1,370 words / 9:35

One would think that news the FBI has arrested an active US Marine for threatening to go on a shooting rampage against US citizens would be a major news story.

But one would think wrong. As is so often the case, we have ourselves an inconvenient perpetrator and an unprotected target group.

Last Friday at a Marine base in Twentynine Palms, California, federal agents arrested 23-year-old black New Jersey native Joshua Cobb and charged him with transmitting a threat in interstate and foreign commerce. Their case hinges around this social-media post Cobb allegedly wrote on December 17, 2022:

I want to cause mayhem on the white community. The reason i [sic] specifically want to target white people is because as a black male, they will NEVER understand my struggles. Same way I will never understand their struggles, but I don’t care to. I want to erase them. All of them really, but in this case as many as I possibly can. As of today I have officially began [sic] planning my attack. It is going to take place in 2023 in the state of New Jersey, I have not chosen a [sic] exact date but I am going to be sure it is close to an important holiday to their race. I have a location in mind already which I have frequented for the past year and I am certain nobody there is armed to be able to stop me from spraying them to the ground. I have already acquired 2 of the 4 firearms I plan to use for my attack, and I also know my entry and exit points already after the mayhem.

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link/target as.”

According to the FBI, Cobb had willingly consented to an interview at the Marine base in April and admitted he’d written the post. They also claim he said that he continued to, in their words, “have homicidal ideations and still harbored feelings of contempt towards those whom he perceived as privileged white people in New Jersey.” Cobb is quoted as saying during the interview:

I had another [idea] where it was, like, a grocery store because obviously a grocery store is, like, almost always crowded. Specifically this is where the white thing gets in because that’s where I was feeling I wanted to hit, like, a specific . . . hit a specific grocery store that was in Robbinsville cause it was, like, one of them grocery stores, like, where you just see all these fucking rich-ass white people. . . . And then like the other idea was, like . . . it was just go into like a rich white area and just, like, start shooting.

Sites that Cobb specified he wanted to attack were a Jersey Strong gym and an Aldi grocery store in Robbinsville, New Jersey, a census-designated place on Trenton’s eastern outskirts.

Trenton is a former factory town ruined by the one-two punch of deindustrialization and desegregation. It’s yet another blown-to-shit New Jersey city in the rusted, carcinogenic vein of Camden, Newark, and Paterson. As of 2020, nine out of ten Trentonians were either black or Hispanic, while a piddling 9.36% were white.

The official criminal complaint lists several other messages, both from social media and Cobb’s phone, that echo what one tends to hear from serial killers and mass murderers along the lines of I fucking hate all of you, there’s no place in this cold and cruel world for people like me, you’re fake and I’m real, the world has always mistreated and misunderstood me, so I will make you feel the pain you’ve made me feel, ad nauseam.

In some posts, Cobb allegedly brags that he takes great glee in torturing and killing cats, which is standard fare for people who eventually graduate to becoming mass murderers and serial killers.

It’s not as if black mass shooters are rare. As is the case with serial killers and murderers in general, blacks are overrepresented in mass shootings. But one wouldn’t know any of that from reading the news.

During the interview with the feds, Cobb allegedly expressed feelings of kinship with other mass shooters such as Nikolas Cruz, who shot and killed 17 people at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, and Peyton Gendron, a white man who wrote a manifesto decrying the Great Replacement before murdering ten black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York in May of 2022.

What’s astounding (but really shouldn’t be) is the degree to which the feds and the mainstream media — assuming they covered the story at all — tiptoed around the fact that this case involves a black man allegedly announcing that he specifically intended to wipe out white people. The reluctance to name him as a black person is similar to the media’s habit of referring to rampaging coon-mobs as “teens.”

The headline to the United States Attorney’s Office press release about Cobb’s arrest is “Mercer County Man Charged with Communicating Threats to Attack White People.” The headline carefully slaloms around the fact that the “man” communicating these threats is black. The only instance of the word “black” in the entire press release occurs when it quotes Cobb self-identifying as “a black male.” The same principle applies to the ten-page criminal complaint: The word “black” only appears twice, both times when citing Cobb’s own words. It’s almost as if they’re afraid to note that a black man is threatening to shoot up a bunch of white people, so they let him do the dirty work for them.

The most egregious case of “fear of naming the jigaboo” occurs in this article from Lawyer Herald — not only is the word “black” entirely absent from the article, but the stock photo they chose depicts a black female lawyer staring disapprovingly at a white criminal suspect dressed in orange scrubs. Egads!

At least The New York Times bucked the trend with the headline “Black Man Charged With Threatening to Kill White People in Mass Shooting.”

I couldn’t find a picture of Cobb anywhere in the mainstream media. After some digging, I found evidence suggesting that Cobb used to post on Watch People Die, described as a site “dedicated to uploading media depicting real-life deaths of people, such as workplace accidents, vehicular manslaughter, gun violence, suicides, and various forms of homicide.” A poster on the site claims that Cobb had an account there under the handle “1dayUsuffer” and alleges that he also posted videos on TikTok under the screen name “cobbx.” A brief perusal of the TikTok page strongly suggests that this is indeed Cobb, because apart from the screen name “cobbx,” the videos show a young black man in full military gear, pumping iron at the gym and listening to gunfire from his apartment in Trenton, New Jersey.

Several things in this case don’t quite add up. One is the fact that not only did Cobb agree to talk to the police, he also allegedly confessed to making the posts and then dug an even deeper hole for himself by admitting he continues to harbor homicidal fantasies. Most black thugs from the ghetto are at least criminally savvy enough to never talk to the po-po without a lawyer present. Another puzzling factoid is a very odd post where he said, “I’m just leaving evidence for whoever investigates my case.” That’s the first time I’ve ever heard of an aspirant killer deliberately leaving evidence for investigators.

To me, the most plausible explanation is that the FBI apprehended him before he could perpetrate a mass shooting not because they care about protecting white citizens — or, for that matter, anyone from New Jersey — but because the optics of an anti-white mass murder by a black member of the armed forces in the style of former Navy enlistee Mark “The New Orleans Sniper” Essex undermines the current canard that white-supremacist terror is the biggest threat facing the country. So they preemptively busted him, issued a hasty press release, and downplayed the fact that he’s black, hoping that no one would notice.

If that’s their strategy, it’s worked so far. Hardly anyone has noticed this story. I expect that the not-noticing will intensify.