The Boogeyman Lives – According To The Corporate Media

Who remembers all those times as a child that you painstakingly checked under your bed and in your closet with your heart in your throat, the need to be sure the boogeyman wasn’t hiding in your room? Despite your parents’ reassurance that the boogeyman wasn’t real, you still had to check before you could go to bed.

Turns out your parents were wrong! At least according to the corporate media.

The media would have us believe the boogeyman is very real, and he wears a Hawaiian shirt. Forget your childhood visions of Freddy Krueger or Hulking monsters in hockey masks; the real boogeymen wear Hawaiian shirts and carry guns, sometimes big scary black guns!

In and around May 2020, the mainstream media learned a new word, “Boogaloo”. Doesn’t the very name strike fear into your heart? According to the media, the Boogaloo is anything from a militia group to neo-Nazis or even a Satanic cult. All these terrifying things wrapped in Hawaiian shirts and labeled as “libertarian-leaning”.

By now most are aware of the origin of the name from the 198’s movie, Electric Boogaloo, that nobody ever heard of until the terrifying Boogaloo movement was discovered by the media. The term Boogaloo began to pop up sometime during Barack Obama’s presidency. A big push for gun control started in the Obama years giving rise to some strong opposition amongst Second Amendment supporters and American gun owners. This same period also saw the birth of the meme culture. Connect the dots and the Boogaloo was born.

Yes, the terrifying Boogaloo is a meme. See search results for Civil War 2, The Electric Boogaloo, or the Big Luau for more information. And yes, it results in a lot of smack-talking and shit-posting of said memes among gun owners and supporters of the Second Amendment in various online forums in recent years.

While the idea of the Boogaloo and the memes exist as what is essentially a joke, the threat of losing our rights is very real. The George Floyd incident and resulting protests brought that to light. Suddenly America is aware of police brutality, no knock raids, profiling, in this case by race. Things gun owners have always feared, particularly with the recent wave of red flag laws. These rights violations are exactly the kinds of things American gun owners have fought and spoken out against for decades, concerns that created the Boogaloo meme.

Of course, to read the stories created by the corporate media, the Boogaloo is something very different. Even though almost every article points out that the Boogaloo “movement” is not really organized and defies concrete description, they still paint it as something dangerous. This attitude undoubtedly comes from the armed men seen at recent protests and of course the few individuals arrested for their violent activities during the protests who claimed affiliation with the Boogaloo.

However, despite these few arrests, most of the armed men were guilty of nothing more than standing around. Sound familiar? Isn’t that part of the message that Black Lives Matter is trying get across?

Profiling is wrong whether it is based on race or gun ownership. If you sense a double standard you are probably right. The media constantly feeds this perception. If we are asked to believe that something called the Boogaloo is dangerous, how can we possibly doubt that there is a strong media bias in this country?

In a culture that is becoming increasingly opposed to gun ownership, a culture determined to find a nefarious far-right extremist group to blame for every violent activity in the country, this is not a bit surprising. Nor is it surprising that the idea of the Boogaloo was born in the first place.