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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

What’s crazy though is for the first time in my life I actually fear for the future existence of the US. I watched 9/11 in real time and that didn’t feel as much of a threat to our existence as this does. There’s an actual civil war movement among the extremists now. I don’t think that existed during the civil rights movement days, even. Nor even the Vietnam fallout.

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I think there's a lot of rose colored history about the civil rights movement. We're mostly taught one side of it in school - that good people protested and won out over bad people.

We don't, in general, talk about the horrible things that were happening back then. Only unlike a lot of racial problems today, they happened in plain sight and were celebrated. I know Rand Paul got a lot of hate for his recent speech against the legislation to make lynching a federal crime, but the things he talked about happening back when lynching was a frequent problem really opened my eyes to how bad things were.

We don't talk about the fact that before MLK was assassinated, he was widely disliked by the american public.

We don't talk about the fact that a lot of American gun control we still have was passed as a reaction to the civil rights movement - as a way to disarm minorities and weaken their ability to protest.

I wasn't there, but I get the feeling we're still a long ways from things being as bad as they were during the 60's civil rights movement.

Most people don't even know who Fred Hampton was. Even people who lived through the civil rights movement don't recall his name. My own parents downplay the violence of the 70s in favor of the rhetoric du jour that they're fed from mainstream media, and they lived in DC from 1972 until late in 1980 (and, all things considered, they are leftists, not liberals, which makes it even more astonishing to me). It's quite astounding just how fragile our memories are and how easily we can be (emotionally) manipulated.

"Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough is a good read on the subject (political violence in the late 60s and 70s). There's a good blog / semi-book review that I link people to when they seem intent on learning more of the history (which I originally got from a comment on HN during the 2016 election cycle) [0].

[0]: https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/

This is fascinating to me. The more I see about America's protest history, the more it seems like the last 20 years have been abnormally calm and your normal state of affairs is more like the mood in 2020. A quote I liked from your linked article:

>You have to understand: in 1968, many radicals absolutely believed that the United States was getting ready to collapse. One Weatherman puts it: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution. We believed 3rd World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976.”

> ...it seems like the last 20 years have been abnormally calm and your normal state of affairs is more like the mood in 2020.

There are periods of calm and periods of dramatic unrest. The history of political activism / protests in America touches the civil rights movement, the worker rights / labor movements, etc..., and goes all the way back to the first taxes the newly formed United States federal government tried to levy against domestic goods (in the form of the Whiskey Rebellion [0]). The American revolution itself was the result of a series of protests that started with the Stamp Act of 1765 [1]. It is a truly fascinating history.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamp_Act_1765

I didn't know who Fred Hampton was (I do now; this comment prompted me to read his Wikipedia article), but I did know his name, from Gil Scott-Heron's poem/song/rap, "No Knock".

And it's worth noting that through one lens the Manson killings were an act of political violence. His stated motivations (to start a race war[1]) were certainly political.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helter_Skelter_(scenario)#Back...

The black panthers [1] emerged precisely because of police brutality and the lack of recourse / accountability. The difference this time is that the internet and cameras made it possible for people across the country to hear and see the stories up close. Suddenly the victims weren't random people in a far away land -- they had an identity, and watching their last moments makes the racial bias all too clear. History might not repeat itself, but it definitely does rhyme

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party#Founding_t...

If you think things are worse now than in the 1960's, I don't know what to tell you. They were way worse.

Multiple politicians assassinated. Major multi-day riots across multiple cities with hundred dead. Then a president being impeached.

2020 doesn't even come close to the 1960's.

Trump and Clinton were both impeached too. Neither were convicted, but Nixon wasn't convicted either (he quit before that could happen.)

Very true, but to your point, it was a given Nixon was leaving. With Clinton and Trump it was more political than a done deal.

White supremacists have wanted civil war since... the actual civil war? I'm not sure there has ever been a point when civil war was not on the table among extremists. Do you have particular current examples that are especially disconcerting?

Pretty sure OP was calling the people peacefully protesting police brutality as “the extremists”.

Nope.

I mean, people like to throw around race war occasionally now but I only hear about it from the far-right.

Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence. During the 1960s, I believe Malcolm X was ready to have a real war to defend Black Americans. Now, at worse the discord is about justifying some looting that has diminished.

>Nobody on the far-left is advocating for the extreme violence

I have seen many people talking about "burning the system to the ground".

I think that's a metaphor like they want to destroy systematic racism or prison industrial complex? But I haven't seen those posts. Anything public you wanna share?

>I think that's a metaphor

Maybe we could consider it purely metaphorical, if there hadn't been a rash of arsons across the US in recent weeks.

I mean... I'm was looking up stuff and it seems the arsons have been up since March at least in Vancouver.

https://www.straight.com/news/vancouver-police-warn-of-sharp...

Cool story, its completely irrelevant to what happened last week in the US

Do you have a link to the civil war movement claim? Are they being reported anywhere or by anyone?

The "boogaloo" movement?

I live in the middle of NYC, which has had several scenes of looting not 30 min from me broadcast to the entire nation, and I haven't heard of any such movement here. Maybe this is my east coast classist bubble, but I'd appreciate being educated on this matter?

So there’s the boogaloo movement. There’s the Calexit campaign that was propped up by Russia in California last election. Probably you’re not seeing it because you’re not being targeted on social media for it and not going those parts of the internet. I really hope Zuckerberg was serious about policing foreign governments from buying ads on their platforms.

For the record there are some of us who actually have uninfluenced interest in breaking apart the US either into separate countries or at least geographic regions with a significantly weakened federal government modeled after the Articles of Confederation from 1781.

My general feeling is that it is too difficult to manage democracies over large geographic areas because the people at the edges tend to not have enough interaction with each other on a social or economic basis to recognize each other's problems.

So I don't know about CalExit but I have definitely spoken about New England or Northeast Secession (heh NExit) as something I'm at least interested in. I just hope if the opportunity ever comes up we can do it peacefully...

Yes, do you have links to said movements or reporters of said movements? Where are you getting this information?

Facebook has taken steps to limit Boogaloo groups on its platform.

https://www.engadget.com/facebook-limits-boogaloo-groups-122...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/04/boogal...

There's been a lot of reporting on it as they've stepped up action over the last year. Did you not see the news stories about these individuals stationing inside the Michigan Capitol with assault rifles?

"Boogaloo" is a longstanding meme that refers to a possible upcoming civil war, that the media has recently misconstrued into a movement trying to cause a civil war.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/boogaloo

Yup, I frequent a lot of website where "boogaloo" is discussed and it's a freakin' joke.

Reminds me of "jenkum", the drug the media reported on that turned out to be a prank.

http://www.seditionists.com/parshall_complaint.pdf

It's being misconstrued by the MSM to stop the left and right from uniting in their common goal of reforming tyrannical governments.

Here's a good in-depth exploration of the movement. Some of these people are quite eager for such a war.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-move...

I got about 1/5th through before I couldn't help but wonder if this was a satire site. He's uncomfortable with decades-old common internet acronyms, and unable to recognize a joke, taking several used in the article completely seriously.

One of the comments there puts it better than I can:

> Honestly, most of it is genuinely trolling. I don’t go on it anymore (used to more often), but really the whole thing is a meme. Sure, a few people take it seriously, but I have no doubt it is no statistically different than any other group that has a subculture.

> 4chans entire subculture exists to start trends, meme, and get a reaction. The boogaloo movement was always a meme and it is only now being legitimized because of mainstream news coverage. Now, people who aren’t about of the Chan subculture see it and start to believe in it legitimately.. when that never was the case to begin with.

> They did this with the “OK” symbol, Waterproof Iphones, TayTweets, and most recently Boogaloo.

> Now they are doing it with #goBaldForBLM (or at least trying to).

> Just kind of sad to see a credible investigative journalism site constantly spending time to focus on 4chan.. when it’s trolls.. and the only people who take it seriously are the ones who read about it through the lens of an article.

It's the media not understanding the internet and creating their own boogeyman.

Err.. I hate to break it to you, but the Chan trolling culture has been used a a deliberate way of pushing extreme views into the mainstream for a long time now.

Look no further than Pizzagate and now QAnon. Boogaloo may have started out like that but people quickly made it a real thing long before mainstream media jumped on board.

The whole "oh it's only trolling, can't you take a joke" is just a front used for people to shield their true beliefs behind.

Here's a criminal charge[1] against one Boogaloo person. I'd note this sentence: "During the rally LYNAM stated their group was not for joking around"

[1] http://www.seditionists.com/parshall_complaint.pdf

“The media” isn’t causing dudes in aloha shirts to go to protests with a bunch of guns.

Nah man, the cops don’t have it in them to actually destroy the country. Those extremists will quit long before then.

Yea, you are going to have to provide some references for that one.

Where have you been? There's been groups pepping for a second civil war (the meme-name is "boogaloo", as in "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo") for at least a decade now.

I'm optimistic that red and blue America will have something more like Czechoslovakia's Velvet Divorce involving minimal bloodshed, but I'd be surprised if the USA makes it to 2100 as a single polity.

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