Introducing the Accelerationism Events Dataset
Michael Loadenthal,
School of Public and International Affairs, The University of Cincinnati
——
This essay serves to introduce a new resource for the study of far-right militant accelerationism–a data set titled the Accelerationism Events Dataset (AED). Over the next several months, the research team behind AED’s creation will author a series of thematic analyses exploring the defendants alleged to be responsible for accelerationism-linked felonies.
The AED was built by a team of six researchers with the Prosecution Project (tPP), a long-term, all-volunteer, open-source intelligence research platform tracking and analyzing political violence occurring in the United States. The team includes tPP’s Executive Director and founder, Dr. Michael Loadenthal (The University of Cincinnati), as well as five Coders and Senior Coders with the project: Mary Bennett Doty (Bridging Divides Initiative, Princeton University), Samantha Fagone (University of Kentucky), Grace Stewart (Miami University), Olivia Thomas (Miami University), and Bella Tuffias-Mora (Oberlin College). Each thematic analysis will be chiefly authored by one of these team members and published sequentially throughout the Winter and Spring of 2024.
Methodology and Design
To construct the AED, the six-person research team met every two weeks, via Zoom, to review cases and chart a continued path forward. Researchers began collecting event data in July 2023 and completed final data coding in November. During these five months, approximately 300 cases were identified that featured accelerationist actors. After systematic review and exclusion of a small number of cases, the process yielded 290 initial cases.
Researchers proceeded through a six-phase research design:
1. Reviewing background literature,
2. Tagging existing cases,
3. Full-text searching,
4. Court record searching,
5. Data coding, and finally,
6. Data verification.
During phase one, researchers familiarized themselves with accelerationism as a political-extremist framework, reviewing predetermined readings from the academic and practitioner spheres of study. After this phase, researchers began locating and tagging accelerationism-linked individuals and crimes already existing in tPP’s universe of more than 9,400 criminal cases.
After identifying the initial 290 cases, the research team conducted a series of full-text and targeted searches to identify known accelerationist individuals, those associated with known accelerationist groups, and those cases whose narratives included key terms linked to accelerationism. Researchers worked from a shared list of 36 “accelerationist search terms” likely to appear in these cases. The team used this list to conduct searches for additional cases throughout tPP’s data. Search terms included Iron March, Fascist Forge, Terrorgram, James Mason, Siege, Day of the Rope, Great Replacement, Saint, No Political Solution, The Turner Diaries, and others.
Following these searches, the team conducted additional searches of tPP’s criminal case data focusing on cases that:
Mentioned specific technologies (e.g., Telegram, Gab),
Featured certain visual aesthetics and branding (e.g., Dark Foreigner, Siege Culture, Vaporwave, Fashwave), and/or
Evoked the names of so-called ‘Saints’ (i.e., past accelerationist attackers).
Additional searches were conducted throughout more than 30,000 court records held by tPP to identify other cases. Finally, researchers reexamined the wider accelerationist literature to identify and integrate known actors and groups whose cases may not have been detected by tPP’s initial monitoring.
Throughout all keyword-driven search approaches, if a case was detected, researchers reviewed primary and secondary source materials associated with that case including evidentiary affidavits, court records, news media, and other materials associated with the case. Researchers scrutinized the defendants’ means, motives, strategies, rhetoric, ideology, and targeting logic to distinguish accelerationist crimes from other forms of political violence and to verify that each case holistically fit the study’s criterion. Through this search phase, researchers continued to tag and complete existing cases while locating new ones. After the tagging, searching, and secondary searching phases were completed, the final phase involved the team completing the coding for all cases that met the inclusion criteria using tPP’s established methodology, Code Book, and team structure. The coding period lasted several weeks while researchers simultaneously tracked down missing data.
Seeking Comprehensive Accuracy
After a wide universe of cases was identified, the team engaged in a period of verification, data cleaning, and validation. To provide an additional robustness check to ensure individual cases had not been missed, the team conducted group-driven searches (e.g., Atomwaffen Division, the Base) to identify known individuals associated with 28 known accelerationist groups. In evaluating defendants with known group affiliations, researchers were asked to over include initially and then to carefully evaluate the individual conditions of a case. For example, all cases associated with active clubs, boogalooers, and attacks on infrastructure were initially included for evaluation, although many were later excluded as the defendants’ specific actions, or speech did not align with an accelerationist praxis. These individual determinations and methodological nuances were recorded in a collectively authored Code Book and Project Manual and refined throughout the project to ensure optimal intercoder reliability.
Once individual defendants were linked to accelerationism via a group affiliation, their name was cross-checked against those already identified by researchers. When new defendant names were located that met the inclusion criteria of both tPP and the current study, they were added for further coding. Researchers also spoke with several subject matter experts–specializing in the study of militias, the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis, respectively–to consider and validate several edge cases, and to determine whether these groups and individuals met the present study’s inclusion criteria.
Inclusion Criteria and Limitations
This process of identification and verification led to the codification of a seven-criteria inclusion test included below:
Membership or association with an accelerationist group.
Reference to accelerationist figureheads (e.g., “Saints”, Mason).
Reference to accelerationist ideas or rhetoric (e.g., “the grid”, collapse, crashing down).
Reference to accelerationist media and technology (e.g., Siege, Telegram, Bowl Patrol).
Targeting infrastructure to exacerbate tension, structural failures, vulnerabilities, etc.
Utilizing a strategy or theory of change based on destabilization, anti-democratic disruption, or drawing the state into direct confrontation.
Speaking in terms of anti-democratic action and avoiding “within the system” rhetoric (e.g., treason, civil war, constitutional/unconstitutional).
If an individual met any of these seven criteria, their case received secondary evaluation. Some criteria–such as criteria five–required extra scrutiny, as several adjacent extremist movements also target infrastructure but are outside the scope of the AED. Other criteria–such as criteria one, two, three, or four–were more deterministic, with very few non-accelerationist actors utilizing such ideological markers.
The aforementioned methodology and design helped to expose several key limitations, most notably:
In seeking to better understand a defendant’s socio-political framework via legal records and popular press accounts, these texts were often too vague to distinguish accelerationist versus non-accelerationist cases. In cases where researchers were unable to locate sufficient evidence to justify inclusion, the case was excluded.
When examining the AED from a group-driven perspective, there are numerous individuals aligned with organizations operating within an accelerationist framework (e.g., Proud Boys, Oath Keepers). These cases required individual consideration, often in conjunction with subject matter experts, and many preliminary cases were later excluded.
Because this data set is based only on those cases that ended in felony criminal charges, some well-known incidents are therefore not included. This includes a litany of cases in which accelerationists carried out acts of violence and were killed on the scene. In these cases, since the accelerationist was never charged criminally, their case does not appear in the data. Therefore, the data set serves as an approximation of criminal trends but is by design not a comprehensive record of national, criminal action.
Based on the team’s research design and methodology, and with the abovementioned limitations in mind, a final data set of 265 cases was identified. The data set includes 20 cases occurring during the Summer 2020 wave of racial justice protests, and 79 cases occurring during the 2021 attack on the US Capitol. All cases in the data set were:
Prosecuted from 1990 to 2024,
In the United States,
Involving individuals who promoted a far-right accelerationist ideology, and
Resulted in criminal charges at the felony level.
While the majority (91%) of the cases identified occurred 2016-2023, 24 cases (9%) did occur prior to 2015 wherein scholars acknowledged accelerationism as an offline phenomenon. These neo-fascist, proto-accelerationist groups adopted many of the tactics, techniques, and rhetorics seen in contemporary accelerationism, though they emerged prior to the framework’s identification and naming.
Researchers will continue to identify additional cases and add them to the data using an inter-team tagging system.
The Road Ahead
Over the next several months, our team will complete and publish a series of six additional analytical pieces to explore these data. The first piece will focus on the tactics, techniques, and procedures seen throughout the cases that comprise the AED, followed by pieces analyzing geographic and temporal patterns, demographic trends of criminal defendants, defendants’ group affiliation and ideological orientations, symbology employed by defendants, and the legal outcomes and processes of criminal cases.
Dr. Michael Loadenthal is an Assistant Professor of Research, in the School of Public and International Affairs, at the University of Cincinnati. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Prosecution Project, which he founded in 2017. Dr. Loadenthal’s research focuses on political violence, and social movements, and their intersections with extremism, technology, security, and the law.
