t fi rst glance, the We Are Washington rally might
have looked like an early Fourth of July celebra-
tion, all bright stars-and-stripes Americana. It
was a cool May morning in the state capital,
Olympia, and low clouds were threatening to
ruin the red, white and blue archway of balloons
above the rally stage, the crepe paper behind it
and the cut-out letters propped up in front that
spelled ‘‘FREEDOM.’’ Few people wore masks.
A man with a pistol on his hip meandered
through the several-hundred-person crowd
selling tiny yellow Gadsden fl ags — the ‘‘Don’t
Tread on Me’’ rattlesnake — for $5 each to any-
one who wasn’t already carrying something.
A canopy of marker-drawn signs held above
heads blared complaints about Covid-19 and
the stay-at-home order declared by Gov. Jay
Inslee, at this point in its 69th day. ‘‘0.2% Death
Rate. No Muzzle’’; ‘‘Inslee Is the Real Virus’’;
‘‘Kim Jong Inslee.’’ Some took a more conspir-
atorial tone: ‘‘You Are Being Lied To.’’
Near the back of the crowd was a social-
media-ready selfi e backdrop: a large Q made
of squares of cardboard, lying on the grass in
front of the Capitol building. Below it, a hashtag:
#WWG1WGA, ‘‘Where we go one, we go all.’’ It’s
the rallying cry for QAnon, the conspiracy theory
that at its most basic centers on a Democrat-run
child-sex-traffi cking ring and at its most elabo-
rate involves fi gures like the pope and Joe Biden
having been executed in secret and replaced with
holograms. It might seem, in other words, like
an odd theory to fl oat at a rally that was osten-
sibly about the reopening of the local economy.
But around the country, events like this one had
become a beacon to fringe thinkers: anti-vaxxers,
internet trolls, gun nuts, Proud Boys, hate groups,
antigovernment militias and any other Ameri-
cans who interpreted social-distancing and
face-covering regulations as an infringement of
their constitutional freedoms.
These reopening rallies had become more
than just rallies, allowing everyday Americans —
suspecting a liberal ploy in the shutdown of the
economy and misled by right-wing politicians,
up to and including President Trump, about the
dangers of the coronavirus — to be exposed to
the ideologies of a wide variety of extremists.
As the crowd grew in Olympia, a woman in
a hooded sweatshirt got up onstage to give a
speech and encourage the crowd to join some-
thing called People’s Rights Washington. They
could be a part of it by texting the word RIGHTS
to a fi ve-digit number, which would then enlist
them in a phone tree, allowing any member to
report anything they deem a violation of per-
sonal freedom. ‘‘If there is an emergency, if a
contact tracer shows up at your door, if C.P.S.
shows up at your door, if the Health Department
comes to your work and threatens to shut you
down,’’ she explained, ‘‘we can send a text out
that says, ‘Get to this address right now.’ ’’
Standing at the rear edge of the crowd, I took
a few steps closer when I realized the voice
coming from the stage sounded familiar. It was
Kelli Stewart. She has been a live-streamer at
several federal-court trials I’ve covered in the
West — particularly of the Bundy family in both
Nevada and Oregon. After Ammon Bundy, his
brother Ryan and several other defendants
were acquitted in 2016 of charges related to
occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Ref-
uge in Oregon, Stewart cheered and cried at
the verdict, then paced in front of the court-
house reading from the Constitution. In the
past two months, she has live-streamed from
rallies and from the ‘‘underground church’’ she
opened. For several years, she has referred to
law enforcement as ‘‘Blue ISIS.’’
Now she explained to the crowd in Olympia
that just a few years ago, she was just like all of
them. She was a mother, a Sunday-school teach-
er raising goats on a small farm when the news
of the refuge occupation broke. But it wasn’t
until Robert LaVoy Finicum, a 54-year-old Ari-
zona rancher who served as a spokesman for the
occupation, was shot and killed by the police
that she became an activist. It was her wake-upcall, she said: the moment when the world she
had always known was forever changed.
Stewart is now a fi xture at right-wing rallies
like this one, and as she spoke, she got at some-
thing undeniably true about these gatherings:
This is where everyday people like her can be
reborn, leaving their world behind and sub-
scribing to a new collective truth. This is where
they fi nd fellowship with other people who are
upset enough about the same things, who hold
the same fears and frustrations. This is where
isolation ends, where communion begins.
At the back of this crowd, which was mostly
mothers and grandmothers and church leaders
and business owners and the like, stood a clutch of
men with long guns who didn’t seem to be listen-
ing much to the speeches. They clustered togeth-
er in small groups, their eyes scanning the crowd
behind sunglasses. One man carried a fl ag bear-
ing the logo of the Three Percenters militia: the
Roman numeral III in the center of a ring of stars.
There was a cardboard sign propped up with the
letters ‘‘NWO’’ — New World Order — crossed
out. And in this mix were a couple of men wear-
ing body armor decorated with American-fl ag
patches. One wore a blue-and-white fl oral Hawai-
ian shirt under a desert-sand-colored vest, packed
with as many as 90 extra rounds of ammunition.
The other man had a diff erent patch on his vest.
It read: ‘‘Boogaloo.’’J
ust what the word ‘‘Boogaloo’’ means depends
on whom you ask. In simple terms, it’s the new-
est and youngest subset of the antigovernment
movement, born in the full light of the internet
age — with all the peculiarities that entails. The
name comes from 4chan, the lamentably prolifi c
message board where many memes are born, and
involves the 1984 breakdancing movie ‘‘Breakin’
2: Electric Boogaloo.’’ Though the movie was
panned, the second half of its name had a long
afterlife, eventually wending its way onto forums
and social media, where it became slang for a
fabled coming civil war — a sequel to the fi rst.38 8.23.20