George Floyd, The Boogaloo Boys and the Spectre of Neoreaction

The protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a 46 year old unarmed black man, by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin have spread throughout and beyond the United States, as demonstrators have taken to the streets to demand justice. The event has fuelled international uproar, with protests occurring at the United States Embassies in Greece and Germany, in addition to demonstrations across the UK.

In America, however, various far-right groups have attempted to derail these protests, hijacking them for nefarious ends and aiming to divert a rebellion against racist police brutality and the institutional injustices that still characterise the American political and legal system into outright racial warfare. One such group calls themselves the ‘Boogaloo Boys’, a reference to the 1984 film ‘Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo’: a film so bad that it has since garnered a cult following. Their Hawaiian shirts, another reference to the film, are a distinctive marker of their identity. Recruited from the depths of 4chan and subreddit forums such as /k/(whose focus is on firearms), these groups are the dark underbelly of a festering online subculture that seeks to accelerate the decline of the United States as it currently exists so that a genuinely autocratic and overtly white supremacist society can be reborn from its ashes. This idea, known as ‘accelerationism’ is by no means novel; Neo-Nazi James Mason, in his pamphlet ‘Siege’ stated that “At this juncture social malaise cannot be halted, only accelerated onward to the abyss, capitulating the whole vile episode of this end cycle.”

Numerous acts of sporadic, seemingly uncoordinated violence have followed this pattern, as the New-Zealand mosque shooter wrote in his manifesto: “Stability and comfort are the enemies of revolutionary change…therefore we must destabilise and discomfort society wherever possible.” John Earnest, who shot up a Synagogue in 2019, stated that his aim was for the U.S. Government to begin confiscating guns, so that white Americans would instinctively defend their 2nd Amendment rights, leading to a schism between the federal government and the decentralised armed militias among whom acclerationism continues to ferment. In much the same way as Earnest hoped that gun control measures would spark pro-gun uprisings, the Boogaloo Boys are eager to exacerbate racial tensions in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to provoke a fearful and defensive reaction from White America. Given that President Trump called in the National Guard to maintain ‘law and order’ in the aftermath of the protests, and was photographed holding a Bible, it is arguable that the 2020 election will be portrayed by Trump and his acolytes as a cataclysmic battle for the soul of the nation; between Order and Anarchy, or between Good and Evil. Tucker Carlson claimed that the protests represent “oppression” and “tyranny” being carried out by Black Americans.

The Boogaloo Boys have frequently compared George Floyd to Duncan Lemp, a 21 year old who was killed by a SWAT team in Maryland for illegally possessing firearms despite having a juvenile criminal record, thereby using this pivotal moment in American history to legitimise insurrectionary violence. Bradley Bunn, aged 53, a member of the Boogaloo’s Georgia faction, was arrested by the FBI earlier this year for making pipe bombs. As President Trump’s stranglehold on power becomes increasingly untenable against the backdrop of the deadly Covid- 19 pandemic that has claimed thousands of black lives, coupled with the continued inability to hold to account police officers who routinely murder civilians, the opportunity for hijacking social discontent to push accelerationist ideology and advocate a second civil war seems optimal.

The roots of accelerationism lie in obscure academic discourse, and are intrinsically linked with another fascistic idea: Neoreaction, which is sometimes abbreviated to ‘NrX’. Nick Land, a former professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, is a leading proponent of this ideology, which holds that democracy itself is flawed as it runs counter to the unrestricted ability of elites to wield political and economic power, instead advocating for acceleration towards a ‘technocapital singularity’, where automation has rendered human labour practically obsolete and the concentration of Capital into monopolistic firms has stymied unnecessary competition, leaving only the ‘strongest’ firms standing. In this system, AI, new technologies and cryptocurrencies facilitate whole economic sectors and monetary systems with no need for human involvement. For Land, “modernity has Capitalism as its motor”. Another prominent figure in ‘NrX’ circles is computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, who writes a blog under the pseudonym ‘Mencius Moldbug’. Yarvin is inspired by the cameralism of Prussian enlightened absolutist ruler Frederick the Great along with the repressive State-Capitalism that currently exists in China, proposing a system in which joint-stock companies elect rulers who merge the positions of CEO and Dictator, governing only with their interests in mind.

This is particularly disturbing given the context of the protests, as the Covid-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate impact upon Black Americans, who have died of Covid- 19 at nearly 3 times the rate for White Americans, in addition to an estimated 19% unemployment rate according to the U.S. Department of Labour. Ideas such as Neoreaction that view large swathes of the population as disposable will inevitably support the elimination of the employment prospects and livelihoods of Black Americans, attempting to neutralise the problems of unemployment and discrimination not by alleviating them, but by ceasing to consider them a priority. Land himself describes his ideology as “hyper-racism” and has compared the process of Capital accumulation with the Darwinian theory of the selection of genes which best foster reproduction. It is not difficult to see why a eugenicist, racist and hyper-capitalist ideology might be popular with far-right agitators eager to stave off the threats of racial justice, egalitarianism and socialism that the George Floyd protests have sparked.

In fact, the Boogaloo Boys can be considered the latest iteration in a Libertarian to Fascist Pipeline in which erstwhile advocates of limited government and lower taxes devolve into fascists on the basis of threats to private property and White racial hegemony. Yarvin was notably inspired by ‘anarcho-capitalist’ and alt-right figure Hans Hermann Hoppe’s book ‘Democracy: The God that Failed’, which also inspired Richard Spencer. It is not unknown for defenders of the ‘free market’ to endorse hugely disproportionate state violence and institutionalised racism in the interests of abrogating the “tyranny of the majority”. Murray Rothbard, for example, claimed that “racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.” Even Frederich Hayek, a relatively mainstream economist beloved by many a right wing pseudo-intellectual, gave support to fascists such as Augusto Pinochet and Antonio Salazer on the basis that democracy, unlike the market, was dispensable in the creation of a free society.

The current position of the United States as a declining world power, beset by record high levels of unemployment, spiralling public sector debt, much of which is owed to China, and the ubiquitous scourge of racism that has been present at its heart since its foundation, means that blind American exceptionalism is no longer enough to assuage the resentment of an increasingly belligerent population. It may be that as the United States cedes political, economic and technological influence to China, the most radical, reactionary elements of American society decide that the optimal strategy is to emulate China’s model of ruthlessly efficient monopoly Capitalism combined with ethnonationalist repression of minorities and suppression of free speech and thought by unaccountable tech companies. The combined forces of acceleration and neoreaction are seen as a way of purging the undesirable or weak elements from American society so that the autonomous forces of Capital can be unleashed without any regard for human welfare or societal cohesion.

The death of George Floyd has opened up fissures that the sclerotic United States has long harboured. The injustice of American police brutality is by no means new, but it has taken this cold-blooded, protracted murder to prompt worldwide protests against it. But the attempts by the Boogaloo Boys to ferment racial tensions and accelerate the divisions in American society represent something altogether more sinister; an attempt to mobilise a white backlash, and to fan the flames of racial separatism amidst the smouldering ruins of a decaying empire.