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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMen wearing Hawaiian shirts and carrying guns add a volatile new element to protests
A Tampa television reporter was broadcasting live from protests last weekend when two young men in Hawaiian shirts moved in front of the camera and began chanting the name of an obscure white nationalist group, drowning out protesters shouting No Justice, No Peace!
The incident was one of a growing number in which far-right extremists who once organized mainly online have been inserting themselves into the real-world protests roiling much of the nation, sowing confusion about the nature of the protests and seeking attention for their causes.
Theyve appeared, sometimes carrying assault rifles, at protests in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia and dozens of other cities, often wearing Hawaiian shirts a seemingly goofy uniform that, within the ranks of their movement, signals adherence to a violent, divisive, anti-government ideology.
This increasingly visible spillover from radical online forums has alarmed researchers, who for months have tracked surging support for groups advocating armed rebellion as their conversations have spread from fringe platforms such as 4chan and Gab to mainstream forums on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter and YouTube. The largest groups have hundreds of thousands of followers.
These groups have displayed a flexible ideology, espousing gun rights in Richmond in January, opposition to government public health restrictions in several state capitals in March and April and, over the past week, resistance to police brutality against African Americans, though the goal in some cases may be mainly to distract attention from those causes, according to recent research.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/03/white-men-wearings-hawaiian-shirts-carrying-guns-add-volatile-new-element-floyd-protests/
Squidly
(783 posts)Are the signature garb of the Boogaloo boys
rockfordfile
(8,702 posts)BComplex
(8,050 posts)Joe Biden needs an army of brains and energy people to put this country back together again. And the laws we have to pass in the first 100 days have to make this kind of thing never again possible.
stopdiggin
(11,306 posts)bring them before the law. Unfortunately, just marching around with a gun (and fruit salad for a brain) is entirely legal in most of the country.
(and note the "unfortunately" included here)
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