Accelerationism, in the sense relevant to this collection, is the position that violence should be committed in order to hasten the collapse of the existing political order — on the expectation that what follows will be preferable to its adherents.
The New York Attorney General’s investigative report into the 2022 Buffalo shooting states the goal directly, drawing on Cynthia Miller-Idriss’s work: such violence is intended to “create immediate societal panic, inspire copycat actors, and encourage reciprocal or revenge terror acts from affected groups.”
How it functions
It is not an organization and has no membership, which is why the tactics recorded on this page are publication rather than mobilization. The mechanism is a manifesto that names its own purpose as encouraging the next attack. The Attorney General’s report documents one such case in detail: an attacker whose stated aim was to “encourage further attacks that will eventually start the war that will save the Western world”, and who wrote a manifesto designed to be used as a manual by whoever came next.
That design — content produced to function as an instruction to others — is what distinguishes this current from the broader extremist milieu it draws on.
Threat assessment
The Department of Homeland Security’s October 2020 Homeland Threat Assessment concluded that among domestic violent extremists, “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists — specifically white supremacist extremists — will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.”
That assessment concerns the wider category, not accelerationism as such. It is cited here with that limit stated, because the distinction is real and the earlier version of this page did not observe it.
What was removed
The previous version listed a three-phase chronology, named specific forums and texts as incubators, attributed three attacks in two countries to the ideology, and asserted four categories of political impact — shifts in counterterrorism resourcing, legislative responses, cross-border coordination documented by investigators, and changes to platform takedown protocols. None was sourced.
The founded field read “2010s”, which is not a date. It has been removed rather than replaced,
because no source cited here dates the current’s emergence.
Sources
- 01.
Office of the New York State Attorney General. Investigative Report on the role of online platforms in the tragic mass shooting in Buffalo on May 14, 2022. (2022). Released October 18, 2022. Source for the definition of acceleration used here — that acts of violence are intended to "create immediate societal panic, inspire copycat actors, and encourage reciprocal or revenge terror acts from affected groups" — and for a documented case in which an attacker stated an explicitly accelerationist aim.
- 02.
Miller-Idriss, C. (2020). Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. Princeton University Press. The scholarly source the Attorney General's report cites for its definition of acceleration. Metadata confirmed against the Crossref record for the DOI.
- 03.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Threat Assessment, October 2020. (2020). Source for the assessment that among domestic violent extremists, "racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists—specifically white supremacist extremists—will remain the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland". The assessment is about that broader category, not about accelerationism specifically, and is cited with that scope.