Sort of vaguely related to previous thread, I’ve started reading The Turner Diaries—for reasons that really don’t bear going into—and it’s... illuminating.

I was thinking about writing something about it for Patreon, and I may still (I‘m actually toying with doing a Let’s Read but I honestly don’t know who would voluntarily expose themselves to that and I don’t blame them) but still, a couple thoughts:

1. I’m only a couple chapters in but I’ve read a summary, and the ethics of the book are especially revealing because they follow the right wing ethos of “it’s fine when we do it”.

Morality isn’t what you do, it’s who’s doing the doing.

Tyranny isn’t tyranny when we do it, because We Are Good And Right. Oppression isn’t oppression when we do it because We Are Good And Right, and Good And Right people don’t feel oppressed by a regime that perfectly serves them.

If you feel oppressed clearly you’re Wrong and Bad.

If you get killed by this regime, it’s morally fine; you got killed because you deserved to die. If you didn’t deserve it, you wouldn’t have gotten killed.

Or if you didn’t deserve it, well, we gotta break a few eggs. Greater good and all that.

So you still kind of deserved it, because the great racially purified regime deserves to exist more than you do.

There is nothing morally bad about the most atrocious violence in this worldview. All that matters is whether the right people are doing the violence.

There is no line, in terms of atrocity. If you’re Good, then everything you do is good and justified, no matter what it is.

This seems pretty basic, for anyone who’s familiar with extremist ideology, but I still think it’s really important to note.

Because again, it’s merely a hyper-extreme version of the basic conservative line: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It’s not about the law, in other words. It’s about your place in a specific group.

Your place in a specific group determines how you are to be treated. Essentially nothing else about you matters.

This is why it’s so hilarious when conservatives accuse us of playing identity politics.

The other thing that strikes me about The Turner Diaries—not so much in terms of what I’ve read so far but more in terms of what I’ve read about the book overall—is where the emphasis of the fantasy is placed.

Which is to say it’s almost entirely about the terrorism, race war, and ensuing genocide, and that is not a mere accident of the book’s setting.

It’s because the violence is what these people really care about and what they really want.

We know almost nothing about this racially pure utopia that allegedly follows the murderous ethnic cleansing of the planet. There are essentially no details.

*Because those details are not interesting to the author or to the audience*.

Winning is boring. It’s much more exciting to be the violent opposition, and to entertain a fantasy wherein you take bloody vengeance on all your enemies. Everything after that? Whatever. Yawn.

This is why racist right wing extremism is fundamentally nihilistic: it isn’t actually concerned with building a racial utopia, no matter how vehemently it claims to be working toward that. It doesn’t want to build at all. It only wants to destroy.

A racially pure utopia is also pretty nihilistic (the notion of utopia is in itself sort of nihilistic; a lot of my doctoral dissertation dealt with that). But at least it’s ostensibly *something you build*.

But they don’t care about that.

Why does this matter for the GOP in general right now? Because we see the exact same thing in them, and we’ve seen it for a while.

They hate winning. They won in 2016 and they won’t stop whining about it.

They also don’t know what to *do*, because their theory of the case does not involve doing anything constructive. So they haven’t really done anything except dismantle government and confirm judges and get an awful lot of people sick and killed.

Long story short: conservatives will swear up and down that stuff like The Turner Diaries is anathema to Real Conservatism and it’s nothing whatsoever to do with them.

But the ugly truth is that it’s very much to do with them.

It’s their ideology carried to its logical conclusion, with full intellectual integrity. It’s where you end up when you stop dithering and flirting and go all-in.

I’m somewhat oversimplifying here, but yes.

Anyway, like I said, it’s an illuminating read. I’m still not certain I *don’t* want to write more in-depth about it, so if you’re interested in that maybe let me know.