Illustration by Tomer Hanuka 43
pulled him over, he tells them his name is Dun-
can Lemp. Stephen Parshall, of Battle Born
Igloo, used a logo from one of Lemp’s compa-
nies as his profi le photo on Facebook. By late
July, fi ve Boogaloo bois who showed up to a
Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, Ore.,
told a reporter that they were there in support
of the protesters, adding that the police had
killed some of ‘‘our own people.’’ ‘‘Never for-
get Duncan Lemp,’’ one said. ‘‘Never forget,’’
his colleagues echoed. On Lemp’s girlfriend’s
Instagram page, Boogaloo bois have promised
her that they will one day avenge his death.
In stickers slapped to street signs, in Booga-
loo groups and in YouTube comments, members
repeat the words ‘‘we are Duncan Lemp’’ or ‘‘his
name was Duncan Lemp’’ like mantras. In the
last few months of his life, Lemp used social
media to show off antigovernment slogans and
Boogaloo memes. His mother remembers ask-
ing him what it meant. ‘‘For him it was about
Second Amendment rights,’’ she told me. In
one Instagram photo, captioned simply ‘‘III%,’’
Lemp holds a rifl e and grins from the back of a
group of armed, camoufl aged men. In another
post, which appears to be a screenshot from awebsite, hands thrust rifl es in the air. Below are
the words of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, ‘‘sic
semper tyrannis’’ — thus always to tyrants — the
same words that adorned Timothy McVeigh’s
T-shirt the morning in 1995 that he bombed the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City, killing 168 people.
In the three-decade life span of modern
right-wing militias, they have amassed some-
thing of a canon of martyrs. There’s the story
of Gordon Kahl, a highly decorated World War
II veteran and anti-Semitic conspiracy theo-
rist who refused to pay his taxes. When law
enforcement tried to serve him a warrant in
1983, he and his son killed two U.S. Marshals,
before Kahl went on the run for four months
and was killed in a shootout in Arkansas —
but not before killing another law-enforce-
ment offi cer. There’s Robert LaVoy Finicum,
a leader at the 2016 armed occupation of the
Malheur wildlife reserve in Oregon, who died
after speeding away from the police, hopping
out of his vehicle and repeatedly yelling ‘‘Go
ahead and shoot me!’’ while, according to law
enforcement, reaching for a loaded pistol.
At the May reopening rally in Olympia, Kelli
Stewart told the crowd to read the stories of
Finicum and Kahl when they got home.
There’s the Weaver family, the white sep-
aratists at the center of 1992’s Ruby Ridge
standoff , which ended with three dead: Vicki
and Samuel Weaver and one U.S. Marshal. And,
of course, the botched assault on the Branch
Davidian compound in Waco in 1993, which
ended in the deaths of at least 80 civilians
(including 20 minors) and four A.T.F. agents —
an event Kris Hunter, the Texas Boogaloo boi,
says he recalls seeing unfold when he was 12.
‘‘I saw the tanks rolling down the freeway,’’
he told me. Maybe the Branch Davidians had
broken the law, he conceded. ‘‘Does that mean
that people need to burn alive in their homes
and they need to be sieged for weeks at a time?
That’s something that is alarming and should
be alarming to all Americans.’’
Timothy McVeigh was in Waco during the
siege — he had driven there from Florida to
see it — and it was the event that fi nally pushed
him over the edge, the reason he went on to
bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City.
McVeigh’s story demonstrates how powerful
even the most absurd ideas can be to disaff ect-
ed men with dreams of violence. A wayward
young gulf war veteran, he drove in looping
circles around the United States in the early
1990s, befriending other people at gun shows
who shared his passion for fi rearms, which
survivalists like McVeigh believed would one
day become more valuable than American cur-
rency. At those events, he met other people
who also believed in antigovernment conspir-
acies, and who found solace and inspiration in
a book he sold copies of at those gun shows:The New York Times Magazine