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Fox News viewers and other Trump supporters everywhere doubtlessly patted themselves on the back and exchanged high-fives when they saw a carefully situated African-American man conspicuously standing behind Donald Trump at his rally in Phoenix on Tuesday night. The man was shown shouting and guffawing with approval as Trump tried to justify his warm embrace of neo-Nazis and white supremacists ever since the Charlottesville murders.
This wasn’t the first time "Michael the Black Man" has appeared in Trump’s orbit. He’s been a fixture at Trump rallies from the get-go:
At a number of political rallies over the last two years, a character calling himself “Michael the Black Man” has appeared in the crowd directly behind Donald Trump, impossible to miss and possibly planted.
He holds signs that scream “BLACKS FOR TRUMP” and wears a T-shirt proclaiming with equal conviction that “TRUMP & Republicans Are Not Racist.”
Much like the tiny number of Republican women in the U.S. Congress who are habitually trotted out to front Bill-signing ceremonies and other publicized PR events for the GOP, this fellow would stand out like a sore thumb in a sea of white from a birds-eye view of Trump’s rallies, but for propaganda purposes he’s perfectly placed. The idea being that Trump’s supporters are not, in fact, largely a cadre of the most virulent racists in the nation, but that they are in fact “diverse" and "attractive” to minorities, just like “Michael the Black Man".
Except this particular fellow is rather...unique:
Before he started calling himself Michael the Black Man, the man identified as Maurice Woodside. Around 1980, he joined a cult led by Hulon Mitchell Jr., who went by Yahweh Ben Yahweh and eventually turned violent, reported the New Times. The two men met when Woodside was 21 years old.
The casual viewer could be forgiven for thinking that this gentleman’s presence symbolized some type of affinity or common cause between Trump and African-Americans. It is highly unlikely, however, that anything Mr. Woodside actually believes would resonate tremendously with the African-American community as a whole:
The radical fringe activist from Miami once belonged to a violent black supremacist religious cult and he runs a handful of amateur, unintelligible conspiracy websites. He has called Barack Obama “The Beast” and Hillary Clinton a Ku Klux Klan member. Oprah, he says, is the devil.
Most curiously, in the 1990s, he was charged, then acquitted, with conspiracy to commit two murders.
His website, gods2.com suggests that Mr. Woodside is as deeply disturbed as his new hero, Donald Trump:
His website, Gods2.com, proclaims on the landing page: “LATIN, BLACK AND WHITE MUST UNITE!”
Links on that site lead to another one, honestfact.com, which claims that the “Real KKK Slave Masters” are “CHEROKEE Indians (Hidden Babylonians).”
The proclamations only get more unhinged from there: “ISIS AND HILLARY RACE WAR PLOT TO KILL ALL BLACK & WHITE WOMAN OF AMERICA WITH MS-13.”
And: “YAHWEH BEN YAHWEH Taught Us To Vote Republican & is Now VINDICATED.”
And: “BLACKS FOR TRUMP SUPPORTS SENATOR JEFF SESSIONS”
The site also displays a photo of a Confederate flag with the caption: “Cherokee Democratic Flag.”
“Race War” seems be a recurring theme for Mr. Woodside. As The Intercept notes, his postings, while largely unintelligible, seem on their face to derive from a mixture of paranoid fantasies about the Bible and political figures:
While it is difficult to follow the logic of most of his rants, a Facebook post from last October, explaining his opposition to Hillary Clinton in apocalyptic terms, gives a flavor of the style. “Semiramis mother of Nimrod was a White as Snow Canaanite who’s NickName is ISIS passed to Hagar to Nefitiri to Delilah to Jezebel to Mary Magdalene & the Illuminati has passed it to HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON,” Woodside wrote on Facebook on October 27, two days after he was praised by Trump at a rally in Florida. Clinton, he added, is “the Great Red (White as Snow see through skin to the Red Bloody Mucle) Dragon who wants to Kill Sarah the Black Woman of America Rev.12:1-12.”
The Intercept raises the sensible question of why the Secret Service would allow someone with a violent background and a history of bizarre online ranting within a few feet of a sitting President.
As The Intercept and other publications reported last year, he initially reinvented himself as a Republican activist in the 1990s, after the black supremacist cult leader he had followed throughout the previous decade, Yahweh ben Yahweh, was jailed for a series of killings that included the beheading of one victim. Woodside was eventually acquitted of playing any part in those murders, despite testimony implicating him in two killings from his own brother, who had also been in the cult.
Woodside denies that he’s a plant, but his past relationship with Trump, who has pointed him out in his speeches, and with the Republican Party (as an invitee to the Palm Beach County GOP’s "Lincoln dinner”--held at Mar-a Lago) suggests that the campaign is well aware of his usefulness. For millions of Republican viewers tuning in Tuesday night, Mr. Woodside became the face of all African-Americans, living proof that Trump could not possibly be a racist.
The reality, of course, is that Mr. Woodside is about as representative of African-Americans as hard-core Trump supporters are representative of decent human beings.
More on this guy from Sue The Cat.