Thread by @hradzka

Looking over the El Paso perp's reported manifesto (which, despite early uncertainty, does not look like a hoax) and an archive of the Dayton perp's twitter, I found an unexpected commonality that scares the bejesus out of me.

Per the manifesto, the El Paso perp was a white nationalist (w/ a side of environmentalism/ecofascism). The Dayton perp's social media and people who knew him describe him as a Hard Lefty. He was a socialist, and an acquaintance from the music scene described him as antifascist.

So, assholes alike in deed, but different in philosophy and outlook.

Except they were both interested in accelerationism.

The El Paso perp, like the Poway perp, took inspiration from the NZ perp's manifesto, which was explicitly accelerationist.

The Dayton perp has references to his interest in accelerationism on his Twitter; here's a screencap from an archive:

So, what's accelerationism? The dumb version tl;dr is that everything's going crazy faster and the only way out is through, so *increasing* the level of chaos will lead to a breakthrough (and, if you're a political fanatic, bring about the world you personally want to live in).

I hear about accelerationism more from the Hard Righties I monitor than the Hard Lefties.

But aspects of it pop up in both camps. In a way, it's not far removed from the Marxist idea of "heightening the contradictions," which has a long history in Hard Lefty practice.

And it's not just full-on commies; these ideas have spread through the Left, so you see it pop up all the time.

Here's a sympathetic example: the SCLC.

If you're MLK's SCLC, and you stage anti-segregation demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, but the city fathers roll with the punches, don't overreact, wait you out... that hurts your ability to produce effect.

So you look over suitable locations, and hello Birmingham, AL.

Because nonviolent people being set on by short-tempered, short-sighted Bull Connor's dogs and firehoses heightens the contradictions: peaceful SCLC vs. violent Southern segregationist order.

The Southern order shows itself to be unorderly.

That's kind of accelerationist, right? Make things worse in the short term to force a change so things get resolved in the medium term and better in the long term.

This is not how stupid extremists see accelerationism. They leave out the medium term part.

The best way you can see this is to look at the Hard Righties, where the idea pops up in cycles (even before "accelerationism" was common parlance on the Hard Right).

Lots of Hard Righties -- Atomwaffen today; Louis Beam and Bob Mathews 35 years ago -- think chaos yields result.

For example, Bob Mathews fantasized about stuff thusly:

PROBLEM: white people aren't flocking to white nationalism
SOLUTION: destroy infrastructure in the cities
BECAUSE: black people will riot
MEANING: white people will radicalize
RESULT: white nationalist recruiting boom

Bob Mathews's obsession with this makes more sense when you realize that Hard Righties are pig-ignorant of history.

(Hard Righties will be offended by this because they think they have a FANTASTIC sense of history & know it very well. Yeah: they only know the parts they like.)

(I can't get too up on my high horse, because in my experience mainstream Righties have a very similar problem. If you read socialist stuff you'll see serious analysis of socialist movement successes and failures. Not so much on the Right, mainstream or radical.)

What I eventually realized was that this faith in black rioting being the key to radicalizing whites was that the idea really came up among guys of a particular generation -- white nationalist dudes who had grown up at a time when there were a truckload of race riots.

It wasn't history they were looking at. It was personal experience. "What radicalized me will SURELY work for everyone else!"

...ignoring the clear fact that, you know

it hadn't

But this idea has stuck around, and keeps remanifesting, and you see the accelerationist version in the NZ perp's manifesto.

He actually predicted the resultant NZ gun ban, and wanted it, on the theory that it would radicalize NZ gun owners and convert them to white nationalism.

The Poway and El Paso perps read the NZ perp's manifesto and, buying into accelerationism, agreed with the notion that murder to create chaos was the way for white nationalists to break through to "white people will buy what we're selling!"

(It doesn't seem to occur to them that the general white public might conclude that "yes in fact these guys are insanely dangerous," and respond accordingly.)

The Dayton perp's motives are still murky. He reportedly had a kill list and a rape list in his school days. So there's longstanding nastiness.

But the interest in accelerationism makes that motivation a real possibility, too.

The rise of accelerationism as an evident component in mass murders scares the bejesus out of me. Because if individuals (or groups) just start wanting chaos for the sake of chaos, out of a faith that the world they want is on the higher side, it's going to be very hard to stop.

/fin (for now).