Vox Explores Accelerationism

If memory serves, I believe this is the first article I have seen in the mainstream media which recognizes the accelerationists or the boogalootarians as we call them being their own distinct group with their own mindset, texts and strategy. Usually, they are lumped together with us by journos as “alt-right” or “white supremacists” or “White Nationalists.”

Vox.com:

“Blaze Bernstein, age 19 at the time of his murder, loved to cook.

Before he traveled back to his home in California for the 2017-’18 winter break, the University of Pennsylvania sophomore had been elected managing editor of a campus cooking publication called Penn Appétit. It’s a position he ended up never filling. …

These killings were often linked to the alt-right, described as an outgrowth of the movement’s rise in the Trump era. But many of these suspected killers, from Atomwaffen thugs to the New Zealand mosque shooter to the Poway synagogue attacker, are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist ideology, one that dismisses the alt-right as cowards unwilling to take matters into their own hands.

It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms.

Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right’s attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies. Their preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions, however, is not voting, but violence — attacking racial minorities and Jews as a way of bringing us closer to a race war, and using firearms to spark divisive fights over gun control. The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself; they hope for a white-dominated future after that. …”

Violent accelerationism doesn’t have anything to do with the alt-right or neoreaction. These people have always been a faction of the White Nationalist movement.

Dylann Roof and Glenn Miller were accelerationists. They tend to be fascinated with other mass shooters like mass shooters in general. Glenn Miller used to write love letters to Joseph Paul Franklin who went to prison for shooting interracial couples in the 1970s. Violent accelerationists believe in collapsing the system through engaging in acts of violence that generate lots of publicity that stokes social tensions and increases racial polarization.

A good example of this is Dylann Roof who wanted to incite a race war by shooting blacks at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The Left predictably took the bait and reacted to the Charleston shooting by declaring a war on Confederate monuments. The war against Confederate monuments led to a backlash that has played out through the election of Trump to Charlottesville. Violent accelerationists have generally been successful in stoking polarization. It is the part where they bring down the system and emerge victorious which they get wrong.

The fatal flaw of violent accelerationism is that the vast majority of people on the Right and even within the White Nationalist movement are repulsed by them. This is because conservatives are oriented toward authority and preserving the social order and murdering people and breaking the law cuts against the grain of their most deeply held values. No one but the handful of people who incline toward accelerationism has any sympathy for church and synagogue shooters.

Still, the violent accelerationists are not wrong about the fragility of our social order and its deepening divisions. A poll recently came out which shows that two-thirds of the public believes we are on the edge of a civil war. The boogalootarians are simply impatient for it to start. If they were better versed in American history, then they would know that the violence has to be started by the Left for the Right to feel angry enough and morally justified to strike back.

Note: The most likely scenario is that that the accelerationists will all be in prison by the time some disgruntled leftist finally kicks off the Boogaloo. I’m not saying that it isn’t coming or is inconceivable. I just think their strategy of bringing it about is bunk.