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.
While large groups of people can be dangerous even if unarmed, somehow I find myself automatically suspicious of white supremacists who show up to protests they disagree with carrying guns.
John,
You can’t credibly claim self defense when you go somewhere, armed, in masks, and intending a violent confrontation to take place. Fuck off.
Twitter egg guy,
You can fuck off too.
Also, if we’re going to take that account as accurate, they showed up to deliberately get footage with recognizable faces of as many people as possible while trying to prevent anyone from being able to pick them out of a police lineup later.
I wonder what they could possibly have intended to do with that footage
Or what? Are you going to stamp you little feet and shriek at a high volume? Or is this more in the way of a weasely physical threat from an anonymous punk?
I think that YOU damn well better state it, you pathetic drive-by keyboard coward.
By the way, that rant was aimed at the bottom-feeding “Jimmly Russla.”
John: Yes, it’s hard to believe that after days of being harassed by these racist assholes while protesting the very real problem of being harassed and killed by law enforcement the protesters might have had quite enough of it. And to top it off, after the shooting, police on the scene maced the protesters!!
I could easily see /b/ getting royally pissed at /k/ and /pol/ and having /out/ raise hell in both corners.
@Frank Torpedo:
If World War 3 is against Nazis then it’ll be a very short war this time.
Look at those gunmen closely. Look at the number of weapons factories they own. Look at the farms, mines, electronics workshops and textile mills they control. Is that number zero? Why yes, yes it is. What about the number of foreign governments funnelling supplies to them? Is that zero? Again, yes.
Now look at the rest of humanity, and see what we have. Is it literally everything? Then any sort of industrial war between us – if it even gets to that level – will be pretty one-sided. What are they going to do when they can’t buy bullets? Cry?
The thing to understand is that these people are consumers. They bought those guns, that car and those army surplus clothes. They bought the webhosting and the electricity that lets them run their websites. They bought (via giving their eyeballs to advertisers) their social media accounts. They produced none of it themselves. Nothing about them is home grown, nothing is original.
When it is pointed out to them that this makes them utterly dependent on and exploited by others, and that those who are shrewder than them will therefore naturally rise above them, they grow angry. Their anger os a consumer anger, however, which means that someone can come along and persuade them to buy a hardline political ideology, buy a leader, by a flag. Again, none of this is home grown: their ideologies are as shrink wrapped and off-the-shelf as their anime, their video games, their flags and their firearms. Even their humour is nothing but the repetition of preproduced and prepackaged elements.
All they are is a method for other people to enrich and empower themselves at the cost of a few human lives. Tragically, these young 4channers don’t seem to mind that their lives are among those.
Or to speak in terms they might understand: l2 OC, newf*g.
Sounds like yer jimmies are rustling, Jimmly Russla.
Mah boi, rustling the jimmies of scared white males is what ALL true (social justice) warriors strive for!
*drinks from goblet*
Gee, it sure is boring around here! I wonder what 4chan’s up to?
http://i.imgur.com/VM32FRa.gif
@EJ
Your post reminds me of when some white supremacists tried to run a small town. Long story short, the town collapsed in on itself, so I’m much of your opinion that the MRA-Reich wouldn’t survive contact with the real world for long.
These people appear to have a tenuous grasp on reality at best, so I place their chances of winning at virtually nil, but it seems to me like they’re making more and more serious bids to make real-world attempts at making their ideology a reality.
We know they’re grouping up, arming themselves, and carrying out little raids on innocent people. I’d say they’ve been doing it before this event, even. I fear this isn’t going to be the last of these little incidents, and, if they aren’t careful, they will end up drawing enough attention to cause the very same things you describe to occur to them.
It gives me hella pause, as someone who was born in 1990, to see people just casually talking about how Hitler did nothing wrong, and ‘blood purity’ and all kinds of wacky shit that I had relegated to the bad old days of the 1940’s. I’m having problems coping with that, not gonna lie. This is not the future I expected, at all.
And When the Levees Broke, one of the most powerful documentaries of the last decade – and one of the reasons it’s so powerful is because Spike Lee doesn’t go down the obvious route of turning it into the crude anti-Bush polemic that someone like Michael Moore undoubtedly would have made of the Hurricane Katrina story.
Spike Lee is annoyingly hit-and-miss for me, but the best stuff is so good that I’m more than happy to approach the next one with an open mind.
Have 4chan trolls always been racist blowhards? Or were 4chan and other boards were originally places where “harmless” (relatively) trolls hung out, but was eventually co-opted by right wing groups?
Are you saying places like Reddit used to not be hard right hellholes? If so, what do you think made them change and veer so right wing? You think it had to do with the 2008 economic crisis or other factors?
@Hipsterminator,
so Spike Lee’s ripping off Lysistrata? Should be interesting.
@Zarathustra
4chan used to organize raids and pranks on right-wing reactionary neo-nazi bastards, like Hal Turner.
Nowadays, they would probably invite Hal Turner to speak on their site. I think that says a lot about their change in dynamic.
I used to be on 4chan in 2003 – 2006 and they were far less hateful than these days, in my opinion, but I may be wrong. I jettisoned them after growing disgusted with their behavior.
“Are you saying places like Reddit used to not be hard right hellholes? If so, what do you think made them change and veer so right wing? You think it had to do with the 2008 economic crisis or other factors?”
Close. I think it had to do with Obama being elected.
Oops,
massively ninjaed 🙂
@John,
seconding what others have said. Even if events did go down as you relate, the fact is they were attending a BLM event in disguise, carrying guns, and speaking in racist language together. It’s pretty obvious they weren’t there to express their solidarity with African Americans.
Just to be warned folks, if that transcript does accurately reflect what happened then the guys will be acquitted (assuming there’s even a trial).
Whatever we may think of their motives they would have a defence in law.
The test would be:
Might they have had an honest belief they were at risk of serious harm?
It would be very difficult for the prosecution to prove to the requisite standard that they didn’t believe that being chased by lots of angry people did put them at risk.
It’s irrelevant that they may have provoked the response by their actions. There’s meant to be no “you were asking for it” principle in common law, no matter how obnoxious the victim.
It doesn’t even matter that they may have anticipated the response. Again the law isn’t meant to import a “you must have know this would happen” exclusion to self defence.
There are sound legal reasons behind all this. People may not have much sympathy for the 5 men and think that the law should therefore be changed, but there’s a saying “hard cases make bad laws”.
Removing this protections would mean that, for example, legitimate protestors or counter protestors would have no protection in law if they were set upon themselves. Over here for example, every hunt sab knows that they’re inevitably going to be attacked by hunt supporters. Does that mean they should’t be allowed to defend themselves when that happens?
The law has to be applied equally to everyone; not just decent people.
How about proving they were there in order to harm people?
Because there sure as hell were motives for the protesters to believe they were at risk (and they were!!)
I know it’s not the protesters on trial, so they don’t need to demonstrate their reasons, but there must be some principle about getting armed and going in the middle of a bunch of people you demonstrably hate…
It shouldn’t be about whether “shooters had it coming” as much as about “dudes went to that place armed with the intent of causing harm”.
(I guess there could be twist there, as in “they were going to a protest filled with angry people, of course they took precautions like taking firearms”)
@ Lux
Yeah, as you demonstrate, every argument against them can actually be used by the Defence.
As to the legal points, one of the complexities of self defence law is, as it’s all about subjective perception, both parties to a conflict can be acting in legitimate self defence.
Party A thinks that Party B is there to hurt them so takes action (that’s lawful whether or not B actually was there to hurt them). Party B defends themselves against Party A (again that;s lawful). It doesn’t matter that one or both of the parties may have been mistaken about the potential danger.
It’s even the case that you can use self defence in a conflict you physically start, if the initial victim *grossly* over reacts and your reaction is proportional to that reaction.
Don’t forget folks, a successful use of self defence in court does not mean that you actually were in danger, just that the prosecution cant disprove beyond reasonable doubt that you might have thought you were (word salad there, but that is the test)
@Alan:
fixed that for you.
Also, don’t you think that that video of them in the car constitutes evidence of a motive for escalation? And I really don’t have any legal experience whatsoever, but I thought that acting in self-defense is limited by proportionality? What you argue seems to me to be based on stand your ground, which is a bad law.
Just a point of fact, Minnesota doesn’t even had a SYG law.
And thank fuck for that.
As a matter of fact, we’re a Duty to Retreat state.
@Alan:
Do I understand you correctly to say that hunt saboteurs are legally be permitted to carry lethal force in the hope that they could provoke hunters into attacking them and then kill those hunters in self defence? That seems a strange thing to be legal.
What about rival firms of football supporters? Were I to wish to kill a man with impunity, could I do it simply by walking into a pub belonging to a rival club, being loud, and then pulling out a lethal weapon when the inevitable occurs?
In short, am I misunderstanding it, or is placing oneself into a legitimately threatening situation that one created oneself for this purpose then considered a reasonable reason to use deadly force?