Armed Fascists Are Roaming Texas Floods Looking For Looters

Posted By: S Nicholson August 31, 2017

Armed right-wing paramilitary groups are patrolling parts of Texas affected by Hurricane Harvey under the guise of helping hurricane victims.

A group of “Proud Boys” — a men’s rights group with fascist leanings — photographed themselves wading through flooded neighborhoods with assault weapons and flashing a hand signal associated with extremist militia groups. They refer to themselves as an “anti looting patrol.”

The image is a stark contrast from depictions of other volunteer responders, who have used their own boats for search and rescue or who are donating and distributing basic necessities to those in need after the tragedy.

Violent white supremacists have a well-established history of using natural disasters as an opportunity to inflict deadly violence on  minority communities.

For instance, after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, “white vigilantes” shot and killed black storm victims “with impunity,” ProPublica reported. One of the worst racial massacres in American history took place after a hurricane struck Galveston, TX in 1900, when white vigilantes hunted black residents.

The devastation in Harvey again opens the door for white supremacists to conduct a disguised lynching campaign, even as reports of “looting” are relatively low in the affected areas. Perceptions of “looting” are also strongly linked to race, as news media after Katrina referred to starving black victims as looters, but their white counterparts were just “finding” the food in the empty grocery stores.

The Proud Boys are known to harbor white supremacists and Nazis, and their posing with weapons after a disaster that disproportionately affected poorer residents and people of color is a continuation of this sinister American legacy.

Meanwhile, antifascists, anarchists and others on the left who have been demonized by President Trump, Democratic leaders and the media have been actively engaged in rescues, supply distribution and giving medical aid to the thousands of residents in Southeast Texas who have been displaced by the megastorm.