Far-right groups like the “Boogaloo” and “O9A” continue to attract troops and veterans – By Meghann Myers (Military Times) / June 23 2020
As protesters have taken to the streets this month to call for racial justice and police reform, in the wake of the alleged murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, another movement has made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Its name is Boogaloo.
Two weeks after the FBI arrested an Army reservist and two veterans, one of the Navy and the other the Air Force, for planning to incite violence at a Las Vegas protest, an active-duty airman shot and killed a federal security officer in Oakland, California.
All four, according to their online activity, identified with the far-right group, which is loosely tied to anti-government and white-supremacist beliefs, but mostly advocates for an armed insurrection― of whatever kind― in general.
Though largely brushed off by veterans and service members as a group of has-beens and wannabes, the Boogaloo archetype that emerged in memes in the past decade has taken hold in the violent-extremist corners of the internet.
In both the white-power and anti-government “communities, ‘boogaloo’ was frequently associated with racist violence and, in many cases, was an explicit call for race war,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Today the term is regularly deployed by white nationalists and neo-Nazis who want to see society descend into chaos so that they can come to power and build a new fascist state.”
But the movement, as it were, is still disparate and diffuse. And it’s one of several quasi-groups that have sparked investigations in the military.
Continue to article: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/06/23/far-right-groups-like-the-boogaloo-and-o9a-continue-to-attract-troops-and-veterans/
