Over every three nights of the Republican National Convention so far, speakers have returned to one theme: In American cities, at least according to these speakers, Protestants who are hostile to the police and skyrocket crime – and as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has been chosen, this will be the future.
As Vice President Mike Pence said during his keynote address Wednesday, “in the midst of this global pandemic … we have seen violence and chaos in the streets of our big cities.”
Pence’s speech highlighted one law enforcement officer, which strongly implied that this officer was the victim of leftist radicals against police officers and against President Trump: “Dave Patrick Underwood was an officer in the Homeland Security Department’s Federal Protective Service “Security, who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” Pence said before acknowledging Underwood’s sister, who was in public.
Underwood’s death is tragic, but it has nothing to do with left-wing radicals.
Underwood was just killed blocks away from anti-police violence protests in Oakland, but federal authorities say he was killed by Steven Carrillo, a sergeant of the Air Force staff and a follower of the “boogaloo boys”, a right-wing extremist movement that, according to the Katie Shepherd of the Washington Post, “has tried to use peaceful protests against police brutality to spread foreign views and provoke a racial war.”
Carrillo was taken into federal custody, and he faces murder charges.
The “boogaloo” movement, which originated on the website 4chan, is a bizarre mix of jokes, conservative gun culture and civil war nostalgia. It derives its name from the 1984 breakdancing film Breakin ‘2: Electric Boogaloo, a film that is sometimes used as a sarcastic shorthand for an unnecessary sequel. The idea is that the Boogaloo movement hopes to bring a follow-up to the Civil War.
As Jane Coaston of Vox writes, the movement is “a freely affiliated anti-government movement that has included some white nationalists who believe in an ‘accelerating’ ideology that encourages the promotion of bourgeois violence around the division of politics. system. “
This right-wing extremist movement is emphatically not associated with Biden, the Democratic Party, Black Lives Matter, as any left-wing protest movement trying to prevent police violence. The death of Underwood is, as far as we know, only related to leftist protest movements to the extent that the Boogaloo boys hope to exploit protests and advance goals that those protesters would probably find flashy.
And yet, for Mike Pence, the death of Underwood was simply an opportunity to inflict violence on his political opponents – regardless of whether the attack actually has a real basis.
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