The boogaloo movement, whose adherents are often referred to as boogaloo boys or boogaloo bois, is a loosely organized far-right anti-government extremist movement in the United States. It has also been described as a militia. Adherents say they are preparing for, or seek to incite, a second American Civil War or second American Revolution which they call "the boogaloo" or "the boog".
The movement consists of pro-gun, anti-government groups. The specific ideology of each group varies and views on topics such as race differ widely. Some are white supremacist or neo-Nazi groups who believe that the impending unrest will be a race war. There are also groups that condemn racism and white supremacy, although attempts by some individual elements of the movement to support anti-racist groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter have been met with wariness and skepticism, and researchers and journalists are unsure if they are genuine or meant to obscure the movement's actual objectives.
The movement primarily organizes online, but adherents have appeared at in-person events including anti-lockdown and George Floyd protests. Heavily armed, boogaloo members are often identified by their attire of Hawaiian shirts and military fatigues.
Boogaloo emerged on 4chan and subsequently spread to other platforms. Although usage of the term dates back to 2012, the movement did not gain mainstream attention until late 2019. Adherents use boogaloo, including variations so as to avoid social media crackdowns, to refer to violent uprisings against the federal government, often anticipated to follow government confiscation of firearms.
Individuals affiliated with the boogaloo movement have been charged with crimes, including the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; the murders of a security contractor and a police officer; a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; and incidents related to participation in the George Floyd riots. In mid-2020, several companies acted to limit the movement's activities and visibility on their social media and chat platforms.
Overview Naming and identity The term boogaloo alludes to the 1984 sequel film Breakin' 2:Electric Boogaloo, which was derided by critics as a derivative rehash. Subsequently, appending "2: Electric Boogaloo" to a name became a jocular verbal template for any kind of sequel, especially one that strongly mimics the original. The boogaloo movement adopted its identity based on the anticipation of a second American Civil War or second American Revolution, which was referred to as "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo" and became popularly known among adherents as "the boogaloo".
Participants in the boogaloo movement also use other similar-sounding derivations of the word, including boog, boojahideen, big igloo, blue igloo, and big luau to avoid crackdowns and automated content flags imposed by social media sites to limit or ban boogaloo-related content. Intensified efforts by social media companies to restrict boogaloo content have caused adherents to use terms even further detached from the original word such as spicy to refer to the movement. The boogaloo movement has created logos and other imagery incorporating igloo snow huts and Hawaiian prints based on these derivations. Adherents of the boogaloo sometimes carry black-and-white versions of the American flag, with a middle stripe replaced with a stripe of red tropical print and the stars replaced with an igloo. The stripes sometimes list the names of people who have been killed by police, including Eric Garner, Vicki Weaver, Robert LaVoy Finicum, Breonna Taylor, and Duncan Lemp.
Adherents attend protests heavily armed and wearing tactical gear, and sometimes identify themselves by wearing Hawaiian shirts along with military fatigues. The boogaloo movement has also used imagery popular among the far-right such as the Pepe the Frog meme.
Political beliefs
Groups in the boogaloo movement are far-right, anti-government, and pro-gun. Some groups have also been variously described as being alt-right, anarchist, libertarian, or right-libertarian. According to Alex Newhouse, a digital researcher at Middlebury's CTEC, "the way we know the 'boogaloo' movement is a far-right movement is because they draw a line directly from Waco and Ruby Ridge. They hold up things like the McVeigh bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and the armed response to Ruby Ridge as "heroic moments in American history", which they view as citizens standing up to government oppression. Newhouse also identified the choice by adherents of the movement to provide armed protection to private businesses during anti-lockdown protests and George Floyd protests as evidence that the movement is right-wing, saying that leftists would not be likely to do the same as they are more likely to view large corporations as an integral component of capitalist exploitation. According to Newhouse, this emphasis on the importance of private property is part of what makes the boogaloo movement "very much an extreme right libertarian ideology".
The groups and individuals often self-identify as libertarian, although a few individuals have also described themselves as adherents of related ideologies, including anarcho-capitalism and minarchism. There are also "a few apparent anarchists", including some self-identified "anarchists". Pitcavage described the "anarchists" who have adopted "'boogaloo' rhetoric" as generally being right-wing anarcho-capitalists, not what he terms "left-wing anarchists". MacNab has stated that "most boogaloo members are libertarian anarchists who hate cops". The SPLC notes that "a look at the movement's origins and its online communities make it clear that its politics are much more complicated than straightforward libertarianism". The Daily Beast reported in October 2020 that the varying ideologies of groups within the movement cause confusion about its overall ideology, and that some adherents intentionally obfuscate the movement's ideology in order to attract more followers.
In June 2020, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) tweeted in reply to a Politico article about the boogaloo movement that an intelligence bulletin released by the agency "does NOT identify the Boogaloo movement as left-wing OR right-wing" and stated that "they are simply violent extremists from both ends of the ideological spectrum". The Guardian refuted the DHS' description of the movement, saying that experts on extremism concur that the boogaloo movement is right-wing. Daryl Johnson, a former DHS analyst, told The Guardian that he believed the DHS' claim that the boogaloo movement was not right-wing was "playing politics". Johnson further stated that the boogaloo movement is "an ultra-nationalist primarily white movement of people who belong to the militias. Could there be somebody that has different sympathies that's part of it? Sure. It's predominantly right-wing".
Members of boogaloo groups typically believe in accelerationism and support any action that will speed impending civil war and eventually the collapse of society. According to The Economist, boogaloo group members have supported to this end the "spreading of disinformation and conspiracy theories, attacks on infrastructure (such as that on New York's 311 line) and lone-wolf terrorism". Some participants in the movement claim that the group and its ideology are nothing more than online jokes, but some law enforcement officials and researchers maintain that people connected to the groups have been implicated in plans to commit real violence. The Tech Transparency Project has observed that while public posts on boogaloo Facebook pages tend to be satirical, members of private boogaloo groups "exchang[e] detailed information and tactics on how to organize and execute a revolt against American authorities". Some of the private groups ban the sharing of memes to keep the conversation focused on serious topics. The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) has also commented on the mix of serious and joking content, writing that "this ambiguity is a key feature of the problem: Like a virus hiding from the immune system, the use of comical-meme language permits the network to organize violence secretly behind a mirage of inside jokes and plausible deniability". According to the Anti-Defamation League, boogaloo adherents' use of humor makes their content more digestible by softening the violent underpinnings of some of their beliefs. While many people might reject an explicit call for violence, some might be more receptive to a meme that cloaks such violent sentiment with an overlay of humor. Counter-extremism organizations have also noticed an overlap of antisemitic, white supremacist Christian Identity (CI) beliefs and Boogaloo. For example the "Boogaloo Intel Drop" webpage promoted the theology and preparing for societal collapse. CI beliefs themselves also converge with accelerationism.
Some boogaloo groups are white supremacist or neo-Nazi and specifically believe that "the boogaloo" will be a race war. Some boogaloo groups have condemned racism. According to The Guardian, "there's real disagreement, even among experts who monitor extremist groups, about whether the 'boogaloo' movement as a whole should be described as 'white supremacist'". Analysts from the ADL and Middlebury's Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism (CTEC) have argued that "a significant number of 'boogaloo' supporters are genuinely not white supremacist". The researchers have described the movement as having two wings: "one advocating for race war and one obsessed with societal breakdown and rebellion against the government". However, "other experts say that lip service from some 'boogaloo' supporters about wanting to be a multi-racial movement should not be taken seriously". The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has said that "few of [the boogaloo movement's] adherents are interested in aligning with Black Lives Matter or antifascist protesters against police brutality". According to Joan Donovan, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, "[w]e're equivocating for the sake of an imagined audience. The idea that you would dismantle the US government at this stage is to undo the protections that have been granted to black people, queer people, disabled people, to stop foreign policy related to immigration. There are always racialized and eugenic sub-themes in these groups. That's what war is, at its base. It's about who should live. I don't think you can get away from the ways in which the rhetoric supports a white supremacist ideology, once you start talking about the kinds of policies or strategies they think need to be implemented".
The boogaloo movement has also been described as a militia. Lois Beckett, writing for The Guardian, has compared it to the right-wing anti-government militia and patriot movements of the 1990s and 2000s, stating that "supporters see the current federal government as illegitimate, while remaining deeply patriotic. They revere the constitution and see themselves as the true descendants of America's founding fathers. In their view, current US lawmakers are the equivalent of occupying British forces during the revolutionary war. Among the 'boogaloo' merchandise for sale online are images of George Washington armed with a modern, AR-15-style rifle". Mark Pitcavage, a researcher at the Center on Extremism of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has identified the boogaloo movement's contempt for law enforcement as the element that most strongly distinguishes them from other militia groups.
Structure and membership