‘Boogaloo bois’: America’s newest extremist threat
Far-right movement shares ideology with white supremacist groups
Afar-right movement whose followers have appeared heavily armed at recent US protests has suddenly become one of the biggest worries of law enforcement, after one member killed two California police officers.
Few had heard of the Boogaloo
movement before this year. But on Tuesday, the Justice Department charged one of its followers, California Air Force Sergeant Steven Carrillo, with the drive-by killing of an Oakland police officer during the May 29 Black Lives Matter protests.
Eight days later, Carillo killed another policeman in an ambush after his van was discovered — laden with weapons and bomb-making materials — near Santa Cruz.
After he was captured, Carillo wrote “boog” on the hood of a car in his own blood, along with “I became unreasonable,” a popular resistance meme in the extreme right.
Carillo’s killings marked the rise of the stridently anti-police and anti-authority movement, which promotes a “boogaloo” — a new civil war.
They came just after the May 30 arrest in Las Vegas of three self-styled “Boogaloo bois” who had assembled weapons and Molotov cocktails with the aim of sparking violence during a Black Lives Matter protest.
Other recent cases include a follower in Texas charged on April 11 with making a terroristic threat after he posted a video saying he was going to ambush and murder a police officer.
A Denver, Colorado Boogaloo supporter was arrested on May 1 with pipe bombs in his possession ahead of a rally against coronavirus restrictions that he had planned to attend.
And also in early May, police arrested members of a heavily armed gang of white men with Boogaloo ties in West Odessa, Texas after they confronted a police team seeking to close a bar that had opened in defiance of pandemic lockdown rules.