that. that is that the white power movement, for the purposes of this committee, hearing their interested and figuring out culpability for the former president and other members of the administration. they spent a lot of time on things like, did he know about the election being lost, did he issue a call that was then used as a unification point and a call to arms for various extremist groups, it s very clear that both of those things are true based on the testimony we heard today. but the other part that we should be paying attention to is what the attack on the capitol meant to people in this movement. one of the comments that was read in testimony today to the tweet about it will be wild that the former president wrote was a direct reference to a white power novel called the turner diaries, which describes it s a handbook for how white
was a direct reference to a white power novel called the turner diaries which describes a sort of it s a handbook for how white separatists can take over the united states and then through a campaign of violence and genocide create an all-white planet. this is important because that book has in it an attack on the capitol very much like the one we saw on the 6th. and the point of that attack within that book and within the ideology of this movement is not a mass casualty event. it was not imagined as a mass casualty action. like the one they very successfully undertook in oklahoma city. it was imagined as a strike at the heart of power that was meant to recruit. and it was stunningly successful. so we shouldn t let the idea of ineptitude distract us from what was for the militant right a very successful recruitment action. i want to play part of the testimony from steven ayers, he was a supporter of donald trump. not affiliated with any of these
recruitment action for radicalized trump supporters. what exactly do you mean by that? could you just expand on that a little bit more? absolutely. so january 6 as an event follows a playbook laid out in a novel from the 1970s called the turner diaries, which is a cultural central point of this kind of activism. it lays out a number of different sorts of attacks that a white guerrilla movement might take to unseat what they see as a corrupt state and bring out a race war. one of the incidents in the book is an attack in the capitol. in the turner diaries, it s a mortar attack, but it s very similar to january 6 in that it s not indicated as a death toll but rather a strike at the heart of power. in the book they talk about how they can use an attack like that not to kill large numbers of people, but instead to show other white people that this cause can work and to bring people into the fold.