Upcoming Virtual Harvard Kennedy School of Government Event on My Book “Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom”

Free to Move—Final Cover

On October 22, 4-5:30 PM eastern time, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government will be hosting me for a virtual talk about my new book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. The event is free and open to the public. You don’t have to have any Harvard connection to participate. Anyone interested can register here.

In addition to my talk, there will be commentary by Harvard economics Professor Edward Glaeser, one of the world’s leading experts on urban development and interjurisdictional mobility. It is an honor to take part in this event with him!

This presentation is co-sponsored by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

The Introduction to my book, which provides an overview of the rest, is available for free download here. I have pledged to donate 50% of all royalties from the book to charities supporting refugees.

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The Complicated Truth About the Boogaloo Movement

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Is America headed for a civil war?

According to the followers of one fast-growing online subculture, increasing political polarization and instability will inevitably lead to a domestic armed conflict, which they refer to as Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo.

That’s a play on the title of a 1984 breakdancing film, from which the movement—known as “the Boogaloo,” “Big Igloo” or, sometimes, “Big Luau”—also derived its name.

The Hawaiian shirt-wearing, gun-toting activists known as Boogbois have migrated out of memespace and into the streets, showing up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in many American cities—often in apparent sympathy with the cause.

The media have called them white nationalists and accelerationist terrorists. “The boogaloo movement is (for the most part) a libertarian group,” according to one member.

But these labels don’t capture what this dispersed movement is all about.

The Boogaloo movement is Gen Z Second Amendment activism. Its members forgo the patriotic symbolism of traditional militia movements for flowered apparel, bright patches, and colorful memes. Their approach to organizing resembles Hong Kong’s decentralized, privacy-conscious, and social media-heavy protest movement.

They are digitally native activists, raised on Instagram and TikTok, who understand that in the world of online feedback loops, actions are often less important than the way they’re presented.

Their online rhetoric is infused with paranoia, and its members circulate unfounded theories of rampant, unchecked pedophilia, which they say must be stamped out extrajudicially, if necessary. They claim that societal breakdown is inevitable, but their public stances often makes it seem as if a violent Civil War is something they’d like to see happen. And the movement’s organic, leaderless structure leaves it highly susceptible to being co-opted by its worst, most dangerous actors.

The members who spoke to Reason stand against gun control, the drug war, and aggressive policing. They are also convinced that there’s rampant pedophilia in American society that must be dealt with, extrajudicially if need be.

Sometimes they’ve aligned themselves with right-wing militia groups, at other moments, with Black Lives Matter. The one issue that seems to unify them is a conviction that armed resistance to government overreach is entirely justified.

“It’s a very powerful movement that has come together and unified against racism, tyranny, pedophilia, and government overreach,” says Mike Dunn, a visible face in a mostly faceless movement. “It’s one of the biggest unified movements there has been among gun owners and freedom-loving Americans.”

On October 8, police arrested Dunn for allegedly trespassing while openly carrying a firearm at a rally for Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Jo Jorgensen.

Dunn says he left home at age 16 and joined the Marine Corps a year later. When he returned to Virginia, he embarked on a new political project.

“I began building militias and connecting them all together under one under one [heading],” says Dunn. “And then my buddy, who I was connected with through some militia work…was Duncan Lemp.”

In March, Montgomery County police shot to death 21-year-old Duncan Lemp after bursting into his Maryland home in the middle of the night with an arrest warrant.

“I believe they blatantly killed him in cold blood. And we’re going to have justice,” says Dunn. “After he was killed, it really pushed me to become part of the Boogaloo movement.”

Lemp’s death gave rise to theories that he was targeted for his involvement in militia movements. Police say they were seizing firearms he wasn’t allowed to own because of a juvenile conviction. The Montgomery County Police Department has failed to produce the arrest warrant or bodycam footage of the shooting despite requests from Reason‘s C.J. Ciamerella.

The Lemp faction of the Boogaloo movement often use his name as a social media handle and regularly post about police brutality, though they’ve migrated to Telegram and other encrypted platforms after Facebook started shutting down their groups. In these anonymous channels, racist and anti-Semitic language becomes more frequently visible.

But while racist groups speak of the Boogaloo as an impending race war, this group portrays it as a sequel to the American Revolution.

Dunn says he was drawn to the movement by its hardline stance against racism, which set it apart from many other armed movements he’d joined.

“I had grown up country, flying the rebel flag, saying some pretty dumb stuff,” says Dunn. “And that’s something that attracted me to the Boogaloo movement, was how much they hated racism and how much they weren’t willing to deal with it. And I began to change my viewpoint.”

Boogaloo members have marched alongside Black Lives Matter protesters, although their presence hasn’t always been welcomed. And they’ve clashed with racist groups. The Boogbois once led a chant of “White Supremacy Sucks,” disrupting a speech at a pro-gun rally in Richmond.

“We’re not white supremacists. We believe in liberty for all,” says John, who asked that we identify him only by his first name and who runs a Boogaloo-themed Instagram page called Too_Savage_for_Statists. “And liberty for all means…regardless of race, gender, whether you’re trans. It doesn’t matter.”

In addition to supporting Black Lives Matter, he was in Hong Kong in 2019 helping pro-democracy demonstrators. He says that there are parallels between the two protest movements.

“The biggest similarity that I’ve seen is…how the Chinese media describes the Hong Kong protesters is the exact same way the conservative media in the U.S. [describes] the BLM movement,” says John. “I don’t think conservatives in America would like to compare themselves to conservatives in China, but that’s really how it is.”

Journalist Robert Evans co-authored an investigation of the movement for the website Bellingcat. He says the first time he noticed the Boogbois appearing in-person at events was at the January 2020 gun rights rally in front of the Virginia State Capitol.

“I was worried that we would have seen more violence directly attributed to the movement than we have seen currently. And hopefully, things stay that way,” says Evans.

No movement can tightly control its message, especially one as decentralized as the Boogbois, meaning anyone can easily carry out violence and acts of terrorism under their banner.

One man accused of killing a sheriff’s deputy and federal agent in California had a boogaloo patch in his car, and he allegedly scrawled boogaloo phrases in blood on the hood of a vehicle. The Department of Justice has charged three men connected to the Boogaloo movement with planning to incite violence with Molotov cocktails at a Las Vegas Black Lives Matter rally. The FBI has even attempted to link Boogaloo members with Hamas in order to charge them under international antiterrorism laws.

And a federal law enforcement official told NBC News that some of the men involved in the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer have ties to the movement.

“I don’t want to downplay the danger because you’ve got…thousands of armed people talking about wanting to contribute to a societal breakdown,” says Evans.

And while many of the more outspoken Boogbois may espouse libertarian-sounding political ideals, Evans believes that what most unifies the broader Boogaloo movement is a shared belief in the need to prepare for impending state collapse by amassing weapons.

“It’s less than ideology, more of an aesthetic,” says Evans. “A worship of weapons and the products that surround warfare…It is a desire among people to enact the things they’ve seen in movies…It’s more than anything, a way for people who have not seen war, but who fetishize aspects of conflict to dress up and carry out fantasies.”

Dunn and John both deny that they are actively trying to accelerate domestic warfare but rather want to be prepared to resist a tyrannical government power grab.

“None of us want a war, we just see it as inevitable,” says John.

And Dunn says that their posture is purely defensive.

“[Former U.S. Defense Secretary] ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis said…basically, ‘If you want war, if you want to screw with me, please don’t. But if you do screw with me, I will kill you all.’ And I think that’s the mentality of the movement,” says Dunn.

But Evans thinks the fixation on collapse and violent conflict can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the presence of more armed civilians on the streets increases the likelihood of an inciting incident.

“As someone who’s reported from civil wars, you can’t prepare yourself for this…If they had a real physical [sense] of what civil war means and what it would mean in this country, they wouldn’t be buying AR-15s and ammunition. They would be dedicating their lives to stopping that from happening every single way that they could,” says Evans.

But the Boogbois maintain that the Second Amendment remains relevant in contemporary politics.

“An armed people was meant to be a check [against] the state,” says John. “[The framers of the U.S. Constitution] wanted the people to be able to outgun the state if they overstep their bounds.”

The Boogbois is only one of several armed groups showing up at protests. There are also the pro-Trump Proud Boys, which drew media scrutiny after Trump’s ambiguous statement about them in a presidential debate.

And there are black nationalist gun groups like the Not Fucking Around Coalition and various militia groups like the Oathkeepers and the III%ers.

In the event of the predicted conflict between warring political factions actually happening, it’s not clear with which side Boogbois like John and Dunn would align. Neither support Donald Trump or Joe Biden, instead preferring Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, and, in the field, Boogbois have often walked a fine line, attempting to position themselves as an armed buffer between police and demonstrators, peacekeepers between leftist and rightist groups, as well as protectors of private property.

While it’s difficult to estimate the exact size of the movement, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights has documented a Boogaloo presence at protests in at least a dozen states this year. Dunn says the Boogaloo movement is already a sizable force and only poised to grow.

“It’s probably the largest actively armed movement in the United States to date,” says Dunn, based on online metrics. “A Facebook group had a hundred thousand people in it…before everything started getting taken down. Now we have groups everywhere… every state.”

Evans agrees.

“It is certainly the largest movement I have seen in my lifetime, in the United States, that is focused around armed citizens taking political action [focused on] those arms,” says Evans.

And to fully understand the group’s potential reach, Evans says it’s important to recognize that apocalyptic narratives are deeply ingrained in the American psyche and not lose sight of the fact that, as principled as some of its members may sound, the Boogaloo meme at the center of the movement is still one of impending war.

“There’s a direct line between the zombie apocalypse memes that were such a rage in the aughts and the Boogaloo,” says Evan. “That’s where a lot of the people who are into this started buying guns… What the Boogaloo has done is taken that impulse… and attached to it something much more realistic because we’re not going to deal with zombies ever. We might have a civil war.”

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. 

Photos: Zach D Roberts/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Jana Birchum/Polaris/Newscom; REBECCA COOK/REUTERS/Newscom; BRYAN WOOLSTON/REUTERS/Newscom; JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom; John C. Clark/ZUMA Press/Newscom; JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom; JULIA RENDLEMAN/REUTERS/Newscom; NURI VALLBONA/REUTERS/Newscom; Sebastiano Tomada/Sipa USA/Newscom; Stephanie Keith/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Joel Angel Juarez/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Adam J. Dewey/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Zach D Roberts/ZUMA Press/Newscom; John C. Clark/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; JULIA RENDLEMAN/REUTERS/Newscom; JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; Chad Martin / SOPA Images/Sipa U/Newscom

Music: “Leaving Earth,” Bits and Pieces,” “Killing Time,” “Imitate,” “Fall,” and “Apparition” by Stanley Gurvich licensed through Artlist.

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The Portland Protest Shooter’s Death Looks More and More Like Excessive Force—but Trump Keeps Bragging About It

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Execution squad? The more that comes out about the federal task force killing of Portland murder suspect Michael Forest Reinoehl, the worse his death looks.

The president isn’t helping. “We sent in the U.S. Marshals. Took 15 minutes, it was over. Fifteen minutes, it was over—we got him,” Donald Trump told a crowd in North Carolina on Thursday. “They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him, and 15 minutes—that ended.”

A benefit-of-the-doubt reading here would be that Trump’s “they” who “didn’t want to arrest” was a reference to the Portland police—who hadn’t yet arrested Reinoehl by the time the task force intervened—and not an admission that agents didn’t want to take Reinoehl in alive (as some have been reading it).

But either way, the end of the mission is nothing to be bragging about. By many accounts, the officers didn’t even attempt to arrest Reinoehl peacefully.

Investigators said this week that Reinoehl—pursued for fatally shooting Aaron “Jay” Danielson during a confrontation at an August 29 protest in Portland—had a loaded handgun when local law enforcement serving on the U.S. Marshals Pacific Northwest Violent Offender Task Force killed him on September 3. But the gun was still in Reinoehl’s front pants pocket as police fired more than 30 bullets at him.

“The new information follows initial reports from investigators [that] the federal fugitive task force involved in shooting Reinoehl gave conflicting statements,” reports ABC News.

One member of the task force claimed that Reinoehl pointed a gun at them. Another said that didn’t happen, but Reinoehl was reaching for a gun when they shot him. A U.S. Marshal’s Office press release claimed Reinoehl “produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers.”

This week, Thurston County Sheriff’s Lt. Ray Brady said that Reinoehl’s hand may have been on a gun or may have been merely “near” the gun.

At a Tuesday press conference, investigators said they still do not know if the gun in Reinoehl’s pocket on the night of his death was the same gun used to kill Danielson a few nights prior.

Almost two dozen witnesses to Reinoehl’s subsequent death say task force members never identified themselves or warned Reinoehl him before opening fire on him, though Sheriff Brady disputed this on Tuesday.

Nathaniel Dingess, who lived nearby, told The Oregonian in September that he “saw Reinoehl walk toward his car holding a cellphone in his hand when two unmarked law enforcement vehicles converged outside the complex [and] began firing at Reinoehl.” After initially shooting, they told Reinoehl to halt and then resumed shooting, Dingess said, adding that he never saw Reinoehl reach for a gun.

The New York Times talked with 22 people who had been nearby when Reinoehl was killed, and only one recalled the task force members saying anything before they starting shooting:

Mr. Louis…some 140 feet from Mr. Reinoehl, also said the police opened fire immediately, without giving any warnings—as did Mr. Smith and Mr. Cutler.

“There was no, ‘Get out of the car!’ There was no, ‘Stop!’ There was no nothing. They just got out of the car and started shooting,” Mr. Louis said.

Mr. Smith described it similarly: “There was no yelling. There was no screaming. There was no altercation. It was just straight to gunshots.”

Of the five eyewitnesses, none saw Reinoehl holding or reaching for a gun.

Despite the questions surrounding the officers conduct, Trump has repeatedly bragged about this operation—and even described it as “retribution.”


ELECTION 2020

Presidential candidates Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Jo Jorgensen fielded voter questions on Thursday night. On a night originally slated for a debate between Trump and Biden, the Republican and Democratic nominees instead squared off in dueling TV interviews.

During Biden’s time taking questions in Philadelphia from ABC host George Stephanopoulos, Biden said police should shoot people in the leg as a deescalation tactic (this is a bad idea); asked if he supports court packing, he said he was “open to considering what happens” after the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation process.

On NBC, Trump spread major misinformation about masks, claiming erroneously that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said “that 85 percent of the people wearing masks catch” COVID-19. He also evaded questions about his taxes, whether he took a coronavirus test before the first debate, and more. And he claimed (once again) that he has “done more for the African-American community than any president with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.”

Meanwhile, libertarian presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen talked with Reason‘s Matt Welch. Watch that here.


FREE MINDS

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Ajit Pai announced yesterday that he will accept the Trump administration’s request to “interpret” Section 230. While Pai’s announcement isn’t necessarily bad news, it’s not a good sign that he announced the effort in a statement misrepresenting the law as a special protection for tech companies—a popular bit of ant-230 propaganda that simply is not true.

Prominent Republicans pushed several misconceptions about Section 230 yesterday, as hysteria about it reaches a fever pitch among extremely online conservatives. The most prominent of these is the idea “publisher” and “platform” are legal categories which websites must stay on one side or the other of.

(For good primers on Section 230 myths, see this Reason TV video and this Techdirt post.)


FREE MARKETS

Bill Gates questions antitrust investigation. Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke out against the congressional strategy of tackling tech companies’ potential antitrust violations as a group, rather than on a company-by-company basis. “I think it’s kind of unfortunate that they’re grouping the companies together, because there are so many different issues,” Gates said at the GeekWire Summit. Antitrust enforcers famously targeted Microsoft in the 1990s.

“If they want to get serious, they’re going to have to focus in, enumerate the issues and them debate them. So I’d say we’re kind of at the beginning,” he continued. Gates thinks we should be having more conversation about how tech practices affect consumers and “a little less about demonizing the specific people involved.”

Gates also commended today’s tech CEOs for their ability to play nice with politicians and regulators:

I think the main mistake I made, which was not realizing how important it would be to develop relationships in Washington, be engaged there—these companies are not making the same mistake that I made. They have lots of people. Jeff even has a nice house in Washington, DC. They may even be making some other mistakes. But everybody saw what I did and knows better now.

If their recent treatment is what it looks like when they suck up to D.C. power, I shudder to think what things would look like otherwise.


FOLLOWUP

Twitter is revising its hacked materials policy after the company used it as grounds to remove a New York Post story about Joe Biden and his son Hunter.


QUICK HITS

• In which Trump does not appear to realize that The Babylon Bee is a satire site:

• After a woman used a racial slur outside a grocery store in Pennsylvania, “the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office determined that the woman’s alleged conduct supports the ‘charging of several violations.'” But Gisele Barreto Fetterman, the target of the slur and the wife of Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, told police she didn’t want to press charges.

• “The government can pursue people for disclosing classified information, but it can’t stop them from publishing books just because they might make the president’s family look bad,” writes national security lawyer Mark S. Zaid at The Washington Post.

• A tiny bit of good news on the free speech and free markets fronts: “A judge in San Francisco said Thursday she’s not likely to lift a temporary block on the US government’s attempts to ban WeChat,” reports The Verge. “Beeler did not issue a ruling Thursday but said the government had not presented new evidence to persuade her that there were significant national security concerns with allowing WeChat to remain active in the US.”

What happens if Roe v. Wade is overturned?

• Rick and Morty is extremist material in Russia:

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A Thought Experiment: Allow Cameras in the Supreme Court, But Only Admit People from the Public from a Lottery

The Supreme Court has now been live-streaming the oral argument of cases for several months. At the outset, I would listen to every case, whether or not I was interested in it. I’ll admit, now my interest has waned. I will tune into a case that I have some interest in. Or more likely, I’l wait till the transcript comes out. Old habits die hard.

Fortunately, this natural experiment, which was induced by the pandemic, has dispelled certain myths. First, there was a longstanding concern that the news media would splice up soundbites from the arguments in a misleading way. I don’t think this has happened–even for high profile cases involving the President’s tax returns. Second, there was a longstanding concern that the attorney would grandstand. We haven’t seen this either. Third, there was a longstanding concern that the Justices would grandstand. Nope.

At some point, the Justices will be able to resume in-person meetings. If I had to guess, the Supreme Court chamber will be empty. Only the Justices, the advocates, and perhaps some members of the press would be allowed into the session. At that point, I hope the Court continues the natural experiment, and allows live-streaming of the audio. Given an empty chamber, there is no risk of disruption. Indeed, I think the risk of disruption is the most potent objection to placing cameras in the Court.

For many reasons, I enjoyed watching Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearing. One unexpected plus: there were no disruptions. Watching the Kavanaugh hearings was excruciating. Every few moments, a protestor popped up and caused a disruption. It took a few moments to remove that protestor. Then another protestor popped up. And so on. The process was awful. Judge Barrett’s hearing was something of natural experiment. Due to the COVID-19 protocols, there were no spectators allowed from the public. Yet, the public had full gavel-to-gavel access to the proceedings. Recall there was a protestor who snuck into the Supreme Court a few years ago. The Court would be hesitant to add cameras in light of that experience.

But what if the pandemic has shined the light on a potential solution? What if the Supreme Court no longer admits people off the street into oral arguments? What if the general public can register for tickets in advance? And the Court could hold a lottery (along the lines I discussed here)? I think this random approach would make it very difficult for protestors to sneak into an argument and cause a disruption. Also, a lottery would eliminate the perverse incentives for paid-line waiters, and line-cutters.

I think this sort of internal change could grease the skids for cameras in the Court.

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Settled by “Scientism”

I encourage everyone to read Professor John McGinnis’s essay, Blinded by Scientism. He explains that it is not possible to resolve policy debates by “following the science.” Policy debates implicate a lot of values that should not be delegated to apparent experts. Indeed, the views of experts are often shaped by their values. As a result, McGinnis writes, politically accountable leaders, and not scientists, should make those tough decisions.

But the mantra of “follow the science” is even more problematic when applied to politics than administration. It is not possible to make politics subsidiary to science. First, the facts are open to dispute as are some of those about climate change, for instance. Second, no one set of facts is likely to dictate any result. Policies on climate change affect economic growth and that is another set of facts that must investigated. And as James Rogers has noted at this site, the radical uncertainty present in most judgments about human affairs requires prudential judgments, not just scientific modeling.

But most importantly, politics demands debate about values, not just facts. There are tradeoffs between different policies. The Green New Deal may hamper economic growth and thus harm generations to come. As a result, it may be wiser to adapt to a warming climate rather than try to prevent it at great cost. Moreover, it is a question of value, not fact, as to who should bear the burden of climate changes policies—this generation or future generations who, because of technological acceleration, may be substantially richer.

John introduces a term I had not heard before: scientism.

Scientism is an attempt to shut down political debates.  It shifts the discussion from questions of value, which are accessible to all, to questions of facts which are in the domain of the experts, thus shifting the terrain of the debate. It also hampers the evolution of expert consensus, because when science becomes a front for politics, dissenting from the party lines becomes harder even for experts. And it allows progressives to portray their opponents as ignorant. That has been a common trope of progressive politics: conservatives are the stupid party.

I have long encountered the notion of “scientism” in the Second Amendment context. Gun control advocates have long described gun control as a public health issue. On face value, this characterization may make some sense. Guns can lead to health problems. But the import of this statement is very different. When something is a public health issue, it should be resolved by public health experts. In short this slogan shuts down any political debate. #Science. The decision to enact, or not enact certain gun control laws cannot be based entirely on counting. This decision must incorporate competing values, for which elected officials can stake their position. I wrote about some of these issues years ago in an article titled, The Shooting Cycle.

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The Complicated Truth About the Boogaloo Movement

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Is America headed for a civil war?

According to the followers of one fast-growing online subculture, increasing political polarization and instability will inevitably lead to a domestic armed conflict, which they refer to as Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo.

That’s a play on the title of a 1984 breakdancing film, from which the movement—known as “the Boogaloo,” “Big Igloo” or, sometimes, “Big Luau”—also derived its name.

The Hawaiian shirt-wearing, gun-toting activists known as Boogbois have migrated out of memespace and into the streets, showing up at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in many American cities—often in apparent sympathy with the cause.

The media have called them white nationalists and accelerationist terrorists. “The boogaloo movement is (for the most part) a libertarian group,” according to one member.

But these labels don’t capture what this dispersed movement is all about.

The Boogaloo movement is Gen Z Second Amendment activism. Its members forgo the patriotic symbolism of traditional militia movements for flowered apparel, bright patches, and colorful memes. Their approach to organizing resembles Hong Kong’s decentralized, privacy-conscious, and social media-heavy protest movement.

They are digitally native activists, raised on Instagram and TikTok, who understand that in the world of online feedback loops, actions are often less important than the way they’re presented.

Their online rhetoric is infused with paranoia, and its members circulate unfounded theories of rampant, unchecked pedophilia, which they say must be stamped out extrajudicially, if necessary. They claim that societal breakdown is inevitable, but their public stances often makes it seem as if a violent Civil War is something they’d like to see happen. And the movement’s organic, leaderless structure leaves it highly susceptible to being co-opted by its worst, most dangerous actors.

The members who spoke to Reason stand against gun control, the drug war, and aggressive policing. They are also convinced that there’s rampant pedophilia in American society that must be dealt with, extrajudicially if need be.

Sometimes they’ve aligned themselves with right-wing militia groups, at other moments, with Black Lives Matter. The one issue that seems to unify them is a conviction that armed resistance to government overreach is entirely justified.

“It’s a very powerful movement that has come together and unified against racism, tyranny, pedophilia, and government overreach,” says Mike Dunn, a visible face in a mostly faceless movement. “It’s one of the biggest unified movements there has been among gun owners and freedom-loving Americans.”

On October 8, police arrested Dunn for allegedly trespassing while openly carrying a firearm at a rally for Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate Jo Jorgensen.

Dunn says he left home at age 16 and joined the Marine Corps a year later. When he returned to Virginia, he embarked on a new political project.

“I began building militias and connecting them all together under one under one [heading],” says Dunn. “And then my buddy, who I was connected with through some militia work…was Duncan Lemp.”

In March, Montgomery County police shot to death 21-year-old Duncan Lemp after bursting into his Maryland home in the middle of the night with an arrest warrant.

“I believe they blatantly killed him in cold blood. And we’re going to have justice,” says Dunn. “After he was killed, it really pushed me to become part of the Boogaloo movement.”

Lemp’s death gave rise to theories that he was targeted for his involvement in militia movements. Police say they were seizing firearms he wasn’t allowed to own because of a juvenile conviction. The Montgomery County Police Department has failed to produce the arrest warrant or bodycam footage of the shooting despite requests from Reason‘s C.J. Ciamerella.

The Lemp faction of the Boogaloo movement often use his name as a social media handle and regularly post about police brutality, though they’ve migrated to Telegram and other encrypted platforms after Facebook started shutting down their groups. In these anonymous channels, racist and anti-Semitic language becomes more frequently visible.

But while racist groups speak of the Boogaloo as an impending race war, this group portrays it as a sequel to the American Revolution.

Dunn says he was drawn to the movement by its hardline stance against racism, which set it apart from many other armed movements he’d joined.

“I had grown up country, flying the rebel flag, saying some pretty dumb stuff,” says Dunn. “And that’s something that attracted me to the Boogaloo movement, was how much they hated racism and how much they weren’t willing to deal with it. And I began to change my viewpoint.”

Boogaloo members have marched alongside Black Lives Matter protesters, although their presence hasn’t always been welcomed. And they’ve clashed with racist groups. The Boogbois once led a chant of “White Supremacy Sucks,” disrupting a speech at a pro-gun rally in Richmond.

“We’re not white supremacists. We believe in liberty for all,” says John, who asked that we identify him only by his first name and who runs a Boogaloo-themed Instagram page called Too_Savage_for_Statists. “And liberty for all means…regardless of race, gender, whether you’re trans. It doesn’t matter.”

In addition to supporting Black Lives Matter, he was in Hong Kong in 2019 helping pro-democracy demonstrators. He says that there are parallels between the two protest movements.

“The biggest similarity that I’ve seen is…how the Chinese media describes the Hong Kong protesters is the exact same way the conservative media in the U.S. [describes] the BLM movement,” says John. “I don’t think conservatives in America would like to compare themselves to conservatives in China, but that’s really how it is.”

Journalist Robert Evans co-authored an investigation of the movement for the website Bellingcat. He says the first time he noticed the Boogbois appearing in-person at events was at the January 2020 gun rights rally in front of the Virginia State Capitol.

“I was worried that we would have seen more violence directly attributed to the movement than we have seen currently. And hopefully, things stay that way,” says Evans.

No movement can tightly control its message, especially one as decentralized as the Boogbois, meaning anyone can easily carry out violence and acts of terrorism under their banner.

One man accused of killing a sheriff’s deputy and federal agent in California had a boogaloo patch in his car, and he allegedly scrawled boogaloo phrases in blood on the hood of a vehicle. The Department of Justice has charged three men connected to the Boogaloo movement with planning to incite violence with Molotov cocktails at a Las Vegas Black Lives Matter rally. The FBI has even attempted to link Boogaloo members with Hamas in order to charge them under international antiterrorism laws.

And a federal law enforcement official told NBC News that some of the men involved in the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer have ties to the movement.

“I don’t want to downplay the danger because you’ve got…thousands of armed people talking about wanting to contribute to a societal breakdown,” says Evans.

And while many of the more outspoken Boogbois may espouse libertarian-sounding political ideals, Evans believes that what most unifies the broader Boogaloo movement is a shared belief in the need to prepare for impending state collapse by amassing weapons.

“It’s less than ideology, more of an aesthetic,” says Evans. “A worship of weapons and the products that surround warfare…It is a desire among people to enact the things they’ve seen in movies…It’s more than anything, a way for people who have not seen war, but who fetishize aspects of conflict to dress up and carry out fantasies.”

Dunn and John both deny that they are actively trying to accelerate domestic warfare but rather want to be prepared to resist a tyrannical government power grab.

“None of us want a war, we just see it as inevitable,” says John.

And Dunn says that their posture is purely defensive.

“[Former U.S. Defense Secretary] ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis said…basically, ‘If you want war, if you want to screw with me, please don’t. But if you do screw with me, I will kill you all.’ And I think that’s the mentality of the movement,” says Dunn.

But Evans thinks the fixation on collapse and violent conflict can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the presence of more armed civilians on the streets increases the likelihood of an inciting incident.

“As someone who’s reported from civil wars, you can’t prepare yourself for this…If they had a real physical [sense] of what civil war means and what it would mean in this country, they wouldn’t be buying AR-15s and ammunition. They would be dedicating their lives to stopping that from happening every single way that they could,” says Evans.

But the Boogbois maintain that the Second Amendment remains relevant in contemporary politics.

“An armed people was meant to be a check [against] the state,” says John. “[The framers of the U.S. Constitution] wanted the people to be able to outgun the state if they overstep their bounds.”

The Boogbois is only one of several armed groups showing up at protests. There are also the pro-Trump Proud Boys, which drew media scrutiny after Trump’s ambiguous statement about them in a presidential debate.

And there are black nationalist gun groups like the Not Fucking Around Coalition and various militia groups like the Oathkeepers and the III%ers.

In the event of the predicted conflict between warring political factions actually happening, it’s not clear with which side Boogbois like John and Dunn would align. Neither support Donald Trump or Joe Biden, instead preferring Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, and, in the field, Boogbois have often walked a fine line, attempting to position themselves as an armed buffer between police and demonstrators, peacekeepers between leftist and rightist groups, as well as protectors of private property.

While it’s difficult to estimate the exact size of the movement, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights has documented a Boogaloo presence at protests in at least a dozen states this year. Dunn says the Boogaloo movement is already a sizable force and only poised to grow.

“It’s probably the largest actively armed movement in the United States to date,” says Dunn, based on online metrics. “A Facebook group had a hundred thousand people in it…before everything started getting taken down. Now we have groups everywhere… every state.”

Evans agrees.

“It is certainly the largest movement I have seen in my lifetime, in the United States, that is focused around armed citizens taking political action [focused on] those arms,” says Evans.

And to fully understand the group’s potential reach, Evans says it’s important to recognize that apocalyptic narratives are deeply ingrained in the American psyche and not lose sight of the fact that, as principled as some of its members may sound, the Boogaloo meme at the center of the movement is still one of impending war.

“There’s a direct line between the zombie apocalypse memes that were such a rage in the aughts and the Boogaloo,” says Evan. “That’s where a lot of the people who are into this started buying guns… What the Boogaloo has done is taken that impulse… and attached to it something much more realistic because we’re not going to deal with zombies ever. We might have a civil war.”

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. 

Photos: Zach D Roberts/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Jana Birchum/Polaris/Newscom; REBECCA COOK/REUTERS/Newscom; BRYAN WOOLSTON/REUTERS/Newscom; JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom; John C. Clark/ZUMA Press/Newscom; JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom; JULIA RENDLEMAN/REUTERS/Newscom; NURI VALLBONA/REUTERS/Newscom; Sebastiano Tomada/Sipa USA/Newscom; Stephanie Keith/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Joel Angel Juarez/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Adam J. Dewey/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Zach D Roberts/ZUMA Press/Newscom; John C. Clark/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; JULIA RENDLEMAN/REUTERS/Newscom; JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS/Newscom; John Rudoff/Sipa USA/Newscom; Chad Martin / SOPA Images/Sipa U/Newscom

Music: “Leaving Earth,” Bits and Pieces,” “Killing Time,” “Imitate,” “Fall,” and “Apparition” by Stanley Gurvich licensed through Artlist.

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The Portland Protest Shooter’s Death Looks More and More Like Excessive Force—but Trump Keeps Bragging About It

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Execution squad? The more that comes out about the federal task force killing of Portland murder suspect Michael Forest Reinoehl, the worse his death looks.

The president isn’t helping. “We sent in the U.S. Marshals. Took 15 minutes, it was over. Fifteen minutes, it was over—we got him,” Donald Trump told a crowd in North Carolina on Thursday. “They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him, and 15 minutes—that ended.”

A benefit-of-the-doubt reading here would be that Trump’s “they” who “didn’t want to arrest” was a reference to the Portland police—who hadn’t yet arrested Reinoehl by the time the task force intervened—and not an admission that agents didn’t want to take Reinoehl in alive (as some have been reading it).

But either way, the end of the mission is nothing to be bragging about. By many accounts, the officers didn’t even attempt to arrest Reinoehl peacefully.

Investigators said this week that Reinoehl—pursued for fatally shooting Aaron “Jay” Danielson during a confrontation at an August 29 protest in Portland—had a loaded handgun when local law enforcement serving on the U.S. Marshals Pacific Northwest Violent Offender Task Force killed him on September 3. But the gun was still in Reinoehl’s front pants pocket as police fired more than 30 bullets at him.

“The new information follows initial reports from investigators [that] the federal fugitive task force involved in shooting Reinoehl gave conflicting statements,” reports ABC News.

One member of the task force claimed that Reinoehl pointed a gun at them. Another said that didn’t happen, but Reinoehl was reaching for a gun when they shot him. A U.S. Marshal’s Office press release claimed Reinoehl “produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers.”

This week, Thurston County Sheriff’s Lt. Ray Brady said that Reinoehl’s hand may have been on a gun or may have been merely “near” the gun.

At a Tuesday press conference, investigators said they still do not know if the gun in Reinoehl’s pocket on the night of his death was the same gun used to kill Danielson a few nights prior.

Almost two dozen witnesses to Reinoehl’s subsequent death say task force members never identified themselves or warned Reinoehl him before opening fire on him, though Sheriff Brady disputed this on Tuesday.

Nathaniel Dingess, who lived nearby, told The Oregonian in September that he “saw Reinoehl walk toward his car holding a cellphone in his hand when two unmarked law enforcement vehicles converged outside the complex [and] began firing at Reinoehl.” After initially shooting, they told Reinoehl to halt and then resumed shooting, Dingess said, adding that he never saw Reinoehl reach for a gun.

The New York Times talked with 22 people who had been nearby when Reinoehl was killed, and only one recalled the task force members saying anything before they starting shooting:

Mr. Louis…some 140 feet from Mr. Reinoehl, also said the police opened fire immediately, without giving any warnings—as did Mr. Smith and Mr. Cutler.

“There was no, ‘Get out of the car!’ There was no, ‘Stop!’ There was no nothing. They just got out of the car and started shooting,” Mr. Louis said.

Mr. Smith described it similarly: “There was no yelling. There was no screaming. There was no altercation. It was just straight to gunshots.”

Of the five eyewitnesses, none saw Reinoehl holding or reaching for a gun.

Despite the questions surrounding the officers conduct, Trump has repeatedly bragged about this operation—and even described it as “retribution.”


ELECTION 2020

Presidential candidates Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Jo Jorgensen fielded voter questions on Thursday night. On a night originally slated for a debate between Trump and Biden, the Republican and Democratic nominees instead squared off in dueling TV interviews.

During Biden’s time taking questions in Philadelphia from ABC host George Stephanopoulos, Biden said police should shoot people in the leg as a deescalation tactic (this is a bad idea); asked if he supports court packing, he said he was “open to considering what happens” after the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation process.

On NBC, Trump spread major misinformation about masks, claiming erroneously that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said “that 85 percent of the people wearing masks catch” COVID-19. He also evaded questions about his taxes, whether he took a coronavirus test before the first debate, and more. And he claimed (once again) that he has “done more for the African-American community than any president with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.”

Meanwhile, libertarian presidential nominee Jo Jorgensen talked with Reason‘s Matt Welch. Watch that here.


FREE MINDS

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Ajit Pai announced yesterday that he will accept the Trump administration’s request to “interpret” Section 230. While Pai’s announcement isn’t necessarily bad news, it’s not a good sign that he announced the effort in a statement misrepresenting the law as a special protection for tech companies—a popular bit of ant-230 propaganda that simply is not true.

Prominent Republicans pushed several misconceptions about Section 230 yesterday, as hysteria about it reaches a fever pitch among extremely online conservatives. The most prominent of these is the idea “publisher” and “platform” are legal categories which websites must stay on one side or the other of.

(For good primers on Section 230 myths, see this Reason TV video and this Techdirt post.)


FREE MARKETS

Bill Gates questions antitrust investigation. Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke out against the congressional strategy of tackling tech companies’ potential antitrust violations as a group, rather than on a company-by-company basis. “I think it’s kind of unfortunate that they’re grouping the companies together, because there are so many different issues,” Gates said at the GeekWire Summit. Antitrust enforcers famously targeted Microsoft in the 1990s.

“If they want to get serious, they’re going to have to focus in, enumerate the issues and them debate them. So I’d say we’re kind of at the beginning,” he continued. Gates thinks we should be having more conversation about how tech practices affect consumers and “a little less about demonizing the specific people involved.”

Gates also commended today’s tech CEOs for their ability to play nice with politicians and regulators:

I think the main mistake I made, which was not realizing how important it would be to develop relationships in Washington, be engaged there—these companies are not making the same mistake that I made. They have lots of people. Jeff even has a nice house in Washington, DC. They may even be making some other mistakes. But everybody saw what I did and knows better now.

If their recent treatment is what it looks like when they suck up to D.C. power, I shudder to think what things would look like otherwise.


FOLLOWUP

Twitter is revising its hacked materials policy after the company used it as grounds to remove a New York Post story about Joe Biden and his son Hunter.


QUICK HITS

• In which Trump does not appear to realize that The Babylon Bee is a satire site:

• After a woman used a racial slur outside a grocery store in Pennsylvania, “the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office determined that the woman’s alleged conduct supports the ‘charging of several violations.'” But Gisele Barreto Fetterman, the target of the slur and the wife of Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, told police she didn’t want to press charges.

• “The government can pursue people for disclosing classified information, but it can’t stop them from publishing books just because they might make the president’s family look bad,” writes national security lawyer Mark S. Zaid at The Washington Post.

• A tiny bit of good news on the free speech and free markets fronts: “A judge in San Francisco said Thursday she’s not likely to lift a temporary block on the US government’s attempts to ban WeChat,” reports The Verge. “Beeler did not issue a ruling Thursday but said the government had not presented new evidence to persuade her that there were significant national security concerns with allowing WeChat to remain active in the US.”

What happens if Roe v. Wade is overturned?

• Rick and Morty is extremist material in Russia:

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A Thought Experiment: Allow Cameras in the Supreme Court, But Only Admit People from the Public from a Lottery

The Supreme Court has now been live-streaming the oral argument of cases for several months. At the outset, I would listen to every case, whether or not I was interested in it. I’ll admit, now my interest has waned. I will tune into a case that I have some interest in. Or more likely, I’l wait till the transcript comes out. Old habits die hard.

Fortunately, this natural experiment, which was induced by the pandemic, has dispelled certain myths. First, there was a longstanding concern that the news media would splice up soundbites from the arguments in a misleading way. I don’t think this has happened–even for high profile cases involving the President’s tax returns. Second, there was a longstanding concern that the attorney would grandstand. We haven’t seen this either. Third, there was a longstanding concern that the Justices would grandstand. Nope.

At some point, the Justices will be able to resume in-person meetings. If I had to guess, the Supreme Court chamber will be empty. Only the Justices, the advocates, and perhaps some members of the press would be allowed into the session. At that point, I hope the Court continues the natural experiment, and allows live-streaming of the audio. Given an empty chamber, there is no risk of disruption. Indeed, I think the risk of disruption is the most potent objection to placing cameras in the Court.

For many reasons, I enjoyed watching Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearing. One unexpected plus: there were no disruptions. Watching the Kavanaugh hearings was excruciating. Every few moments, a protestor popped up and caused a disruption. It took a few moments to remove that protestor. Then another protestor popped up. And so on. The process was awful. Judge Barrett’s hearing was something of natural experiment. Due to the COVID-19 protocols, there were no spectators allowed from the public. Yet, the public had full gavel-to-gavel access to the proceedings. Recall there was a protestor who snuck into the Supreme Court a few years ago. The Court would be hesitant to add cameras in light of that experience.

But what if the pandemic has shined the light on a potential solution? What if the Supreme Court no longer admits people off the street into oral arguments? What if the general public can register for tickets in advance? And the Court could hold a lottery (along the lines I discussed here)? I think this random approach would make it very difficult for protestors to sneak into an argument and cause a disruption. Also, a lottery would eliminate the perverse incentives for paid-line waiters, and line-cutters.

I think this sort of internal change could grease the skids for cameras in the Court.

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Settled by “Scientism”

I encourage everyone to read Professor John McGinnis’s essay, Blinded by Scientism. He explains that it is not possible to resolve policy debates by “following the science.” Policy debates implicate a lot of values that should not be delegated to apparent experts. Indeed, the views of experts are often shaped by their values. As a result, McGinnis writes, politically accountable leaders, and not scientists, should make those tough decisions.

But the mantra of “follow the science” is even more problematic when applied to politics than administration. It is not possible to make politics subsidiary to science. First, the facts are open to dispute as are some of those about climate change, for instance. Second, no one set of facts is likely to dictate any result. Policies on climate change affect economic growth and that is another set of facts that must investigated. And as James Rogers has noted at this site, the radical uncertainty present in most judgments about human affairs requires prudential judgments, not just scientific modeling.

But most importantly, politics demands debate about values, not just facts. There are tradeoffs between different policies. The Green New Deal may hamper economic growth and thus harm generations to come. As a result, it may be wiser to adapt to a warming climate rather than try to prevent it at great cost. Moreover, it is a question of value, not fact, as to who should bear the burden of climate changes policies—this generation or future generations who, because of technological acceleration, may be substantially richer.

John introduces a term I had not heard before: scientism.

Scientism is an attempt to shut down political debates.  It shifts the discussion from questions of value, which are accessible to all, to questions of facts which are in the domain of the experts, thus shifting the terrain of the debate. It also hampers the evolution of expert consensus, because when science becomes a front for politics, dissenting from the party lines becomes harder even for experts. And it allows progressives to portray their opponents as ignorant. That has been a common trope of progressive politics: conservatives are the stupid party.

I have long encountered the notion of “scientism” in the Second Amendment context. Gun control advocates have long described gun control as a public health issue. On face value, this characterization may make some sense. Guns can lead to health problems. But the import of this statement is very different. When something is a public health issue, it should be resolved by public health experts. In short this slogan shuts down any political debate. #Science. The decision to enact, or not enact certain gun control laws cannot be based entirely on counting. This decision must incorporate competing values, for which elected officials can stake their position. I wrote about some of these issues years ago in an article titled, The Shooting Cycle.

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Revelation of Plaintiff’s Gambling Addiction Doesn’t Justify Pseudonymity or Sealing

From Ball v. Skillz Inc., decided Wednesday by Magistrate Judge Brenda Weksler (D. Nev.):

Presently before the court is Plaintiff Jane Roe’s Motion to Proceed under a Fictitious Name … and her Motion to Seal the Certificate of Interested Parties …. Neither Motion was opposed. Nevertheless, based on the strong presumption in favor of public access to judicial proceedings, the court denies these motions.

Plaintiff, Jane Roe, bring claims against defendant for violations of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act and asks this court to allow her to proceed anonymously. She explains that her allegations are inextricably related to her own compulsive gambling, the impact of that gambling on her mental health, the suicidal inclinations she experienced, and the related personal harms she suffered.

She explains that her employer does not know of her struggles with gambling. She also notes that her work requires interaction with members of the public who, upon learning about this case, may “weaponize” the information against her in future encounters. She is fearful of being confronted by those around her if this information were to become public and the ways in which this could affect her professional standing. For similar reasons, she also requests that the certificate of interest parties, which contains her name, be allowed to remain sealed….

“Plaintiffs’ use of fictitious names runs afoul of the public’s common law right of access to judicial proceedings.” Further, Rule 10(a) commands that the title of every complaint “include the names of all the parties.”

The Ninth Circuit allows “parties to use pseudonyms in the ‘unusual case’ when nondisclosure of the party’s identity ‘is necessary … to protect a person from harassment, injury, ridicule or personal embarrassment.'” The Ninth Circuit has permitted plaintiffs to use pseudonyms in three situations: (1) when identification creates a risk of retaliatory physical or mental harm, (2) when anonymity is necessary to privacy in a matter of sensitive and highly personal nature, and (3) when the anonymous party is compelled to admit his or her intention to engage in illegal conduct thereby risking criminal prosecution. If the plaintiff’s motion to proceed anonymously is based on fear of retaliation, the court evaluates the following factors: (1) the severity of the threatened harm, (2) the reasonableness of the anonymous party’s fears, and (3) the anonymous party’s vulnerability to such retaliation (4) the prejudice to the opposing party and (5) the public interest.

The court sympathizes with Plaintiff’s past psychological issues and is comforted by her choice to obtain help. Yet, in terms [of] retaliatory mental harm, she provides only conclusory statements about her fears surrounding future interactions she may have with the public as a result of her job and how knowledge about this case might affect her professional standing with her employer, who is not aware of her past gambling history. The information provided is so lacking that the court is unable to weigh any of the [factors given above].

And, in today’s environment, a past gambling addiction with accompanying mental health problems is not so out of the norm as to constitute sensitive and highly personal in nature. While there is no identifiable prejudice to defendant in allowing plaintiff to remain anonymous, plaintiff cannot show that the need for anonymity in this case outweighs the public’s interest in the proceedings.

Again, this court is sympathetic to Plaintiff’s concerns, but the facts of this case do not overcome the paramount importance of open courts. This court would fail its obligation to the public by allowing the plaintiff to remain anonymous.

Given the procedural posture of the case, including defendant’s pending Motion to Compel Arbitration … and defendant’s Motion to Dismiss …, the court will allow plaintiff some time before she needs to reveal her identity. [But] plaintiff’s motion to proceed anonymously … is DENIED[ and] Plaintiff’s Motion to Seal … is DENIED. IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Plaintiff must file an amended complaint using her true name no later than 14 days after this Court resolves the Motion to Dismiss, at which time the Court will unseal the certificate of interested parties ….

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