A Living Parody: Alleged Berkeley Bomber Arrested

If you have recently been wondering why the world seems so awful these days, we may have found the poster boy.

He’s a white guy with a PhD in African-American studies, he’s 34, he lives with his parents in their $1 million-plus home, he writes “justice jargon” – filled incomprehensibilities for obscure woke ‘zines, he smashed a hotel sign during a putatively pro-trans protest, and now he’s been arrested for firebombing a UC Berkeley campus police car and setting other fires during the recent pro-Hamas protests.

He is Casey Robert Goonan, progressive pretension personified.

Monday, his Pleasant Hill home was raided, after which he was booked into Alameda County jail on suspicion of arson and possession and use of destructive devices. He’s being held in lieu of $1 million bail.

The police car firebombing and the other fires caused little damage and no injuries.

The incident was noted last week on IndyBay.org, a journalism/message board that supports “local, regional and global struggles against exploitation and oppression” and functions “as a non-commercial, non-corporate, anti-capitalist collective.”

The post, which may or may not have been made by Goonan though that seems doubtful given its uncertainty as to the location, reads as follows (all caps in the original):

UCLA STUDENTS WERE ATTACKED LAST NIGHT SO WE RETALIATED WITH A FIREBOMB ON UCB CAMPUS

NOT SURE WHAT BUILDING IT EVEN WAS. HONESTLY DONT REALLY CARE. EVERY SINGLE BUILDING ON THE UC BERKELEY CAMPUS DESERVES TO BE INCINERATED FOLLOWING THE UC SYSTEM’S TREATMENT OF STUDENT PROTESTORS. LAST NIGHT THEY ATTACKED A YOUNG WOMAN STUDENT WHO WAS SPEAKING HER MIND ON A MEGAPHONE. SO WE UNLOADED A FIREBOMB ON THE SIDE OF A CAMPUS BUILDING. THE FLAME WAS BIG AND SPREAD ACROSS THE TREES AND BUSHES ON THE SIDE OF A BUILDING.

LONG LIVE THE STUDENT INTIFADA FOR PALESTINE LIBERATION

STOP THE GENOCIDE NOW

UC SYSTEM MUST DIVEST FROM ISRAEL OR FACE OUR WRATH OF REVENGE

BLESSED IS THE FLAME

Your tax dollars at work…

Goonan seems to be no stranger to inappropriate violence.  He was charged with vandalism last fall after he allegedly smashed the sign of a San Francisco hotel that was hosting the Women’s Declaration International summit. The group believes that women are, well, women and opposes “all forms of discrimination against women and girls that result from replacing ‘sex’ with ‘gender identity’ in law, policy, and social practice.”

In other words, the group endorses equality and reality, hence the trans protest.  

Goonan’s writings that can be found on-line are a treasure trove of wokespeak jargon, bold to the point of incomprehension statements, and diatribes against “fascist America” and such.  Here’s an example from he piece he wrote about the Black Panther Party:

“What we are being forced to confront today is the grave possibility that the numerous regimes of imperial and domestic war-waging that buttress the white locality of the American “homeland” (i.e. Wars on “Drugs,” on “Gangs,” on “Terror,” etc.) may simply overwhelm the quasi-hegemonic grammars of protest, coalition, social justice, and activism. It is from an orientation and approach to praxis which takes seriously the demands of developing awareness of the social aspects of
insurgency and revolutionary movement-building that the warfare condition may become not an obstacle, but a point of departure, confrontation, or even radical possibility.” 

He also seems to believe that white liberal soft-on-crime positions are rooted in a form of racism and harmful to Black radicalism(?) but it’s kinda hard to tell:

“This modernist split between the rational and irrational, citizen and criminal, docile and incendiary can be seen as resonating with the era’s common liberal racial sensibilities in ways that reify and uniquely “dramatize” the state’s posture as neutral arbiter of domestic racial crisis. This fabricated identity as postracial crisis mediator facilitates an array of tacit policing mechanisms, which, in turn, hinge on the (tentative) privileging of a pacifist, Black bourgeois subjectivity and praxis fashioned in diametric opposition to the criminalized figure of the Black insurrectionist.”

Goonan’s attorney, Jeff Wozniak, strongly disputed the reasons for the arrest:

“Mr. Goonan has only been arrested on these charges; no case has been filed by the Alameda DA.  This is a political investigation.  It is an investigation focused on Mr. Goonan’s political beliefs in a free Palestine and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” Wozniak said. “The search warrant specifically sought ‘documents related to the conflict between Israel and Palestine.’ illustrating that this is an investigation to place blame on Mr. Goonan because of his opposition to genocide and demand for a free Palestine.”  

“If charges are filed, Mr. Goonan’s legal team will aggressively fight the charges. It is my hope, however, that (Alameda County DA Pamela) Price does not engage in this political persecution, does not file charges and that Mr. Goonan is released from jail,” Wozniak added.

Maybe not so much, said Wade Stern, president of The Federated University Police Officers’ Association (FUPOA), the union that represent UC campus cops, in calling for Goonan to be prosecuted federally as well:

“The FUPOA commends the collaborative efforts between the University of California, Berkeley Police Department (UCBPD), the State Fire Marshal, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). Their diligent and thorough investigation of these crimes has culminated in the arrest of Mr. Goonan,” said Stern. “We are now urging the prosecuting agency, the United States Attorney for the District of Northern California, to rigorously review the case and proceed with filing the appropriate charges.”

Well, as the saying goes, Goonan will always have his day job to fall back on.

Oh, wait…