I'm honestly just worn out at this point, been running on 3-4 hours of sleep for the last 4 days, so I'm going to try to stay away for a bit for my own mental health, but I do want to say something this morning.
It is interesting to see some higher level semi-confirmation from Walz and the mayors that there are outside agitators involved in a lot of this. It is something that I began to suspect from watching livestreams last night -- small groups of unidentifiable white men systematically moving from building to building, breaking through the plywood lighting fires and yelling to get out and moving on. They were frequently confronted by people of color demanding to know why they were setting their community on fire, but would always just run on to the next area.
It certainly could be anarchists or other more radical left wing agitators -- we do have those types up here. But, to be frank, I'm socially adjacent to some people in that community. I would call several of them good friends. I have heard no calls for anything like this, no relishing the burning of our city.
However, I'm becoming more and more concerned that it might be something a lot more nefarious, and with potential to be a much bigger problem for our country. I've seen some other people mention it, but there's a growing movement online to organize and kick off a second Civil War.
Bellingcat has a very long, excellent article detailing what these groups are and how they proliferate (it isn't just right wing militia types, though they are heavily represented). Near the end, there's
some picture and
text evidence from one of these "Boogaloo" groups showing that they are in Minneapolis and attempting to make this happen.
I'd also remind everyone that a white supremacist from Bloomington and his buddies were sentenced in 2017 for shooting protesters at the 4th Precinct BLM encampment for Jamar Clark in 2015. So we do have some unfortunate recent history on exactly this kind of thing.
Walz has said that they have received intelligence from Federal authorities about white supremacists operating in the area, and also said that the identities of those arrested would be made public. I'll be interested to see that information when it is available.