The Diaries: An Inspiration

While he wrote The Turner Diaries more than two decades ago, Pierce continues to champion its ugly vision of a world for whites only. A National Alliance radio broadcast aired in early 1997 provides one of many examples:

In 1975, when I began writing The Turner Diaries . . . I wanted to take all of the feminist agitators and propagandists and all of the race-mixing fanatics and all of the media bosses and all of the bureaucrats and politicians who were collaborating with them, and I wanted to put them up against a wall, in batches of a thousand or so at a time, and machine-gun them. And I still want to do that. I am convinced that one day we will have to do that before we can get our civilization back on track, and I look forward to the day.

Following its broadcast on short-wave and conventional radio stations, a recording of Pierce's explicitly violent statement was featured on the NA's Web site.

A Racist Crime Spree

Other murderers and terrorists appear to have shared the racist fantasies Pierce voiced in his radio address. The Turner Diaries is thought to be the inspiration behind a crime spree in the early 1980s perpetrated by a gang of extremists called The Order. The Order's crimes included murders, robberies, counterfeiting and the bombing of a synagogue.

After a Seattle bank robbery in 1983, the terrorist gang's leader, Robert Mathews, told an acquaintance that he had orchestrated the heist as the opening scene in what he hoped would be a reenactment of Pierce's American Nazi revolution. Prior to The Order's formation, Mathews was a Pacific Northwest representative of the National Alliance, and other founders of this terrorist gang also traced their roots to the NA. Even the group's name, "The Order," was chosen as a reverent nod to its inspiration -- an elite, clandestine paramilitary unit featured in The Turner Diaries.

The Aryan Republican Army:  Reading the Turner Diaries

More recently, members of a white supremacist gang calling itself the "Aryan Republican Army" took its cues from The Order. Authorities say the "Army," led by Peter Langan, committed 22 bank robberies and bombings across the Midwest between 1992 and 1996 using tactics reminiscent of The Order. Four members of the group have pleaded guilty to a variety of robbery charges, while Langan was convicted in two Federal trials. In a racist video discovered by the FBI, Langan praised Robert Mathews and instructed his viewers to "learn from Bob." Federal prosecutors have also demonstrated that The Turner Diaries was required reading in the Aryan Republican Army.

The New Order: Planning Violence

The activities of The Order have also been cited as a role model for an alleged conspiracy by a group of white supremacists in East St. Louis, Illinois. In March 1998, Federal authorities arrested Dennis McGiffen, an Aryan Nations leader and former Klansman, Wallace Weicherding, also a former Klansman, and Robert Bock. The three were charged with conspiracy to possess and make machine guns. McGiffen and Bock pleaded guilty to the charges one month later.  Wallace Weicherding  was convicted on September 1, 1998.

At the time of their indictment, an FBI agent testified that McGiffen had been forming a group called "The New Order," patterned after Robert Mathews' terrorist gang. The group allegedly planned to bomb the Anti-Defamation League's New York headquarters, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. They had also talked of bombing state capitols and post offices, and poisoning public water supplies with cyanide. Like other admirers of The Order, McGiffen's beliefs were reportedly heavily influenced by The Turner Diaries.