Boogaloo open carry
(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
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“The Boogaloo is tiny compared to, say, [Black Lives Matter], but they are skilled manipulators and understand that since no one really knows what they are about they can pick whatever side they want. The left likes them because white men with rifles deter overreactions by police. The right tolerates them because they are white men with rifles talking about liberty.”

Ford Fischer, founder of News2Share and a regular media presence at right-wing rallies, told Salon he has observed those contradictions on the scene, describing boogaloo physically switching from far-right to far-left sides during protests, and even physically challenging Proud Boys in order to ostensibly protect members of the radical left.

“Covering the boogaloos for the past year and a half has been fascinating because of the contrast between their politics and the rest of street politics in the past year,” Fischer told Salon, though “fascinating” appears to gloss over the normalcy of guns at rallies, as well as fails to capture the seriousness with which the boogaloo’s professed commitment to imminent and brutal violence should be taken. “While 2020 was defined by domestic unrest spanning from social justice to COVID restrictions to the end of Trump’s presidency, the boogaloos have been a feature at many of those situations that don’t fit squarely into a side.

“Their alliances with left and right are pretty situational,” he continued, echoing experts and Sam himself, who share the observation that these affiliations are often disingenuous. “It’s been really interesting to film them in various settings and states and see the way it can vary. In general, they tend to be consistent in their anti-government and pro-gun beliefs, but it’s been challenging explaining their role to audiences used to assigning ‘left’ or ‘right’ labels. 

— Roger Sollenberger in Talking to the Boogaloo, Part 2

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57 COMMENTS

  1. Boogalooo, yeet cannon, pedo bear, OK sign = white power, Boaty Mcboatface, and others all share one common theme, they are all jokes that were puled off on gullible Karens of the left.
    Ant they took the thing, hook line and sinker!

    • In the end the jokes on us since the Karen’s are in control and they’re all too eager round up and execute their “other.”

      Laughing at the media, politicians and other morons who feel compelled to endlessly add any meme, joke or coloquialism to their ever growing list of Nazi identifiers is fun and all but unless this ship if fools rights itself soon there’s gonna be a whole lotta Tommy Bahama shirts in mass graves simply because Karen didn’t get the joke.

      • The problem is that the authoritarian left and their quislings in the MSM will always find some ways to slander and persecute those who don’t toe the line. There’s no way around it, it’s better to be a ‘happy warrior’ and smile in the face of the fire and the fury of the enemies of freedom. And hey, if you can send some of those same enemies of freedom into a fit with nothing more than a ‘spicy meme’ then all the better.

  2. The concept of the Boogs. Wonderful fodder for smoke-and-mirrors by the MSM. OWGs in Hawaiian shirts and ARs slung across their backs, just daring TPTB to start the much-ballyhooed Civil War 2.0

    I don’t think so. Distraction personified.

    The MSM gloms onto Boogs, Proud Boys, and the like because they’re flashy and stir up emotions in readers who don’t know any better. But POTG know better, and that there’s a more effective Patriot ready in the shadows if the balloon ever truly goes up.

    The Gray Man.

    • +1000

      I like my grey’s with a moderate reddish tone… Not too blue. And earth tones too. Gotta mix it up a little.

    • Did you see the picture of the golden calf, I mean golden Trump statue at CPAC?
      It was surrounded by a cordon of incels wearing cowboy hats and floral shirts, kind of like an honor guard.

      No AR15s, I think the conservatives declared CPAC a gun free zone.

      • The Golden Calf, how about that?
        2000 years of slavery and the minute Moses turns his back
        Thank you Lord.
        What a joke

      • It was nothing more than a fun jokey thing but once again you demonstrate the lefts absolute absence of humor. Golden calf? Please

  3. The Boogaloo Movement is Libertarian Anarchist in origin. And it doesn’t matter how a gun owner is dressed. Its the fact they are a gun owner, that is why they hate you.

    I watched as gun owners wearing three-piece suits or modestly dressed women were demonized. Just because they own a gun. The Tyrant doesn’t care how you are dressed. They don’t like it that you have guns. They want you to be defenseless. If you are well-dressed when they come for you, that will be your best dressed day, when they put you in a coffin.

    Simply wearing a Hawaiian shirt is like having a different skin color as a gun owner. It certainly does make you stand out, in the mind of an intolerant gun grabber. Because you don’t look like the Stereotype that they project a gun owner to be. The bigots would prefer you to be wearing all of your “battle rattle”. In camouflage attire. Or wearing some type of a uniform such as Grand Master J wears.

    Dressing like a regular person perhaps on vacation frightens the gun grabber. Because at this point they see you as blending in to the society.

        • it’s for the skinny hipster ones. They are always wearing shitty plate carriers they saw on TFB and skinny jeans. No plans to actually maneuver, just look cool.

      • I own lots of Hawaiian shirts, and I refuse to let any one group coopt and ruin my laid back experience. If anybody asks me if I’m a boogaloo, I just tell them I work at Trader Joes.

  4. Oh geez…I’m old,overweight and wear Hawaiian shirts sometimes. And white. With a black wife & caramel colored son’s. Stereotype much?!? If you “switch sides” you’re just a lowlife azzhole.

  5. my old man used to call me a booglewogger.
    boog powell was a good card to have in all star baseball.
    but boogaloo was just a dumb ringo song, barbara.

  6. “it’s been challenging explaining their role to audiences used to assigning ‘left’ or ‘right’ labels.”

    I have a few Hawaiian shirts myself, they’re fun and comfortable. I’m not sure what to think about these guys. I don’t know any more about the boog boys other that what I read here or in other media, but if you talk about liberty and confuse the label makers, you’re probably saying something right.

    • … ” it’s been challenging explaining their role to audiences “… which translates to ” now, which side of my ass was I talking out of ? ” Not only do they feel they can move the goalposts, apparently the teams can switch sides in the middle of the game.

  7. They don’t fit squarely on a side because they don’t really have one.

    Boogs run the gambit from ancaps to Libertarian back to ancoms. It’s not a movement that has a truly solid “foundation”. It attracts people with widely varied political opinions on the basis of guns, tac gear and a vague notion of “freedom”.

    Some of them are fairly solid. Most are, IME, morons latching on to a “cause” because they have no actual philosophical foundation. In that regard they’re similar to what OathKeepers was (at least locally) ~10 years ago.

    • The ones who believe it’s more than a name are hilarious. They were the ones who held their fists up for black power, and they are the ones who wear the shirts to stand out. Buncha clowns with zero tactics.

      • The parallels with the hack of Gab are deliciously ironic.

        We live in a world where the moniker “Transsexual Demon Hacker” (Hacker Demon?) is actually taken seriously. So, is it really a surprise that a lot of people attracted to “the boog” are neither competent nor informed?

        That line of thought leads to other amusing asides, like HTAF does the GOP lose to these people? But that’s another thing and, at the national level, it’s not like 2A folks do any better.

    • Plus, as applied to American politics, the “sides” are stupid.

      It’s a European Marxist paradigm where Left is communist, Right is fascist, and all of the Nice Socialists meet in the middle. It’s got fuck-all to do with the US, where our idiot Leftists are more like the European right wing than anything else, and the right (and middle) are mostly just a “leave us the hell alone” coalition that doesn’t exist in Europe and never could.

      Left/Right has almost zero correspondence to American culture. Which is how we get to the current crazy point, where our so-called national security experts (leftists, of course) are saying everyone who wants no part of their authoritarian surveillance state must be a fascist. We don’t live in the same reality.

      The boogaloo thing is what happens to some people when they realize the control-freak bastards will NEVER leave you alone as long as they live.

      • Funny thing they seem to confuse though- mussolini was a socialist and met lenin before he joined the fascist party. Different sides of the same wretched coin. One side is just better at projecting it’s sins onto someone else.
        Either way, both systems should be thrown into the scrap pile of history and left to rot.

      • I rarely disagree with you Ing but on this one I do, and for a laundry list of reasons I’m not going to bother to form an essay around.

        The ultra short version is this: There are sides. They’re mostly synthetic in the US but it doesn’t much matter as long as people willingly line up along those imaginary lines. And people do line up, so the illusory nature of the lines ceases to matter. The lines been made real in the same way that some philosophers have argued that God must be real, in a way, simply because He’s been thought of. The fact that the word exists means that, in a way, the object being described exists; If nothing else, as a concept. Like an invention that hasn’t been yet made but has been thought of.

        If one sees a mirage and believes that it is real then the mirage, and what one sees in it, matters quite a lot. Especially when you run out of water chasing after illusions in the desert.

        • I’m not saying there aren’t sides. There clearly are.

          I’m saying that the whole left/right thing was imported from Europe and forced on everybody here — and it doesn’t fit culturally (except that our Left does kind of resemble theirs because oikophobia and xenophilia, but that’s where the resemblance ends).

          The cognitive distortions this produces are incredibly harmful. As you say, when people try to cram everyone else into illusory boxes and chase the mirage, it has real consequences. Thus the thousands of idiot commie-vs.-fascist larpers who think the US is Germany circa 1938. And the idiots in DC who stationed the army in the capitol to protect “democracy” against all the libertarian fascists.

        • “The fact that the word exists means that, in a way, the object being described exists“

          So now I understand the bullshit claims of election fraud, just because you want to believe, it must exist, right?

          It is as nonsensical as the “absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” bullshit.

          More unfortunates who have been deleted by Q, she really knows how to manipulate Trump’s intellectually bankrupt “poorly educated” masses.

      • Left and right are not two sides of a line. They represent divergence from the middle top of a circle. Moving too far left or right means converging towards totalitarianism at the bottom of the circle. That is why the governments of hardcore fascists and communists are almost indistinguishable.

  8. I chuckled.

    We don’t have a side. It’s anti government, pro freedom. Nothing more, nothing less. The ones who held their fists up and marched with BLM are phonies. They blow whichever way the twitter trends take them. They did know one thing though: police are the enemy. But allowing yourself to be surrounded by a commie movement was and is stupid. Either boogaloo, or die.

  9. “… the boogaloos have been a feature at many of those situations that don’t fit squarely into a side.“

    These partisans cannot fathom that there are people who value principle instead of allegiance to a “side.”

  10. I wear Hawaiian shirts because it is a local custom and very comfortable in the climate. I guess I first started wearing them after the war when Robin Masters allowed me to live on his estate. TC and Rick do wear them from time to time but Higgins never does.

  11. Here in Missouri we wear Hawaiian shirts, eat Peeps and drink soda after running and shooting in July.

    • Here in Minnesota we wear six layers of down filled survival gear, can’t get long sleeve Hawaiian shirts, blow Peeps up in the microwave for fun, and drink 40 proof or stronger, since soda just freezes up solid for about 4 months out of the year. We come inside after a day out calling coyotes and just stand in front of the open refrigerator because it 70 degrees warmer than it was outside… oh, and our streets were laid out by drunken Irishmen to confuse and keep out the riff-raff… who Wouldn’t want to be one of us?

  12. I must admit that I’ve worn Hawaiian shirts. Of course, I was in Hawaii. And Hawaiian shirts do make excellent cover garments.

  13. I’ve worn Hawaiian shirts for over twenty years and I eat red meat. I’m the OG boogaloo!!!
    (smile)

    • lefties? lol. K.

      Why is it every time I see a 3%er or oathkeeper sticker it’s next to a punisher skull, a come and take them flag, and a thin blue line flag? And why are they both scared to talk about the boogaloo?

  14. The FBI’s detailed statistics on homicides of police officers document an extreme paucity, as in zero, police officers killed by right wing militia types in recent decades. In contrast, there have been a lot of cops killed by Black and Hispanic gang members. You may recall 2016 when President Obama incited so many of his bastard sons to go on a rampage. The killing stopped only when a police chief got smart enough to not have a memorial which Obama could exploit to incite more massacres. The statistics for killings of victims who aren’t LEOs are similar.

    As for attending rallies carrying guns, that is as stupid as having an ad hoc political convention when General Belasaurious is in command and Empress Theodosia has Emperor Justinian as well as General Belasaurious kitty whipped into submission. You’ll end up with thirty to forty thousand dead conventioneers.

    .
    A far more effective strategy would be to start hunting Karens. The police might fantasize that they can protect themselves and the politicians from armed citizens who go on the offensive, but they can’t protect all of those Karens who live in inner cities and suburbia. The police also can’t protect all of this putative men who have been kitty whipped into submission by the Karens. The best strategy would be to hunt down all of Karens’ husbands and boyfriends but spare all of the Karens who have a nice kitty to be recruited into your own, personal harem.

    • Even though it is wrong I admire, in my way ,
      BLM protesters resorting to violence.
      Compare the “insurrectionist that stormed” the White House . When ask to leave all the Fight or Die, were taking it back’ers quietly left.
      Wheres the backbone at. I’ve only seen BLM walk the walk.
      It is not the time of John Brown and pikes, If a new civil war were to be won the “Blacks” ( I dont like that word either) . Those of African decent would probably be the ones to pull it off.

    • “President Obama incited so many of his bastard sons to go on a rampage“

      In a single speech on January 6, Trump told his followers to fight, using that exact word
      20 times.

      Could you point out the speech where President Obama used the word fight 20 times to incite his followers?

      • You mean, like when he stated that Rudy Giuliani fights?

        Remind us again about when Rudy committed an act of violence?

        “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said.

        Your double-standard a**holery screams so loudly that I don’t give a flying …beeeeeep… what you say. You lie like a rug. It’s all you do.

        • And remind me again which United States Capitol was invaded minutes after Obama spoke these words?

          There doesn’t seem to be any record of Obama sending multiple messages to his supporters, directing them to show up at a specific place and time for a “wild” event.

          I couldn’t find the reference where Obama said “we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down to the capital and we’re going to cheer our brave senators and congressmen and women”, immediately followed by a violent insurrection attempt by thousands of Trump supporters.

          Face it, y’all tried a violent coup attempt and failed miserably, now hundreds of Trump supporters will end up in federal prison thanks to their un-American activities on 6Jan.

          And regardless of whatever lies you and other Trump supporters spout, y’all lost the election fair and square, and lost in every court from local to state to federal District to Federal appeals to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

        • Face it, y’all tried a violent coup attempt…

          Really? If that was true, then where are the rows and rows of filled body bags?

          That was nothing more than a spur of the moment action spurred on by Leftist instigators like John Sullivan. (He even filmed himself telling people to misbehave.) The only person killed was shot by a Capitol Police officer while climbing through a window. (Hint: Not an inherently violent action, and filmed by John Sullivan as he was encouraging that action.)

          You really need to change your handle to be more accurate: Moron49er or Liar49er. Your pick.

  15. Salon? Like a hair dresser? So now them old gossiping biddy’s are trying to figure out gunm stuff. That may be progress? At least they’re not yacking about ” Days of Our Lies” and if Sebastian is still cheating on Amy.

    • Miriam Webster’s dictionary:

      salon noun

      sa·​lon | \ sə-ˈlän , ˈsa-ˌlän, sa-ˈlōⁿ \
      Definition of salon
      1 : an elegant apartment or living room (as in a fashionable home)
      2 : a fashionable assemblage of notables (such as literary figures, artists, or statesmen) held by custom at the home of a prominent person
      3a : a hall for exhibition of art
      b capitalized : an annual exhibition of works of art
      4 : a stylish business establishment or shop
      a beauty salon

      • Possum is well aware of the words he chooses to use. Show a little mental flexibility, please. (Wait, no, you can’t; otherwise you wouldn’t be a party-line leftist.)

  16. Lets try this on for size:

    “The Black Lives Matter Movement is giant compared to, say, Boogaloo, but they are
    skilled manipulators and understand that since no one really knows what they are
    about they can pick whatever side they want. The right likes them because violent
    riots and burning cities deter overreactions by police. The left tolerates them because
    they are talking about justice.”

    Some guy, founder of some news organization and a regular media presence at left-wing
    rallies, told Salon he has observed those contradictions on the scene,
    describing Black Lives Matter physically switching from far-left to far-right sides during
    protests, and even physically challenging other The Proud Boys in order to ostensibly
    protect members of the radical right.

    “Covering Black Lives Matter for the past year and a half has been fascinating
    because of the contrast between their politics and the rest of street politics
    in the past year,” Fischer told Salon, though “fascinating” appears to gloss
    over the normalcy of rioting at rallies, as well as fails to capture the
    seriousness with which the Black Lives Matter’s professed commitment to imminent and
    brutal violence should be taken. “While 2020 was defined by domestic unrest
    spanning from far right violence to COVID restrictions to the end of Trump’s
    presidency, the anti-fascists have been a feature at many of those situations that
    don’t fit squarely into a side.

    “Their alliances with left and right are pretty situational,” he continued,
    echoing experts and Sam himself, who share the observation that these
    affiliations are often disingenuous. “It’s been really interesting to film them
    in various settings and states and see the way it can vary. In general, they
    tend to be consistent in their anti-government beliefs, but it’s
    been challenging explaining their role to audiences used to assigning ‘left’ or
    ‘right’ labels.

    I miss Salon covering technology. Maybe I’m old.

  17. Personally, the real thing that scares me is the Alien Vampire Zombie Virus Apocalypse. This is why I maintain my personal arsenal at the ready and is why I bought a matched pair of those Gurkha fighting knives so that when Milla Jovovich comes to rescue me I can hand her the Zombie killing tools she loves best!

    Of course, she’s off killing Mosters in some alternate dimension just now, so we’ll just have to keep the Alien Vampire Zombie Virus spreaders on standby until Milla gets back from her current gig.

  18. Doesn’t anybody remember subtlety anymore?

    If the fabled “boogaloo” happens (and I don’t think it ever will) the first folks to be targeted will be the ones who stand out. Hawaiian shirted folks will be dropping like flies.

    So try blending in, stop coopting old fat white guy fashions (ahem!), and carry discretely.

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