There was a mild kerfuffle when the father of the Pulse nightclub shooter showed up at a Clinton rally in Orlando last summer, which proves only that unless you’re Dick Cheney and can have the Secret Service screen out people in the parking lot, it’s tough to prevent some deplorable characters from showing up. But via Miami New Times, this batch at a Trump rally is worth noting.
So who is this new face of Trump’s elusive black support?
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, he changed his last name to Symonette, made a career as a musician, started a radio station in Miami and then re-invented himself as Michael the Black Man, an anti-gay, anti-liberal preacher with a golden instinct for getting on TV at GOP events. He’s planned events with Rick Santorum and gotten cable news play for bashing Obama.
Since 1997, he’s been charged with grand theft auto, carrying a weapon onto an airplane and threatening a police officer, but never convicted in any of those cases.
So why is he supporting Trump? Reached on his cell phone in Lakeland, he said he likes Trump’s plan to lower taxes, but also offered a complicated answer tying Hillary Clinton to a range of racist activities.
“One reason is because Hillary’s last name is Rodham, and their family members are Rothchilds, who enslaved 13,000 slaves as collateral,” he says. “She’s also on camera kissing the head of the Ku Klux Klan and saying, ‘That’s my mentor.’ That’s all on my website.”
I bring this up because at the Trump rally yesterday in Miami there was someone holding up one of Michael’s signs with the URL blacked out (so to speak) and it was held by a white person.