boogaloo

Although its origins are unclear, boogaloo originally referred to a rock-and-roll dance and music style especially popular among Latin American youth in New York City in the 1960s.

The name boogaloo was adopted for a style of street dance that inspired the electric boogaloo in the 1970s, which is popularly associated with break dancing. Electric boogaloo dancing was featured in the 1984 film Breakin’: Electric Boogaloo, and its widely mocked sequel of the same year, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

By the 2000s, jokes about Breakin’ 2 extended boogaloo as a slang term for any nonsensical, unnecessary, or strange sequel, literal or figurative. And so the boogaloo movement applied the word boogaloo for a “sequel” to the American Civil War.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, researchers have traced the term boogaloo, in reference to the insurrectionary subculture, back to the website 4chan as early as 2012. The term boogaloo was used on 4chan’s /k/ and /pol/ boards, which—despite being ostensibly dedicated to discussions of weapons and politics, respectively—are often used by white supremacists and other extremist groups to share racist content.

On these 4chan boards, the word boogaloo became especially used in often racist and violent memes or threads about the idea of a second civil war or engaging in violence against the police. Supporters of such a war promoted violence to incite this war, which many felt would be a violent race war.

By the late 2010s, the boogaloo internet subculture spread from 4chan to other online communities such as on Reddit and Facebook.

The political ideologies of boogaloo adherents vary. Some describe themselves as libertarians, others anarchists; yet others are connected with white nationalist, neo-Nazi, fascist groups. Regardless of specific beliefs, members of the boogaloo movement support violent insurrection against the federal government and, often, left-wing groups. They generally believe in accelerating what they believe is inevitable civil war or violent uprising that will lead to the destruction of society.

To this end, boogaloo members promote violence that will hasten an outbreak of civil war—and some have been charged with killing police officers, planning terrorism, and committing other destructive or violent crimes. Some boogaloo members specifically advocate for racial violence, thinking a race war would collapse the federal government to usher in a fascist state.

In demonstrations, boogaloo bois/boys show up heavily armed, often wearing Hawaiian shirts and decorative patches of igloos—both apparently because boogaloo sounds like “Big Luau” or “Big Igloo.” The phrase the Big Luau is also used by some boogaloo members as code for societal collapse or murdering police officers, because, darkly, pigs (slang for “cops”) are cooked at a luau. Another boogaloo variant is boojahideen, playing on mujahideen, “Muslim guerrilla fighters, especially in Afghanistan and Iran.”

Boogaloo has no known leadership or central organization, with self-declared members organizing on social media to do everything from sharing memes to planning violent activities.