And then the woke mob came for the uniform of the summertime backyard BBQ, the Hawaiian shirt.
In a story with all the heft of an organza hankie, The Economist announced that Hawaiian shirts have been canceled because of links to “white nationalism.”
The Economist reports that the group of cop-hating-anarcho-communists who call themselves “The Boogaloo Boys,” a name inspired by an old movie, use Hawaiian shirts as part of their uniform to further their diabolical plots, whatever those are. Since they are mostly white, like antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters in Portland, the woke mob has determined that it makes them “white nationalists” and therefore turns Hawaiian shirts into the uniform of white nationalists.
Related: Day 69: Rioting Mob Sets Portland Police Precinct on Fire. So Much for Promises Riots Would Stop if Feds Left
And this is serious business because the reporter makes the case that the Hawaiian shirts are related – like cousins – to the fascist brown shirts of the 1930s.
Fascism has a history with fashion. In the 1930s the Nazis designed their own shirts and commissioned Hugo Boss to produce them in black and brown. Their modern American cousins buy them off the rack at high-street beachwear boutiques.
Fashion, fascism? See the connection?
The magazine used a photo of a man wearing a holster bearing the name of “III” and the saying, “We the people,” which represents people willing to bear arms in defense of their country.
The gun is partially obscured by – my God, it’s a Hawaiian shirt.
The Wall Street Journal reports that The Boogaloo Boys’ uniform appears to be yet another 4Chan troll, a troll that may ruin summer vacation wardrobes for years to come. The folks at 4Chan are the same mob that started the rumor that the “OK” sign with your fingers was really a racist sign. Sigh.
Related: Jonathan Turley’s Right to Ask if Antifa Mob is the ‘Greatest Movement Against Free Speech in America.’ We’ve Got Proof.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University and the author of Hate in the Homeland, says the shirt is meant to distinguish this group of white supremacists from the others.
The Hawaiian shirt reflects the diabolical sense of humor at the root of the boogaloo community. “Hawaiian luaus feature a pig roast, which is a slur for the police. So [the shirt is] also a way of evoking or suggesting violence in the coming civil war against the police”…
The boogaloo community’s Hawaiian-shirt dress code crystallized in a more organic, bottom-up way, emerging via a tangled web of internet humor and memes. Within fringe groups, this circuitous pathway from a meme to something more real is “a new phenomenon” said Ms. Miller-Idriss. As an earlier example of a meme that was elevated into alt-right iconography, she points to Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that in recent years was appropriated by racist and anti-Semitic groups and subsequently plastered on T-shirts, stickers and flags.
White supremacy and nationalist whack jobs are a real concern, according to testimony about antifa rioters on Capitol Hill this week. But all we really would like is to have our shirts back without someone beating us up when we wear one.
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