'As people enraged by the death of George Floyd took to the streets in cities across the country, white men with guns started showing up—and risking disaster.
[...] Some of them, members of a growing white supremacist movement, openly hope to co-opt the protests to start a race war. Others claim to make common cause with anti-police protesters, but may be inclined to turn guns on protesters when they appear to threaten private property.
[...] The Boogaloo movement has moved increasingly offline and into the real world in recent months, with members showing up at right-wing "re-open" protests, heavily armed and wearing Hawaiian shirts (a really tedious riff on a misspelling of "boogaloo" as "big luau").
[...] Some movement members appeared at a Wednesday night protest in Minneapolis, in hopes of participating in a chaotic scene. Members of at least one "Boogaloo" Facebook group shared pictures of men holding a Boogaloo flag (patterned after a "Blue Lives Matter" flag, but with the movement's trademark tropical pattern) outside an AutoZone that was later set on fire.
Some members of the group used the picture to call, superficially, for "solidarity" with protesters, claiming that "this is not a race issue." But members of the group who posted in real time with supposed updates from the protests revealed other intentions. One, who claimed to be in a group of 16 other movement members at the protest, soon threatened to shoot Black Lives Matter activists because they were not helping enact his visions of violence.
"Fuck BLM. They just shout and march," he wrote. "None of them are kitted up or carrying guns so how do I know they have my back? Nah, fuck BLM. I see any of those freaks and I'm dropping [shooting] them on sight."
In private chat groups viewed by Raw Story, Boogaloo sympathizers set up communication channels for peers at the protest, and discussed coordinating travel to Minneapolis.
The ideology of some heavily-armed figures in the city this week was harder to identify.
A viral video from Wednesday night's protest showed two white men with semi-automatic rifles standing outside a tobacco store. They said they sympathized with demonstrators. But the "heavily armed rednecks," as one of the men described them, weren't there to march in the streets—they were there to guard private property like the tobacco store, potentially turning their guns against the protesters they claimed to support.
[...] Hughes said there was a risk that more overt racists of the Boogaloo movement might seek to radicalize more banal militia types who attend Minneapolis-inspired protests, whether in that city or nationwide.
[...] "When you have white supremacists showing up at a demonstration fully locked and loaded," Levy-Armstrong said, "you don't know what the outcome is going to be."
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https://www.thedaily...UWDJWR4-yapEcCI
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 29 May 2020 - 08:12 PM