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At one point, I read the Turner Diaries in a similar spirit and, while I normally encourage people to read challenging literature, this is the one book that makes me hesitate. It’s absolutely vile and it requires a very skeptical mindset to get any actual value out of it. But, having read it anyway, it did teach me a lot about the worldview of the modern white supremacist.
Firstly, let me just say that the book is god awful. Like, not in terms of its ideas but in terms of what makes a novel well written. The characters are all emotionless as planks of wood, the romance between the main character and his lover is so sterile it could only be written by a virgin who views women as property, the main character constantly fucks things up and the story bends to save him from the stakes that it had just established, etc. Not a lot of people dwell on that part because of everything else wrong with it, but I thought I’d point that out.
I also learned that the modern day cryptofascist has to be profoundly ignorant about just about everything. This book exists to explain a white supremacist’s worldview and it lays out a lot of takes about things like feminism, biology, law, etc. that are all as confident as they are flat out wrong. What I took from this is that the modern day white supremacist has no interest in actually learning anything about the things they hate or even understanding the world that they actually exist in. For whatever reason they choose it, they live for the hate and the hate becomes the single thing that defines everything in their world, no matter what actual facts say.
It’s also a very specific guide on how to conduct a guérilla war against the US government. Like, there are a lot of passages where the main character will describe things like his cell building a bomb by taking whole pages outlining step by step how the bomb was built, what components were used, how they obtained them without the government noticing, and how the bomb is intended to be utilized. The idea that this book is a work of fiction and not a very specific plan for terrorists is pretty flimsy. Mind you, the information is all half a century old and didn’t really work out when actual white supremacist terrorists tried to use it, so don’t go getting ideas that the info is useful. But, when you hear rumors about white supremacists doing things like plotting to attack the power grid or kidnap politicians or infiltrate city councils, understand that that is 100% something they talk about doing and absolutely would do given the right opportunity.
Lastly, and I think this was the biggest insight, cryptofascists believe that they are the antifascists. That sounds ridiculous, but I swear: this book talks at length about how the enemies of the white supremacists are literal fascists, calling them by that name, and declares the white supremacist terrorists freedom fighters against fascist tyranny, even as the book ends by talking about how Hitler was great and we should follow his example and describing the terrorists’ new society as being even more brutally fascistic than the society they just overthrew. It sounds crazy because it is, but if you remember conservatives calling mask mandates during covid fascism and state control, it doesn’t seem so hard to believe. You can’t get through to a cryptofascist by pointing out their hypocrisy because they already wear that hypocrisy like armor.