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Second Civil War: What Is the Boogaloo Movement?
Their online calls for a violent uprising are pure madness
Are these guys for real? Attacking peaceful protestors by driving cars and trucks into their crowds and brandishing guns — is not funny.
Considering the present situation, can somebody be insensitive enough to say racist things? Boogaloo boys are ideologically guided by a wish to spark a second civil war in America.
Oddly, these people are living in the 21st century, and they have such a backward mentality.
Online origins
The boogaloo movement was born two years ago through online discussion boards and funny social media memes, with tens of thousands of posts and followers on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, 4chan and Reddit.
Boogaloo men want to make the protests a publicity stunt for their movement. The word “boogaloo,” was a joking reference to “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a 1984 sequel movie about breakdancing.
Are these people political clowns, wearing Hawaiian shirts and flashing guns, trying to get some recognition with their stupid political antics?
Political views
Boogaloo members anticipate the government will try to confiscate their guns, according to the New York Times. They like the idea that the politicians should be a little scared of the common man.
They are anti-government and anti-law enforcement. They are against liberalists, and they infiltrated, a week ago, the protesting crowds as their supporters, perhaps to create disruption.
If you come for our rights, we are going to come for you. ~ The Boogaloo ideology about the government and police
The mainstream media is portraying boogaloo as far-right extremists and violent white supremacists.
According to some members of the boogaloo, as a group, they are not sure who they are. They are traditional anarchists, Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, men, women, straight and gay.
Boogaloo is a confused, loosely organized group of random people, and some of them have racist views. Their views differ depending on where they live; Michigan guys would be different from Virginia guys and so on. Many of them believe that the time for talk is over. They insist that they are fighting for all kinds of freedoms.
“We are not violent. We are not racist. We have no hate in our hearts. We want to live in peace. We want to be left alone. However, even reasonable men can be pushed to do unreasonable things. The media is painting our image negatively”. ~ a boogaloo member
Spreading conspiracy theories
We cannot assume that the government is always right. The government is capable of being unjust. If a lot of people resist an unjust rule, it would be the right thing to do.
The popularity of boogaloo is growing — says The Tech Transparency Project, a Washington-based tech watchdog group.
Their spirit to resist a powerful institution is commendable, but their actions do not match their stated philosophy.
According to The Economist, to spark the second Civil War, boogaloo members support the “spreading of disinformation and conspiracy theories, attacks on infrastructure — such as that on New York’s 311 line — and lone-wolf terrorism.”
Recent Activities
The first arrests of boogaloo members, Andrew Lynam, William Loomis, and Stephen Parshall, revealed their extremist agenda to hijack the peaceful protests against the killing of George Floyd.
Alleged recent activities include:
- The Associated Press has reported boogaloo members protested against COVID-19 lockdown.
- In McAllen, Texas, on 05 June, a man threatened Black Lives Matter protesters with a chainsaw, telling them to go home. He also shouted racist slurs.
- A man drove a car into the Seattle protest crowd, and shot a demonstrator, named Daniel, 26, in the arm.
- Joshua Bernard, a suspected boogaloo member, stole a police jacket from a police patrol car, as shown in a video.
- In Virginia, an armed man named Harry Rogers was arrested for assault and battery after he drove a truck at protesters, injuring a cyclist. He is a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer.
- In Minneapolis on 31 May, Bogan Vechirko, drove semi-trailer truck towards the protestors and parted the crowd on an overpass.
There have also been other events where someone tried to frighten the protestors by brandishing a gun.
Joanna Mendelson, an investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, says, “This is a dangerous concoction of opportunists who are seeking to take advantage of the current crisis and insert themselves into the violence.”
“Like a virus hiding from the immune system, the use of comical-meme language permits the network to organize violence secretly behind a mirage of inside jokes and plausible deniability,” the Goldenberg report states.
Are Boogaloo related to Ku Klux Klan?
“ ‘Boogaloo’ was often associated with apocalyptic and racist terms like ‘racewar’ and ‘dotr,’ a white power fantasy that imagines a time when ‘race traitors’ will be murdered,” the Goldenberg report said about the origins of the term boogaloo.
“Old fashioned racism is returning to white Americans since early Obama era,” says a 2012 study published in a Journal of University of Chicago Press.
But boogaloo members are less prepared than Ku Klux Klan, at this time, and many of them are not racists at all. The group is a political face of non-serious fun-loving less-educated individuals who dare to express their nasty and inadequate political understanding of American society and institutions.
Conclusion
The level of their commitment and seriousness is unclear. It is depressing to note how the ideas of a random set of people are giving birth to a new type of strange political perspective.
Most of the members, who naively think that they can continue committing the violent acts without consequences, will soon find themselves behind bars, serving their sentences.
A boogaloo Facebook group leader, Duncan Lemp, 21, was gunned down by police in a raid of his home in Potomac, Maryland, on March 12, 2020.
Their major weakness is a lack of capable leadership. When the government is ready to launch a proper defense, with planned strategy and careful analysis, their movement is going to fizzle out in a few months.
Some members of the boogaloo movement have been arrested in Texas, Colorado, and Ohio.
Whether they are racists or not, by trying to plunge their country into political anarchy, they confirm that, despite their witty memes, they are quite shallow.
Still, we can say nothing with certainty. In a chaotic world and volatile politico-economic situation after the pandemic, such prejudices and rifts can become initial conditions for a national catastrophe if left unchecked.
This post was liked by my publishers and they distributed it into Equality, Society and Racism:
This post was liked by my publishers and they distributed it into Politics, Equality, and Racism: