Chaos Comes Calling by Sasha Abramsky

Author:Sasha Abramsky [Abramsky, Sasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2024-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

Around the country, the hot flames of vigilantism and paramilitarism were starting to burn bright. Over the coming months and years, several high-profile vigilantes would attract mass followings, and street-fighting groups, some formally organized like militias, others more resembling the mobs of “football hooligans” or “soccer louts” that repeatedly rioted during European soccer matches in the 1980s—their modus operandi simply violence for the sake of violence—picked up steam.

There was Rittenhouse in Kenosha. In 2021 he would stand trial for the killings and eventually be acquitted on all charges. A judge would subsequently allow him to keep nearly one million of the two million dollars that a fund-raising campaign had accumulated to pay for his bail. Authorities decided, with the support of Rittenhouse himself, to destroy the gun he had used in the killings after rumors began circulating that online buyers, eager for their piece of the vigilante pie, were willing to pay a six-figure sum for the rifle.

In Austin, Texas, in July 2020, US Army sergeant Daniel Perry shot dead a Black Lives Matter protester, a US Air Force veteran named Garrett Foster. Perry would subsequently be sentenced to twenty-five years and would become another martyr for the Right. As his fame grew, he became a political pawn as well. Even before he was sentenced, Texas governor Greg Abbott urged the state board of pardons and paroles to swiftly send him a pardon recommendation letter so that he could secure Perry’s release. Abbott said that the gunman had been railroaded by Austin’s “liberal” prosecutor. And when a slew of Perry’s racist social media postings were released to the public, Abbott stayed silent. It would, after all, be politically inconvenient to critique a man who had become a poster child for Texas’s stand-your-ground law and who was being lauded by conservative talk-radio and internet hosts for his violent actions.

Lone vigilantes weren’t the only swaggering alt-right heroes of this strange moment. Paramilitary and street-fighting groups, some with tightly knit military structures, others simply loosely knit groups of individuals brought together over the internet, were also on the rise.

The Boogaloo Bois, for example, were Hawaiian shirt–wearing alt-right thugs who organized online on 4Chan and gleefully sought out street confrontations with left-wing protesters in cities across the country. They would show up in Minneapolis, Oakland, Las Vegas, and elsewhere, their weapons ostentatiously at the ready, looking for confrontations, and they didn’t always seem to care about whom they fought or which side they shot at: at some protests, they turned on racial-justice demonstrators; at others, the Boogaloo Bois served more as agents provocateurs, seemingly egging on the demonstrators in attacking the police and government buildings. Some members embraced white supremacism, but others simply hated the government and were willing to ally with protesters of all races in attacking institutions of authority. Their rallying cry, “boogaloo,” was, according to insiders, a call to a second civil war.

Somewhat similar to this group, but more explicitly allied with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, were the Proud

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.