The so-called “Boogaloo” movement—the extremist anti-government cult devoted to ginning up a second civil war—is, like many far-right enterprises, deliberately confusing about its politics. After all, its recruitment strategy is focused on attracting mainly disenchanted and disenfranchised people who are so fed up with the status quo that they want to blow it all up. That includes a very broad range of political worldviews, both right and left.
But make no mistake: The “Boogaloo” is a fundamentally far-right movement, devoted to the destruction of liberal democracy, primarily by promoting violent chaos directed at its institutions, beginning with law enforcement but extending to federal civil rights, environmental, and other wide-reaching statutes. Like most far-right movements—particularly those, such as the Proud Boys, that adamantly deny their racism even as they promote white nationalist ideology—it seeks to recruit nearly anyone susceptible to its beliefs, including people of color and those on the far left; inevitably, however, its politics, agenda, and real-life behavior are both authoritarian and fundamentally right-wing, if not proto-fascist.
The case of the three Las Vegas-area “Boogaloo Bois” arrested for building Molotov cocktails as part of a larger campaign to wreak havoc around the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests over police brutality provides an acute example of how the movement blurs ideological lines in its recruitment. Rather than attack BLM—as most “Patriot” and “Proud Boy” groups have done over the past three years—these would-be insurrectionists instead sought to use the BLM protests to amplify their own violent intentions of overthrowing the federal government.
According to the federal informant who provided the FBI with background evidence prior to the men’s arrests, their purpose in building those Molotov cocktails was not to target leftist demonstrators—as “Boogaloo” cultists have sworn to do in different contexts during their initial movement-building phase—but rather to target police officers, as a way of ramping up the violence around the protests.
The informant told the Nevada grand jury that indicted the three men that they initially targeted both police and power facilities in the Las Vegas neighborhoods where the protests were held, largely because they “believed that the area was heavily populated by minorities and that a power outage created by the bombing would incite more civil unrest.”
The informant explained that the bombings weren’t intended “directly to harm African-Americans for the benefit of harming them … It was, in an odd way, to galvanize them to our cause.”
This group of “Boogaloo” fanatics, however, was quite clear in its intentions: “This isn’t a group for screwing around,” the informant quoted the accused leader as saying. “It’s a group dedicated to overthrowing the United States federal government.” One of the men took out a life insurance policy in the event he was killed.
At some anti-police protests dominated by BLM and leftist marchers, “Boogaloo” cultists have shown up wearing their signature Hawaiian shirts and body armor along with a variety of firearms, primarily semi-automatic rifles, claiming that their presence is intended to protect the protesters—even though they might be wearing skull or clown masks that actually signify their affiliation with neo-Nazi ideologies that explicitly condemn nonwhites.
Robert Evans and Jason Wilson at Bellingcat have explored in depth how the Boogaloo recruitment funnel has a very wide opening that includes people from LGBTQ communities, as well as some anarchists and people of color. In its nascent stages, at least, “the apocalyptic, anti-government politics of the “Boogaloo Bois” are not monolithically racist/neo-Nazi,” and indeed on Facebook pages, they can be found to “rail against police shootings of African Americans, and praise black nationalist self-defense groups.”
But the materials also demonstrate that however irony-drenched it may appear to be, this is a movement actively preparing for armed confrontation with law enforcement, and anyone else who would restrict their expansive understanding of the right to bear arms. In a divided, destabilized post-coronavirus landscape, they could well contribute to widespread violence in the streets of American cities.
Moreover, as the Bellingcat report details, the unifying factor of the movement—the desire to “fight it out” with authorities—eventually dovetails those left-wing strands into classic far-right ideology. Many participants suggest different flash points that would inspire them to join such a fight, but the central issue that would galvanize participants is, after all, an essentially right-wing bugbear: gun control.
The source of much of the confusion about the nature of the “Boogaloo” is Attorney General William Barr, who announced in late June that he was forming a task force to combat the “anti-government extremists” linked to violence at the protests—which he blamed on “antifa.”
"Although these extremists profess a variety of ideologies, they are united in their opposition to the core constitutional values of a democratic society governed by law," Barr said.
This characterization readily fits the “Boogaloo” extremists, but is simply a flat falsehood regarding “antifa,” which remains primarily a community-defense response to the violence threatened by proto-fascist groups, and is not hostile to democratic society or the Constitution in any demonstrable way. Moreover, as we have seen, much of the protest violence for which Barr blames “antifa” is in fact the product of far-right activists, including the shootings of two federal officers in Oakland by a self-described “Boogaloo Boi” with far-right libertarian leanings.
This kind of confusion has led the mainstream media to engage in such muddled reportage as the CNN story on Facebook’s “Boogaloo” crackdown, which claimed that “the movement is difficult to categorize due to the diverse nature of its members' social and political beliefs, which range from self-identified left-wing members of the LGBT community to, in some cases, supporters of white supremacy.”
While these latter aspects are technically accurate, the “Boogaloo” cult nonetheless is clearly a far-right movement—one which is capable of recruiting a broad range of participants. That some of those participants may hail from left-wing politics does not make the movement itself, and its agenda, fundamentally different:
- Its origins—particularly the shared violent fantasy of a civil war—are firmly rooted in the radical right, dating back to the 1980s Turner Diaries race-war blueprint and its enthusiasts, continuing forward to the “citizen militias” of the 1990s who eventually morphed into the Tea Party with its Three Percent Militias and far-right Oath Keepers.
- Its online origins similarly hail from the far-right quadrants of the Internet—particularly message boards haunted by the white-nationalist alt-right such as 4chan and 8chan, as well as gaming platforms such as Discord and chat platforms like Telegram. The “Boogaloo” name, as well as its mnemonic nicknames like “Big Luau” and “Big Igloo” all are credited to these message boards.
- The discussions around which the “Boogaloo” as a movement were formed all had far-right hatefulness—including a powerful undercurrent of anti-Semitism—as the fuel for their hopes in a coming civil war. The most publicized “Boogaloo” events—the late-January protest in Richmond, Virginia, by “Patriots” opposed to gun-control legislation, and the Michigan protests against COVID-19 stay-at-home orders—were almost entirely organized and in some cases financed by right-wing operatives and organizations. The Richmond event also attracted the planned participation of a neo-Nazi terrorist cell that allegedly planned to spark violence at the rally, but were arrested beforehand by the FBI.
The large majority of “Boogaloo” participants remain far-right “Patriots” who seem to be conveniently claiming an alliance with left-wing, anti-police protesters on grounds that are dubious at best. And this alliance so far has only shown up at the street protests against police brutality. At Seattle’s CHOP zone, in contrast, a cluster of “Patriots” showed up and were recorded assaulting people on the fringes of the zone.
The violence innate in the movement has gone from online rhetoric to real-world tragedy in short order. Recent incidents in addition to the one in Las Vegas are making clear that men swept up in the movement are increasingly intent on making it a reality:
- An Air Force sergeant in California who was a “Boogaloo” fan shot two federal officers at an anti-police protest in Oakland, one fatally. Two days later, after being tracked to Santa Cruz County, he shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy while being arrested. During the rampage, he scrawled the word “Boog” in blood on the hood of the car he was driving.
- A Texarkana, Texas, man who intended to spark the “Boogaloo” by ambushing police officers, was caught by officers who were alerted by his attempt to livestream his planned killing spree. They went to his location and arrested him shortly thereafter.
- A “Boogaloo” enthusiast who posted comments on Facebook about bringing his rifle to an anti-stay-at-home-orders protest in Denver attracted the interest of FBI agents, who upon visiting him at his home discovered a cache of homemade pipe bombs. The man openly expressed his intent to use them to kill any federal agents who tried to invade his home.
- Another “Boogaloo Boi” planned to livestream his ambush on police officers at an Ohio national park, but was arrested by FBI agents before he could pull off the plan.
A study by the Network Contagion Research Institute published last month warns that while the “Boogaloo” poses as a jocular nonthreat behind its decidedly unserious memes and Hawaiian shirts, it appears in most regards to have actually stolen a page from the Islamic State playbook in which they facilitated “a contagious, new, hybrid, social media operation that allowed Jihadis to crowd-source terror and propaganda outside the guidelines of every national security or military analyst’s playbook.”
The “Boogaloo,” it says, could descend quickly into similar violence:
The topic network for boogaloo describes a coherent, multi-component and detailed conspiracy to launch an inevitable, violent, sudden, and apocalyptic war across the homeland. The conspiracy, replete with suggestions to stockpile ammunition, may itself set the stage for massive real-world violence and sensitize enthusiasts to mobilize in mass for confrontations or charged political events. Furthermore, the meme’s emphasis on military language and culture poses a specific risk to military communities due to the similar thematic structure, fraternal organization, and reward incentives.
No wonder the terrorism experts are concerned.
