Episode 96: The Boogaloo Boys feat Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards
Recently, armed groups of men sporting Hawaiian shirts and other references to the "boogaloo", "big igloo" or "big luau" are showing up to protests and making themselves more visible online. We are joined by Bellingcat journalist and podcast host Robert Evans who'se been out in the streets documenting protests and getting tear-gassed. He'll help us sort out far-right ideology from civil war fetishism and understand a group that is bonded by certain common beliefs and a whole lot of ironic memes.
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SOURCES
QAnon News
https://www.unionleader.com/news/crime/we-dont-want-to-die-father-livestreams-multi-town-police-chase-with-5-kids-in/article_b4663e11-e42c-51ca-8067-c10803777ef8.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/perkins-greene-qanon-2020-elections
Boogaloo
https://apnews.com/6223153093f08fa910c4ab445771b773
https://www.postandcourier.com/news/second-arrest-of-a-boogaloo-boy-suspect-made-after-violent-columbia-demonstrations/article_9e4fdf5c-a76f-11ea-8217-ef9830925b24.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/what-boogaloo-how-online-calls-violent-uprising-are-getting-organized-n1138461
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/feds-warn-violent-opportunists-infiltrating-protests-emboldened-attack/story?id=71040109
https://www.westernjournal.com/exclusive-gen-flynn-forces-evil-want-steal-freedom-dark-night-god-stands-us/
Welcome, listener, to the 96th chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Boogaloo Boys episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Today, we lean our wary eyes towards the Boogaloo Boys.
If you've tuned into any protest coverage, you may have spotted groups of these heavily armed men watching from the sidelines in their now emblematic Hawaiian shirts.
What they're waiting for, and willing to participate in, is a second American Civil War.
Many are virulent racists with far-right belief systems, but others confound expectations when it comes to both their politics and goals.
Travis, his face lit with the flames of a million tiki torches, will give us some background and context on the movement before our interview this week with journalist and podcaster Robert Evans.
Now, he's been live-streaming protest coverage from the ground, mostly in Portland, Oregon, where things are regularly popping off, and there's... I mean, he's wiping tear gas out of his eyes, like, almost every live stream I see.
Yeah, he's white.
It is dramatic viewing whenever he's on the ground.
So we'll be speaking to him and asking him, among other things, what the future holds for the Boogaloo Boys.
But before all that...
The big story of the week.
Of course, QAnon follower positioned to become the first QAnon member of Congress after primary victory.
Wow.
So it finally happened.
God.
A QAnon follower became a hair's breadth away from entering the highest halls of American power after Marjorie Taylor Greene won a plurality of the votes in the Republican primary race for Georgia's 14th district.
We expected the results to be a mess, and so we were giving background and looking at her videos, and then someone already sent in numbers and they were just outrageous, and she ended up, yeah, winning with a crazy margin.
She destroyed.
She ended up crushing it.
We also had her opponent on another stream on Thursday, Kevin Van Alstel, and spoke to him about his platform.
He'll be facing whoever wins the runoff, but presumably her, with her lead in November.
Which has led me to create the hashtag Kevin versus QAnon.
I think it's good.
I think it could do some business.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So she didn't do well enough to get the majority vote.
So she and the second place finisher in that race, John Cowan, will face off a runoff election on August 11th.
Honestly, this is kind of fucked up because she got over 40% of the vote.
I feel like if you get over 40% and the next person down is like 20, the people have spoken.
I don't think that is a true...
The Republicans have spoken even closest to the biggest problem with American politics.
Is that a plural?
Help John Cowan beat her?
I mean, he's a fucking lunatic too.
A gun-toting lunatic as well.
He doesn't necessarily believe in the storm.
Okay, so we're de-escalating fascists just into hard right now.
This is good.
Excellent.
Good progression.
So, yeah, her district is considered a Republican stronghold, and she has received endorsements from mainstream conservative figures like Congressman Jim Jordan, Charlie Kirk, and the organization Students for Trump.
So after her win, Trump tweeted out these words of support to her.
A big winner!
Congratulations.
Yeah, congratulations.
You know, I kind of got to hand it to Georgia because I really thought that the first QAnon
Congress member would come from Florida or Arizona.
Yeah.
But, um...
A big winner congratulations is a bit like I picked up a birthday card and didn't even
sign it.
Yeah, it's...
That's a hallmark statement.
It's almost surprisingly generic.
Usually you would get something from him that'd be like, amazing to see you beat the schoolboy John Cowan by 20 points.
Amazing to see her bench press him into infinity.
She has powerful arms and one day I hope she can control the Congress for me.
If I didn't know any better, I would say that it's almost as if he's distancing himself, just the tiniest bit.
Yeah.
As he retweets QAnon nonstop and talks about the storm.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about just how Q-pilled Marjorie Taylor Greene is, because sometimes when we talk about someone who is a QAnon candidate, that might mean that they tweeted the QAnon hashtag one time.
That counts.
But in this case, she was deeply involved.
She was involved in the community starting at November 2017, just a month after the first Q drop, and she continued to be involved in QAnon as recently as December of 2018.
In one 2017 livestream video, Marjorie Taylor Greene promoted the belief that Q was a government inside source.
Now, Q is a patriot.
He is someone that very much loves his country, and he's on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump, okay?
Now, he appears to have connections at the highest levels, alright?
He's posted many things that seem to verify that he is the real deal, alright?
So many of... it's not just someone poking in the dark, messing with people.
So pretty, pretty unambiguous, I would say.
Not poking in the dark.
It makes it sound like some people have been telling her she's poking in the dark and messing with people.
It's not nonsense.
It's not not calling me for three months because I mentioned it.
Now, she also believes the false theory that there are thousands of secret sealed indictments that were about to be unsealed to reveal the corruption of the deep state and the cabal.
And then also, the other clue is, which I talked about earlier in this video, is the large number of sealed federal indictments, which is now at 4,289, which is just unheard of.
which is just unheard of. It's such a massive amount. Okay, so now, Q has put out there that many high-level officials
will soon be arrested. And it will actually be the drain the swamp scenario that we have always been wanting to
happen.
Um...
He says that once the corruption and the type of corruption is revealed to the American people, it will trigger something he calls the awakening.
Now, I'm only guessing that the awakening, he says it will be like an event, something that we've never witnessed in American history.
But it will cause Americans to unite behind President Trump and his administration in order to completely clean house, okay?
You guys, if that happens, we will be so happy.
I see all those hearts and I love it.
If that happens, we will be so happy.
I really, truly pray that this is true.
Okay, so again, just to go over it, high-level officials will soon be arrested and hopefully that's what we're seeing from all those sealed federal indictments.
I mean, I just see Sarah Connor when she's just a regular mom.
And, you know, the woman that we now know is fully trained Sarah Connor.
She is actually going to the war with the guns.
She's ready this time.
And to be honest, she looks a lot better than her right now.
I'm not so happy that this person's potential psychological recovery means that she's becoming an effective fascist that can win electoral victory.
Yeah, she almost looks more youthful with more energy in the new 2019 campaign vids.
But also you get that ancient yearning for punishment and justice.
It's like, we've all been waiting for this before 2017 too.
It's just like, when is God going to come and cleanse these streets?
It's taxi driver shit.
Now, when the Washington Post reached out to Greene about her QAnon beliefs, she simply released a statement that attacked the newspaper and also attacked Stacey Abrams, AOC, and Nancy Pelosi.
Her strategy apparently is just to attack everything instead of actually addressing her QAnon beliefs.
Yeah, she has all of the, definitely all the women of color that we've established.
She has a little PNG cutout with a transparent background.
And they've been slapping them in like these weird, just like lining them up in videos and then having it turn to red and like flames over their face while it says communism in giant red letters.
I mean, this stuff makes the red scare look subtle and compassionate.
The other big QAnon candidate, Jo Rae Perkins, who won the Republican primary for an Oregon Senate seat, congratulated her fellow QAnon follower.
Here's what she told the blog Talking Points Memo.
Most of the people who read Q posts are people who want to make sure they are fully informed.
Many do their own research on what is posted.
They don't just accept as fact what is shared.
We have learned to either use or improve our critical thinking skills.
So, yes, I am happy to see another candidate that reads the Q Post as part of her pool of research and information source to have won the Georgia primary.
Despite the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene may be joining Congress in a matter of months, current Congress members had nothing to say about it.
The Washington Post was unable to get a comment from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy The NRC does not get involved in primaries.
In general elections, we focus on districts that will deliver us the majority, not R plus 27 safe seats.
committee, on the other hand, released a statement that simply said this.
The NRC does not get involved in primaries. In general elections, we focus on districts
that will deliver us the majority, not R plus 27 safe seats.
So it seems to me that both Greene and the GOP leadership are basically uninterested
in addressing Greene's professed QAnon beliefs in any way.
Well, yes, it's incredibly inconvenient.
Yeah.
It's a little awkward.
I was curious, where did she get her QAnon beliefs in the first place?
In that same livestream that I played earlier, she says that she actually got them from QAnon promoter Liz Crokin.
And Q is telling us, he's an anonymous source, and he's on 4chan.
More and more people are starting to talk about him.
I first heard about him from Liz Kroken and just saw some of her posts and she's been yelling all along that Mueller wears a white hat.
She's been saying all along that he is a good guy in this and he's really going after the swamp creatures and that it's under the guise that he's looking into Trump-Russian collusion.
If she's correct, gosh, she's gonna be a winning pick, so I think that's awesome.
But yes, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this whole people out.
Take this whole people out?
Wow, just take them all out.
I'm of the opinion that this is probably just going to be the start.
I can't predict the future, but here's how I think it's going to go.
After she gets elected, she's going to be the founding member of the House QAnon caucus, along with Congress members Jim Jordan, David Nunes, and Matt Gaetz.
And as more QAnon followers get elected in the 2022 and 2024 elections, I assume that the House will form a QAnon subcommittee underneath the Intelligence Permanent Select Committee.
So there'll just be a QAnon block.
I mean, essentially what they'll do, Travis, what you're describing, is actually just forming QAnon.
It'll be a secret group within, well, maybe not so secret, but a group within the government that is pushing for the prosecution of Democrats.
Hey, wouldn't they become the Q team?
Once again, we're just waiting for Hold on.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I would like to know what Marjorie Taylor's green is on congressional oversight of the Q operation.
Because after all, this is just sort of another unaccountable op by an out-of-control intelligence agency.
Don't we need elected representatives to oversee what the Q team is doing?
No, no Travis, because the secret op is doing what we want it to do, so therefore we gotta back off and only focus on ops that are doing things that we're not so fond of.
It's not a fascist talking point to say they're gonna use death squads on us one day so we should probably just start now.
You know, I just want to take a moment to reflect upon the fact that this is a podcast dedicated to studying the dumbest shit on the internet, right?
And then starting next year, in all likelihood, we will be reporting on Congress, the happenings of Congress, without changing the focus of our podcast whatsoever.
Any political movement would be excited to get an early activist to become a member of Congress in just three years.
I feel like that would be a stunning victory.
Green will not be unopposed.
She's going to be challenged in that election by her Democratic opponent, Kevin Van Osdale, and we did speak with him on a recent Twitch livestream.
You can watch a conversation with him.
He is massively outspent on that race, and anyone who wishes to know Kevin's stance on the issues or donate to his campaign should visit just kevinvanosdale.com.
That last name is spelled A-U-S-D-A-L.
For my next story, a QAnon follower arrested after live streaming himself leading a police chase with his five children in the vehicle.
This is a... OJ's chase could have been better if there was a live stream as well.
Well, that was really the first live stream.
Yeah, that was live streamed.
Well, there was no video, guys.
Well, there was.
From like, news stations.
There weren't like, hearts floating on the side of the screen.
We need the fucking dash cam!
We need to see from inside the vehicle.
Yeah, I want OJ begging for likes in the stream.
Oh, come on.
What?
Apolis Sliman?
No, that's like a teacher at Hogwarts.
I'm sorry.
What?
Appalus Sliman?
Appalus.
No.
Appalus Sliman?
That's like a teacher at Hogwarts.
Come on, man.
So he faces three counts of felony reckless conduct, conduct after an accident, and disobeying
an officer as a consequence of that incident.
At one point during the Facebook live stream, he turned his camera towards the speedometer, which shows him traveling at 110 miles per hour.
Yeah.
And then he went off a cliff and he said, Slyman's rule!
So the chase allegedly ended when he rammed a police cruiser and then crashed into a tree in Northampton, New Hampshire.
Woah, woah, woah.
He crashed with the kids in... five children?
Five children.
There were no reported injuries, fortunately.
Oh, okay.
Alright.
That's good.
While he was live streaming the incident, Slymon asked for help from both Trump and Q. In the background of this video, I believe you can hear the voice of his wife, who was also in the car at the time.
Slymon also makes reference to the mythical Frazzledrip video.
The cops are after me.
Don't you understand I'm trying to protect you?
Are you sure not?
Of course I'm sure!
If the cops are really in on it, then there's nothing that's gonna stop them.
Donald Trump, I need a miracle or something.
Somebody cue in and help me.
Donald Trump ain't gonna help you.
Cue in and help me.
I bet Hillary's gonna help you.
Hillary's not gonna help me.
Yeah, right.
Hillary's demonic.
See, I got the cops on you.
I know about Hillary cutting open the 10-year-old.
I'm a Moomoo Aberdeen!
He's debating live, as he's being chased by the cops, whether the cops are in with the cabal and begging Q to save him, begging Donald Trump to save him.
It shows you that these people... It's a cosmology at this point.
It's a cosmology.
It's crazy.
He's traveling a hundred miles an hour down the freeway.
His life is in mortal danger.
And his family's.
Yeah, the life of his family too.
He's also fucking live streaming.
But his mind...
I just, for me, if I was dealing with five kids in the back, my wife, and the cops, I wouldn't want, like, to also open my phone and get something going, you know?
I know the difference between a are you reality and what he sees on Facebook?
I just for me if I was dealing with five kids in the back my wife and the cops
I wouldn't want like to also open my phone and get something going. You know, just get those hearts going in
chat I just don't know
Lonely and this is his only real significant way of connecting with people his family doesn't understand what
he believes exactly Oh, he needs the portal to be like you're right actually Q
exists. I don't Trump exists. You're not totally crazy You're not bringing your family out in a dangerous insane
adventure where you might kill them all that validation even as he was
About to kill himself quite possibly.
Yeah.
But also, I mean, he might have also thought that, you know, doing the live stream that Trump and Q would actually hear him.
That if he put it out onto the Internet and people saw what the situation was, that maybe, I mean, you could tell he's really praying for a miracle there.
I mean, that feels like an honest moment when he's like, I really need a miracle here.
Here's the thing is that Trump retweets QAnon followers.
He interacts with this community.
So it's totally irrational, but you understand where it's coming from.
He's like, oh, Donald Trump, he understands me and my beliefs, and though he might come to my aid when of course he won't.
Yeah, Donald Trump allows that kind of space of unknown in what he lays out on purpose because he knows there's several conspiracy theories and belief systems he doesn't want to overtly kind of endorse, but he needs them working through his base constantly streaming and these in particular are connected to content.
All of these people will be producing content.
They're taught.
They're digital warriors.
Send the memes out.
It is so essential to his ground game.
It's like he would be shitting on a part of his free digital team during his election.
So, yeah, I don't see him doing it before the election, certainly.
Now, Alpolis Sliman left behind a long social media history.
Analysis from friend of the show, Marc-Andre Argentino, shows that his radicalization happened very quickly.
He was always interested in conspiracy theories and promoted 9-11 trutherism as far back as 2011.
While he also...
While he always promoted a number of conspiracy theories like vaccine harm, weather control, and mind control with fluoride, he actually never mentioned QAnon until June of 2020.
Oh my god!
Specifically, it looks like he was introduced to QAnon on June 6th, but he wasn't fully red-pilled until he watched the documentary Fall of the Cabal on June 8th.
So, this is how quickly this happened.
So, Atlas Lyman was introduced to QAnon on June 6th, and then on June 11th, he was speeding down the freeway at over 100 miles an hour with kids in the car, yelling at Q to save him.
Like, under a week, QAnon turned a guy who was very conspiratorial into a radical extremist who had completely peeled away from reality.
Well, sir, I mean, the harvest season has commenced, and what, you're scared of a couple of fruits popping up on our trees?
This is going to be a long, long, long harvest.
A bloody harvest, my friend.
For my next story, rapper Ice Cube blasted for sharing QAnon and anti-Semitic memes on Twitter.
So this was very sad to see.
Everyone likes to talk about these.
They don't want to talk about the beautiful Nubian Egyptians, the man sucking on the woman's foot.
No one wants to talk about the sexy Ice Cube.
No.
They all want to talk about the QAnon or the anti-Semitic Ice Cube.
That seems more notable.
But he has a lot of anti-cop stuff that's pretty fun.
Well, of course.
It's really all over the place ideologically.
I feel like that day he was like, you know what he did?
He did that thing that Michael does in the office where he's like, if I create like seven more rumors, I can hide that the first rumor I accidentally spread was right.
So he's just like, I'm going to keep pumping shit out all fucking day.
Enjoy it, motherfuckers.
It's a confuse.
You have to overwhelm and confuse.
Nobody knows what to make of it.
Because it started with an overpass sign that I think I've seen here in L.A.
He's just taking photos of like a Q overpass.
Yeah, that one that particular one was actually in Chicago.
Oh, OK.
I'm sorry.
Well, I've seen those messages here, though.
Yeah.
With a plandemic as a hoax and all this shit.
Yeah.
So yeah.
So what happened was apparently I shared that photograph of a bridge over for over a Chicago freeway, which contained the message.
The media is complicit.
Q. And then after being swarmed by QAnon followers who thought that he was Q-pilled, he responded with this message.
Stop it.
I don't know who the fuck Q is.
It's just a true statement.
So I don't know where he's getting his media, but apparently when he was searching out there, kind of, you know, like Nubian or anti-Semitic memes, some Q stuff slipped in too.
Who is feeding him this material?
I want to know.
What's Ice Cube's media diet like?
What are you talking about?
His replies are gonna be full of amazing stuff.
He's huge!
All he needs to do is post, like, research for me, please, and hey, you'll have a thousand memes lined up.
Including these beautiful anti-Semitic... What is this black cube thing?
It looks amazing!
Because, look, if I were Ice Cube, and I posted a picture, not unaware of what Q was, I just kind of liked the other message or whatever, and then my Twitter got flooded with all these people being like, oh, hey, hey, hey, man.
Ah, you're with us, and then other people are like, oh no, that's a wild conspiracy, man, like, don't post that shit, it's fucking, it's bad.
Azcube, wouldn't you go and look up and see what it was?
Yeah.
I wouldn't just be like, everybody's talking about this Q thing, like, I don't know what that is and I wasn't referencing it, so I'm not... I would immediately go on Google and be like, what is this Q thing?
See, this is the kind of nerd shit that people do with Ice Cube.
Ice Cube doesn't reload.
His clip is infinite.
Stop asking.
Yeah, he just output.
Ice T did the same thing.
He shared, remember, a QAnon meme.
Yeah, both Ices.
And then he started dunking on QAnon followers all day.
He thought he was with them.
That was pretty funny.
That was pretty fun, actually.
All right, we'll see how this develops.
But yeah, this black cube, explain this to me, because this does not look... It's a 3D black cube at the center of a Star of David.
And then beneath it, he also tweeted four images of black cube sculptures in California, New York, Denmark, and Australia, implying that there was some sort of worldwide Jewish conspiracy theory that was leaving its symbols everywhere.
He does know that Jews just put the Star of David.
It's fine.
They don't have to hide it behind a cube, right?
For my last story, Michael Flynn publishes batshit editorial.
This is fucking ISIS.
No, it is.
American ISIS.
It is.
Oh my God.
So Michael Flynn, who is currently battling with the court to have his case dismissed after the DOJ dropped its prosecution, wrote one of the most unnerving op-eds I've ever read, certainly.
The op-ed, which is headlined, Forces of Evil Want to Steal Our Freedom in the Dark of Night but God Stands with Us.
Once again, tyranny and treachery are in our midst.
And although we feel we've descended into a hellish state of existence, we must never forget, hell is conquerable.
Eerie. So here is a section from that editorial just to give you a sense.
Once again, tyranny and treachery are in our midst.
And although we feel we've descended into a hellish state of existence,
we must never forget, hell is conquerable.
Prayer is the greatest weapon, and a consciousness of God is the ultimate thought of the day.
The idea or notion of a heaven on earth is a very real sense of being free.
Freedom is oxygen, boy.
He doesn't say boy.
Like the air we breathe, it keeps our lungs full and our hearts beating.
The celestial feeling of freedom brings a sense of peace to our souls.
Freedom must never be taken for granted.
Securing our freedom demands a high price.
That price requires hard work and sacrifice.
Both will bind us all by the value they produce, but only if we are willing to seek new opportunities and new ideas.
Those who have sacrificed the most, those who have given the last true measure of devotion that derives from the love of faith, family, and the cause of freedom.
For all of us to be free, and for the betterment of our Republic and the free world, cannot be allowed to have died in vain.
This is the ultimate sacrifice, and heaven is their reward.
Demented.
I mean, I can't believe... From a fucking general!
Dude, is he a fucking cyborg?
Like, what is he?
I don't know.
But yeah, if someone told me, like, oh, this is the prayers that ISIS bombers say right before they kill themselves, I'd be like, oh, I buy that.
It sounds exactly like it.
Yeah, this is religious extremism.
and uh... he knows who he's speaking to recently a california man named steven carillo was arrested
for allegedly murdering a santa cruz sheriff
According to prosecutors, on June 6th, he threw pipe bombs at police, killing one officer and critically injuring another.
But before he was apprehended... Fucking apprehended?
He threw pipe bombs?
I know.
And he was apprehended!
Before he was, he was nicely asked to sit on the curb.
Oh my fucking god, dude.
But before he was apprehended, Carrillo used blood to scrawl the words, boog, and I became unreasonable on the hood of a car.
Holy shit.
Now, boog refers to the so-called boogaloo movement.
This is a loose right-wing militia network which is agitating for a second American Civil War.
The phrase, I became unreasonable is a reference to a common Boogaloo slogan, become unreasonable.
Now, Carrillo is hardly the only person affiliated with the Boogaloo movement who was arrested this year.
In South Carolina, 22-year-old Kevin Ackley was charged with inciting a riot and aggravated breach of peace.
Several items of clothing retrieved from his home show that he is affiliated with the Boogaloo movement.
In Denver, police seize assault rifles and gas masks from a 20-year-old man named Chevy McGee, who identifies with the Boogaloo movement.
Come on, his name is Chevy McGee?
It's Chevy McGee.
I'm sorry, it brings me no pleasure.
Chevy McGee!
So how exactly did this movement seem to come out of nowhere and start inciting violence all over the country?
The origins of the Boogaloo movement, like QAnon, can be traced to 4chan.
I feel like we haven't yet really fully appreciated the extent to which 4chan is responsible for ruining the country.
The full true story of QAnon's impact on American history won't be evident for, I think, for another 50 years.
But while QAnon originated on 4chan's politics board poll, the Boogaloo movement sprang from 4chan's weapons board, which is simply called K. So if you were to visit the K board right now, you probably wouldn't see anything political.
You might instead see Anons asking for advice on how to acquire a weapons permit, or opinions on various gun accessories, or takes on military history.
In fact, the pinned post on the K Board forbids political discussion.
K is a board devoted to weapons and military equipment.
Discussions about politics or current events belong on pull.
Do not post threads about gun control.
They belong on pull.
Despite that warning, the K-Board naturally leans right.
The actual term Boogaloo derives from the 1984 dancing film Break Into Electric Boogaloo.
Anons on 4chan's K-Board would make references to Civil War 2 Electric Boogaloo, and the name caught on.
Eventually came to be a code word for the expected Civil War itself.
Variations of Boogaloo include The Big Igloo, And the Big Luau.
Now, as a symbol for the movement, Boogaloo Boys can sometimes be seen wearing Hawaiian shirts underneath their bulletproof vests.
So that's a reference to both the Big Luau and the association of Luau's with pig roasts, which is appealing to the Boogaloo Boys as they often call the police pigs.
Yet another Boogaloo name for Civil War is the Ice House, which is a derivative of the Big Igloo.
So, apparently, Boogaloo Boys have a variety of names for the Civil War, which change often because they believe this is necessary in order to evade social media censors.
Before we move on, I do want to reflect on how ludicrous all this is.
So, Civil War I started because the Southern states, they seceded in order to protect the institution of slavery.
And if these guys succeed, then Civil War II is going to start because of a movement named after an 80s dance movie sequel that started on an image board and wears Hawaiian shirts under their full combat gear.
However, the Boogaloo movement didn't really gain steam until it went from 4chan to Facebook in 2018.
These Facebook pages have names like The Big Igloo Boys, Booja Hadid Memes, and Big Kahuna's Big Luau.
It's amazing how 4chan is like the petri dish for all of this shit where they sort of like figure out what the ideology is and like what the shit is and then they bring it to Facebook when it's ready and then it fucking like goes big.
No, 4chan is the R&D team for ironic fascism.
Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it.
Facebook-owned platforms appear to be the central place used by the movement to recruit, organize, and spread its propaganda.
Research by the Tech Transparency Project shows that there were at least 125 Facebook groups devoted to Boogaloo by April 22, 2020.
The real number has increased significantly since then.
These Facebook pages contain a lot of apocalyptic narratives, there are lots of martyr narratives, and there
are lots of, of course, pro-Second Amendment content, there's weapon content, lots of anti-government
propaganda, and even the worshipping of the cult leader David Koresh of Waco
fame.
Weird.
Well, you know, a broken clock.
Now while some far-right movements are deferential to the military and police, the Boogaloo movement
has a more militant libertarian streak when it comes to armed government agents.
The Boogaloo hostility to law enforcement was heightened after police shot and killed Duncan Lemp, a 21-year-old software developer who was associated with the Boogaloo movement and the Three Percenters, a right-wing militia group.
So here's what apparently happened.
On March 12, 2020, Montgomery Police SWAT officers raided Lemp's Potomac, Maryland home on the tip that he was illegally in possession of certain firearms.
The Montgomery Police Department claimed that Lemp was shot only after he ignored officers' orders to show his hands and get on the ground.
Police claimed that he instead proceeded to his interior bedroom door where a rifle was nearby.
The family of Duncan Lemp, however, claimed that he was shot in his bed next to his girlfriend and posed no threat to the officers.
The police department has not yet released body camera footage of the raid.
The application for the warrant authorizing the raid has also not yet been released to Duncan Lemp's family.
Interesting.
A week before the raid, Lemp posted a picture of two people armed with rifles on Instagram with the caption referring to the Boogaloo.
Because of that, and the belief that Lemp was targeted because of his open affiliation with right-wing militias, Lemp has become a martyr for the Boogaloo movement.
On Boogaloo pages, you often see variations of the phrase, his name was Duncan Lemp.
Interestingly, analysis from friend of the show Marc-Andre Argentino shows that Boogaloo content on Twitter has been minimal.
In fact, in 2020, news sites and journalists generated more content around Boogaloo than actual individuals from the Boogaloo movement.
His analysis has also shown that there is a less than 1% overlap of content between the QAnon community and the Boogaloo movement, which is unsurprising because it sounds like the Boogaloo movement aren't the type of people who, like, trust the plan.
No, no, no, no.
They believe they're going to take care of it.
Yeah, they want to do it.
They don't want to sit behind the computer and do it.
They want to be out in the streets.
I mean, it sounds like these guys just want to kill people.
It sounds like they bought all the guns as a hobby, and they're just sitting in the closet, and they're like, oh, man, I really got that new scope and that laser.
I really want to kill people.
Someone really needs to, like, compile the ten most, you know, impactful, like, anti-war films, and we need to strap these people in a chair like Clockwork Orange and, like, force them to watch what the end result of this is.
Like, listen to the letters from the Confederate soldiers.
Hear if they're fucking happy to be in a war, you morons.
They probably want that to some extent.
I mean, for them, they're like Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, where he's like, It was my destiny to die on that battlefield, Gump!
I'll bet they feel like, in some ways, that that's a better existence than just sort of waiting for the next season of Rick and Morty to come out or whatever.
Yeah, I don't doubt that late capitalism is such that life is now... there's a decent trade-off to be had if you want to trade your current state with just civil war.
Yeah, that's good.
It's good when that's an actual thing that some people are like.
Some people looked at the marketplace, they bought into Civil War.
That's right.
The Boogaloo Boys have been especially active in 2020 in three separate waves of protests.
First armed Boogaloos showed up in force in January to protest proposed gun law reform.
Specifically, I'm referring to the tens of thousands of gun rights activists from around the country who rallied at the Virginia Capitol.
In the previous episode, we spoke to Molly Conger about that event.
As a pandemic spread across the United States, Boogaloo Boys protested the lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders.
Most recently, they have been participating in the demonstrations and marches against police brutality and institutional racism in the wake of the George Floyd killing.
Though some of them are more interested in flaming tensions than fighting for the same causes as the Black Lives Matter protesters.
Boogaloo groups are distinguished from exclusively neo-Nazi accelerationist groups in that there is a lot less emphasis on creating a ethnostate for white straight men.
While there are undeniably openly racist elements within the Boogaloo movement, others are more intolerant of racism and in fact advocate for using violence to fight against racist oppression.
Boogaloo Facebook pages will sometimes post memes praising the 19th century abolitionist John Brown, who raided a federal armory in 1859 in an attempt to spark a slave rebellion.
They'll even praise black self-defense groups for their mutual love of guns.
Some Boogaloo groups will even express solidarity with members of the LGBT community.
For example, here's a post from Big Igloo Boys, a prominent Boogaloo Facebook group with 34,000 followers.
As many times as we've addressed our lack of tolerance for racism here, I feel like we've neglected to take a stand for the LGBTQ community within this movement.
I don't care how you joke with your boys or shit like that.
That's not what I'm talking about here.
What I'm referring to, mostly, is religious stance some take against homosexuality or gender reassignment.
I'm not going to get into a gender debate with y'all, but I will say that those who identify in that manner are just as deserving of freedom as you are.
I've seen comments on the page using gay slurs and referring to gays as, quote, abominations, quote, sodomites, whatever.
Let me be the first to say, it's bullshit.
Got a problem with gay people?
Move the fuck on.
I'm not saying you have to join the pride parade or teach your kids about it, but we also don't need to create another divide.
Do I like these guys?
Do I not?
No, you don't.
But you'll have to like them, but you have to recognize they are different from the exclusively neo-Nazi camp.
Yeah, it's such a bizarre hybrid.
So this is why the Boogaloo movement saw opportunity in the nationwide protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Boogaloo Boys found common cause with Black Lives Matter protesters in their mutual opposition to oppressive policing, but they generally don't acknowledge the role of racism in that oppression.
For example, here's what the admin of the Big Igloo Boys said about the protests.
If there was ever a time for boys to stand in solidarity with all free men and women in this country, it is now.
This is not a race issue.
For far too long, we have allowed them to murder us in our homes and in the streets.
We need to stand with the people of Minneapolis.
We need to support them in this protest against a system that allows police brutality to go unchecked.
One commentator added this.
I'm looking for fellow Minneapolis residents to join me in forming a private constitutionally authorized militia to protect people from the MPD, which has killed too many people within the last two years.
This is not to downplay the bigoted elements within the Boogaloo movement or to deny that neo-Nazis also use the term Boogaloo to refer to a race war, but creating a white ethnostate does not seem to be the primary motivation of the Boogaloo movement.
But they're revisionists and they're willing to erase black identity from these protests.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, obviously when the shit hits the fan, they're not our friends.
It's just right now they see a common cause sometimes and others will actually do the exact opposite.
And it's a general mess because these are people who fantasize about actually, you know, having the courage to start an autonomous zone or, you know, do some of the things that they preach.
Despite the sort of the complex and differing views about civil rights within the Boogaloo Boys, I would argue that protesters are right to be wary about them trying to align with their cause.
As reported by ABC News, a leaked intelligence report from the Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement that violent opportunists are infiltrating the protest movement.
Some violent opportunists have become more emboldened following a series of attacks against law enforcement during the last 24 hours nationwide.
This could lead to an increase in potentially lethal engagements with law enforcement officials, as violent opportunists increasingly infiltrate ongoing protest activity.
While the Feds did not specify who these violent opportunists were, there have been multiple reports of Boogaloo Boys attempting to turn peaceful protests into violent riots.
For example, on May 30th, three men who identified themselves as members of the Boogaloo Movement were arrested on terrorism charges in Las Vegas.
At an anti-lockdown protest several days earlier, they had told a confidential informant that they intended to try and cite violence and then kick off a riot at a George Floyd protest.
They were arrested when they were found filling canisters with gasoline and creating Molotov cocktails on their way to a protest.
If there's one thing that unites the Boogaloo movement, it's a desire to finally fight it out with the government, which they see is increasingly encroaching on freedom and gun rights.
They frequently cite so-called red flag laws and gun confiscation as grounds for insurrection.
In response to some of the threats of violence associated with the Boogaloo movement, Facebook has amended its policies.
On May 1, 2020, Facebook prohibited Boogaloo in similar terms, quote, when used with images or statements depicting armed violence.
On June 5, 2020, Facebook told Reuters that it would make it harder to find groups associated with the Boogaloo movement by no longer recommending such groups to members of similar associations.
If you're a three percenter, we won't tell you about the Boogaloos.
They probably already know.
Facebook also told The Verge that it would be demoting Boogaloo-related content in search results.
Of course, Boogaloo pages on Facebook in general are permitted to remain at the moment, which is why we should
probably expect to see a lot more activity from the Boogaloo boys in the future.
Robert Evans is an investigative journalist for Bell & Cat and the host of the Behind the Bastards podcast.
Robert, welcome back to the show, man.
Thanks for having me back.
You have been on the ground at the Portland protests pretty consistently.
Can you just give us your impressions of what's developing there and specifically also what happened last night?
Well, we've always had a really aggressive police force in Portland.
And, you know, there's a number of reasons for that.
One of them is kind of Portland has a reputation earned in the 90s of being a city with like a pretty hardcore activist crew, particularly like anti-police activists.
You know, it earned the nickname Little Beirut in the 90s.
And in addition to that, over the last four years or so, since Trump's election, there's been kind of a series of escalating rallies between far right groups and anti-fascists, a lot of which have ended in like big ugly fights that the police have regularly gotten in the middle of. About two years ago they
shot a guy in the back of the head with a grenade and almost killed him. So they have this
reputation for using a lot of violence and also using a lot of crowd control munitions. And you also have
this like city that has a large chunk of particularly a lot of very young and very angry activists
who are particularly pissed at the police.
So when Minneapolis, you know, kind of went off, uh, after, after the murder of George Floyd, um, people in Portland, like, there was this kind of building sense of, we gotta do something too.
And then, you know, they burned the third precinct.
And the very next night after that, there was this huge march in Portland and thousands of people showed up at the Justice Center and occupied it and, and stuff.
And the police actually peeled, pulled back that whole night.
You know, for, for hours, we didn't see any of them at all.
And there was this kind of sense as soon as this huge crowd showed up at the and our Justice Center is kind of like our police headquarters and it's got like a jail and stuff and as soon as folks showed up there I think was obvious to everybody who knows the city and knows the the kind of has a feel for the community that like Oh, they're gonna fuck up the Justice Center.
Like, Minneapolis just burnt a precinct, this whole crew's here and there's no cops, like, they're gonna- they're going to fuck up this building.
And sure, they- sure enough, they did.
Kids just started- they broke all the windows, there was, like, one wild moment where I was watching people inside the Justice Center break the windows by throwing things from inside the Justice Center through the window and, like, glass was- yeah, it was- Punching it out.
Yeah, it was wild.
They threw fireworks in there, they lit some fires.
Again, it was, like, exactly what you'd expect.
Uh, and then, you know, the police showed up, and they started teargassing everyone, and the crowd scattered to the four winds, and then people kind of ran through the city, um, breaking shit, looting stuff.
Uh, mostly the, um, the two areas that were really hard hit during this were the, um, the luxury shopping district, uh, in downtown Portland, um, and, like, the banks, uh, like, a bunch of banks got lit on fire.
Yeah, and a target got looted obviously and I think that was just because it had become a meme to loot targets after
Minneapolis So like right again
People were gonna loot the fucking target as soon as they I was with the crowd filming when they reached it and it was
like This moment where they escaped the police
There were no cops in sight for the first time in a couple hours and everyone realized they're right next to the
target and it Was like you can hear you know, 500 people make this like
realization like oh we got to fuck up this target now It was very funny
Um...
R.I.P.
Target.
But the police has decided to take, like, further legislative measures?
There was an announcement last night?
Yeah, so after that, there hasn't, like, the subsequent demonstrations haven't involved any looting, but they have involved increasingly just, like, a lot of police violence against, usually just demonstrators doing stuff like sitting in the middle of the road.
There's this big fence around the Justice Center, and a lot of times what'll happen is the crowd will show up around the fence.
And the police will occasionally yell at everybody and fire impact munitions through the fence, and the people will throw water bottles, and when enough water bottles get thrown, the police declare an unlawful assembly, and that means they get to shoot everybody again.
Now, they were very tear gas happy early on, and after repeatedly tear gassing not just thousands of protesters, but all of the traffic in downtown Portland... And you!
I've seen you live on stream wiping tear gas out of your eyes.
Oh, so much tear gas.
I mean, you know, they would gas, like, fucking people on their motorcycles just commuting getting tear gassed.
I saw, like, a truck drive into a crowd because the guy driving it was blind with tear gas.
Like, it was fucking nuts how much gas they were using.
So they got that taken away.
For the audience, you know, Robert clearly has, you know, irritated sinuses and eyes still and lips.
Like, any kind of part of his body that can be affected by this basically low-level, like, chemical warfare stuff.
Yeah, it sucks.
So that's been the last couple of weeks.
And the Portland police are in a lot of hot water because of the use of all of these munitions.
And now the thing that has happened is the city council and the city government is debating on how much to cut their budget by.
And we know it's going to be at least $15 million.
But our commissioner vetoed that budget because it didn't go far enough.
And I think people are going to kind of push for like $50 or $60 million cut out of the police budget.
So the police are clearly And, like, their attitude has changed.
They're clearly scared, but they've had to alter their tactics as a result of all this, and that's made them get, like, more hand-to-hand, and there's been a lot of assaults on journalists.
Donovan Farley, who is, among other things, a stringer for Rolling Stone, was, like, filming the police arresting a woman, and they had, like, a knee on her neck in the same way that, like, the officers who went after George Floyd did.
Um, so he was filming that and they knocked him to the ground and just started beating him with sticks.
My friend Sergio Olmos, who's out filming all the time, has gotten, like, grabbed by the head and, like, shoved around a bunch.
Yeah.
Um, my friend Corey got maced in the eyes for filming an arrest.
And again, all press with, like, clearly displayed credentials.
I've been shot a couple of times with impact munitions, um, and threatened with arrest a bunch of times.
And last night, the Portland Police declared that, One, journalists are not immune from the declaration of an unlawful assembly.
And what that means is that, number one, the police can declare an unlawful assembly at will.
There's no legal definition of that term.
It is a thing they get to say to justify arresting people.
And number two, that means that the police are saying, we can declare that journalists don't have a right to report.
In all of downtown, at will.
Yeah, that's what they're saying, is that we have a right as the police to say it's illegal to be in downtown now.
Yeah.
And you can't report as a journalist on what we're doing.
Sure, just a journalism blackout over a geography.
That's, sure.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a violation of the First Amendment.
So we're all kind of figuring out what we're going to do.
I'm talking with, you know, some local government officials I'm in contact with, some other journalists.
We're putting out a letter.
And I think we're probably going to You know, if they don't shift course real damn quick, I don't see any other remedy but like a lawsuit.
Yeah.
Because that that can't be allowed to stand.
Yeah.
So this this is, of course, you know, central to what is happening right now.
But in the episode, we're also covering Boogaloo Boys.
Sure.
So have you noticed any of them hanging out in Portland?
Yeah, you know, on the first couple of nights there was definitely, like, this crowded guise with rifles hanging out outside of a building with, like, weird face masks, which was a very unsettling moment, um, walking by them as a crowd and not knowing, kind of, what they were gonna do.
Um, there has been, you know, every night there's, like, it's, and it's weird because there's always this mix of, like, uh, rumors, you know, which spread wildly in a crowd of thousands, like, so, like, people being like, oh, did you hear there's this, There's this group of Proud Boys or Neo-Nazis or whatever that's hanging out on the bridge waiting to stop people on their way back to their cars.
That hasn't happened, but there have been things like last night, or the night before last, there was a big white truck with a guy standing on top of it looking out into the crowd for hours, just sort of scanning the crowd, and there were no plates on the car.
Definitely not a cop.
Didn't look like a protester either.
Just a guy staring at and taking pictures of the crowd in a car with no license plates.
That's good.
Yeah, that's great.
Weird shit like that.
You know, you kind of are seeing some of that too.
I was just up at the Seattle Autonomous Zone.
And we know there's some, like, some far-right boogaloo types who have been showing up and kind of hanging around at the outskirts of it.
Well, I hear that's soon to be Bikers for Trump territory, so... Yeah, they've threatened to invade it on July 4th, so we'll fucking see.
We'll see, yeah, on the 4th of July.
Do you have the sense that they're trying to, like, figure out how to react to the George Floyd protests, like, both on the ground and online?
Like, what do you think they want to accomplish?
I don't think there's any kind of unity with the group, because it's not an organization.
It's a meme that has kind of got a bunch of people together in vague agreement with the idea that it'd be cool to have a civil war.
And there's a mix.
So within the crowd, there's a big chunk of the Boogaloo crowd are libertarians with varying degrees of principles, right?
Some of whom are, in fact, very consistent and are like, No, no, no.
We hate the police.
We hate the state.
George Floyd's death is yet another example of, like, horrific state violence.
And we're completely backing these protests.
And you have seen some, like, Boogaloo Boys show up and be pretty consistent about, like, being, like, Black Lives Matter, fuck the police, like, I'm here with a gun because I want to protect these protesters.
You have seen Boogaloo Boys, you know, some of whom, you know, Left Coast Right Watch did a good job of getting internal communications from one chunk of them who were like, Alright, if we show up and act supportive, we can get these folks on our side and they'll start shooting at the cops with us.
And they were recorded saying stuff like, we can't be the ones to shoot first, but we have to provoke the police into opening fire.
And if we do that, that will justify us shooting back.
And you also have this chunk, so you have this chunk who really believes, and I think are more or less kind of down with the cause.
You have this chunk who see the cause as an opportunity to spark an open battle with the authorities.
Yeah.
And you have this chunk who have kind of, you know, initially when everything started, were like, oh yeah, George Floyd was definitely murdered, you know, it's good to protest police brutality.
But as soon as like there was looting, switched over to, oh, I want to kill looters.
Because, like, that's the easy thing, right?
I can hang out outside of a store with a gun, and I can shoot anybody who comes into the store.
And I also think, like, that tends to be the crowd.
Like, what they're doing is more verbally aggressive, but I almost think that that might be the less dangerous chunk of the crowd.
Because I suspect they're kind of showing up armed at these stores, because it gives them an excuse to dress up in their fun gear.
Yeah, to be clear, there's photos of a Ross, a Michaels, and a Hobby Lobby all protected by guys in Hawaiian shirts.
So, like, what are we supposed to make of that and the idea of libertarianism?
I mean, how do those... And also, do you think there's an overlap with neo-Nazi accelerationists who just want a race war?
Absolutely.
You know, there's a sizable minority of the Boogaloo boys who are straight-up Nazis and who see this as, you know, we're doing the thing Nazis always do with non-Nazi groups that are kind of militant and far-right, the thing they did with the militia movement in, you know, the 80s and 90s, and they see this as a recruiting ground.
And you can find, you know, in some of the Boogaloo groups, you can find Some, some really questionable imagery that's like very much neo-nazi adjacent.
And I suspect there is, I mean, I have evidence that there is a somewhat of an organized effort from some neo-nazis to try and recruit from within this movement.
Okay.
Now, again, I don't want to also overstate that because I've also seen like a chunk of like, like one of the large groups online like has a drafted like sort of a manifesto that's like really grounded in anti-racism.
Um, and so it's really complicated what's going on with these folks and they do kind of defy easy categorization.
Like, I see them being described as a right-wing militia, which is not accurate.
The Boogaloo Boys aren't a militia, it's an idea.
And more than anything, it's just...
All that it is, like to say somebody's part of the Boogaloo movement or whatever just means they fantasize about a civil war and actively prepare for it.
And there's a lot of reasons for that.
You know, there are, well I don't think a civil war would be a good idea in this country.
There are real legitimate reasons to think that maybe that's the only option forward, right?
You know, that is an opinion that a principled person can hold for reasons other than being a Nazi.
That's an opinion you can hold if you are just enraged at the treatment of black people and other minorities by law enforcement in this country.
Yeah, of course.
That is an opinion you can hold.
Um, so it's... I think in some ways a lot of the media is not really well set up to deal with this movement, because they have to lump them in as, oh, you know, this is a right-wing militia, because they know right-wing militias.
I know the report on this, you know?
But like, what part of their civil war involves standing in front of a Hobby Lobby with a gun?
Like, how is that?
I want to hear the narrative behind property protection in your civil war.
Those are the people for whom, because this is just sort of a loose, a meme that a bunch of people find intriguing, you have your people who are committed revolutionaries, some of whom have already committed murder.
You know, we've had attacks, we've had people arrested for planning attacks with three men in Vegas, the guy in California who killed those sheriff's deputies.
Yeah.
So there's absolutely real revolutionaries in this group who are willing to kill and die for this idea.
But you also have people who just think it's neat, like who think the Hawaiian shirt stuff's funny, who really like buying military-grade equipment and hanging out in it.
And I think the Hobby Lobby crew, you know, if we want to call them that, those are the folks who don't really want a civil war, but they have all this cool shit.
Totally.
And standing out at a protest where the police are going to be firing into a crowd with a real gun, that's dangerous.
Yes.
That can go real bad for your ass.
Yeah.
Um, standing outside of a Hobby Lobby with your buddies and your rifles.
Number one, nobody's gonna loot that fucking Hobby Lobby anyway.
I think it would be as effective if you stood outside of it with every single amiibo ever printed.
You know?
Just showing your collection.
Just showing what your interests are.
That would confuse people enough that they would not burn it down.
Yeah, that would be more effective.
And there's not even crowds near these people.
It was very funny.
There's a picture from Minneapolis of this crew standing out outside of a tobacconist's shop and stuff, and it's like, okay, yeah, that's gonna get looted, is this tobacconist's shop miles away from the... But it lets them... They want to feel like they're a part of things, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's fun, and they know it's safe.
Nobody's gonna come for the fucking, you know, Hobby Lobby or whatever.
Yeah.
So I do think that, like, that's kind of the chunk of this ideology or whatever the hell you want to, like, again, our terminology, like, I don't have perfect terms to describe this either, because it's kind of a new thing.
But whatever you call this, there's a chunk of people who... Hawaiian Caliphate?
Yeah!
Like...
They just think it's funny.
They think it's cool, and they want to dress up and show off.
That is, God, probably about half of them.
But there's also the case of Duncan Lemp, who was shot by officers during a no-knock raid, and that kind of re-energized the movement.
So there is also more than just the Hobby Lobby crew.
Can you tell us about that?
Absolutely.
He was kind of a libertarian activist.
He was real into the Boogaloo stuff.
He posted on militia websites.
Because of a juvenile charge, the state says he was legally forbidden from owning firearms until the age of 30.
Some people question whether or not that was really a legal restriction.
I don't have anything to say on that.
There's two versions of what happened next.
The thing that we all know is the police entered during a no-knock raid and shot him to death, wounded his girlfriend.
The police came to claim that they were serving a firearms warrant.
Limp met them with a gun in hand and refused to put down the gun and they had to shoot him and they also claimed that he had booby-trapped his house.
Limp's family claims that he was sleeping with his girlfriend and they shot him to death in his bed.
Um, I don't know what the truth is.
Um, I haven't, I haven't seen a really deep dive into what happened to Duncan Limp, but like he's become kind of a rallying point for the whole, the Boogaloo crew.
So he's kind of a symbol of state overreach for them, or police overreach?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they mention, you know, they'll put him down in the same lists of, like, names of victims of police violence as, like, George Floyd, as Michael Brown, but also as, like, so they do recognize, like, these black men and women like Breonna Taylor who were killed by the police, and they'll They'll say their names and put them on stuff, but they also use Duncan Limp, and they talk about, like, the Weavers, the Weaver family, who, um, you know, Ruby Ridge was a big inciting incident for, um, the militia movement in the 90s, where the, uh, the FBI raided this guy Randy Weaver and his little mountaintop compound, and, like, wound up shooting his wife and his little boy.
And they're also, like, really into Waco, you know?
They're, they're kind of obsessed with Waco, because it's like, as a general rule, there's a big focus on violence done by law enforcement, um, and the state to people.
And I do think that like there's a mix of folks who are legitimately furious about this stuff and don't see any other way to be an activist against it.
And folks who just just are kind of like sociopaths who want to get into a gunfight.
Yeah.
Because they never had an opportunity and they're like, this is good cover, right?
Like everybody's pissed off about police violence.
I'm gonna pick that and you know, maybe this will give me my opportunity to get shot at by the cops.
Sure.
And so we've seen the movement mutate, the name for it mutate and change so that they don't get caught on social media and kind of like banned or whatever.
But what do you think is next for them?
If this is such a loose and kind of more of like a symbology...
Yeah, I mean, I think we're going to continue to see more terrorist attacks and attempted terrorist attacks.
We've seen a number already.
We've seen some people shot.
I think we'll see more people shot.
I think it'll be a mix of some of these Boogaloo folks, you know, focusing on the protesters and shooting at protesters because they fucking hate liberals and leftists and stuff.
I think we will see some of these Boogaloo boys shoot cops.
You know, I think there's a decent chance we'll see some of these folks at a protest when the police fire fire back at the police.
I don't know what would happen in that case.
That's going to be an interesting moment.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's going to continue to accelerate, which is the goal of like the kind of most extreme fringe here is to accelerate everything that's happening in our society.
Right.
Pushing it towards violence.
Is that the unifying strand then?
Civil War accelerationism?
No, no, no.
Civil War fetishism is the unifying strand.
They're not all accelerationists.
They aren't all into actively pushing a civil war.
Again, like really the unifying thing is they all think the idea is cool.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for helping us to intelligently continue to be confused, but in an informed way where we understand how many prisms this thing can be viewed through.
It's certainly fascinating.
And I mean, you're also dealing with state repression.
You're dealing with police crackdowns and all of these laws.
And also attempting to cover a movement that is kind of veering off into terrorism.
I mean, how do you feel kind of at the center of all of that?
That August is going to be a hell of a month.
You know, where the protests aren't stopping.
I think they'll probably reach an ebb point for a little while and decline slightly for the next couple of weeks, but they're not stopping.
August is when unemployment and like the new unemployment payments that have come in as a result of the coronavirus, that all runs out.
August is when eviction protections and mortgage dispensers run out.
And it's also the hottest month of the year, which tends to be the month with the most violent crime.
So, August is really gonna suck for all of that and all of the reasons and the things I've been covering.
Police violence and these, like, Boogaloo Boys trying to accelerate things.
Like, strappin' for August is the only thing I'm really thinking about right now.
And what is next for you this week?
Are you going back out?
Are you going to give your sinuses some rest?
Or are you just going to snort some wasabi and just run out there like a warrior again?
I'll probably be out at some point this week.
I have writing that I have to do for the next couple of days, so I wasn't going to go out the first chunk of this week anyway.
We're going to see about whether or not we have to sue the Portland Police Bureau.
But yeah, I'll be out again at some point, whenever I'm able to actually do that.
Well, stay safe, and yeah, I think I speak for everybody who watches you out there.
Stay safe, and keep doing what you're doing.
And, I mean, obviously this is a stretch, but we do cover QAnon, and we are covering the Boogaloo Boys.
Do you think there's any overlap there?
I haven't seen really any evidence of that, and I do kind of think that sort of, they come out of different groups of people.
Yeah.
But I think that both QAnon, which I think is probably fairer to call a religion at this point than anything else, and the Boogaloo movement are products of the way social media works, right?
Neither of them would exist in a meaningful way without YouTube and Facebook.
More Facebook for the Boogaloo movement, but So they're both products of this kind of unregulated digital territory, which is like, effectively, our collective unconsciousness.
And when an idea like the Boogaloo or QAnon grows to devour a sizable enough chunk of that giant distributed digital brain, the result in the real world is tens of thousands of people who now We are committed to an idea that is real dangerous.
And that's where we are.
And it's a thing that didn't necessarily need to happen.
Once the decision was made that we weren't going to police or monitor or take any actions whatsoever to stop the spread of disinformation in online communities, that the companies sort of running them were just going to let them spiral.
Into wherever they spiraled.
I think these things were kind of inevitable.
The QAnon and the Boogaloo, these are products of what happens if you give people a platform that can spread any idea to millions of people instantly, and then you artificially inflate the number of people who come into contact with those ideas algorithmically in order to maximize profits.
And that's what we're dealing with here.
You can follow Robert at iwriteok, that's the letter O and K at the end, and you can find his podcast, Behind the Bastards, on all podcasting platforms.
Do you have anything you want to plug, man, or like a particular fund you think needs help right now?
Yeah, I mean, the Black Resilience Fund in Portland is an organization that does a lot of good work for the black community in Portland.
You can also, there's the PDX protest bail fund for protests here, and then there's a bail fund for protesters in Atlanta, which just went off in the last 48 hours or so.
So, you know, I would consider looking that up.
Just in general, helping with bail funds is a good thing to do right now.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you so much for all your work and for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week.
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Almost 80 of them, currently.
Is it?
Yeah, 80 this week.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact!
And now, today's Auto-Tune!
Welcome back everybody, this is Eric here with Direct Veteran 8888.
Today, we've got another Top 5 Guns video for you.
This is the Top 5 Guns of the Boog, baby!
Alright, we're going to get into this a little bit.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
I've got a couple of special guests with me in today's video.
This is Josh and Josh.
So what is meant by this Boogaloo, right?
A lot of people see this term thrown around.
I'm going to spend a brief moment discussing what it actually means.
So what is meant by this boogaloo, right? A lot of people see this term thrown
around. I'm just spend a brief moment discussing what it actually means.
Boogaloo is a pop culture reference to the big luau, right?
And what they mean by that is, you know, a potential standing up against the
tyrannical government. And there actually is some fact to the style of
the boot. You notice I'm wearing a Hawaiian t-shirt, right? And the
Hawaiian t-shirts are actually a very common theme that you're going to see
in the boogaloo pop culture reference and with the big luau pop culture
reference.
And the reason is, is back in the day, right, we're talking 70s, 80s and stuff like that.
Special operations, you know, there was a lot of hipster guys that were getting into special operations.
And we're talking, you know, tier one guys and like, you know, Navy SEALs.
And there was this huge sort of culture clash of guys that would go out on combat operations in t-shirts, shorts, We're not, you know, trying to be, you know,
