The Turner Diaries, chapter 23: the storm is upon us

[image credit: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP]

(A note because this is going up unlocked: this is about the fucking Turner Diaries. It deals with some ugly shit, although I’ve tried to minimize how explicit the ugliness gets. Proceed with care.)

Well, here we are.

“The Day of the Rope” is probably the climactic event this book is best known for. It’s certainly one of the most memeable parts, which is why you see it all over the fucking place—or you do if you pay attention to at least rightward-leaning conspiracy theorists. It gets thrown around a lot, and I think sometimes the people doing the throwing may not know precisely where it comes from. But now you know, if you didn’t already: When you see someone using that phrase, it is violent hate speech derived from violent hate speech.

I’m honestly not sure how to organize my thoughts on this chapter, because out of all the chapters we’ve covered so far, not only is this the most immediately relevant, but it’s also in many ways the purest and most on-the-nose expression of this ideology, what it values and wants and believes is desirable, and for that reason it provides some of the most piercing (no pun intended) examples of why it’s so presently dangerous and how easy it is for a lot of it to fly under the radar.

I’ll go through the chapter in more detail, but basically: the Day of the Rope, which Earl is describing after the fact, is when the Org’s troops go out into the community with a list of names of “mongrels” and race traitors, break down doors and drag people into the street and hang them in public.

It is terrorism, obviously, but of a very particular kind, and of a kind we’ve seen in real life before now. Instances of sudden genocidal mass killing like the Rwandan genocide come to mind, but even more, events like Kristallnacht—very public, theatrical displays of raw political power in the form of violence that signals the dominance of the fascist regime, what the regime stands for and who it stands against, and what people can expect if they don’t fall in line.

But it does more than that. There are four further aspects at work.

• A) It invites members of the public to explicitly identify themselves with the in-group (who the fuck would want to be in the out-group, look what’s happening to them). It sends the message that this kind of terror is not only acceptable but is in fact how you make yourself safe. So:
• B) It invites those in-group members to solidify their place in that group by participating in the violence, reinforcing the notion that what you do is a major signal regarding who you are (and on the DotR, white people who are not Org soldiers do indeed eventually do some killing of their own).
• C) It provides a larger permission structure to engage in this kind of solidarity-through-violence as a matter of course, especially for people who wanted to do it anyway.
• D) It prepares the public mind for the political violence yet to come.

I don’t say that there’s no Final Solution without Kristallnacht, but I do say it directly helped make it unfold in the way it did.

Have we seen anything remotely like this happening? Recently? In the last few months? Anything at all?

Now, the insurrection of January 6th is not at all the same thing as Kristallnacht—for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is that it wasn’t violence directed at a specific ethnic group. It was not a pogrom. But it was unquestionably organized political violence, it was done in public for a specific signaling purpose, and it took place with at least the tacit support of the regime if not at its explicit direction.

And if not is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

This interview with historian Katherine Belew deals in more detail with how this book is directly connected to what happened on 1/6.

The thing about the Day of the Rope—and 1/6—is that these are not isolated incidents and they not meant to be. Again, they’re messages about how things are going to work going forward. Earl talks about this like it’s a one-off; he calls it “a grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one” and speaks of it in implied terms of a singular purge that mostly gets the job done in one go, noting that the night of the Day is the first peaceful night in the occupied zone since the Org took over. But of course things like this never happen only once, and as with Kristallnacht, the Day of the Rope is only a prelude to the much larger genocide yet to come.

But I want to talk for a sec about what the Day of the Rope actually is in fictional terms—the role it’s serving in this narrative. Because it is first and foremost a revenge fantasy.

(I say “revenge” only because that’s what the fantasists imagine it is, as part of their own victimhood self-narrative; they are the oppressed group getting revenge on their brutal oppressors.)

Which means it’s time to talk—again—about QAnon.

The QAnon version of the Day of the Rope is “the Storm”, which at its most basic level is an event defined by mass arrests of Cabal members followed in many cases by public executions. It’s been connected (including by congressnightmare Marjorie Taylor Greene) to the MAGA phrase “drain the swamp”. It’s an event greatly anticipated and deeply longed for by QAnon cultists, and indeed it’s sometimes actually referred to as the Day of the Rope.

Because it’s essentially a fascist fantasy, and QAnon is essentially a fascist cult/movement.

But my point is that adherents long for the Storm not because they, like Earl Turner and indeed some actual real-life Nazis (so they claim, more on this shortly), view it as an unpleasant but necessary stop along the way to the glorious Great Awakening (Earl actually expresses horror and disgust at some of what he witnesses, which: shut the fuck up, Earl). They long for it because they want to see people they don’t like suffer and die for their satisfaction. It’s often talked about as a desire to see justice done, but it really isn’t; it’s political sadism. The cruelty, as Adam Serwer has famously written, is the point.

It’s also, like I said, a revenge fantasy. It’s easy to misunderstand this part of it, because if you’re not super familiar with the QAnon ideology and cosmology, you’d think that the victims here are the children being tortured for their adrenochrome. But the thing about QAnon and the shadowy Satanic baby-eating Cabal—one of the things that makes QAnon so attractive for angry confused people looking to make sense of an increasingly chaotic world—is that the Cabal is the boogeyman responsible for everything bad in your life: Your financial woes, your health care problems, your career struggles, and virtually any other issue you care to toss in there. You really see this when you look at what Anons envision the post-Awakening world to be; it’s a veritable golden age, a return to a fantastical prelapsarian state of being where all people live in peace and harmony and prosperity.

Except for all the people who got murdered in public. They don’t get to come along. Indeed, the golden age is possible only because those people were (publicly) murdered.

Again, this sort of fantasy is in many respects one of the core essences of fascism. A victimhood self-narrative, an easily identified and cartoonishly evil enemy, and the promise that once that enemy is disposed of—which involves the permanent suspension of any meaningful notion of human rights or due process—everything will be great and fine forever after.

Here’s the big problem with this and QAnon, though: the Storm—for all that Anons have insisted it’s “upon us”—has not actually arrived. Hillary Clinton has not been executed on TV. Trump is out of power—for now—and Joe Biden has indeed been sworn in as president. Q themself has gone quiet (and given that it’s been all but established in Cullen Hoback’s documentary Q: Into the Storm that Q is Ron Watkins, I wouldn’t be surprised if we never heard from Q again). 1/6 was a moment of extraordinary rupture and trauma, but it was not the Storm. QAnon has historically been a sort of slacktivist “movement”, full of invitations to “trust the plan” and “sit back and enjoy the show” and popcorn emojis. But that’s not the case anymore, and now there are an increasing number of Anons who are starting to believe that perhaps they were the Plan all along, and if the Storm is going to happen—and the Great Awakening cannot happen without the Storm—they’re going to have to be the ones to bring it about.

Some of these people are in elected office at this moment, on all levels. More will almost certainly be coming. This is what we’re up against in 2022 and 2024, and incidentally, this is additionally why I’m way more nervous now than I was in four years of a Trump presidency.

I also want to take a second here to talk about right wing Christian eschatology.

I’m guessing that most of the people reading this are at least vaguely familiar with the concept of the Rapture. It’s a genuinely weird bit of theology supported by virtually nothing in canonical Christian scripture, but the important thing for my purposes isn’t the Rapture itself but what comes after the Rapture and the years of Tribulation during which the Antichrist will establish a dystopian kingdom on Earth. I’m speaking of the time when a tyrannical Jesus Christ will return to basically murder and condemn to eternal torture all the people who didn’t get with the program.

It’s worth noting that this includes all Jews who refuse to convert. There’s a reason why Evangelical Christians in America support the state of Israel, and their dirty little open secret is that it isn’t that they particularly like Jews.

This is, first and foremost, a Christian—really a Christofascist—revenge fantasy very much in line with the Storm—not just because people they don’t like (and imagine are oppressing them) will get their comeuppance, but because those people will also have to admit that they were wrong the whole time. The Storm/Great Awakening narrative works very much along the same lines; once the American—and indeed the global—public sees the evil of the Cabal exposed, they’ll fall instantly in line behind Donald Trump, and all the Anons who have been indefinitely disinvited from family gatherings will spend weeks fielding groveling phone calls and emails from relatives and friends telling them how right they were and apologizing for having gotten it so wrong.

It’s actually a deeply perverse but wholly recognizable version of the Kingdom of Heaven as described by Jesus in the Gospels. It’s just that the profoundly celebratory images and language about radically inclusive reconciliation between God and humanity have been replaced by sadism and spite. Sure, we can let bygones be bygones—after you say you were wrong and you’re sorry about it, and also after a bunch of people which category may include you suffer for our pleasure.

So what is my point here? Because I know it might seem like I’ve gone a bit afield.

My point is that the basic framework of the Day of the Rope—its premises and psychology and emotional pathology—is far from being fringe ideology; it is knitted into the political fabric of the United States and is the driving force behind a great deal of what’s happening today. And has in the past been part and parcel of some of history’s most terrible atrocities.

My point is also that no matter how “grim” Earl claims to find it, no matter how disturbed he claims to be regarding Org paramilitary beating prisoners before executing them (Earl gets into a thing with a captain over it, because Earl has Morals), Pierce himself clearly exults in this scenario, and so do racist extremists everywhere. This book is a right wing accelerationist Bible, and the whole premise of accelerationism is that political violence is not only necessary but desirable and admirable.

Like I mentioned above, there’s a lot of precedent for this sort of weird inconsistency in attitudes toward mass killing; many of the Nazis intimately involved in the Final Solution at least claimed to regard it as a nasty, regrettable business best completed as quickly and efficiently and above all as secretly as possible, at the same time as others—sometimes in the same room at the same time—were declaring themselves and others heroes who should be lauded for selflessly taking on a glorious mission in defense of the fatherland. This inconsistency was not a problem; it was a matter of personal convenience. Things like the Day of the Rope and the Storm and the eschatology of Evangelical premillennial dispensationalists put the lie to this kind of performative squeamishness.

Right wing politics fetishizes violence and takes outright pleasure in it. It longs for it.

This is the bedrock of the contemporary Republican party and the heritage of a significant portion of American politics. This is why we can’t afford to ignore it, and why we should anticipate 1/6 as only the beginning of something far more dangerous. When me and DHS agree on something, you know we’re in dire straits.

So let’s talk about the chapter in a little more detail, because there are some points worth calling attention to.

First, I want to mention an important feature that might have gotten lost in this lengthy introductory exegesis, which is that while People of Color certainly get massacred, the Day of the Rope in terms of public displays of violence is reserved largely for race traitors. Further, white men are hung with signs reading “I betrayed my race”, while white women are given signs reading “I defiled my race”.

That’s an important word. Defiled.

The key thing to note here is that “betrayal” in this context is explicitly gendered in a manner that mixes racism with misogynistic combined sexual anxiety and fetishism in a noxious pattern we’ve seen throughout. Mere betrayal is reserved for policy and cultural transgressions, while feminized betrayal is sexual in nature and therefore wrapped up in notions of purity. We’ve gotten to the point where it feels gross to directly quote any of this fucking book, but I feel like this bit should speak for itself:

There are many thousands of hanging female corpses like that in this city tonight, all wearing identical placards around their necks. They are the White women who were married to or living with Blacks, with Jews, or with other non-White males.

There are also a number of men wearing the l-defiled-my-race placard, but the women easily outnumber them seven or eight to one. On the other hand, about ninety per cent of the corpses with the I-betrayed-my-race placards are men, and overall the sexes seem to be roughly balanced. Those wearing the latter placards are the politicians, the lawyers, the businessmen, the TV newscasters, the newspaper reporters and editors, the judges, the teachers, the school officials, the "civic leaders," the bureaucrats, the preachers, and all the others who, for reasons of career or status or votes or whatever, helped promote or implement the System's racial program. The System had already paid them their 30 pieces of silver. Today we paid them.

“30 pieces of silver”. Of course.

There’s a good bit to unpack here, but I want to call attention to one particular implicit assumption, which is that men do shit and women exist primarily in order to have sex and reproduce the (pure) race. The only thing of any real lasting meaning that women can do in this worldview is to have sex, that sex is primarily reproductive in nature, and they can do the sex with the right people or with the wrong people without any room in between. Actions and identity are inextricably linked to the point of conflation (remember that the rightness or lack thereof of an act is determined solely by who is doing it and who they’re doing it to), so if you do the sex with the wrong people then you are wrong and bad. You have done an impure thing and are therefore impure in a sense that verges on the religious. You must be cleansed with violence.

I really can’t emphasize enough the importance of this. People who track the contemporary extremist right wing have written entire books about how the extravagantly misogynist—and therefore also gender reductionist—“men’s rights” segment of the online right acts as a direct radicalization pipeline into hardcore racist groups. Hang out among incels (on second thought, don’t) and you won’t have to do so for very long before you start running into racial slurs and thinly veiled blood libel.

But as I’ve done multiple times, I also want to note the bizarre and deeply unsettling prurient side to this, the fetishization of racialized female purity and the sense that for people like this, white women doing something so transgressive as to have sex with anyone who isn’t white or—good lord—is Jewish is somehow hot in a really dirty way.

You still have to lynch them for it, but it’s kinda hot.

Let’s (God, please) move on.

At one point during the argument about how unseemly and un-white it is to abuse the people you’re publicly executing without trial, Earl/Pierce doesn’t miss the chance to be both homophobic and weirdly… old? I dunno, he just talks like a racist WWII Generation grandfather here:

I really couldn't counter either of the captain's arguments, but I did note with some satisfaction that when he turned away from me he strode angrily over to a group of soldiers who were brutally pistol-whipping a long-haired, effeminate-looking youth in an outlandishly "mod" getup-a popular "rock" performer- and ordered them to stop.

Like… “mod” and “rock”. This was written in 1978 and is supposed to be taking place in the early 1990s. I know fashion trends often cycle through decades as waves of nostalgia and counter-nostalgia shift, but come on.

Earl also has some more general social commentary regarding the way the Org compiled their “arrest lists”, and who they decided would be on it and why:

For example, a White family might have a dossier as race criminals because a neighbor had once observed a Black attending a cocktail party at their home or because they displayed one of the "Equality Now" bumper stickers, which have been distributed so widely by the Human Relations Councils. In general, unless there was also other evidence in a particular dossier, these people were not put on the arrest list. Otherwise, we'd have had to hang better than 10 per cent of the White population-an entirely impractical task.

He goes on to talk about the “moral weakness” of most of the white population, and reveals a lot about what Pierce and people who share his ideology think about how society actually works:

When good men are the rulers and the program-makers for a society, the population as a whole will reflect this, and people with no originality or moral sense of direction of their own will nevertheless fervently support the highest aims of their society. But when evil men rule, as has been the case in America for many years now, most of the population will wallow happily in degeneracy of the worst kind and will self-righteously parrot every filthy and destructive idea that they have been taught.

In explicit terms, this is one of the less hateful passages one might run across in this book. In a deeper sense, its sheer nihilistic fascism shouldn’t be mistaken. There is absolutely no room for any form of democracy in this worldview, because people cannot be trusted to rule themselves. It’s strange and interesting, when you dig right down to it, just how much people like Pierce actually hate other white people, for the very simple reason that they hate people, period. That’s the thing about hating people in this way: it tends to creep outward and infect your feelings toward people who aren’t technically in the hated category, because those people are not as hateful as you are, and in the end you look at everyone, even the people who ostensibly agree with you, even yourself, in the worst possible light.

You are, as C.S. Lewis wrote, “fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred”.

Finally, while I agree with dril that you do not under any circumstances gotta hand it to them, out of desperation to identify anything that doesn’t make me tired and depressed I want to note that Pierce does actually succeed in accidentally writing a fairly decent—if not super original—bit of horror at the beginning of the chapter:

In the areas to which we have not yet restored electrical power the corpses are less visible, but the feeling of horror in the air there is even worse than in the lighted areas. I had to walk through a two-block-long, unlighted residential section between HQ and my living quarters after our unit meeting tonight. In the middle of one of the unlighted blocks I saw what appeared to be a person standing on the sidewalk directly in front of me. As I approached the silent figure, whose features were hidden in the shadow of a large tree overhanging the sidewalk, it remained motionless, blocking my way.

Feeling some apprehension, I slipped my pistol out of its holster. Then, when I was within a dozen feet of the figure, which had been facing away from me,began turning slowly toward me. There was something indescribably eerie about the movement, and I stopped in my tracks as the figure continued to turn. A slight breeze rustled the foliage overhead, and suddenly a beam of moonlight broke through the leaves and fell directly on the silently turning shape before me.

If only it was a passage written by a completely different person, in a completely different book, in a completely different context, ideally in a completely different and less dismal universe.