The Boogaloo Boys consider themselves allied with BLM.

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Honestly looks like a bunch of dumb fricking kids that don’t understand the ramifications of their actions

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The Boogaloo Boys consider themselves allied with BLM.

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At first glance, the We Are Washington rally might have looked like an early Fourth of July celebration, all bright stars-and-stripes Americana. It was a cool May morning in the state capital, Olympia, and low clouds were threatening to ruin the red, white and blue archway of balloons above the rally stage, the crepe paper behind it and the cut-out letters propped up in front that spelled “FREEDOM.” Few people wore masks. A man with a pistol on his hip meandered through the several-hundred-person crowd selling tiny yellow Gadsden flags — the “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake — for $5 each to anyone who wasn’t already carrying something. A canopy of marker-drawn signs held above heads blared complaints about Covid-19 and the stay-at-home order declared by Gov. Jay Inslee, at this point in its 69th day. “0.2% Death Rate. No Muzzle”; “Inslee Is the Real Virus”; “Kim Jong Inslee.” Some took a more conspiratorial tone: “You Are Being Lied To.”

Near the back of the crowd was a social-media-ready selfie backdrop: a large Q made of squares of cardboard, lying on the grass in front of the Capitol building. Below it, a hashtag: #WWG1WGA, “Where we go one, we go all.” It’s the rallying cry for QAnon, the conspiracy theory that at its most basic centers on a Democrat-run child-sex-trafficking ring and at its most elaborate involves figures like the pope and Joe Biden having been executed in secret and replaced with holograms. It might seem, in other words, like an odd theory to float at a rally that was ostensibly about the reopening of the local economy. But around the country, events like this one had become a beacon to fringe thinkers: anti-vaxxers, internet trolls, gun nuts, Proud Boys, hate groups, antigovernment militias and any other Americans who interpreted social-distancing and face-covering regulations as an infringement of their constitutional freedoms.

These reopening rallies had become more than just rallies, allowing everyday Americans — suspecting a liberal ploy in the shutdown of the economy and misled by right-wing politicians, up to and including President Trump, about the dangers of the coronavirus — to be exposed to the ideologies of a wide variety of extremists.

As the crowd grew in Olympia, a woman in a hooded sweatshirt got up onstage to give a speech and encourage the crowd to join something called People’s Rights Washington. They could be a part of it by texting the word RIGHTS to a five-digit number, which would then enlist them in a phone tree, allowing any member to report anything they deem a violation of personal freedom. “If there is an emergency, if a contact tracer shows up at your door, if C.P.S. shows up at your door, if the Health Department comes to your work and threatens to shut you down,” she explained, “we can send a text out that says, ‘Get to this address right now.’”

Standing at the rear edge of the crowd, I took a few steps closer when I realized the voice coming from the stage sounded familiar. It was Kelli Stewart. She has been a live-streamer at several federal-court trials I’ve covered in the West — particularly of the Bundy family in both Nevada and Oregon. After Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan and several other defendants were acquitted in 2016 of charges related to occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, Stewart cheered and cried at the verdict, then paced in front of the courthouse reading from the Constitution. In the past two months, she has live-streamed from rallies and from the “underground church” she opened. For several years, she has referred to law enforcement as “Blue ISIS.”

Now she explained to the crowd in Olympia that just a few years ago, she was just like all of them. She was a mother, a Sunday-school teacher raising goats on a small farm when the news of the refuge occupation broke. But it wasn’t until Robert LaVoy Finicum, a 54-year-old Arizona rancher who served as a spokesman for the occupation, was shot and killed by the police that she became an activist. It was her wake-up call, she said: the moment when the world she had always known was forever changed.

Stewart is now a fixture at right-wing rallies like this one, and as she spoke, she got at something undeniably true about these gatherings: This is where everyday people like her can be reborn, leaving their world behind and subscribing to a new collective truth. This is where they find fellowship with other people who are upset enough about the same things, who hold the same fears and frustrations. This is where isolation ends, where communion begins.

At the back of this crowd, which was mostly mothers and grandmothers and church leaders and business owners and the like, stood a clutch of men with long guns who didn’t seem to be listening much to the speeches. They clustered together in small groups, their eyes scanning the crowd behind sunglasses. One man carried a flag bearing the logo of the Three Percenters militia: the Roman numeral III in the center of a ring of stars. There was a cardboard sign propped up with the letters “NWO” — New World Order — crossed out. And in this mix were a couple of men wearing body armor decorated with American-flag patches. One wore a blue-and-white floral Hawaiian shirt under a desert-sand-colored vest, packed with as many as 90 extra rounds of ammunition. The other man had a different patch on his vest. It read: “Boogaloo.”

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Back in November 2019, Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, issued a warning about who was using the word “Boogaloo” and why, in the form of a blog post illustrated with bizarre memes pulled from their forums: Pepe the frog firing a bazooka, a laser-eyed storm trooper with a black-sun halo, a big igloo. Though some still use “Boogaloo” as a joke, Pitcavage wrote, “an increasing number of people employ it with serious intent.” Still, he finished with a note of caution: Some people use the word “Boogaloo” to “mock some of the more fanatical or gung-ho elements of their own movement.”

“By that time it had crystallized from more than just a concept or a term,” he told me in July. “The beginnings of a movement had already started.” He went on: “It also started manifesting in the real world, with people showing up at events, self-identifying as Boogaloo.” The spring of 2020 was like a coming-out party for the movement, as men in colorful floral shirts and body armor festooned with igloo-shaped patches, semiautomatic weapons in hand, showed up at reopening rallies against Covid-19 restrictions across the country, from Lansing, Mich., to Denver, to Harrisburg, Pa. Some carried black-and-white American flags with a red stripe of floral print through the middle and an igloo in the place of stars.

In March, a Missouri white supremacist told an undercover F.B.I. agent he planned to detonate a car bomb outside a hospital treating Covid-19 patients. He called the plan “Operation Boogaloo.” When the F.B.I. tried to serve the man a probable-cause warrant, a firefight ensued, and he shot himself before he could be apprehended and succumbed to his wounds at the hospital. In April, a man in Texarkana, Texas, who identified with the movement streamed a live video on Facebook while dressed in body armor and a Hawaiian shirt, telling viewers he was “hunting the hunters”: searching for police officers to ambush. He is accused of leading several officers on a high-speed chase, continuing even after his tires were deflated by a spike strip. He was later apprehended and pleaded not guilty to attempted-murder charges.

As the movement’s profile rose, catching the attention of the media, Boogaloo bois bent the word to shield it from the eyes of content moderators. “Boogaloo” became “big igloo,” then “big luau” — hence the Hawaiian shirts. Boogaloo bois became “boojahideen.” On the forums, they would joke about a “pig roast” — code for killing police officers. In June, Facebook claimed that it deleted hundreds of accounts and pages devoted to the movement; by mid-July, the Boogaloo bois were back on Facebook talking about a “spicy fiesta.”

“The problem with the Boogaloo bois is they’re not a cohesive movement,” J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said during testimony to the House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism in mid-July. “You could actually, in a really bizarre world, have two Boogaloo groups shooting at each other.” It is on the issue of law enforcement that the Boogaloo seems to greatly diverge from the militias that came before it, which in many cases collaborate with or even have members that are police officers. “They’re really anti-police,” Pitcavage says of the Boogaloo; they may say they want to find common cause with anyone protesting the police — but some want to act as agents provocateurs, accelerating street violence and furthering any conflict. For many of them, the protests following the killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day looked like the perfect opportunity to create mayhem.

On May 29, according to a criminal complaint, Steven Carrillo — a 32-year-old Air Force sergeant who has served in Kuwait, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan — tapped out a message on Facebook to other Boogaloo bois he had met online. Carrillo was stationed at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California and saw potential in the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in Oakland. “Go to the riots and support our own cause,” Carrillo instructed his friends. “Use their anger to fuel our fire. Think outside the box.”

That night in Oakland, the police clashed with protesters again and again, fogging the crowd in clouds of tear gas. Marchers blocked the freeway. Around 9 p.m., according to local reports, the police tried to disperse protesters again with crowd-control munitions. It was 9:44 p.m. when a white van with no plates and what looked like a missing hubcap rolled through the intersection of 12th and Jefferson in the middle of downtown Oakland, about nine blocks from the protests. As it rolled by the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse, the side door slid open, and gunfire came out in bursts of twos and threes. Nine-millimeter rounds ripped through the courthouse’s squat guard station — a beige hut with an eggshell-blue roof dripping with rust stains.

Inside were two contracted federal security officers. One was David Patrick Underwood, a 53-year-old Black man who had recently bought an engagement ring for his girlfriend. The bullets from that white van killed Underwood and seriously wounded the other officer. The van was there one second — a flash of white on security footage — and then it was gone.

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