How the Black MAGA Grift Actually Works

Racist white people love having a Black person tell them that every ugly suspicion they have ever entertained was not racism at all—it was simply excellent pattern recognition.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

I woke up this morning to an unusually hot San Gabriel Valley, told Alexa to turn on the air conditioner, and put on my grip socks before heading into the living room because the hardwood floor in there is slick enough to turn an ordinary trip to the couch into the Winter Olympics. Once I had secured proper traction, I parked myself in front of the television and let YouTube’s algorithm run its course.

First up was my homegirl Dr. Avis Jones-DeWeever, breaking down how Trump has been hinting at the aggressive moves he plans to make to tilt the 2026 midterms in his favor. Next came a clip of Francesca Fiorentini on The Bitchuation Room—not always my cup of tea, but even when I disagree with her, I can usually see how a rational person got to her conclusion, which is more than I can say for what came next.

Then a clip of Piers Morgan Uncensored popped up featuring Officer Brandon Tatum. Scratch that—just Brandon Tatum. He spent six years patrolling the mean streets of Tucson, which was apparently long enough to keep a badge warm and build an entire media identity around it, but not long enough that anyone at the department had to hold a candlelight vigil when he left. He is not a police officer anymore; he just plays one on camera. The second his face showed up, I knew exactly what kind of segment I was in for, because Piers Morgan Uncensored is easily one of the most disingenuous shows on all of YouTube.

My first thought was: why is God doing this to me this morning? Then I remembered — a week earlier, I wrote a piece calling Piers Morgan a hack, and I must have accidentally watched it on my main YouTube channel instead of my ghost channel, the one I built specifically to keep conservative charlatans out of my real algorithm. So I have no one to blame but myself. I cursed my own timeline.

What followed was Brandon Tatum Gish-galloping through a solid block of lies so quickly that the only dependable fact-check was whether his mouth was moving. He condemned Candace Owens’s conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s murder as contradicted by evidence from the preliminary hearing, then immediately pivoted to say he knows Owens personally and plans to sit her down himself, as though America had been waiting for Officer Tatum to convene an emergency session of the MAGA Council of Elders.

He pushed back on a fellow panelist for describing Kirk’s death as “MAGA eating itself” and insisted Kirk could not have been racist because the two of them had worked together on initiatives for the Black community. Which initiatives? He never really said. The one concrete example I remember was Kirk helping get more than a hundred Black people invited to the White House to meet Trump. That is nice, I suppose, in the same way a group tour of the Cheesecake Factory is nice. But getting a roomful of Black people close enough to Trump for a photograph is not the same thing as improving Black employment, education, health care, housing, wealth, or anything else that might qualify as helping a community. Unless the initiative was called Black People Get to Stand Near the President for an Afternoon, I am still waiting on the details.

Tatum then argued that the real story of Black life after slavery was Black Wall Street and family structure, not the institution that had spent centuries tearing Black families apart and preventing Black people from accumulating wealth in the first place. This is also where I have to note that Tatum is married to a white woman, which I have absolutely no problem with. Love who you love. But if your own family is interracial, perhaps you are not the ideal spokesman for a lecture about preserving some narrowly defined version of Black family togetherness. You cannot build your household according to the principle that race does not determine family, then show up on television five minutes later sounding like the keynote speaker at the Black Nuclear Family Restoration Summit. Pick a framework.

Along the way, he nodded approvingly at Kirk’s attacks on Martin Luther King Jr., because apparently the new method of defending Black history is minimizing slavery, scolding Black families, insulting the most famous civil-rights leader in American history, and then pointing to a White House field trip as proof that you care deeply about the community.