Earl Turner's Diary

Weird Little Guys

iHeartPodcasts and Cool Zone Media

True Crime, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the man responsible for bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City was arrested, he was carrying a page of his favorite book. The book had been sold at gun shows and in ads in nazi newsletters for years, but suddenly the rest of the country was asking... can a book kill?

Sources:

Berger, J.M. "The Turner Legacy: The Storied Origins and Enduring Impact of White Nationalism’s Deadly Bible", The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism - The Hague 7, no. 8 (2016).

Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home : The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press, 2018.

Sunshine, Spencer (2024). Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge

Pierce, Kelvin. Sins of My Father, Growing Up with America's Most Dangerous White Supremacist. Independently Published, 2020

Martin Durham, White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics (new
york: routledge, 2007)

Gardell, Mattias (2003). Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kaplan, Jeffrey (July 2018). "America's apocalyptic literature of the radical right". International Sociology. 33 (4): 503–522

Flynn, Kevin, and Gary Gerhardt. The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America's Racist Underground Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, 1989.

Michael, George(2003) 'The revolutionary model of Dr William L. Pierce', Terrorism and Political Violence, 15: 3

Michael, George(2010) 'Blueprints and Fantasies: A Review and Analysis of Extremist Fiction', Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 33: 2

Griffin, R. S. (2001). The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds. 1st Books Library.

Cullick, Jonathan S. “The Literary Offenses of a Neo-Nazi: Narrative Voice in ‘The Turner Diaries.’” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 24, no. 3, 2002, pp. 87–99.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/guru-white-hate-william-pierce-timothy-mcveigh-831091/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
0:05.9	Cool Zone Media.
0:10.8	On April 20th, 1995,
0:14.2	the front page of almost every newspaper in the country ran the same photograph.
0:20.6	A firefighter standing in the rubble with an infant in his arms.
0:27.3	Terrorist bomb hits heartland, clues lacking. The headlines screamed.
0:33.7	Papers ran quotes from anonymous federal law enforcement sources, saying the bomber was likely an Islamic extremist.
0:41.6	Government officials speaking off the record confirmed that they suspected it was a jihadist group, with ties to Iran.
0:49.8	Reporters rushed to get comments from counterterrorism experts, and plenty of them were happy to speculate,
0:56.7	that only a Muslim could have set off that truck bomb in Oklahoma City.
1:01.4	But experts in right-wing extremism saw something different in the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah building.
1:08.7	They were looking at an almost exact recreation of the bombing depicted
1:13.3	in the Turner Diaries, a novel sold at gun shows and by mail through Nazi newsletters.
1:20.1	And they were right. That first day, those experts didn't know yet that the bomber had
1:25.9	already been arrested, and that he'd been carrying photocopies of his favorite passages from the novel.
1:32.2	But they'd known immediately that it looked eerily like the events of the novel had come to life.
1:38.8	Two days after the bombing, the novel's author shrugged off any connection,
1:43.7	telling a reporter who reached him at his
1:45.2	compound that it was really, really grasping to try to make any connection to his book.
1:52.5	But he knew. He knew that his book could kill because this wasn't the first time it had.
2:02.6	I'm Molly Conger. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird little guys. This is a story about a book.
2:27.4	Sort of.
	...

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