Who are the Boogaloo Bois? A man who shot up a Minneapolis police precinct was associated with the extremist movement, according to unsealed documents
Electric Boogaloo #ElectricBoogaloo
In May and June, protesters expressing anger and frustration over continued police brutality in the US and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis saw an interesting sight: armed men in Hawaiian shirts. They appeared in Texas, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Kentucky, and largely flummoxed local officials and onlookers.
The loosely organized group of predominantly white men call themselves the Boogaloo Bois, a name that comes from the cult 1984 film “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” but morphed in online message boards and groups to reference a theoretical second US civil war and uprising against the federal government.
Online, where almost all of their organization occurs, members have created numerous groups and pages under the names “big igloo” and “big luau” in an attempt to avoid censorship from tech platforms.
The far-right group, born from 4chan’s /k/ board, which is dedicated to gun worship, has no firm central organization, and only has a loose collection of shared values, but seemingly became activated by the anti-police protests, which many of them appeared to largely agree with given their disdain for most forms of policing and oversight.
Boogaloo Bois have been linked to several violent incidents, connected through a loose digital network, the FBI said
The Boogaloo Bois’ presence at the Black Lives Matter protests in the spring was frightening for other protesters and local governments, who had good reason to be suspicious of their intentions and ideologies, according to officials.
In April, a Texas Boogaloo Boi was arrested after allegedly stating his intent to hunt and kill a police officer during a livestream. In May, guns were confiscated from some Boogaloo Bois in Denver. In June, three Boogaloo Bois were arrested in Las Vegas after filling up gas canisters and making Molotov cocktails, according to federal prosecutors, who say they were picked up on terrorism-related charges.
On Friday, the FBI indicted 26-year-old Ivan Harrison Hunter who, according to an affidavit, shot up a Minneapolis police precinct on May 28, at the height of the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd.
The unsealed document, obtained by Buzzfeed News, revealed that Hunter had communicated with Steven Carillo, the California Boogaloo member charged in June for allegedly killing two cops and injuring another and a September plot to give weapons to Hamas.
Hours after he allegedly shot up the Minneapolis precinct, Hunter messaged Carrillo, who suggested that he go “for police buildings.”
“I did better lol,” Carrillo said, according to Buzzfeed News. The FBI said in June that Carillo had shot and killed a federal officer in Oakland, California, that night.
The communications illustrate the loose digital network used by the Boogaloos to coordinate their plans. Facebook formally banned Boogaloo content on June 30, designating it a “violent US-based anti-government network.”
Boogaloo Bois are pro-gun, anti-authority, and some have affiliated themselves with aspects of racist extremism
As was recounted in a May Bellingcat investigation, the Boogaloo Bois are decentralized and largely without a firm power structure, meaning that their ideological identity isn’t as homogeneous as other militia or political movements like QAnon, which follows a specific set of conspiracy theories. In the last two years, however, shitposting (sharing offensive and shocking memes just for fun) and gun collection comparisons evolved into militia-organizing and training — all in preparation for the theoretical boogaloo, or civil war.
Alexander Reid Ross, a researcher who tracks white nationalism and a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, calls the Boogaloos a “rebranding of sovereign citizen style libertarian-right militia” organizations. A central tenant of Boogaloo groups is to encourage preparation for the impending war, and orient members towards anti-police and anti-authority action when the time comes. Put simply, most Boogaloo Bois are “preppers with a sincere hatred of the federal government,” Reid Ross said.
Researchers from Middlebury College’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC) said in a May report that the group “is seen as the breaking point where government oppression is finally met with revolutionary violence from armed citizens.”
In various online forums and chat rooms — and on Instagram and Facebook — members share anti-police memes and pro-gun ideology, and frequently compare themselves to American revolutionaries and police to “redcoats.”
“Their opposition is not merely to Trump or to racist police, but to the sort of overarching authorities of federal government, and especially federal policing. Those overlaps have been fairly common for a long time among right-wing libertarians,” Reid Ross said.
While racism isn’t an inherent part of the Boogaloo Bois ideology, some members use Neo-Nazi symbols at protests, including the skull balaclava, suggesting that white nationalists have identified with aspects of the loose movement and joined up. There is overlap between the groups’ ideologies, as many white nationalists and neo-Nazis believe in an impending “race war,” which is a similar concept to the “civil war” Boogaloos say they’re preparing for.
Like other far-right groups, the Boogaloo Bois movement began on the internet. 
The Boogaloo Bois are extremely memetic — just the name of the group alone is based on the meme of the “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” film. Followers often communicate with popular internet memes. “It’s part of the memetic environment of the far-right,” Reid Ross said of the movement.
The group originated on 4chan’s white supremacist and libertarian message boards, according to Middlebury’s CTEC. As early as 2013, 4chan users were discussing the Day of the Rope, which is the reckoning or “large-scale violent conflict, from uprisings to nuclear war,” the CTEC found, that Boogaloo Bois are awaiting.
Beyond 4chan, Boogaloo Bois have congregated on Facebook, Telegram, and Discord, the latter of which are largely unregulated social platforms, though Facebook has said the group is banned from the platform. Searches for Boogaloo Bois and Boogaloos yield no results on Facebook as of Monday.
Despite the overlap between white supremacy and far-right ideologies and the Boogaloo Bois, many Boogaloo posts online have disavowed racism and anti-gay rhetoric in their conversations. In a May 27 post on the Boogaloo Bois Facebook page, an administrator of the page wrote in his post that “as many times as we’ve addressed our lack of tolerance for racism here I feel like we’ve neglected to take a stand for the lgbtq community within this movement.”
Still, researchers into extremist movements warn against accepting these claims of progressive or left wing values as representations of the group as a whole.
Boogaloo Bois have been popping up at protests across the US, and believe that national protests are moving us closer to war.
The Boogaloos’ presence at nationwide protests has caused confusion and fear among protesters, with many calling them white supremacists, and with governments pointing to them as outside instigators.
Typically, Boogaloos have attended Black Lives Matter protests for one of two reasons. Some are hoping to co-opt the protests to start a civil war, form new militia groups, and feed the flames of what they view as chaos. Generally, the protests are viewed as moving us closer to a Boogaloo.
Others are trying to “protect” cities from looters and rioting that have continued in spite of the largely peaceful protests. The #boogaloo hashtag has been inundated with violent memes, as Vice reported, perhaps indicating that Boogaloo Bois are more interested in stoking discord than the group chooses to let on.
A video posted on Twitter showed a large group of people carrying guns and wearing Hawaiian shirts at a Dallas protest. One of the people, wearing camouflage clothing, held up a “Black Lives Matter” sign.
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Boogaloo boys at Dallas protest yesterday. Any leftist that thinks that these people are on your side needs to realize these are hardcore rightwingers looking to kick off a second civil war. They are not our friends. As always, if you recognize any of these guys hit the DM’s. pic.twitter.com/H99OGA6LJP
In Minneapolis, one Boogaloo Bois follower wore a gas mask and shared a picture of other men who stood by the protests with rifles. “In order to combat the state we must think smarter than them and have a strategic plan. It’s great seeing people that have come prepared within the area,” @fry_cook_mafia wrote in an Instagram post over the weekend.
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One of the pictures he shared showed men who were interviewed by the Minnesota Reformer, a local news organization. “Cops are less likely to tread on people’s rights when there’s other armed people around them,” one of the men told the Minnesota Reformer, adding that they wanted to protect a tobacco store from being looted.
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These guys say they support the protests but not the looting. Showed up to help this tobacco store owner stop people from breaking in pic.twitter.com/x2FMQiQwVK
Boogaloo Bois have also been spotted at protests in North Carolina, Kentucky (see top photo), and Oregon.
“When we see these far-right groups manifesting in the streets and saying that they’re with the protesters, we’re just seeing another instance of the far right attempting to jump into and perhaps derail a left wing, or rather a broad mass protest movement,” Reid Ross said, adding that many of these people are simply engaging in a “vigilante fantasy.”
Even if some of the Boogaloo Bois are attending protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, the rest of the protesters will not easily accept them, given their ties to white supremacy.
“In spite of some efforts, this wariness from protestors and the left-wing will likely continue as long as white supremacist accelerationists are promoting their own concept of the Boogaloo,” the CTEC report said, “and as long as the white supremacists continue to view the Boogaloo Bois as either pawns or allies in their advocacy for a race war.”
Read the original article on Insider