There was little of the overt racism and neofascism that featured in the Berkeley clashes. The line of Boston police between them surely had something to do with this, but it also seemed that Antifa, though highly visible waving red and black flags at the front of the counter protest, was smaller than the various socialist and left-wing groups to their rear who, while coordinating with Antifa, had pledged their own members to non-violence. Neither was there the attempt by Antifa to physically disrupt or attack those participating in the rally as they did in Berkley.
Best games of 2017 4chan free#
A line of oath keepers provided a kind of internal crowd control at the free speech rally pushing their own cohort back when they moved up to confront the other side. There were traditional chants like “USA! USA!” and “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!” But a moment later, “Gender studies” would be called out-as if that said it all-with “Go back to 4Chan,” the response.įor the most part, though, violence was averted. The opposing sides hurled memes and slogans at each other, expressing both their politics and their self awareness.
In the end, not much actually happened during the rally, which was planned for 12-5 but ended early. In Berkeley, Puppy said, there were “people getting sucker punched and beaten by literal neo-Nazis.” “We saw in Berkeley what happened,” said an Antifa protester who identified himself as Puppy and covered his face with a red motorcycle helmet worn over a black mask. It was a similar story on both sides of the divide: that the other side had assaulted innocent people in Berkeley and they had come out in Boston to prevent something like that from happening here. Bringing people out by publicizing in online forums like 4Chan and Reddit, “that Antifa was going to be stopping this rally from happening.” Once the antifa threat had been established, Rasmussen said, “then the Oath Keepers came in offering security for it.” “We used posters to advertise it,” Rasmussen said. By far the oldest one.” The rally only started to gain momentum, Rasmussen claimed, once Antifa paid attention to it. Of the other organizers, Rasmussen said, “I was the oldest one at 32. He took up the job of applying for permits with the city and coordinating with the police department. “I had a whole bunch of history with occupy and other activist movements,” Rasmussen said. With the idea for an event in Boston and a private discussion board set up for planning, Verette put up a notice on 4Chan for more planners. “It was partially anti-Antifa,” he told The Daily Beast, “especially because they’ve been threatening people and harming people.” Verette’s friend and fellow event organizer Kevin Crowley, 18, agreed. “We wouldn’t have planned something like this otherwise,” he said. He hoped “the rally would turn out to be a big celebration of our rights as Americans, a patriotic event, really.”īut he added that it came about as “sort of a reaction” to Berkeley. He says that after getting the idea from an anonymous post on /pol/ he migrated discussion into a dedicated planning forum on the discord server. Verette, still in high school, describes himself as a libertarian who believes in individual freedoms and the free market. Curious onlookers took seats on nearby park benches. Between the two factions, a dozen or so officers from the Boston Police Department occupied a narrow pedestrian walkway. The variety of subcultural uniforms and insignia among them, blended paramilitary, biker, and videogame cultures.Ībout a hundred and fifty yards across from the rally, various left-wing and Antifa counter-protesters assembled on a hill in front of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Everyone seemed to be thinking about Berkeley.Ī group of several hundred right-wing aligned protesters, who claimed their rally was being held to defend free speech, occupied one piece of ground in the park.
In Boston, there was little of that pretense. There, at the birthplace of the country’s free speech movement, protestors, militants, and masked street fighters clashed, sometimes violently, over whether Milo Yiannopoulos should be allowed to speak publicly, what kind of dystopia America is becoming, and who the real fascists are. In Berkeley, you might have been able to glimpse history looming grandly in the background. But the real draw for protesters and counter-protestors alike seemed to be a shared view of the conflict between Antifas (self described anti-fascists) and Nazis-or anarchists and Americans, depending on who you asked-as a travelling fight club that had come to town. Hundreds of people gathered on Boston Common Saturday after word spread for weeks of a free speech rally orchestrated by right-wing groups.
0 kommentar(er)
