 Is America headed for a civil war? According to the followers of one fast-growing online subculture, increasing political polarization and instability will inevitably lead to a domestic armed conflict, which they refer to as Civil War II, Electric Boogaloo. That's a play on the title of a 1984 breakdancing film, from which the movement known as the Boogaloo aka Big Igloo aka Big Luau also derived its name. The Hawaiian shirt-wearing, gun-toting activists known as Boog Boys have migrated out of meme space and into the streets, showing up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in many American cities, in apparent sympathy with the cause. The media have called them white nationalists and accelerationist terrorists. The Boogaloo movement is for the most part a libertarian group, according to one member. These labels don't capture what this dispersed movement is all about. The Boogaloo movement is Gen Z Second Amendment activism. Its members forego the patriotic symbolism of traditional militia movements for flowered apparel, bright patches, and colorful memes. Their approach to organizing resembles Hong Kong's decentralized, privacy-conscious and social media-heavy protest movement. They're digitally native activists, raised on Instagram and TikTok, who understand that in the world of online feedback loops, actions are often less important than the way they're presented. Their online rhetoric is infused with paranoia, and its members circulate unfounded theories of rampant pedophilia, which they say must be stamped out extra judicially if necessary. They claim that societal breakdown is inevitable, but their public stance often makes it seem as if a violent civil war is something they'd like to see happen. And the movement's organic, leaderless structure leaves it highly susceptible to being co-opted by its worst, most dangerous actors. The members that a reason spoke with stand against gun control, the drug war, and aggressive policing. We believe that everyone deserves to be free, quite simply, and we don't like federal government on that level. Sometimes they've aligned themselves with right-wing militia groups at other moments with Black Lives Matter. The one issue that seems to unify them is a conviction that armed resistance to government overreach is entirely justified. They could tear gasses, but they ain't going to tear gasses. You can try. I don't incite violence. I incite defense. I would say it's a very powerful movement that has come together and unified against racism, tyranny, pedophilia, government overreach. It's one of the biggest unified movements there's been among gun owners, freedom-loving Americans. Mike Dunn has become a visible face in a mostly faceless movement. On October 8th, police arrested Dunn for allegedly trespassing while open carrying a firearm at a rally for Libertarian presidential candidate Joe Jorgensen. You're telling me that you enforce the unconstitutional law. Dunn says he left home at age 16 and joined the Marine Corps a year later. When he returned to Virginia, he embarked on a new political project. The gun control push was getting really heavy in Virginia, and so I began building militias and connecting them all together under one head. Then my buddy who I was connected with through some militia work and online was Duncan Lemp. In March, Montgomery County police shot to death 21-year-old Duncan Lemp in his Maryland home after bursting in in the middle of the night with an arrest warrant. I believe they blatantly killed him in cold blood, and we're going to have justice. Lemp's death gave rise to theories that he was targeted for his involvement with the militia movement. Police say they were seizing firearms he wasn't allowed to own because of a juvenile conviction. The Lemp faction of the Bougalou movement often used his name as a social media handle and regularly post about police brutality. While online racist groups speak of the Bougalou as an impending race war, this group portrays it as a sequel to the American Revolution. Duncan says he was drawn to the movement by its hardline stance against racism, which set it apart from other armed movements. I had grown up, country, find the rebel flag, say some pretty dumb stuff, and that's something that attracted me to the Bougalou movement was how much they hated racism and how much they weren't willing to deal with it. And so I began changing some of my personal viewpoints and again understanding things. Bougalou members have marched alongside Black Lives Matter protesters, although their presence hasn't always been welcomed. And they've clashed with racist groups. The Boug boys once led a chant of white supremacy sucks, disrupting a speech at a pro-gun rally in Richmond. White supremacists, we believe in liberty for all, regardless of race, gender, creed, whether you're trans, it doesn't matter, we need liberty for all. John, who asked that we identify him only by his first name, runs a Bougalou-themed Instagram page called Two Savage for Statists. In addition to supporting Black Lives Matter, he was in Hong Kong in 2019 helping pro-democracy demonstrators. He says there are parallels between the two protest movements. How the Chinese media describes the Hong Kong protesters. Hong Kong was brought by another violent clash on Sunday, again between rally youth and police. The exact same way the conservative media in the U.S. described the BLM movement. A small group of highly aggressive, emotionally charged activists took over our culture. They forced the entire country to obey their will. I don't think conservatives in America would like to compare themselves to conservatives in China, but that's really how it is. I was worried that we would have seen more violence directly attributed to the movement than we have seen currently. Journalist Robert Evans co-authored an investigation of the movement for the website Bellingcat. He says the first time he noticed the Boog Boys appearing at in-person events was at the January 2020 gun rights rally in front of the Virginia State Capitol. I began sort of after that point getting concerned about what impact they were going to have on the protests this summer. Because obviously 2020 I've been expecting for a while was going to be a pretty harsh summer in terms of protests. So the fact that there was this group of folks who were kind of committed to the idea of a societal breakdown in a civil war, or at least committed to the idea of getting into gunfights with police, which was a big thing that I noticed in a lot of their early sort of memes, that concerned me, which was why I started following them so closely. No movement can tightly control its message, especially one as decentralized as the Boog Boys. Meaning anyone can easily carry out violence and acts of terror under their banner. One man accused of killing a sheriff's deputy and federal agent in California had a Boogaloo patch in his car, and allegedly scrawled Boogaloo phrases in blood on the hood of a vehicle. The Department of Justice has charged three men connected to the Boogaloo movement accused of planning to incite violence with Molotov cocktails at a Las Vegas Black Lives Matter rally. The FBI has even attempted to link Boogaloo members with Hamas in order to charge them under international anti-terrorism laws. And a federal law enforcement officer told NBC News that some of the men involved in the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have ties to the movement. Dun and John both deny that they are actively trying to accelerate domestic warfare, but rather want to be prepared to resist a tyrannical government power grab. In reality, nobody wants a war, nobody. We are prepared, but it is something we don't want to happen. At the end of the day, we don't need acceleration. This is going to happen whether people want to or not, sadly. Mad Dog Madness says, if you want to screw with me, please don't, but if you do screw with me, I will kill you all. And I think that's the mentality of the movement. But Evans thinks the fixation on collapse and violent conflict can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the presence of more armed civilians on the streets increases the likelihood of an inciting incident. As someone who's reported from civil wars, if they had a real physical understanding of what civil war means and what it would mean in this country, they wouldn't be buying AR-15s and ammunition. They would be dedicating their lives to stopping that from happening every single way that they could, because there's nothing I can imagine that's more terrifying. Our founders put the second amendment in place. The armed people was meant to be a check. They wanted the people to be able to outgun the state if they overstepped their bounds. The Boop Boys are only one of several armed groups showing up at protests. There are also the pro-Trump Proud Boys, which drew media scrutiny after Trump's ambiguous statement about them in the presidential debate. Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And there are black nationalist gun groups like the Not-Fucking-Around Coalition and various militia groups like the Oath Keepers and 3%ers. In the event of the predicted conflict between warring political factions actually happening, it's not entirely clear what side Boop Boys like John and Dunn would align with. Neither support Donald Trump or Joe Biden, instead preferring libertarian Joe Jorgensen. Within the field, Boop Boys have often walked a fine line, attempting to position themselves as an armed buffer between police and demonstrators, peacekeepers, between leftist and rightist groups, as well as protectors of private property. And attempt to murder a better citizen was wrong, and I'm all for a protest, but you can't be destroying your neighbor's houses and businesses. It's probably the largest actively armed movement in the United States to date. I know at one time we could have created a Facebook group and had 100,000 people in it that were dedicated. We have groups everywhere. Every state, there's Boop Boys, so it is massive. It is certainly the largest movement I have seen in my lifetime in the United States that is focused around armed citizens taking political action that focuses around those arms. To understand the group's potential reach, Evan says it's important to recognize that apocalyptic narratives are deeply ingrained in the American psyche, and that as principled, as some of its members may sound, that the meme at the center of the movement is still one of impending war. How many Boogaloo folks are there? I don't know. How many folks do I think are out there who are interested in these ideas and who are following these communities to some extent and who find this kind of conversation about what they will do in a civil war and like their excitement for said conflict? I wouldn't be surprised if it was a couple of million in this country. I think one of the things that isn't done enough that you ought to do when talking about this is there's a direct line between the zombie apocalypse memes and stuff that were such a rage in the early aughts and the Boogaloo. Like, that's where a lot of the people who are into this started buying guns, started buying arms, started buying survival equipment. More than anything, what the Boogaloo has done is taken that impulse and attached to it something much more realistic because, you know, we're not going to deal with zombies ever. We might have a civil war.