Earl Turner's Diary

it was a Jahadist group with ties to Iran. Reporters rushed to get comments from counter terrorism experts, and plenty of them were happy to speculate that only a Muslim could have set off that truck bomb in Oklahoma City. But experts in right wing extremism saw something different in

the rubble of the Alfred P. Mura building. They were looking at an almost exact recreation of the bombing depicted in the Turner Diaries, a novel sold at gun shows and by mail through nazy newsletters, and they were right. That first day. Those experts didn't know yet that the bomber had already been arrested, and that he'd been carrying photocopies of his favorite passages from the novel, but they'd known immediately that it looked early like the events of

the novel had come to life. Two days after the bombing, the novel's author shrugged off any connection, telling a reporter who reached him at his compound that it was really really grasping to try to make any connection to his book, but he knew, he knew that his book could kill because this wasn't the first time it had. I'm Molly Conger, and this is where little guys, this is a story about a book, sort of. There are some recurring elements on this show that I've hinted at a thousand times

without really getting into in any detail. It feels like some sort of Homeric epithet the way I describe these things the same way every time they're mentioned in passing. But swift footed Achilles and the wine dark Sea have been replaced with miniature portraits of monsters we haven't gotten to yet, and The Turner Diaries is one of those.

It's a book, a novel, work of fiction. It's been called by both its fans and critics the bible of the racist right, the most important work of white National's Propaganda in the English language, and the Blueprint for White Revolution, and in all the stories I tell, it's almost always there. In the very first episode of this show, Kevin Strom's first wife blurted out at dinner with the book's author

that she hadn't enjoyed it. Dennis Mahon, the klansman who spent decades building bombs, said this was the book that really opened his eyes. Mass shooters listed in the recommended reading appendix of their Rambling manifestos. A South African Nazi terrorist group borrowed its name from the plot, unrelated to the American Nazi terrorist group who also named itself after

the group in the book. Aspiring race warriors yearn for the Day of the Rope, a phrase coined by the narrator of the book to describe the mass public executions of those deemed to be race traders. Even the weird little guys who don't have the attention span to read the novel for themselves have been influenced by it because they're steeped in a culture that has revered this book for fifty years. But when it comes up, it's only ever in passing. Every time we come across this book

in one of our stories. I'm just asking you to trust me when I tell you that it's important, and that the pages of this novel are soaked in blood, as you're no doubt sick of hearing me say. At this point, this show is one long story told out of order. There may not even be any reasonable way of putting it in order, with all of its interlocking

pieces across space and time. But I'm trying to figure out as I go, and I keep having to double back to give you a piece I know you'll need before we continue along whatever path I've wandered down in a given week. You see, what I had in mind for the beginning of the new year was a pretty exciting story about a couple of klansmen bungling an attempted coup in the Caribbean. It's an adventure that never quite made it to the high Seas, and I am looking

forward to it. But as I started fitting the pieces together, I remembered what happened last time I sat down to start this story. I need to double back if I don't set the stage by telling you some stories about Don Black and David Duke and a couple of Canadian neo Nazi groups. I'll spend too much time darting off down these tangents. You know that children's book if you give a musa muffin, maybe you had the one about the mouse and the cookie, But we were a moose

muffin household. That's the one I read, and that's kind of what's happening here. You know, the moose needed a glass of milk for his muffin. And to tell you about this attempted coup, I have to tell you about some of the guys first. And if I'm going to tell you anything about David Duke or Don Black, I

have to start with the day they met. But I can't even start writing about the rest of their friendship because it seems worth mentioning that there was a third man in the car with them the day they met, and that man was a serial killer. But what you are probably asking, does any of that have to do with the Turner Diaries? Not much, admittedly, but it has

everything to do with the sequel. So the coup will have to wait because I worked so far backwards on this train of thought that before we even get to the actual story of the Nazi serial killer who paralyzed Larry Flint. We're going to have to talk about this book. William Luther Pierce looms large in so many stories about

white nationalism in the United States. He comes up a lot, particularly in the last few months, because I've been writing about the American Nazi Party and Pierce was an early member. He quit his job as a physicist working on jet engines for a defense contractor and moved to Virginia to work with George Lincoln Rockwell in the sixties. By the mid seventies, he'd established his own organization, National Alliance, and until his death in two thousand and two, Pierce exerted

enormous influence on the extreme right. This will not be the last time you hear about William Luther Pierce, but today we're just looking at his novels, The Turner Diaries, published in nineteen seventy eight, and Hunter in nineteen eighty nine. The Turner Diaries was originally written in a serialized format, published one chapter at a time in issues of Attack, the newsletter for his newly formed white supremacist organization, National Alliance,

from nineteen seventy five through nineteen seventy eight. Each issue of Attack contained a chunk of the story written under the pen name Andrew MacDonald in what is almost certainly a crude ripoff of Jack London's Iron Heel. The novel is presented as a series of diary entries written by

the protagonist, a man named Earl Turner. It is, as it says, Turner's Diary, and the diary is sandwich between a forward and an epilogue written by a historian who has unearthed this document one hundred years after the Great

Revolution that it describes. The found document bit recurs throughout the text, with these little parenthetical notes to the reader from the historian, helpfully providing context for readers of this ancient text, explaining things like the dollar was the basic monetary unit in the United States in the Old Era, or women's lib was a form of mass psychosis which broke out in the last three decades of the Old Era.

The historian tells us that before he became a martyr in the Revolution, Earl Turner was just a rank and file member of the Organization, a white nationalist group that was at war with the system, which is the incredibly creative name that the novel uses to refer broadly to the government, but also the media and whatever other nebulous societal forces are being controlled and weaponized by the novel's true villain, the Jews. Turner's first diary entry provides a

lot of exposition. The author probably should have found a way to work that into the history briads forward, but I'm not here to backseat drive the terrorism Bible. In that first entry, Turner is writing in nineteen ninety one, and he tells his diary that it's been two years since the co Enact outlawed ownership of guns. The system deputized armed squads of black men to carry out gun confiscation raids, rounding up and arresting thousands of white gun owners.

From there, the book follows Turner and the organization as they ramp up their terroristic activity. Turner is inducted into the secret inner circle of the organization called the Order. He's captured by the government but manages to escape, and as punishment for allowing himself to be captured alive, he's assigned a suicide mission, which he completes, thus securing his place as a martyr for the cause. Now I have to confess for all the commentary I've read a this book,

both by academics and the books fans. I'd never actually sat down and just read it like a book. I mean, I know the broad strokes, I know what's in it. I've read passages of it. I've read things referring to passages of it. I just don't read a lot of novels, and this was definitely not on my list for when I was going to sit down and read a novel. But picking through it more carefully now, it's actually very funny how much of himself Pierce reveals, probably by accident.

I think a lot of inexperienced writers, people who are trying their hand at fiction for the first time, end up spilling a lot of their own psyche into the protagonist's inner monologue. Like I said, I don't read a lot of fiction, so I don't quite have the language for this, but I think you can sort of feel it when the author hasn't actually invested in world building. They haven't built a fictional world for the story so much as they have just published their own fantasy. Do

you know what I mean? Earl Turner is afraid of all the same things Pierce is afraid of. He identifies the same solutions Pierce believes should be implemented in the real world. He hates the same people, lives in the same area, holds a similar profession, and even hides his guns the same way. Earl Turner's description of these underground weapons caches are really similar to something I read in a memoir by the ex wife of a man who

lived on Pierce's Nazi compound in the nineties. She wrote that one of the tasks the women were expected to work on when they weren't busy with their children was building these watertight containers that were used to protect the guns they buried underground. What most people know about the Turner Diaries, though, are the passages that have been fired

real life re enactments in the book. The organization's first real attack on the system was a bombing, and the book describes in great detail how the organization went about sourcing the materials for a forty four hundred pound ammonium nitrate bomb. The book describes how they assembled the bomb and how they placed the bomb in the back of the truck and then parked that truck outside of a government building, knowing it would kill hundreds of mostly innocent people.

Earl Turner's bomb went off a little after nine am outside the FBI headquarters, killing seven hundred people. When Timothy McVeigh brought those pages to life, he built a remarkably similar bomb, placed it in the back of a remarkably similar truck, and parked it outside of a federal building. A little after nine am. He killed one hundred and sixty eight people at a federal building in Oklahoma City.

After his bomb went off, Earl Turner wrote in his diary, all day yesterday and most of today, we watched the TV coverage of rescue crews bringing the dead and injured out of the building. It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear, since most of the victims of our bomb were only pawns who were no more committed to the sick philosophy or the racially destructive goals of the system than we are. But there is no way we can destroy the system without hurting many thousands

of innocent people. No way, And maybe Timothy McVeigh was thinking about that passage when he selected his target. Maybe Earl Turner's words soothed his conscience as he walked calmly away from the truck, knowing it was parked directly underneath the building's daycare center. He would later deny targeting the day care center, claiming he hadn't even known it was then everything I've read leads me to believe that's a lie. He described his victims the same way Earl Turner did.

He'd been obsessed with the novel for years before he built that bomb, and when he was arrested on the day of the bombing, police found a sealed envelope in his car. He was full of right wing political pamphlets, news clippings about the siege at Waco, and copy of the Declaration of Independence, and a photocopy of pages sixty one and sixty two of the Turner Diaries. McVeigh had underlined a passage on that page that read, in part, but the real value of all our attacks today lies

in the psychological impact, not the immediate casualties. But Timothy McVeigh wasn't the only man to take Pierce's novel as marching orders. He wasn't even the first. Pierre shrugged off questions about McVeagh, telling reporters he had no idea why a man he'd never heard of called the National Alliance hotline repeatedly in the days before the bombing, and maybe he's telling the truth. I'm sure they never met and they probably never spoke. Mcvay's relationship with Pierce was one directional.

He read the book, but there's no doubt at all that William Luther Pierce personally mentored the first man who tried to become Earl Turner, the first man who built bombs and spilled blood in the name of the Turner Diaries.

This was something they had discussed extensively ahead of time. In his later recollection of that day, you heard Pierce call the group Matthews formed a few weeks later, the Silent Brotherhood, and that was one name for it, but it's best known as the Order. In truth, Matthews didn't want to give the group a name at all, at least according to former members who spoke about its founding

after Matthews died. Giving it a name would make it easier to talk about, and he didn't want to encourage anyone to talk about what they were about to do. But if they had to call it something, he told them they should call it the Order, like the secret group within the organization in the Turner Diaries, the book

they'd all read, and just a quick aside. He probably should have just left it at the Order, and that is what they called it for the first full year, but a few months before he died, he decided it needed some kind of formal name, and I think he fell victim to a problem I see pretty often with guys like this. They love Nazi Germany, but they refused

to learn German. So when he was scrounging around trying to find a dignified and clever and properly hit Larian name for his organization, he thought of a book he'd seen on a shelf at one of the member's houses. It was a book of photographs of members of the SS and the book was called ven alla Bruderschweigen, which is a portion of a line and a poem written in eighteen fourteen by German poet Maximilian Gottfried from Schenckendorf. The phrase, in the context of the poem translates to

when all brothers are silent. But if you just pull out two words from the phrase, it doesn't really mean anything. I mean, each one of those individual words has a meaning. Ruder means brother, Schweigen means silence, But it doesn't mean silent brothers. Ruderschweigen just means brother silent. It's just two unrelated nouns. But that is what they had stamped onto the giant gold medallions that they all wore with pride. But in that recording, Pierce calls it the Silent Brotherhood, again,

a name it had only briefly. Maybe he thought that sounded more dignified. But I think the more likely explanation is that he knew calling it the Order would draw attention to the fact that he was involved, and he was trying to distance himself from what really looked like a terror cell that had been formed at his direction. At the very least, it was clearly inspired by his work, and he never did like taking credit for the actions he encouraged younger, bolder men to take. But regardless, the

names are interchangeable. The Silent Brotherhood Bruderschweigen the Order, and it was Robert Matthew's speech in nineteen eighty three that brought the Order to life.

on revolutionary action. He's proposing the formation of a group within a gree just as Earl Turner was drafted from the organization into its secret inner core the Order, and just like Earl Turner's brothers and arms did in the book, The Order funded their activities through robbery and counterfeiting. They never did get very good at counterfeiting, but they pulled in millions of dollars from a series of armored car robberies.

They bombed a movie theater and a Seneca. They planned to carry out a series of assassinations, killings that would in a direct sense, take out their perceived enemies of the white race and rid the world of these undesirable elements, but also to destabilize society to push the country closer

to an all out race war. They didn't make a lot of progress on assassinating Henry Kissinger, shooting a Rockefeller, or a rothschild or killing television producer Norman Lear, but they did shoot and kill Denver talk radio personality Alan berg. Berg was targeted not only because he was Jewish, which would have been enough on his own to earn him a spot on their list, but specifically berg had invited a pair of Christian identity preachers onto his radio show,

and he'd embarrassed them pretty badly. The whole story of the Order is something worth revisiting in greater detail. Matthews is still widely celebrated as a martyr within the movement. Although it was short lived, the Order, the one that existed in real life, really shaped the landscape of white nationalist terror for years to come. And I still haven't watched the twenty twenty four movie starring Nicholas Holt as Robert Matthews and Jude Law as the FBI agent who

tracks him down. So maybe I'll watch that and we can talk about it. I wonder now that I'm thinking about the parallels in more detail, Robert Matthews thought about Earl Turner at the end. He was holed up in a safe house on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle when the FEDS finally caught up to him, negotiations

broke down. He refused to come out. He put on a gas mask and ignored the volleys of tear gas, and he ignored the pleas of his friends and accomplices that the FBI brought to the scene to try to reason with him. He wouldn't come out. They only meant to start a small fire. They wanted to smoke him out. I really don't think they could have known the flare they fired through the broken window was going to land

in a box of hand grenades. When Robert Matthews climbed into the bathtub to seek refuge from the flames, did he imagine he was Earl Turner in the cockpit, preparing to die in the blast when he dropped a nuclear bomb on the Pentagon. How much did any of them really think about Earl Turner? And to what extent did Peers intend for the novel to motivate real world action. We can't really know. And the problem with trying to sort out anyone's motivation for anything is that people lie.

They lie to themselves, They lie to escape responsibility, They lie to create propaganda. They write fictions that glorify their martyrs and exonerate themselves and cast their enemies as villains and fools. Pierce calls it the Silent Brotherhood, because to call it the Order would be an admission that they'd

done it for him. He never admitted any involvement. He denied receiving a Duffel bag full of cash from Matthews after one of the armored car robberies, despite the obvious fact that he used that money to purchase the land that would become his Nazi compound in West Virginia. And the degree to which the Turner Diaries was truly viewed as a Bible as a manual within the group is fuzzy. Was this treated as scripture or were they being tongue in cheek when they referred to themselves using the name

of a fictional group from a novel. It depends on who you believe. Pierce himself tells different stories depending on his mood. He almost seems to delight in being impossible to pin down reading some of these old quotes. I swear you can hear him winking. In his book Gods of the Blood, Swedish historian Massius Gardel writes that quote the extent to which Matthews and the Brooders identified with the Order of the Turner Diaries in an ultimate goal

to overthrow the US government is uncertain retrospectively. In prison, Order members differed widely in their assessments of what they had intended, ranging from modest hopes of contributing financially to racist organizations to optimistic expectations of igniting an armed Aryan revolution. And for that book, Gardell was able to interview several members of the Order who were still alive to talk

about it in the late nineties. He got a different answer from every gray haired old Nazi who was willing to take his call. Gary Yarborough told him the novel was just pulp fiction. David Tates and the group mainly just wanted money, and all the other stuff was secondary. But Randy Dewey was adamant that the Turner Diaries had really been a bible, particularly for Robert Matthews. It had functioned as a blueprint for their Holy War, he said.

In a separate interview, former Order member Richard Kemp told Gardell quote, although I'm embarrassed to say that that's what we've patterned ourselves after, I think as far as the Turner Diary is being a guide, I think he was more than a guide. All our criminal activities were patterned after that, and Gardell leaves it at that their self reported motivations and beliefs varied. That seems to be true,

and that's to be expected. I think within any group there are going to be varying levels of commitment to the core tenets, right. But what sticks out to me in Gardell's book is that of the four members he was able to get an answer from, two of them were in the room the night the Order was founded. Randall Dewey and Richard Kemp were founding members, so maybe

they had a clearer idea of the original vision. Another member, Bruce Pearce, who isn't quoted in Gardell's book, was carrying a copy of the Turner Diaries on his person when he was arrested. Order member Randall Rader kept a stack of dozens of copies on hand so he could give one to anyone who visited. When new members took their oath to the group, they were presented with their own copy at a swearing in ceremony. The book obviously meant

something to them. When Timothy McVeagh went on trial, his defense team sought to downplay the significance of the novel. His lawyer argued that it was no more a blueprint for a bombing than Lady Chatterley's Lover could teach the reader how to make love. I haven't read that one, so I won't weigh in, and I don't know enough about bomb making to tell you how critical a distinction it is. That mcvay's bomb used nitromethane, which wasn't mentioned

in the novel. But as hard as mcvay's defense team tried to emphasize these little differences, it's hard to ignore the fact that he spent years obsessed with the Turner Diaries. He slept with a copy of it under his pillow, He talked to it about anyone who would listened. He recommended it to his army buddies. He gave people copies of it. He traveled the country selling it at gun shows. He cut out, copied, and annotated his favorite passages, carrying

them with him on the morning of the bombing. It wasn't just a book, It was the book. In a twenty sixteen paper for the International Center for Counter Terrorism researcher Jay M. Berger connects the text to other attacks.

In addition to the hundred and sixty eight people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, the Turner Diaries figured prominently in the motivation behind at least thirty three other murders, including the ten people killed in Germany in the early two thousands by a group called the National Socialist Underground. In one particularly grim case, we have the murderer's own words in the heat of the moment. This is a crime that I hesitate to even describe. Years ago, I

went to this cursed sounding event. It was a program put on by the diversity office of my local university's police department. They hadn't advertised the event at all, but it was open to the public, and I'm very nosy. So I was there and I was the only person there. I sat in a plastic chair and an auditorium that was meant to see hundreds, and I sobbed through a presentation from Leuvon Harris. She's the younger sister of James Byrd Junior. She came prepared with a slide show of

family pictures. Her brother, James was a mamma's boy and he loved his sisters. He played the trumpet, and he taught his sister Melinda how to play the piano. He lost two toes in a bicycle accident as a child, but he never let his limp get to him. I was nine when James Bird was murdered. I lived in Texas at the time, and I remember seeing it on

the news, reading the details of his death again. Now, I'm so grateful to his sister for keeping part of him alive, because if I have to tell you how he died, at least now you know too that he played the piano at his family reunion and his mom taught Sunday school. On the day James Bird died, he accepted a ride from a truck that passed him as

he was walking home. But instead of taking him home, three white men drove him out to the middle of nowhere and they beat him until he appeared to lose consciousness. And as he's lying there in the dirt, one of the men, Sean Berry, asked if they were just going to leave him there, and John William King replied, we're starting. And the Turner diaries early as he pulled a heavy chain out of the bed of his truck and attached

it to bird's ankles. He was making a joke. He was about to drag a man to death, and he was making a joke. He was so deeply immersed in the world of the Turner Diaries that it didn't require any explanation. That's all he said. It was a reference ready at hand. It was understood what he meant. He was going to lynch this black man, just like the

heroes in the novel would have done. When David Copeland confessed to the nineteen ninety nine London nail bombings, a series of attacks that killed three and wounded one hundred and forty others, he told the police, if you've read the Turner Diaries, you know the year two thousand, they'll be uprising. And all that racial violence in the streets Miam was political. It was to cause a racial war this country, beginning with the Order in nineteen eighty four

through this paper's publication date in twenty sixteen. Burger attributes over two hundred deaths to the Turner Diaries. And in that paper he wrote, quote, the Turner Diaries does not attempt to persuade readers that they should be racist. Rather, it assumes readers have already made an identity choice. Instead, it seeks to persuade readers that imminent violent action is a rational choice. And that's such an interesting point that

I don't think would have occurred to me. It's racist propaganda, but it's not propaganda aimed at making you racist, which is what most racist propaganda is. Burger argues that the novel has no actual ideological framework in that regard. I mean, it's racist, right, grotesquely, so violently, nauseatingly graphically racist, but that's just sort of a given. It doesn't actually say why. Earl Turner doesn't tell you why he hates. He just does,

and he assumes you do too. The goal of the propaganda is not to get you to be racist, it's to convince you that you should do violence about it. So much of Pierce's other work is densely packed with

these explanations and rationales and flawed historical analyzes. And when you read Christian identity texts, for example, they twist themselves into these theological knots explaining why black people aren't really human, and they offer pages of biblical interpretation trying to force a single word to explain their theory of the racist universe. But Earl Turner doesn't do that. The reader brings his own ideological baggage to the book, and it fills in

those gaps seamlessly. Earl Turner doesn't have to tell you why you hate black people. He just explains how to build the bomb. The question of how much blame a book can truly bear for the actions of its readers is a thorny one. But if any book can be said to have motivated any action, if that's a possibility you're willing to consider, then this book has a body count in the hundreds. The degree to which different scholars are willing to place that blame varies, but most agree

there's blame to be had. There may be other holdouts. But in my research this week I came across two authors in particular, who seem to take Pierce's word for it when he says the book was never meant to cause real world violence. One of them, I think we can discount right off the bat. Robert S. Griffin, a professor of education at the University of Vermont, wrote the

Authorized Biography of William Luther Pierce. A self published book called The Fame of a dead man's deeds, and Griffin holds himself out as an unbiased observer, a scholar who's interested in the subject but doesn't support Pierce's cause. He called the book a work of cultural anthropology. Whether or not he was racist before he spent a month interviewing Pierce on his Nazi compound, I couldn't tell you, but

he certainly was. Afterwards. Heidi Birich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center at the time, outright called Griffin a neo Nazi, and I'm inclined to agree. All of his published work prior to the year two thousand was about education, that's his field of study. But after he self published this Nazis biography, he mostly wrote about white nationalist topics. A later collection of essays called Living White, featured pieces with titles like Rearing Honorable White Children and

Reading Rockwell. Reviews of his biography of Pierce call it a hasiography, an obsequious, fawning, one sided justification of Pierce's beliefs, and that's not one person's review. Each one of those descriptions is from a different, damning review, and it is regrettably one of the most thorough accounts of Pierce's life. It is a rich text. I have actually consulted it frequently over the last few months, but you can't trust it any more than you would trust something written by

Pierce himself. The author never questions, never contradicts, never fact checks or pushes back. He may as well have just ghostwritten Pierce's autobiography. There are whole chapters where every word is in between quotation marks. In the book, Pierce tells Griffin that The Turner Diaries was just a novel. It was a work of pure fiction. It can't be interpreted

as any form of advocacy. But Pierce also gave an interview to Matius Gardel that same year, and when he spoke with Gardell, Pierce readily admitted that he understood his novels to be a way to teach people, to get them to see the world through the eyes of the protagonist as he makes decisions or solves a problem, so that the reader can experience that thought process and be carried along with the character and be made to see

things the way the character sees them. And that's why I have so much trouble trusting the academic papers on the subject authored by a political scientist named George Michael, citing Griffin's book, which he calls quote excellent, Michael laments that there remains so much confusion among academics about where Pierce truly stood on the topic of terrorism, writing quote Much has been made about Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries. It is frequently referred to as a blueprint for revolution

and the bible of the racialist right. Despite these characterizations, there is really little practical advice for would be revolutionaries that can be gleaned from the book.

not be that particular bomb. In a footnote in one of Michael's papers, he claims the documentary evidence does not support the idea that Pierce believed there was value in revolutionary violence, citing in support only a dismissive comment Pierce once made about James Mason, the author of siege. Michael doesn't bother to mention at this juncture that Pierce had been Mason's mentor that siege really only exists because Pierce

took Mason under his wing as a teenager. He may be half right, though, I think William Luther Pierce got smarter as he got older. He got more cautious. He stopped admitting that he supported terrorism, he stopped calling for

it in public in his own published writing. But I'm not sure a man who was an arms dealer, who built bombs in his basement, and was for decades the leader of a neo Nazi organization linked to so many acts of terrorism, is someone we can trust to answer honestly when asked in public how much he enjoys the terrorism committed in his name. But Pierce has been dead for twenty five years, so I guess we can agree

to disagree. In another article, Michael dismisses the idea that the Turner Diaries was intended as a blueprint for violence. The evidence provided in the paper is a page long direct quote from Pierce, taken from an interview with the author. It was Pierce's response to being asked if he wrote the novel as a blueprint for violence. Pierce's answer is long and rambling, and it's mostly not actually an answer

to the question at all. But at the end of what is and I cannot emphasize this enough a full page long quote in an article that is only eighteen pages long, Pierce says it was not intended from the start to be anything except an experiment in getting people to absorb ideas through this recreational reading. They won't read a serious head tooral or a serious historical feature. They will read an adventure story. So you slip the ideas

into the adventure story. In the dialogue, and Michael apparently interprets this answer as support for his thesis that the book is just a story and not a blueprint for violence. But what does Pierce actually say. It's long, and it's easy to get lost, But what is he saying. He says it was an experiment in getting people to absorb ideas. They won't read an editorial, they won't read philosophy or history, but they'll read an adventure story. So he slipped the

ideas into the adventure story. He doesn't say what those ideas are, but we read the book, we know what those ideas are He's talking about hiding the message inside a fictional dialogue like you'd hide a dog's pill and a piece of cheese. So he's admitting that it isn't just cheese, it isn't just a story. And the ideas being smuggled into the reader's head are the ones that form this blueprint of violence. The ideas he's talking about are ideas for different kinds of violence that you should do.

He's shaking his head no, but he's saying yes. And this is why you can't take a Nazi at his word. So it should come as no surprise that both of these authors, Pierce's biographer Robert S. Griffin and this political scientist George Michael, they both credulously repeat Pierce's denial that the protagonist in his second novel is based on a real person. Now, part of the slipperiness of Pierce's own accounting of events is that his approach genuinely did shift

over time. He was a leading voice in the movement for more than forty years. He had to adapt to the political landscape around him. His core value remained relatively stable, but he matured and his rhetorical strategies changed. Robert Matthews may have been Earl Turner, but Earl turners martyrdom brought about the White Revolution, and Robert Matthews burnt to a crisp piing in a bathtub. The other members of the

Order went to prison. They may be sometimes remembered as heroes and martyrs and proud Aryan warriors or whatever, But there was no revolution. There was no White utopia afterwards, and Pierce himself was never charged with a crime, but he was under investigation for years. Members of the Order went on trial. The FBI and the ATF raided a compound belonging to the Covenant the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, a group with connections to members of

the Order. The investigation into the crimes of the Order and the alleged plot by members of the Covenant the Sword in the Arm of the Lord to poison the water supply with cyanide led two sedition charges against fourteen leaders from all across the movement. Those cases all fell apart, and Pierce himself was never actually charged, and a couple of people went to prison for things like murdering a cop.

But it was a tense time and there was a very real possibility in the mid to late eighties that the government would connect Pierce to an act of terrorism, and I think that explains why his second novel was so different. Hunter wasn't published until nineteen eighty nine, but he told his own biographer that he started working on it in nineteen eighty four. He didn't elaborate on that, but it's not hard to imagine. Right in nineteen eighty four,

members of the Order are getting rounded up. Matthews died, Pierce took the cash that he'd gotten from the armored truck robbery and bought a massive tract of undeveloped land and the mountains of West Virginia. His protege had failed, and he retreated to the hills to reflect on the need for tactical changes in the wake of this government crackdown. In his doctoral dissertation, extremism scholar Jeffrey Kaplan suggested that the world of the Turner Diaries is one where a

mass revolutionary movement can successfully bring about a revolution. The hero dies, but the movement prevails, and the narrator tells you that there was a white utopia on the other side. But after the failure of the order in real life. He's trying to find his footing in this new political landscape, so he writes a story modeled after the newly popular idea of leaderless resistance, a lone gunman who can't trust anyone.

There's no martyrdom, no victory, no utopia, just violence. Hunter tells the story of Oscar Jeger, a lone wolf killer on a mission to murder inter racial couples. The novel was dedicated to a man named Joseph Paul Franklin, and he wrote on the dedication page quote to Joseph Paul Franklin, the lone hunter who saw his duty as a white man and did what a responsible son of his race must do. Between nineteen seventy seven and nineteen eighty, Joseph

Paul Franklin murdered more than twenty people. He targeted, mainly in a racial couples, but he also shot civil rights activists Rob Banks, and bombed a synagogue. Despite putting Franklin's name on the dedication page, Pierce flatly denied that he'd based the character on Franklin. His credulous biographer didn't press the issue. Griffin didn't ask why the novel opens with a double murder that perfectly mirrors one that Franklin committed in real life, and he doesn't even mention that Pierce

knew him. We'll pick back up next week with the true true story that inspired William Luther Pierce's second novel, starting in a bus station parking lot where a budding serial killer first met a teenage Don Black while they waited for David Duke to pick them up in his dad's car. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Ally Coner. Our executive producers are Sophie Lettreman and

Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Blue Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer. It is nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guy subrenet. It just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little guys,

and honestly, don't read the Turner Diaries. It's not worth it. Do something fun.