Far-right radicals go all ‘boogaloo’ on U.S. cops
“I became unreasonable.”
Drill down deep enough, to the magna layer of violent loathing and there’s almost a wry, if twisted, logic to it.
If by logic one means seething resentments and hatchetedged grievances.
“I became unreasonable” is a racist meme, among numerous online dog-whistles associated with a particular radical right militant group: the Boogaloo Boys.
Steven Carrillo is an ardent Boogaloo, according to documents unsealed by the FBI this week. He was also an active duty military staff sergeant stationed at the Travis air force base in California, leader of an elite security team that guards aircraft in high-terrorist areas overseas.
The 32-year-old father of two wrote the meme and “BOOG,” in his own blood, on a Toyota Corolla that he car-jacked while fleeing police.
When a pair of Santa Cruz sheriff’s deputies on June 6, following a tip, tracked Carrillo up a winding road to his mountain home, they drove into an ambush. One was killed, the other critically wounded.
Carrillo was already wanted in the drive-by shooting last month of a protective security guard outside a federal courthouse in Oakland, leaning out of a van to spray gunfire across the sentry shack. An associate he’d connected with online drove the vehicle.
A massive demonstration over the police killing of George Floyd had been going on nearby.
And that, allegedly, was the distraction Carrillo had been seeking, with police resources focused on preventing rioting and looting. The trigger point, as well.
“It’s on our coast now, this needs to be nationwide,” Carillo had posted in a group chat, referring to a YouTube video showing a crowd of protesters attacking two California Highway Patrol vehicles. “It’s a great opportunity to target the specialty soup bois. Keep that energy going.”
“Let’s boogie!” replied Robert Alvin Justus Jr., who was all in on the scheme, as the getaway driver.
Bois: Another term for “boys,” as in Boogaloo Bois.
Soup: Shorthand for the “alphabet soup’’ of law enforcement agencies: FBI, ATF, Federal Protective Service (FPS). Carrillo hated police. “They came to Oakland to kill cops,” FBI special agent in charge Jack Bennett told a news conference on Tuesday.
The Boogaloo Boys have been busy at it over the weeks that protests over police brutality and racial injustice raged on America’s streets, tied to at least seven violent incidents, along with several other right wing organizations that have infiltrated the demonstrations.
Yet neither President Donald Trump nor his attorney general, William Barr, made any reference to the alt-right outfits when condemning the mayhem sparked by protests, most of which have actually been peaceful.
Didn’t call out, say, the Proud Boys or the III Percenters or the Boogaloo.
Instead, they cited Antifa “and other radical left-wing groups,” Trump vowing to designate Antifa a terrorist organization, even though the federal government has no legal authority to label a wholly domestic group the way it designates foreign terrorist organizations.
In fact, as detailed in charge sheet records and court documents scrutinized by Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post and National Public Radio, none of the accused are alleged to have Antifa ties.
Among all the cases brought by the Justice Department thus far, the only extremist group mentioned is the “Boogaloo Movement.”
But with his presidency in flames, Trump goes ever harder, beating the radical left tattoo, striking chords that quickens the blood of his red meat base. Who are the Boogaloo? Fundamentally extremist right, pro-gun, anti-government and seeking a catalyst for Civil War 2.0. Boogaloo is that war.
They tend to skew younger than most white supremacist groups. Their silly name began as an online ironic meme in 2012, derived from the 1984 movie “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a sequel to the original “Breakin’,” about break-dancing, which starred Ice-T. Loosely associated as an online phenomenon, they believe — they choose to believe — that another American civil war is imminent and strive to promote it.
Their ideology focuses on visible gun ownership; they’ve shown up at Black Lives Matter rallies bristling with weapons, purportedly to protect demonstrators from police violence, committed to “accelerationist” tactics, that is sowing chaos and stoking political tension to provoke a revolution that would bring down western democracies. But lone-wolf attacks are encouraged for now.
Identifiable by their heavy arms, combat fatigues and distinct Hawaiian shirts. The Hawaiian motif alludes to “the big luau,” an alternative label to Boogaloo, “the big luau” referencing pig (police) roasts.
Not all Boogaloos are white supremacists — some claim to be allies of BLM, which has no credibility — but racism is definitely an underpinning.
They have expanded online over the past six months at breakneck speed, initially active on 4chans’ /k/ forum and Reddit before migrating to other social media platforms and routinely changing the terminology to avoid censoring crackdowns. (Facebook on May 1 banned use of the word “Boogaloo” and some 50 other derivates of that term, recently removing more than 500 Facebook accounts and 300 Instagram accounts associated with Boogaloo.)
Already burgeoning in opposition to gun reforms adopted by some U.S. states, Boogaloos, say law enforcement and hatetracking authorities, seized upon the anti-racism protests of the last couple of months to foment their pie-in-the-sky revolution, coalescing at first around “reopen” rallies amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hijack, amplify and incite. In late May, three Nevada men were arrested on terrorism-related charges as they were headed for downtown Las Vegas with Molotov cocktails, as anti-racism demonstrations were going on. Prosecutors said they intended to ignite violence at the protests. All were self-identified members of the Boogaloo Movement.
In April, an Arkansas man was arrested after threatening to kill a cop on a Facebook Live video. “I feel like hunting the hunters,” he wrote, also referencing “boogaloo,” according to police.
In March, a Missouri man with neo-Nazi ties was shot and killed by the FBI after plotting to bomb a hospital in Kansas City on the first day of the city’s lockdown. The man had told an undercover FBI agent that he wanted “to create enough chaos to kick start a revolution” and referred to his planned attack as “Operation Boogaloo.”
Arrests of Boogaloo adherents have also occurred in Texas, Colorado and Ohio, the New York Times reports, all involving plots to ambush law enforcement. Fringe, but lethal. Just one dimension of white supremacist groups that have gained new footholds online during stay-at-home orders. Moonshot CVE, a Londonbased firm that works against violent extremism, reported a 21 per cent increase in white supremacist content on Google in April in lockdown states.
Boogaloo is a relative newcomer to the radical reactionary rogues gallery, but climbing fast.
“Elements of the Boogaloo have evolved from a gathering of militia enthusiasts and Second Amendment advocates into a full-fledged violent extremist group, which inspires lone wolf actors and cell-like actors alike,” said Joel Finkelstein, director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks misinformation and manipulation online.
“Given recent events and the inability of law enforcement to grasp and intercept this new mode of distributed terror, we think an increase in these kinds of violent attacks against police are almost inevitable.”
Research by the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino shows there have been 27 homicides connect to far-right extremists (excluding the May shootings in Oakland and Santa Cruz) since 2019.
All these toxic elements converged in the California bloodshed ascribed to Carrillo and Justus.
The unsealed FBI documents assert that, as protesters flooded the streets, Carrillo sat at his computer and wrote on Facebook: “Go to the protests and support our cause. Show them the real targets. Use their anger to fuel our cause. Think outside the box. We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage.”
On May 23, a night of Oakland’s most chaotic clashes between protesters and police, Carrillo sprayed the guard hut with gunfire. As Justus drove them afterward, Carrillo crowed, according to the affidavit: “Did you see how they f------ fell!” (This detail came from Justus, who, accompanied by his parents, subsequently turned himself in to the FBI.)
The shooting sparked an eight-day manhunt that ended at Carillo’s isolated house after someone reported spotting a white van that appeared to contain firearms and bombmaking equipment. Police would find those items, Boogaloo patches and insignia, ejected cartridges connecting the shootings in Oakland and Santa Cruz.
During the gun battle with Santa Cruz deputies, Carrillo was shot in the hip, yet managed to escape, carjacking a Toyota Camry at gunpoint, allegedly, abandoning that car but not before scrawling boogaloo-linked phrases on its hood. He was eventually tackled and disarmed by a civilian after stumbling onto his property and demanding the homeowner’s car keys.
Carrillo is sitting in an Oakland jail, charged with murder and attempted murder in both shooting episodes. He could face the death penalty if convicted. Justus is charged with aiding and abetting murder in the shooting death of the guard. “I became unreasonable.” The genesis for that Boogaloo-adopted meme?
Marvin Heemayer, a 52-yearold muffler repair mechanic, ex-air force, so profoundly frustrated with what he described as a corrupt mayor and city council — he’d been entangled for years with a zoning bylaw dispute and other local violations — that he retrofitted a bulldozer, and, on June 4, 2004, went on a rampage, demolishing 13 buildings in the town of Granby, Colo., including the town hall, before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot.
What Heemayer actually wrote in notes left behind: “I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable.”