MSNBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny warned on Tuesday night that there appears to be an ominous threat from the far-right “boogaloo” movement that is only getting worse.
“What do you see as the sort of situation now in terms of particularly Facebook and others in hosting activity for thee kinds of groups?” host Chris Hayes asked.
“I talked to someone on the Homeland Security Advisory Council in March, and he said to me, you know, when we have groups of heavily-armed people loudly talking about their plans for insurrection and to kill law enforcement officials, we should probably listen to them,” said Zadrozny. “It seems that we haven’t. And Facebook right now continues to host boogaloo groups who are getting around just the basic level of content moderation they’re doing for these groups and, you know, right now they’re existing on Reddit and they’re even siphoning off to smaller, more private forums that we’re seeing like Discord. I mean, the long and short of it is these groups continue to exist even after all this violence. So in terms of what the platform, their role in it, their responsibility, it seems they’re taking very, very little.”
“It’s striking, too, I mean, the sort of role of both sort of Second Amendment fetishization as a kind of ideological theme and wanting the second Civil War, and also guns at the ready,” said Hayes. “I mean, one of the things we have seen at all these right-wing protests, you know, whether it’s the people who are going to show up to defend their town from Antifa or these folks, that they are — they are armed to the teeth. Like, there is no question about that.”
“Yeah, they are. They have lots of guns and they show their power level,” said Zadrozny. “That’s the one plus in this is that, you know, a lot of these extremists really do — are open about their extremist ties, so we can see the fact that they’re all wearing, you know, Hawaiian shirts, for example, as another sort of stupid in-joke that sort of masks the real danger that they pose. We see them, you know, with boogaloo patches and other sort of insignia that can sort of call them out.”
“But the scary thing for protesters that we’ve talked to, Black Lives Matter protesters and others, is that when they’re at these protests, they can’t tell the difference between who’s there, you know, advocating for their Second Amendment right and who is an actual, you know, real threat,” she added. “And I think it’s just — it’s a terrifying situation.”
Take a look at their discussion in the video clip below:
RELATED: Twitter Flags Another Trump Tweet, Puts Warning Label For ‘Threat To Harm’
