This morning, a lot of people thinking about The Turner Diaries, so here is some history. Turner Diaries is a novel that imagines a successful coup by white power activists who take over a homeland, then the US, then the world (1)

Several of the methods used in the book appeared in yesterday's insurrection. One is the "Day of the Rope," in which "traitors" (including members of Congress, people in interracial relationships, journalists, etc) are publicly hanged. Yesterday the mob erected a gallows (2)
...Yesterday the mob erected a gallows and people took selfies in front of it. (3)
Turner Diaries also prominently features an attack on the U.S. Capitol, though somewhat different than what we saw. In the book it's a mortar attack. But significantly, the point of the attack is NOT mass casualty, but showing people that even the Capitol can be attacked (4)
Turner Diaries places enormous importance on the protection of white women. The fact that a white woman was shot yesterday will fit into this narrative (a story that also goes back to Vicky Weaver's death in the Ruby Ridge standoff) (5)
To be clear, the plan outlined in Turner Diaries is ***PROFOUNDLY*** genocidal and anti-democratic, eventually involving the annihilation of all nonwhite people throughout the world through chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons. (6)
The reason this is important: Turner Diaries has been enormously important to white power, militant right, and accelerationist activists not because it's a good novel, but because it explains how a small number of people might overthrow the United States (7)
(And we know it's important because the book itself appears all over the place in the white power movement--stacks of them at paramilitary training camps, copies handed out at rallies, OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh sold the book and carried it with him, and more) (8)
This shows us 1) at least some of the people who stormed the Capitol yesterday come from the same movement that has been threatening democracy and killing civilians for decades if not generations (9)
2) This didn't come out of nowhere, but follows a history we can learn and understand in order to combat this very dangerous ideology. As a reminder, the nation in white nationalism is the Aryan nation, not the US. This movement is anti-American (10)
If you would like to learn more, please don't purchase The Turner Diaries as money sometimes still flows back to white power groups from those purchases. Get a pirated copy. Or read summaries. (11)
My book Bring the War Home has lots more detail on all of this https://t.co/gK48bEF01N (12)

More from Politics

39.1% of Democrats think that it's wrong to negatively stereotype people based on their place of birth... AND that Southerners are more racist. https://t.co/yp1hviLuBB


65.2% of Republicans think that people shouldn't be so easily offended... AND that Black Lives Matter is offensive.
https://t.co/znmVhqIaL8


64.6% of Democrats think that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body... AND that selling organs should be illegal.

48.5% of Democrats think that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body... AND that prostitution should be illegal.


57.9% of Republicans think that people should be free to express their opinions in the workplace... AND that athletes should not be allowed to sit or kneel during the national anthem. https://t.co/ds2ig1NJFr


Democrats: Men and women are equal in their talents and abilities. Also, women are superior. https://t.co/bEFSmqQguo
My piece in the NY Times today: "the Trump administration is denying applications submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at a rate 37 percent higher than the Obama administration did in 2016."

Based on this analysis: "Denials for immigration benefits—travel documents, work permits, green cards, worker petitions, etc.—increased 37 percent since FY 2016. On an absolute basis, FY 2018 will see more than about 155,000 more denials than FY 2016."
https://t.co/Bl0naOO0sh


"This increase in denials cannot be credited to an overall rise in applications. In fact, the total number of applications so far this year is 2 percent lower than in 2016. It could be that the higher denial rate is also discouraging some people from applying at all.."

Thanks to @gsiskind for his insightful comments. The increase in denials, he said, is “significant enough to make one think that Congress must have passed legislation changing the requirements. But we know they have not.”

My conclusion:
Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.
This idea - that elections should translate into policy - is not wrong at all. But political science can help explain why it's not working this way. There are three main explanations: 1. mandates are constructed, not automatic, 2. party asymmetry, 3. partisan conpetition 1/


First, party/policy mandates from elections are far from self-executing in our system. Work on mandates from Dahl to Ellis and Kirk on the history of the mandate to mine on its role in post-Nixon politics, to Peterson Grossback and Stimson all emphasize that this link is... 2/

Created deliberately and isn't always persuasive. Others have to convinced that the election meant a particular thing for it to work in a legislative context. I theorized in the immediate period of after the 2020 election that this was part of why Repubs signed on to ...3/

Trump's demonstrably false fraud nonsense - it derailed an emerging mandate news cycle. Winners of elections get what they get - institutional control - but can't expect much beyond that unless the perception of an election mandate takes hold. And it didn't. 4/

Let's turn to the legislation element of this. There's just an asymmetry in terms of passing a relief bill. Republicans are presumably less motivated to get some kind of deal passed. Democrats are more likely to want to do *something.* 5/

You May Also Like