NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A Super Bowl halftime show performer was charged Thursday with two misdemeanors, about 4 1/2 months after he ran across the field at the Superdome waving a flag that included the words “Sudan and Free Gaza,” Louisiana State Police said.
Zul-Qarnain Kwame Nantambu, 41, turned himself in to authorities to face of charges resisting a police officer and disturbing the peace by interrupting a lawful assembly, police said. He surrendered in coordination with his attorney and was booked into the Orleans Parish Justice Center.
Nantambu revealed the flag and ran on the field during rapper Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance on Feb. 9. He was detained on the field after his demonstration but not charged. The NFL said at the time he would be banned for life from league stadiums and events.
According to a statement from police, Nantambu had been hired as an extra performer and “had permission to be on the field during the performance, but did not have permission to demonstrate as he did.”
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy thanked investigators for their work.
“We take any attempt to disrupt any part of an NFL game, including the halftime show, very seriously and are pleased this individual will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” McCarthy said in a statement.
Obviously, I don't agree with the rest of what you said either, but this part is really egregious. The US is the global hegemon, and its crimes are innumerable but I can list as many as you like. Its power is difficult to overstate, nor its involvement in the dire state of the world at present. Obviously it gets used as a bizarre scapegoat by reactionaries in the imperial periphery and semi-periphery (e.g., blaming queerness on an American attempt to corrupt public morality), but that's very different from correctly identifying America for its actual genocidal atrocities, coups, imperialist extraction, and so on.
You really are falling into fundamentally conservative traps of thinking that idealize America as some pure thing being corrupted rather than seeing the machine for what it is.