Vice News reports:

With their trademark Hawaiian shirts, tactical gear, and AR-style rifles, the Boogaloo Bois burst onto the American protest scene in 2020, testing the limits of open-carry laws while rallying around shared fantasies of armed insurrection. At the center of their movement was Mike Dunn, then a 19-year-old baby-faced former marine, who’d built a name for himself organizing militia groups across Virginia.

But it wasn’t just flashy displays of defiance and edgy memes that made the Boogaloo Bois infamous: That year, Boogaloo members racked up charges for shooting at police stations, plotting to sabotage the power grid, participating in a conspiracy to kidnap the governor of Michigan, and even attempting to sell arms to Hamas.

But the breaking point for the government was when a Boogaloo Boi murdered two law enforcement officers in California. The DOJ formed a task force to investigate anti-government extremists and the FBI began knocking on doors. Six months later, almost as quickly as these floral-shirted militants had materialized on American streets, the Boogaloo Bois disappeared from public view. Even Dunn hung up his Hawaiian shirt, changed his phone number, got a job at a county jail, and laid low for a while.

The sudden disappearance of the Boogaloos fueled speculation that the slew of DOJ investigations and arrests had literally taken them off the board—perhaps destroying the movement forever. “The fact of the matter is the FBI won,” a once-prominent Boogaloo from Texas recently wrote online.

While it’s true that the threat of prosecution caused the Boogaloo Bois to lower their profile, the fierce anti-government ideology underpinning the movement never went anywhere. And now, the Boogaloo Bois appear to be regrouping, plotting their public comeback to coincide with what many fear could be a tense, even violent, presidential election season. [Continue reading…]