‘Mic Dispatch’ episode 1: Inside the FBI’s crackdown on “black identity extremists”

In the debut episode of Mic Dispatch, Mic’s newsmagazine on Facebook Watch, we meet Rakem Balogun, whose legal name is Christopher Daniels. Balogun was arrested and spent five months in jail after he posted a Facebook post praising Micah Johnson, the lone gunman who killed five Dallas police officers in July 2016.

The circumstances of Balogun’s arrest have been reported as the first “black identity extremist” case. With the BIE label, revealed in a leaked FBI document first published by Foreign Policy in October, the FBI has attempted to link a wave of black-led anti-police brutality protests to “an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.”