Horowitz: The Brooklyn shooting and the rise of black nationalism

You can’t blame the FBI for seemingly missing every mass shooter or domestic terrorist. After all, the bureau is stretched thin hatching kidnapping plots in Michigan, investigating garage door ropes, and finding anyone who was within a half a mile of the Capitol on January 6. But what about those who are obsessed with white supremacism? Aren’t they the least bit concerned that most of the recent mass casualty shootings and domestic terror attacks appear to be committed by black nationalists?

I couldn’t understand why the Tuesday morning shooting that left 29 shot or otherwise injured in a Brooklyn subway car was not a bigger news story. After all, millions take the NYC subways, and if there is a mass shooting with smoke bombs released, that is a pretty scary event. But by the end of the day, the memory hole became obvious, as has been the case with nearly every dramatic domestic terror attack in recent memory. The suspect in this case was an avowed black nationalist who preached violent hate toward whites. In other words, 99.5% of Americans will never know his name.

Yesterday, police arrested 62-year-old Frank James in connection with the April 12 attack that thankfully led to no fatalities because of a jam in one of his pistol magazines. So, who is Frank James? Andy Ngo, editor of the Post Millennial, found numerous posts from what appears to be his Facebook page promoting BLM, the Black Liberation Army, Nation of Islam, and individuals who attacked whites. He posted a photo of a man who killed five Dallas police officers in 2016 and called on people to kill whites. Just before the April 12 shooting, he posted a video of himself shouting racist statements on a New York street.

James also recently posted a video on YouTube criticizing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for marrying a white person.

Social media is full of these postings from countless individuals, yet they are never censored the way posts on vaccines are. The left claims without any proof that simple conservative speech is proof of white supremacism and leads to violence, yet when we have numerous attacks from black supremacists who are promoting their hate online, that never raises red flags.

In other words, if James turns out to be the shooter, the Brooklyn shooting will go the way of the Waukesha massacre and the attempted assassination of a Louisville mayoral candidate, where all the suspects had a long history of promoting black supremacism. Which is why it’s important to rehash some stories you may never have heard in recent years:

• In what can only be described as a biblical-level tragedy, six Americans were killed and dozens others were injured when Darrell Edwards Brooks allegedly plowed through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, just two days after the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in neighboring Kenosha. Brooks has a paper trail of similar grievances as Frank James. Yet few Americans even know this attack occurred, much less understand the motivation behind it.
• In February, BLM activist Quintez Brown was charged with attempted murder for stepping into the campaign headquarters of Louisville mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg and opening fire. Luckily, the bullets only grazed the candidate’s clothing and the shooter was stopped and apprehended. He came with extended magazines and clearly was coming as an assassin, but a judge let him out on $100,000 bail, which was posted by national BLM umbrella groups. Brown’s Twitter bio reads, “We have one scientific and correct solution, Pan-Africanism: the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism." And the fact that he attempted to murder a Jewish mayoral candidate should raise some eyebrows, but that is not news.
• Then there is the Capitol Hill attacker. Yes, the only attack on the Capitol that actually directly killed a Capitol police officer, you know, the one you never heard of. On April 2, 2021, Noah Green, a self-declared follower of Louis Farrakhan, rammed two police cars, resulting in the death of Officer William Evans and the maiming of another officer, before he was shot by police when he exited the car with a knife. I don’t know of any memorials for Officer Evans being used to inveigh against black supremacism or law enforcement programs dedicated to monitoring future Noah Greens.
• In 2020, David Anderson and Francine Graham, two members of the black nationalist Black Hebrew Israelite church, killed a police officer in Jersey City after holding hostages at a kosher grocery store and concocted an initial plot to bomb a Jewish community center with enough explosive material to kill people five football fields away.
• A few months earlier, Grafton Thomas was charged with murder close by in Monsey, New York, when he allegedly charged into a Hanukah party with a machete, killing one and injuring several others. Police later charged him with additional hate crimes after discovering Black Hebrew Israelite writing with swastikas in his possession. In general, Jews are the victims of 58% of the religiously targeted hate crimes. But few focus on who the perpetrators are. These attacks on Jews in the NY/NJ region are continuing. Last week, Dion Marsh, 27, allegedly told his family Jews are “the real devil” and warned of a “blood bath” before running down two people and then stabbing a Jewish man in the chest in Ocean County, NJ.
• Then there is the rise of black militias, which lends credence to the concern that the supremacist mindset has already gone kinetic. Last June, 29-year-old Othal Wallace was arrested for the execution-style murder of Daytona Beach Officer Jason Rayner. Police believe he was associated with the NFAC Black Militia, the New Black Panther Party, and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club Alabama Chapter. He was apprehended in DeKalb County, Georgia, and found heavily armed in a treehouse at a property allegedly associated with the "Not F***ing Around Coalition" (NFAC). In an interview with NFAC's leader, John Fitzgerald Johnson, also known as Grandmaster Jay, who is currently in jail after being charged with pointing a rifle at Secret Service and Louisville metro police, the Atlantic described many of NFAC's adherents as follows: "They joined a group that promised to take a bite out of the Earth and reserve it for Black people. They expected to be led by a commander who preaches radical separatism, and who will swagger with an AR-15 in public and boast that his snipers can bisect a white militiaman's head from 1,000 yards away. Jay told me that he already had to vet his recruits carefully."

All of these stories jolt your gut with the instinctive thought, “Imagine if a white person, much less a bona fide white supremacist, had done these things.” We would have had civilization, policy, and legal changes to our entire country based on those events.

Unlike the other side, we have no desire to accentuate the race of various perpetrators. If we actually deterred and locked up career violent criminals of all persuasions and had the FBI focused on known threats that aren’t political persecutions, we’d stop most of these attacks. Indeed, Frank James had nine prior arrests and was on the FBI’s radar, but the bureau failed to act. But there is something disquieting about years’ worth of incessant blood libels lodged against white people, in which every cultural and governmental institution inundates people with the idea that black people are oppressed. If we are to believe that merely being white is a threat to black people, then perhaps that is fueling the rise of black nationalism … and with deadly consequences.

It’s never a good idea to begin criminalizing speech, even hateful speech. But we typically count on culture to broadly shun those who engage in that behavior. As it relates to white supremacy, we all know that any individual caught espousing those views will have the weight of the universe marshaled against him. No such deterrent, however, exists against black supremacism, and in fact, it is clearly encouraged by government and culture, which allows not just the vague supremacist sentiments, but even the overt calls for targeted violence against white people to exist unrestricted in the public square, which often can cross the legal boundary into criminal behavior.

Indeed, critical race theory is not just a theory. It has real human consequences.

Editor's note: This article has been corrected. The attack on a kosher grocery store occurred in Jersey City, not Newark.