From social media to US streets: Boogaloo movement makes its presence felt during George Floyd protests
Firstpost
19 June 2020
As protests against police brutality and racism draw lakhs in the US
despite the coronavirus pandemic, movements like the antifa and Black
Lives Matter have been blamed for incidents of violence witnessed during
these gatherings.
Often seen wearing Hawaiian shirts, carrying guns and seemingly set
on starting a civil war, followers of the pro-gun and anti-government
Boogaloo movement have also been seen at these protests. On Monday, a
Texas bodybuilder arrested for running a steroid trafficking ring, was
found to have been publicly associated with the movement. He had used
his social media accounts to advocate vigilante ‘guerrilla warfare’
against the National Guardsman patrolling Black Lives Matter protests, Fox News reported.
In another incident on Friday, a US Air Force sergeant wrote the word
“boog” and the phrase, “I became unreasonable,” in blood on the hood of
a car, shortly before being arrested on accusations of shooting dead a
sheriff’s deputy in California’s Santa Cruz. He was also accused of
throwing lit pipe bombs and shooting at other deputies and planning to
kill more, Reuters reported.
On 30 May, the FBI arrested three individuals, all with US military
experience and associated with the Boogaloo movement, on the way to BLM
protests. They had in their possession Molotov cocktails that they were
allegedly planning to use at the protests in Nevada, Las Vegas.
While President Donald Trump has repeatedly singled out antifa, a
movement of primarily leftist anti-authoritarians, as a major instigator
of the unrest, the term does not appear in any of the federal charging
documents against 53 individuals accused looting and violence at
protests held after George Floyd’s death on 25 May, a Reuters
report said. The documents mention only one group – the Boogaloo
movement, the followers of which are largely an assortment of right-wing
extremists, according to hate group experts.
The movement began on the internet but is now spilling on to the
streets of the United States. The name was derived from a 1980s film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.
The Boogaloo movement originated largely on 4chan’s /k/ forum, where
users discuss weapons and guns. The term “boogaloo” has been used on the
forum since 2012, in reference to "Barack Obama’s reelection causing a
second civil war", according to Reuters. However, among the
recent protests this year where supporters of the movement were seen was
in January in Richmond, Virginia at a rally against the state’s attempt
to bring in more stringent gun laws.
Boogaloo followers hold a resentful approach towards the law
enforcement specifically and believe the government would restrict
access to firearms. They believe in an accelerationist ideology, which
entails disorder between the people and police to cause a breakdown of
the political system. By April this year, an advocacy group called the Tech Transparency
Project warned that Boogaloo followers were discussing taking up arms
while promoting protests to “liberate” states from coronavirus
restrictions, according to Reuters. The group that tracks tech
companies had reported on 22 April that Boogaloo groups are especially
active on Facebook, where at least 125 operate. More than half of those
groups have been created since January. Additionally, it was found that
tens of thousands of people joined Boogaloo-related Facebook groups over
a 30-day period in March and April.
Reddit shut down several Boogaloo-related communities in February and
another set in May for inciting or glorifying violence. On 1 May,
Facebook banned the use of Boogaloo and related terms when they
accompany pictures of weapons and calls to action. It decided over a
month later that the platform will no longer recommend such groups to
members of similar associations, making it more difficult to find these
groups. Terms like Boogaloo Bois, big igloo and big luau then emerged to
evade scrutiny.
In a 27 May memo, the Department of Homeland Security raised concerns
that domestic terror groups could target the protests, including
allegations from the FBI that “a white supremacist extremist Telegram
channel incited followers to engage in violence and start the ‘boogaloo’
by shooting in a crowd”, Vox
reported. Far-Right militias and Boogaloo-related groups were present
at 40 protests against police brutality and Floyd’s death, Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights found.
Whether boogaloos hold a white supremacist or white nationalist
approach remains unclear. The movement’s members have showed up armed to
protect stores from protesters on the one hand, while some of the most
popular Facebook pages have celebrated the agitation against George
Floyd’s death, The Guardian reported.
Claims that the group travels to various states to join protests are
also unfounded. Of the 57 people arrested in Minneapolis on 30 May as
protests against police brutality turned violent, 47 provided Minnesota
addresses, while only 10 were from other states, The Washington Post
reported. A US intelligence assessment released last week too said that
most of the violence at protests appears to have been driven by
opportunists. But the assessment also said there was some evidence that organised extremists were tied to violence or promoting it online.
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