LIL INTERNET: Can we talk about the Black Boogaloo Alliance?

Daniel Keller: I feel like it's not a real thing. But yeah, it is interesting for sure. It's signaling, right.

LI: Did you hear about the sports player who posted the Hitler meme? There's this really bad, fake quote about like, Hitler, saying, “oh, the third World War will happen when the Americans finally realize that they hold the true jewel, the true treasure, God's true treasure, the Black people, the real tribe of Israel, the real chosen people.”

DK: So it's some Hotep Boogaloo—I mean, that's just, I guess, 2020 mashup. Guaranteed there is the—

LI: Dan do you have a Hotep definition that's good?

DK: Ah, I don't know if I have a very succinct one. It's like this Black Israelight kind of thing that is like, I think it's been going on for a while, but it’s like exploited everything niche. It was sort of adjacent to Nation of Islam, in my understanding, but I don't know..

Carly Busta: It's like, you know, the guys on 125th street wearing like Pharaoh outfits

DK: Basically they think that Black slave descendants are the real tribe of Israelites and Jews are fake and so it has a crazy antisemitic aspect

LI: So it's a very like woo-woo bookstore, crystals and books of Egypt about how Black people are the chosen tribe of Israel...

CB: Like QAnon but with black identities

LI: Thank you Carly, Black QAnon... from the 70s.

DK: Also is the tribe meant to be all Black people? Or what tribe? Because, like, think about all of the…

LI: It's also hyper-masculine, it's reactionary, very traditionalist.

DK: You wear some Ankhs and stuff.

LI: Yeah, anyway, the right accelerationist Telegrams and a lot of the right-wing press were going crazy about this march where like 100 armed Black people walked into some small, majority white town in Georgia. These are all Black Americans, all carrying guns, wearing tactical vests, marching in line like a militia.

DK: I mean, it's like Black Panther. But with the aesthetics of Boogaloo basically.

LI: They're there. It's called the NFAC, which means “not fucking around coalition.” And the leader is named Grandmaster J, which is like a combination of Jam Master Jay and Grandmaster Flash, like two early rap pioneers. So his name sounds familiar to everybody, but he’s not really anyone special. He actually went kind of viral years ago as being like the salesman figure for this gimmicky laser controller that was like “you can DJ with lasers!” It's called Beamz with a Z. And it's just this thing that has four lasers. And, you know, basically, it's a MIDI controller that if the laser is [interrupted by your hands], it triggers something. But he was in their commercial like hand miming a really famous turntable battle set, with his hands in the lasers, like doing fader tricks and all this stuff and make it look like he was really laser DJing but he wasn't doing anything really. It was all fake. So he got called out everyone's like, “First of all, who the fuck is Grandmaster J? Second of all, like, this product is like a scam. And this is so fucked up and weird.” Whole bunch of people dissed him. He disappeared for years, right? He starts popping up in Hotep shit on Instagram. Now he's the leader of this armed black militia called Not Fucking Around Coalition, but he posted the same fake Hitler meme as the sports player did.