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Let’s review who the players are on ‘Team Everyone Who Is a Racist,’ vs. ‘Team Everyone Who Is Not a Racist’ — some surprise rookies have showed up and you need to know about them.
Old-timer, right-wing-media veterans Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were slow off the mark in reacting to the protests. For awhile they stuck to their RE-OPEN NOW NOW NOW rants, sneering at all the snowflake, liberal mask-wearers for several days before waking up and pivoting to anarchy! looters! and The chaos in America needs to end now What we’re witnessing is the fundamental failure of the liberal governments in cities across America (Hannity) and Los Angeles Mayor Bows to Anarchists, Defunds Police (Limbaugh.)
Tucker Carlson (Gen-X) was quicker and quite panicky, denouncing the protests as “a form of tyranny” and “oppression” within a couple of days. By June 1 he was addressing Trump directly: “You can regularly say embarrassing things on television. You can hire Omarosa to work at the White House. All of that will be forgiven if you protect your people. But if you do not protect them…then you’re done.” Tucker is terrified. And named “Tucker” so….
But keep your eye on the newbie Boogaloo Bois that have crawled out of 4chan, sewer of the internet, and are now showing up IRL (“in real life”) at demonstrations. Their goal is to provoke civil war in the America. To this end, they show up at BLM events with assault rifles and tactical gear, sometimes wearing Hawaiian shirts — “The Big Luau” or the “big igloo” is what they call their longed-for civil war. They pose as anti-racists but their online roots are the exact opposite, per the SPLC.
They are definitely not Black Lives Matter supporters. Nor are they garden-variety, Fox-News-watching Republicans like that loudmouth FaceBook “friend” you’d like to get rid of. They are not antifa; they are not anarchists; they’re not even fascists — they’re nihilists. They believe in nothing beyond the destruction of ordered society. As we learned in the Big Lebowski, they have no ethos.
As with QAnon, the Boogaloo movement can attract total nutters like this guy from Dorchester who led a police chase through Haverhill and into New Hampshire with his five kids in the car. And speaking of QAnon, be aware that we are now looking at having them in congress, one from California and one from Georgia. This is where we are in 2020.
AND IN THIS CORNER, WEARING THE BLUE TRUNKS…
In spite of this, I do not despair. On the side of truth and justice we have… almost everyone. Black Lives Matter was co-founded by three gay, black, female community organizers – Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi – after the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
These. Women. Will. Not. Stop. And all over the world people have launched huge protest marches — Europe, Scandinavia, Brazil, Syria, Ireland, Australia, and on and on. Here’s the Maori in New Zealand performing a Haka (my favorite indigenous art form) in support of BLM:
Here in America, in addition to “the liberals,” whatever that means, every person of good will and conscience has turned out, from the Wiccans to the Amish
But one ally no one expected to show up for this fight was … K-Pop stans who mostly exist on TikTok. South Korean popular music (K-Pop) is a completely manufactured, tightly controlled (because lucrative) commodity, but their fan base is legendary for its global reach and capacity for unified action. They are incredibly well-organized, there are hundreds of thousands of them, and they are proving to be quite effective. Usually their campaigns all about “stanning” some performer or other, but this time they’ve decided to support BLM and it’s kind of impressive.
It’s easy to make fun of K-Pop and K-Pop stans, but if you’ve ever raised a teen girl, or been one yourself, you will know they are a force to be reckoned with, especially in the collective. And it’s easy to make fun of the comic book nerd who made the picture of “us” launching into battle below, but it warms my crusty old heart to see the young ones step up, in their own weird way.
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