ELK RAPIDS, Mich. (MIRS News) – A few years ago, an obscure 1984 film called “Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo” gave rise to a long-running internet meme that morphed into a code for anti-government extremists that was dubbed “Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

Taking over the government for the “people” became known as the “Big Luau.” The loose network of believers started wearing Hawaiian shirts as their sort of dress code.

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Seen by many as “keyboard warriors” who talk a big game, last week’s convictions of Adam Fox and Barry Croft for planning the kidnapping and murder of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was proof that the lines between fantasy and reality can get dangerously blurred.

The trial showed clothing as disarming as a Hawaiian shirt and a moniker as goofy as “Boogaloo,” conceals an extremist national movement where the magnet is trying to start or preparing for a second civil war.

“Don’t let them take the Hawaiian shirts from you. They shouldn’t be able to co-opt it,” said Rachel Goldwasser, a research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Yet it appears they are well on their way to doing that. The internet-sprung movement has pulled militias and typically white men who feel shunned by society into a call to violence against government, as is evident in the Fox and Croft case. Also, Steven Carrillo, who reportedly had ties to the Boogaloo movement, was sentenced to life in prison Friday in California after killing a Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s deputy.

Any extremist movement needs to be taken seriously, said Amy Cooter, an expert on domestic militias and senior research fellow at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism.

“The problem is that not all of them are just going to sit back and talk. Some of them are angry enough to be motivated to action and unless we have inside connections into these groups it is really hard to tell the difference,” Cooter said on this week’s edition of the MIRS Monday podcast.

When it comes to the thinking of a civil war mindset there is more of a tendency to think about the problem than look at possible outcomes, she said.

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“I think that many of them haven’t thought that far ahead, to be honest,” Cooter said.

Michigan State Police spokesperson Shanon Banner said they work with local and federal law enforcement to identify groups and always encourage people to report suspicious activity through a tip line at 855-642-4847, or 855-MICH-TIP.

“Domestic terrorism is a threat we are aware of and concerned with,” Banner said.

MSP, FBI and local law enforcement were involved in the 14 arrests, which included Fox and Croft, as well as members of the Wolverine Watchmen, a militia organization that many of the men awaiting trial on state charges, and two men who pled guilty in federal court, belonged.

The Boogaloo Bois have an overlap with many existing domestic terrorist organizations, because the idea of a civil war would allow some groups, such as the neo-Nazis, to remake the nation in the image they want to see, Cooter said.

“The scary part about this, in some ways, is there is not just one stereotypical model for the type of person that can be sucked into this kind of thinking or this kind of action,” she said.

Goldwasser said the head of the Three Percenters, also known as III%ers, an antigovernment group, identified as believing in the Boogaloo Movement.

Goldwasser said there was also a shift in ideology that came in during the 2016 presidential election that moved people to become more engaged in what was happening in their communities. While some entered the political arena to enact a revolution, others ended up in the hands of extremists seeing the revolution as something more physical.

“This movement has been largely driven underground,” she said.

She and Cooter said a lot of that was largely due to de-platforming members from social media spaces like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

Goldwasser said Jan. 6 also helped in sending the group back to the shadows of the internet.

However, Cooter said most of the Jan. 6 rioters, while sharing some ideology with the Boogaloo, were not card-carrying members of the movement.

“I think that’s sort of a good signal that many of these underlying fears and concerns that we need to be addressing in some way aren’t just limited to what we think of as being extremist groups, but are fairly broad-based in some segments of our population,” she said.

One segment of the population is America First voters who have taken the idea of a revolution in America to the political establishment.

Goldwasser said there is a group listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an antigovernment group, called the American Patriot Council, that is run by former gubernatorial candidate Ryan Kelley. She said many of the ideas skirt the Boogaloo Movement and that many Boogaloo Bois were present at a protest on April 30, 2020.

Fox himself wore a Hawaiian shirt in the Capitol building as he carried his rifle under the rotunda on that day.

Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, who makes claims of being a constitutional sheriff, is a government official who has interacted with Boogaloo Bois. In May 2020, WWMT reported Leaf was the keynote speaker at an American Patriot Rally in Grand Rapids, which was heavily attended by members of the Boogaloo Movement, including many members of the Wolverine Watchmen.

“They very clearly have not denounced these particular groups and in fact have welcomed them into their political spaces and spaces of protests,” Goldwasser said.

She said the Boogaloo movement isn’t in any way a new phenomenon and take their ideology from other extremist movements or observed groups, such as Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols – a native of Deckerville in the Thumb – blowing up a building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

“The Boogaloo wants to be over-involved with society, they also want to prepare, but they want to instigate and actively stir up trouble rather than almost try to stay outside of it,” Cooter said.