This morning, a lot of people thinking about The Turner Diaries, so here is some history. Turner Diaries is a novel that imagines a successful coup by white power activists who take over a homeland, then the US, then the world (1)

Several of the methods used in the book appeared in yesterday's insurrection. One is the "Day of the Rope," in which "traitors" (including members of Congress, people in interracial relationships, journalists, etc) are publicly hanged. Yesterday the mob erected a gallows (2)

...Yesterday the mob erected a gallows and people took selfies in front of it. (3)

Turner Diaries also prominently features an attack on the U.S. Capitol, though somewhat different than what we saw. In the book it's a mortar attack. But significantly, the point of the attack is NOT mass casualty, but showing people that even the Capitol can be attacked (4)

Turner Diaries places enormous importance on the protection of white women. The fact that a white woman was shot yesterday will fit into this narrative (a story that also goes back to Vicky Weaver's death in the Ruby Ridge standoff) (5)

To be clear, the plan outlined in Turner Diaries is ***PROFOUNDLY*** genocidal and anti-democratic, eventually involving the annihilation of all nonwhite people throughout the world through chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons. (6)

The reason this is important: Turner Diaries has been enormously important to white power, militant right, and accelerationist activists not because it's a good novel, but because it explains how a small number of people might overthrow the United States (7)

(And we know it's important because the book itself appears all over the place in the white power movement--stacks of them at paramilitary training camps, copies handed out at rallies, OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh sold the book and carried it with him, and more) (8)

This shows us 1) at least some of the people who stormed the Capitol yesterday come from the same movement that has been threatening democracy and killing civilians for decades if not generations (9)

2) This didn't come out of nowhere, but follows a history we can learn and understand in order to combat this very dangerous ideology. As a reminder, the nation in white nationalism is the Aryan nation, not the US. This movement is anti-American (10)

If you would like to learn more, please don't purchase The Turner Diaries as money sometimes still flows back to white power groups from those purchases. Get a pirated copy. Or read summaries. (11)

My book Bring the War Home has lots more detail on all of this https://www.powells.com/book/bring-the-war-home-9780674237698 (12)