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What Is Accelerationism? An Ideology Shaping Domestic Terror

, by Elizabeth Whitworth
Three shadowy men hiding behind an American flag illustrate what accelerationist ideology is about

Accelerationism is one of the most significant and least understood shifts in domestic extremism over the past decade. That’s according to FBI Special Agent Scott Payne, who argues that accelerationism represents a fundamentally different kind of threat. Unlike the white supremacist movements most Americans are familiar with (groups that sought social and political influence while operating within existing institutions), the goal of accelerationism isn’t to change the system—it’s to destroy it.

Understanding what accelerationism is, where it came from, and why it has spread so rapidly is essential context for anyone trying to make sense of the domestic terrorism landscape today. Payne, who spent five months undercover inside The Base (one of the most prominent accelerationist groups in the US), lays out that context in his 2025 memoir, Code Name: Pale Horse. I share his perspective along with some context and analysis.

Table of Contents

What Is Accelerationism?

Scott Payne spent nearly three decades in law enforcement (including SWAT teams and undercover operations). One of his targets was domestic terrorists. I spent a few years in federal law enforcement myself, but my focus was on other threats, so I found Payne’s story not only illuminating but alarming. In his memoir Code Name: Pale Horse (co-written with journalist Michelle Shephard), he explains the core idea of accelerationist ideology: Western governments can’t be reformed through democratic politics because they’re irredeemably corrupt, weakened by multiculturalism and immigration. Accelerationists believe society will collapse under these internal contradictions, and their goal is to hasten this collapse through violence and chaos.

Accelerationists envision that, during the collapse, violent conflict will erupt between racial groups—a race war they believe white people will win—enabling them to establish a white ethnostate: territories governed by and for white people, whether in the Pacific Northwest, Appalachia, or other regions. They use the term “Boogaloo” to refer to this collapse and subsequent race war.

According to Payne, accelerationist ideology differs from other forms of extremism in the US. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan have sought social and political acceptance, operating within the system while advocating hateful positions. Militia groups and organizations such as the Proud Boys see themselves as defending constitutional rights rather than destroying the system: They might prepare for societal collapse, but they don’t work to cause it.

(Shortform note: According to Britannica, the transplant of accelerationism from Marxist philosophy onto the ideology of white supremacy helps explain Payne’s observation that members of The Base were willing to support causes they despise and vote for candidates they hate. They welcome any disorder that might crack the foundations of what they call “the System,” a term they capitalize to signal that they see government, media, law enforcement, and democratic institutions not as separate things that can be fixed but as a single corrupt structure that must come down entirely. They see every fracture in the social order as progress. But scholars say that what accelerationists want on the other side of collapse is far less developed than their vision of destruction.)

Where Did Accelerationism Come From?

Payne explains that accelerationists organize in small cells that operate autonomously while maintaining loose connections to broader movements. They draw ideological inspiration from Siege, a collection of essays written in the 1980s that gained influence after being rediscovered by neo-Nazi forums in 2015, which advocates for what James Mason calls a “leaderless resistance” of small groups conducting guerrilla attacks. It suggests tactics including derailing trains, poisoning water supplies, assassinating politicians, and conducting mass shootings targeting racial minorities—not to achieve specific policy outcomes but to trigger the breakdown that could lead to a race war and allow the establishment of white ethnostates.

The Intellectual History of Accelerationism

White supremacist movements had spent decades nursing their fears about racial decline, demographic change, and a government they considered an enemy of white interests. What separated Mason from his contemporaries wasn’t his hatreds but his ideas about what to do with them. While organizations such as the KKK pursued legitimacy by getting their sympathizers into elected office, cultivating mainstream support, and working through legal and political channels, Mason thought this was delusional. Siege (the newsletter he published through the early 1980s) argued that society was so corrupt it couldn’t be remade to serve white supremacy; it had to be brought down. He called for “total war against the system.”

In his newsletter, Mason advocated for the leaderless, lone-wolf terrorist tactics that Payne cites in his book, drawing on a Cold War-era CIA strategy designed by intelligence officer Ulius Amoss to protect anti-Soviet underground networks from communist infiltrators. KKK leader Louis Beam adapted the concept for white supremacist groups in a 1983 essay, and Mason agreed that small, self-directed groups sharing an ideology but no chain of command would be hard for authorities to dismantle. After Mason stopped publishing his newsletter in 1986, his writing spent two decades in obscurity. The text’s second life began in 2015, when Iron March, a neo-Nazi online forum, republished it and built an ideological subculture around it.

The neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, which formed on Iron March that same year, made Siege mandatory reading for its members. The Base and a wave of international groups—Sonnenkreig Division (UK), Feuerkrieg Division (Estonia), and Antipodean Resistance (Australia)—followed directly in its wake. A final irony is worth noting: The word “accelerationism,” which was applied to Mason’s work retroactively, was borrowed from the academic left, where post-Marxist philosophers used it to describe the idea that intensifying the contradictions of capitalism would hasten its collapse toward revolution and open the door to something better. Extremists see the tactic as a way to achieve racial domination.

How Does Accelerationism Spread?

Payne sees the internet as an accelerant—a tool that lets extremist groups recruit faster than law enforcement can respond. He’s not wrong; that’s well-supported by the evidence. Researchers who study radicalization caution us against treating the internet as the root cause of the problem. The dominant view in the field is that the internet shapes and speeds up a journey that begins elsewhere—in experiences of social rejection, economic frustration, and a hunger for belonging and purpose. With the internet, these communities can find people who are already on the margins, not because the internet creates that marginality but because isolation tends to redirect people online, where extremist communities reach them before anyone else does.

The cell structure, encrypted communications, and online recruiting that make accelerationist groups hard to monitor aren’t part of a unified strategy; they’re what happens when people who want to stay hidden adopt modern tools. The roots of this playbook go back to 1983, when Louis Beam popularized the idea of “leaderless resistance” that James Mason adopted. Beam had watched federal prosecutions dismantle hierarchical white supremacist groups and realized a distributed structure needed a decentralized way to communicate. At an Aryan Nations Congress, Beam introduced a white supremacist computer bulletin board, a precursor to online forums that was accessible only by dialing in directly over a phone line.

Encrypted apps are just the current version of this 1983 technology. What’s changed is the scale at which people who subscribe to extreme ideologies can make connections with one another. The spread of radicalization behaves like a “complex contagion”—it doesn’t take hold from a single encounter but requires sustained contact with reinforcing material and people. Online communities are the machinery for producing that kind of sustained contact at scale. People who’ve experienced trauma or feel a deep sense of marginalization are more open to extremist narratives, but the men Payne describes aren’t a new type of person; they’re an old type of person with a new way of finding each other.

How Widespread Is Accelerationism?

Payne notes that, by 2021, 90% of white nationalist groups had adopted accelerationist ideology—a dramatic shift from the 1980s through the early 2000s, when explicit calls for societal collapse would have been considered counterproductive within most extremist movements.

That said, accelerationism is a slippery target because it can be grafted onto any ideology. Three 2019 mass shootings in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton were linked to accelerationist thinking, despite the fact that the Dayton shooter self-identified as a socialist. This helps explain why Payne’s figure of 90% adoption among white nationalist groups is hard to verify: The claim tracks the spread of a tactic, not the membership of an organization. But a 2024 study that analyzed 66 million words posted on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront over two decades found accelerationist sentiment woven through discussions across the entire period. The idea has spread—and proven more durable than any single group.

White supremacists were responsible for 244 of the 443 deaths caused by domestic extremists from 2012 to 2021, and a Senate investigation found that DHS and the FBI had not fully complied with a 2019 law requiring annual reporting on domestic terrorism data, while federal resources remained disproportionately focused on international terrorism. It’s important to note that not all 443 deaths were ideologically motivated; they were committed by people with extremist ties and include gang-related violence or personal disputes involving known extremists. The Senate report used this broad dataset to illustrate the overall footprint of extremist-related violence in the US. The numbers are estimates, not definitive government tallies (ironically, because of the very reporting failures the Senate report criticized).

The Threat That’s Hardest to Stop

Undercover agents such as Payne infiltrate groups that are organized, but the most lethal domestic attacks are increasingly carried out by people who never join a formal group at all. Research on over a thousand people convicted of ideologically motivated crimes found that, the more formally organized an extremist group becomes, the less likely its members are to perpetrate acts of mass violence. The reason is almost mundane: Groups with public profiles and recruiting infrastructure have strong incentives to avoid the scrutiny that follows violence. People who act alone tend to be those who couldn’t make it into a group or were pushed out of one.

Accelerationist communities have an elaborate apparatus for canonizing mass killers, which scholars call “Saints Culture”: Attackers are elevated to quasi-religious figures, commemorated on monthly calendars and in propaganda. The point isn’t to belong during one’s life; it’s to be remembered as one of the movement’s martyrs. (As a Christian, not only am I horrified by the ideology and behavior embraced by accelerationists, I’m disgusted by their attempts to connect it to Christianity in any way.)

In August 2023, a white gunman inspired by accelerationist ideas entered a Jacksonville, Florida, Dollar General store and killed three Black victims with weapons including a rifle decorated with swastikas. Authorities found no evidence that he belonged to The Base or any other organized group. What he shared with them was something harder to police: a violent worldview learned in the same online spaces. His manifesto expressed hope that his attack would inspire others to act—a pattern among white supremacist killers, where isolation doesn’t necessarily mean disconnection.

That’s what makes the spread of accelerationist ideas so difficult to stop. There’s no gathering for an agent to join, no conspiracy to disrupt, and no singular group to take down. There’s just a long lineage of accelerationist violence for attackers to seek to join.

What Can We Do About It?

Prosecution removes a dangerous individual, but, without addressing the conditions that made radicalization appealing in the first place, the pipeline stays open. Research funded by the National Institute of Justice, including interviews with former white supremacists and their families, finds that what draws people into extremist movements looks less like ideological conviction than a personal crisis: a lost job, a social rupture, a trauma with no outlet, or a need for belonging that ordinary life has failed to meet.

Organizations such as Life After Hate (which is staffed by former extremists) work to address this gap, but they point to a complication that Payne’s account omits: Putting someone in prison separates them from their extremist cell, but it doesn’t separate them from their beliefs. Researchers distinguish these two outcomes—physical exit from a group versus ideological change—and find they often diverge. Furthermore, people trying to counteract the spread of extremist ideologies are largely operating without a map: There are no industry standards, rigorous studies are rare, and organizations have historically scraped by with minimal funding while trying to document what they’re learning as they go.

Learn More About Accelerationism

I hope this article serves as a good introduction to accelerationism, but there’s more to dig into if you’re interested. Payne’s book offers a personal glimpse into accelerationist ideology and the people who hold it, and I encourage you to read Shortform’s guide to Code Name: Pale Horse.

Additional Sources

Elizabeth Whitworth

Elizabeth has a lifelong love of books. She devours nonfiction, especially in the areas of history, theology, and philosophy. A switch to audiobooks has kindled her enjoyment of well-narrated fiction, particularly Victorian and early 20th-century works. She appreciates idea-driven books—and a classic murder mystery now and then. Elizabeth has a Substack and is writing a book about what the Bible says about death and hell.

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