The Turner Diaries is notable for its lack of ideological persuasion. At one point in the novel, its protagonist, Earl Turner, is given a book to read. Turner claims the book perfectly explains the reasons for white supremacy and the justification of all of The Order’s actions. Importantly, this magical tome’s contents are never specified. Although the novel’s epilogue broadly hints at a Nazi orientation, the book never explicitly identifies The Order with a specific movement.

Due in part to Pierce’s desire to appeal to “normal” people, as well as the novel’s limited initial circulation among neo-Nazis, Turner assumes its readers are already racist and do not need to be recruited to that mindset. The abandonment of “why” empowers a singular narrative focus on “what” and “how”—the necessity of immediate, violent action and concrete suggestions about how to go about it. This is part of why the book has so often been associated with violence and terrorism.

But as the book’s notoriety grew, it had another effect on the white nationalist movement. The Turner Diaries is a Rorschach test for racists of all stripes, pedestrian or ideological. Readers can bring their own ideologies and justifications to the narrative, or they can bring none at all.

Over the course of time, this universalist approach to white supremacy became the dominant trend for the movement in the United States and Europe. Rather than attempting to market the elaborate mythology and scriptural footnotes of Christian Identity, or the stigmatized pageantry of Hitler and the Nazis, prominent white nationalists began to take a more carefully generic approach, playing on racial fear and resentment as they existed, rather than attempting to manufacture doctrinaire justifications.

It began with The Order, a real-life terrorist cell that was directly based on the organization described in The Turner Diaries. In a yearlong spree starting in 1983, The Order killed three people and stole millions of dollars, much of which was then distributed to white nationalist leaders and never recovered. Members of the group referred to Turner as their “bible.”

One member of The Order, David Lane, became a prolific writer in prison after authorities broke up the gang in 1984. Although he wrote a number of lengthy ideological tracts, one of his most important works was the three-page “White Genocide Manifesto,” which took Pierce’s dislike for complex ideological formulations to new heights, instead arguing from a platform of “Nature's laws, common sense and current circumstances.” The manifesto argues that “’racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide,” and that the “white race” is on the verge of extinction due to interbreeding with other races.

Lane later distilled his views further into a one-sentence statement now known as the 14 Words and widely quoted by white nationalists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Lane died in prison in 2007.