Boogaloo movement
[1][27][28] 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.
[33] 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 fiesta to refer to the movement.
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.
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.
[13][5][48] 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".
[20] 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".
[20] 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.
[54] Following the filing of terrorism charges against three Nevada men with ties to the Department of Defense (DoD), the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) stated in a June 2020 report: "Racially motivated violent extremist (RMVE) movements that subscribe to boogaloo have engaged in conceptual discussions about recruiting military or former military members for their perceived knowledge of combat training.... NCIS cannot discount the possibility of DoD affiliated individuals sympathetic to or engaged in the boogaloo movement.
[1] Megan Squire, a computer science professor and online extremism researcher at Elon University, observed the term begin to be used among white supremacists on the Telegram messaging app in the summer of 2019, where they used it to describe a race war.
They attribute surges in popularity to a viral incident in November 2019 where a military veteran posted content mentioning the boogaloo on Instagram during a standoff with police and to the December 2019 impeachment of Donald Trump.
[11] Virginia Governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency for the day of the rally in response to intelligence that indicated there was "a threat of an armed militia groups storming our capital".
[64] According to Vice, although the boogaloo groups tried to position themselves as allies of the Black Lives Matter movement, they generally avoided addressing police brutality in the United States as a racial issue.
[1][35][54][33] Online extremism researcher Megan Squire observed references to the boogaloo in white supremacist Telegram chat rooms in the summer of 2019, before the movement began to become popular on gun forums in September of the same year.
However, Squire observed in mid-June 2020 that despite Facebook's policy and enforcement changes to remove and demote boogaloo-related content, membership among boogaloo groups on the platform as well as on Discord and Reddit had remained steady or increased.
At the time of the attacks, Carrillo was an active-duty member of an elite Air Force unit tasked with guarding American military personnel at unsecure foreign airfields.
[31] An NBC News investigation into the suspects' social media profiles found a swift online radicalization following Whitmer's implementation of a statewide lockdown as part of an effort to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in Michigan.
Solomon and Teeter connected with an FBI informant who had posed as a member of the Hamas organization, who they agreed to supply weapons to, and they also made plans to bomb a courthouse in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
"[65] They were arrested when they were found filling canisters with gasoline and creating Molotov cocktails on their way to such a protest on May 30, and each was charged with the federal crimes of conspiracy to damage and destroy by fire and explosive, and possession of unregistered firearms.
He had previously posted on social media about using "guerrilla warfare" against members of the National Guard deployed at the Floyd protests, committing violence against looters, and "hunting Antifa".
[1][93] The event was later identified as the cause of a large spike in boogaloo-related comments on the 4chan /pol/ board as well as on other boogaloo sites and right-wing militia social media pages, where followers had organized during the incident to disrupt police by bombarding them with phone calls and posted incitements of violence.
[94] After a high-speed, nighttime police chase through Bowie County, Texas, he was apprehended wearing a Hawaiian shirt and tactical vest with three firearms, 156 rounds of ammunition, and a sword.
[27][95] Swenson was convicted of attempted murder of a police officer, terroristic threatening, evading arrest in a vehicle, and violation of the Texas Hate Crimes Act, and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
In April 2020, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) published a Threat Awareness Message about the movement and the potential danger it posed to police and government entities.
[55][56] A May 29, 2020, memo published by the DHS warned officers of an extremist white supremacist Telegram channel encouraging its members to commit acts of violence and inciting them to "start the 'boogaloo'" during the George Floyd protests.
The report also warned that adherents may live in D.C. or may be prepared to travel long distances to D.C. "to incite civil unrest or conduct violence encouraged in online forums associated with the movement".
On June 19, the DHS published an intelligence report that drew a similar conclusion and stated that "domestic terrorists advocating for the boogaloo very likely will take advantage of any regional or national situation involving heightened fear and tensions to promote their violent extremist ideology and call supporters to action".
[109] Members of the Trump administration made misleading statements incorrectly attributing boogaloo-related violence to radical leftist activists and inaccurately suggesting that the May and June murders of two police and security officers were tied to racial justice protests.
[110][111] On June 1, President Donald Trump said in a speech that the country "has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, antifa and others... A federal officer in California, an African American enforcement hero, was shot and killed.
"[112] During his Republican National Convention speech on August 26, 2020, Vice President Mike Pence implied that Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer in the Department of Homeland Security Federal Protective Service, had been killed by radical leftist activists at a Floyd protest that was also in Oakland.
[118] TikTok hides hashtags related to the boogaloo movement, and their content policies prohibit videos containing firearms outside of a few exceptions, such as when used in a fictional context or when "used in a safe and controlled environment such as a shooting range".
