Reflections on the Right and its Violence, Part II

A Theoretical Investigation into Reactionary Violence
An ICE agent in Broadview, Illinois wears a skull mask, a garment associated with neo-nazi terrorism (September 6, 2025)

V - Translatio Imperii

Do these people—the killers—matter? Do they hold positions of power? Are their acts historically impactful beyond the immediate carnage? Sociologically speaking, they do not seem to originate from the same source as military, special forces, border patrol, police, etc. This is a new development: The old kind of killers—the Klan and Black Legion, the ex-officers of the Freikorps and squadristi, Eastern European pogromists, or even the neo-fascist bombers of the Italian Years of Lead—were largely the same kind of people hired to be the state’s official killers, and they had extensive connections to state officials who could turn a blind eye when needed.

Those of the new breed are a breed apart both demographically and ideologically.1 They are younger, less extroverted, less active in official politics, and much more besides. Their acts of violence are not obviously embedded in a broader social movement or institution. The US Department of Justice has a name for them: Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs).2 Researchers and journalists elsewhere, such as the Accelerationist Research Consortium (ARC), have borrowed the term accelerationist to describe them. Both of these names curiously elide the nazi link and thereby obfuscate the historical connection between this modern form of terror and its historical predecessors, instead opting to implicitly define it by its exceptionality, albeit in different ways.

The most broadly accepted definition of ‘(militant) accelerationism’ in this context is, as far as I can tell, the one put forward by Matthew Kriner for the aforementioned ARC. It goes like this: “Militant accelerationism is a set of tactics and strategies designed to put pressure on and exacerbate latent social divisions, often through violence, thus hastening societal collapse.”3 This definition has a few problems. Kriner essentially argues that “militant accelerationism” is an outgrowth of “philosophical forms of accelerationism—such as the technology-centric visions of Nick Land and the anti-colonial liberationist theories of left-accelerationists.” It is a “set of tactics and strategies” which “grew to include various ideological currents, the most dominant of which is neofascism” (my emphasis). Kriner should know that “accelerationist” tactics were being promoted and even put into practice by fascists (and homegrown American “patriots”) decades before Nick Land started blogging.4 The Turner Diaries was written all the way back in 1978, and various Nazi guides to ‘revolution’ have been easily accessible on the internet from the 1990s onward. The ARC definition both distorts the historical picture and obfuscates attempts to understand the so-called accelerationists as part of both the broader fascist social movement and the right in general, thus constructing ‘accelerationism’ as a historical and social anomaly that can only be defeated by police methods.

The NVEs, meanwhile, are exceptional because they “engage in criminal conduct” in the pursuit of “goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” Ken Klippenstein notes that the term was created by the Trump II FBI “to replace the Biden administration’s focus on anti-government and ‘anti-authority’ extremism adopted after January 6,”5 but the appeal to “civilized society” found in the 2025 court documents ultimately occupies the same semiotic space as the Biden administration’s references to “anti-government” and “anti-authority” opinion. Moreover, “sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability” has been one of the main tools of US foreign policy for several decades now, and it is often difficult to find a coherent motive for such acts of wanton destruction beyond “hatred of society at large.” Take the 1998 destruction of the Al-Shifa medicine factory in Sudan.6 The alibi that they had intelligence it was a chemical weapons plant is only credible with the understanding that they also believed the Sudanese to be subhuman, a despised and cursed race, so verifying this intelligence was unnecessary. Racism is thus the most powerful vector of “nihilism,” that accursed alibi, in human history.

There are further similarities between the agents of stochastic terror and the agents of the state. This is most clear when comparing their actions to those of the US military and especially its special forces (Navy SEALs, Delta Force, etc). What is a search and destroy operation after all? It is an act of targeted killing typically based on questionable intelligence and executed with the presupposition that anyone encountered along the way was either complicit or a witness, to be disposed of in any case. Normal rules of engagement and laws of war are suspended. Children become nothing more than extinguishable heat signatures.

This is not to say that the killers are schooled in military technique: Most are (thankfully) relatively incompetent. I think the parallels are rather an example of action at a distance (and, of course, easy access to military-grade weaponry). When certain forms of violence are widely practiced and marked as legitimate by the state, this has far-reaching consequences for the use of violence throughout society. Police forces have increasingly grown to resemble the military over the past few decades, and today they are being joined everywhere by the National Guard and a completely militarized ICE. Even private security guards increasingly opt for a SWAT-style look. Given the continuous decline in violence that the US has experienced for decades, this is somewhat odd. There are economic explanations about the sale of surplus and used military equipment, but at a deeper level this militarism is, as the sociologists of the Bush era conjectured, a symptom of decline and the correlate expansion of the powers of fear and chaos.

VI - Do You Need a Movement to Be a Fascist?

The Order of Nine Angles and similar organizations may or may not exist—at least, they may or may not exist in the way that an organization such as the Dominican Order or Republican Party exists. We can be sure that there are individual adherents and that these individual adherents come together both in person and online. The most obvious trace of these organizations are the various artifacts that they leave behind: literature, online webpages and accounts, visual media, etc. Some authoritative fascist texts on strategy and organization—to the extent that they can be justly labeled that and not mere flights of political fantasy—outright reject large-scale organization in favor of small, cell-based or individual acts of terror. Their mantra: “You don’t need a movement to be a fascist.” Are they right?

The first thing to note in answering his question is that when neo-nazis use the word “movement,” they mean a large-scale organization, not a social movement as such. One can certainly be a fascist without being a part of a large-scale organization. Being a fascist without being part of a social movement (namely the right in general) is, however, a historical impossibility, if not a strictly logical one. (I am emphasizing, once again, that the killers are objectively part of the same social movement as Fox News hosts.) Beyond that connection, sociologists and miscellaneous counter-terrorism/extremism researchers have done a decent job of mapping out the “accelerationist” movement in particular—although admittedly the subjects in question made this mapping process pretty easy with their atrocious operational security.7

What emerges instead of a single organization are interconnected networks of more and less committed individuals and the groups they form. At one end are the empty husks serving life sentences and writing letters by hand in the hole of a maximum security prison. At the other end are teenagers who repost ultra-nazi memes about the “day of the rope” because they think it’s funny. Between these individuated poles of the social movement are discrete groups formal and informal. If we imagine the social movement as a kind of two-dimensional graph with individuals and groups on one axis, then the other dimension would be the social infrastructure and institutional background that makes this social movement possible as an aggregate of human beings. That category would include digital means of communication and coordination, the broader global social movement of the right, and certain institutions of the state—insofar as they are actually involved.

Despite the talk of “white jihad,” the organizational finesse of fascist terror groups pales in comparison to the likes of Al-Qaeda. The decentralization and network-based organizational structure of contemporary fascist terrorism is more a result of weakness and the congenital inability of these cretins to organize anything without the internet as a scaffold than deliberate strategy, despite their protestations to the contrary. Both as a mass and as individuals, they seem like highly manipulable actors. This is nothing new. The Italian fascist Enzo Erra, writing for the short-lived neo-fascist review Imperium in 1950, positively described the rank-and-file of the post-war neo-fascist movement as “a legion of true fanatics,” adding that “it is fanaticism that the revolution needs today.”8 Right-wing organizations are universally based on fear, trickery, irrational authority, backbiting, and the like. Dysfunction only seems to become more severe with illegal groups that have no real recourse to binding rules and bylaws.

The right’s ‘intellectuals’ and leadership strata almost always believe they are getting one over on their simpleminded underlings. The political leadership is correct about this, the intellectuals less so. Traditional intellectuals, as Gramsci called them, have always been pawns of the real, political leadership, whose cultural standard is often rather poor. The right-wing Catholic intelligentsia uniformly falls in line behind Trump because he gives them what they want in exchange for obedience—endorsement of so many mortal sins is forgiven under plenary political indulgence. The grunts and lower level ‘intellectuals’ (today: podcasters, etc.) similarly follow the top dog’s diktat unswervingly. In the event that they do dissent, this is done with the awareness that they cannot risk straying too far from the path—to the extent that they are organic intellectuals they remain mere organs functionally subordinated to something greater.

It was scandalous for Mario Borghezio, at the time a Member of European Parliament for the Lega Nord and himself a former cadre of the Italian neo-fascist movement, to publicly express his agreement with the beliefs (if not the actions) of Anders Breivik in 2011. (In the US, Glenn Beck compared the murdered children to members of the Hitler Youth, to give some idea of how the American right responded.)9 The situation has evolved since then. Now the killers identify themselves with recognized political parties, which have largely absorbed the Luciferian impulse and bent it to their will. Thus the defense attorney of Patrick Crusius, the mass murderer and face behind the “Chudjak” meme, told El Paso Matters that his client “thought he had to stop the [Hispanic] invasion [of Texas] because that’s what his president was telling him.”10 For the attorney, this was evidence that Crusius was mentally unwell and, given he made similar arguments at his client’s sentencing hearing, also a possible extenuating circumstance. For us it is something different—even taking into account the perfidy inherent to lawyery! Young Republican activists’ private exaltation of rape as “epic” is the memetic afterbirth of the Order of Nine Angles’ radicalization of traditional right wing defenses of sexual violence into outright praise for it.11 The prodigal son has returned.

From a historical perspective, passive, conservative reaction produces the activist right and maintains the latter as a kind of kept boy or covert bastard, but finds itself falling back on this apprentice in times of need. The ‘Alt-Right,’ as it used to be known, was an organizational failure, but it provided an impetus and cadre of footsoldiers that could reinvigorate the flailing organs of the Republican Party and help bring it to power. The ascendance of Trump seems, in retrospect, to be both highly contingent and the inevitable culmination of many deeper historical processes. That is normal. “History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”12

VII - Special Bodies of Armed Men

The German-Jewish jurist Ernst Fraenkel introduced the term dual state to describe the legal structure of the Third Reich.13 He argued that the Nazi state was divided into a “prerogative state” and a “normative state.” The former was a basically political body unconcerned with formal procedure and governed by a hierarchical chain of command ultimately terminating in the will of the Führer, while the latter represented the institutions governing “normal life,” in particular the regulation of private property. Crucially, the relationship between these two states was combative: the former possessed potentially unlimited jurisdiction, and new exceptions to the normative legal order could be called into existence at any moment.

Fraenkel’s picture, of course, does not map perfectly onto the present, but insofar as there are any attempts to make real changes in the structure of the US government today, these attempts are characterized by a dualism of exception and norm like that of the double state. The old style of unified, legally structured racial apartheid and blatant class domination that characterized the Solid South would be difficult if not impossible to restore, certainly within the span of a single presidential term, and so it seems to me that one of the main goals of the American right in this moment is to establish a kind of deformed double state without recourse to a full-on declaration of martial law or autogolpe. Indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of this ‘late fascism’ is its pointed avoidance of the totalizing rhetoric of a Mussolini or Hitler—Stephen Miller’s vituperative discourse notwithstanding.

The preferential vehicle for such a transformation today is the executive branch, the decrepit head of which is argued to already hold “plenary authority” by his aforementioned scheming vizier,14 but any part of the state will work in a pinch. (Indeed, some on the right are rather perturbed by Trump’s attempts to circumvent the sham judiciary they’ve cultivated for decades. In the case against Mahmoud Khalil, the State’s legal team is trying to get the case trapped in the immigration courts, which as administrative courts are not actually part of the judiciary and, since the unitarity of the executive has been all but ceded by the Supreme Court, therefore fall under the control of the President—a possible vessel for a system of Sondergerichte? But let me not digress too much.) The technique is a matter of combining finesse with bravado. For every spectacular episode of ethnic cleansing in the barrio, there are several less publicized agreements made and intragovernmental Drumpfschaltung campaigns enacted. When one plot against the human race is foiled—the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp, for example—another one is quickly devised and a step-by-step program to realize it is set in motion. While Federalist Society bigwigs no doubt have some fears that Trump will blow his load prematurely and ruin all their hard work, as he genuinely seemed to have done for a moment back on January 6, 2021, one can rest assured that they will keep their disagreements civil. It’s not like they have any other horses to bet on.

Political maneuvers like the ones I just described mainly serve to concentrate power, but beyond the short-term schematics of Project 2025 there is little indication of long term planning. For all the right’s unity, policy continues to prove a stumbling block. ‘More of everything worse, less of everything good’ seems an adequate summary of the vision for now. Historian Nicholas Nagy-Talavera remarked of Count Gyula Károlyi, one time Prime Minister of Hungary under Admiral Horthy, that for even a relatively well-meaning reactionary paternalist such as Károlyi, the content of reforms mattered less than the fact that they came from above.15 Such is the case too with whatever seemingly ameliorative reforms are floated in the pages of Project 2025 or blurted out by Trump. Among the rank-and-file society is considered a zero sum game, and it is therefore assumed that punishment and deprivation must automatically result in redistribution. This is one reason for attacking immigrants, but it has clear limits.

The United States depends heavily on the labor of undocumented workers, as everyone knows. Breaking the back of agricultural capital to mandate higher wages and make the work attractive to citizens is not on the agenda, nor can “people that live in the inner city,” as Trump euphemistically called them,16 be forced back to the fields. There is no clear way out, thus in the absence of any coherent plan, a white terror (literally!) is devised. The only real goal of it seems to be social and legal de-integration of immigrants (if not the outright dis-integration of immigrant communities), which is a prerequisite for the construction of any satisfactorily inhumane and bloodsucking solution to the ‘immigration question,’ as it used to be called.

In Spring of this year, Trump and Grand Poobah Miller attempted to deploy a shoddy legal argument that members of Tren de Aragua, a previously obscure Venezuelan gang, were “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States”17 under orders from Nicolas Maduro and therefore eligible for detainment and expulsion under the Alien Enemies Act—and also that a number of random Venezuelan immigrants plucked off the street were in fact hardened enforcers and saboteurs for this outfit. They’ve since backed off from this argument—mainly because it wasn’t working in court—but have continued pursuing external aggression against the Bolivarian Republic by arbitrarily murdering Venezuelan boatmen with drone strikes. This blatant provocation is justified by smearing the boats as drug smuggling vessels whose freight was en route to the US. War is thus justified by a failed internal policy in order to retroactively justify this policy, which was itself intended to justify the war.

I saw a video recently of a masked skull-cracker—whether he was ICE or CBP I could not discern—incredulously asking a bystander, “How am I a Nazi?” In the back seat of his paddywagon was, of course, a restrained Latino man. All reporting on the farcical recruitment campaign being pursued by the Department of Homeland Security—a “shit show”18 according to an anonymous administration source—has driven home the same conclusion suggested by that video: ICE hopefuls are uniquely stupid, callous, and bellicose. The pseudonymous Yanis Varoufuckice recounted his (?) experiences talking with men who variously claimed to have seen video evidence of the Taliban at a fast-food restaurant or wanted to rid Times Square of “savages.”19 Most characteristic—a real patriot cannot stand to see his nation’s shrines to Mammon defiled by dusky brutes!

Perhaps the most interesting specimen from Mssr. Varoufuckice’s account, however, is the man who really just wanted to “[parlay] his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs.” That too is characteristic, and gels nicely with the reports of NPR and the New York Times. The former pointed out the moderate views on immigration held by some applicants and the apathetic order-follower attitude of others,20 while the latter noted the presence of “a large number of working-class African American and Hispanic men”21 and several naturalized aspirants at a Texas hiring fair. This indicates that while some wanted to bust heads, a fair number viewed being a deportation officer as a job like any other. (I knew a guy who briefly worked at a temporary immigration ‘intake’ facility for undocumented children during the first months of the Biden admin, a lifelong democratic voter whose parents are immigrants—to him it was just a job. Never underestimate the power of money!) But anyway, I can’t imagine that attitude lasts long in the line of duty. Even if the recruits did not come in as recipients of political spoils, they will leave that way. One cannot pursue a career hunting ‘tonks’—Border Patrol slang for immigrants that originated as onomatopoeia for the sound made when a human skull is struck with a metal flashlight—and expect to come out the other side an even-keeled moderate.

Expanding the repressive apparatus is essentially the only attempt that the right has made to mollify rather than exacerbate the looming crisis of the middle classes, which has its roots in the inability of capital to expand fast enough to absorb labor-power whether skilled or unskilled. In a perverse way it seems almost hopeful to imagine that these utter rubes are being cultivated as a state within the state. They will be less a coherent body like the SS, more a strategic node among others for transforming the structure of the state into a shape more favorable to the right.

VIII - In the Style of Demons

Clichés about the right’s ability to learn from the left are grossly overstated and almost obfuscate the role of money and class power in the right’s successes. Commitment to slower-paced strategies that make use of civil society were not learned from the left. Civil society is making its last stand in the US today—in many places its independent existence has already been annihilated by the State and/or capital—for both the right and bourgeois liberalism.22 In the event that the former is victorious, people will perhaps finally learn that civil society is not an unalloyed good, or indeed necessarily a good at all.

A key component of the decay of civil society is the decline of religion in America, a process that has been correlated with the ascendence of the religious right. That movement, which we can see as being born in response to school desegregation on one hand and Roe v. Wade on the other, took decades to build the influence it presently wields.23 Religious actors have political sway because they can mobilize their base, not because their beliefs are popular or even necessarily representative of their correligionists. Churches are one of the last real holdouts of classical, palm-greasing machine politics.

It has always been obvious that Christianity is a lever of social authority with regard to the family—if one drives around the South they will sooner or later encounter billboards proclaiming that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. The role of the religion in legitimizing and organizing violence against women and children, trivial to demonstrate, often goes unacknowledged outside of the political-intellectual ghettos of militant atheism and feminism. (One is hard-pressed to find militant atheism even among self-proclaimed Communists today!) It is unlikely that all the legal and political victories of the feminist movement (e.g. sexual harassment law) will be able to withstand an all-out campaign to destroy them, even if certain protections can be maintained at state and local levels. Mores will be harder to directly change, but they are also an area where the victories have been more uneven. Women cannot be forced out of work at this point, but their situation can be made worse and more precarious in innumerable ways.

If it is uncomfortable for many to confront the patriarchal role of the Christian churches, then the racial element in them is noted even more rarely. On one hand there is a racialized Protestant work ethic wielded against sections of the working class (themselves overwhelmingly Christian), and on the other Christianity functions as a more explicit codeword for white against middle class minorities and immigrants (who may or may not be Christian). In both cases it also encodes settlerism as a particular valence of whiteness. Allowances are made for conservative Black and Latino churches willing to admit the moral depravity of their neighbors and join in the struggle against the ways of the world, but evangelism to immigrants is out of the question.

Part of the reason that conversion therapy (another gift of civil society!) is so repulsive is that it violates freedom of thought, traditionally considered the basis of so many other rights. I doubt that many bigots grasp the violence wrought by the love of the sinner and hatred of sin—charity does not “cover the multitude of sins,” as Peter taught, but in fact creates that multitude, as Wilde observed. It is in this Christian universe of discourse that Randy Shumway, chair of Utah’s state Homeless Services Board and alum of a bank founded by his polygamist pedophile prophet, the “Lion of the Lord” Brigham Young, by the name of Zions Bancorporation, can say that his plans to build an “accountability center” for the homeless—also ein Kameradschaftslager?—will put a stop to the “culture of permissiveness” prevailing amongst them and redirect them “towards human flourishing.”24 That is compassionate conservatism! The suggestion that being put in a cage has anything to do with flourishing—that should be enough of a sign that we are reading the words of an assassin.

The defense of the patriarchal family and jealous guarding of control over education is at least one area where cruelty, far from being “the point,” is quite functional. Childhood is the ground floor of domination, a time in life where coercion and persuasion are mixed freely. While the positive side of education is difficult to engineer, deprivation is trivial. Once you’ve given up on the future, it is easy to sacrifice someone else’s child for an uncertain short-term advantage. (We’ve only been doing it for thousands, if not millions, of years!) Even if the overall funding pool remained the same—and it will not—so-called “school choice” laws will transfer power to reactionary elements in civil society, especially the churches. Under a full “school choice” system, school segregation would explode to levels not seen since before Brown v. Board of Education. Private schools are, moreover, legally permitted to beat children in almost every state of the Union, a privilege jealously guarded by religious fundamentalists of every confession: The government of New York was prompted to put the kibosh on beating in private schools in 2023 (!) because of the extent of its use in Hasidic yeshivas in particular.25

Beating of children may be on the decline, but they are exposed to other dangers, the most pressing of which is the vacuousness of their futures. Even the scions of the ruling class have little left to do but enjoy themselves before last call in the millennium. In the meantime, a school system which does not even have the well-meaning barbarity to funnel the proletarian urchins it’s responsible for into polytechnical schools and dump them on the streets by age sixteen oversees a collapse in literacy. The very idea of public education is founded on a liberal idea of progress inextricable from the historical arc of capitalist civilization, an arc which is now stumbling and seems poised to lunge into the abyss.

IX - Children of Rage

“People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in’s house and say I love you.” —President George W. Bush

Between the time I started writing this essay and when I sat to finish it, multiple O9A terror attacks occurred in different parts of the globe. On the morning of the day I am writing, November 7th, 2025, a bomb attack took place at a high school’s mosque in Jakarta, Indonesia that injured over fifty people.26 At the scene of the crime, a replica assault rifle was discovered. It was emblazoned with numerous anti-Muslim, Nazi, and school shooting slogans and symbols: the triple cross of the Romanian Iron Guard, the phrase natural selection, the number 14, references to Charles Martel and the Battle of Tours, the names of anti-Muslim terrorists, and on the barrel For Agartha—a reference to esoteric Nazism popularized by right-wing memes. The suspect is seventeen years old.

A little over a week before this, on the 28th of October, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior announced the arrest of a fourteen year old boy in connection to an international extortion network connected to thirty incidents of suicide and other acts of violence. The boy allegedly coordinated this campaign through the game Roblox. “We received information through international cooperation that someone was luring victims to harm themselves, writing their names in blood on their bodies, and inciting violence, psychological abuse, suicide, and arson, including burning their homes and belongings, even animals,” an official announced to the press in front of AI generated graphics of a Roblox character and a boy in an orange prison jumpsuit.27 One of the officials repeatedly gestured to the image, which clearly featured the logo of Google’s Gemini AI service in the bottom right-hand corner, and referenced “the boy you see before you,” implying the chimeric image depicted the actual suspect. No mention was made of O9A, 764, incels, or anything of that nature, but the parallels were immediately clear.

These people, the killers, are probably not misunderstood kids with noble souls deep down. Everything I read about every one of these individuals leads me to see them as unpleasant types, and stupid as well. Their backgrounds are often somewhat misfortunate—recall the gentleman with the cleft palate mentioned in the Overture—but ultimately well within the socially accepted parameters of misery. In other words, there is nothing special about them, nothing singular. They are statistical products as much as anyone else.

I cannot recall an instance in which one of these killers or would-be killers got onto the stand and made a convincing performance of madness, either.28 (The relevance of mental illness and its extent among killers is also disputed in the quantitative literature on the topic.) They all seem to understand quite well what they did or planned to do. If the O9A teenagers believe (whatever that means!) in a magical Nazi alien named Drill Sergeant Grey—and I really must emphasize that I am not making that up—this does not make them any more insane than someone who claims to have a ‘personal relationship with God.’ Can we confidently say that there is a difference in kind between a Columbine-worshipping true crime community member and a Swiftie? Things change once violence is committed, but the majority of school shooting fans treat massacres as young people treat any other fandom.

So goes the story: a quiet but nice boy becomes increasingly withdrawn and consumed with screens. Maladaptive online interactions with a nefarious anti-social group clouds out happiness. An intolerable split between online identity and meatspace existence emerges. What is his relation to society? A yearning for recognition, satisfaction, and pleasure that becomes a vengeful demand. The entire breadth of their desire is epitomized in one killer’s repeated Google searches for “school shooter porn.”29 Even in its explicitly political incarnations, this kind of youth terror is an assertion of the private life of power, to use a compelling phrase from Corey Robin.30 Acts of internet incubated individual terror are a depoliticized species of political action. Allowing myself to lapse into Habermasianism for a moment, I would call such violence a protest against the colonization of the human lifeworld by the strategic paradigm of the class state and capitalist economy, outrage at the impossibility of community, acceptance, and belonging being given in any way except by grace alone. Whereas that triad cannot be extracted by violence, their subjective correlates (recognition, satisfaction, and pleasure) can, and their negative counterparts can be briefly forgotten amidst the bloodshed.

All the clichés from 20th century social theory about anomie, alienation, malaise, social dislocation, etc. have found their moment of truth today, but one recent addition to that pile struck me as especially relevant to this phenomenon. Roberto Unger introduced the word belittlement to describe what Lacanian psychoanalysts previously referred to as castration, i.e. the inherent unsatisfiability of desire. Jonathan Crary has wagered that the internet—and, one might add, the entire repertoire of capitalist culture—has produced a localized proof of Unger (and Lacan’s) theorems by making belittlement into a transcendental condition of participation in a whole region of human life.31 Even if desire has always been unsatisfiable, we did not always have this transcendental fact rubbed into our faces 24/7. More than anything, these acts of violence are a rebellion against belittlement. That negative content eclipses the positive longings.

Whether or not the killers planned to commit suicide in advance, and many do, they almost invariably decide to do so in the moment because it saves them from the humiliating ritual of explaining their idiotic beliefs and performing their cringe-worthy personas in front of the world that they hated. One can detect a crushing fear of being belittled once again—a psychiatrist described the multi-media manifesto package sent to NBC by the Virginia Tech killer as “a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character.”32 (The more ideologically coherent Nazis do not commit suicide because for them it really is propaganda of the deed. Their milieu is just distinct enough to make a difference.) If they die—after livestreaming their spree to friends on Discord, of course—they will become martyrs, special ones venerated more like Kurt Cobain or Vincent van Gogh as men “suicided by society”33 than properly political martyrs.

But in a certain sense they are political martyrs. The Satanic Nazism of O9A found an elective affinity with school massacres for reasons beyond mutual attraction to the heinous. The worldview—if it can be called that—typically expressed in the manifestos of prima facie apolitical killers is, upon further examination, intensely reactionary.34 James Mason, in what seemed like idiotic insanity at the time, tried to forge a connection between Nazi terrorism and the world of spectacular crime by pitching Charles Manson as a kind of Aryan prophet in the 1980s, and by making connections with counter-culture scenester fascists he was able to have his obscure newsletter reprinted numerous times, such that it eventually fell into the hands of the users of Ironmarch, who sought to prove Mason’s interpretation right. With all this in mind, the formation of Satanic Nazi terrorist cults dedicated to sexually exploiting children (764) and grooming them into committing violent crimes (the Ukrainian-Russian ‘Maniacs Murder Cult’) makes more sense.35 (Also, these cult/terror networks seem to themselves be largely made up of teenagers and young adults.) Either ‘accelerationists’ adopted their particular style of sanctifying killers from teenage true crime fans or the two practices evolved in parallel.36 Their grooming tactics, which they claim to have learned from studying FBI manuals,37 also bear a striking resemblance to the organically emergent modes of commiseration and maladaptive sociality endemic to the true crime community and related online subcultures.

What is the bigger scandal—that Nazi Satanists are grooming children to self-harm and commit school shootings or that children were already doing such things with no Satanic influence? Is the addition of pentagrams and swastikas enough to make people care? A single instance of mass murder committed by a teenager should be sufficient cause for a society to turn itself inside out looking for answers and solutions.

Notes

  1. The old kind of extra-legal-but-still-state-affiliated killers still exist, and not just in the US; just look at Israel and especially India for a truly by the book example. ↩

  2. Ken Klippenstein, “What are ‘Nihilistic Violent Extremists’?” kenklippenstein.com (blog), 04/15/2025. https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/what-are-nihilist-violent-extremists ↩

  3. Matthew Kriner, “An Introduction to Militant Accelerationism,” Accelerationism Research Consortium, 05/9/2022, https://www.accresearch.org/shortanalysis/an-introduction-to-militant-accelerationism ↩

  4. To the extent that he is aware of the history, he distorts it. And so the neo-fascist bombers of Italy are made into ‘accelerationist’ collapse-mongers avant la lettre, when in reality their strategy, to the extent that it existed, was centered around trying to provoke a military coup d’État—hopefully supported by the US—in the style of the 1967 coup in Greece, not foment abstract social collapse. Similarly, James Mason articulated his promotion of terrorism as a last ditch defense of “western civilization,” not an attack on it. ↩

  5. ibid. ↩

  6. Nathan J. Robinson, “Bill Clinton’s Act of Terrorism,” Jacobin, 10/12/2016. https://jacobin.com/2016/10/bill-clinton-al-shifa-sudan-bombing-khartoum ↩

  7. Their attention to the connection between American and Western European ‘accelerationism’ and the Ukrainian Nazi scene has been limited, however. During my research for this essay, I found one scholarly resource on political extremism had deleted their entry on the Azov Movement entirely some time after 2022. Strange bedfellows, no? ↩

  8. Enzo Erra, “Stile,” Imperium, vol. 1, no. 4–5, August–September 1950, quoted in Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, “Evola’s Interpretation of Fascism and Moral Responsibility,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 50, Nos. 4-5 (2016), 478-494; 489. ↩

  9. Ben Quinn, “Glenn Beck likens Norwegian dead to Hitler youth,” The Guardian, 7/25/2011 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jul/26/glenn-beck-norwegian-dead-hitler ↩

  10. Robert Moore, “Patrick Crusius believed he was fulfilling Trump’s wishes in El Paso attack, his attorney says,” El Paso Matters, 03/30/2025 https://elpasomatters.org/2025/03/30/patrick-crusius-donald-trump-aug-3-2019-walmart-mass-shooting/ ↩

  11. Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo, “‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat,” Politico, 10/14/2025 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146?nid=0000018f-3124-de07-a98f-3be4d1400000\&nname=politico-toplines\&nrid=e7a7bde2-d71f-4a8c-adbc-55691c58ff5a ↩

  12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 4, Lawrence and Wishart (1975), 5-211; 93. ↩

  13. Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, tr. E. A. Shils et al, Oxford University Press (2017) ↩

  14. Michael M. Grynbaum, “Stephen Miller Cited ‘Plenary Authority,’ Then Paused. Conspiracy Theories Started Flying,” New York Times, 10/08/2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/business/media/stephen-miller-plenary-authority-cnn-conspiracies.html ↩

  15. Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others: A History of Fascism in Hungary and Romania, Center for Romanian Studies (2001), 125. ↩

  16. Steve Benen, “Trump suggests undocumented farm workers are ‘naturally’ designed for field work,” MSNBC, 8/05/2025 https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-undocumented-farm-workers-naturally-farms-rcna223147 ↩

  17. Executive Order No. 10903, FR 90 13033 (March 15, 2025), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-03-20/pdf/2025-04865.pdf ↩

  18. Priscilla Alvarez, “Inside ICE’s messy effort to hire 10,000 more deportation officers,” CNN, 10/23/2025 https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/politics/ice-recruiting-problems-deportation-agents ↩

  19. Yanis Varoufuckice, “Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE,” n+1, Issue 51 (Fall 2025) https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/politics/yanis-two-days-talking-to-people-looking-for-jobs-at-ice-2/ ↩

  20. Ximena Bustillo, “Fired feds, Trump lovers and veterans: Meet the people applying for ICE jobs,” National Public Radio, 9/23/2025 https://www.npr.org/2025/09/26/nx-s1-5534437/dhs-ice-job-fair ↩

  21. Jess Bidgood and Nicholas Nehamas, “Meet the New ICE Recruits,” New York Times, 9/08/2025 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/us/politics/ice-job-fair-texas.html ↩

  22. Antonio Negri argued that civil society had been integrated into the State and capital back in the 1970s and later reiterated this thesis with Michael Hardt in the 1990s. Perhaps it is dead for the left, but I think it still has some life left in it for the bourgeois world. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form, University of Minnesota Press (1994), 145, 204. ↩

  23. About the role of desegregation, see Randall Ballmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (2021). ↩

  24. Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle, “In Utah, Trump’s Vision for Homelessness Begins to Take Shape,” New York Times, 10/29/2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/us/politics/utah-trump-homeless-campus.html ; Kameradschaftslager were a short-lived type of labor camp for unemployed men in the Third Reich, see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Penguin (2006), 44. ↩

  25. Brian M. Rosenthal and Eliza Shapiro, “Corporal Punishment in Private Schools Is Outlawed in New York,” New York Times, 10/26/2023 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/nyregion/hasidic-yeshiva-corporal-punishment-law.html ↩

  26. Jerome Wirawan and Aleks Philips, “More than 50 people injured in mosque blast at Jakarta high school,” British Broadcasting Corporation, 11/07/2025 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clykgdg3l42o ↩

  27. Iraq 24 HD TV, “Aietiqal murahiq bieumar 14 eam yaqud 16 shabakatan duliatan lilaibtizaz eabr laeba ‘alrubliks,’” post 10/28/2025 by Iraq 24 HD TV, YouTube 1:45 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGX1ziRf4NM ↩

  28. The teenage murderer Devon Arthurs was diagnosed with “schizophrenia, autism, and other mental illnesses,” but he also initially told police that he killed his roommates—fellow nazis—because they were planning terror attacks. He pleaded guilty for the killings in 2023 after finally being declared mentally fit to stand trial and took a publicly repentant stance. CBS News / Associated Press, “Former neo-Nazi pleads guilty to murdering Florida roommates in 2017,” CBS News, 05/08/2023 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-neo-nazi-guilty-in-2017-slayings-of-florida-roommates/ ↩

  29. See Andrew Atterbury, “Parkland shooter’s internet history riddled with searches about other mass shootings,” Politico, 11/14/2018 https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2018/11/14/parkland-shooters-internet-history-riddled-with-searches-about-other-mass-shootings-696795 and WPBF 25 News, “Prosecutors discuss search history of Nikolas Cruz” posted 7/27/2022 by WPBF 25 News, YouTube, 25:06 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2xgPhvB14Q ↩

  30. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, Oxford University Press (2018) ↩

  31. Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Verso (2022) ↩

  32. This remark was brought to my attention by its reproduction in Bifo’s Heroes. ABC News, “The Mind of a Killer -- Caught on Tape,” ABC News, 2/09/2009 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/VATech/story?id=3057152\&page=1 ↩

  33. I allude to Antonin Artaud’s essay “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society.” Artaud’s homage to van Gogh bears a certain resemblance to some of the admiration meted out to killers. See Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag and tr. Helen Weaver, University of California Press (1976), 483-511 ↩

  34. Bifo drew comparisons between the ‘survival of the fittest’ tropes that abound in such manifestos and neoliberalism ↩

  35. For more information about the ‘Maniacs Murder Cult,’ see Marc-André Argentino et al, “Nihilism and Terror: How M.K.Y. Is Redefining Terrorism, Recruitment, and Mass Violence,” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 17 No. 8 (September 2024), 22-29 https://ctc.westpoint.edu/nihilism-and-terror-how-m-k-y-is-redefining-terrorism-recruitment-and-mass-violence/ ↩

  36. There is also an Eastern European connection here, but I can’t put together the historical picture. ↩

  37. Events in Ukraine, “MKU II: Into Agartha,” Events in Ukraine (blog), 10/07/2025, https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/mku-ii-into-agartha. Although I have found myself disagreeing with some of the perspectives offered by the author of Events in Ukraine, he must be commended for writing about this topic and bringing to light much little-known information about the Ukrainian connection to the O9A network. ↩