What to Do With the Most Dangerous Book in America

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Recently, I was invited to the Dalkey Book Festival, in Ireland, to speak at a session titled “Books That Changed the World.” I assumed that, as a Shakespeare scholar, I was expected to talk about the global impact of the   First Folio . Instead, frightened by what has been happening in America, I decided to choose a book that is changing the world   right now . For that, I turned to a 1978 novel I had long heard of but never read:   The Turner Diaries , by William Luther Pierce, a physicist and the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

I knew that that the novel had once served as a deadly template for domestic terrorists such as   Timothy McVeigh , who drew from its pages when he planned the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, and Robert Jay Mathews, whose white-supremacist gang took its name, the Order, from the novel; a member of the Order killed the Jewish radio host   Alan Berg . I also knew that it had inspired John William King, part of a group that dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, to death behind a pickup truck. As King shackled Byrd to the vehicle, he was reported to have said, “We’re going to start   The Turner Diaries   early.”

The book is a vile, racist fantasy culminating in genocide, but it isn’t just a how-to manual for homegrown terrorists. What has been labeled the “bible of the racist right” has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before. Literature can be mind opening, but it can also be corrosive, and there is no exaggeration in saying that   The Turner Diaries   and books like it have played a part in spreading hateful ideas that now even influence government policy.

Seeking a copy online, I was led directly to Amazon. I was surprised to find the book available on that site, which had reportedly   stopped selling it   after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Before then, according to a   New York Times   article about the ban, Amazon had marketed the book alongside a warning identifying it as “a racist, white supremacist fantasy.” Amazon had justified the sale of what it acknowledged to be an “infamous work”—one that has now reportedly sold as many as half a million copies—because of the novel’s “historical significance and educational role in the understanding and prevention of racism and acts of terrorism.” I found that to be a sound policy; I would no more ban offensive books, which need to be studied and analyzed, than I would prevent scientists from investigating infectious pathogens.

It was only after reading the novel that I fully grasped why Amazon had previously decided to remove it from its site after a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol.  Proud Boys  had helped organize and lead that assault, encouraged a few months earlier when Trump was asked during a presidential debate to condemn the group and replied: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!” The month before the January 6 attack, in a livestreamed video, Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader, described government officials as “evil scum” who “deserved to die a traitor’s death”—to which another leader, Ethan Nordean, replied, “Yup, Day of the Rope.” That was the name that Pierce gave, in  The Turner Diaries , to the day when enemies are lynched, “a grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one” orchestrated in hopes of “straightening out the majority of the population and reorienting their thinking.” The appearance on January 6 of a gallows with a noose hanging from it outside the Capitol visually reinforced the allusion to that defining moment in the novel. Biggs and Nordean  were later sentenced  for their roles in the assault to 17 and 18 years in prison, respectively. ( Trump commuted  their sentences.)

The Turner Diaries  tells the story of Earl Turner, who, in the closing years of the 20th century, participates in a revolution that begins as a race war in the United States and results in the annihilation of nonwhite people (and those aligned with them) from the planet. It is told through a series of diary entries that Turner makes from September 16, 1991, to November 9, 1993, the day he pilots an airplane into the Pentagon in a suicide mission. July 19, 1993, is an especially exciting day for him, as Turner witnesses “what surely must be one of the biggest mass migrations in history,” the evacuation of Black people, Latinos, and immigrants at “a rate of better than a million a day.” Once nonwhite people are gone, he writes, the “air seems cleaner, the sun brighter, life more joyous.”

The diary entries are framed by a foreword and an epilogue, said to have been written in 2099 and reflecting back on these world-changing events. The novel, which is horrifying and heartless, slowly acclimates readers to greater levels of violence and hatred, with healthy doses of propaganda justifying large-scale murder. Black people are depicted as rapists and cannibals, Jews as rapacious and controlling, and white people who believe in a multicultural society as race traitors who also deserve to die.

I purchased the $30 paperback, now in its third edition, the first to be published under William Pierce’s name rather than his pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald. The book was   advertised on Amazon , shockingly, as a “futuristic action-adventure novel.” The pitch for the book had gotten a thorough makeover, the stain of extremist violence whitewashed by a seemingly innocent, policy-based appeal. Amazon no longer warned customers that   The Turner Diaries   was infamous; it offered only the publisher’s description of the novel as one “that warns us of how American society might unravel if the immigration and racial policies being pursued then—which are being pursued to an even greater extent today—were allowed to continue.” This language, which existed on sales pages before January 6, also appears on other sites where the book has remained available online, including Books-A-Million and Bookshop.org.

On Amazon, the book’s publisher, which is presumably the creator of the alarming description, was listed as the innocuous-sounding Cosmotheist Books. A search for the publisher leads to the National Alliance, which invites new members committed to “a thorough rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values.” Amazon was sharing profits from the book with a neo-Nazi organization, one that I was now indirectly funding.

That the book had appeared for sale again on Amazon now that Trump is president again didn’t strike me as all that surprising. The start of Trump’s second term calls to mind familiar themes from the novel. I am not suggesting that the president or those in his immediate circle have read it—only that the book, now in circulation for roughly half a century, has informed the thinking of people who yearn to “make America great again” by expelling immigrants and appealing to white grievances. In  The Turner Diaries , those who have governed America are blamed for granting “automatic citizenship to everyone who had managed to sneak across the Mexican border,” and liberalism is derided as “an essentially feminine, submissive world view.” Anger is also directed at the mainstream media: “One day we will have a truly American press in this country, but a lot of editors’ throats will have to be cut first.” When the current Trump administration  reportedly pushed out  two Black military leaders, General Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Lieutenant General Telita Crosland, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s broader calls to  rid the armed forces of DEI , I couldn’t help thinking of Turner’s lament that the U.S. Army was more than 40 percent Black, and that “the day will come when we must make our move inside the military.”

Read: White supremacy’s gateway to the American mind

In May, Trump invited   white South African refugees   to America. When asked by a journalist why he had done so, he repeated the sort of discredited claims of white genocide that fill the pages of   The Turner Diaries , while blaming the press for covering it up: “It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about.” (South Africa does have a   very high murder rate , but overwhelmingly, the victims are Black.) The roundups and expulsions in the novel rhyme with the Trump administration’s error-prone but unapologetic deportation strategy. Some purges in   The Turner Diaries   are based on mistaken identities and false accusations, but “there was no admitting to the possibility of mistakes”; acting with “arbitrariness and unpredictability” was part of the plan. On June 15, Trump posted on Truth Social words that echo the novel’s xenophobic rhetoric: “We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities” to “reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.”

It may be a coincidence that the Los Angeles metropolitan area, to which Trump has   deployed Marines and the National Guard , is the site deliberately chosen in the novel to trigger the violent clashes that foment militarization in the country. I would be interested to know whether Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser responsible for overseeing the recent harsh immigration roundups in Los Angeles, has read Pierce’s novel; we do know that he   sent emails to   Breitbart News   recommending Jean Raspail’s 1973   The Camp of the Saints , a novel that   the   Southern Poverty Law Center   has called “a sort of anti-immigration analog to   The Turner Diaries. ” The center’s website still warns about the dangers of both books.

Recently, I went back to Amazon, only to discover that   The Turner Diaries   had disappeared: By early June, the site had erased all traces of the novel. The title had even vanished from my browsing history. I reached out to Amazon; a spokesperson referred me to content guidelines prohibiting the promotion of “hate speech” and confirmed that the title had been discovered and removed. What they wouldn’t tell me is why it had been briefly available, even on Amazon’s sites in Germany and Canada, countries where   The Turner Diaries   has been banned. I wondered whether the books’ appearance was a subversive act by an employee who holds extremist sympathies, or was perhaps authorized by someone who had seen Amazon’s CEO,   Jeff Bezos , squelch the endorsement of Kamala Harris in   The Washington Post   (which he owns) and donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. But this is speculation. What is badly needed is transparency.   The Turner Diaries   may remain invisible to many Americans, but its effect on what is happening in the country today is plain to see.