God, Guns, And Sedition: FAR-RIGHT TERRORISM IN AMERICA By Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware - Part 1

We are no longer trying to destroy the System directly, but are now concentrating on undermining the general public’s support for the System. —Earl Turner, in The Turner Diaries

By the end of Obama’s first term in office, for example, the number of anti-government militias and other so-called Patriot groups active in the United States surpassed the previous peak of 858 in 1996 to reach a new high of 1,360. Most notably, 2009 saw the formation of the Oath Keepers, a nationwide militia dedicated to defending its own distorted interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the Three Percenters...

...the Oath Keepers pledge to fulfill the oath all military and police take to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” That oath, mandated by Article VI of the Constitution itself, is to the Constitution, not to the politicians, and Oath Keepers declare that they will not obey unconstitutional orders, such as orders to disarm the American people, to conduct warrantless searches, or to detain Americans as “enemy combatants” in violation of their ancient right to jury trial. By prioritizing the recruitment of active duty, reservist, and National Guard personnel and others with prior military service, the Oath Keepers sought to position themselves as the “tip of the spear” should the U.S. government ever deploy the country’s bona fide military to curtail individual civil liberties in violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. Reminiscent of many of the anti-government movements that emerged in the decades following America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, these new militia organizations grew both in number and threat as a result of the influx of individuals with recent combat and relevant communications and logistical experience acquired in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the journalist and activist David Neiwert observed about the newly formed Oath Keepers, “suddenly, as more veterans and people with serious training in the handling of arms came on board, these militia training exercises transformed from the often-bumbling comedies of errors that typified pre–Tea Party militia activities to serious training sessions with deadly intent.” The Oath Keepers’ efforts to establish themselves as a protective force against perceived tyranny were reminiscent of al-Qaeda’s own attempts to create an elite vanguard of Muslims to defend the global ummah against the West.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-additional-oath-keepers-sentenced-seditious-conspiracy-related-us-capitol-breach

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/four-members-oath-keepers-sentenced-roles-jan-6-capitol-breach

Now Reading Book by E. Jean Carroll

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September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years of talking—and nothing but talking—we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words. —Earl Turner, in The Turner Diaries Over the past four decades, advertisements for The Turner Diaries have repeatedly asked an apocalyptic question: “What will you do when they come to take your guns?” Its author, however, was not simply a zealous exponent of Second Amendment rights. Rather, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the hate-monitoring organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, as founder and leader of the National Alliance—“a group whose members included terrorists, bank robbers and would-be bombers”—William Luther Pierce was “America’s most important neo-Nazi for some three decades until his death in 2002” and “the movement’s fiercest anti-semitic ideologue.” Defying the prevailing stereotype of American white supremacists as crude country bumpkins or uneducated “rednecks,” Pierce graduated from Houston’s prestigious Rice University in 1955 and subsequently worked at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory before studying at Caltech and obtaining his doctorate in physics from the University of Colorado. He taught at Oregon State University for a time. But Pierce’s strident anti-communism and racist and anti-semitic beliefs increasingly pulled him toward a career of full-time advocacy and hate-mongering. 

In 1974, Pierce founded the National Alliance. Its goal continues to find supporters today: “We must have no non-Whites in our space and we must have open space around us for expansion.… We will do whatever is necessary to achieve this White living space and to keep it White. We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved, because we realize that it is absolutely necessary for our racial survival.” The Anti-Defamation League (or ADL, formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith), the organization founded over a century ago to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and … secure justice and fair treatment to all,” described the National Alliance in 1998 and again in 2000 as “the single most dangerous organized hate group in the United States today.” The National Alliance earned this distinction largely as a result of Pierce’s pseudonymous authorship of The Turner Diaries as Andrew Macdonald. No other book has had so pervasive or sustained an influence over violent far-right extremism in the United States as The Turner Diaries. Within five years of its publication, the New York Times would report that Pierce’s dystopian treatise of race war and revolution had become “the bible of an anti-Semitic movement” that in 1984, as we shall see, actually declared war on the U.S. government. An apocryphal claim appeared on the back of the 1985 edition that similarly noted how the FBI “has labeled The Turner Diaries ‘the bible of the racist right.’ ” Often repeated, it was most likely penned by Pierce for publicity purposes. 

Nonetheless, a prescient 1991 FBI memorandum described The Turner Diaries as “a significant work and foundation document closely embraced by the leadership as well as rank and file members of the Right-wing, White Supremist [sic] Movement, also known as the ‘Christian Identity Movement.’ ”

By the time of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which The Turner Diaries inspired, at least two hundred thousand and perhaps as many as five hundred thousand copies of the paperback had been sold. Distributed by National Vanguard Books, the National Alliance’s publishing arm, it could occasionally be found at book shops, but more often The Turner Diaries was hawked by individual sellers at gun shows and venues such as the annual Soldier of Fortune Convention in Las Vegas as well as by mail order through advertisements placed in Shotgun News and other gun magazines as well as the now defunct Soldier of Fortune magazine. The book recounts the eponymous hero’s two-year struggle after he and his “fellow patriots” are forced to go underground to defend themselves when a predatory government imposes the “Cohen Act” to seize all legally held firearms. After more than eight hundred thousand of his fellow citizens are arrested, a thirty-five-year-old electrical engineer named Earl Turner joins “The Organization,” the movement spearheading this revolution-cum–race war, and embarks on a concerted terrorist campaign that includes the assassination of public officials, journalists, and prominent Jews; the wholesale murder of African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities; shooting down commercial airliners; poisoning municipal water supplies; and bombing public utilities. Among the more noteworthy incidents is the “Day of the Rope,” when the Organization carries out a public mass execution by hanging an expansive category of alleged 'race traitors,' including “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 others. 

In addition, chapter 6 recounts a truck bombing of the FBI’s downtown Washington, DC, headquarters. “All day yesterday and most of today we watched the TV coverage of rescue crews bringing the dead and injured out of the building”—a particularly important passage in the book given its chilling similarity to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. 

“It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear,” it continues, 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. It is a cancer too deeply rooted in our flesh. And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us—if we don’t cut this cancer from our living flesh—our whole race will die. Turner is later inducted into a more elite unit within the Organization known as “The Order.” That unit has seized control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and launches missile attacks that obliterate New York City and Tel Aviv but fails to destroy the former Soviet Union. The Soviets then launch a retaliatory strike against the United States that Turner describes as “horrendous, but spotty. They fired everything they had left at us, but it simply wasn’t enough. Several of the largest American cities, including Washington and Chicago, were spared.” Turner, accordingly, is ordered to carry out a kamikaze attack on the Pentagon in a small airplane containing a nuclear weapon. An “epilog” records the consequences of Turner’s martyrdom: the final defeat and collapse of the United States. The Organization eventually conquers Europe and, unleashing an array of chemical, biological, and radiological weapons, defeats China and “effectively sterilize[s] … some million square miles of the earth’s surface, from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean.” 

The “dream of a White world finally became a certainty,” the book concludes—with Turner having “helped greatly to assure that his race would survive and prosper … and that The Order would spread its wise and benevolent rule over the earth for all time to come.” Pierce denies that his intention in writing The Turner Diaries was to provide any kind of a blueprint or model for the violent race revolution it recounts. But on numerous occasions the novel has done exactly that: inspiring emulation and imitation—with often tragic results. 

Among those who adopted the battle plan delineated in The Turner Diaries was a lifelong militant anti-communist and anti-government firebrand named Robert Mathews. Mathews was just one rising star in a white supremacist universe that embraced The Turner Diaries’ core tenets of racism, anti-semitism, xenophobia, and sedition; it also included such prominent figures as William Potter Gale, Richard Girnt Butler, Gordon Kahl, James Ellison, Kerry Noble, and Louis Beam, who all played key roles in the emergence of this movement during the 1980s.

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