(note: for more details, my report provides documentation and further exploration of this subject. It also features a picture of Trump with said author.)
This Spring, Donald Trump met — and accepted a book written by — a man whose ideas demonstrably inspired one of Europe’s worst terrorist attacks in decades, a 2011 neo-Nazi act of terrorism deadlier than the June 12, 2016 mass shooting at Orlando, Florida’s Pulse gay nightclub.
That 2011 terrorist attack included use of a fuel oil and fertilizer truck bomb. We’ll return to the subject shortly. But first, some other relevant history:
In 1995, a bombing carried out with a rented truck filled with fuel oil and fertilizer nearly leveled the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Among the 168 dead were 19 children and several pregnant women. Over 500 were injured.
Police soon arrested one of the bombers, Timothy McVeigh — who had with him a novel called The Turner Diaries that described a race war in which white supremacist insurgents use various unorthodox methods, including the detonation of captured nuclear devices, to topple the federal government and then exterminate Jews, non-whites, and gays.
This man Donald Trump met this Spring is the author of several books. One is the 2009 book The Next Conservatism, which anticipated most of the platform Trump has run on in the 2016 election primaries. Another, essentially an updated version of The Turner Diaries, is the 2014 novel titled Victoria — A Novel Of Fourth Generation War*.
The novel describes a coming race war, that starts in 2020, in which racist white Christian militia insurgents use various unorthodox methods to topple the Federal government, then carry out ethnic cleansing.
They force black families out of cities into the countryside (see chapter 27, search for term “countryside”) where, in rural areas of the South - as the author bluntly puts it, “eyeholes were cut in sheets” (p.310). They cram Puerto Ricans onto boats and ship them back to Puerto Rico.
They summarily execute (see chapter 27) African-Americans accused of even minor crimes. To stop a black nationalist uprising in Atlanta they vaporize the heart of the city with a tactical nuclear weapon.
They ban the religious practice of Islam because, per the hero of the story, “the one thing Muslims seem to do efficiently is murder” (p.222). They launch a new Christian crusade to conquer the Muslim countries of the world.
That was not the book its author gave to Donald Trump. The book he gave to Trump was his 2009 book The Next Conservatism, which reads as if as if it had been specifically commissioned as a strategic template for Trump's presidential campaign :
The Next Conservatism calls for stopping illegal immigration, controlling the U.S.-Mexico border, the ethnic and religious profiling of legal immigrants, making English the official national language (a less noticed Trump suggestion), protective tariffs, rebuilding American industry - to bring back well-paying jobs, investing in infrastructure (such as roads, bridges, and public transit), and pulling back from interventionist American foreign policies.
Trump could have derived most of his 2016 primary positions from a two-hour session with The Next Conservatism by simply dog-earing pages and underlining key bits of text with his signature golden Sharpie.
Co-author of The Next Conservatism is William S. Lind, who co-wrote The Next Conservatism with his good friend and longtime working colleague the late Paul Weyrich, who died in late 2008 shortly before the book was published.
(Lind also happens to be the author (under the pen-name “Thomas Hobbes”) of the 2014 novel Victoria — A Novel of Fourth Generation Warfare.)
One longtime observer of the America right has described Paul Weyrich as "the connective tissue of the modern conservative movement".
Weyrich played a central role launching much of the movement's early infrastructure including the Free Congress Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and a succession of conservative evangelical activist groups and coalitions - first Christian Voice (formed from several California anti-gay and anti-pornography groups), then the Moral Majority, then the Christian Coalition.
Interlaced throughout The Next Conservatism is a conspiracy theory, promoted since the late 1990s by the authors William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich, called “cultural Marxism”, which claims that an alleged plot by Jewish Marxists, launched in the 1920s, threatens to destroy America by undermining its white European Christian culture.
That “cultural Marxism” idea demonstrably inspired one of Europe’s worst acts of terrorism in decades, Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attacks that killed and wounded almost 400.
William S. Lind, who — according to Lind (and there’s a photo of the meeting) — Donald Trump met this Spring 2016, has been the most aggressive and dedicated promoter of the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory which is now accepted widely on the American right.
The idea is even given credence at mainstream conservative institutions passionately opposed to the presidential candidacy of Trump — such as the National Review, which only a few months before dedicating an entire issue to attacking Trump ran a favorable review of a book predicated on the “cultural Marxism” notion.
The “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory has also become popular on the European right, and was a central preoccupation of Anders Behring Breivik — who in 2011 simultaneously perpetrated an Olso, Norway truck bombing and a mass shooting of Norwegian teenagers.
Anders Breivik’s combined attacks killed 77 and wounded 319. In his mass-shooting, Breivik used hollow point ammunition to achieve maximum tissue damage and blood loss.
Breivik told the press that his attacks were meant to publicize his 1518-page political manifesto, the central thesis of which reproduces William S. Lind’s “cultural Marxism” idea. The terms “cultural Marxism” and “cultural Marxist” appear over 600 times in Breivik’s manifesto.
Anders Breivik was so taken with William S. Lind’s 2004 Free Congress Foundation book "Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology", which detailed the origins of the alleged “cultural Marxism” plot, that Breivik’s manifesto plagiarized Lind’s book almost in its entirety.
The Next Conservatism also contains extensive discussion of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory and on page 39 even provides a web link to the former Free Congress Foundation web page which had offered a free PDF copy of William S. Lind’s 2004 book "Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology" (Lind edited the book and wrote the first chapter) that was plagiarized by Anders Behring Breivik in his 1518-page political manifesto titled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence.
Following Breivik’s terrorist attacks, that web page with the PDF of the book disappeared from the Free Congress Foundation’s website.
According to the book (and also Breivik’s political manifesto), twin key components of the “cultural Marxism” plot are 1) the promotion of “political correctness” and 2) the entrance into the United States of both legal and illegal immigrants who do not share America’s traditional Anglo-European cultural heritage and who refuse to assimilate into that culture.
Both of those concerns have been themes central to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, and in his speeches Trump routinely attacks “political correctness” — a term that proponents of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory idea use as shorthand to refer to the idea.
*Note: the link provided for Victoria — A Novel of Fourth Generation War is to a website page with links to the complete first 35 chapters, up to page 344 of the 585 page novel. The white supremacist nuking of Atlanta — which besides (presumably) incinerating several million people also conveniently happens to vaporize Jane Fonda — is described in chapter 36 of the book, which this author owns a copy of along with The Next Conservatism.