Symbols of the System: Why Accelerationists Target Law Enforcement
by Samantha Olson
Introduction
On May 29, 2020, U.S. Air Force sergeant Steven Carrillo murdered Federal Protective Service officer David Patrick Underwood amid the unrest of the George Floyd protests in Oakland, California. A week later, Carrillo killed Sheriff Sergeant Damon Gutzwiller when the latter arrived to investigate a suspicious vehicle at Carrillo’s residence. Carrillo was affiliated with the Boogaloo movement,” a decentralized extremist network rooted in libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideologies that is oriented around anti-authority, anti-government, and anti-police sentiment. Adherents anticipate a second civil war––or “boogaloo”––as the tyrannical and repressive United States government shows its hand.
Two years later, The Hard Reset, one of the Terrorgram Collective’s many publications, urged readers to “kill the cop in your head.” The passage concludes: “I will kill the cop in my head. When the cop is dead. I will be free.” For neo-fascist accelerationists like those on Terrorgram, the “cop” in this metaphor symbolizes internalized restraint, psychological barriers to violence, and the impulse to conform. But that metaphor quickly gives way to more literal calls for action. Another Terrorgram author writes: “cops don’t protect us from them, cops protect them from us”––a claim that casts police as the last bulwark standing between these accelerationists and their vision of a white ethnostate through “total non-white death.”
As the Boogaloo and neo-fascist frameworks suggest, accelerationism––a set of tactics and strategies aimed at hastening societal collapse––is far from a monolith. However, what unites its disparate adherents is shared hostility toward “the System” and its existing political and societal structures. Often, these actors identify a common and predictable cast of enemies: Jewish people, democratic governments, and law enforcement, which are then woven together by conspiratorial narratives like the Great Replacement or the deep state. Within this grievance framework, law enforcement becomes both a symbol and an instrument of the state’s coercive power, making officers prime targets for those seeking to accelerate collapse.
This explainer traces the logic behind accelerationists’ targeting of law enforcement within the Boogaloo and Terrorgram milieus: why they fixate on police, how those attacks have evolved, and what this might mean for law enforcement and public safety going forward.
Symbols of the System
To understand why law enforcement has been consistently targeted by accelerationists, it is critical to understand what “the System” represents in their worldview. Essentially, the System is an all-encompassing term for the social, political, and institutional order that accelerationists believe enshrines civilizational decay. In the neo-fascist strain of accelerationism, symptoms of this decay are purportedly evident in liberal democracy, multiculturalism, racial integration, feminism, and LGBTQ rights. In their view, each of these ills has been orchestrated by the System for the purpose of replacing whites with Jews and other minorities, effectively enacting white genocide.
Within the Boogaloo framework, symptoms of System-induced decay more often include government overreach, perceived instances of police brutality (such as the fatal police shooting of Duncan Lemp in Potomac, Maryland, a Boogaloo Facebook leader), and increasing federal or state regulations, usually on firearms. For both Boogaloo members and neo-fascists, the only viable solution is to hasten the System’s inevitable collapse.
Despite their differing visions of the post-collapse future, both entities prescribe violence. Neo-fascist accelerationist ideologues such as James Mason, call for total war against the System to bring about a purified order with the white race restored to its former glory at the helm of an ethnostate. To do so, neo-fascist accelerationists advocate attacks against critical infrastructure, racial minorities, and other symbolic targets with the intention of inspiring apocalyptic race war. The Boogaloo movement is less singularly focused on white supremacy and instead seeks to exploit existing social unrest (i.e., COVID-19 lockdown protests, BLM protests) to catalyze widespread revolutionary upheaval. Boogaloo affiliates have frequently infiltrated otherwise peaceful protests to incite anti-police rioting that they hope will tip the scales in favor of the demise of the current United States government. The unifying goal of both strains is the destruction of the present order.
Law enforcement occupies a unique place in this schema. Police are not merely representatives of the corrupt state but are also its enforcers. They patrol neighborhoods, protect critical infrastructure, and respond to unrest––all of which frustrates the accelerationist aim at fomenting societal unrest significant enough to cause total collapse. As one Terrorgram author bluntly puts it: “cops maintain the order and preserve the lawless degeneracy.” The core of the neo-fascist versus police dynamic is the perception of police as bastions of a racially -integrated and decaying society.
Boogaloo also perceives police as inherently adversarial to their aims; one member in Texarkana, Texas, for example, livestreamed himself “hunting the hunters” as he searched for police officers to kill. The Boogaloo versus police dynamic is characterized by the perception of police as enforcers and representatives of an authoritarian regime that facilitates the deep state. In both the neo-fascist and Boogaloo cases, the inversion of law enforcement’s role is central to understanding how accelerationists justify violence against officers: they are barriers to establishing a society that is safe and fruitful, not instruments to achieve it. This is a critical departure from the views espoused by militias like the Oath Keepers who appeal to current and former law enforcement to entice their membership, or at least tolerance of militia activity.
For accelerationists, violence against law enforcement is not simply retaliation for perceived historical flashpoints such as Ruby Ridge and Waco, but preemptive, righteous action.
Accessibility of Police Targets
A key reason for accelerationists’ focus on police targets is their visibility and accessibility. While politicians, bureaucrats, and other social elites may be symbolically more powerful than police, they are harder to reach. Law enforcement officers are ever-present, armed extensions of the state that regularly interact with the public. Across Terrorgram publications, accelerationists suggest that readers attack “cops in their cars while they wait in their speed traps” and call in false reports to attract officers to ambushes that, as one author puts it, “turn it into a pig roast.” Essentially, police are the first line of state power––and an exceptionally responsive one––that extremists can reach and kill. Boogaloo adherents similarly exploit the availability of police targets. Boogaloo took advantage of BLM protests and their associated police presence during the spring and summer of 2020 to target police, most often by encouraging violence at otherwise peaceful protests, under the guise of opposing police brutality. For example, in May 2020 in Las Vegas, three Boogaloo members were arrested for plotting to incite BLM protestors against police.
Some anti-police violence is less planned and purely opportunistic, born of proximity. Sovereign Citizens anti-government extremists who reject the authority of the United States government to levy taxes or require various licenses, are venerated by accelerationists for killing the law enforcement personnel who serve them warrants or tax evasion papers. Individuals like Gordon Kahl (a Posse Comitatus leader who killed two U.S. Marshals in North Dakota and a county sheriff in Arkansas in 1983) and Jerry and Joe Kane (sovereign citizens who killed two police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas in 2012) are lionized by both strains for striking the state’s enforcers. Even Robert Bowers––the perpetrator of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in 2018––receives specific praise in the Terrorgram documentary, White Terror, for injuring a police officer at the scene.
In each of these cases, police serve as proxies––stand-ins for a wider System seen as irredeemably hostile. Targeting them delivers maximum symbolic impact with relatively minimal operational complexity. Law enforcement officers are the most visible and accessible representatives of state authority, making them ideal targets for actors seeking to strike at the apparatus of power without requiring access to more challenging and protected targets like federal buildings or political figures. For accelerationists, attacking police is not only tactically feasible, but also theatrical. These actions are designed to provoke public outrage and insecurity, escalate state responses, and further delegitimize the System in the eyes of its sympathizers. By this logic, violence against law enforcement becomes both a practical method of disruption and a profound symbol of ideological warfare.
Fetishization
But there is also a unique psychological and sadistic function of police targeting that is worth emphasizing in the accelerationist milieu, usually associated with neo-fascist accelerationism rather than the Boogaloo framework. Indeed, the murder of police officers and law enforcement has been celebrated widely on Terrorgram. In White Terror, a documentary compendium of so-called accelerationist “saints,” twenty-one of one hundred and five saints are celebrated for having killed at least one police officer. Of those twenty-one, fifteen perpetrators intentionally sought out law enforcement targets.
Furthermore, across Terrorgram publications, authors indulge in grotesque fantasies of kidnapping, drugging, and torturing police officers––an offense made all the more attractive because cops “[are] not used to that.” In one especially disturbing example, an author in the Terrorgram Publication “Militant Accelerationism,” describes a fictional shoot-out between a cell of accelerationist terrorists and law enforcement. After the accelerationists prevail, a protagonist named Victor claims a surviving female federal agent as his “war bride.” Even more frequently, throughout publications and user-to-user communications, accelerationists fantasize about murdering police, whether by convenience or conspiracy. This kind of fiction blurs the line between fantasy and incitement, revealing how violence against law enforcement is increasingly fetishized within these circles.
Conclusion
Ultimately, if police represent the maintenance of the System’s status quo or are a significant barrier to its collapse, their subjugation or murder becomes necessary for accelerationists who are trying subverting that status quo. Whether through convenience, conspiracy, or ideological conviction, killing police becomes a crucial step in their imagined path to collapse.
As accelerationist ecosystems continue to evolve, the threat to law enforcement is unlikely to diminish and may, in fact, become more unpredictable. Both the Boogaloo and neo-fascist milieus have shown a consistent ability to adapt their narratives to new crises, from pandemic lockdowns to political unrest, using each as an opportunity to reframe police as enforcers of tyranny and legitimate targets of violence. Their communications have also grown more decentralized, blending encrypted messaging, memes, and livestreams to spread tactics and glorify cop-killers. As accelerationist Saints Culture continues to promise subcultural sanctification and celebrity to violent perpetrators, the veneration of attackers who kill police will continue to inspire similar attacks on law enforcement and potentially other authority figures. Going forward, police will also continue to be convenient targets for an extremist movement that has identified the state as a first order enemy and that lavishes praise on those who take action.
Preventing accelerationist violence against police is uniquely difficult because one of the very things that makes officers vulnerable––their visibility and public accessibility––is also essential to their role. We cannot make police less accessible. What we can do is ensure that they are better prepared. That means equipping officers not only with protective tools and situational training, but also with knowledge: a deeper understanding of why they might be targeted, how extremist narratives about police evolve, and what ideological currents continue to fuel these threats. As accelerationists continue to view violence as just as symbolic as it is strategic, that kind of awareness is not just protective, it is essential.
List of Accelerationist Attacks on Law Enforcement
1 July 2017 – Warrington, UK
Twenty-two year old Jack Renshaw is arrested after plotting to take hostages and lure a female detective, previously investigating him for his involvement in National Action, to the scene and kill her.
17 October 2019 – Jefferson, Texas
Beau Merryman, neo-Nazi accelerationist–affiliated teenager, is arrested after distributing designs of explosives he intended to use to attack federal buildings.
24 March 2020 – Belton, Missouri
Timothy Wilson dies from a self-inflicted gunshot wound following a shootout with FBI agents investigating his connection with a known active-duty military Feuerkrieg Division member. Wilson had planned to car bomb a medical center, motivated by anger over COVID-19 and his ties to the Boogaloo Movement, National Socialist Movement, and Vorherrschaft Division.
28 May 2020 – Minneapolis, Minnesota
Self-described member of the Boogaloo Bois, Ivan Hunter, fires thirteen rounds into the entryway of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct building.
29 May 2020 – Oakland, California
Boogaloo member and former U.S. Air Force sergeant Steven Carrillo perpetrates a drive-by shooting, killing a Federal Protective Service officer. A week later, Carrillo kills a sheriff investigating a suspicious vehicle.
30 May 2020 – Las Vegas, Nevada
Three Boogaloo members are arrested after plotting to incite BLM protestors against police.
October 2021 – Newcastle, UK
Gateshead College student, Luke Skelton, is arrested after plotting to blow up a police station with the intent to catalyze apocalyptic race war.
4 November 2021 – Norfolk, Virginia
Former member of the National Guard, Francis Harker, is arrested following the discovery of firearms and illegal drugs. In June 2020, Harker had discussed attacking law enforcement during a traffic stop. His social media revealed connections to The Base as well as endorsements of violence against law enforcement.
14 December 2022 – Savage, Minnesota
River Smith, affiliated with neo-Nazi accelerationist group The Base, is arrested after attempting to purchase grenades and convert weapons to be fully automatic. Smith told an undercover agent he was preparing for a violent standoff with police. Smith discussed learning about his “enemy” by watching police bodycam footage online.
6 September 2024 – Snohomish, Washington
Kyle Benton, an affiliate of the Satanic neo-Nazi accelerationist group “the Order of Nine Angles,” is arrested on domestic violence charges. Benton posted online about his intention to kill homeless people and attack law enforcement
9 October 2024 – Louisville, Kentucky
Law enforcement arrest 18-year-old Curtis Hodges after he allegedly threatens to attack police with an explosive device. Hodges was affiliated with 764 and the Order of Nine Angles.
17 December 2024 – Smithfield, Virginia
Virginia resident Brad Spafford is arrested following the discovery of the largest homemade explosives cache in United States history. Spafford was affiliated with accelerationist networks including 764 and Maniacs Murder Cult and expressed support for assassinating politicians. During the raid, a backpack labeled “#nolivesmatter” was discovered at the home.
