Left and Right

White supremacists or anti-police libertarians? What we know about the ‘boogaloo’

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The correct strategy for anti-state radicals is to encourage the development and expansion of the libertarian tendencies among the boogaloos, while driving a wedge between them and the “pro-race war” sectors of the far-right in order to marginalize the latter from the wide spectrum of the right-wing opposition. The same approach should be taken with the Antifa, encourage the more seriously anarchistic and redeemable among them, marginalize the Red Guard wannabes.

By Lois Beckett

The Guardian

Men showing up to protests wearing Hawaiian shirts and carrying military-style rifles. Facebook groups full of intense discussions about imminent civil war.

Over the past year, online conversations about the “boogaloo”, an ironic term for a second civil war, have begun to coalesce into the beginnings of an actual movement, according to experts who monitor American extremists. Facebook has designated a network of “boogaloo” groups as a dangerous organization similar to the Islamic State, and banned them from both Facebook and Instagram. At least 15 arrests and five deaths have been publicly linked to “boogaloo” rhetoric, including the murders of two law enforcement officers in California.

But there’s still plenty of confusion over how to accurately label this still-developing ideology. Here’s a guide to what we know, and what we don’t, about the politics of the “boogaloo.”

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  1. From the article:
    “The way we know the ‘boogaloo’ movement is a far-right movement is because they draw a line directly from Waco and Ruby Ridge,” said Alex Newhouse, a digital researcher at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at Middlebury Institute for International Studies.

    “They hold up things like the McVeigh bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and the armed response to Ruby Ridge as heroic moments in American history,” where citizens stood up to government oppression, Newhouse said.”

    My comment:

    If that’s the best these fool commentators have, they are NUTS. While Waco was portrayed as being based on a religious nut, the reality was that it was a blatant government assault on a group of apparently peaceful people who were just living in their own space in a rural area.

    (a rather substantial number of the Branch Davidians were actually black, maybe many of them were British blacks. This was discussed on various computer networks at the time; the Internet was nascent.)

    But the reason that liberals and leftists didn’t stand up for that group was, primarily, that the incident started about a week after Bill Clinton took office, and they couldn’t allow ‘their guy’ to be seen as having made or tolerated a terrible error.

    Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma city because he didn’t have much of a way to fight back.

    Reply

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