The Turner Diaries - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

The narrative starts with a foreword set in 2099, one hundred years after the events depicted in the book. The bulk of the book then quotes a recently discovered diary of a man named Earl Turner, an active member of the white Aryan revolutionary movement that caused these events. The book details a violent overthrow of the United States federal government by Turner and his militant comrades and a brutal contemporaneous race war that takes place first in North America, and then the rest of the world.

The story starts soon after the federal government has confiscated all civilian firearms in the country under the fictional Cohen Act, and the Organization to which Turner and his cohorts belong goes underground and engages in guerrilla war against the System, which is depicted as the totality of the government, media, and economy that is under left-wing Jewish control. The Organization starts with acts such as the bombing of FBI headquarters and continues to prosecute an ongoing, low level campaign of terrorism, assassination and economic sabotage throughout the United States. Turner's exploits lead to his initiation into the Order, a quasi-religious inner cadre that directs the Organization and whose existence remains secret to both the System and ordinary Organization members.

Eventually, the Organization seizes physical control of Southern California, including the nuclear weapons at Vandenberg Air Force Base; ethnically cleanses the area of all blacks and summarily executes all Jews and other "race traitors". The Organization's response to a white woman who had a black man as a lover is summary execution. The Organization has little use for most white "mainstream" Americans. Those on the Left are seen as dupes or willing agents of the Jews, while conservatives and libertarians are regarded as misguided fools, for, after all, the Jews "took over according to the Constitution, fair and square." Turner and his comrades save their special contempt for the ordinary people, who care about nothing beyond being kept comfortable and entertained.

The Organization then uses both the Southern California base of operations and their nuclear weapons to open a wider war in which they launch nuclear strikes against New York City and Israel, initiate a nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union, and plant nuclear weapons and new terrorist cells throughout North America. Many major U.S. cities are destroyed, including Baltimore and Detroit. The diary section ends with the protagonist flying an airplane equipped with an atomic bomb on a suicide mission to destroy The Pentagon, in order to eliminate the leadership of the remaining military government before it orders an assault to retake California. The novel ends with an epilogue summarizing how the Organization continued on to conquer the rest of the world and how people of other races were eliminated (China and the entire eastern half of Asia were destroyed by prolonged bombardment with various weapons of mass destruction and made into an enormous desert; Blacks were exterminated in Africa as well as America; Puerto Ricans, described as "a repulsive mongrel race", were exterminated and the island re-settled by whites).