May 8, 2020
THE TRUMP BRAND (profanity alert)
The 'Boogaloo Bois' Are Bringing Their AR-15s and Civil War Ideology to the Lockdown Protests (Tess Owen, May 8 2020, Vice)
They should be taken at their word and crushed.A report by the Tech Transparency Project last month identified 125 Facebook groups that were dedicated to "boogaloo," and more than 60% of those had been created between February and April. On those pages, shitposting, racism and anti-government memes intermingle. That's typical for Boogaloo pages, according to a February report by the National Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which tracks how hate moves from the internet into the real world."While many still use the boogaloo meme jokingly, an increasing number of people employ the phrase to incite an apocalyptic confrontation with law enforcement and government officials or to provoke ethnic warfare," NCRI wrote.The incident in West Odessa, Texas, was just the latest example of extremists, including boogaloo bois, taking up arms in response to lockdown orders.On Thursday, Colorado police said they were investigating threats of civil war made against health centers. "We the people' are DONE with this [*******]," one person wrote in an email, according to local news outlets, "and you're about to start a hot-shooting no [*****] civil war."And last Friday, federal agents arrested Bradley Bunn, a 53-year-old man in Loveland, Colorado, for possession of pipe bombs, which he said he'd planned to use against law enforcement if they raided his property in the middle of the night (a possible reference to Lemp). Local news outlets identified him as a member of a militia, and reported that he'd planned to attend an armed lockdown protest.Following Bunn's arrest, according to the Site Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist activity, misinformation about an impending FBI raid on armed protesters began circulating on 4chan and far-right Telegram channels -- with some users encouraging armed resistance.Also last week, heavily armed men with long guns stormed Michigan's capitol, joining hundreds of conservative protesters who were demanding an end to stay-at-home orders. Some state lawmakers had shown up to work that day with bulletproof vests on in anticipation of violence.On May 1, armed militia men also showed up to protest lockdown orders in Richmond, Virginia. The same day, armed men promoting boogaloo protested in Raleigh, North Carolina. They had responded to a "call to arms" issued by a Facebook group called "Blue Igloo" (a homophone for boogaloo). "They're called guns," one person wrote in response to the event page, the Triad-City-Beat reported. "Show up ready to use them. I'm tired of this [****]. I'm not going to any more protests unless serious men come and are ready to defend our lives and liberties."And earlier in April, police in Texas arrested Aaron Swenson, a self-proclaimed "boogaloo boi" who was Facebook live-streaming his search for a police officer to "ambush and execute." He, too, was upset about Duncan Lemp's death.The day after Lemp was killed, Swenson changed his Facebook profile picture to a photo of himself in a Hawaiian shirt, and an armored vest, and the hashtag #HisNameWasDuncan, according to a Buzzfeed report.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2020 9:53 AM
