On Monday night, as I noted yesterday, someone (or more than one someone) shot five Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis. Witnesses to the shooting and others who have been following the protest say that the shots came from a small group of white supremacists who had been hanging around the protest for days. .
We still don’t know who pulled the trigger, but it is growing increasingly clear that most if not all of the small squad of racists at the protest were 4channers associated with the /pol/ and /k/ boards, the first a politics board overrun with racists and conspiracy theories and the second a hangout for weapons enthusiasts.
But a lot has happened since my last post, so here’s a roundup of some of the more significant developments.
The police are holding four men — all white, and all in their twenties — allegedly involved in the shooting.
According to local newspaper, police have arrested 23-year-old Lawrence “Lance” Scarsella III, who is one of the two masked men shown driving to the protests in this video last week. (Here’s what appears to be a video of the arrest.)
Ironically, Black Powder Ranger, as Scarsella is apparently known online, was not the one brandishing the gun. BLM activists say that SaigaMarine, the gun-toting racist driving the car and spouting racist epithets, was the somewhat older Hispanic man arrested and released yesterday because he evidently had an alibi for the night of the shooting.
Two other men — identified as Daniel Thomas Macey and Nathan Gustavsson — turned themselves in to police yesterday. Newsweek reports that the police are also questioning a fourth man, Joseph Backman.
While we still don’t know the details of the shooting, someone — apparently one of the 4chan gang — sent a video to a local radio station that appears to show what happened in the minutes immediately before the shooting, in which a group of BLM protesters confronted the 4channers filming their protest. Unfortunately, the video has no sound
Videos of the racist gang at the protest — there are several making the rounds on YouTube — make it abundantly clear that they are either 4channers or others intimately familiar with 4chan lingo. One of the gang even sports a /k/ patch on his jacket.
Much of their conversation consists of little more than repitition of 4chan memes and coded language (e.g. “cultural enrichment”) that they apparently thought would conceal their racism from the Black Lives Matter crowd. No such luck for them: BLM activists figured out relatively quickly that the small group of masked men talking amongst themselves as they not-so-secretly filmed the crowd were up to no good.
Here’s one of the videos of them at the demonstration:
While the racist gang at the protests is clearly connected to 4chan, it’s not clear if any of its members are connected to broader hate movements or subcultures, from GamerGate to the militia movement.
But they are certainly steeped in racism and in America’s gun culture. Digging through the limited information on the internet about the 4chan contingent at the protests, Raw Story notes that they seem to share “a fascination with guns, video games, the Confederacy and right-wing militia groups.”
The cover photo on Scarcella’s Facebook page, for example, shows what’s known as the Bonnie Blue Confederate flag. One of his Facebook likes is OAF Nation, a veterans’ group so right-wing that it has attacked other veterans’ groups for distributing what it called ” f*ggoty ass yard signs” asking those lighting fireworks to not do so near the homes of veterans with PTSD.
Gustavsson, one of the men who turned himself in, brandishes a rifle in his Facebook profile picture as well.
SaigaMarine — apparently the man arrested and released — also posed for his Facebook profile “armed and donning full military gear, the StarTribune reports. “He describes his occupation simply as ‘Saving the Constitution.'”
I will post more when I know more.
Please email me, or post in the comments below, if you see something.
Post also from twitter, but anyway, you have your boards confused. /b/ is random bullshit, /pol/ is politics. (And by politics, I mean Nazis.)
Brain fart on my part now fixed. Thanks!
Not so long ago, this kind of violent white supremacy shit would have been considered shocking and unacceptable. But in a time when Trump and his racist ilk are widely viewed as respectable, it’s becoming mainstream.
Has anyone seen this yet? Spike Lee’s latest joint. Chi-Raq, where the women of South Chicago go on a sex strike to make the poor mens give up their guns. Wait till the white wimmins see it.
The MRA butthurt will hurt and hurt bad. Pass the popcorn.
Right? This should have been the end of Donald Trump’s candidacy.
He should be asked about this every time he makes an appearance on any major media network. “After two men peed on and beat with a metal pole, a Hispanic homeless man, for no reason other than because ‘Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported’ — you said that your followers are ‘very passionate people who love this country and want this country to be great again’. How do you defend making such a statement?”
Get to the source of it:
White Supremacist “lone wolf” terrorism tactic:
“The term ‘lone wolf’ was popularized in the late 1990s by white supremacists Tom Metzger and Alex Curtis as part of an encouragement to fellow racists to act alone for tactical security reasons when committing violent crimes.[2] Other terms that have been used to describe similar or comparable forms of political violence include ‘leaderless resistance’[3], ‘individual terrorism’[4] and ‘freelance terrorism’[5].”
http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/preventing-lone-wolf/html
Bragging at lewrockwell.com (2008): “These folks were first-generation conservatives, not clueless party-hearty newcomers. There were so many veterans of Young Americans For Freedom that we quickly adopted “OAF’s” as our label: “Old Americans for Freedom.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/04/christopher-manion/the-old-time-religion-revised-2/
Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR): “White, Far Right and Armed: Tea Party and Militias Mobilize to Defend Nevada County Supremacy Activist”
(Oath Keepers, States Rights, White Supremacy, Ron Paul, militias)
http://www.irehr.org/2014/04/17/bundy-standoff/
Ron Paul’s white supremacist power play: Dave Neiwert, 2007 (currently contributes to SPLC hate watch):
“Virtually every far-right entity — neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militias, constitutionalists, Minutemen, nativists, you name it — that I’ve been monitoring for the past decade or more is lining up behind Paul. I’ve checked with other human-rights observers, and they’re seeing the same thing. Ron Paul, rather quietly and under the radar, has managed to unite nearly the entire radical right behind him.”
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/11/dark-side-of-paul-phenomenon.html
“a fascination with guns, video games, the Confederacy and right-wing militia groups.”
See this: Ron Paul’s Tea Party “patriots” network with militia groups: https://www.academia.edu/9716371/CHAPTER_20_OATH_KEEPERS_NETWORKS_WITH_TEA_PARTY_AND_PATRIOTS
“Ron Paul’s Neo-Confederate “South Was Right” Civil War Speech With Confederate Flag”
Right Wing Watch (Video Clip): “Ron Paul Stars In Oath Keepers Militia Film By Far-Right Filmmaker” http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ron-paul-stars-oath-keepers-militia-film-anti-semitic-filmmaker#sthash.4NTL279o.dpuf
Spike Lee’s adapting Aristophanes? I might have to watch that, and I don’t think I’ve seen a Spike Lee film in my life.
For those who don’t know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysistrata
“He describes his occupation simply as ‘Saving the Constitution.’”
Is that “between jobs”, but for bigots?
@Rabid Rabbit Watch Do The Right Thing. It’s a classic.
(And yeah, I’m also looking forward to what looks like it could be a really clever adaptation of Lysistrata.)
Wow, people obsessed with guns and white – uh, I mean right-wing politics are super violent and racist. Who would have thought.
@Rabid Rabbit — I enthusiastically second Malice’s recommendation of Do The Right Thing. Powerful stuff.
Spike Lee is doing Lysistrata? This Is A Good Idea.
According to the BLM protesters themselves, the 3 white individuals were attacked by the black crowd repeatedly as they attempted to flee. After being chased down an alleyway one of the individuals fired on their pursuers in presumable self defense.
Link verifying my statement.
https://imgur.com/gallery/g3rDmcs
” OAF Nation, a veterans’ group so right-wing that it has attacked other veterans’ groups for distributing what it called ” f*ggoty ass yard signs”
– LOL!
“BLM activists say that SaigaMarine, the gun-toting racist driving the car and spouting racist epithets, was the somewhat older Hispanic man arrested and released yesterday because he evidently had an alibi for the night of the shooting.”
– So it was him or it wasn’t him?
And what if these thugs weren’t 4Channers but just appropriated their lingo to deflect attention away from who they really are and to give 4Chan a bad name. (ok, an even worse name).???
They turned themselves in, and a lot of us here in Minneapolis are wondering if that means they have some connection to the police.
God knows police are being lying, fascist assholes at every opportunity. Earlier this week, they posted to their FB wall an image of supposed “molotov cocktails” they’d found outside. It was a few dirty bottles and jars with uncut clothing stuck in them, one such being an entire shirt. It was so obviously faked: one “cocktail” was a dirty Ortega salsa bottle with the cap SITTING RIGHT GODDAMN THERE NEXT TO IT IN THE PHOTO.
I swear, this week’s Internet has been only encouraging this response in me:
@VirtuallyOutOfTouch
SaigaMarine brandished a gun in a threatening video recorded previously. He apparently managed to prove that he was somewhere else when the actual shooting happened.
Definitely 4chan. Glad i stopped reading that trash years ago.
VooT,
If I understand correctly, the video of Saiga and Scarcella driving to the protest is not from the night of the shooting; they had been stalking the protest for several days, and Saiga had taken the night off when Scarcella allegedly started shooting
“it’s not clear if any of its members are connected to broader hate movements or subcultures, from GamerGate to the militia movement.”
David, you are coming dangerously close to making allegations that you really don’t want to make. If you have some reason to believe that GG is involved, you’d damn well better state it.
He’s the Constitutions home security guard.
@Pandapool — The Species that Endangers YOU (aka Jackie; currently using they/their, he/his pronouns)
Well, you see, chaps – to borrow a line from Jaroslav Hasek – these people spend all this time on internet shitpits like 4chan, talking about Killing the Chimp-out prone Dindu Nuffin Nogs, Racecucked Betabux Chumps, and so on, which indicates quite a deeply ingrained hatred of others, but when you suggest these things, a lot of people tend to handwave it off as just being trolling.
I, for one, took all of these people very seriously, about four years or so, or five, or six. I’m not sure when, but a lot of communities on the Internet took a very hard right-leaning stance, such as Reddit, I foresaw nothing good coming of it. I considered what most internet users called harmless trolling and provocation to be indicative of internalized rage.
To put it simply, while most people were dismissing those who used racist terms as mere trolls, I believed that they seriously felt that way.
I also felt that these places, like /pol/, would have serious real-world effects soon, and that it wasn’t just a happy little troll party, as others insisted it was.
I saw a graphic a few hours ago, labeled “The /pol/ Europe Map”, and, naturally, it had a swastika on it. In red and black and white, mind you.
Anyway, I’m gonna be mildly upset if World War 3 really is just World War 2(.0), based on the current trends of the past 50 years repeating themselves. Do we really have to fight the Nazis again? I feel like I’m living in a third-rate videogame. From Japan, or from a decade or so when every FPS game was about World War 2. The original Call of Duty came out then, and Medal of Honor was the Best Thing Ever, and Battlefield 1942 came out. I had BF1942, MoH, and COD. I didn’t know it was going to be preparation for my adult years, however.
Thirded. Also, Malcolm X was a masterpiece.
So the Reich-wingers and the Channers are initiating Damage Control Protocol, which involves sending people to spam all the news sites about how the BLM people punched the Anons, ergo, the Anons were fully justified in their opening fire on the BLM, and that the anons were in grave danger.
Aside from how this sounds like Zimmer saying that he had every right to shoot Trayvon after Trayvon hit him, gunning people down because they hit you is hardly acceptable.