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Army reservist, recognized each other and their
online friends by their body armor. Lynam was
an administrator for the group, which formed
earlier that month.
Parshall, who went by the nickname Kiwi, had
served in the Navy, and his Facebook profi le sug-
gests he didn’t much care for it. (‘‘This isn’t China,
and I can say whatever I feel,’’ he wrote in 2010.
‘‘Don’t join the navy!!’’) In 2015, just days after
Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people inside
a church in Charleston, S.C., Parshall changed
his profi le picture to a Confederate fl ag. Lynam,
a Nevada native 12 years his junior, was a former
altar boy who went to join the Army Reserve.
But their Facebook pages showed an interest in
similar topics: Lynam liked the page for ‘‘Being
Libertarian’’ and was a member of a group called
‘‘BoojieBastards: Intelligence and Surveillance.’’
Now, in Las Vegas, as all around them people
honked their horns and waved signs during a
‘‘drive-thru protest,’’ the men talked of making
plans to overthrow the United States govern-
ment. Lynam said that he didn’t see the Booga-
loo as ‘‘just another militia group to sit around
and be friends with.’’ Parshall had taken out a
life-insurance policy, he told the others, and
he accepted that their actions — whatever they
ended up being — might get him killed. They
didn’t know that someone in their midst would
soon become a paid F.B.I. informant.
The group planned a series of long hiking trips
around the red Nevada desert. During each, the
men — paranoid about surveillance — would
leave their fi rearms and phones in a car, before
hiking on trails in body armor. They discussed
their desire to diff erentiate their group from anti-
government militia groups, which were, accord-
ing to the informant, ‘‘old-style’’ groups that are
‘‘mostly populated by older individuals and
individuals who had antigovernment leanings
without being prepared to take violent action.’’
During a late-April hike through the des-
ert with other members of Battle Born Igloo,
Parshall fl oated a plan to destroy a National
Park Service fee station at Lake Mead with a
fi rebomb. The target had a deeper signifi cance:
Six years earlier, the rancher Cliven Bundy
called for the fee station’s destruction during
his April 2014 standoff with federal Bureau of
Land Management and National Park Service
agents. Bundy, aided by militias from around the
country who off ered their support, took up arms
against government offi cers over two decades
of unpaid grazing fees he owed, which Bundy
believed the government had no right to levy on
ranchers. And when those outnumbered offi cers
backed down and the family declared it a vic-
tory, it inspired others to go even further. Two
months later, a married couple named Jerad and
Amanda Miller, who had been present at the
standoff , killed two Las Vegas police offi cers as
they ate their lunch, draping a Gadsden fl ag and
a swastika over one victim and pinning a note
to the other’s uniform that read: ‘‘This is the
beginning of the revolution.’’ Battle Born Igloo
thought that in targeting that specifi c fee station,
their own group might inspire copycat groups.
Though the Nevada Boogaloo group was
clearly taking inspiration from the same old
guard of right-wing militias they claimed to
resent, their diff erences became more evident in
late May, as the Black Lives Matter protests grew.
While militias fl ocked to certain cities claiming
to protect them from rioting and looting, the
Nevada men, according to the paid informant,
saw an opportunity in Black Lives Matter, which
they perceived to be anti-law-enforcement. To a
grand jury, the F.B.I.’s paid informant confi rmed
that Battle Born Igloo was not just antigovern-
ment but also anarchist — in Lynam’s words,
‘‘antiracist, anti-tyrant, 100 percent pro-individ-
ual liberty.’’ In late May, Lynam, Parshall and
the others shifted their focus to twisting the
protests for racial justice into a tool for their
own nihilistic ends. They considered throwing
Molotov cocktails at police cars, hoping that
might cause protesters to attack offi cers and
cause a riot. They eventually discussed a new
idea: destroying a power substation, again in
the hope of starting a riot.
On the night of May 30, according to pros-
ecutors, Lynam, Parshall and another military
veteran, William Loomis, readied an arsenal
of Molotovs, fi reworks, guns and ammunition
to bring to a Black Lives Matter protest in
downtown Las Vegas. But before they could
get there, they were swarmed by F.B.I. agents
and arrested. In June, all three men pleaded
not guilty to state and federal charges including
possession of unregistered fi rearms and con-
spiracy to commit an act of terrorism. (Through
a lawyer, Parshall denied all charges against
him. Requests for comment from Lynam’s and
Loomis’s lawyers went unanswered.)
About a month before the planned attack,
Lynam did an interview with the Las Vegas
talk-radio hosts Brian Shapiro and JD Sharp,
whom he met at a reopening rally.
‘‘I appreciate you joining us,’’ Shapiro said.
‘‘How are you?’’
On the recording, Lynam sounds young and
unsure of himself: ‘‘Uh, good. Thank you for
having me.’’
For most of the interview, the chatty hosts
argue with Lynam about gun rights, but they
also want him to explain why Battle Born Igloo
came to an otherwise small, peaceful reopening
rally armed to the teeth. Were they a new militia?
‘‘Absolutely not,’’ Lynam insisted. ‘‘We’re
aware there’s those that might be a little terrifi ed
of it,’’ he told the hosts at one point. ‘‘The point
isn’t to make people afraid, it’s to show people
and to bring up a dialogue.’’
If that sounded like a lie, it wasn’t the only
one he told. He had also given the hosts an alias.
He told them his name was Duncan Lemp.A
round 4:30 in the morning on March 12, a SWAT
team in Montgomery County, Md., raided the
home of a 21-year-old computer programmer
named Duncan Socrates Lemp. They had
received an anonymous tip that he was in illegal
possession of a fi rearm, and they were issued
a no-knock warrant, allowing them to enter
unannounced. A SWAT unit approached Lemp’s
home, where he lived with his parents, brother
and girlfriend, and, according to Rene Sandler,
the family’s lawyer, shattered his bedroom win-
dow, tossing fl ash-bang grenades inside, and
then began shooting through the window, fatally
wounding Lemp before they even entered the
home. (The Montgomery County Police Depart-
ment, which declined to comment, has given a
diff erent account of events, saying that Lemp
was armed and refused to comply with their
commands.) Lemp’s pregnant girlfriend, who
had been sleeping in his bed, was forced to stay
put with his lifeless body for over an hour.
On Facebook, Lemp called himself a Boo-
galoo boi. The Boogaloo has since taken him
up as a cause celebre, comparing his death to
that of Breonna Taylor, the Black woman who
was shot by Louisville police offi cers executing
a no-knock warrant. At a protest over Lemp’s
death in April at the Montgomery police head-
quarters, men in Hawaiian shirts thrust the
Boogaloo fl ag in the air. People around the
world raised over $17,000 for his funeral and
the family’s legal fees in a GoFundMe campaign.
In three days, they cleared out all 125 items in
a baby registry for his unborn child. And then
they began to invoke his name as their own.
In a YouTube video posted in June, which
a man recorded after Virginia police offi cers