotypes of people that share the same skin color as her.
As grifters, their concern does not lie with having real discussions for the betterment of the black community, let alone the intellectual promotion of conservatism.
I had a lot of personal conflicts before and during the writing of this piece.
On the one hand, there is a strong case to be made that the best way to deal with any sort of grifter is to just ignore them. After all, grifters thrive under the spotlight, requiring any sort of attention to stay relevant.
On the other, we are in an election year, one where the presumptive Democratic nominee is prone to making gaffes, racial ones not withstanding. There is a lot to unpack with this fact and valid discussions to be had regarding the Democratic Party’s perceived entitlement to the “black vote.”
That said, the three aforementioned characters and their peers are not the ones to look to for insight on this or any other matter concerning race in the United States. As grifters, their concern does not lie with having real discussions for the betterment of the black community, let alone the intellectual promotion of conservatism.
At the end of the day, they are just part of a corp of shameless pandering opportunists cashing out on all things MAGA at the expense of their brothers and sisters.
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