A Florida man accused of posting online threats to carry out mass violence has been arrested and charged with making an interstate threat and a weapon violation, federal court records show.

Alexander Lightner, 26, of Venice, Florida, allegedly posted comments online that were “intended to convey the message that he was planning to conduct a racially or ethnically motivated mass casualty event,” according to an affidavit.

He was interviewed by FBI agents from the bureau’s Tampa Field Office a week later on January 5, and law enforcement executed a search warrant at Lightner’s home before he was arrested.

While searching Lightner’s home, FBI agents found an unlawful firearm suppressor in a laundry hamper of a bedroom he shared with his brother and “propaganda regarding white supremacist and accelerationist ideology in Lightner’s bedroom,” according to court records.

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    propaganda regarding white supremacist and accelerationist ideology

    For those like me who had to look up “accelerationist ideology” because the mountain of hate-filled right-wing “make it up as you go along” bullshit is too deep for me to keep up with anymore, here it is. From Wikipedia:

    Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as “acceleration”.

    That’s bad enough (speed up entropy until everything goes boom faster than expected) but apparently it’s also really popular with the fascists as well.

    I guess no one told these evolutionary wonders that historically, when you blow shit up, you do NOT get shiny new utopias, clean fields and places to start anew. You get huge mountains of waste no one is going to cart off for you, people even more exploited and needy than they ever were before, and the kind of “radical social transformation” no one ever wants for themselves.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Sounds like a philosophy created to suit the crowd who is cheering on the next civil war.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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        1 year ago

        Combined with a lot of defeatist cope. “I don’t need to stay politically active, I’m just going to let it all burn down and build back from the ashes! I’m smart, not broken and lazy!”

        • stoly@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Definitely a lot of the rugged individualism as if they could recreate an electrical generator after the fall.

    • prole@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      People who subscribe to accelerationist ideology are usually ok with blowing up the entire thing if it means we no longer live in a multicultural society or whatever. They’d like (their bullshit concept of) a “utopia,” but would settle for complete destruction.