Are the Boogaloo Bois Right-Wing or Left-Wing Extremists? And Does It Even Matter?
Boogaloos are ideological heirs of the right-wing militia movement that developed after Ruby Ridge and Waco.
My late father wasn’t in a militia, but he was deeply sympathetic to the movement.
He choked up every time he told me the story of Ruby Ridge.
The feds entrapped Randy Weaver, he said, sending an informant to ask him to sell a sawed-off shotgun that was just barely shorter than the legal limit. Then, when the feds came to arrest Randy, they besieged the house with orders to shoot on sight. They fatally shot the family’s dog. They fatally shot fourteen-year-old Sammy Weaver in the back. They fatally shot Vicki Weaver, who was holding her ten-month-old baby, Elisheba.
My older brother was the same age as Sammy Weaver; I’m just three months younger than Elisheba. When my dad thought of the carnage at Ruby Ridge, he thought of his own family.
He never liked federal police.
Who Are the Boogaloos?
In late May and early June of this year, amid the George Floyd protests, an adherent of the decentralized Boogaloo Bois militia movement killed two law enforcement officers in California, and another opened fire on Minneapolis police.
This October, the FBI arrested more than a dozen suspects in a plot to kidnap Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer. The alleged conspirators are members of a group called Wolverine Watchmen, a Boogaloo-affiliated cell.
While it can be hard to make firm statements about the beliefs of loosely organized movements, we can say a few things about Boogaloos: They’re recent, dating back only to 2019. They want to start a civil war — or at least they say that they believe it’s inevitable, and are looking forward to it. Most are anarcho-capitalists. They’re immersed in irony and inside jokes. They wear Hawaiian shirts (because “Big Luau” sounds like “Boogaloo”) and often sport “big igloo” patches and tattoos. And they hate the government, often including cops.
Most Boogaloos aren’t white nationalists. Some even marched with Black Lives Matter. This led CNN to conclude that Boogaloos “are an emerging incarnation of extremism that seems to defy easy categorization” and “yet another confounding factor in the ongoing effort among local, state and federal officials to puzzle out the political sympathies of the agitators showing up to the mostly peaceful George Floyd rallies.” And some on the right want to paint Boogaloos as left-wing extremists, based on their anti-cop ideology and the fact that at least one of the suspects in the plot against Whitmer apparently thinks that Trump is a terrible authoritarian.
While it’s true that it can be complicated to parse out someone’s deep-seated views from amid a steady flow of ironic memes — and the Boogaloos have a deep appreciation for ironic memes — we’ve forgotten the recent past if we believe anti-cop sentiments are limited to left-wing extremists.
Rise of the Militias
Some historians trace the origins of the modern militia movement back to the 1980s, or even earlier, but we can certainly see it in the right-wing antigovernmental “Patriot Movement” of the 1990s — the loosely affiliated community that found its roots in the blood-soaked earth of Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian complex, and that ultimately birthed such acts of violent hatred as the Oklahoma City bombing.
The Patriot Movement lost some of its steam in the 2000s but came roaring back in 2009, with the election of Barack Obama. That year, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo about the dangers of right-wing terrorism, igniting the fury of conservatives, many of whom felt they were being singled out for their political beliefs. The pushback was so fierce the report was withdrawn.
And yet, typical American Republicans have long had more in common with their Democratic counterparts than with these right-wing extremists. Though the Patriot Movement has saved its deepest vitriol for Democrats, they have long been contemptuous of establishment Republicans. They peddled conspiracy theories about the Bushes and any Republicans they could link to their favorite shadowy bogeyman groups — Skull and Bones, the Bohemian Grove, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve. The founder of Oath Keepers called John McCain “a traitor to the Constitution” who should be “tried for treason before a jury of his peers” and subsequently “hung by the neck until dead.” And over the years, many escalated beyond mere words: Patriot Movement affiliates have plotted — and at times carried out — terrorist attacks on federal buildings, engaged in extensive paramilitary training, and murdered both federal and local police.
Over the years, the right-wing fringe has had a more complicated relationship with local police than with the feds. Some believed local police were critically important — my dad thought that it was important that police be local, so that they could defend us against the tyranny of the feds, an idea pushed by the John Birch Society.
But he also told me to never let an officer search my trunk — because if I let them in the trunk they could plant drugs — and believed that cops didn’t have the right to tell him he needed to have a license plate on his car. Most of my middle-class white friends tell me they weren’t scared of the police as a child. I vividly remember being about six or seven and moving behind a fake plant in a coffee shop so that a pair of officers couldn’t see me — I was always afraid of uniformed police. I absolutely couldn’t relax when a cop was in the room.
In 2014, hundreds of militia members, including people affiliated with Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, converged in Nevada to help defend Cliven Bundy in his standoff against the Bureau of Land Management. (The Bureau of Land Management had impounded Bundy’s cattle because he wouldn’t pay the fees to graze the cows on federal land; Bundy claimed he had a right to the land because his ancestors had been grazing cattle on it since before the federal government staked their claim.) That incident was brought to a peaceful settlement when the government backed down, but two of Bundy’s supporters murdered a pair of Las Vegas police officers in cold blood shortly thereafter.
Cliven Bundy’s son Ammon, who led his own takeover of federal land two years later, has publicly come out in support of Black Lives Matter and defunding the police, saying, “You must have a problem in your mind if you believe that Black Lives Matter is more dangerous than the police.”
During the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama years, there was little debate how these extremists ought to be classified: they were right-wing.
But the election of Donald Trump changed the fabric of the militia movement. Suddenly, with rumors tearing like wildfire through social media that Trump was successfully taking on “the Deep State,” many of the militias began to see federal power, at least power wielded by Trump, in a different light. Suddenly, someone in charge was on their side. Some even cheered Trump’s decision to send federal police into Portland — the same federal police that militias have long loathed.
But many of the Boogaloos did not cheer. Though they’re a newer group on the scene, a significant contingent of their affiliates still hold to the suspicions of the 1990s antigovernmental movement — and did not decide that the government might suddenly be on their side when Trump took power.
But let’s be clear that this is not a story of nostalgia or of a beleaguered sect holding fast to their ideals. We must condemn violence and the praise of violence in clear, unmitigated terms.
And the Boogaloos’ breathless anticipation of civil war is violent to its core.
Does It Even Matter That They’re Right-Wing?
A two-party system can make it seem like there are two teams — either you’re Right or Left. We so often rush to excuse or minimize the bad behavior of people on our own side while believing every critical word we hear about the other side. We want to believe that “they” are grotesquely violent, and that our team is made up of angels.
And so it’s tempting for conservatives to try to link Boogaloos to leftism — and there will always be examples to cherry-pick. After all, it’s a movement, not an organization. There is no central authority that can cast out a member, and there is no single set of principles that everyone who claims the label must adhere to. But historically, we can map where the Boogaloos fit — they’re, for the most part, anarcho-capitalists who use Ruby Ridge and Waco, among other incidents, as rallying cries. Anti-cop sentiment has never been a disqualifier for being a right-wing extremist.
But the difficulties some people have had classifying the group are a perfect illustration of why we cannot simplify the political map to two teams. If we do, we will become reactionaries, quick to defend anyone on “our team,” no matter how horrifying their rhetoric or behavior. Instead, we must declare that principles matter, that character counts, that violence is not the answer, and that hate is not a productive response to hate.
This isn’t a claim that all sides are equal, nor a call to political moderatism. It’s about how we can move forward. Liberals, conservatives, libertarians, socialists, and people who choose other labels can and should hold to these principles: We condemn violence. We prize truth. We criticize politicians of any ideology when they act in ways that run counter to our values. We praise that which is praiseworthy, even when it comes from someone we’d ordinarily disagree with.
In a tense election year, it can be hard to remember the things that unite us. It’s easier to fall into the trap of thinking it’s “us vs. them.” But we must strive to find those points of commonality, to strike back at the fragmented discourse that wants to tear us apart, to resist the urge to blame every problem on the other side of the aisle, and instead to work together to preserve our democratic republic. The founder of Oath Keepers called John McCain a traitor worthy of execution.
Joe Biden called him a brother.
