But they were black and brown, and Washington Post readers had to slog to paragraph 16 to learn that.
By Darren McKinney
The story didn’t make the Washington Post’s front page July 4. Relegated to p. A3, “11 arrested after armed standoff in Mass. near I-95” nonetheless reported law enforcement’s dramatic “hours-long standoff with a group of heavily armed men” that prompted “stay-at-home orders for nearby residents and a highway shutdown during the holiday weekend.”
Readers who made it to paragraph 9 learned that both the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) deem the group, known both as the Moorish Sovereign Citizens and the Rise of the Moors, an “extremist movement.” (Incidentally, Post owner Jeff Bezos’s Amazon sells a book offering insights into this movement’s philosophical underpinnings even as it has banned a book that explores the physiological and psychological downsides to gender-transition procedures for children, teens and young adults. But I digress.)
Not until paragraph 16, however, did readers unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s “Othello” get a definitive clue that these armed misfits, reportedly enroute to Maine for some backwoods paramilitary “training,” weren’t rage- and hate-filled white guys, the likes of which President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, the Washington Post and many other media outlets are always telling us are now our country’s most pressing danger. And even then the clue came not in a straightforward declaration by reporters Caroline Anders and Desmond Butler but in a somewhat cryptic quote from a kooks-of-color video, in which a spokesman denies the group comprises “Black identity extremists.”
What a relief, huh? Good to know they’re only black identity moderates. But wait, that notion doesn’t quite square with their recent criminal history.
The Post grudgingly reported that in 2017 one Moorish Sovereign Citizens “adherent, Markeith D. Loyd,” rather immoderately “shot an Orlando police officer and then ran over a county sheriff’s deputy.” The Post did not report that the officer Loyd allegedly killed (he’ll stand trial in October after Covid delays) was trying to arrest him for the earlier murder of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, for which he has since been convicted.
Another movement adherent, Markese D. Lampley, in early 2020 allegedly “shot and killed a restaurant manager” in Pennsylvania in a robbery attempt and asserted in court that state authorities “had no jurisdiction over him.” The Post did not report that, after insisting he serve as his own defense attorney, Lampley was found guilty of second-degree murder and 14 additional criminal counts July 2 and now faces life in prison without parole when he’s sentenced in August. And according to the ADL, other adherents have shot at police after routine traffic stops.
Yet the Post story paraphrases a seemingly ambivalent, almost reassuring ADL spokesman saying the Moorish Sovereign Citizens movement “has not usually been associated with paramilitary activity.” Would the ADL, SPLC or Post editorial board remain so calm and openminded about a bunch of white guys “carrying rifles and handguns” and “wearing camouflage jackets, bullet-proof vests and body cameras”? How about Christopher Wray’s FBI?
As for Director Wray’s FBI the answer almost certainly is “no.” How do we know that? Because just a few pages later in that same July 4 Post, readers learned that the “FBI launches flurry of arrests over attacks on journalists during Jan. 6 riot,” [A8]. Reporter Devlin Barrett explained that, even though “[t]here is no federal law against attacking a journalist . . . the Justice Department has charged those who went after reporters or their gear . . . with committing violence in the restricted grounds of the Capitol, or destroying property on the Capitol grounds.”
Such a sweet gesture by federal law enforcement will surely help its budding white-folks-are-horrible romance with progressive media blossom all the more.
Meanwhile, the feds have not, at least according to subsequent Post reporting, shown any interest in prosecuting the Moorish Sovereign Citizens who closed down an Interstate with guns on a holiday weekend. That prosecution for unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition is being left to the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office in Woburn, Massachusetts.