An anti-government, pro-gun movement linked to recent violence in the U.S. is gaining supporters in Canada — prompting warnings from experts over their often hateful, violent remarks against protesters, police and Ottawa’s new firearms restrictions.
In the U.S, Boogaloos have recently been in the spotlight, after some showed up heavily armed at anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
There are no reports of Boogaloos at Canadian protests. But online, the nascent movement has inspired at least two Facebook pages where followers have recently talked about killing protesters and RCMP officers alike.
The Facebook pages identified by CBC News were created in the past six months and in that time grew to around 800 followers each.
That kind of support is cause for concern, say experts like Alexander Reid Ross, a postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right in Portland, Ore.
“People need very little to do a whole lot of damage,” Ross said.
A screenshot of a Canadian Boogaloo page on Facebook which has since been taken down. (Facebook)
Ross said he started to see more activity by Canadians on sites frequented by Boogaloo supporters in the wake of the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, and the resulting tighter restrictions on firearms.
While it is impossible to know where all of them come from, many of the people interacting with the Facebook pages list locations in Canada in their profiles. Others list locations in the U.S. or other countries.
The administrator of one page, who refused to be identified, told CBC News that nearly half of its followers were located in Canada. The page, which CBC News has decided not to name, has 854 followers and is managed by accounts in Canada, according to Facebook’s transparency data.
Another page, the K/razy Kanucks Big Kanadian Igloo, had attracted nearly 800 followers before Facebook removed it last week, following an inquiry from CBC News, saying it contravened its community standards against violence and incitement.
The unnamed page, however, is still up and includes posts that threaten police and talk about harming protesters.
On June 13, one of page’s moderators posted that “pink misting” protesters would “really slap,” above a meme critical of protestors in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Pink misting is slang for either killing someone with an explosive or a sniper’s bullet.
Another post links to a story about a 26-year-old woman killed in a police shooting in Edmundston, N.B., and the line, “This is why we need guns” — a reference to Canadians defending themselves against police.
While many of the posts on the pages viewed by CBC News were reshared from American groups, others discuss events in Canada.
Several were critical of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, objecting to the government’s tougher gun rules or mocking his criticism of unconscious bias and anti-Black racism.
Others are critical of police or the government in general, including one post that jokingly referred to using “claymore Roombas” to blow up an RCMP armoured vehicle.
One post opposed the federal government’s plan to accept more immigrants after the pandemic is over. Another criticized Chinese investors buying Canadian farmland.
Banned by Facebook
While some American Boogaloo supporters openly advocate for a second civil war in the U.S., the administrator who spoke to CBC said he thinks political change should follow the proper democratic process. He said his page is meant to be about memes and humour.
But Facebook says it is taking anything referring to the Boogaloo movement seriously.
“We continue to remove content using Boogaloo and related terms when accompanied by statements and images depicting armed violence,” Facebook Canada spokeswoman Meg Sinclair said in a statement.
“We are also preventing these Pages and groups from being recommended on Facebook.”
On Tuesday Facebook said it was banning all Boogaloo content.
Facebook recently lost $56 billion in market value as advertisers like Mountain Equipment Co-op, Coca-Cola and Lulemon leaveover concerns it isn’t doing enough to police hate speech and disinformation.
On Reddit and Instragram, Canadian references to the Boogaloo movement are generally found on subreddits or accounts frequented by firearms enthusiasts. Some show photos of users posing with their firearms, and mentioning boogaloo.
Boogaloo supporters span a wide range of political ideologies according to Barbara Perry, a criminologist specializing in hate crime at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. (CBC)
Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard said the platform has been banning Boogaloo-associated communities since spring.
“Our site-wide policies explicitly prohibit users and communities from posting content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals,” Gamelgaard said.
The RCMP won’t say whether it is monitoring or investigating Boogaloo supporters in Canada.
“The RCMP does not investigate movements or ideologies, but will investigate the criminal activity of any individuals who threaten the safety and security of Canadians,” said RCMP spokeswoman Cpl. Caroline Duval in an email to CBC.
‘Waiting for the boogaloo’
While memes and phrases referring to a “boogaloo,” or second U.S. civil war, have been online for many years, the movement has gained prominence in the past few months.
In April, the Tech Transparency Project, a Washington-based group that studies the influence of technology on society, identified more than 125 Facebook groups tied to the movement, and found that more than 60 per cent of them had been created in the previous three months.
The group provided CBC News with examples of Canadian Boogaloo content it had identified, including a Facebook post in April from a Calgary gun store, The Shooting Edge, advertising a shotgun as “your favourite 12ga [gauge] BOOGALOO gun.”
The store made the same post to Instagram in April, along with another about AK-47-themed T-shirts to wear while “waiting for the boogaloo.”
Store owner J.R. Cox says the posts are satirical.
“The thing that we tend to do with our posts is we try not to take ourselves too seriously. We are not preparing for the end of the world and we’re not preparing to get people ready to go to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban,” he said.
There’s a mix of ideologies among people drawn to Boogaloo content, including some anarchists and left-wingers, but most are far-right or libertarian, according to Barbara Perry, director of Ontario Tech University’s Centre on Hate, Bias and Extremism
“The thing that binds them, regardless of what their orientation may be, is an anti-statist position. So we see in particular a real concern, a real reaction to gun legislation that restricts firearms,” Perry said.
Perry said some supporters of existing far-right groups in Canada could be attracted to the Boogaloo movement.
“Some of them might be drifting towards the Boogaloo as they see an alignment there with their narratives.”
Boogaloo supporters often use phrases that sound similar — like “big igloos” or “big luaus” — to evade social media monitoring. Some supportershave appeared at U.S. protests heavily armed and wearing Hawaiian shirts, a reference to “big luaus.”
The colourful shirts are in line with the satirical or seemingly innocuous elements sometimes used by extremist groups, according to Kathleen Belew, an associate history professor at the University of Chicago and the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.
“It follows a much longer thread of organizing, also used by groups like the white power movement, the militia movement, which have used kind of public facing, sometimes funny and acceptable forms to mask what is an inherently violent ideology,” said Belew.
Recent violence in the U.S. included the killing of two law enforcement officers in California, allegedly by a man who scrawled phrases related to the Boogaloo movement on a car, according to NBC.
In May, three veterans were arrested in Las Vegas on terrorism and explosives charges. The FBI alleges they intended to disrupt protests over the death of George Floyd, and were all members of a Nevada Boogaloo Facebook group.
While Canadian supporters haven’t gone that far, Perry says the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns, job losses, businesses failing and racial tensions risk increasing Boogaloo support in Canada.
“You put all those layers together, it’s sort of ripe for an acceleration of the movement, an exacerbation of the movement,” she said.
“The fear is that they now take a page from the book of their American counterparts.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.
Use of other products has been dropping, too.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.
Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.
The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.
Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.
Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,
Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.
Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”
But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.
Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.
Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”
An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.
