acceleration race war

10 21 not sure how relates to 2nd civil war qanon storm

EXPAND 6 26 INCLIDE TECH LORD NOTION TO ACCEL DAMAGE TO GET RID OF STATE/DEMOC REES-MOG

see great replacement, --> mass shoot

see radicalization funnel

turner diary? knock out elec power creates X state, which...?

RWWTags: Laura Loomer Accelerationism white nationalism

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1997 BK SOV IND

E. Glen Weyl and Jaron Lanier criticized in 2022 its predictions about Fujimori's self-coup, cocaine traffic in the United States, bankrupt Canada, right-wing coups, cryptocurrencies and income redistribution. They point the processes predicted by the book are not unavoidable and point to Thiel, Sebastian Kurz and Jacob Rees-Mogg helping accelerate the power of the state to provoke a reaction enabling its collapse.^[13]

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RWW

09/09/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Eric Metaxas declares that "America was on the verge of going away forever" until President Donald Trump saved religious liberty: "So I praise Jesus for this commission, for this president, and for this nation."

It is telling the slavery-apologist Doug Wilson repeatedly refers to the Civil War as "the War between the States."

Elijah Schaffer reports that he is seeking to obtain the uncensored footage of a young white woman being brutally murdered by a mentally-ill black man with plans to release it "out of the necessity to prevent a race war."

Reacting to the same murder, Wesley Todd says that black people are inherently more violent because "when you worship demons for thousands of years, you tend to be a violent, impulsive people. Old habits die hard."

Finally, Joshua Haymes proclaims that "every single politician should be giving special treatment to Christianity."

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AN 4 25

A Wisconsin teenager accused of murdering two family members and plotting to assassinate President Donald Trump was inspired by Terrorgram, a white supremacist network that operated on the Telegram messaging and social media platform for half a decade, according to federal court records.

The Terrorgram community, which has been linked to around three dozen criminal cases around the globe, including at least three mass shootings, was profiled last month in stories and a documentary produced by ProPublica and FRONTLINE.

The court documents allege that Nikita Casap, a 17-year-old from Waukesha, Wisconsin, wrote a three-page manifesto calling for the assassination of Trump in order to “foment a political revolution in the United States and ‘save the white race’ from ‘Jewish controlled politicians.’”

In his manifesto, Casap allegedly encouraged people to read the writings of Juraj Krajčík, a longtime Terrogram figure who murdered two people in an attack on an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, according to the court records. Casap also allegedly recommended two publications produced by the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced alleged hit lists, videos and written publications — including instructions for building bombs and sabotaging critical infrastructure — and distributed them throughout the Terrorgram ecosystem.

Launched in 2019, Terrorgram was a constellation of scores of Telegram channels and chat groups focused on inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism and anti-government sabotage. At the network’s peak, some Terrorgram channels drew thousands of followers. Over the past six months, however, the network has been disrupted as authorities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have arrested key Terrorgram influencers and community members.

But the violence hasn’t stopped.

Casap in February allegedly shot and killed his mother, Tatiana Casap, and stepfather, Donald Mayer; stole their property; and fled in their Volkswagen Atlas, Waukesha County prosecutors say. He was arrested in Kansas. Prosecutors have charged the teen with two counts of first-degree homicide, as well as identity theft and other theft charges. He is expected to be arraigned on May 7, according to court records.

A witness told local investigators that Casap “was in touch with a male in Russia through the Telegram app and they were planning to overthrow the U.S. government and assassinate President Trump,” according to charging documents in the Wisconsin case.

The newly unsealed federal court filings indicate that the FBI is investigating Casap in connection to the alleged assassination plot.

The bureau declined to comment on the matter.

Last fall, federal prosecutors accused two Americans of acting as leaders of the Terrorgram Collective and charged them with soliciting the murder of federal officials and a host of other terrorism-related offenses. The U.S. State Department has officially designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization, as have officials in the United Kingdom and Australia. The two Americans have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“Do absolutely anything you can that will lead to the collapse of America or any country you live in,” Casap allegedly wrote in his manifesto, according to an FBI affidavit. “This is the only way we can save the White race.”

The teen’s writings and online postings that are cited in the affidavit indicate that he is a believer in militant accelerationism, a concept that has become increasingly popular with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists over the past decade. Militant accelerationists aim to speed the collapse of modern society through acts of spectacular violence; from the ruins of today’s democracies, they aim to build all-white ethno-states organized on fascist principles.

Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, a nonprofit think tank, called the alleged Casap plot unique. “It’s the first time we’re explicitly seeing an individual tie an accelerationist act or plot with the president of the United States as a means of collapsing society,” Kriner said. “I think what we have here is a fairly clear-cut case of an individual who is being groomed to take drastic terrorist action in an accelerationist manner.”

Casap’s public defender could not be reached for comment.

A Telegram spokesperson said, “Telegram supports the peaceful exchange of ideas; however, calls for violence are strictly prohibited by our Terms of Service and are removed proactively as well as in response to user reports."

A ProPublica and FRONTLINE review shows that Casap was recently active in at least five extremist Telegram channels or chat groups, including a Russian-language neo-Nazi chat in which posters uploaded detailed instructions for crafting explosives, poisons and improvised firearms. He was also a member of a chat group with more than 4,300 participants run by the Misanthropic Division, a global neo-Nazi organization.

Casap, according to the federal documents, also sought out information online about the Order of Nine Angles, a cult that blends Satanic concepts and Nazi ideology and has increasingly turned to Telegram to recruit and proselytize.

“This is a clear example of how Terrorgram continues to influence murder,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher who studies online extremism. “Nikita was influenced online by an assortment of ideologies and groups that intersect with the Terrorgram ecosphere.”

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YIKES BONGINO #2

AN 2 25

The Base, a paramilitary neo-Nazi/white supremacist group founded in 2018, was a major target of the FBI and its former director, Christopher Wray, during Joe Biden's presidency. And in 2022, according to The Guardian's Ben Makuch, The Base "seemed to disappear" in the United States.

But Makuch, in an article published on February 24, warns that The Base appears to be "regrouping" in 2025.

"An international neo-Nazi terrorist group with origins in the U.S. appears to be quickly rebuilding its global and stateside ranks, according to information obtained by The Guardian from its digital accounts," Makuch reports. "Founded in 2018, The Base has been the intense focus of a years-long FBI counterterrorism investigation that has resulted in more than a dozen of its members arrested. It has plotted an assassination, mass shootings and other actions in Europe, which made it a proscribed terrorist organization in several countries."

The Base's "regrouping," according to Makuch, "comes at a time when the Trump Administration has made it a policy goal to move away from policing far-right extremism" and the FBI is now under the direction of Trump loyalist Kash Patel.

Makuch reports, "Experts say federal law enforcement ignoring far-right groups such as The Base could expose Americans to increased domestic terror threats…. A flurry of new images on The Base's various social media accounts, some closed and some open, show members claiming to be in the U.S. and across Europe brandishing pistols or military-style rifles and donning the trademark skull mask of the accelerationist neo-Nazi movement — one that demands acts of terrorism to bring down world governments. In one photo, a member is holding a knife and what appears to be a pistol in front of the Base flag in the United Kingdom, while others feature members in Bulgaria, Italy, Belgium and Sweden. "

Steven Rai of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) warns that The Base's activities in the U.S. need to be taken seriously.

Rai told The Guardian, "The Base has released a slow but steady trickle of propaganda over the past several months that has mostly highlighted their presence in Europe, so this shift in focus towards the U.S. should raise alarms. The timing of this shift is particularly noteworthy. While neo-Nazi accelerationist groups like The Base have been on their back foot due to intense law enforcement pressure, which disrupted their most integral organizers and propaganda artists, they may sense an opening with the recent change of administration in the U.S…. Violent extremists are absolutely paying attention to the changes in the national security establishment in the U.S."

Terrorism expert Colin Clarke, who serves as director of research at the Soufan Center, stresses that The Base are well-aware of changes in leadership at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Clarke told The Guardian, "I think groups like The Base, far-right extremist groups that are strategic, have been waiting for the right opportunity before reinvigorating their respective organizations. This means that far-right extremist groups likely perceive the reelection of Trump as a green light to rebuild without fear of arrest or prosecution."

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'Nothing is beyond our reach': Extremist site accused of 'grooming' teen attackers exposed

An image taken by school shooter Solomon Henderson and shared in his diary features a character from the Soyjak website. It's thought to be based on Patrick Crusius, who carried out a mass shooting in El Paso.

(Taken from Solomon Henderson's diary.)

Jordan Greenand Raw StoryFebruary 01, 2025

Before taking a handgun out of his backpack and walking into the cafeteria at Antioch High School in Nashville, where he opened fire and killed another student before taking his own life on Jan. 22, 17-year-old Solomon Henderson posted a link to an online screed filled with violence and unfiltered racism.

His message gave “special thanks” to Soyjak.party, an imageboard website whose anonymous users and administrators post bigoted memes based on a stock set of caricatures that typically make fun of liberals, sensitive men and trans people.

Using the insider lingo of the community, Henderson closed his post with a sign-off, “Remember keep jakking ‘teens,” followed by the website’s emblem, an octopus-like creature wrapping its tentacles around the globe. The emblem was accompanied by the slogan, “Nothing is beyond our reach.”

Henderson is one of three teenage attackers who have carried out shootings — and in one case a knife attack — over the past six months that extremism researchers have linked to a subset of the Soyjak community known as the Soyjak Attackers Video Fandom, or SAVF.

In the hours after Henderson’s school attack, investigators at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism monitored discussions among the anonymous users on the Soyjak website.

“We watched as they started panicking about losing their website out of fear because they believed the Antioch shooter had been groomed to carry out the shooting by their imageboards,” Carla Hill, the center’s director of investigative research, told Raw Story.

Henderson was a Black teenager whose writings revealed a deep immersion in white supremacist ideology. His consumption of extremist content appears to have manifested as a loathing for himself and other Black people, as he grappled with personal difficulties.

Henderson also identified with the involuntary celibate, or incel, movement, whose members blame women and society for their lack of romantic success.

The title of Henderson’s screed combined the two ideas by marrying a racial slur against Black people with the suffix “cel,” adding a parenthetical to explain that he was an “involuntary” Black person.

“We felt like the Antioch shooter was driven to self-loathing by what he saw online,” Hill said. “That’s how he came to be a self-hating person.”

Other terrorist attacks — such as the car-ramming recently carried out by an ISIS sympathizer in New Orleans and the 2019 mass shooting by a white supremacist at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas — have proven to be significantly more lethal, but Henderson’s attack has unnerved extremism researchers as a harbinger of an emerging hybrid threat that is harder to pin down.

Hill took notice of three intertwined “driving forces” behind Henderson’s attack.

“There’s the incel space — various incel spaces — we found him in those. Soyjak crosses over with that,” Hill said. “Then, he was in spaces that glorify violence and gore and school shooters. Third, he was in these reactionary imageboard sites like Soyjak that serve as a hub for all kinds of extremist discourses, including antisemitism, accelerationism, white supremacy and misogyny.”

Through his participation in overlapping fringe internet subcultures where members use multiple social media platforms to celebrate white supremacist mass murder, dabble in the occult and engage in degrading interpersonal drama, Henderson connected online with 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who fatally shot a fellow student and teacher before taking her own life in Madison, WI, in December.

And Henderson took inspiration from an 18-year-old Turk named Arda Küçükyetim, who carried out a knife attack at an open-air café near a mosque in August. Rupnow participated in an online group that held a pre-arranged viewing party to watch Kücükyetim carry out the attack on a livestream.

Küçükyetim and Rupnow were also “part of” the Soyjak Attacker Video Fandom,” according to a report written by two pseudonymous authors and published by Marc-André Argentino, a senior researcher at the Accelerationist Research Consortium.

A screed left behind by Ryan Palmeter, a 21-year-old white supremacist who fatally shot three Black people in a Dollar Store in Jacksonville, FL in August 2023, also bears the imprint of the Soyjak community. A graphic included in Palmeter’s document includes a Soyjak character known as Chudjak, who is said to have been inspired by Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter. The word “soy” is emblazoned across Chudjak’s T-shirt in the graphic. The reference caught the attention of Henderson, who referenced him in his writings as a “soyteen,” the term that insiders use to describe a member of the community.

Similar to Palmeter, Henderson and Küçukyetim published screeds in advance of their attacks that celebrated previous white supremacist shootings, reviewed their meticulous planning and gear, and provided encouragement to readers they hoped would emulate their actions. (Rupnow also engaged in this ritualistic practice, but it’s unclear what she wrote because she left her Google document on private before taking her own life.)

As part of an iterative effort to promote accelerationist violence calculated to bring about the collapse of society, Henderson and Küçükyetim’s posts shared one specific facet: They recommended documents produced by the Terrorgram Collective, which was recently named as a specially designated global terrorist entity by the U.S. State Department.

Terrorgram first emerged in 2019 and, within a couple years, coalesced into a tight-knit group that produced PDFs with highly stylized graphics that combine terrorist propaganda, white supremacist hate, and tactical guidance. Terrorgram’s propaganda venerates white supremacist mass murderers by calling them “saints.”

Terrorgram’s publications function like a virus that finds a receptive host in fringe online extremist communities such as Soyjak, and then infects individuals who attack society at large through mass shootings and other lone-actor violence.

Henderson shared instructions on how to perpetrate attacks on social media from a Terrorgram Collective publication, among others, according to Argentino, and links to three of the publications appear in his screed.

Küçükyetim, meanwhile, shared PDFs of three Terrorgram publications on Telegram, according to a federal indictment of two Terrorgram Collective leaders. Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, CA, and Matthew Allison of Boise, ID, the Terrorgram leaders, were arrested less than a month after Kücükyetim carried out his attack. Humber and Allison were indicted on 15 counts, including conspiring to provide material support for terrorists, and could face up to 220 years in prison if convicted.

On the morning of his attack in the northwestern Turkish city of Eskisehir, according to the Humber/Allison indictment, Küçükyetim posted in a Telegram group chat: “Come see how much humans I can cleanse.” The post included links to a livestream and PDF files of the Terrorgram publications.

Hill and her team at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found the group chat. A Telegram account they identified as Natalie Rupnow's joined the chat through an invitation, which meant that she had been connected somehow to the other members of the chat prior to the livestreamed attack, Hill said.

Hill told Raw Story that Rupnow participated in a post-play discussion to evaluate the merits of the attack. Rupnow remarked that Küçükyetim had been “caught” and that the death toll was “0 probably,” but that he deserved “credit” for at least trying.

Humber and Allison also took note of the attack.

“He included the Terrorgram books and other Saint manifestos in his file dump, gives shoutouts to the other Saints in his manifesto and references several Hard Reset passages, he was 100% our guy,” Humber wrote in a chat with Allison, according to the indictment.

“But he’s not white, so I can’t give him an honorary title,” she added. “We still celebrating his attack tho, he did it for Terrorgram.”

When Rupnow posted her screed on X before opening fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, WI on Dec. 16, Henderson replied under the post: “Livestream it.”

Later that day, after the attack, he expressed excitement that “the newest skool shooter followed” him on two of his X accounts.

In his diary, Henderson appears to speculate that he may have influenced Rupnow.

“It’s weird how we had similar takes and views, but not really because she followed my account,” he wrote.

“Arda was right!” Henderson added. Then he quoted directly from Küçükyetim’s screed: “Remember, I and the other saints will not forget what you did…. In this way, you will motivate future saints.”

It’s not clear whether Henderson directly interacted with Küçükyetim. In his diary, Henderson described Küçükyetim as “an ultimate saint” and “someone I was inspired by,” while cryptically adding, “maybe I didn’t know him.”

The transfer of terrorist motivation and camaraderie in each of the attackers’ screeds is part of a negative feedback loop, along with group chats and other social media posts, that is ensnaring some teenagers who are globally linked to one another through the internet.

“It’s not like a conversation in real life where if I told you something crazy you would be like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Hill said. “It’s an echo chamber that allows anything to go. They’re not getting healthy feedback. It builds on things that trouble them, and causes real-world problems.”

The proliferation of accelerationist terrorism through online radicalization is a challenge that law enforcement is not equipped to handle alone, she said.

“It’s going to take everyone,” Hill said. “It’s going to take parents talking to kids about how what you see on the internet could be false and horrible. And the tech community somehow trying to stop the spread of this.”

NOW READ: Incompetence and chaos as Trump 2.0 crashes and burns

This story is the first in a three-part series exploring how violent online subcultures provide the opportunity for teenagers attracted to accelerationism and inceldom to network and encourage one another to carry out terrorist attacks.

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alternet-logo

US extremists are rattled by new sanctions against global terrorism group

Jordan Green January 15, 2025

The State Department has applied the “specially designated global terrorist” designation to the Terrorgram Collective in a groundbreaking move that for the first time sanctions a transnational white supremacist terrorist group with a significant presence in the United States.

The announcement on Monday — one week before President Biden leaves office — justified the designation based on the group “posing a significant risk of committing, or having participated in training to commit acts of terrorism, that threaten the security of United States nationals or national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Terrorgram is an amalgam of the words “terror” and “Telegram,” the latter of which is a social media platform used by members to distribute propaganda.

“This is the first time you’ve seen a white supremacist group that had members or supporters in the U.S. receive the designation,” Seamus Hughes, a researcher at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska, told Raw Story.

Two of the group’s leaders, Dallas Erin Humber of California and Matthew Robert Allison of Idaho, were indicted last year on charges that included conspiracy, solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of the murder of federal officials, and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists. Two other individuals, Brandon Russell — founder of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division — and Andrew Takhistov, who each face federal charges related to plots to attack the power grid, are also linked to Terrorgram.

The indictment against Humber and Allison describes Terrorgram as “a network of channels, group chats, and users on Telegram that promote white supremacists accelerationism: an ideology centered on the belief that the white race is superior; that society is irreparably corrupt and cannot be saved by political action; and that violence and terrorism is necessary to ignite a race war and ‘accelerate’ the collapse of the government and the rise of a white ethnostate.”

Terrorgram is not the first transnational white supremacist terrorist group to be sanctioned by the State Department. In 2020, under the first Trump administration, the State Department applied the “specially designated global terrorist” identification to the Russian Imperial Movement, which was implicated in a series of bombings in 2016 and 2017 that targeted refugee shelters in Sweden. Nordic Resistance Movement, a group founded in Sweden, was added to the list last June.

The specific bans designated groups and individuals from holding property and financial interests in the United States, while also prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in financial transactions with them.

Following the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the Russian Imperial Movement invited the organizers to visit its paramilitary training camps in St. Petersburg, according to Nathan Sales, a former Trump administration State Department counterterrorism official who testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Sales said there is no evidence that the Charlottesville organizers accepted the invitation, but the following month, Russian Imperial Movement leaders traveled to the United States to network with white supremacists, and one posed for a photo with the group’s flag in front of the White House.

“What is most interesting for me is this represents the first time when a designation would have ramifications for U.S. prosecutors,” Hughes said. “There’s not a cadre of Russian Imperial Movement adherents in the U.S., whereas there is a good number of individuals that were drawn to Terrorgram in the U.S.”

Hughes said the designation will give prosecutors the ability to request terrorism enhancements during sentencing.

“It helps for them to tell the story to a jury that this is not just a bunch of angry people online, but an actual terrorist group,” he added.

The designation is also likely to make social media companies more reluctant to allow members and associates to organize on their platforms.

“Because tech companies can face legal risks if they provide services to designated groups or individuals, sanctions can prompt them to sever ties with those listed as terrorists,” Sales testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee back in 2022.

The announcement about the State Department sanction against Terrorgram is already causing ripples of unease across Telegram.

Reacting to the announcement on Monday, a neo-Nazi channel that advertises itself as a source of “tradecraft to evade authorities online,” posted: “We all know we are operating on borrowed time here on Telegram. It is unfortunate, as it is a hell of an app.”

The post went on to say that users should not trust Pavel Durov, the Russian founder and CEO of Telegram, to protect their data.

“We don’t want any of our admins or subscribers to wind up in federal prison over ironically being part of a ‘terror group,’” the post continued. “With no publicly available criteria to determine guilt or association, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It doesn’t make sense to maintain a presence where the enemy has the advantage.”

Prior to the arrests of two American leaders last September, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced charges against two unnamed Ontario men “alleged to have participated in the creation of Terrorgram Collective manifestos and Atomwaffen Division recruiting videos.”

The Canadian arrests in December 2023 followed an 18-month investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That timeframe puts the launch of the investigation roughly in June 2021, the time of the first Terrorgram publication Militant Accelerationism, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center investigation.

Federal prosecutors allege that Humber and Allison joined Terrorgram in 2019, and became leaders of the group in the summer of 2022, “after one previous leader was arrested and charged with terrorism offenses and another became aware that he was the subject of a terrorism related investigation.”

Following Humber and Allison’s arrests, three foreign nationals appear to have taken over leadership of Terrorgram. The State Department designation identifies Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira of Brazil, Noah Licul of Croatia and Hendrik Walh-Muller of South Africa as “leaders of the Terrorgram Collective” and “specially designated global terrorists.”

Terrorgram is linked to two other federal prosecutions in the United States beyond Humber and Allison. Russell, the Atomwaffen founder, was arrested in February 2023 and charged alongside codefendant Sarah Beth Clendaniel in an alleged plot to carry out a coordinated attack on electrical substations designed to create a widespread power outage in Baltimore.

While Terrorgram is not directly mentioned in charging documents for the case, a review of Russell’s Telegram chats by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that he forwarded a Terrorgram document called Make It Count to another Telegram user.

Court filings by the government also allege that Russell told an FBI confidential human source that they should use Mylar balloons to short out a power transformer. That tactic is recommended in another Terrorgram publication The Hard Reset, which is described by the government as including “detailed information on how to attack a substation, including the use of Mylar balloons.”

The State Department announcement references a planned energy facility attack by Andrew Takhistov in New Jersey last summer without directly naming him.

Takhistov’s charging documents allege that he “claimed to have taken a role in the publication of” The Hard Reset and that he sent a PDF of the document to an FBI undercover employee. Takhistov allegedly praised The Hard Reset as “the only thing you need” to plan a white supremacist terror attack.

Takhistov was active in the Terrorgram group chats, and Humber posted an Audiobook promoting white supremacist murder in January 2024 in response to a request from Takhistov, according to government court filings. Later, according to the government, Takhistov thanked a Terrorgram chat administrator for posting a video “with instructions for using Mylar balloons to commit an attack on an energy facility.”

Lawyers for Takhistov and Russell could not be reached for comment for this story prior to publication.

The State Department announcement listing Terrorgram as a terrorist entity cited the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, released in June 2021. The framework highlighted the government’s efforts to assess whether foreign entities could meet the criteria for the “specially designated global terrorist” designation.

“These designations are part of a broader U.S. government effort to address the transnational dimensions of the threat posed by [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist] actors and reflect the Biden-Harris administration’s continued commitment to countering domestic terrorism, which includes REMVE and white identity terrorism,” the State Department said.

The emphasis on tackling white supremacist terrorism under the Biden administration has been embraced by an array of agencies in addition to State, including Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI.

The commitment across the federal government to combating white supremacist terrorism under Biden’s leadership built on a growing consensus within the agencies that took hold during the first Trump administration. It remains unclear whether the second Trump administration will maintain the same course.

“In fact, we viewed it as such a critical threat that back in June of 2019, under my leadership, we elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority, on the same level with ISIS and homegrown violent extremists, where it remains to this day,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2021.

Wray was appointed to lead the FBI by Trump in 2017.

Kash Patel, who has been named by Trump to replace Wray in the incoming administration, has expressed skepticism towards the government’s focus on “domestic terrorism.”

“Whistleblowers have revealed in multiple ways how the Deep State is continuing to weaponize the power of the state against internal dissidents,” he wrote in his book Government Gangsters. “To pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data on domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”

Asked for clarification on Patel’s views, a Trump transition spokesperson previously pledged to Raw Story that Patel will “protect Americans from terrorism as the agency’s director.”

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8 23 AN invol admit hosp 2017? desantis booed

'Diary of a madman': Florida shooter with 'several manifestos' originally targeted HBCU

Maya Boddie August 27, 2023

The white gunman who murdered three Black people at a Jacksonville, Florida Dollar General store Saturday night has been identified by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department.

The Sheriff's Department shared the suspect's name on Sunday via X — formerly known as Twitter — along with a photo, writing, "Sheriff TK Waters holds follow-up briefing to identify the three victims who senselessly lost their lives yesterday during this tragic event. The suspect has been identified as 21yo Ryan Palmeter."

Although department officials noted that the 21-year-old "bought his guns legally and had no criminal history," according to Reuters, "Authorities have described the shooting as racially motivated, saying the man had authored 'several manifestos; for media, his parents and law enforcement detailing his hatred for Black people."

During the Sunday press conference, Waters described one manifesto as a "diary of a madman."

Reuters reports:

On Saturday, he was spotted trying to enter a local historically Black college, Edward Waters University, before heading to the Dollar General store.

The university said in a statement that a man had refused to identify himself and had been turned away by a campus security officer. 'It was later determined that the individual would be involved in a shooting near EWU campus,' the institution said.

The New York Times reports Palmeter used an "an AR-15-style rifle that bore swastika markings, as well as a handgun" to kill the three victims before turning the gun on himself.

READ MORE: Targeted 'because they were Black': Jacksonville’s state senator reacts to Saturday mass shooting

Reuters' full report is available at this link (subscription required).

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Florida Sheriff slams DeSantis’ permitless carry law in Jon Stewart interview: 'No benefit to the community' ›

Leading anti-racism activist explains how Trump's 'casual racism' fuels far-right terrorism ›

Targeted 'because they were Black': Jacksonville’s state senator reacts to Saturday mass shooting ›

The end of the ‘optics debate’

Amid heightened visibility following the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, members of the white supremacist movement began what they called the “optics debate.” What would provide their movement with its best shot at achieving its goals – toning down its overtly racist rhetoric and acting as an insurgent political movement, or openly embracing national socialism and violence? One terrorist referred to this question directly before allegedly picking up an automatic rifle and committing the worst antisemitic attack in American history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The suspect in the shooting, Robert Bowers, claimed that his enemies “[like] to bring invaders in that kill our people.” He wrote on Gab, a social media site favored by some extremists: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

That debate is largely over now, and the attack on Tree of Life marked a turning point. The key debate within the white power movement is no longer about optics, but the utility of violence.

Violence has always been at the core of the white power movement.It’s justified by a belief that a genocide is being committed against white people, which paints violence on the part of extremists as defensive. It’s also irrational to suggest that any of the movement’s goals – racial separation or the creation of an ethnostate – could ever possibly occur without violence. But, for the sake of optics, most of the movement’s adherents refused to openly state the obvious.

We’re seeing the growth of the accelerationist wing, which openly embraces terroristic violence as a political tool, because the question of optics now holds far less weight.An ever-growing segment of the white power movement no longer sees any use in pursuing electoral politics, which stems in large part from their disappointment in the Trump administration and their belief that, if anything, the president simply bought them more time before society begins to crumble. They also feel demographic change bearing down on them, making the notion of building a consciously pro-white political coalition all the more improbable.

As ever, the tech landscape provides ample space for extremists to propagandize. As social media becomes more decentralized, white power activists are less afraid of being deplatformed. The result is an emboldened and solidified segment of the white power movement that celebrates mass killers, openly encourages white men to commit acts of violence, and is attempting to build networks of likeminded extremists to train in preparation for an imagined future race war.

‘We know that eventually what we want will lead to violence.’

After Unite the Right, leaders in the extreme right have tried to articulate what “white nationalism 3.0” might look like: the successor to the “1.0” period that lasted from roughly the 1970s up to the 2000s – defined by Nazi aesthetics and a well-earned reputation for violence – and the “2.0” era in which the movement adopted the “alt-right” moniker.

Despite their efforts, no unifying idea or figure seemed to emerge – certainly not one like Trump, whose rhetoric helped fuse the various factions of the far right during his presidential run.

One of those who has tried to articulate a new vision for the movement is the neo-Confederate Brad Griffin, who devoted a series of articles to outlining what the “3.0” version of the movement should look like. Griffin has spent more than a decade participating in the white nationalist movement and acting as its most prolific in-house critic. He uses his blog to describe the movement to itself, delineate its many factions and define its strategies. But he has struggled to articulate anything like an actionable vision for his fellow white nationalists moving forward, instead offering a sprawling 25-point plan emphasizing concepts like “morality,” “post-Americanism” and “innovation.” If anything does come through clearly in his 3.0 series, it’s that the movement should emulate figures like Voltaire and Martin Luther and act as social critics.He calls this “positive accelerationism” – the end goal being the collapse of the political establishment, not society itself.

His suggestion has failed to inspire the troops. The audience he’s speaking to is largely one that came together online through coordinated trolling campaigns, meme-making and one-upping each other’s most vile jokes. Enlightenment philosophy doesn’t offer the same sort of transgressive thrill, and there are few signs that Griffin or his likeminded followers will be able to reel in the movement they helped nurture at the beginning of the Trump era.

Others in the movement criticize violence as counterproductive but look at shooters with sympathy.Greg Johnson, who runs the white nationalist publishing house Counter-Currents, has created a boilerplate blog post into which he inserts each new alleged attacker’s name and republishes after a mass shooting. “I have no desire to absolve Robert Bowers, much less blame his victims,” he wrote after the Pittsburgh massacre, naming Tree of Life’s alleged attacker. “But he would not be a killer, and they would not be dead, if America were not a multicultural society.”

“All of us will feel the same effects,” he continued, “unless we heed the warning signs and turn back against the rising tide of color.”

Many leaders in the movement are parroting Johnson: ostensibly condemning violence in the name of white supremacy while insisting it is inevitable.One figure guilty of that is Mike Peinovich, who founded thewhite nationalist podcast “The Right Stuff” (TRS) in 2012 and cohosts of its flagship podcast, “The Daily Shoah.” After mass shootings, Peinovich usually jumps on one of his site’s podcasts to disavow the shooter and downplay the violence of the white nationalist movement.

In August 2019, after a shooting in an El Paso Walmart left 22 people dead, Peinovich said that “white nationalists are just a small leaf” in the “potpourri of mass shooters.” He and others within TRS’s inner circle have tried to temper the site’s image, in one instance forcing a podcast host who goes by “Larry Ridgeway” to change the name of his show from “HateHouse” to “LoveCast.” They also banned him from hosting guests such as Vic Mackey, a neo-Nazi who openly glorifies violence. Ridgeway and TRS parted ways in September 2019, prompting Ridgeway to go on a drunken late-night rant in which he called TRS’s philosophy “sit-on-your-hands nationalism.”

While he moderates what TRS puts out to the public, in private communications Peinovich has candidly expressed his belief that violence is a necessary part of their political project. On the inevitability of violence, he wrote in a December 2017 post to the secret Identity Dixie Facebook group about one of his monologues on that day’s “Daily Shoah” episode: “That was public, and we still did the bit about how we know there will be violence at some point. We can’t do that publicly again. Everyone gets it. Seriously. Anyone who has come over to this gets that and is prepared for that.” He continued:

If we say openly that, yeah we know that eventually what we want will lead to violence, we are putting ourselves in moral and potentially legal jeopardy and jews will absolutely seize on that. Particularly statements about knowing about inevitable violence. They could totally try to RICO us for that, so you can’t be super principled about this in public. We have to be f------ smart.

Peinovich underlined what Unite the Right made clear: there is no moderate, non-violent version of white nationalism. The “optics debate” was never just a discussion of strategy, but an attempt to distract from the fact that everyone who embraces white nationalism also – transparently or not – necessarily accepts violence as a political tool. There is simply no way for their political project to work without violence. And since that’s true, it’s been relatively easy for a violence-obsessed accelerationist wing to rise up within the white supremacist movement, especially in this moment of strategic uncertainty.

And now, accelerationists have assembled across the internet – some on heavily guarded sites or encrypted chats with intense vetting procedures and others on easily accessible social media platforms. The evidence of the accelerationist influence has been grimly consistent since the attack in Pittsburgh, including more mass shootings, dozens of arrests, foiled plots, vandalismof synagogues and continued recruitment efforts among groups that organize using a terrorist cell structure.

Leaderless resistance: An old white power tactic gets revived

Insurgent violence has always played a role in the modern white power movement, though its appeal has ebbed and flowed.According to historian Kathleen Belew, the movement first underwent a “revolutionary turn” in 1983, when white power leaders met at the Aryan Nations World Congress and reportedly declared war on the federal government. It was a moment of political upheaval similar in many ways to the present, with a public increasingly uncertain about their economic future, suspicious of government and public institutions, and politically polarized. Combined with the aggrievement and betrayal many veterans felt after Vietnam, those factors provided fertile ground for a white power movement that was decidedly in favor of violent overthrow of the American government.

Many of the leaders to emerge from that moment remain important figures in the white power movement, especially Klansman Louis Beam, who was the most notable figure to articulate the “leaderless resistance” strategy that guided radical elements of the movement well into the 1990s. In a 1983 essay, Beam argued that extremists should organize themselves into “phantom cells” – made up of just one or a handful of members – that would carry out violent actions against the state. While not formally joined together, all the members of the white power community would read the same foundational literature so that they retained ideological cohesion. It would be, he wrote, “an intelligence nightmare for a government” to try to track the disconnected cells, all operating under their own direction and not the guidance of an organizational leader.

Terroristic strategies receded in the 1990s, in part because the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead led the FBI to place the organized hate movement under greater scrutiny. (Timothy McVeigh moved in extremist circles and excerpts from The Turner Diaries, which fictionalizes a white supremacist revolution, were found in his car after the bombing.) But recently, they’ve been gaining currency in the movement once again, as have figures like Beam. Leaderless resistance has once again become one of the movement’s prevailing strategies.

One of the key factors motivating a violent shift within the white power movement is an overwhelming frustration with the Trump administration and, even more so, electoral politics itself.

Even among those who revered Trump only a short time ago, the president has become an object of criticism. For some, disillusionment set in before he even took office. Brad Griffin wrote that “the bloom [was] already off the rose” only two months after Trump was elected. “This was supposed to be a great victory for populist nationalism,” he wrote, before complaining that the president-elect was adding “Republican establishment cronies” to his cabinet. By the 2018 midterms, many white nationalist leaders shared Griffin’s frustrations. “We are wondering if Trump trotted out ending birthright citizenship and other populist red meat merely to save himself and his worthless party for another round of tax cuts, foreign policy distractions, and fundamental betrayals of white America,” Johnson wrote two days after the elections. The Trump administration has inflicted many cruelties on immigrants and migrant children and welcomed those who hawk white nationalist ideas onto his staff. But the president has, according to some white supremacist commentators, failed to make adequate headway on their hateful agenda and acted more like an establishment conservative than a far-right populist.

Eventually recognizing that electoral politics could not create change – let alone revolutionary change – at a pace they found satisfying, a growing segment of the white power movement has chosen to eschew electoral politics entirely.

‘It’s the birthrates’

White power activists are obsessed with non-white migration and birthrates of both whites and people of color – all factors that are leading, the Census Bureau predicts, to white people becoming a minority population in 2044. The manifestos of recent alleged white supremacist mass killers reflect the terror with which they greet this so-called “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy that alleges white people around the world are being systematically replaced. “It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates,” opened the manifesto linked to the convicted shooter in that attack. The manifesto also included a section on accelerationism and “destabilization.” He called them “tactics for victory.”

Base leader Rinaldo Nazarro, when explaining why he had chosen to devote himself to “system collapse” rather than mass-movement or electoral politics on a December 2017 podcast, likewise cited demographics: “As time goes on, our numbers continue to dwindle, the pressure keeps getting ramped up on whites cause that’s not gonna end. … Like, look, there’s no turning back the clock. Our numbers are just not gonna increase from here.” With a shrinking white political bloc, Nazarro and many others contend, why pursue electoral strategies? Among a growing segment of the white power movement, there is a pervasive sense that they are out of time and out of institutional or political remedies.

Online spaces foster terrorists

For this terroristic part of the movement to gather any steam, they needed spaces to congregate and reinforce each other’s belief that violence is, beyond all doubt, the only way to move toward their political vision. In the years since Trump was elected, theaccelerationist movement has grown on places like Gab and, increasingly, on the encrypted messaging app Telegram – both platforms run by techno-libertarians who tout their commitment to a laissez-faire form of content moderation, which, in practice, means allowing extremists to use their platforms largely unabated.

“I guess I have to say it again and again,” a channel admin who uses the name of Fox News host Tucker Carlson as his moniker wrote in May 2019. “Destabilizing the US is the only way to create a mass movement of any kind ever. Therefore Accelerationism is the only path to victory for anyone further right then [sic] John McCain. Lets face it, We don’t have the numbers to win the next presidential election nor the one after that.”

In another post a few days later, “Carlson” admonished those who believe “we are getting out of this without bullets flying.”

Because it tolerates even their most violent ideations, Telegram has become a safe haven for accelerationists in a social media world where the they fear deplatforming (though, it bears mentioning, major social media companies continue to harbor extremists on their platforms and enforce their policies against hate inconsistently and insufficiently).

Hatewatch notified Telegram that far-right extremists were calling for acts of terrorism on their platform in June 2019, but the company did not respond. Some white terror channels were placed in a restricted state in January 2020 and, the next month, a handful appeared to have been removed from the site. The company has not explained why certain channels were restricted. In any case, users have found ways around the restrictions and channels often reappear shortly after deletion.

“Build your base on a platform that doesn’t hate you. Use this superior gathering place to send [Twitter] to its well deserved grave,” one Telegram admin told their more than 5,000 subscribers.

A number of channel administrators have formed a formalized network of users who promote terrorism and violence. They have created a web of extremist content by constantly sharing posts from each other’s channels. While about a dozen core channels in the network set the ideological tone for the rest – one with nearly 6,000 subscribers and many more with close to 4,000 – hundreds of channels contain accelerationist content. In other words, finding your way into just one channel in the network makes it easy enough to completely submerge yourself in an echo chamber of violent extremism.

Over roughly the last decade, terroristic violence has been heralded as a solution by a segment of white supremacist activists – but most of them were sequestered on highly secretive sites where it was difficult for even true believers to gain access. The primary hub was Iron March, a site that was online from 2011 to 2017, during which time it helped launch at least nine fascist groups around the world. Iron March produced both Atomwaffen Division and American Vanguard – whoseoffshoot organization, Vanguard America, murderer James Alex Fields marched with at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.

The forum had a total of 1,653 posters – far smaller than many Telegram channels peddling accelerationist and exterminationist content. But the small community helped shape the aesthetics, language and ideological foundations that eventually came to proliferate on Telegram. On Iron March, the writings of older figures in the white power movement, like George Lincoln Rockwell and Louis Beam, were resurrected, butnone more so than James Mason. A committed neo-Nazi since the 1960s, Mason produced a newsletter called SIEGE between 1980 and 1986 that was eventually compiled into a single, unwieldy volume meant to serve as a guide for racist revolutionaries. Readers, the publisher of the volume’s second edition wrote in the introduction, should heed the “clarion call, wage battles of attrition, and act in a manner commensurate to Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City fame.” From Iron March, SIEGE and its ideas were launched into the wider spaces of the internet, turning #readsiege into a meme within certain white supremacist social media circles.

For the most part, however, the kind of ideas and discussions found on Iron March – the overt calls for terroristic violence, deep dives into the writings and speeches of fascist thinkers and advice on how to form networks of leaderless cells in the style outlined by Beam – were difficult to find on social media before white supremacists began flocking to Telegram.The platform has radically changed the kinds of rhetoric white supremacists openly use and has, in turn, changed the tenor of the movement as a whole. Just as users on Iron March talked each other into embracing ever more extreme and violent ideas, users on Telegram are doing the same – but they are operating within a vastly larger and more accessible platform that facilitates social networking and peer-to-peer contact.

While still steeped in the language of memes familiar to anyone who has scrolled 4chan’s /pol/ board, the rhetoric on Telegram is remarkably earnest and direct. “Real shit,” one user wrote to their more than 3,000 subscribers last October, “However you try to cut it, there will be violence. An insane amount of bloodshed.”

Once people do find their way onto Telegram (likely through links supplied by extremists on places like Twitter and YouTube), the platform’s design could make it an exceptionally effective space for quickening the process of radicalization. Channels act like a steady propaganda stream in which the admin(s) of a channel can, day and night, tell their subscribers that the white race is being attacked and that it is their job to acquire weapons, learn how to make explosives and become expert in guerrilla warfare and operational security.

Channels are packed with propaganda that is often sophisticated, including branded and highly stylized images and videos. Telegram allows users to upload videos up to 1.5 gigabytes – far larger than any other comparable platform. It became the primary platform through which The Base posted their propaganda, including photos and videos of members engaging in paramilitary-style training.

Within that unceasing stream of posts, subscribers are made to feel as if a race war is looming on the horizon. “Boogaloo soon,” a meme referencing a future civil war, is a common refrain from people like Paul Nehlen, a former Republican congressional candidate turned neo-Nazi who has more than 2,300 Telegram subscribers. One Telegram admin promoted a channel created to “prepare the reader to become and [sic] effective guerrilla fighter.” “Lots of information you will need one day,” they wrote above a link to the channel. “Don’t be the f****t that gets taken out on day one of the boogaloo.” Another provided a simple message to “all Jews…living in White countries around the world: Run.”

White power activists pine for stories they can use to create collective outrage or celebration that will bond members of the community. After a December 2019 shooting at a kosher grocery in Jersey City, New Jersey, for instance, Telegram users posted “Pleaseletitbeawhitemale.” They were evidently hoping their movement had gained a new “saint,” a term accelerationists use to describe many mass killers. When white supremacist shooters do carry out an attack, extremists swarm to places like Telegram and 4chan in ugly veneration and to encourage others to be the next to take up arms for their cause.

Where do we go from here?

In many ways, today’s white power movement is backward-looking: its heroes are men who are long dead or well into old age, whose decades-old speeches are found on YouTube or whose books have been preserved as PDFs and spread through dedicated white power literature channels on Telegram. But that allows members of the movement to engage in mythmaking. In their minds, they are the heirs to a movement that began decades ago and are nobly carrying out the fight. They believe – not unlike many Americans all across the political spectrum – that we’ve arrived at a breaking point.

The conditions that have allowed this violence-obsessed part of the white power movement to congeal and grow are not likely to change any time soon. Scholars and pundits are actively questioning whether American democracy can withstand the threats being made against it. A recent survey conducted by political scientist Lilliana Mason showed that some 20% of Americans “[appear] to be willing to tolerate some form of political violence in politics,” while the far right is openly talking about the prospect of civil war. On the economic front, Americans continue to struggle to find stability and, on the political side, people believe not only trust in government, but in each other, is declining. Uncertainty like this provides fertile ground for extremists.

The tech landscape also makes the problem of violent extremism more difficult to control. Legislators, Elon University Professor of Computer Science Megan Squire has pointed out, continue to pursue reactive policies rather than work to anticipate how extremists will use platforms to propagandize and recruit in the future – a necessity for a movement that is constantly moving and adapting. Use of mainstream platforms is part of the problem, while the other is the emergence of an alt-tech infrastructure – including social media platforms, payment processors, video streaming services and more – where extremists can do and say whatever they want without fear of deplatforming. “There will be a move towards the decentralized web, which is this peer-to-peer internet replacement,” she said. “It will be very hard to appeal to any centralized authority to do things like remove manifesto files or … a disruptive person off of a social media site.” How these problems are addressed will determine just how much kindling extremists have to burn as the country heads toward the 2020 election.