The Boogaloos are a far-right, white supremacy militia group that organize across the internet. Boogaloos came into existence via the firearms board ‘/k/’ on 4Chan, and then expanded onto Facebook. They were more widely reported on after engaging in violent attacks. A boogaloo member is allegedly responsible for shooting Federal Protective Service officer David Patrick Underwood and another officer in Oakland, California on May 29, 2020; Underwood did not survive. The Boogaloo traffics in memes promoting civil war, armed revolts, and fantasies about taking down the U.S. government. These memes have spread from 4Chan to Discord chat servers, Facebook and Reddit. Armed with rifles, AK47s and heavy combat gear combined with their Hawaiian shirts, Boogaloos star- ted appearing at George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests, as well as pro-gun rallies; and Boogaloos, like other white supremacy groups, have a specific memetic framing and language to their posts – from the words they use and the topics they discuss to the kinds of memes they create.

The ‘boogaloo’ is not a single coherent group but represents a decentralized informal on-line movement, yet devoted adherents consistently reproduce hierarchical right-wing social values despite their superficial opposition to government authority. The boogaloo contains several strains, which Unicorn Riot has been monitoring via the chat app Discord throughout 2020. The group Patriotwave represents one of the more dominant recurring strains of Booga- loo phenomena. While a few members of the loose-knit group may claim to identify as leftist or even “libertarian socialist“, the group overall trends heavily in directions similar to previous far-right meme-based militia formations such as ‘Anticom‘, one of the younger online fascist groups (pr marily organized over Discord) involved in planning and facilitating the deadly Au- gust 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville.

The specific kind of content they post is important, because it creates a ‘sameness’ and a framing of values, thoughts, and political platforms and beliefs shared across the group. These are ‘deep memetic frames’ that are manifested within the group and bleed into their offline and online lives as actual beliefs. “Deep memetic frames” are a descriptor created by Ryan Milner and Whitney Phillips to explain how memes and movements create “sense-making orientations to the world” which “shape what we know, what we see, and what we’re willing to accept as evidence“... “establish the identity of the bad ‘them,’ as opposed to the valiant ‘us,’ and prescribe what can or should be done in response“. Phillips was using this framing specifically in a Wired article to talk about the dangers of QAnon, but it can be applied to Boogaloo bois as well. Deep memetic frames aren’t contained to one corner of the internet or one part of a person’s life. Deep memetic frames illustrate how memes can become beliefs that worm their way into a person’s being, making con- spiracy theories like QAnon feel like a real framework for seeing the world. And Boogaloo operates via similar pathways.