re: The Boogaloo Boys consider themselves allied with BLM.

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The group planned a series of long hiking trips around the red Nevada desert. During each, the men — paranoid about surveillance — would leave their firearms and phones in a car, before hiking on trails in body armor. They discussed their desire to differentiate their group from antigovernment militia groups, which were, according to the informant, “old-style” groups that are “mostly populated by older individuals and individuals who had antigovernment leanings without being prepared to take violent action.”

During a late-April hike through the desert with other members of Battle Born Igloo, Parshall floated a plan to destroy a National Park Service fee station at Lake Mead with a firebomb. The target had a deeper significance: Six years earlier, the rancher Cliven Bundy called for the fee station’s destruction during his April 2014 standoff with federal Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service agents. Bundy, aided by militias from around the country who offered their support, took up arms against government officers over two decades of unpaid grazing fees he owed, which Bundy believed the government had no right to levy on ranchers. And when those outnumbered officers backed down and the family declared it a victory, it inspired others to go even further. Two months later, a married couple named Jerad and Amanda Miller, who had been present at the standoff, killed two Las Vegas police officers as they ate their lunch, draping a Gadsden flag and a swastika over one victim and pinning a note to the other’s uniform that read: “This is the beginning of the revolution.” Battle Born Igloo thought that in targeting that specific fee station, their own group might inspire copycat groups.

Though the Nevada Boogaloo group was clearly taking inspiration from the same old guard of right-wing militias they claimed to resent, their differences became more evident in late May, as the Black Lives Matter protests grew. While militias flocked to certain cities claiming to protect them from rioting and looting, the Nevada men, according to the paid informant, saw an opportunity in Black Lives Matter, which they perceived to be anti-law-enforcement. To a grand jury, the F.B.I.’s paid informant confirmed that Battle Born Igloo was not just antigovernment but also anarchist — in Lynam’s words, “antiracist, anti-tyrant, 100 percent pro-individual liberty.” In late May, Lynam, Parshall and the others shifted their focus to twisting the protests for racial justice into a tool for their own nihilistic ends. They considered throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars, hoping that might cause protesters to attack officers and cause a riot. They eventually discussed a new idea: destroying a power substation, again in the hope of starting a riot.

On the night of May 30, according to prosecutors, Lynam, Parshall and another military veteran, William Loomis, readied an arsenal of Molotovs, fireworks, guns and ammunition to bring to a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Las Vegas. But before they could get there, they were swarmed by F.B.I. agents and arrested. In June, all three men pleaded not guilty to state and federal charges including possession of unregistered firearms and conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism. (Through a lawyer, Parshall denied all charges against him. Requests for comment from Lynam’s and Loomis’s lawyers went unanswered.)

About a month before the planned attack, Lynam did an interview with the Las Vegas talk-radio hosts Brian Shapiro and JD Sharp, whom he met at a reopening rally.

“I appreciate you joining us,” Shapiro said. “How are you?”

On the recording, Lynam sounds young and unsure of himself: “Uh, good. Thank you for having me.”

For most of the interview, the chatty hosts argue with Lynam about gun rights, but they also want him to explain why Battle Born Igloo came to an otherwise small, peaceful reopening rally armed to the teeth. Were they a new militia?

“Absolutely not,” Lynam insisted. “We’re aware there’s those that might be a little terrified of it,” he told the hosts at one point. “The point isn’t to make people afraid, it’s to show people and to bring up a dialogue.”

If that sounded like a lie, it wasn’t the only one he told. He had also given the hosts an alias.

He told them his name was Duncan Lemp.

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Around 4:30 in the morning on March 12, a SWAT team in Montgomery County, Md., raided the home of a 21-year-old computer programmer named Duncan Socrates Lemp. They had received an anonymous tip that he was in illegal possession of a firearm, and they were issued a no-knock warrant, allowing them to enter unannounced. A SWAT unit approached Lemp’s home, where he lived with his parents, brother and girlfriend, and, according to Rene Sandler, the family’s lawyer, shattered his bedroom window, tossing flash-bang grenades inside, and then began shooting through the window, fatally wounding Lemp before they even entered the home. (The Montgomery County Police Department, which declined to comment, has given a different account of events, saying that Lemp was armed and refused to comply with their commands.) Lemp’s pregnant girlfriend, who had been sleeping in his bed, was forced to stay put with his lifeless body for over an hour.

On Facebook, Lemp called himself a Boogaloo boi. The Boogaloo has since taken him up as a cause celebre, comparing his death to that of Breonna Taylor, the Black woman who was shot by Louisville police officers executing a no-knock warrant. At a protest over Lemp’s death in April at the Montgomery police headquarters, men in Hawaiian shirts thrust the Boogaloo flag in the air. People around the world raised over $17,000 for his funeral and the family’s legal fees in a GoFundMe campaign. In three days, they cleared out all 125 items in a baby registry for his unborn child. And then they began to invoke his name as their own.

In a YouTube video posted in June, which a man recorded after Virginia police officers pulled him over, he tells them his name is Duncan Lemp. Stephen Parshall, of Battle Born Igloo, used a logo from one of Lemp’s companies as his profile photo on Facebook. By late July, five Boogaloo bois who showed up to a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, Ore., told a reporter that they were there in support of the protesters, adding that the police had killed some of “our own people.” “Never forget Duncan Lemp,” one said. “Never forget,” his colleagues echoed. On Lemp’s girlfriend’s Instagram page, Boogaloo bois have promised her that they will one day avenge his death.

In stickers slapped to street signs, in Boogaloo groups and in YouTube comments, members repeat the words “we are Duncan Lemp” or “his name was Duncan Lemp” like mantras. In the last few months of his life, Lemp used social media to show off antigovernment slogans and Boogaloo memes. His mother remembers asking him what it meant. “For him it was about Second Amendment rights,” she told me. In one Instagram photo, captioned simply “III%,” Lemp holds a rifle and grins from the back of a group of armed, camouflaged men. In another post, which appears to be a screenshot from a website, hands thrust rifles in the air. Below are the words of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, “sic semper tyrannis” — thus always to tyrants — the same words that adorned Timothy McVeigh’s T-shirt the morning in 1995 that he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

In the three-decade life span of modern right-wing militias, they have amassed something of a canon of martyrs. There’s the story of Gordon Kahl, a highly decorated World War II veteran and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who refused to pay his taxes. When law enforcement tried to serve him a warrant in 1983, he and his son killed two U.S. Marshals, before Kahl went on the run for four months and was killed in a shootout in Arkansas — but not before killing another law-enforcement officer. There’s Robert LaVoy Finicum, a leader at the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur wildlife reserve in Oregon, who died after speeding away from the police, hopping out of his vehicle and repeatedly yelling “Go ahead and shoot me!” while, according to law enforcement, reaching for a loaded pistol. At the May reopening rally in Olympia, Kelli Stewart told the crowd to read the stories of Finicum and Kahl when they got home.

There’s the Weaver family, the white separatists at the center of 1992’s Ruby Ridge standoff, which ended with three dead: Vicki and Samuel Weaver and one U.S. Marshal. And, of course, the botched assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993, which ended in the deaths of at least 80 civilians (including 20 minors) and four A.T.F. agents — an event Kris Hunter, the Texas Boogaloo boi, says he recalls seeing unfold when he was 12. “I saw the tanks rolling down the freeway,” he told me. Maybe the Branch Davidians had broken the law, he conceded. “Does that mean that people need to burn alive in their homes and they need to be sieged for weeks at a time? That’s something that is alarming and should be alarming to all Americans.”

Timothy McVeigh was in Waco during the siege — he had driven there from Florida to see it — and it was the event that finally pushed him over the edge, the reason he went on to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh’s story demonstrates how powerful even the most absurd ideas can be to disaffected men with dreams of violence. A wayward young gulf war veteran, he drove in looping circles around the United States in the early 1990s, befriending other people at gun shows who shared his passion for firearms, which survivalists like McVeigh believed would one day become more valuable than American currency. At those events, he met other people who also believed in antigovernment conspiracies, and who found solace and inspiration in a book he sold copies of at those gun shows: “The Turner Diaries,” a 1978 novel written under a pseudonym by the white supremacist William Luther Pierce. To McVeigh, it was more than just a novel. It was a battle plan.

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After the late-May shooting of Officer Underwood in Oakland, it would take eight more days for the authorities to receive a tip about a white van with no plates and a mismatched hubcap abandoned on the side of a curving, wooded road deep in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, 75 miles to the south. Guns, ammunition and bomb-making supplies could be seen through the windows. Authorities tracked the van’s owner to a house in Ben Lomond, 20 minutes outside Santa Cruz — the home of Steven Carrillo.

In photographs, Carrillo has doughy cheeks and a weightlifter’s build. He married his high school sweetheart, who was also in the Air Force, and they had two children. Carrillo’s wife committed suicide in 2018, and friends of his have speculated in the media that the experience changed him. In the spring of 2020, prosecutors say, Carrillo met another Northern California man in a Boogaloo group on Facebook: 30-year-old Robert Justus. Carrillo would eventually recruit Justus to drive his van in Oakland on May 29. Prosecutors believe Carrillo was the shooter. (Justus, escorted by his parents, turned himself in to the F.B.I. on June 11. He is currently in custody, charged with aiding and abetting murder and aiding and abetting attempted murder; he pleaded not guilty.)

The Carrillo house in Ben Lomond is off a gravelly, shaded road. That day in June, a group of Santa Cruz County sheriff’s deputies approached the property, and as they did, a hail of nine-millimeter bullets ripped through two of their uniforms — killing Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller, 38, and seriously wounding another officer. There was an explosion, and then Carrillo — in a royal blue shirt and khaki pants, bleeding from a wound in his right leg — sprinted from the property and down the road. He carjacked an approaching white Toyota Camry at gunpoint. He sped away but abandoned the car minutes later.

Erik Thom was driving home to Santa Cruz through Ben Lomond when he saw signs on the highway about a roadblock and an active shooter. He pulled off at a marijuana dispensary and asked a woman in the parking lot what was going on.

“All of a sudden I hear this ‘Help! Help! Help!’” he told me. He grabbed his dog, Brown, and sprinted around the corner toward a house. The woman followed him, recording video on her smartphone.

Two men were wrestling on the ground. One was the man everyone was looking for: Steven Carrillo. Brown sank his teeth into Carrillo’s arm, and Thom aided the other man — the resident of the home, where Carrillo had tried to take another car — in restraining him. In the struggle, Carrillo dropped a pistol. Only when it hit the ground, Thom says, did he notice what else was already there: an AR-15 and a pipe bomb.

“This is what the roadblock was about,” he recalls thinking. “This is the active shooter.”

“I was putting a little bit of pressure on his arm, and he said, ‘Hey, dude, lay off my arm,’ and I said, ‘[expletive] you,’” Thom says. “And he said, ‘I’m done fighting the fight.’ He said it twice.” Then he uttered something about Afghanistan. Thom’s still not sure what, but he says in that moment, not knowing anything about what had happened in the minutes and days before, he felt bad for him. Thom told me he was sympathetic to those with P.T.S.D., and he had a cousin who had died during a confrontation with the police.

The men held Carrillo down until the police arrived and cuffed him. As the officers grasped Carrillo’s arms, leading him away, he taunted them. “I’m sick of these goddamn police,” he yelled at the stone-faced officers. “Listen! Are you listening?”

Later, investigators found that Carrillo’s home, too, was filled with improvised explosives, and sources told local reporters they think they “interrupted something big.” (Carrillo has pleaded not guilty to federal charges and is being held without bail; his attorney declined to comment for this article.) When they found the white Toyota Camry Carrillo had carjacked, they discovered something more Carrillo wanted them to hear.

Before abandoning the car, Carrillo seems to have dipped his fingers in his open leg wound and painted three messages across the hood of the car. None of them were his own ideas.

He wrote “stop the duopoly” — a reference to the dominance of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the American political system, a fixation of many Boogaloo bois.

He wrote “I became unreasonable” — yet another Boogaloo meme, the words of a welder named Marvin Heemeyer, who in 2004 fabricated a nearly indestructible “killdozer,” a modified earth mover outfitted with a .50-caliber rifle, and plowed it through 13 buildings in the town of Granby, Colo. It was an act of revenge over a land dispute. When he was finished, he shot himself. He is considered a martyr by antigovernment extremists.

And Carrillo wrote one more thing. He wanted the whole world to know what this was, to send a message that the killing of two law-enforcement officers was, perhaps, the first shot of a new kind of war — one that may have started on the internet, but one that is already starting to play out in real life. It was, in a way, his manifesto, his confession that conspiracy theories and memes found in him the perfect host. This was what he was willing to risk his life for.

In his blood, he wrote: “BOOG.”

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