At 9:02 on the morning of April 19, 1995, a powerful fertilizer bomb exploded in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight people, including twenty children, were killed. More than 500 people were badly injured. Federal authorities at first suspected foreign terrorists. The trail, however, led elsewhere—to two (and possibly more) self-styled American “patriots” with ties to the neo-nazi “militia” movement. One of the suspects, Timothy McVeigh, carried a copy of The Turner Diaries, the “bible” of various radical right, neo-nazi militia groups. At his trial in Denver, the prosecution made numerous references to The Turner Diaries. McVeigh himself chose not to speak during the trial in which he was found guilty and sentenced to death. If we are to understand the thinking of McVeigh and other home-grown terrorists, we must understand the contents of this book.

The Turner Diaries is a work of fiction. It purports to be the diaries kept by Earl Turner, a militant member of a neo-nazi group called the Organization which in the “Great Revolution” of the late twentieth century overthrew the Jewishled “System” (i.e., the U.S. government) and in the twenty-first century inaugurated an all-white, racially pure New Era. During the Old Era, the System discriminated against patriotic white Americans by confiscating their guns, promoting policies of affirmative action, encouraging non-white foreign immigration and interracial marriage, and putting Jews, African-Americans, and other minorities in positions of authority in schools and universities, the mass media, the FBI, and other governmental institutions.