Illustration by Tomer Hanuka 39
To some white supremacists, it means a race war.
To others, it was all just a joke. But many oth-
ers take it seriously, and to them it means a less
well-defi ned cataclysm touched off , or sped up
by, any number of groups who share antigovern-
ment ideas and a deep love of fi rearms.
The Boogaloo is not just an event; it’s a
movement of people, too. They call themselves
‘‘Boogalooers’’ or ‘‘Boogaloo bois.’’ Most seem
to have extreme libertarian politics, with a
heavy emphasis on Second Amendment rights.
The Boogaloo is leaderless, and its goals diff er
depending on which Facebook or Telegram
group you’re hanging out in. Some of these
men claim to be antiracist, while others hold
white-supremacist beliefs and warn of an
impending white genocide. While some Boo-
galoo pages on Facebook feature periodic talk
of racial justice and urgent needs to address
climate change, many others are fi lled with
memes featuring neo-Nazi black suns. If there
is one thing that binds the Boogaloo together
besides guns and Hawaiian shirts, it is a fi rm
anti-authority, anti-law-enforcement stance —
and a willingness, if not an outright desire, to
bring about the collapse of American society.When I spoke to Kris Hunter, a 39-year-old
Boogaloo boi from Waco, Texas, he painted the
movement as just wanting to help. Hunter told
me he and his compatriots feel their hands have
been forced. ‘‘A lot of the violence perpetrated by
the government, police brutality, foreign wars,
civilian casualties, no-knock raids — I guess the
way we viewed it was: ‘How in the world are we
supposed to stand up against this?’ ’’
I reached Hunter through Tree of Liberty,
a website that seems to be acting as a public
face for a movement that, by and large, con-
gregates on private social-media pages. He says
his group — the United States Boogalier Corps,
by his estimate 80 percent military veterans —
doesn’t take this self-appointed duty lightly. He
pointed to the Boston Massacre of 1770, when
fi ve colonists were shot by British soldiers. ‘‘That
was this moment when both the British and col-
onists realized we have run out of all peaceful
options, and now they’re literally killing us out
in the open,’’ he said. ‘‘We want the American
people to understand that they have the consti-
tutional authority to defend themselves against
unconstitutional oppression.’’ But he insisted the
movement does not want any actual confronta-
tion with government forces.
This is not at all an uncommon stance among
right-wing militias, which the Boogaloo both
resembles and diverges from. And to truly under-
stand the Boogaloo, you must fi rst understand the
militia movement that took root in the United
States in the 1990s. The standoff between the
white-supremacist Weaver family and the A.T.F.
and the F.B.I. at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and the siege
of the Branch Davidians’ compound at Waco led
to a rapid expansion in their ranks, but broader
societal dislocations were in the background, too.
The United Nations and NAFTA, for example, fi g-
ure prominently in militia ideology, often claimed
to be signs of a so-called New World Order. ‘‘Peo-
ple get sucked into these movements for a bunch
of diff erent reasons,’’ says Travis McAdam, for-
mer executive director of the Montana Human
Rights Network, a progressive organization that
does research on the state’s extremists. ‘‘For some
people it’s guns or environmental regulations,
or some people don’t like people of color. You
have people brought into this wide opening of
the funnel cloud for various reasons.’’
But Boogaloo bois ‘‘are making their way
through the funnel cloud,’’ McAdam says. And
like militias, they’re arming up for the future. But
there’s a key diff erence. With militias, ‘‘there’s
always that imminent war coming, there’s
always that invasion by One World forces,’’ he
says. ‘‘It never happened, but it was always going
to happen. Whereas with the Boogaloo stuff ,
there is a piece of that that is like, ‘We want to
make that happen.’ ’’
The Boogaloo has thrived in an environment
rife with entry points to the militia funnel cloud
— the nihilistic swamps of social media and