Revealed: debate opponent of Mehdi Hasan organized violent far-right protests

The Guardian

5 days ago

A debating opponent of the leftwing media figure Mehdi Hasan in a controversial viral YouTube video was previously the organizer of two violent far-right protests in Berkeley, California in 2017, the Guardian can reveal.
The video debate session with Hasan, published to the 10 million-subscriber Jubilee channel, has already attracted scrutiny due to platforming a self-described 'fascist', Connor Estelle, who reportedly lost his job after he was identified by online researchers.
Unidentified until now was another of Hasan's opponents in the debate video, Richard Black. In conversation with Hasan, Black refused to condemn violence against police officers, claimed that the Los Angeles police department was directed by 'liberal Marxists', and described his own political position as being 'white nativist', adding that 'neocons, libertarians, all those mainstream people, [they] might as well be leftists to me'.
In March and April 2017, meanwhile, Black organized counter-protests – later referred to as the first and second 'battles of Berkeley' by the US far right – that pitted members of the Proud Boys and the Rise Above Movement against protesters who opposed a campus speech by the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
Those rallies helped herald an era of 'alt-right' street violence that culminated in incidents such as the Charlottesville riot in 2017 and the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
The Jubilee debate has gone viral, with many viewers praising Hasan's expert dismantling of his opponents' far-right views, and others criticizing Jubilee's platforming of far-right extremist opponents.
Devin Burghart, president and executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights and an expert on extremist movements, offered 'three possible explanations' for Jubilee's decision to include far-right voices on the panel.
Burghart said: 'Either Jubilee producers were unbelievably negligent in the vetting of debaters, or they chose to stack the room with racists and fascists against a lone person of color in the hopes of capturing a viral moment to increase channel engagement … [or] they were trying to surreptitiously sound an alarm that many young Republicans are being drawn to fascism by having Mehdi systematically expose them during the debate.'
He added: 'None of those explanations speaks well of the company or the format, and highlights the peril of sharing a platform with disingenuous far-rightists seeking eyeballs.'
The video recording Hasan appeared in was an episode of Surrounded, a series published by Jubilee, a YouTube-only channel run by Jubilee Media.
The program's format sees one prominent individual with well-known beliefs debate against a room of people with opposing views, with the lone person making claims and the group taking turns challenging them individually, for up to 20 minutes per claim. The opposing group can vote out individual debaters by raising red flags when they feel that person is not representing their position well.
Black first appeared as a sole opponent to oppose Hasan's claim that 'Donald Trump is pro-crime'. He began by asking Hasan, a British American of Indian ancestry: 'What's your ethnic background, if you don't mind me asking?'
Then, referring back to an example Hasan had used with a previous debater of Trump pardoning January 6 protesters, Black said: 'I am happy that he released J6. In fact, so much so that I was prepared to protest if he didn't.'
When Hasan then asked if that meant he was OK with Trump being pro-crime, Black replied: 'Sure, because you know what? We're changing the definition of what crime is.'
When Hasan asked, 'You don't think stomping on police officers' heads is a crime?', Black said: 'It's no longer a relevant conversation any more.'
He added: 'Have you seen the US in the last four or five years, BLM protests? I myself have been involved in these protests.'
Black then claimed: 'I've seen egregious things, things that you couldn't even imagine being done to conservatives.'
He concluded: 'It's not about that. It's about tribal warfare. That's where we're at in the US.'
Jubilee provided links to social media accounts associated with each of Hasan's interlocutors. In Black's case, they linked to an Instagram account which, although bare bones, did feature the name 'Richie Black'.
The account indicated that he is located in Costa Mesa, California, and featured a headshot of Black and another man along with text and a link to another Instagram account belonging to Safari Journal Co.
That account in turn linked to a Safari Journal Co website, whose about page says: 'We mentor young Men and Women to elevate their understanding and grounding of the Nationalist Doctrine, Post-Industrial Revolution, the Mythic State, Cultural Homogeneity, American History and Health.'
The Guardian compared videos and images of Black from Instagram and his Jubilee appearance to news photography of the organizer of the 2017 protests in Berkeley, named as Rich Black in contemporary reports. The photos, eight years apart, appeared to depict the same person.
Black was reportedly the organizer of rallies in Berkeley's downtown to defend free speech in March and April 2017, which set a pattern of violent far-right protests in liberal cities, a pattern that would be repeated in subsequent years in Portland, Oregon, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Washington DC.
A 4 March 2017 rally, billed as 'March 4 Trump', was a response to a planned protest against a campus speech by the rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, then an alt-right darling but who would soon fall from grace after appearing to relativize pedophilia in a podcast appearance.
Archived posts from Black's now-defunct Twitter/X account show him promoting the March event, and whipping up alt-right supporters with images of the event in progress.
Clashes there resulted in seven injuries and 10 arrests. The event saw Kyle Chapman, hitherto known as 'Based Stickman', become a Maga celebrity after he assaulted counter-protesters with a wooden signpost while dressed in makeshift riot gear.
That rally also attracted members of the Rise Above Movement, a southern California white supremacist group that was reported as having 'a singular purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes'.
Following the March rally, Black, described at the time by Time magazine in its reporting at that time as a 'libertarian grant writer from the Los Angeles area' who decided to organize a 'comeback' event in Berkeley where 'rightwingers could 'come and speak, from start to finish, without being physically shut down''.
The April event was even more violent, with opposing groups at first clashing in Berkeley's civic center park but then spreading into surrounding streets, and fighting with 'wooden poles, pepper spray, mace, explosives, bagels, milk, and fists'.
The following Monday, on a since-deleted Twitter/X account, Black reportedly posted a video of himself in which he said, 'I could not be more satisfied with the outcome of the event', claiming that attenders including those on the far-right had taken a 'stand against radicalism and domestic terrorism'.
The events also saw members of the neo-Nazi Rise Above Movement (RAM) charged over their alleged premeditated violence at both protests. A labyrinthine prosecution finally concluded last December when the one-time fugitive and RAM founder Rob Rundo was sentenced to two years of time served and two years of supervised release.
Jubilee has 10 million subscribers at the time of writing, and has had some 2.8bn views across its videos, according to the analytics platform Social Blade. This puts it just inside the top 400 channels by subscribers and 6,120th by views.
The channel was founded in 2010, over which time it has issued about 1,430 videos. But it enjoyed growth spurts and renewed media coverage during the last US election season, when episodes of Surrounded featuring mainstream political figures such as the senior Democrat Pete Buttigieg.
In the context of this renewed interest, the CEO and founder, Jason Y Lee, told Variety that the platform aimed to 'provoke understanding and create human connection', to show 'what discourse can and should look like', and to be 'the Disney of empathy'.
The Guardian contacted Lee for comment on this reporting, but received no response.
In a January YouTube interview, the journalist Taylor Lorenz asked Lee if he was 'worried about getting played by the far right', given 'their ability to weaponize the attention economy and move the Overton window further to the right' by being platformed on Jubilee.
Lee said 'we actually do rounds of interviews' with potential panelists, and 'we'll talk to them about their ideology, their points of view and perspectives'.
Lee added: 'We don't want to favor one side or the other, but we are very careful in trying to make sure that we're not spreaders of misinformation or ideologies that might be hateful or bad.'
Meanwhile, it is not clear what Black has been doing between his initial burst of prominence and his Jubilee appearance.
Burghart, the extremism expert, said: 'It's not uncommon to see a figure engaged in street-level activism drop off the radar for a time and appear later in more mainstream settings.'
He added: 'It's a good reminder that monitoring the far-right needs to be a long-term project, keeping an eye on both the margins and the mainstream.'