The Turner Diaries

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

by Jeffrey Toobin  · 1 May 2023  · 357pp  · 130,117 words

, starting with American Hunter, the NRA magazine. McVeigh even studied the small advertisements in the back pages. He responded to one for a novel called The Turner Diaries. The book arrived by mail, and he read it for the first of many times. It changed his life, as it did numerous others. The

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cover of The Turner Diaries lists the author as Andrew Macdonald, which was a pseudonym for William Luther Pierce, who led a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization called the National

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Jewish cabal known as the System. Under a law called the “Cohen Act,” all privately owned firearms are subject to confiscation by the government. (In The Turner Diaries, gun control is the essence of tyranny.) The System is racially biased in favor of Black people. Under its rules, Black people are allowed to

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it destroys us—if we don’t cut this cancer out of our living flesh—our whole race will die.” McVeigh embraced the ideology underlying The Turner Diaries including the paranoia about immigration and race-mixing, which has been a preoccupation of white supremacists throughout American history. In later years, as demographic change

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the foreign born. That became McVeigh’s mission, too—and that of his political heirs. Crucially, for McVeigh, the bombing of the FBI building in The Turner Diaries sparks a broad rebellion against the dreaded System. Turner instructs a confederate on the “unique historical role of the Jews as the ferment of decomposition

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of the Rope” became a kind of extremist code for the moment when white people take their revenge against their enemies. Toward the end of The Turner Diaries, the United States is convulsed by a nuclear Civil War. Sixty million Americans are dead. The epilogue points to a happy ending. By 1999, the

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Organization had won a global war, and “the dream of a White world became a certainty.” The violence in The Turner Diaries is so lurid, almost cartoonish, that it’s tempting to dismiss the book as political pornography. In fact, the Diaries reflects an ideology with deep

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McVeigh when he lit the fuse in his truck at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. It is difficult to overstate the influence of The Turner Diaries on McVeigh. In a letter to his childhood friend Steve Hodge, which was written four years before the Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh enclosed a copy

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piece.” (Notwithstanding some imperfect spelling, McVeigh turned out to be a skilled and forceful writer.) McVeigh’s gun obsession, as well as his fixation with The Turner Diaries, fed an interest in self-dramatization, which was striking in someone who had led such a circumscribed life. Hodge told McVeigh’s lawyers that Tim

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yes, adding, “So if the fire department ever comes, we are just going to stand back and watch it go, right?” * * * McVeigh’s purchase of The Turner Diaries put him on mailing lists for other like-minded literature. From the catalog of William Pierce’s National Alliance, he furthered his interest in homemade

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if there was any connection between these deliveries and welfare. Still, these ideas stayed with McVeigh and reinforced the racial attitudes he’d absorbed from The Turner Diaries. He was, by his later teenage years, a thoroughgoing racist. With no social life to speak of, and some savings from gifts from his grandparents

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the horror that followed, was his messianic streak, his sense that he was destined for great things and a dramatic end. By this time, too, The Turner Diaries had planted the thought of a truck bomb demolishing a government building and leading to a political revolution. Tim wasn’t going to find that

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friend, McVeigh said, referring to Black people, “I have seen real evil.”) These sentiments meshed well with the rage that coursed through his favorite book, The Turner Diaries. But McVeigh, at age twenty, had no historical or legal context for his views. He always thought of himself as a patriot—he had enlisted

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AR-15 assault weapon. Back in his room, McVeigh continued to avidly read Soldier of Fortune as well as military and gun manuals, and reread The Turner Diaries. Fellow white soldiers who were interviewed later by the FBI said they never agreed with McVeigh’s views on race, but McVeigh himself claimed he

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found a receptive audience among them. Black soldiers who were interviewed said McVeigh kept a careful distance from them. He bought copies of The Turner Diaries for Michael Fortier and several other friends at the base. Fort Riley was polarized along racial lines. Anti-white and anti-Black graffiti marred many

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others in the 1990s, it was expensive and inconvenient to steep themselves in right-wing extremism. They had to pay for magazine subscriptions; books like The Turner Diaries were available through advertisements in those magazines or at gun shows. Shortwave radio was a balky technology. (Rush Limbaugh, at least, was easy to locate

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. We have to fund our war efforts with, sometimes, ‘covert’ means. We operate no different than the American underground in Nazi Germany.” He sent Jennifer The Turner Diaries as well as his favorite document from American history—the full Declaration of Independence, with the colonists’ complaints about the king highlighted in yellow. “Now

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during the day and William Cooper at night. After Waco, he gorged on propaganda-style documentaries like Waco, the Big Lie. But throughout this period, The Turner Diaries remained his lodestar. So, when McVeigh decided, after the passage of the assault weapons ban, that he was going to go on the offensive, he

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poke small holes in the walls of the trailer to run the extension cord and the switch into the cab.” McVeigh followed the plan in The Turner Diaries—his “blueprint.” Still, the book, with all its specificity, did not tell McVeigh everything he needed to know. Where to get the fertilizer and how

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,000 from his father and made a few dollars at the gun shows, buying and selling whatever he could find—military clothing, ammunition, copies of The Turner Diaries. Both men had charged several thousand dollars in gold bars to their credit cards, and they had cashed in several bars to pay for the

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April began, McVeigh moved out of their home into a motel. McVeigh was clearly disgusted with Fortier and started giving him reading assignments, starting with The Turner Diaries, to try to jolt him into joining forces with him. Fortier thought he was getting too many “negative vibes” from McVeigh and worried that McVeigh

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shield him in the aftermath. He left a few messages for Richard Coffman, who worked for the National Alliance, the right-wing organization that published The Turner Diaries. Coffman never called him back. McVeigh also called Andreas Strassmeir, the German émigré who lived in Elohim City, and left him a message. But Strassmeir

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—with a few dozen pages inside. Some were photocopies, some were quotations and comments in McVeigh’s distinctive hand. There was a page photocopied from The Turner Diaries, which McVeigh had marked with a yellow highlighter: “The real value of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties

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’s organization, established a 244-acre compound on the remote Bull Shoals Lake in the Ozarks, just south of the Missouri border. Drawing inspiration from The Turner Diaries, the group amassed an arsenal of weapons and talked of taking the fight to the government. Federal prosecutors obtained a search warrant for the compound

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McVeigh to provide his intellectual autobiography. What did he believe, and why? This gave McVeigh the chance to show off what he had learned from The Turner Diaries, The Spotlight, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill Cooper on shortwave. McVeigh claimed that he was acting out of patriotism, out of faith with the nation’s

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bombed the Murrah building. These twenty-first-century extremists found incendiary information on the internet a lot faster than McVeigh tracked down paper copies of The Turner Diaries and The Spotlight. Their transformation—and their crimes—happened faster, too. Even more important, social media allowed like-minded extremists to gather and scheme in

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same websites. Robert Bowers, who killed eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, used the social media website Gab. Patrick Crusius, a fan of The Turner Diaries who killed twenty-three people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, posted on the online message board 8chan, as did John Earnest, who killed

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wavered: whether to plead guilty. The bombing was a political gesture—an act of protest against Bill Clinton’s federal government. Like the protagonist of The Turner Diaries, McVeigh hoped that his action would set off a broader rebellion. For that reason, he wanted to claim credit for the bombing and explain his

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this point, the FBI had the results of the search warrant. Inside the Fortier mobile home, agents found bomb-making guides, right-wing literature (including The Turner Diaries), and several guns, but nothing that could tie Fortier directly to the bombing. (The audio bug in the house and tap on the phone also

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edges. It didn’t. Matsch had experience with right-wing extremism. In 1987, he had conducted the trial of two white supremacists (avid readers of The Turner Diaries), who were convicted of killing the Denver radio host Alan Berg. (The Oliver Stone movie Talk Radio was loosely based on the case.) As with

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gave a marathon opening statement—more than four hours long—but the gist was a reasonable-doubt defense. Jones mocked the government’s reliance on The Turner Diaries—“a work of fiction”—as McVeigh’s inspiration. Jones was an Anglophile in temperament as well as couture, which sometimes led to references that probably

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eluded a Colorado jury. “The Turner Diaries,” he said, “is no more a blueprint, much less a reason, to blow up a federal building… than Lady Chatterley’s Lover can teach you

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time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Hanger also testified about the envelope of clippings he discovered in the car, which included excerpts from The Turner Diaries and various documents about the American Revolution. Still, the most incriminating moment in Hanger’s testimony may have come at the very end. Prosecutor Scott

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interview McVeigh so he could express his views about Waco and gun rights, which might even attract sympathy from some jurors. Like Earl Turner in The Turner Diaries, McVeigh hoped his ideas would provoke the public to revolt against the government. If McVeigh talked about his political agenda to O’Connor on camera

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rebellion to overthrow the federal government—the way Earl Turner’s attack on the FBI building led to the civil war depicted in the novel The Turner Diaries. That didn’t happen. But neither did McVeigh’s movement die in the wreckage of the Murrah building. His brand of right-wing extremism lives

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12, 1996, a white supremacist named Larry Shoemake shot eleven Black people, killing one, in Jackson, Mississippi, before dying in a fire he had set. (The Turner Diaries “was like an eye opener for him,” his wife later said.) On July 27, 1996, Eric Rudolph, a white supremacist, set off a bomb at

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7, 1998, three white men killed James Byrd Jr., a Black man, by dragging him behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early,” one of the killers was reported to have said during the assault. Apart from the Olympic bombing and the Byrd murder, these investigations drew

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, largely because they took place far from big cities, with their concentrations of media outlets. It was not a full-fledged national rebellion, as in The Turner Diaries, like McVeigh wanted, but he did set off a string of attacks on his enemies. In public statements, some members of the movement defended the

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Oklahoma City bombing. Like McVeigh, William Pierce, the author of The Turner Diaries, embraced the bombing as a tough but necessary step. “Terrorism is a nasty business,” he said on shortwave radio ten days after the bombing. “Most

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right-wing obsession with “replacement theory”—the idea that the white majority in the United States would be replaced by people of color and immigrants. The Turner Diaries was an early expositor of this view, which was later made famous by Fox’s Tucker Carlson.) Besides the militias, most of the extremist groups

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kill. Fuck ’em. Done with this bullshit.” Then he turned to the cameraman who was following him and said he was “only kidding.” Likewise, too, The Turner Diaries endured as a source of inspiration to right-wing extremists, including those who participated in the insurrection. Shortly before January 6, on a live-streamed

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, and they all deserve to die a traitor’s death.” Ethan Nordean answered, “Yup, Day of the Rope”—invoking the cataclysmic day of violence from The Turner Diaries. On social media and sites such as 4chan, Telegram, and Stormfront, some users noted the parallels between the insurrection at the Capitol and the rebellion

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. Some of the commenters asserted, with justification, that January 6 was the closest the nation had come to replicating the white supremacist triumph that concludes The Turner Diaries. (In response to the events of January 6, 2021, Amazon and some used book sites stopped selling the book.) On the late afternoon of January

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Report, March 15, 1999, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1999/national-alliance-founder-william-pierce’s-writing-inspires-slaughter. “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early”: Sue Anne Presley, “Three Accused Tied to Hate Groups,” Washington Post, June 13, 1998, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/jasper/accused061198

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from Roger Stone Documentary,” Washington Post, Sept. 26, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/26/jan6-committee-roger-stone-documentary/. Likewise, too, The Turner Diaries: Alexandra Alter, “How ‘The Turner Diaries’ Incites White Supremacists,” New York Times, Jan. 12, updated, Jan. 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/books/turner-diaries-white

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Dystopian Neo-Nazi Novel Helped Fuel Decades of White Supremacist Terrorism,” Vox, Jan. 28, 2021, https://www.vox.com/22232779/the-turner-diaries-novel-links-to-terrorism-william-luther-pierce. day of violence from The Turner Diaries: Tom Dreisbach, “Conspiracy Charges Bring Proud Boys’ History of Violence Into the Spotlight,” NPR, April 9, 2021, https://www

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, 130, 144 stolen dynamite and blasting caps in, 106–7, 112, 120, 126, 129, 140 storage sheds rented for, 104, 108, 112, 122, 126, 129 The Turner Diaries as model for, 101–2, 104, 108, 109 “Oklahoma City Bombing, The” (House Oversight Committee report), 240, 355 Oklahoma City National Memorial, 375 Oklahoma Highway

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

by Elle Reeve  · 9 Jul 2024

. * * * Around the same time, in the mid-2000s, a couple hundred miles away, Matthew Heimbach went on Amazon.com and bought an SS flag and The Turner Diaries. He was a teenager in a wealthy bedroom community outside Washington, D.C. Amazon suggested he “might be interested in” lots of other things, like

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in school. Smart fucking guy. He knew what it was, and didn’t say a fucking word. Mein Kampf shows up on my desk, or The Turner Diaries—didn’t say a fuckin’ word.” When his parents divorced, Heimbach said, his father didn’t make a scene. “No screaming, no yelling, no crying

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, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/ CHAPTER 9: RIGHT-WING WOMEN “Day of the Rope”: Andrew MacDonald, The Turner Diaries (Barricade Books Inc., 1996). In 1987, Dworkin landed: “The Spy 100,” Spy, October 1987. In that book, Dworkin: Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women: The Politics

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy

by Talia Lavin  · 14 Jul 2020  · 231pp  · 71,299 words

young neo-Nazi named William Luther Pierce produced a work that would go on to inspire an extraordinary amount of violence. The novel was called The Turner Diaries. Published in 1978, it was a futuristic description of the violent struggle for a white utopia in the United States. While it was disseminated as

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work of fiction, some of its devoted readers did whatever they could to make the racist fantasy it depicted reality—up to and including murder. The Turner Diaries proved a remarkably resilient and compelling narrative for white supremacists and conspiracists across the country; it was sold at gun shows and by mail order

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paid off African-Americans to oppose white racism, and cast a “Jewish spell” over the majority of white Americans, lulling them into materialism and complacency. The Turner Diaries would go on to inspire a white-supremacist terrorist gang called the Order, directly named after the group in the book, to rob banks and

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Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people, including children. The FBI has labeled it the “Bible of the racist right.” If so, a devotee of the Turner Diaries subsequently produced the movement’s catechism. David Lane, a member of the terror cell the Order, wrote a tract while imprisoned for Berg’s murder

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overlapped indistinguishably, forming an endless, roiling soup of incitement and gloating camaraderie. Users swapped texts like Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto about “white genocide,” PDFs of The Turner Diaries, the neo-Nazi book Siege by James Mason, Holocaust-denial manifestos, and quotes about Adolf Hitler. They also voiced their discomfort and frustration with the

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white-supremacist murderer Brenton Tarrant expressed in his manifesto prior to shooting over fifty Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand: “It’s the birthrates.” The Turner Diaries, the 1978 novel by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce that served as a direct inspiration for Timothy McVeigh and other white-supremacist terrorists, lays out

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15

by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson  · 25 Sep 2023  · 525pp  · 166,724 words

1978, William Luther Pierce, who founded a white nationalist organization, wrote a dystopian fantasy novel under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. Set in the early 1990s, The Turner Diaries had on its red cover a sketch of a white man and a white woman holding guns. The first edition showed the woman gripping one

Global Catastrophic Risks

by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic  · 2 Jul 2008

. (2000). Premillennialism. In Landes, R.A. (ed.) , The Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennia! Movements, pp. 3 3 1 (New York: Routledge). Whitsel, B. ( 1 998) . The Turner Diaries and Cosmotheism: William Pierce's Theology of Revolution. Nova Religio, 1(2), 1 83-1 97. Wilson, D. (2007). Where's My ]etpack?: A Guide

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use whatever CBRN [chemical, biological, radiologicaL nuclear] materials it gets in ways that will ensure the most corpses' ( Scheuer, 2002, p. 198). 28 For instance, The Turner Diaries, a novel written by the former leader of the National Alliance, William Pierce, and which has had considerable influence on many right·wingers, describes racist

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: Metropolitan Books). Lugar, R.G. (2005). The Lugar Survey on Proliferation Threats and Responses (Washington, DC: U . S . Senate). Macdonald, A. [pseudonym for Pierce] ( 1999). The Turner Diaries: A Novel. Hillsboro, W.V.: National Vanguard; originally published 1 980. Maerli, M . B . (Summer, 2000). Relearning the ABCs: terrorists and 'weapons of mass destruction

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vacuum instability 354-6 547 anticipation 346-7 runaway technologies 357-8 phytoplankton, effect of ocean acidification 274 picornaviruses, effect of humidity 292 Pierce, W., The Turner Diaries 418 Pinatubo eruption ( 1 99 1 ) , environmental effects 2 1 1 Pinto, J . P . e t al. 206-7 Pipes, R. 504 Pirsig, R. 1

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impact 184, 230 tuberculosis 288, 297 association with H !VfAIDS 299-300 Tunguska impact (1908) 184, 222, 229 Turco, R.P. et a!. 208, 391 The Turner Diaries, Pierce, W. 418 Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. 95-6, 102 typhus 291 Ubiquity, Buchanan, M. 181, 182 The Ultimate fate ofthe Universe, Islam, ) . N

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

by David Brin  · 1 Jan 1998  · 205pp  · 18,208 words

present winds up being stored and valued, so will misinformation, lies, and slanderous halftruths. While ethnic crafts and amateur science promote wholesome diversity, calumnies like the Turner Diaries will also keep circulating, reproduced by cheap electronic means, infecting yet more fragile minds and egos with the same cruel madness that brought ruinous destruction

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him credibility with some citizens. We have seen anonymity at work in countless fabrications and calumnies, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Turner Diaries, but it also plays a subtly powerful role in some of the most respected modern media journals. Speaking about unsigned newspaper editorials, E. M. Forster

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It

by Matthew Williams  · 23 Mar 2021  · 592pp  · 125,186 words

the ‘homosexual agenda’, was a key moment in the development of Copeland’s vision for his London attacks. After this he digested biographies of Hitler, The Turner Diaries (which depicts violent revolution and a race war in the US), the pamphlet A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution written by David Myatt, and The

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election, 1; Twitter, 1, 2, 3, 4; YouTube algorithms, 1 trust, 1, 2, 3 Tsorionov, Dmitry ‘Enteo’, 1, 2 Tunisia attacks, 1 Turks, 1, 2 The Turner Diaries, 1 twins, 1 Twitter: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; filter bubbles and bias, 1; how much online hate speech, 1, 2; Japan care

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City

by Mike Davis  · 27 Aug 2001

example, the group's founder. Dr. John Tanton, likes to terrify supporters with apocalyptic Aryan rhetoric that might have been lifted from the pages of the Turner Diaries: To govern does is to populate. In this society this hold? political power the instance in first to a group that is simply which those

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI

by Frank Pasquale  · 14 May 2020  · 1,172pp  · 114,305 words

, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), discussing the popularity of Andrew Macdonald’s novel The Turner Diaries (Charlottesville, VA: National Vanguard Books, 1999). 38. Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Joseph A

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm  · 4 Jan 2021  · 156pp  · 49,653 words

the continents, wade through rising rivers of blood and collect firewood for surviving elders, in a book of revelation whose climactic battles bring to mind The Turner Diaries and other American fantasies of race war. It is another ending for deep ecology. It makes the very notion of violent resistance appear nauseating. Perhaps

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

by Douglas Edwards  · 11 Jul 2011  · 496pp  · 154,363 words