The Boogaloo Path to a New Rainbow Coalition

 Fred Hampton had a dream. It was a little more militant than Doctor King's, but no less ambitious. The young chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party dreamed of a grand coalition of revolutionaries spanning across racial and class boundaries, united to bring down the American Empire and the police state it fostered in the ghettos of Chicago that he called home. Fred began to build his dream locally, creating the original Rainbow Coalition with Jose Cha Cha Jimenez of the Puerto Rican Young Lords and William "Preacherman" Fesperman of the Hillbilly Nationalists in the Young Patriots Organization. He also brokered unprecedented city wide ceasefires between warring street gangs by convincing them that their true power lied in their ability to protect their turf from the real thugs in the Chicago PD.

Soon Hampton's dream began to spread across the country, creating a paisley quilt of countercultural tribes devoted to uniting to take down the man by any means necessary, from the modern day Aztec warriors in the Chicano Brown Berets to the Rock n Roll dope jihadists in John Sinclair's White Panther Party to the new Dog Soldiers of the American Indian Movement. Fred didn't dream of an army, Fred dreamt of a thousand armies, with a thousand flags, fighting a thousand revolutions at once, overwhelming the most powerful empire in modern history with not one, but two, three, four Vietnams, all raging in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in the Third World from the belly of the beast. For this daring dream, Fred Hampton had to die.  

So his enemies, both local and national, devised a plan. The FBI used an informant named William O'Neal to drug Hampton so their would be zero possibility of the courageous young warrior defending himself. Cook County States Attorney, Edward Hanrahan put together a police hit squad and on December 4, 1969, they performed a no knock raid, murdered Hampton's bodyguard, Mark Clark, dragged Hampton's pregnant girlfriend from their bed and put three bullets into the 21 year old revolutionary dreamer, including two in his head, execution style. Sadly, do to the top-down structure of Hampton's Rainbow Coalition, it quickly collapsed without its iconic leader. But Fred Hampton's dream of revolutionary bottom unity lives on in some very unexpected places. 

On the surface, today's Boogaloo Bois couldn't be more different than the Black Panthers of yesteryear. They are a coalition of mostly white militiamen far more inspired by Murray Rothbard than Mao Zedong, but the two iconoclastic organizations actually have more than a few things in common. They are both heavily demonized groups of young revolutionaries who seek to take on the police-warfare state with the high powered tools of the Second Amendment, and they both share Fred Hampton's dream of a diverse coalition of radicals devoted to bringing Babylon to its proper place on it's knees.

The Boog have recently announced their intention to create their own Rainbow Coalition Army, made up of decentralized unity coalitions devoted to bringing radicals of all stripes together to pool their resources against common enemies like the police, the feds, and the military industrial complex. Their hope is to totally rewire the way this country views politics by convincing it's subjects to reject the phony partisan tribalism of the culture war and focus on the common ground we share to fight on. Speaking as a lifelong leftist who grew up idolizing sixties icons of revolutionary solidarity like Fred Hampton and Huey Newton, I couldn't be more on board. But too many of my comrades have rejected this opportunity out of hand based largely on the lies used by the feds and their dickless flunkies in the mainstream media to unfairly demonize the Boogaloo.

The mainstream narrative on the Boogaloo Movement is that it's a dangerous gang of armed white supremacists out to foment a race war. I use to suffer from this delusion myself before I actually met and got to know some Boogaloo Bois online. The group's real history is a lot more complicated than the mainstream mythology. It all began as an online joke, a broad meme shared among the ranks of the gun rights community predicting a second American Revolution and comparing the tongue in cheek prospect to the epic cheeseball cult classic, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. A wide variety of eccentric characters got involved in the initial joke, including some assholes on the far right, but this wasn't what materialized into an actual physical movement on the streets. What we now know as the Boogaloo Bois were born from two eerily familiar murders in early March of 2020.

Duncan Lemp was an ambitious young student and software engineer who had a passion for guns, Wikileaks, and transhumanism. He was also involved with a number of right wing militia groups in his native Maryland. The local Potomac police, who had run-ins with Lemp as a teenager, acquired a search warrant based on an anonymous tip that the young rebel possessed illegal firearms. What resulted on March 12 2020 was a bloody no-knock raid in which Lemp was shot dead in his bed through his window next to his pregnant girlfriend . No illegal weapons were found. He was only 21. 

The very next day, on March 13 2020, Breonna Taylor was murdered by police in Louisville, Kentucky when her boyfriend attempted to defend their home with his Second Amendment rights during another bloody no-knock raid. The juxtaposition between these two tragedies shook something loose in the Boogaloo Bois. If militiamen and inner city Blacks were being slaughtered by the same runaway police state then maybe they should be fighting side by side together against this shared enemy. When George Floyd was lynched a little over a month later, Hawaiian shirt clad Boogaloo Bois joined the subsequent uprising across the country with their AR-15's in toe and a movement was born. 

The reality of the Boogaloo is that they are a loosely affiliated, decentralized collection of libertarians and anarchists of various stripes. They are predominantly white and largely lean towards the free market school of stateless agitation that this genderfuck Yippie has come to embrace. But they are anything but racist. Quite the contrary. their movement only moved from social media to the streets out of a desire to express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement. The only acts of violence connected to the group were one lone active shooter who mindlessly adopted their rhetoric and a rioter who was filmed firing an AR-15 into a Minneapolis police station that had been abandoned and burning for hours. But too many of my fellow leftists can't seem to get past the mainstream smears and embrace what I see as a game changing opportunity to bring Fred Hampton's dream of revolutionary unity into the 21st Century.

One thing that both Hampton and the Boog understood is that we cannot go it alone. Any revolutionary who truly seeks to smash the state and end it's global imperial massacre needs to except that no single faction or school of thought can achieve this goal alone. We have to look beyond left and right, Black and white, Queer and straight, to what truly unites us all. Whether you're a Black kid in the hood, a Redneck in the holler, or a tranny in the trailer park, we are all on the bottom of a system that only serves the savages on the top. There is more than enough America for every kind of stateless society to coexist peacefully, but none of us are gonna get there until we come together to tear this motherfucker down.

The state realizes this and they are terrified. That is why the same moneyed mandarins who used Cointelpro to dismantle the Panthers and Fred Hampton's dream of a rainbow revolution are now very busy trying to use the same evil tricks against the Boogaloo. Both Bill Barr's National Task Force against radical extremism and Joe Biden's National Security Council Strategy against domestic terrorism explicitly name the Boogaloo Movement as a top priority target and their dutiful whores in the corporate news machine are hard at work trying to demonize and isolate this movement for revolutionary social justice. Take it from Chuck D, don't believe the hype, and accept the opportunity from the Boogaloo Bois to keep Fred Hampton's dream alive while the fire's still hot. Divided we crumble. United they fall.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

*  Come Together by the Beatles

*  Don't Believe the Hype by Public Enemy

*  Children of the Revolution by T. Rex

*  Hip Hop by Dead Prez

*  Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

*  Ruff Ryder's Anthem by DMX

*  The Universal by Blur

*  War Pigs by Black Sabbath

*  Bull's On Parade by Rage Against the Machine

*  Sex Bomb by Flipper

*  A Pillar of Salt by the Thermals