Insurrection and The Turner Diaries

How a revisionist version of the 2nd Amendment leads to carnage

FBI sketch of Timothy McVeigh; via FBI

By: Devin Hughes

On April 19, 1995, a colossal blast ripped through the morning calm of Oklahoma City.

The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was shorn in two, with pieces of the building flying hundreds of yards in every direction. The building housed multiple government agency offices, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that was responsible for enforcing gun laws the far-right deemed tyrannical and the botched siege in Waco, Texas, exactly two years prior. The attack was revenge for that siege, which had served as a rallying cry for the extreme political right across the country. The architects of the bombing, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, killed 168 people.

As it turned out, McVeigh frequently toured gun shows, was an ardent pro-gun advocate, and his attack came just weeks after National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre railed against “jack-booted government thugs,” a phrase directed at ATF agents.

When McVeigh was pulled over for driving without a license plate later that day, he was illegally carrying a handgun, leading to his arrest even before the authorities knew he was the bomber. His shirt read “sic semper tyrannis,” and pages of The Turner Diaries — a novel beloved by the far-right depicting a future insurrection — were strewn across the back of the car.

Sic semper tyrannis, “Thus always to tyrants,” was the infamous Latin phrase uttered by John Wilkes Booth as he shot President Abraham Lincoln in the waning days of the Civil War.

Just as Booth had before him, McVeigh saw himself as a courageous freedom fighter taking a principled stand against a tyrannical federal government, fighting against those who he believed betrayed the United States Constitution.

“The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 was the deadliest act of homegrown terrorism in U.S. history, resulting in the deaths of 168 people.” Via FBI

Today there is growing momentum to read the Second Amendment as a license for individuals to take up arms against the federal government, should they deem it tyrannical.

Regardless of the specific arms used, aiding and abetting an insurrection is dangerous. The most recent intellectual salvo in this movement is a law review article by two California pro-gun lawyers, C.D. Michel and Konstadinos Moros, titled “Restrictions ‘our ancestors would never have accepted’: The Historical Case Against Assault Weapon Bans.”

In their article, Michel and Moros argue that assault weapon bans are unconstitutional because assault weapons are the weapons most likely to be used to topple the government. They then cite dozens of historical quotes all talking about the necessity of an armed population as a bastion of liberty. All of which points to their central conclusion that the Founding Fathers would never have sought to ban weapons of war from the population because of the individual right to insurrection they see as enshrined in the Second Amendment. 

Michel and Moros' admission that assault weapons are actually the most effective weapons civilians have access to for combat is revealing. And they are careful to qualify their work with the caveat that, “None of this is to say the United States is near a situation today where violent armed resistance is necessary to protect our constitutional order.”

Dangerously however, they make no mention of what they would consider necessary armed resistance, leaving such a determination under their framework to every individual in the United States, no matter how extreme their views.

As such, their article is a complete intellectual and moral morass for several major reasons: 

• First, one of the Founding Fathers’ biggest fears was a standing army, and such a force inevitably leading to tyranny. What does the United States have currently? A standing army. Further, most free, democratic societies have a standing army. An armed population has no relationship with how free a society is, as multiple countries with far stricter gun laws (and lower rates of gun ownership) are consistently rated more free than the United States. Step 1 of honoring the Founding Fathers’ fears about tyranny would require dismantling the U.S. military, but nobody, not even Michel and Moros, are seriously considering that.

• Second, the Second Amendment was always seen as a collective right to resist a tyrannical government, not something that would be decided at an individual level. The original idea was that militias — funded, supplied, trained, and under the command of States — would provide internal and external security. Michel and Moros even admit in a footnote that resisting tyranny is on a “societal level.” Another word for societal would be collective. Each individual deciding for themself what constitutes tyranny is a pure prescription for carnage, a fact which we will return to. 

• Third, even as a collective right to resist tyranny, the concept has historically proven to be lacking. The Constitution was drafted in the immediate aftermath of Shays’ Rebellion, an armed uprising by farmers against what they saw as a tyrannical state government collecting onerous taxes. Massachusetts was not sympathetic and assembled the militia to suppress the insurrection. The crisis caused widespread concern and fueled the need for a stronger central government to prevent such insurrections in the future.

• Finally, the biggest test of this Insurrectionist theory was the Civil War. Whether the Confederacy was actually within its constitutional rights to secede from the United States — and to be clear, they weren’t — sparked a four-year long bloody struggle that would cost 750,000 lives. The Confederacy felt the need to wage a war, and then lost the war by force of arms, and therefore the argument. Regardless of how fervently, or how many, secessionists believed that the 1860s-era federal government had become tyrannical, the U.S. Constitution never granted a right to insurrection even at a collective level in practice.

Which brings us squarely back to an alleged individual right to insurrection. And let’s ignore for the sake of argument that individual insurrection is codified in the Constitution as treason. Rather than anything the Founding Fathers had intended, an individual right to identify and fight a “tyrannical government” is far more attuned to The Turner Diaries in theory and practice than the real Second Amendment.

The Turner Diaries, published in 1978, is the fever dream of William Luther Pierce, a one-time member of the American Nazi party who left because they weren’t extreme enough for him.

The “novel” describes a dystopian future in which Jewish and Black people have taken over society, leaving hard-working whites with little power. In response to the Cohen Act, a draconian gun control law, the book’s “protagonist” joins a white supremacist terror cell that bombs the FBI headquarters, launches mortar attacks against high-ranking officials, and casually murders Jewish and Black people whenever they have the chance.

The final pages of the book describe the terror cell taking control of southern California, and launching a complete genocide against Jewish and Black people and their allies in what is called the “day of the rope.” They then proceed to cause a world-wide nuclear war that leads to the terror cell establishing a new White Supremacist global dominion. 

Despite being reprehensible, as detailed in the podcast, Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right, the book has become gospel among a fringe segment of the political right. The work of fiction serves as a template for how a small group of “freedom fighters,” with little more than their personal firearms and homemade explosive devices, can topple a tyrannical government intent on taking those firearms and enforcing the “horrors” of a multicultural society.

It also serves as a yardstick for measuring when a government has become tyrannical, heavily centering gun rights as paramount, as well as the necessity of an armed society to defeat a government it deems tyrannical.

Hatred and gun rights are often intertwined in insurrectionist ideology. 

Via Inside Gun Shows: What Goes On When Everybody Thinks Nobody’s Watching

This is not merely an intellectual exercise or a look at fiction, as the deadly consequences of the alleged individual right to engage in insurrection touted by The Turner Diaries and the far right have been keenly felt over the past several decades. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Timothy McVeigh had the pages of The Turner Diaries on him when he was arrested and used it as inspiration for his bombing attack, which closely mirrored the FBI bombing in the book. 

The mass shooters in Charleston, the Tree of Life synagogue, Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo all targeted minorities and sought to create a race war, closely mirroring the plot of the book. Indeed, the Christchurch and Buffalo shooters explicitly wrote about their hopes that their shootings would trigger a gun control law such as the Cohen Act, thereby sparking the events in The Turner Diaries by causing gun owners in the United States to rise up.

During the January 6th attempted insurrection, militia members in the crowd used “day of the rope” symbolism directly from the book. The Boogaloo Movement, a far-right, decentralized pro-gun movement, is named after Internet parlance referring to the coming second Civil War. And these are but a few examples.

This is what a Second Amendment “right” to individual insurrection looks like: killers deeming that the government has already become too tyrannical and direct action is needed, along with self-appointed and designated militias a hair-trigger away from mass violence.

An individual right of this sort is a recipe for anarchy and carnage, not glorious revolution and liberty.

During an insurrection to topple a “tyrannical” government, the primary people in the sights of weapons of war would be law enforcement officers and men and women in the armed services, along with those deemed to be political enemies.

Today, on the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, 168 empty chairs sit next to a reflecting pool, symbolizing the lives forever lost on that day 28 years ago. The cost of not countering this dangerous perversion of the 2nd Amendment could be even more empty chairs.

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Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.