This article contains news and liberal commentary.
A member of Boogaloo Bois, a violent far-right militia group, “has been charged with participating in a riot after he allegedly shot 13 rounds from an AK-47 style assault rifle into a Minneapolis Police Department building during the civil unrest following the death of George Floyd in late May,” ABC News reported on Friday, October 23, 2020. “Ivan Hunter, 26, is accused of traveling from Texas to Minneapolis to meet up with other members of the ‘Boogaloo Bois’ with the goal of carrying out acts of violence during the riots.” (Read story here.)
President Trump, a white supremacist, has tried to portray Black Lives Matter as a violent movement. That’s a lie.
The BLM protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, as I wrote here. And when violence has occurred, much of it came from police and rightwing extremists. A new study from a counter-terrorism expert finds that “right-wing extremists have accounted for two-thirds of domestic terrorist attacks and plots” this year (read about it here, and read the study here).
The Boogaloo Bois are pro-Trump, anti-government, and anti-police. One of them, Steven Carillo, is charged for the murder of a federal law enforcement officer in San Francisco. (Read about it here.) Another, “identified as Aaron Swenson, was arrested on April 11, 2020 in Texas after streaming a live video on Facebook in which he stated he was driving around looking for police officers to ambush.” (Quoted from Wikipedia, here.) A rightwing militia also is implicated in a recent plot to kidnap and possibly kill two governors. (Read about that here.) The violence tendencies of these groups stem in part from a mindset that they’re soldiers in a “civil war.”
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s rhetoric. The biggest threat to our communities is organized violence from the far right, not sporadic and impulsive violence from the left. And the fact some sheriffs and cops are sympathetic to these thugs is both sad and inexcusable.