Thanks for the review. I haven't read The Turner Diaries, and had always lumped it together with Siege in my mental categorization as fanfiction for fanatics. Maybe not entirely fair, but this review helps shed a little more light on a book that is fairly low in my list of reading priorities.
Like you I believe Nationalists today are not aspirational enough. The meek inquiries towards mere existence, please-leave-us-alone-isms, and other scrapings and beggings and escapisms are seemingly balanced out with fantasies of hyperviolence and vain bravado. It's pretty much like how Conservatives fantasize in their impotency!
The "14 Words" asks for a bare minimum. While that lowest common denominator kind of sentiment is useful in getting common agreeance, it really isn't inspiring at all. It's essentially a negative proposition: "Don't make us not-exist." It's not enough to exist, but to thrive, expand, master, and adventure! Aim for the heavens and land among the stars kind of sentiments inspire people far more than begging for scraps from the table. It doesn't matter if you're kicking and screaming down there on the floor and dreaming about upturning the table, that isn't a position of strength or a real aspiring aim.
But is it an improvement from a total blackpill? Probably. At least rage against the dying of the light rather than mope there idly. Energy can be harnessed, but despondency is useless.
Last note on your good piece is how rocket-scientist Pierce was clearly intelligent enough to apprehend the Nationalist worldview, but might not have proposed a feasible solution in this book. It reminds me greatly of Ted Kaczynski in how he grasped the matter exquisitely well, but his proposed (and practiced) solutions were paltry and unable to scale, even aside from whatever moral hazards they presented.
Being able to apprehend and convey complex problems brilliantly is no guarantee of forming a viable solution. Looking at those who did form solutions that advanced the matter in great or small ways, like the Alt-Right or 4chan memes or whatever else, it seems more of a kind of poetic inspiration than an intellectual breakthrough that catalyzes success. Maybe it goes back to how Socrates in trying to discover the wisest men couldn't exactly find them in any one particular profession, but he found the residue of wisdom in different forms among many of them.
Anyway, thank you for the book review, and I will be on the lookout for more! If you haven't read it already, I'd highly recommend Let Them Look West by Marty Philips. Basic premise: a cynical Jewish reporter is dispatched to cover the story of a governor who built an artificial mountain monument to Christianity in flat Wyoming. As far as Nationalistic fiction goes, it's one of the best I've read. That it has a kind of positive aspiration coming from an author who is incredibly melancholic is a very interesting flavor for sure. Might be refreshingly distinct from the Day of the Rope angle of fictions you've so far reviewed.
Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah the methods and prescriptions are quite different compared to modern WNs. I think that's why the alt-right called guys like Pierce 1.0 and describe themselves as 2.0
I read The Turner Diaries a few years ago. I don’t see what Pierce really hoped to accomplish with it besides provide cathartic revenge porn to his followers.
That's definitely what the point of the whole "day of the rope" thing was. I think he was trying to give some tactical advice to his followers based on what he thought would happen in the future. The issue is fiction is a hard medium too communicate that sort of thing effectively. The book siege by James Mason does the same thing more effectively.
I wouldn't give Pierce the prediction points you afford him. On black-on-white crime, nothing has gotten worse since the 1960s. BLM did cause massive damage, but that damage was diffused throughout the country, as opposed to the LA Riots, which were concentrated. Diffuse costs are much less exigent than concentrated costs. I don't think "white racial consciousness" has risen in any measurable way, especially if you look at data on interracial dating.
With regard to internet activism, it's really quite simple and easy to post a racist meme. So the increased visibility of racist activity doesn't actually indicate increased commitment to white identity; it just indicates that the internet does a better job of exposing populist rage than previous media forms, which were centralized and had gatekeepers.
>On black-on-white crime, nothing has gotten worse since the 1960s.
That's true and I mentioned it. I'm not saying it's gotten worse, I'm saying that hate crime laws have been used in recent instances to incriminate whites and cases of self-defense.
>BLM did cause massive damage, but that damage was diffused throughout the country, as opposed to the LA Riots, which were concentrated.
My point with mentioning the riots and drawing a parallel wasn't about property damage though. What Pierce describes in the book is an episode of mass psychosis in Chicago surrounding black victimhood. I think we saw a pretty clear parallel to that with the summer of Floyd. Even if the psychosis itself was less localized to one area.
>I don't think "white racial consciousness" has risen in any measurable way, especially if you look at data on interracial dating.
I don't think that's a good heuristic to judge racial attitudes or levels of white racial consciousness. What I think the public acceptance of interracial relationships shows is that the one drop standard of whiteness is on its way out. Look at how many internet racists get exposed for having non-white girlfriends. Hell look at how many internet racists are mixed race. An increase in racial consciousness and an increase in toleration of race mixing can both happen at the same time. Race mixing is more accepted among blacks as well yet they're way more racially conscious than they were in the late 90s and early 2000s.
>With regard to internet activism, it's really quite simple and easy to post a racist meme. So the increased visibility of racist activity doesn't actually indicate increased commitment to white identity; it just indicates that the internet does a better job of exposing populist rage than previous media forms, which were centralized and had gatekeepers.
I don't accept this argument. The internet has been widely available in first world countries since the early 2000s. Social media was a thing all throughout the mid-2000s and very early 2010s. It was also basically uncensored prior to 2016. Pro white activism didn't really pick up until around 2014-2015. A lot of this was a reaction to the Obama administration and anti-white sentiments put forward by sjw types. I remember the late 2000s / early 2010s because I was aware of these issues before most people. Nobody was talking about race or politics in the way they are now. There really was no mainstream racialist right wing back then.
An important distinction is between "loving your race" as a positive identity and "hating outsiders" as a negative affect. Racism has increased, both against blacks and whites, but "loving your own race" has decreased overall. If you look at the data on blacks you'll find that they actually don't love their own race, they just hate whites. The peak of positive black identity was the 1970s.
I agree with your assessment but here's a hot take. I actually think doing either is stupid. I don't love the white race. And I don't hate the black race. I think the right type of racism is an empirical assessment of racial differences and ability and to assess policy based on the facts of biological racial disparities. For instance with no other information but race I would prefer to live around white people due to them having a higher IQ on average and everything that implies (lower crime rates, better property values etc). But if we were controlling for IQ and behavior I wouldn't really care much about the race of my neighbors at all.
Given the data from implicit association tests, I doubt you would rather live around Chinese than whites. I'm not saying people aren't ethnocentric; I'm saying it hasn't increased in the way that Pierce predicted. It's a complicated question because, as you pointed out, the definition of racism is absolute and not well qualified. So it's hard to have a scientific conversation about a topic which is deliberately semantically obfuscated, for moralistic reasons.
> Given the data from implicit association tests, I doubt you would rather live around Chinese than whites.
I was speaking in terms of conscious decisions. Unconsciously you're probably right I would choose to live around whites.
> I'm saying it hasn't increased in the way that Pierce predicted.
Oh no neither I or Pierce are saying the public at large is more ethnocentric. On the contrary in the past people on average were more racist in the 70s and 80s than they are now. Pierce also predicted this outcome. In the book most people are going along with the systems programs. Pierce predicted there would be an increase in white nationalist resistance groups. Or to put it in the other terms a small dedicated minority would be radicalized.
I made a post a few days ago summarizing this point.
"The population was overall further right on issues like race, gender roles and sexuality in the 1980s. But the number of hardcore ideological far rightists was probably smaller both per capita and numerically. The big shift since 2015 has been in the radicalization and education of a disaffected, energetic segment of young people online. There has also been a shift in the right wing ecosystem as well since these kids grew up and filled roles as staffers and in conservative media. If they succeed we should see their ideas eventually filter down into the masses and shift the public's views closer to or to the right of where they were in the 80s."
I think if you survey people's grandparents, you will find more "hardcore racists" than among Zoomers today. It's an empirical question. We could ask, "would you support re-instituting racial segregation?" and see a clear decline from 10% to 5%, or whatever it is. Happy to be proven wrong with data, but I don't consider racist shitposts online to be representative. They are misrepresentative. I'm speaking of 1970 vs 2025, not 2014 vs 2016. Obviously over those 2 years, there was a shift. If I draw a graph, it will look like 10%, down to 3%, up to 5%. So you can say "racists have doubled in 2 years!" but that's not the big picture.
Thanks for the review. I haven't read The Turner Diaries, and had always lumped it together with Siege in my mental categorization as fanfiction for fanatics. Maybe not entirely fair, but this review helps shed a little more light on a book that is fairly low in my list of reading priorities.
Like you I believe Nationalists today are not aspirational enough. The meek inquiries towards mere existence, please-leave-us-alone-isms, and other scrapings and beggings and escapisms are seemingly balanced out with fantasies of hyperviolence and vain bravado. It's pretty much like how Conservatives fantasize in their impotency!
The "14 Words" asks for a bare minimum. While that lowest common denominator kind of sentiment is useful in getting common agreeance, it really isn't inspiring at all. It's essentially a negative proposition: "Don't make us not-exist." It's not enough to exist, but to thrive, expand, master, and adventure! Aim for the heavens and land among the stars kind of sentiments inspire people far more than begging for scraps from the table. It doesn't matter if you're kicking and screaming down there on the floor and dreaming about upturning the table, that isn't a position of strength or a real aspiring aim.
But is it an improvement from a total blackpill? Probably. At least rage against the dying of the light rather than mope there idly. Energy can be harnessed, but despondency is useless.
Last note on your good piece is how rocket-scientist Pierce was clearly intelligent enough to apprehend the Nationalist worldview, but might not have proposed a feasible solution in this book. It reminds me greatly of Ted Kaczynski in how he grasped the matter exquisitely well, but his proposed (and practiced) solutions were paltry and unable to scale, even aside from whatever moral hazards they presented.
Being able to apprehend and convey complex problems brilliantly is no guarantee of forming a viable solution. Looking at those who did form solutions that advanced the matter in great or small ways, like the Alt-Right or 4chan memes or whatever else, it seems more of a kind of poetic inspiration than an intellectual breakthrough that catalyzes success. Maybe it goes back to how Socrates in trying to discover the wisest men couldn't exactly find them in any one particular profession, but he found the residue of wisdom in different forms among many of them.
Anyway, thank you for the book review, and I will be on the lookout for more! If you haven't read it already, I'd highly recommend Let Them Look West by Marty Philips. Basic premise: a cynical Jewish reporter is dispatched to cover the story of a governor who built an artificial mountain monument to Christianity in flat Wyoming. As far as Nationalistic fiction goes, it's one of the best I've read. That it has a kind of positive aspiration coming from an author who is incredibly melancholic is a very interesting flavor for sure. Might be refreshingly distinct from the Day of the Rope angle of fictions you've so far reviewed.
Glad you enjoyed it. Yeah the methods and prescriptions are quite different compared to modern WNs. I think that's why the alt-right called guys like Pierce 1.0 and describe themselves as 2.0
I read The Turner Diaries a few years ago. I don’t see what Pierce really hoped to accomplish with it besides provide cathartic revenge porn to his followers.
That's definitely what the point of the whole "day of the rope" thing was. I think he was trying to give some tactical advice to his followers based on what he thought would happen in the future. The issue is fiction is a hard medium too communicate that sort of thing effectively. The book siege by James Mason does the same thing more effectively.
I wouldn't give Pierce the prediction points you afford him. On black-on-white crime, nothing has gotten worse since the 1960s. BLM did cause massive damage, but that damage was diffused throughout the country, as opposed to the LA Riots, which were concentrated. Diffuse costs are much less exigent than concentrated costs. I don't think "white racial consciousness" has risen in any measurable way, especially if you look at data on interracial dating.
With regard to internet activism, it's really quite simple and easy to post a racist meme. So the increased visibility of racist activity doesn't actually indicate increased commitment to white identity; it just indicates that the internet does a better job of exposing populist rage than previous media forms, which were centralized and had gatekeepers.
>On black-on-white crime, nothing has gotten worse since the 1960s.
That's true and I mentioned it. I'm not saying it's gotten worse, I'm saying that hate crime laws have been used in recent instances to incriminate whites and cases of self-defense.
>BLM did cause massive damage, but that damage was diffused throughout the country, as opposed to the LA Riots, which were concentrated.
My point with mentioning the riots and drawing a parallel wasn't about property damage though. What Pierce describes in the book is an episode of mass psychosis in Chicago surrounding black victimhood. I think we saw a pretty clear parallel to that with the summer of Floyd. Even if the psychosis itself was less localized to one area.
>I don't think "white racial consciousness" has risen in any measurable way, especially if you look at data on interracial dating.
I don't think that's a good heuristic to judge racial attitudes or levels of white racial consciousness. What I think the public acceptance of interracial relationships shows is that the one drop standard of whiteness is on its way out. Look at how many internet racists get exposed for having non-white girlfriends. Hell look at how many internet racists are mixed race. An increase in racial consciousness and an increase in toleration of race mixing can both happen at the same time. Race mixing is more accepted among blacks as well yet they're way more racially conscious than they were in the late 90s and early 2000s.
>With regard to internet activism, it's really quite simple and easy to post a racist meme. So the increased visibility of racist activity doesn't actually indicate increased commitment to white identity; it just indicates that the internet does a better job of exposing populist rage than previous media forms, which were centralized and had gatekeepers.
I don't accept this argument. The internet has been widely available in first world countries since the early 2000s. Social media was a thing all throughout the mid-2000s and very early 2010s. It was also basically uncensored prior to 2016. Pro white activism didn't really pick up until around 2014-2015. A lot of this was a reaction to the Obama administration and anti-white sentiments put forward by sjw types. I remember the late 2000s / early 2010s because I was aware of these issues before most people. Nobody was talking about race or politics in the way they are now. There really was no mainstream racialist right wing back then.
An important distinction is between "loving your race" as a positive identity and "hating outsiders" as a negative affect. Racism has increased, both against blacks and whites, but "loving your own race" has decreased overall. If you look at the data on blacks you'll find that they actually don't love their own race, they just hate whites. The peak of positive black identity was the 1970s.
I agree with your assessment but here's a hot take. I actually think doing either is stupid. I don't love the white race. And I don't hate the black race. I think the right type of racism is an empirical assessment of racial differences and ability and to assess policy based on the facts of biological racial disparities. For instance with no other information but race I would prefer to live around white people due to them having a higher IQ on average and everything that implies (lower crime rates, better property values etc). But if we were controlling for IQ and behavior I wouldn't really care much about the race of my neighbors at all.
Given the data from implicit association tests, I doubt you would rather live around Chinese than whites. I'm not saying people aren't ethnocentric; I'm saying it hasn't increased in the way that Pierce predicted. It's a complicated question because, as you pointed out, the definition of racism is absolute and not well qualified. So it's hard to have a scientific conversation about a topic which is deliberately semantically obfuscated, for moralistic reasons.
> Given the data from implicit association tests, I doubt you would rather live around Chinese than whites.
I was speaking in terms of conscious decisions. Unconsciously you're probably right I would choose to live around whites.
> I'm saying it hasn't increased in the way that Pierce predicted.
Oh no neither I or Pierce are saying the public at large is more ethnocentric. On the contrary in the past people on average were more racist in the 70s and 80s than they are now. Pierce also predicted this outcome. In the book most people are going along with the systems programs. Pierce predicted there would be an increase in white nationalist resistance groups. Or to put it in the other terms a small dedicated minority would be radicalized.
I made a post a few days ago summarizing this point.
"The population was overall further right on issues like race, gender roles and sexuality in the 1980s. But the number of hardcore ideological far rightists was probably smaller both per capita and numerically. The big shift since 2015 has been in the radicalization and education of a disaffected, energetic segment of young people online. There has also been a shift in the right wing ecosystem as well since these kids grew up and filled roles as staffers and in conservative media. If they succeed we should see their ideas eventually filter down into the masses and shift the public's views closer to or to the right of where they were in the 80s."
I think if you survey people's grandparents, you will find more "hardcore racists" than among Zoomers today. It's an empirical question. We could ask, "would you support re-instituting racial segregation?" and see a clear decline from 10% to 5%, or whatever it is. Happy to be proven wrong with data, but I don't consider racist shitposts online to be representative. They are misrepresentative. I'm speaking of 1970 vs 2025, not 2014 vs 2016. Obviously over those 2 years, there was a shift. If I draw a graph, it will look like 10%, down to 3%, up to 5%. So you can say "racists have doubled in 2 years!" but that's not the big picture.