'Original manual of hatred': The 1978 novel behind MAGA’s authoritarian tendencies

30 April

President Donald Trump at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 22, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Several recent steps taken by President Donald Trump have been criticized as being undemocratic and "authoritarian" in nature. Earlier this month, a survey of more than 500 political scientists found that most think the United States is transitioning from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.

An article by Gregg Barak published in Salon on Wednesday said that "The Turner Diaries," a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, the founder of an American white nationalist group, is what drives the Make America Great Again (MAGA) worldview, which is seen the factor behind these "authoritarian" moves by the administration.

The article called the novel "modern America’s original manual of hatred."

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"First published in 1978 and recently banned by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon following the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, thanks to the combined minds of Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, this racist dystopian novel about a white supremacist insurrection undergirds the Trumpian worldview. In a nutshell, the book is an apocalyptic tale of genocide against racial minorities set in a near-future America," Barak wrote in the article.

"This narrative successfully captured 49.8% of the voting electorate in November 2024. First introduced in 2015 after Donald and Melania Trump came down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his bid for the Republican nomination, the premise was always focal to his three political campaigns and his first term of abuse, lawlessness and corruption. Soon after the failed coup d’état on Jan. 6, 2021, this narrative became the core message of Trumpism," he added.

"Perhaps nothing captures Trump’s authoritarian agenda better than ICE’s illegal kidnapping and disappearing of hundreds of people or DOGE’s firings or dismissals of some 250,000 federal workers – all without any due process of law. All of which makes perfect sense in the Trumpian schemes to dismantle and emasculate USAID worldwide and to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s rationale for the proposed 'redesign' of the State Department to diminish or do away with human rights programs and others targeting war crimes or the strengthening of freedom and democracy," Barak said.

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The author said for nearly five decades, the “Diaries” have been the right wing’s favorite go-to conspiracy theory. He added that the "many of the driving forces behind Trumpian authoritarianism today can be traced back to the hateful thesis of the 'Diaries.'"

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