It’s a generic phrase used quite widely by folks as a reference to societal unrest or societal breakdown, usually in the context of “preparing for” or “being ready for” such an event. The attempt to twist it to fit a certain narrative based on how a ridiculously small minority of people act is obnoxious and paints a whole lot of good people in a bad light.

That depends on how you define "trolling". It's an internet meme taking out of context and in bad faith.

The real story is that a lot of people are fed up with government overreach, abuse, and infringements of our constitutional liberties, and with the culture that supports it all. And also Hawaiian shirts are an aesthetic. That's all there is to it.

Basically? It's a bunch of people fed up with the high arbitrary BS that characterize American attempts at firearm regulation. At least that was how it started.

When you start getting ridiculousness like coat hangers and shoelaces labelled as machine guns, having to play "Mother May I?" with a federal agency to not lose your right to vote, having the exercise of your Constitutional rights locked behind a tax stamp (in the same manner as a poll tax) and increasingly being on the butt of every moral-panic induced attempt at having your Constitutionally established right undermined through weasel wording by the Supreme Court and an abject refusal by the same court to hear any cases that would make inroads on restoring those rights...

Well... Ya start to notice patterns. Like how the same thing happens with the first, the fourth, the fifth, the tenth...

Long story short it was a fantasy scenario concocted as a response to a hypothetical erosion of civil rights/breakdown in the overall political situation of the United States that would qualify as an instance of "Shit Hitting the Fan" (SHTF) that would justify the seemingly irrational stockpiling of weapons and ammunition.

It's been targeted, because it's a convenient boogeyman, it's nebulous, and it's being taken seriously by a bunch of people who don't understand the lost art of not taking everything you read on the Internet too seriously.

Plus, it's fun to say, and the Hawaiian shirts+tacticool are peak aesthetic.

Boogaloo itself comes from an older meme, <something> 2:Electric Boogaloo being an obligatory stand-in for a senseless sequel. Which fits for how the media is trying to portray the goal of people who know what the term means.

In the firearm community, there is generally a vein of dedication that liberty from draconian firearm regulation shouldn't come from the barrel of a gun, but by popular acceptance that the tool itself isn't evil, even if there are people who do evil things with it, and if the community could just do a better job at reaching out and explaining how firearms work, and the ridiculousness of the current vein of firearm regulations, the world (as experienced by firearms enthusiasts) would be a much better place.

Generally, the people in the community are avid theorycrafters, lovers of all things military, history buffs, engineers, degenerate hunters, etc.

Do you maybe have some unsavory elements taking things way too seriously? Probably. The irrationality of those hypothetical bad apples is only matched by those that think this is newsworthy.

Then again, as one of those who has actually picked through the net in search of hard to find nuggets of oral-ish history, I may be somewhat desensitized to the sense of controversy and alarm anything related to it inspires in people. Persistence in the face of obscenity and atrocity are generally used as a form of litmus test to determine whether or not someone is genuinely looking into the more unpleasant depths of reality for that nugget of understanding they're looking for.

Don't ask what it is I'm looking for that keeps me digging. I probably lost track of it years ago, and know now only that I must dig.

I agree, and unfortunately, that’s the problem. It’s just another effort to paint a group of perfectly decent people with reasonable beliefs into a corner.