Secret Service Warns: the Boogaloos Are Coming to D.C., States

QueEx

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Secret Service Warns the Boogaloos Are Coming to D.C., States

The insurrection is not over, according to an intelligence bulletin acquired by The Daily Beast that warns a coming wave of MAGA demonstrations may turn violent.

Secret Service Warns the Boogaloos Are Coming to D.C., States (thedailybeast.com)


Erin Banc
Spencer Ackerman
Asawin Suebsaeng
Sam Brodey
January 13, 2021


The Secret Service has issued an intelligence bulletin warning of additional armed protests in Washington before and after the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden—particularly from the Boogaloo Boys—that in some cases it expects to become violent.

The Secret Service bulletin, dated Jan. 11, is unclassified but marked not for distribution outside law-enforcement channels, and was obtained by The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast is declining to give specifics for these rallies to prevent insurrectionists from organizing through the media.

Although the primary responsibility of the Secret Service is to protect the president, the intelligence bulletin warns of demonstrations slated for state capitols as well. That bolsters a recent warning from the FBI about armed protests across all 50 states. A previous report by Yahoo News said a Dec. 24 document from the FBI’s Minnesota field office also warned state and local authorities of threats from right-wing extremist groups at protests in Washington and other state capitols planned for later this month.

One demonstration cited in the document is scheduled to take place before the inaugural by the Boogaloos, a loose collective meme-turned-movement of enthusiasts for a second civil war, several adherents of which have been arrested and charged for violence during summer and fall 2020 counterprotests against Black Lives Matter. “Although no civil disobedience has been confirmed,” the bulletin states, “organizers have encouraged attendees to bring weapons to the event.”

Another demonstration scheduled for before the inaugural aims to bring “armed citizens” out for a show of force across both state capitals and Washington, D.C., though the sponsor group, Tree of Liberty, which is affiliated with the Boogaloo, alleges to be peaceful.

Although the incitement social-media network Parler has been deplatformed by Apple and Amazon, the Secret Service tracked a user calling for a “Come and Take It” rally, a reference to the Spartan-Persian battle of Thermopylae, that “mentions fighting and posted, ‘never never never stop fighting.” It aims to bring supporters to the Capitol and the White House to “literally PHYSICALLY STOP THE STEAL.”

Backlash from the larger social-media and web hosting companies to the Jan. 6 insurrection has had a disruptive effect on planning for right-wing demonstrations, the bulletin found. But that also has the effect of limiting the Secret Service’s “ability to review information for… situational awareness on these events,” it concedes. Users frustrated by the shutdown of Parler and the de-platforming of many Twitter users are moving to the secure messaging apps Telegraph and Signal, the Secret Service bulletin states.

While many of the demonstrations tracked by the Secret Service are cited in the bulletin as typical political protest, from both left-wing and right-wing groups, some of the inauguration protests are expected to be violent.

One planned demonstration, called a Million Militia March displays a logo bearing crossed AR-15s, an ersatz military patch and both American and Gadsden flags, and purports to be the “1st Regiment of the Restored American Republic.” The bulletin says organizers “have encouraged attendees to bring weapons to the event through the use of images of weapons on promotional materials for the event. The group claims they will not attack, but will defend.” The District of Columbia does not honor any other state’s gun license or permit.



Yet the Secret Service suggests that the event “appears to be a rough concept” of an organizer prone to posting statements like “I am the smartest human.” But the prevalence of such posts, it continues, might nevertheless give the event a momentum of its own. The organizer “encouraged attendees to wear attire depicting guns and MAGA paraphernalia,” and the iconography of the event includes a picture of an AR-15-style long gun with the caption “To All Democrats: Enjoy Hell.”

During a press briefing on Tuesday, the acting U.S. attorney spearheading the prosecutorial response to the insurrection stated that a grand jury is empaneled to look at additional charges for the Jan. 6 rioters, including sedition and conspiracy – a suggestion that charges may extend beyond those who participated in the riot to ensnare the Republican politicians who incited it. A senior FBI official, Assistant Director Steven D’Antuono of the Washington Field Office, stated that the bureau was continuing to receive information to disrupt “possibly future violent activity.”

As of Wednesday, President Trump has been briefed by some officials on possible security threats to the Biden inauguration, a White House official told The Daily Beast. Two other sources with direct knowledge of the matter say that in private conversations over the past week, Trump has continued entertaining wildly incorrect conspiracy theories that antifascists had infiltrated the MAGA mob during the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol and had caused trouble. Trump has also asked advisers and confidants to look into such rumors.

The president has raised the antifa and false-flag theories in discussions about potential threats during Inauguration Day, as well, the sources said.
White House spokespeople did not immediately provide comment for this story on Wednesday.

House members were set to be briefed by the Secret Service on Wednesday afternoon about inauguration security measures, according to a congressional source. Senators received a similar briefing on Tuesday.

On Monday, House Democrats got an initial look at the current environment of violent, right-wing threats during a sobering phone briefing from law enforcement. In that call, first reported by HuffPost and later confirmed by The Daily Beast, authorities outlined four different threats from extremists, from a plan to avenge the death of Ashli Babbitt, the MAGA rioter killed by police on Jan. 6, to general danger to lawmakers and law enforcement officials.

As National Guardsmen patrolled the halls of the Capitol building on Wednesday, lawmakers confessed to being uneasy—or at least uncertain—about how they might be kept safe next week.

“I feel safe today,” Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), the third-ranking House Democrat, said to Capitol reporters on Wednesday. “I have no idea how I’m going to feel on the 20th.”


Secret Service Warns the Boogaloos Are Coming to D.C., States (thedailybeast.com)
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
From what I am hearing, the Secret Service needs to isolate the president from watching TV, YouTube , or being exposed to social media which can be used to incite the president himself. There was one president which I don't remember that isolated himself and did not read newspapers/watch TV as a good security measure.

After dealing with the sophisticated attacks myself, I have started to adopt some of these measures to prevent manipulation. This is something that all of us could use to deal with informational overload and incitement by hostile actors. I frequently run across sophisticated attacks from social media, TV, and YouTube.

I don't think it will be to the degree that I am dealing with but being aware of this option as a countermeasure is important. This is an example of what can happen to some people that are exposed to these attacks or leading a mob of rioters to the Capitol.

capitol-seige-1.jpg
 
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QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
The Boogaloo Bois Prepare for Civil War
As the FBI warns of violence, anti-government
extremists are ready to get in on the chaos.



In the menagerie of right-wing populist groups, the boogaloo bois stand out for their fashion, for their great love of memes, and, to put it plainly, for the incoherence of their ideology. Which is saying a lot, considering that the riot at the Capitol last Wednesday featured partisans of:

-the long-gone country of South Vietnam, Falun Gong adherents,​
- end-times Christians,​
- neo-Nazis, QAnon believers,​
- a handful of Orthodox Jews, and​
- Daniel Boone impersonators.​

The boogaloos weren’t a huge presence in that mob. But according to federal officials, the attack on the Capitol has galvanized them and could inspire boogaloo violence in D.C. and around the country between now and Inauguration Day. The FBI warned earlier that boogaloos could launch attacks in state capitols this Sunday, January 17.

The boogaloos don’t appear interested in fighting for Donald Trump—they tend to despise him, mostly because they think he panders to the police. But for the past year, boogaloo bois all over the United States have been cheering on the country’s breakdown, waiting for the moment when their nihilistic memes would come to life and the country would devolve into bloody chaos.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take the boogaloo threat. Some are likely just joking when they “shit-post” about shooting cops or “yeeting alphabet boys”—killing government law-enforcement agents. But others seem serious. They’ve already shown up heavily armed (and in their signature Hawaiian shirts) at protests and at state capitols. They’ve allegedly killed law-enforcement officers, talked about throwing Molotov cocktails at cops during the racial-justice protests this summer, and plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. They say they want a total reset of society, even if they haven’t thought very hard about what, exactly, should come next.


Who are the boogaloo bois?

And why do they want to start a civil war?


I’ve spent the past few months trying to figure that out.

Let’s start with what boogaloo isn’t:

--> It isn’t, mainly, a white-supremacist organization, though there are some white-supremacist boogaloo bois.​
--> It isn’t a collection of Trump supporters ready to fight for the president, like, say, the Proud Boys.​
--> And despite the various attacks—planned or carried out—against police officers and government officials, boogaloo also isn’t a militia in any traditional sense of the word.​
--> It isn’t even really a movement.​
It’s more like an absurdist internet culture propagated by libertarian-leaning gun enthusiasts on 4chan—the anonymous, Wild West version of Reddit—that has somehow moved into the real world. It’s jargon and memes and jokes and a sometimes-serious desire to bring about a violent revolution to overthrow the U.S. government.

Like nearly everything about boogaloo, the ideas and terminology are simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying.

The term boogaloo, for example, - can refer to the purveyors of this culture or to an event: a violent revolution some of them hope to hasten, dubbed Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. The name itself is a takeoff on a pervasive internet joke, an allusion to a 1980s dance movie, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. (Take a moment to pity historians, centuries from now, as they try to understand how the name of a dance-movie sequel turned into the name of a proposed nationwide insurrection.)


JJ MacNab has studied anti-government extremist groups for more than 20 years. As a fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, she’s tracked the boogaloo bois online since last fall, when she saw an uptick in memes calling—in a jokey way—for a civil war.


Some of the boogaloo bois, she told me, are “accelerationists,” meaning they’re looking for any provocationbe it proposed:
- gun-control measures,​
- Black Lives Matter protests, or​
- the presidential inauguration—​
to spark a violent conflict.


Other boogalooers believe that the “boogaloo” will be brought to them by the opposing side, by measures like gun confiscation, or some other perceived overstepping of authority.


Over the past two years, the terminology moved from 4chan to Facebook, where a few groups quickly grew to thousands of members. MacNab says she tries to identify what she calls the “social butterflies” of the online groups: young men who seem to intuitively understand what’s cool and funny to their peers, and what isn’t. Once she finds a few, she follows them from group to group, across the internet, as a way of accessing their world.

The word boogaloo morphed into big igloo, which brought about a deluge of igloo imagery, and also into big luau, which is what prompted some boogaloo bois to wear Hawaiian shirts under their body armor. One boogaloo meme shows the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden snake set against a turquoise-and-pink floral pattern above the words aloha fuckface.

If none of this makes much sense, that’s the point. “They really want to create their own in-world so the rest of us won’t get their jokes,” MacNab told me.

“It’s tribal,” she added. “These are tribal markings: the shirts they wear, the jargon they speak, even the types of guns they like.”


Boogaloo culture stepped out of social media and into the real world in January 2020, at a giant pro-gun rally in Richmond, Virginia. The gathering, a response to proposed gun-control laws in Virginia’s state legislature, drew a reported 22,000 Second Amendment supporters. Several came wearing floral-print shirts—which stuck out in the crowd and got people wondering who they were.

MacNab says that as the boogaloo bois drew attention, white-supremacist groups, mostly on the messaging app Telegram, co-opted the luau aesthetic. But in the Facebook groups—where the number of boogaloo was huge compared with the number on Telegram—racism wasn’t tolerated. Instead, the men who gathered there were united by a love of guns and a hatred of cops and the government.

In March, a man in Potomac, Maryland, named Duncan Lemp . . . who was being investigated for firearms violations was killed by police during a no-knock raid of his parents’ house. Lemp was shot one day before Breonna Taylor, and he became a martyr to boogaloo bois. His name was turned into a hashtag and a rallying cry, much like Taylor’s.

Read: MAGA-land’s favorite newspaper

Aaron Swenson, a 36-year-old from Texas, appears to have been especially moved by Lemp’s death. He reportedly posted about the killing the next day, and changed his profile picture to a photo of a torso wearing a Hawaiian shirt and armored vest, with a hashtag: #HisNameWasDuncan.

In April, Swenson posted on Facebook—reportedly using the name “Arnold Derpingston”—that he felt “like hunting the hunters.” = Translation: looking for police officers to kill. According to authorities, he then live-streamed himself driving around for about an hour with two pistols, a shotgun, and a bulletproof vest. After a 25-minute standoff on the side of a highway, he surrendered to police. (Swenson’s defense attorney has said that he was actually trying to “commit suicide by cop.”)​
In a recording of the live-stream that later surfaced on YouTube, some of Swenson’s boogaloo brethren warned that he’d be disavowed by the group because he’d gotten the timing wrong. The insurrection hadn’t arrived yet.​

Others seem to have thought that the time for an uprising had come this summer, when marches and protests broke out across the country following the murder of George Floyd. Because boogaloos generally hate cops, they debated whether to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Some joined the marches, but plenty of others dismissed the idea: They equate Black Lives Matter with Marxism, or don’t see police overreach as a racial issue.


Still others appear to have believed they could use the protests to ignite violence.

-- the Steven Carrillo Matter --
In May, a 32-year-old Air Force staff sergeant named Steven Carrillo allegedly fired on a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, killing one security officer and wounding another.​
A week later, Carrillo allegedly shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy. Wounded and on the run, he hijacked a car and, before his arrest, wrote “boog” in blood on the hood. (Carrillo has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges, including carjacking, murder, and attempted murder.)​
According to an FBI affidavit, on the night of the first shooting, Carrillo was in communication with Ivan Hunter, a 26-year-old from Texas who had driven to Minneapolis apparently to incite violence during the protests there. Wearing a skull mask and tactical gear, Hunter allegedly fired an AK-47-style rifle 13 times at the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct while the building was set ablaze.​
Hunter messaged Carrillo: “Go for police buildings.”​
Carrillo replied: “I did better lol.”​


Whether they’re employed or not and live at home or not, many boogaloo bois own thousands of dollars’ worth of guns and gear. They like to post photos with their weapons. Sometimes the men who show up to rallies or protests or statehouses wearing military-grade night-vision goggles or floral shirts with Gucci belts are actually dressing like memes. They are literally internet jokes come to life.

How many simply enjoy the gun memes and the juvenile jokes and maybe vaguely agree with some of the political concepts—and how many seriously want to start a war with the cops? It’s impossible to say. Even experts like MacNab, who study this sort of thing full-time, haven’t figured out how to tell who’s just joking and who might be more inclined to real-world violence.

In early October, as I was talking to MacNab for this story, a man in Madison Heights, Michigan, was killed in a shoot-out with FBI agents. She got a tip that the man was associated with the boogaloo bois. “His online persona was Colonel Shithead 7.0,” she said.



Not Sure Who/What They Really Are . . .

Looking through his Facebook page, MacNab said, she found nothing that made him seem especially likely to act out in the real world. But according to the Detroit Free Press, he was also a convicted felon who had previously shot at police officers, had a childhood connection to Ruby Ridge, and was being tracked by the FBI.

Even if an overwhelming majority of boogaloo bois are just shitposting, at least a few are clearly ready to follow through. I asked MacNab why she thought these men would want to bring about a violent revolution in this country.

“They want Rome to fall,” she said. “They want chaos to bring it down.”​
And what do they want to replace it, after the anarchy?​
“If you ask them,” she told me, “they can’t really give you an answer.”​


Watching hordes of armed people storming the doors of Congress, facing off with any cop who offered resistance, killing a Capitol Police officer, and chasing another through the halls of a government building, I couldn’t help thinking: These are the fantasies that boogaloo bois have been posting about for months. The riot may have captured their imagination.


The FBI warning, which was dated December 29, describes nationwide rallies planned for January 17. The bulletin refers to boogaloo bois who have shown a “willingness to commit violence in support of their ideology,” and says that boogaloo bois in Minnesota went to the statehouse “to perform reconnaissance.” They reportedly discussed blowing up a building that police might be able to use as a sniper location “in the event of a gun battle.”

Read: Some pro-Trump rioters wanted more violence

Just before the FBI bulletin became public, I’d come across a boogaloo website that was promoting the January 17 rallies, and wasn’t sure what to make of it. A tweet from a boogaloo-linked account mentioning the rallies includes a hashtag of the name of the woman shot at the U.S. Capitol.

“Remember what happened today,” the tweet reads. “Learn from it, bring the same energy.” It claims that people will be at “every American capital” as part of “the largest armed protest to ever take place on American soil.” In the background, behind the text, is the faint image of the kind of flower you’d see on a Hawaiian-print shirt.

Maybe it’s a joke. But nobody should be surprised if it’s not.

MICHAEL J. MOONEY writes about crime, politics, and culture. He lives in Dallas.



Boogaloo Bois Prepare for Civil War - The Atlantic
 

COINTELPRO

Transnational Member
Registered
My issue is people (whites and foreigners like Asians, Indians, and weak minded blacks) with their bizarre racial beliefs/theories which they try to force onto you through violence. They have gone missionary-black church with that bullshit and go global spreading their ethnic supremacist beliefs and interfering with my activities.

It is like somebody that is an atheist, having a person spewing bible verses at you all day. I am thinking about committing these people if they get out of hand.
 
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