POV: You’re Recycling a Boogaloo Meme

In the weeks since ICE murdered Renée Good in broad daylight, an act captured by multiple camera angles, the content creation machine has been busy, spinning up a whole wave of responsive content. This content ranges from righteous outrage and anger, as well as depraved and disrespectful AI generations of Good. As a researcher of armed activism, one of these recent trends caught my eye — the resurgence of “nastiest angle” posts, specifically those following this formula: 

Text overlaid on the post reads “POV — you’re trying to call me but ICE is raiding my house and I’m holding the nastiest angle” (or some similar iteration of this). The accompanying audio is the sound of a cell phone vibrating loudly, like someone is avoiding picking up the phone. The images, usually a short montage of slightly shifted angles, eventually reveal the clever hiding spot of someone holding a firearm in the direction of a door or route of ingress — prepared to shoot this hypothetical federal agent. 

That this trend arose in the midst of high-profile ICE killings of U.S. citizens should come as no surprise. Google search interest in the meme (using ICE as the targeted agency) spiked on January 15, about a week after ICE murdered Renée Good and a little over a week before they murdered Alex Pretti, situating itself neatly within a context of ICE killing civilians point-blank (amid the agency’s much longer legacy of violence). 

This meme’s origins have a mixed history and connect to several different reference points. I’ll untangle them below. 

Angle of Origins

This kind of content has various origins, deriving from a cultural soup created by the first-person shooter (FPS) gaming community, especially those among games with a fast time-to-kill (how long it takes to kill a player after getting sights on target). These games usually consist of broad maps, key objectives, and team play, where multiple players are expected to coordinate against a similarly organized enemy team. Examples include extraction shooters (like Tarkov), asymmetric objective shooters (like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege), other attack/defend shooters, either those with hero select (like Valorant) and those without (like Counter-Strike), and any number of battle royale shooters (like Call of Duty’s Warzone mode). The commonalities between these games include their first-person perspective, but also (and especially) the pervasiveness of camping (standing still waiting for opponents to come to oneself rather than seeking them out) and – except for Valorant’s magical agents – a commitment to a realistic military aesthetic. 

In all of these games, “holding an angle” is a commonly known phrase for the (usually defensive posture) of keeping your sights set down a route that the enemy team or enemy players are expected to come through. There are dozens of videos and guides for each game on particularly strong angles that an endeavoring player could learn to hold: 

The quality of a held angle increases as the player’s ability to fire with essentially no need to shift one’s aim, the distance of the map covered by the angle in distance both walked by the enemy team and measured distance from the barrel of the gun, and also how difficult it would be for the enemy team to return fire. This last part is peculiar but important. The angle holder makes it harder for the opponent to shoot them by partially or completely obscuring their character model, shifting their angle from the line of sight from the attacker, and/or assuming a position that seems unlikely for the attacker to look. This last point – the unlikely spot – detail is native to the video game itself: players are able to lie prone on top of surfaces that out-of-game bodies would find difficult, they are able to clip through items in the game (such as trash cans or other in-game assets that behave strangely with player model collision), and they are able to hide in dark spots where in-game lighting renders their model essentially invisible. 

ICE? ATF? The Political Valence of 3-Letter Agencies

As someone who has tracked militia and right-wing gun culture online for over a decade, the memes I have seen from these spaces take up space in my brain that I will realistically never recover for more important things. I also, admittedly – cringily – watch probably too many YouTube Shorts from airsoft guys, and “holding an angle” has been common language in their spaces forever. Less cringily, and perhaps more importantly, this recent post-ironic posting of these “nastiest angle” videos definitely smells of Boogaloo posting of yesteryear, and the Boogaloo movement’s many afterlives. 

In Boogaloo memes, jokes about preparing to shoot federal agents have mostly hinged on hypothetical armed engagements with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). The selected agency that would hypothetically be raiding the home of one of these “nastiest angle” posters often tells us about their specific ideological commitment: whereas traditional Patriot Movement guys (like III% and Oath Keepers) might refer to ‘Democrats,’ ‘Antifa,’ ‘BLM,’ ‘UN Blue Helmets,’ or any number of other (usually unarmed) targets, Boogaloo guys almost always have the ATF as their designated target. 

TikTok, as a platform, allows creators to borrow the audio from a video to then remix it into their own video, which leaves a trace of the original creator. The most commonly used TikTok audio (as designated by the platform) for recent ICE nasty angles videos is directly attributed to a user whose username is a portmanteau including the name of the fictional protagonist of American Psycho. On closer inspection, this creator is a right-wing micro-influencer who runs a clothing brand that — at the moment of writing — is running a limited-time drop of a shirt emblazoned “BRING BACK BULLYING”. He borrows a lot from the aesthetic residue of the Boogaloo movement, occasionally posting images of himself wearing Night Optical/Observation Devices (NODs). 

This user’s first video, whose audio has since been borrowed by more recent anti-ICE videos, selects “ATF” as the target, describing them as “serving a no knock warrant”, while he stands on top of a dresser, aiming over an old Panasonic TV. He tagged the video with #r6, a reference to Rainbow Six Siege, kindly providing further evidence of the role FPS games play in this specific trend.

But even this gun guy, who posted the above video last October (well into Trump’s second term and before more recent ICE escalations), was not the first to post a “nasty angle” video to audio of a vibrating cell phone. I found a video with the same sound on TikTok posted back in 2023. This time, an airsoft content creator posted the video, showing a Gadsden flag on his ceiling. It is his most-viewed TikTok by a massive margin.

This video used a TikTok-designated ‘sound’ that is the same audio file, but without the direct link to the Boog poster mentioned earlier. One of the related memes that arose using this sound, however, is one that reads "You gotta ignore Dokkaebi's call because you’re holding a nasty angle". The meme at this time (in mid 2023, prior to the ATF-ization of the meme) has a direct reference to the aforementioned Rainbow Six Siege. Grace “Dokkaebi” Nam is a South Korean operator in Siege for the attacker role. Notably, she has an ability to hack the phone of a slain defender, giving her the ability to ‘call’ other defenders’ phones. This makes the phones audibly buzz like a phone call until the defender deactivates their phone. Notably, many of these Dokkaebi videos include Nerf guns and similar plastic blasters (rather than firearms or airsoft guns). 

So, basically, here’s how I understand the trajectory of this meme. In mid-2023, Rainbow Six players made a meme about an in-game character, using language known by other players (and players of other games). At the tail end of this trend, airsoft right-wingers picked it up and infused it with Boogaloo-style posting language. Then, a few years later, an explicitly Boog-aligned influencer picks the meme back up, cleaning the language and showcasing a revamped format. Four months later, people pick up this trend but make it about ICE instead of the ATF (or an in-game character). Now, such posts have been produced hundreds, if not thousands, of times on TikTok and Instagram. 

Lesson: Don’t Post Your Home Layout

I realize that a lot of meme and online culture crosses through problematic parts of the Internet. And fantasizing about blasting an authoritarian as they try to violate your rights is something I understand – the news cycle is certainly driving such ideation. A lot of this posting, though, is at best fedposting (posting violent threats online that either looks like what an undercover agent might post or is). Be careful posting things like this, because you can very well draw attention to yourself as a ‘violent extremist’, ironically giving the state justification for raiding your home based on a joke about them doing the very same. Relatedly, it’s generally not a great idea to post your actual firearms online, simply given the scrutiny this can draw. The ATF (the target of Boogaloo posters, etc) mostly gets warrants over what they believe to be firearms violations, and even if you aren’t posting a violative firearm, they have not gone beyond using screenshots from other people’s social media posts to make claims of improper licensing. 

Further, these posts give useful insights into not just the physical layout of one’s home, but angles that would otherwise be used in such an engagement. People are literally posting the angle they would take, negating the element of surprise such angles would give them in a real kinetic situation. Given the multiple interior angles shown in these videos, too, people are posting vital information about the specific layout of their homes, once again, giving away the tactical advantage one would ostensibly have inside their own domicile. 

These posts have fostered their own flourishing of meta-commentary on responding to ICE home invasions, with some posters going so far as to describe the “quantum” (???) nature of having the “mental skill” (uhh??) to shoot an ICE agent after describing the trend as “PTSD flavored Where’s Waldo?” (okay, kinda fair). Despite the context, this is an apt description given how so much of this content is influenced by how deeply traumatized our society has been in the wake of spectacular violence against families, unarmed moms, and those who dare to not be bystanders.