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The Economist, May 17th 2020
Extremists see the pandemic as the prelude to the apocalyptic “boogaloo”
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IN MORE THAN 30 of America’s 50 state capitals angry crowds have been
gathering to protest against stay-at-home orders. Buoyed by tweets from
President Donald Trump encouraging them to “liberate” their states, some
even compare their elected officials to the Nazis. A few among them
toting assault weapons are dressed incongruously in Hawaiian shirts.
They might seem almost comical were it not for the fact that, in the
fetid corners of the internet, such beachwear is recognised as the
uniform of the extreme right.
The extreme right is making good use of the pandemic. A fractious
movement by nature, its followers have responded to covid-19 in many
ways besides displays of brash shirts and guns. They have carried out
Zoom-bombings (ie, interrupting video-conference meetings), encouraged
others to infect police officers and Jews and sought to disrupt
government activities, including New York City’s 311 line for
non-emergency information and National Guard operations.
Some have even come perilously close to committing deadly acts of
terrorism. In March a man with ties to neo-Nazi groups was killed in a
shootout with FBI officers who were attempting to arrest him for
planning to bomb a hospital in Missouri. Though he had been planning the
attack for some time and had considered a variety of targets, the
outbreak of covid-19 persuaded him to strike a hospital to gain extra
publicity.
The spreading of conspiracy theories is central to the extreme right’s
activities. Some claim the virus is a hoax. Others blame the Chinese,
the Jews or even Bill Gates. Some claim that the federal government is
using the virus as a pretext to confiscate weapons and enforce “medical
martial law”. Extremists also spread more familiar conspiracy theories,
decrying 5G networks and vaccinations, which help introduce the
uninitiated to their ideology.
Lockdowns fit this recruitment agenda. Stuck at home with money running
short, people might become “more receptive to these movements”, warns
Joshua Fisher-Birch, of the Counter-Extremism Project, an NGO. The far
right is making use of online platforms such as Facebook, Gab and
Telegram to spread its message to this captive audience. They use an
ever-changing litany of memes, ranging from George Washington dressed as
one of their ranks to Ronald McDonald with a machine gun on his lap.
They also have a significant presence in the online gaming world, which
helps them attract young recruits.
A closer look at the far right’s beliefs helps explain why extremists
have been energised by America’s new reality. Three related ideas—white
supremacy, the “boogaloo” and “accelerationism”—are particularly suited
to the coronavirus crisis.
The most familiar of these is white supremacy. Its adherents exploit the
virus’s geographical origins to drum up racial antipathy towards Chinese
people. Anti-semites have been accusing Jews of deliberately spreading
plagues ever since the Black Death, and covid-19 gives them a chance to
reuse the template. The supremacists thus use fears about “white
genocide” to argue for closed borders and eventually a white
ethno-state. “Open borders is the virus,” declares one protest sticker
placed on road signs.
Some white supremacists are also among those who style themselves as
“Boogaloo Boys” or “Boojahdeen”. This refers to a belief in an imminent
“boogaloo”: an armed insurrection against the American government, a
race war, or both. The term is ultimately (and tortuously) derived from
“Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”, a film about breakdancing, made in
1984, which was a near-copy of its precursor, “Breakin’”. Boogaloo boys
style the forthcoming war as a repeat of the American civil war. The
Hawaiian shirts that dot the crowds are a reference to “the big luau”,
another name for the “boogaloo”, which celebrates pig (police) roasts.
(A luau is a traditional Hawaiian feast.)
Prolific practitioners of “memetic warfare” and fond of merchandising,
the white supremacists’ primary objective is to recruit, especially
among members of America’s armed forces. Their online forums are filled
with information on how to 3D-print guns and make napalm. The “boogaloo
boys” have repeatedly claimed that particular events will trigger their
apocalyptic vision (a gun-rights rally in January, for example, was
supposed to lead to mass confiscations by the state of Virginia,
sparking civil war). But the social dislocation that has accompanied
covid-19 lends a veneer of credibility to these fantasies; some
extremists predict that “things will begin to implode” as early as the
autumn. “Boog is coming boys. Get prepping,” declares one message in a
far-right Telegram channel.
Protests against stay-at-home orders provide an opportunity to spread
both of these beliefs. The vast majority of people in attendance are
ordinary Americans. But demonstrations decrying over-reach by the state
also tend to draw radical libertarians, militiamen and Second Amendment
die-hards who worry that lockdowns will lead to tyranny and the
confiscation of firearms. Extremists think these groups are susceptible
to their more radical ideology. The New Jersey European Heritage
Association, a white-supremacist group, has been spotted as far away as
Florida handing out propaganda. Press reports lumping ordinary
protesters in with the extreme right may also help to create a general
sense of grievance on which extremists can prey.
But it is the third idea, accelerationism, that is best placed to spread
during the pandemic. Accelerationism is a strange marriage of Marxism
and neo-Nazism. The idea is that the internal contradictions of the
economic and political order will cause it to collapse. From the ruins,
the extreme right can create its “nation built on blood and soil”. They
see the virus both as evidence of accelerationism’s truth and an
excellent opportunity to hasten the system’s demise. Followers act alone
or organise themselves into decentralised terrorist cells, encouraging
any act that will “accelerate” this breakdown (an idea borrowed from
Lenin). These include the spreading of disinformation and conspiracy
theories, attacks on infrastructure (such as that on New York’s 311
line) and lone-wolf terrorism. The would-be hospital bomber was a
believer. So were the gunmen who attacked mosques in Christchurch, New
Zealand, and a synagogue in Poway, California, last year.
The publicity drive seems to be working, even if the extremists’ numbers
are still small. Moonshot CVE, an organisation that monitors extremism
online, reports that in America the average number of daily searches
related to white supremacy (eg, links to extremist literature or the
coded language of the far right) rose from 1,475 between June 2019 and
February 2020 to 2,024 between March 30th and April 28th. Far-right
Telegram and Facebook groups have grown larger during lockdown. The
pandemic “is their coming-out party”, says Colin Clarke of the Soufan
Center, an NGO that researches into extremism. “This is going to be a
watershed moment for a lot of these groups in terms of recruitment”.
But for the far right, the aim is not recruitment for its own sake: “the
purpose of propaganda is to push people towards action”, as one neo-Nazi
puts it on Telegram. And as demonstrated by the murderous attacks in
Christchurch and Poway, and the killing spree by Anders Breivik, another
right-wing extremist, in Oslo in 2011, even lone actors can wreak
terrible havoc.
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