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‘‘The Turner Diaries,’’ a 1978 novel written under
a pseudonym by the white supremacist William
Luther Pierce. To McVeigh, it was more than just
a novel. It was a battle plan.
‘‘The Turner Diaries’’ is a neo-Nazi hero’s tale:
a book that tells the fi ctional story of Earl Turner,
a character so aggrieved at the state of the world
that he joins an underground terrorist cell. In the
story, after the American government has taken
guns away from civilians and begun systemati-
cally subordinating white people to other racial
groups, Turner and his compatriots wage a cam-
paign of terror in an eff ort to eliminate all other
races from the planet. It is a pornographically
violent fantasy that fi nds glory in ethnic cleans-
ing, where judges, politicians, actors and jour-
nalists — among others deemed ‘‘race traitors’’
— are killed in mass hangings on what comes to
be known as the Day of the Rope. At one point,
Turner’s accomplices park a truck with a fertil-
izer bomb under a federal building and detonate
it — crippling the government at a key moment.
McVeigh was hoping to deliver a blow to the
government so forceful that it would bring it to
its knees and ensure another Waco would never
happen. In the days leading up to the bombing,
McVeigh was said to have warned his sister of a
coming revolution against the federal govern-
ment. When he was arrested, the F.B.I. found a
photocopied page from the book in his car with
the following passage highlighted: ‘‘The real value
of all our attacks today lies in the psychologi-
cal impact.... [The politicians and bureaucrats]
learned this afternoon that not one of them is
beyond our reach. They can huddle behind
barbed wire and tanks in the city, and they can
hide behind the concrete walls of their country
estates, but we can still fi nd them and kill them.’’
This fantasy about a cataclysmic end of Amer-
ica as we know it is the thing that binds the Boo-
galoo to a long legacy of violent homegrown ter-
rorists in this country. The similarities between
McVeigh and the Boogaloo are countless if you
look for them. He was a veteran. He wasn’t part of
an established group. He didn’t subscribe to one
ideology or follow some charismatic leader. He
was a guy whose beliefs about the government
were informed by what happened at Waco and
conspiracy theories and a badly written book.
And yet, the Oklahoma City bombing remains
the largest act of domestic terrorism the United
States has ever seen.
Boogaloo bois might not be driving the coun-
try selling books at gun shows, but through
memes, they share the shorthand version of the
ideas that inspired McVeigh. Guns are currency.
Martyrs are never forgotten. Even the Day of the
Rope is having a second life as a hashtag shared
by members of a movement that some try to
insist is not racist. There is no Boogaloo man-
ifesto — not yet, at least. But there is a version
of the Boogaloo fl ag that has been going around
the internet more and more lately. It’s that same
black-and-white fl ag with the red strip of fl owers,
but this time, on all the stripes, there are names:His name was Eric Garner.
Her name was Vicki Weaver.
His name was Robert LaVoy Finicum.
Her name was Breonna Taylor.
His name was Duncan Lemp.After the late-May shooting of Offi cer Under-
wood in Oakland, it would take eight more days
for the authorities to receive a tip about a white
van with no plates and a mismatched hubcap
abandoned on the side of a curving, wooded
road deep in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains,
75 miles to the south. Guns, ammunition and
bomb-making supplies could be seen through
the windows. Authorities tracked the van’s owner
to a house in Ben Lomond, 20 minutes outside
Santa Cruz — the home of Steven Carrillo.
In photographs, Carrillo has doughy cheeks and
a weightlifter’s build. He married his high school
sweetheart, who was also in the Air Force, and
they had two children. Carrillo’s wife committed
suicide in 2018, and friends of his have speculated
in the media that the experience changed him. In
the spring of 2020, prosecutors say, Carrillo met
another Northern California man in a Boogaloo
group on Facebook: 30-year-old Robert Justus.
Carrillo would eventually recruit Justus to drive
his van in Oakland on May 29. Prosecutors believe
Carrillo was the shooter. (Justus, escorted by his
parents, turned himself in to the F.B.I. on June 11.
He is currently in custody, charged with aiding and
abetting murder and aiding and abetting attempt-
ed murder; he pleaded not guilty.)
The Carrillo house in Ben Lomond is off
a gravelly, shaded road. That day in June, a
group of Santa Cruz County sheriff ’s deputies
approached the property, and as they did, a hail
of nine-millimeter bullets ripped through two of
their uniforms — killing Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller,
38, and seriously wounding another offi cer.
There was an explosion, and then Carrillo —
in a royal blue shirt and khaki pants, bleeding
from a wound in his right leg — sprinted from
the property and down the road. He carjacked an
approaching white Toyota Camry at gunpoint. He
sped away but abandoned the car minutes later.
Erik Thom was driving home to Santa Cruz
through Ben Lomond when he saw signs on the
highway about a roadblock and an active shooter.
He pulled off at a marijuana dispensary and asked
a woman in the parking lot what was going on.
‘‘All of a sudden I hear this ‘Help! Help!
Help!’ ’’ he told me. He grabbed his dog, Brown,
and sprinted around the corner toward a house.
The woman followed him, recording video on
her smartphone.
Two men were wrestling on the ground. One
was the man everyone was looking for: Steven
Carrillo. Brown sank his teeth into Carrillo’s arm,
and Thom aided the other man — the residentof the home, where Carrillo had tried to take
another car — in restraining him. In the strug-
gle, Carrillo dropped a pistol. Only when it hit
the ground, Thom says, did he notice what else
was already there: an AR-15 and a pipe bomb.
‘‘This is what the roadblock was about,’’ he
recalls thinking. ‘‘This is the active shooter.’’
‘‘I was putting a little bit of pressure on his arm,
and he said, ‘Hey, dude, lay off my arm,’ and I said,
‘[expletive] you,’ ’’ Thom says. ‘‘And he said, ‘I’m
done fi ghting the fi ght.’ He said it twice.’’ Then he
uttered something about Afghanistan. Thom’s still
not sure what, but he says in that moment, not
knowing anything about what had happened in
the minutes and days before, he felt bad for him.
Thom told me he was sympathetic to those with
P.T.S.D., and he had a cousin who had died during
a confrontation with the police.
The men held Carrillo down until the police
arrived and cuff ed him. As the offi cers grasped
Carrillo’s arms, leading him away, he taunted
them. ‘‘I’m sick of these goddamn police,’’ he
yelled at the stone-faced offi cers. ‘‘Listen! Are
you listening?’’
Later, investigators found that Carrillo’s
home, too, was fi lled with improvised explo-
sives, and sources told local reporters they think
they ‘‘interrupted something big.’’ (Carrillo has
pleaded not guilty to federal charges and is
being held without bail; his attorney declined
to comment for this article.) When they found
the white Toyota Camry Carrillo had carjacked,
they discovered something more Carrillo want-
ed them to hear.
Before abandoning the car, Carrillo seems to
have dipped his fi ngers in his open leg wound
and painted three messages across the hood of
the car. None of them were his own ideas.
He wrote ‘‘stop the duopoly’’ — a reference
to the dominance of the Republican and Demo-
cratic Parties in the American political system, a
fi xation of many Boogaloo bois.
He wrote ‘‘I became unreasonable’’ — yet
another Boogaloo meme, the words of a welder
named Marvin Heemeyer, who in 2004 fabricat-
ed a nearly indestructible ‘‘killdozer,’’ a modifi ed
earth mover outfi tted with a .50-caliber rifl e, and
plowed it through 13 buildings in the town of
Granby, Colo. It was an act of revenge over a
land dispute. When he was fi nished, he shot
himself. He is considered a martyr by antigov-
ernment extremists.
And Carrillo wrote one more thing. He wanted
the whole world to know what this was, to send a
message that the killing of two law-enforcement
offi cers was, perhaps, the fi rst shot of a new kind
of war — one that may have started on the inter-
net, but one that is already starting to play out
in real life. It was, in a way, his manifesto, his
confession that conspiracy theories and memes
found in him the perfect host. This was what he
was willing to risk his life for.
In his blood, he wrote: ‘‘BOOG.’’