What’s the worst book you’ve ever read? The question doesn’t come up very often, but for the past 25 years I’ve had what feels like a trump card: The Turner Diaries, a violent and violently antisemitic, racist, and dystopian novel from 1978 written by William Luther Pierce, a physicist and rocket scientist who later in life became a neoNazi. He founded and led the National Alliance, which “was the most dominant and dangerous hate group in America,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “for nearly thirty years.” At the time I read The Turner Diaries, circa 2000, I had a job at a foundation that funded social science research about violence, so it was assigned reading for a work project about terrorism. The book’s notoriety then came from its connection to Timothy McVeigh, who was a huge fan of it; he discovered it during his stint in the Army, handed out copies to people he thought would be interested in it, and had highlighted, photocopied pages from it in his car when he was arrested for the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and injured over eight hundred more.
The book’s influence preceded McVeigh. In the early 1980s, nine men formed a white supremacist group called the Order—a name taken from the novel—and went on a crime spree that ended in the 1984 killing of Jewish radio host Alan Berg in Denver. A copycat group of four people, the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), committed a series of robberies from 1994 to 1996 inspired by the real 1980s Order and the fictional one in Pierce’s book. In 1998, a trio calling themselves the Aryan People’s Republic (ARP) embarked on a crime streak that left five people dead. The ARA, ARP, and McVeigh are all connected with Elohim City, a white supremacist separatist compound in Oklahoma where The Turner Diaries is required reading for members of its security detail.
In the twenty-first century, the book’s reputation for its ability to foment violence has only grown. In 1998, one of the three white supremacists who killed James Byrd Jr. in Texas, dragging him behind their pickup truck for three miles, declared at the time that they were “going to start The Turner Diaries early.” The book is connected to a man who set off a series of nail bombs in London in 1999 that killed three and injured 140, a group of three who perpetrated nine killings in Germany from 2000 to 2009, a man who committed a string of shootings in Sweden from 2003 to 2010, a violent spree by a Massachusetts teenager in 2006, another man who carried out murder and bombings in the United Kingdom in 2013, and a man who killed three people in Kansas in 2014. It’s possible, though disputed, that the manifesto of Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, lifts from the book, among other sources. Tropes from the book showed up in the rhetoric of Proud Boys who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The horrific violence associated with The Turner Diaries has cemented its reputation. On January 12, 2021, The New York Times ran a piece on “how The Turner Diaries incites white supremacists.” The Atlantic didn’t blink in 2025 in calling it “the most dangerous book in America.” Canada, Germany, and France have banned the book, and Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major booksellers, at the time of this writing, don’t carry it, for its neo-Nazi content (although all of them allow or carry Mein Kampf). The implication hovering in the air is that it’s too dangerous.
But how? Among the factors lurking in the background of that question is the assumption that reading a book can make people violent who wouldn’t otherwise be. The problem with this assumption is that there’s no hard evidence for it. In the case of The Turner Diaries, we think the book is dangerous because the people who committed the crimes say it inspired them to do what they did. But people who commit terrible crimes have said they’re inspired by all kinds of things: the Bible, the Quran, horror movies, a Beatles song, the desire to impress Jodie Foster. Meanwhile, decades of psychological research have created no clear consensus that consuming violent media of any kind—books, movies, TV shows, video games—actually makes more than a very small percentage of people more violent.
“Violent or aggressive actions seldom result from a single cause; rather, multiple factors converging over time contribute to such behavior,” states a literature review of studies of the effects of media violence from the Journal of Adolescent Health. “Accordingly, the influence of the violent mass media is best viewed as one of the many potential factors that influence the risk for violence and aggression. No reputable researcher is suggesting that media violence is the cause of violent behavior.” None finds that nonviolent people will become violent just because they read a book.
That The Turner Diaries doesn’t just throw a switch to violent behavior is borne out in the book’s sales figures. Pierce essentially self-published early editions of The Turner Diaries through the publishing arm of the National Alliance and distributed them by mail and at gun shows. By 1995, he claimed to have sold 185,000 copies, and today, even if booksellers won’t carry it, a PDF of it is easily available on the internet for free (go ahead, Google it). It’s a pretty safe assumption that the vast majority of its readers are not like me, but rather people already ideologically aligned with the book, ready to receive its message. And yet, while the violence associated with The Turner Diaries is horrific, it hasn’t produced an army of murderers; a minuscule percentage of the people who have read it went on to kill.
That said, research does suggest that violent media can play a role in making someone more aggressive; it’s a factor in the complex dynamics of social context, family, friends, and the environment a person lives in, which all can bend a person toward violence. And studies have found that someone already psychologically prone to aggression can become more aggressive, in the short and long term, after consuming violent media. The Journal of Adolescent Health literature review finds the size of the effect of violent media on public health is on par, as a public health problem, with smoking, lead exposure, and the effects of sexually transmitted diseases—all things that we have decided, as a society, to do something about. “As with many other public health threats, not every child who is exposed to this threat will acquire the affliction of violent behavior, and many will acquire the affliction who are not exposed to the threat,” the authors state. “However, that does not diminish the need to address the threat.”
In that sense, however, The Turner Diaries has been singled out: it exists in a constant flood of violent media, from books and movies about serial killers to video games filled with gruesome violence and impossibly high body counts. People looking for violent media have no shortage of possibilities. And yet The Turner Diaries seems to have been deemed uniquely dangerous, to the point that it has been chased out of print. That may make most of us feel better. But given that it’s still circulating among its true believers, is it wise? Should the rest of us know what’s so dangerous about it? And what is lost if we start deciding—or if someone else decides for us—that some things are too dangerous for us to see?
The edition of the book I read decades ago was published by Barricade Books, which reprinted the book in 1996. Barricade had a history of publishing titles that other publishers might be squeamish about—a reprint of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, porn actress Linda Lovelace’s autobiography Ordeal, and The Anarchist Cookbook. In case there was any doubt as to the publisher’s motivations for reprinting The Turner Diaries, however, the back cover stated, in bright red lettering, “This book contains racist propaganda,” and “It is being published to alert and warn America.” Calling The Turner Diaries “a dreadful book,” the publisher, Lyle Stuart, explained in his foreword:
There are some people who are born to do unpopular things that need doing. I seem to be one of them. When I announced that I would publish The Turner Diaries in a trade edition for sale through bookshops, the response was awesome. I was denounced from pulpits. I was attacked in a letter to retail book chains by Morris Dees and his Southern Poverty Law Center…. I happen to admire and respect Mr. Dees. But when you have lived for what sometimes seems to have been thousands of years, you come to understand that those you admire may not always be right.
I have fought censorship all of my adult life. To me, the most precious of all rights in this marvelous country called the United States of America is the freedom to think, write, and say whatever is on your mind, subject to the laws of libel. That freedom extends to thoughts that are stupid, ignorant, or incendiary…. [T]he majority—you and I—must always protect the right of the minority—even a minority of one—to express the most outrageous and offensive ideas. Only then is total freedom of expression guaranteed.
Stuart’s focus on ideas—not just violent content—gets at the idea that perhaps there’s something deeper happening in The Turner Diaries, something beyond the surface-level hatred and gore, that makes it a trigger for violence in the real world. If so, what is it? What makes a book so dangerous that people want to keep it out of people’s hands?
The Turner Diaries puts an interesting spin on that question, because lists of dangerous books are usually compendia from the other side of the ideological spectrum. In the past, U.S. federal obscenity laws snared a few books now considered classics because they were just too sexy, too libertine: James Joyce’s Ulysses (banned from 1922 to 1934), D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (banned from 1928 to 1959), Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (banned from 1934 to 1964). More recently, there have been attempts to restrict people’s access to books at local and state levels, spearheaded by conservative groups targeting public school libraries. According to PEN America, there have been nearly twenty-three thousand instances of groups succeeding in pressuring libraries to stop carrying books, “a number never before seen in the life of any living American.” The efforts focus on “books about race and racism,” by which PEN America means books that someone has decided are too woke, “or books featuring individuals of color and LGBTQ+ people and topics, as well as those for older readers that have sexual references or discuss sexual violence.” PEN America counted 3,362 such removals of books from libraries in the 2022–23 academic year, 10,046 in 2023–24, and 6,870 in 2024–25. In the most recent count, Anthony Burgess’s 1962 dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange was targeted the most. Coming in second were Jennifer Nivens’s 2020 young-adult novel Breathless, which the author describes as a “frank take on sex and love, parental divorce, finding yourself, and the importance of writing your story,” and Patricia McCormick’s 2006 young-adult novel Sold, about a young Nepalese girl sold into prostitution.
Other books, as Stuart suggests, are deemed dangerous because they contain powerful ideas that have motivated a lot of people to change their lives and society. Almost every major religious belief system has core texts associated with it that, at some point or other, some authority figure has found threatening—in several cases, until they adopt it and threaten others with it; think about how the Roman Empire first persecuted Christians, then became Christian and forced others to convert. The Communist Manifesto wrought dramatic change across the world; depending on how thick you think the through-line is from Marx and Engels to Stalin, you can argue that it’s responsible for millions of deaths. I wouldn’t argue that, but I don’t quibble at all with the idea that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring transformed the environmental movement, from one concerned with conservation of natural spaces to one concerned with overt activism against corporations and governments, with dramatic effects on legislation and social norms.
The Turner Diaries’s violence aside, part of the concern about the book is in line with this second group—the fear is that there are concepts in it that can change people’s minds, radicalize them to be sympathetic to violence or to carry it out themselves. That The Turner Diaries is a piece of dystopian fiction lends some validity to this fear. Other dystopian classics have affected readers individually and social discourse generally, from the aforementioned A Clockwork Orange to George Orwell’s 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
A Clockwork Orange works its influence through its inventive use of language and its corrosive view of both youth gone amok and the depredations of an overreaching state system. 1984 and Brave New World, meanwhile, each dramatize compelling concepts in ways that stick in the brain: Orwell’s understanding of the ways language shapes thought, and how a totalitarian regime could manipulate language to control people’s thoughts and perceptions of the world; Huxley’s droll wit and highly prescient vision of a society shaped by genetic engineering and pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, not only does Butler’s chaotic scenario—a country beset by social disorder and environmental collapse—eerily echo our own, but she tells the story of a nascent religion so thoroughly that she provides some of its sacred texts. The older books have already made their way into common speech and thought; Butler’s books, which get more attention each year since her death, and are now taught in high schools, seem well on their way. Does The Turner Diaries have some similar alchemy of text, plot, character, and concept, to sway those who aren’t persuaded already?
The Turner Diaries tells the story of Earl Turner, an engineer who rises through the ranks of a white supremacist army called the Organization as it wages a race war across the United States and, in time, the world. We learn at the beginning of the book that Turner is already dead, a hallowed martyr to the cause of racial purity; the only question is how that all went down. Turner as a diarist is less of an actor than a camera, and a purveyor of logistical information, as we learn about how the Organization grows and how the war—against the arrayed powers of government and society that Turner calls the System—unfolds.
At the beginning of the book, the Organization reads as a loose collection of vigilante groups spread across the country. Turner belongs to a cell of four, and their main concerns involve staying undetected and getting money, which they do at first by looting a Jewish-owned liquor store and killing its owner. They take over an abandoned house and do grunt work until they’re tasked with their first big assignment: blowing up the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They do this, with grotesque success, using a truck bomb. They then proceed to bomb The Washington Post and visit the paper’s (Jewish) editor at home to blow him “literally in half” with a shotgun. The broader Organization, gaining members and now acting more like an organized militia, attacks the Capitol with mortars and bombs to disrupt a lawmaking session. It also rewards Turner for his actions in the race war by making him a member of its elite, ideologically pure fighting squad called—you saw this coming—the Order. But after he’s captured by their enemies and taken alive, when he should have taken a suicide pill, the Order puts him on reserve for a suicide mission in the future, an assignment to which Turner assents.
It takes a while for that mission to arrive. In the meantime, the Organization grows into an army that starts by dismantling infrastructure around the country and proceeds to take over southern California. In Los Angeles, it executes thousands of people deemed race traitors, hanging them from streetlights on what’s called the Day of the Rope. From this position, the Organization acquires nuclear warheads, and in the escalating conflict between the Organization and the System, a series of U.S. cities are destroyed. The Organization then attacks the Soviet Union and triggers a global war, which somehow also falls along racial and antisemitic lines. In the fury of this final conflict, the Order calls upon Turner to fly a plane armed with a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon. He readily complies. In an epilogue, we learn that after Turner’s death the race war consumes the globe, and after billions of deaths, the complete eradication of Jews, and the ravaging of a planet, “the dream of a White world” is realized.
Okay. Taking a step back, there are aspects of The Turner Diaries that don’t feel out of place in any book about radical revolutionaries, of any political persuasion, fighting a larger system. One of the Organization’s main problems, for example, is a complacent public. “We had badly underestimated the degree to which materialism had corrupted our fellow citizens, as well as the extent to which their feelings could be manipulated by the mass media,” Turner writes ruefully toward the beginning of the book. “As long as the government is able to keep the economy somehow gasping and wheezing along, the people can be conditioned to accept any outrage. Despite the continuing inflation and the gradually declining standard of living, most Americans are still able to keep their bellies full today, and we must simply face the fact that that’s the only thing which counts for most of them.”
And yes, there is a roster of events in The Turner Diaries that a small number of its readers have made echo in the real world. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing mirrors the bombing of the FBI headquarters in the book. The real Order got its name from the one on the novel. The Capitol rioters on January 6 invoked the Day of the Rope. These facts in isolation can make The Turner Diaries seem predictive.
But the book’s dystopia, in setting up what reads like a radical conservative fantasy of what an oppressive liberal government would look like, pushes its scenario into incredulity while insisting on its believability. We learn, for example, that in the late 1980s the government rounds up everyone’s guns through a piece of legislation called the Cohen Act, a precipitating event for the Organization’s formation. It adopts an open immigration policy, granting citizenship to anyone who has been in the country for two years, but also tries to set up systems to surveil its people constantly. We learn that somehow the Supreme Court rules “that all laws making rape a crime are unconstitutional, because they presume a legal difference between the sexes,” as if that makes any sense. In The Turner Diaries’s 1991, America is a country on the verge of collapse. The standard of living has plummeted. Food is rationed, and the government is rife with petty, obvious corruption. Georgetown, the tony neighborhood in Washington, D.C., is a nest of gay bars, massage parlors, porn stalls, liquor stores, and “similar capitalist ventures…. Garbage litters the sidewalks, and Blacks, who used to be pretty scarce there, are swarming all over.” Boarded-up townhouses are “occupied by colonies of squatters, mostly young dropouts and runaways…. Ritual torture and ritual murder are rumored to take place, as well as ritual cannibalism, ritual sex orgies, and other non-Western practices.”
In stretching credulity, and trying the noncommitted reader’s patience, the quotations above remind one of a major aspect of The Turner Diaries: in addition to being offensive, it is often dumb and lazy. Sentence for sentence, the book is middle-school level, forgoing details (“similar capitalist ventures”; “other non-Western practices”) that a better novelist would flesh out. When it’s not horrifying in the virulence of its antisemitism and racism, it’s often boring. Pierce commits the classic first-novelist blunder of making his diarist, the narrator we spend all our time with, someone who isn’t in the action: he isn’t doing most of the fighting or decision-making in the race war the book is about.
So, we get summaries rather than dramatizations of how that war is going, and much of Turner’s time is consumed with logistics. There are pages and pages of Turner moving supplies from one place to another—say, a cache of guns from rural Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C.—or turning power on in a decrepit house, or setting up a communications grid, with little consequence for the plot or for the reader. Unlike in The Anarchist Cookbook, there isn’t enough detail in The Turner Diaries for the book to function as an instruction manual for making explosives or causing general mayhem. But it does have a lot of complaining (“If we don’t do a better job of planning our operations in the future, we have some rough times ahead!”). Meanwhile, the battles largely happen elsewhere.
Above all, for all the influence it’s said to have had, The Turner Diaries doesn’t contain a single articulated idea—and shies away from ideas when an opportunity presents itself. It traffics constantly in antisemitism and racism, but takes them at face value, without interrogation or explanation, and thus never makes the case for either in a way that would persuade anyone. Early on, we learn that Turner’s love interest Katherine joined the Organization because she learned about “the unique historical role of the Jews as the “ferment of decomposition of races and civilizations,” but the book doesn’t explain what that role is, or what “ ferment of decomposition” could possibly mean. The reader is expected to know.
When Turner is inducted into the Order, making him an elite in the white supremacist fight, we learn that part of that induction involves reading a book to get the Organization’s truth. In science fiction novels worth their salt, this point in the plot is a chance for the authors to lay out the Big Idea, the one that creates legions of fans, whether it’s psychohistory, the academic discipline Isaac Asimov cooked up for his Foundation trilogy, or Earthseed, the religion Octavia Butler created for her Parable series. Asimov and Butler do the hard work of delineating their ideas, fleshing them out, and chasing down their complications, with ramifications for the characters and the stories the novels tell, and those ideas are a big part of the reason people still read their books today.
Pierce, meanwhile, takes the easy way out. He tells us about the existence of the Order’s book, and that it’s four hundred pages long, but he won’t let us look under the cover. “The book placed our present struggle—the Organization and its goals and what is at stake—in a much larger context than I have ever really considered before,” he writes. “That is, I had thought about many of the things in the book before, but I had never put them all together into a single, coherent pattern. I had never seen the whole picture so clearly.” What is that pattern, or that picture? Pierce won’t say. Instead, he has Turner tell us that “for the first time I understand the deepest meaning of what we are doing. I understand now why we cannot fail, no matter what we must do to win and no matter how many of us must perish in doing it. Everything that has been and everything that is yet to be depend on us. We are truly the instruments of God in the fulfillment of His Grand Design. These may seem like strange words to be coming from me, who has never been religious, but they are utterly sincere words.”
We see that the narrator is converted. But we get nothing explaining how or why—nothing that works on us unless we’re already converted as well. Pierce sets up for himself the chance to alter the reader’s mind, and doesn’t take it. It’s hard to say why. Maybe he doesn’t know how to do the work. Maybe he knows only his allies will read his book, and so they don’t need the explanation. And maybe, on a certain level, he knows that spelling it all out for anyone who isn’t already on his team would drives them away. So The Turner Diaries talks about a coherent worldview without really having one. A reader looking for that worldview in its pages won’t find much more than a hot, shallow stew of unexamined hatred and poorly understood Christianity.
The Turner Diaries gets closest to an actual idea when it talks about public complacency. In this realm, however, what’s most noteworthy is the way Turner and the Organization purport to fight for white Americans while, page by page, narrowing the parameters for who, even among white people, is worth saving. A fifth of the way through the book, Turner writes,
If the freedom of the American people were the only thing at stake, the existence of the Organization would hardly be justified. Americans have lost their right to be free. Slavery is the just and proper state for a people who have grown as soft, self-indulgent, careless, credulous, and befuddled as we have.
Indeed, we are already slaves. We have allowed a diabolically clever, alien minority to put chains on our souls and our minds. These spiritual chains are a truer marker of slavery than the iron chains which are yet to come.
Why didn’t we rebel 35 years ago, when they took our schools away from us and began converting them into racially mixed jungles? Why didn’t we throw them all out of the country 50 years ago, instead of letting them use us as cannon fodder in their war to subjugate Europe?
More to the point, why didn’t we rise up three years ago, when they started taking our guns away? Why didn’t we rise up in righteous fury and drag these arrogant aliens into the streets and cut their throats open? …
The Enemy we are fighting fully intends to destroy the racial basis of our existence. No excuse for our failure will have any meaning, for there will be only a swarming horde of indifferent, mulatto zombies to hear it. There will be no White men to remember us—either to blame us for our weakness or to forgive us for our folly.
The “alien minority” in this passage, it’s clear from context, are the Jews, and by this point Pierce is starting to show his hand; it’s not hard to detect the sympathy for Nazis (and the intense rewriting of history) in describing World War II as a struggle to “subjugate Europe.” But the operational idea in this passage isn’t antisemitism or racism, which is, again, taken for granted. The real target here is white people who don’t share the Organization’s agenda, and as the book progresses, those white people are cast out with the same violence that Turner and the Organization use on everyone else they hate.
To the extent that there is any character development in The Turner Diaries, it depicts Turner’s increasing ability to justify killing anyone who doesn’t agree with him, regardless of race. In contemplating the dozens of dead at FBI headquarters, he muses that “there was never a way to solve the race problem which would be fair for everybody or which everyone concerned could be politely persuaded into accepting without any fuss or unpleasantness, they kept trying to evade it…. And the same has been true of the Jewish problem and the immigration problem and the overpopulation problem and the eugenics problem and a thousand related problems.” This increasingly nonsensical chain of thoughts makes it just easy enough for Turner to kill a member of the Organization for insufficient devotion to the cause, even though he says it makes him “very, very depressed.”
He gets over it fast, though. Fifteen pages later, he writes of moderate conservatives that “we mustn’t let them know that they are all inevitably headed for the gallows.” Later, when the Organization kills a sheriff and his wife, Turner writes that “it is a terrible thing to kill women of our own race, but we are engaged in a war in which all the old rules have been scrapped.” By the time the war goes nuclear, Turner’s justifications are all too easy. “If the White nations of the world had not allowed themselves to become subject to the Jew, to Jewish ideas, to the Jewish spirit, this war would not be necessary,” he writes. “I cannot think of any segment of White society, from the Maryland red-necks and their families whose radioactive bodies we bulldozed into a huge pit a few days ago to the university professors we strung up in Los Angeles last July, which can truly claim that it did not deserve what happened to it.”
“All that matters, in the long run, is that when the smoke has finally cleared the last battalion in the field is ours,” he concludes. So, in the end, the book makes a hash even of its own premise. The Organization says it’s seeking racial purity, but the purity it’s really looking for is ideological. Pierce, as the author, doesn’t try to persuade. He makes readers choose a side, and offers no reason to join his other than the threat of violence if we don’t.
Pierce, it’s clear, would like his side to be white supremacy, or, for that matter, full-blown Nazism. His narrator’s diatribe against “the media campaign against Hitler and the Germans back in the 1940s” includes, unsurprisingly, a healthy dose of nonsensical Holocaust denialism: “The Jews convinced the American people that the stories were true, and the result was World War II, with millions of the best of our race butchered—by us—and all of eastern and central Europe turned into a huge, communist prison camp.” At the end of the book, Pierce engineers it so that the worldwide genocide of Jews happens in 1999, “just 110 years after the birth of the Great One.” Anyone want to guess who was born in 1889?
But the future that Pierce envisions undermines his own cause, because it’s almost completely destructive. For those few who survive the apocalyptic global race war, the world is uninhabitable, a smoking ruin. To be sure, most dystopian novels have grim endings. But most dystopian novels are ironic, or cautionary, or both, while The Turner Diaries, in its naïveté, is neither: it’s aspirational. Those dystopias that reach for some hope—like Butler’s Parable of the Sower—offer a belief system, a way of moving through the world, that can allow its characters to survive the cataclysm and build something better from the ashes. Pierce offers a pile of ashes and wants us to believe it’s a victory.
It’s hard to imagine The Turner Diaries creating hateful people. It is, however, easy to imagine already hateful people really liking it. Today, with the book available online, it’s hard to tease out the causation when fans of the book have committed hate crimes. But at least one example from its earlier history suggests that The Turner Diaries might be more of a convenient dose of confirmation bias for would-be murderers than an inspiration for murder in the first place. Robert Mathews, who in 1983 founded the real Order, already had a long history of hateful ideas by the time he came across the book. He joined the John Birch Society when he was 11 and founded his own white supremacist group, the Sons of Liberty, in 1971, when he was 19, a couple years before Pierce started serializing The Turner Diaries in his magazine. There is no doubt the novel shaped many of the details surrounding Mathews’s Order. But it’s also quite likely that, had The Turner Diaries never existed, Mathews would still have founded, or gotten involved in, a violent white supremacist group.
Even where the chronology can’t be teased apart, in its pre-internet history, The Turner Diaries never appears in isolation; very early on, the only way to get it was to go to a gun show or order it directly from Pierce. Timothy McVeigh found it at a time when he drifted from gun shows to white supremacist compounds, having dropped out of college and later out of the Army. The Turner Diaries was—and to some extent, still is—part of a larger context of self-reinforcing views, an echo chamber of hate that some people fall into and never get out of. But you have to be in the chamber already for the book’s voice to resonate. If you’re not—as this reader isn’t—it’s just some of the worst noise you’ve ever heard.
Why harp on this? Why try to dismantle the power The Turner Diaries has acquired in its own putrid corner of the public imagination? The first move is to return to Lyle Stuart’s reasons for publishing it. Given our nation’s Puritan origins, the American impulse to ban, censor, or bury books—and, for that matter, controversial ideas—predates the enshrining of the freedom of speech in our country’s founding documents, and the tension between those two positions has run strong ever since. Even Stuart, who died in 2006, wasn’t an absolutist: he believed in the necessity of libel laws. But he understood that freedom of speech means having to listen to ideas one finds hateful and offensive. This stance is out of fashion these days on both the left and the right, for different but dovetailing reasons, and while that has led to some corners of society being kinder, it has also been part of the erosion of trust in journalism and academia, and has been duplicitously weaponized to make our politics more venal, less based in a shared reality, and more easily manipulated. And, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer holds.” Relegating The Turner Diaries to a seamy corner of the internet has led to a lot of people taking a few people’s words for it that the novel holds some powerful sway over the minds of young white men, instead of taking a look, judging for themselves, and seeing how vacuous it is. (Do you believe me? Should you?)
But if The Turner Diaries is so empty, why is it connected to so much real violence? Unsurprisingly, Arendt has something to say about that, too. Pierce’s novel orbits Arendt’s famous conception of the banality of evil, a term she coined writing in The New Yorker about the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann had played an instrumental role in the Holocaust, his decisions and actions part of the chain of events leading to the deaths of millions. Thanks to piles of documentation at his trial, that was never in doubt. What for many became maddening, and for Arendt fascinating, was Eichmann’s repeated insistence that he had no real authority in the Nazi killing machine and was only following orders; thus, he seemed to feel no real remorse for what he had done and didn’t consider himself guilty of anything. Arendt was struck by how ordinary he seemed—boring, even. Given the horrific, annihilating enormity of the Holocaust, it was maybe natural for Eichmann’s prosecutors, and the general public, to look for a motive equal in weight to the crime, some writhing pit of searing hate that Eichmann would shout from to explain why he did what he did. Instead, there was only a bureaucrat, checking off boxes, taking meetings, filling out forms.
Actually reading The Turner Diaries also suggests that we may have put it in the wrong seamy corner, and by doing so we may be robbing ourselves of ways to address it. To accept it as a white supremacist or Nazi tract is to accept the definition Pierce and other readers want for it. But from its pages, we only get shallow hatred, received concepts that don’t get examined because they won’t hold up if they are. It’s nihilism, without logic or reason. Understanding it this way opens a pathway to seeing how to counteract the violence the book is associated with.
If nihilism—a life without meaning—lies at the core of the book’s allure, perhaps part of the response lies in a better vision for the future that readers of The Turner Diaries can see themselves in, one that acknowledges their anger and pain and, instead of suggesting the creation of an elite army that sets them apart, brings them into a larger whole, together with everyone else. It sounds dumb to say that maybe the beginning of the answer lies in a warm hug, or a kind word. But that’s the level The Turner Diaries operates at. Its turgid, workmanlike prose only comes to life when describing violence. Maybe part of the solution is in words that come to life describing ways to find a place in its many opposites: hope, growth, healing, peace.