Digital books and the far right

ABSTRACT

Books are a recognized but insufficiently researched means for dissemination of ideologies, including by far-right violent extremists. Considering that the far-right are early and effective adopters of new communication technology, this article explores how digital publication and circulation of books can both enable and direct a known potential pathway to radicalization to extremism: the ‘intellectual quest’. This article explores the publication history and commercial circulation of novels by self-identified American neo-Nazis William L. Pierce and Harold A. Covington, which have been linked to planning and acts of violence both in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, and how commercial algorithms direct potential purchasers to ideologically adjacent material. We argue that digital book publishing and circulation have particular affordances for articulating, amplifying and normalizing violent extremist ideologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Accelerationism
• far-right
• fiction
• digital publishing
• e-books

Introduction

On 27^th December 2021, a gunman identified as Lyndon McLeod went on a violent rampage that killed 6 people in Denver, Colorado, before being himself shot and killed by police. McLeod was quickly identified online as having written a trilogy of novels, titled Sanction¹; a science fiction trilogy that involves genetic manipulation, serial killing and societal collapse. The first novel featured scenes that closely resembled parts of McLeod’s murders, including identifying by name several people who would become his victims, as well as other real-life individuals. Among the latter was Jack Donovan, a well-known author in the manosphere and far-right, associated (like McLeod) with the white nationalist masculinist group the Wolves of Vinland (Kriner, Upchurch, and Aaron 2022). McLeod’s books were not just a fantasy of individual violence against people he believed had wronged him tragically played out in reality. The murders in them are the catalyst for a fictional chain of events leading to societal collapse and race war; they narrativize militant accelerationism, a violent orientation that has been increasing influential on the far-right in recent years (Kriner 2022). Early in the research that this article reports, we had noted that McLeod/McClay’s novels, which were among those suggested by the algorithm (they have now been removed from sale on Amazon), led directly to accelerationist non-fiction books including Donovan’s The Way of Men (Donovan 2012), Becoming a Barbarian (2016) and A More Complete Beast (2018). After his murders, Sanction was taken off both Amazon and the personal website where he sold them and were not easy to find. A few months later, however, they were easily available online in multiple formats.

This tragic vignette illustrates broader patterns in the publication and circulation of far-right extremist (FRE) ideological material in book form in the twenty-first century. FREs have a decades-long history of strategizing and seeking to recruit through the literature, from William L. Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (Griffin 2001)² and Hunter (1989), through to an expanding raft of contemporary accelerationist fictions in the present. McLeod’s mass murder is just one example of political violence linked to far-right novels. The Turner Diaries, for example, has been associated with numerous terrorist acts, including the Oklahoma City bombing (Berger 2016). Research into novels by neo-Nazis, including Pierce’s books and similar ‘blueprints and fantasies’ of genocide and white supremacist takeover (Michael 2010), typically focuses on their content, strategies for disseminating FRE ideologies,and impact (e.g. Berger 2016; Gardell 2021; Jackson 2015; Kaplan 2018; Michael 2010; Young and Downes 2022). Paul Jackson offers a useful summary: they ‘can be seen as texts designed to give legitimacy to neo-Nazi [or other extremist] ideals … give licence to hold extreme views … [and] at the very least, help to make violence action appear morally desirable and even justified’ (Jackson 2015, 87). This scholarly attention is grounded in the established status of the authors as FRE leaders. In our current era of digitally based loose social networks (Newhouse 2021) and easy self-publication through platforms like Amazon, this is an incomplete foundation on which to build an understanding of far-right fictions and their significance, leaving production and distribution un-explored.

FREs are known to be early and effective adopters of new communication platforms, using them to connect with like-minded individuals or groups and also to radicalize new adherents (Conway 2017; Conway, Scrivens, and Macnair 2019). Dissemination of ideas and the creation of ‘ideological authorities’ through book publication and circulation is a key strategy of the far-right in the twenty-first century (Ravndal 2021, 2), and the use of fiction to spread ideology and inspire violence is well documented as detailed above. Although digital technology revolutionized book publishing, distribution and reception as significantly as it did other means of communication, there has been no specific exploration of digital books within the broader FRE ecosystem. In this article, we argue that digital book publishing and circulation play an important yet under-examined role in spreading and normalizing FRE ideas and positions. We suggest that the specific affordances of digital publishing and circulation have substantially increased FREs’ capacities to disseminate their hate-filled ideologies.

Methodology: questing

The EU-based Radicalization Awareness Network recognizes that some FRE individuals, ‘often students or well-educated individuals,’ understand themselves to be on an ‘intellectual quest’ (Kruglanski 2014; Sterkenburg 2019). As researchers, we seek to understand what such a quest might look like in the digital environment of the contemporary far-right, and why. We adopted, therefore, an autoethnographic approach, ‘questing’ as individuals in order to draw on our own experiences to illuminate the broad cultural context (Ellis and Bochner, 2000). Our focus is on fiction books, but the patterns we identify are by no means restricted to them. Our approach was exploratory and began with books by self-identified FREs: Pierce’s novels and those of his contemporary American neo-Nazi Harold A. Covington, as the most well known and clearly associated with planning and enactment of violence. We asked simple questions that an individual who encountered such titles, might ask: ‘where can I get these books’ and ‘what else should I read’? We used simple Google and Amazon searches to find out what was available, where, in what format, and what was associated with them. We corroborated these results with lists available on Goodreads and far-right curricula, such as Milo Yiannopoulos’ ‘America First’ reading list for alt-Right supporters,³ which point interested individuals towards further far-right works.

We found that neo-Nazi fictions like The Turner Diaries exist in a digital ecology of ‘redpill university’ servers, reading lists and reader recommendations, that makes gravitating towards these extreme works likely (Newhouse 2021). Furthermore, there is a raft of fictions that surround the truly neo-Nazi works, which are the result of the libertarian environment of the digital publishing revolution (Ravndal 2021). These provide imaginative scenarios that serve functions of normalization and acclimatization, as potential recruits pass down the ‘redpill pipeline’ that leads to extremist radicalization. We then analysed our findings, drawing on book history and research into FRE to understand the position and function of digital book publishing and distribution in this ecosystem. This article draws on research we have done both individually and collaboratively, including in a pilot study focused on accelerationism; the ideological current sweeping the far-right in recent years (ADL 2019).

Publication histories

Understanding the contemporary context in which we found a network of ideologically linked books, including a vast raft of far-right fictions, including extremist novels arguably advocating violence, requires comparison with the situation before digital publishing and distribution. The publication history of Pierce and Covington’s novels demonstrates that books are no exception to the pattern of FRE early adoption of new digital communication technologies. In the early 2000s, ‘one of the most profound effects of the digital revolution [was] the broadening of the concept of what it means to be a publisher’ (Kasdorf 2003, p. liii); this democratization opened up new possibilities for the far-right as the publication histories of Pierce and Covington’s notorious works demonstrate.

Pierce was the leader of a major neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance, in the 1970s. He started a dedicated publishing house for the organization: National Alliance Books, which produced The Turner Diaries.⁴ Most extremists did not have the financial capacity for such an endeavour and even with the resources of the National Alliance at his command, Pierce did not find publishing easy. According to the hagiography by Robert S. Griffin, it was almost impossible to find somewhere that would actually print The Turner Diaries (Griffin 2001, 141). By the time the novel helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to commit the Oklahoma Bombing in 1995, The Turner Diaries was nonetheless already associated with FRE violence, circulated significantly in far-right circles and was well known to the FBI. Those events sparked its first production in a mainstream publishing house ‘TO ALERT AND WARN AMERICANS’ of its violent message, according to the cover (Berger 2016, 29).

Covington, in contrast, did not have the resources of a major neo-Nazi organization and could not secure an agent, much less a mainstream publishing deal, even for his historical novels that did not openly create ‘blueprints and fantasies’ of race war (Michael 2010). Revolutions in publishing technology, however, would solve these problems for him. In 2003, just 4 years after bemoaning his inability to get an agent, Covington extolled the benefits of ‘print-per-order self-publishing’, that is, print-on-demand, for what he termed ‘racial fiction’ (Covington 2005, 174–76). Print-on-demand, a fundamentally digital process, allowed, as Covington observed, circumvention of the need for capital to fund printing and storage. It also avoided the challenges of reprints that he said had hampered circulation of earlier FRE novels, including The Turner Diaries (Covington 2005, 176). Covington used a ‘subsidy publishing’ model in which he outsourced production and distribution to an independent company that had no interest in the content of his novels (Haugland 2006, 5–6). Contracts which absolved the publisher of any responsibility for content, which, along with their pursuit of profits and the fictional nature of the books, were credited by Covington with allowing him to escape censorship (Covington 2005, 175–6). He quickly and easily began publishing and circulating what he called ‘a lifetime of literary work in eighteen months’ (Covington 2005, 175). The company that still publishes his novels for a small fee, iUniverse, did everything from typesetting, to basic marketing and listing his titles for sale through major mainstream outlets, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble (Covington 2005, 174). This would later include ebook and print-on-demand versions through Google Play and Amazon.

Subsidy publishers of the early 2000s produced books mainly for purchase by ‘authors and their families’ (Haugland 2006, 5), but Covington, like Pierce and other FRE leaders, already had an established internet following through various FRE blogs and other forums. Covington positioned his novels as a way to spread FRE ideology, encouraging his existing followers to buy them ‘as gifts for that politically incorrect friend’ (Covington 2008). The advent of digital publishing allowed Covington to overcome resourcing and social checks on the distribution of his neo-Nazi fictions in ways that paralleled the increased reach of FREs in the digital communication ecosystem much more broadly. His experience was an early instance, if not a conscious model, for the pattern of publishing and distribution of more recent far-right and FRE books. Covington’s novels, like Pierce’s, also circulate as free PDFs that are easily locatable online. They are unlikely to have entered this space without their early print-on-demand forms; searching for them also leads to troves of similar and related FRE material.

Circulating ‘pro-White’ books

Digital curation of lists of books, including but not limited to fiction, is a key aspect of dissemination of far-right ideas. One of us found a website dedicated to this purpose through a simple Google search for a title of one of Covington’s books and ‘PDF’. It is a self-described ‘online reading room’, created in 2014 with the stated aim of ‘gathering together all the books fit to read for a pro-White audience and making them available in four different formats (hardcopy, Kindle, PDF and HTML)’ (“Site Redesign” 2016). If there was any doubt that it is part of the far-right milieu, the ‘Follow me on Twitter’ link leads to the account of Russell James, whose profile says he is a ‘Proud Aryan [and …] White Rights Advocate [who is …] Committed to the 14 Words;’⁵ this is a reference to a slogan coined by David Lane and popular among white supremacists (ADL n.d..). The project is not complete, with no updates to progress since 2017.

The Colchester Collection is designed precisely for a far-right ‘intellectual quest’ and illustrates how mainstream digital publication and archiving platforms are open to exploitation by FREs. The website lists between 800 and 1,000 books grouped into subject section ranging from ‘Arts & Entertainment’ to ‘Fiction’, ‘Men’s Rights’, ‘Race’, ‘Religion’, ‘Jewishness’, ‘Philosophy’ and ‘White Identity’, and more. Pre-occupations of the far-right are evident in this list, while the breadth of topics covered demonstrates the range of spaces an FRE ‘intellectual quest’ might traverse. In the ‘Fiction’ section, Pierce and Covington’s novels sit alongside other far-right and extremist fictions, some pseudonymous, going back to Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan ,⁶ and imperialist nineteenth-century children’s historical fiction by G. A. Henty.⁷ These are embedded among a mix of canonical and classic Western literature from Aesop’s Fables to the Edda, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Edgar Allen Poe, T.S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Homer, The Nibelungenlied, Grimm’s fairy-tales, J. R. R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, and books by anti-totalitarian left-wing authors George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut. These mainstream works both legitimize FRE fictions by their proximity and make claims about the whiteness of the Western canon itself. The mix of openly FRE books, including by self-identified Nazis and neo-Nazis, from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, alongside mainstream nineteenth-century and twentieth-century material, is typical of other sections. It is inflected by the availability of older material through digital means, a point, which highlights a specific affordance of digital circulation of both old and new books: accessibility.

Each title listed on The Colchester Collection has links to free copies and/or to Amazon, or occasionally other online bookselling sites, for e-book and hardcopy purchase; the latter is typically print-on-demand. Free copies are typically in downloadable PDF format hosted on mainstream external websites such as the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Google Books. The Internet Archive has been identified as a significant component of the far-right digital ecosystem, hosting, for example, Nazi and neo-Nazi and the publications of Holocaust deniers (Baele, Brace, and Coan 2020; Stalinsky and Sosnow 2021). A scanned copy of Dixon’s The Clansman (1905), for example, was uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2011⁸; The Colchester Collection link directly downloads the PDF from the source. The book can also be purchased through multiple digital platforms, but the ease of the free download is noticeable. In other subjects, sections of these external sites provide free access to outdated scholarship that give (disproven) intellectual cover for FRE positions, such as Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races (1853) to J. C. Nott and G.R. Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854). Contemporary concerns about mis- and dis-information typically focus on material produced relatively recently, such as conspiracy theories; however, the opening up of access to older material by scanning, digital reproduction and open access is also problematic.

Algorithms: directed quests, accelerating

Curated lists and forums like The Colchester Collection take substantial effort to establish and maintain; our exploration revealed that existing, highly successful commercial platforms can obviate the need to devote time and resources because they are designed to not only enable but encourage users to identify and access more ‘similar’ material. The nature of selling algorithms on major ebook sites, such as Amazon and Google Play, directs readers to material deemed similar to that are searched, viewed or placed in a cart. The details of such algorithms are commercial secrets, and systematically investigating their specific patterns (which titles(s) led to what others, how do buying histories nuance specific recommendations linked to a given title and so on) was beyond the scope of this research and would have required a more systematic repetition of searches than our quest autoethnography allowed. Our quest demonstrated, nonetheless, that by working as intended – suggesting material relevant to that searched for – sales algorithms can play a significant enabling role in an FRE ‘quest’. Even now after it has been removed from sale in Australia, just searching ‘Turner Diaries’ on Amazon leads to results that include far-right material; the algorithm enables a directed quest even when the initial goal cannot be located on the site. We found early in our research that putting Covington’s work temporarily into an account’s in-store browsing history or shopping cart inducts the user down a right-wing rabbit hole that leads to increasingly radical titles as buying suggestions. Some of these are established parts of the right-wing ecosystem, but sales algorithms also take customers beyond the works authored by known FREs and other far-right figures to a raft of seemingly mainstream novels in the ‘adventure/thriller’ genre that could be easily read as imitations of Tom Clancy or Matthew Reilly books, but which construct fundamentally dystopian scenarios that map closely onto a major thrust of contemporary FRE thought: accelerationism.

Accelerationism and FREs

In keeping with our methodology, we divert here for a short side-quest, through a brief history of accelerationism to illustrate the ‘intellectual’ aspect of such ideological journeys. Accelerationism is an intellectual and political movement that is very significant in the far-right today (ADL 2019). In that context, it is best described as an insurgency strategy that complements the political millenarianism and apocalyptic religious doctrines native to the extremist Right. Culturally and intellectually speaking, however, accelerationism began as a left-wing movement proposing an avantgarde alternative to historical materialism, before developing decisively into neo-reactionary thinking. The idea of accelerationism originated within the avantgarde art circles of the Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit at Warwick University, led by cyber-feminist Sadie Plant (in 1993–1994) and now-disgraced philosopher Nick Land (1995–1998). Accelerationism’s political beginning stems from its initial formulation as an alternative to Marxism (and other forms of left-wing politics), which based their strategy in analysis of the contradictions of capitalism. By 2017, the Right had noticed the libertarian thought of Land, Yiannopoulos and co-thinkers, and adopted accelerationism as a right-wing strategy (ADL 2019; Miller 2020). Right-wing accelerationism aims at not posthumanist speculations about superhuman augmentation but an anti-humanist ethics of natural superhumanism (Land 2017), with both racist and sexist inflections. The flavour of this supremacist goulash of ‘might makes right’ ethics with the politics of hate can be gleaned from the handful of accelerationist manifestos of the far- and extremist-right today (Miller 2020). Although accelerationism originated in libertarianism, its focus on eugenics and hostility to democracy makes it completely compatible with white supremacism and neo-Nazi politics. The idea behind accelerationist thinking is straightforward, as a poster, by terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, indicates: ‘sure, it’s going to collapse – but can’t it hurry up?’ Their plan is to accelerate the supposedly impending disintegration of society through acts of terrorism that intensify and quicken the spiral into chaos (Loadenthal, Hausserman and Thierry, 2020). This is because on the fascist analysis, the best hope for the construction of a white supremacist state (typically in the soon-to-be former U.S.A.) is a situation of ungovernability. This brand of purposeful violence aiming to cause social collapse is differentiated from more passive modes as ‘militant accelerationism’ (Kriner 2021)

Accelerationism and FRE books

For the ‘intellectually questing’ potential FRE recruit, books – both fiction and non-fiction – are a trove of ideas that can be easily accessed and pursued through digital means. Articulations of action hastening societal collapse reach back as least as far as Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978) and are not limited to the pages of fiction. James Mason’s Siege (1992), Tom Chittum’s Civil War II: the Coming Breakup of America (1996) and much of Donovan’s writing all arguably resonate with accelerationist programmes. All circulate widely in free digital forms. Donovan’s The Way of Men (2012), for example, advocates masculine tribalism and supposed natural domination, as a response to a catastrophic degeneracy of modern life that Donovan says should be intensified to breakdown by violence (Donovan 2012, 141–42). The resonances with McLeod/McClay’s Sanction are strong.

Fiction also plays a critical role in rightwing accelerationism. The Base is an accelerationist group oriented to terrorist actions designed to spark a war of secession in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.A., in order to set up a white supremacist statelet (Miller 2020). It has recruited actively in other countries as well, including Australia, with the same white nationalist purpose. The militant accelerationism of The Base took the form, for instance, of a plot to perform a false flag attack on a pro-gun rally in Richmond Virginia, disguised as Antifa or BLM activists, in order to trigger nationwide armed reprisals by armed rightwing militias (Wilson 2020a). This basic strategy was inspired by Covington’s ‘Northwestern Trilogy Plus One’ (Wilson 2020b) which maps out a strategy for the creation of the ‘Northwestern Republic’, from guerilla warfare (book 1), through liberated zones (book 2), to regional insurrection (book 3) and finally, state formation (book 4). Covington’s novels have also reportedly inspired other planning for violence in both the U.S.A. and the U.K. (Barnes 2019; Michael 2014, 62). Pierce and Covington’s novels, then, have a lasting power to inspire extremist planning and action beyond the lifetimes of their authors and remain significant in the communicative digital ecosystem of FREs.

The algorithmically driven parts of our research quest, which began with Pierce and Covington’s novels, showed us that recent years have also seen a slew of accelerationist fictions, alongside and sometimes crossing over with far-right secessionist and survivalist fictions, published both pseudonymously, and by known members of the far-right. McLeod’s Sanction series is one example. Mike Ma’s Harassment Architecture (2019) is a fictionalized lone wolf rage fantasy that justifies hate crimes in a degenerate civilization on the basis of a quick roundup of the usual suspects of the culture wars: equal opportunity, ‘political correctness’, racial miscegenation, sexual harassment laws and male sexual frustration. A recent follow-up, Gothic Violence (2021) sees a band of terrorist surfers take over Florida amid the chaos caused by their violence. As we explore further below, numerous other novels by authors who are not known FREs or publicly associated with the far-right are also arguably right-wing accelerationist fictions. Recommendation algorithms on digital sales platforms send users to them, keeping up with new publications with speed and comprehensiveness that manually curated lists can not emulate.

Expanding the territory

Given its domination of contemporary book sales, it is not surprising that Amazon was a frequent stop on our research ‘intellectual quest’. Amazon is known (Kofman, Tseng, and Weigel 2020) to provide a digital platform for circulation of FRE ebooks, although it is far from unique in this as our research showed. Our experience with its sales algorithm described above suggested that we should investigate its function in directing readers of FRE books further. We created a new Amazon account and explored what was recommended based on what other customers who had purchased Pierce’s The Turner Diaries and Hunter, Covington’s Northwest series, James Mason’s Siege and the works of Donovan and Ma, had also bought and viewed.⁹

We were recommended an array of novels, which narrative social collapse and descent into violence.¹⁰ All were at least trilogies, with at least one series running to more than 30 books. Almost all of them, so far as we have been able to ascertain, are digitally self-published as ebook and print-on-demand editions. This means that, without the marketing and distribution channels of established publishing houses, they rely for sales on digital circulation that includes algorithmic recommendations on major platform. Rather than a list, which would be out-of-date before this essay appeared given the speed at which new books of this kind are published, we offer here some description of general trends and illustrative examples.

The novels recommended by Amazon do not often take an explicitly militant accelerationist position in that for the most part they do not narrativize terrorist violence by lone actors or loosely networked organizations with the aim of causing societal collapse. Mike Ma’s novels noted above are an exception to this general pattern, as were McLeod/McClay’s. Without exception, however, they narrativize social collapse, followed by widespread violence, almost always between white men and minority groups and/or gun-loving patriots and a liberal government, followed by recuperation of political control by white right-wing patriots. Violence, then, is positioned as both necessary and morally correct meaning that in a broad sense these fictions typically follow a central path laid out in the neo-Nazi novels of Pierce and Covington. ‘Preppers’ feature as heroic protagonists very prominently, as do ex-military characters; many novels combine the two, as in Jeff Kirkham and Jason Ross’ Black Autumn (2018). Fictional worlds in which conspiracy theories that circulate widely in right-wing, including FRE, milieus also abound. Eric Robert Gurr’s Civil War II (2019), for example, tells the story of a leftwing provocateur who engineers a fraudulent presidential election, triggering civil war and secession. Secessionist civil war is a common backdrop in the novels we were recommended, although it is not always sparked by election fraud. The books we were algorithmically recommended typically combine right-wing discourse around threats to the status quo, a variety of conspiracy theories and visions of (supposedly) inevitable societal collapse.

Matthew Bracken’s Enemies trilogy (2003–2009), for example, has been termed ‘a fictionalized version of the Aztlan conspiracy theory that now animates large swathes of the anti-immigration movement’ (Buchanan 2007). Books like Bracken’s ‘can be worked into ongoing conspiracy theories’ (Konda 2019, 321). Bracken has made no explicit public statements advocating violence that we have identified but has speculated about when civil war will break out in the U.S.A. and has a significant following in the militia movement (Lenz 2011). He has reportedly publicly claimed that the U.S. government is exaggerating the white supremacist threat to ‘advance a global conspiracy to open borders and undermine sovereign countries’ (Holt 2020). His books are a fictionalized version of conspiracy theories and beliefs that circulate on the far-right including among FRE and thus give credence to ideas that resonate strongly with accelerationist, including militant accelerationist, positions.

Many of the fictions Amazon directed us to seem to have an ambivalent attitude towards acceleration of social collapse, hovering between the passive receptivity of the survivalist enclave (which assumes collapse is imminent) and the active intensification stance of the extremist supporter. James Wesley, Rawles’ Patriots series (2009–2015) imagines an economic breakdown followed by civil chaos, in order to stage survivalist retreat, followed by pro-Constitutional regroupment, of a band of highly armed preppers, who must eventually stage an insurrection against socialist tyranny.¹¹ Rawles is a high-profile survivalist and the founder of the American Redoubt movement that aims to create a safe haven from social and economic collapse in the high country of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Washington and Oregon on what Rawles describes as religious lines: ‘Christians of all races are welcome to be my neighbours. I also welcome Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews, because we share the same moral framework’ (Rawles 2011). There is regional and political overlap with Covington’s imagined Pacific Northwest white homeland. In 2011, the Southern Poverty Law Centre identified a ‘cumulative effect’ of migration by FREs and others, including people inspired by Rawles, to Montana, arguing that this had led to a rise in anti-Semitic and anti-government activity (Lenz 2011). Rawles’ series is exemplary of a trend towards ‘postapocalyptic survivalist dystopia’ in twenty-first century American fiction (Henry 2020, 66) and ‘provided inspiration’ to patriot conspiracies in the ‘militia heyday’ (Konda 2019, 321). Rawles’ series is the most well-known and longstanding of a raft of ‘prepper’ or survivalist books Amazon recommended to us.

The publication history of the Patriots series demonstrates the significance of digital communication tools to the mainstreaming of formerly fringe works. The editions currently available are from an independent but mainstream publisher, Ulysses Press, but it has a long history of digital self-publication. Rawles’ first two editions of the book that is now sold as Patriots: a Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse were distributed for free online and reportedly had 17,000 and 82,000 downloads, respectively, between 1995 and 1998 (Rawles 2009). A ‘self-published’ limited edition updated version reportedly sold 1,600 copies in 1997 to 1998 (Rawles 2009). The book was taken up by Huntington House press and published under the current title for the first time in late 1998. Rawles claims that it went through three editions and nine printings selling 37,500 copies before the publisher went bankrupt in 2005 (2009); although we have been able to find only one edition from the period.¹² From 2006, Rawles again self-published an ‘expanded’ edition through Xlibris before the title was acquired by Ulysses Press and issued in paperback in 2009 and hardback in 2012; these editions are the editions sold on Amazon (and elsewhere) and held in 350 libraries around the world according to WorldCat.org. Early, free editions still circulated on survivalist blogs well into the twenty-first century.¹³ The Ulysses Press editions coincided with increased public attention to survivalism, and Rawles’ books in particular from both U.S. and international press (Strauss 2009; Willis 2008).

Bracken’s and Rawles’ books are praised on far-right websites such as The Occidentalist Observer and Occidental Dissent,¹⁴ demonstrating novels that do not advocate specifically for accelerationist violence or neo-Nazism are part of that ecosystem. Amazon’s recommendations algorithm took us beyond books that have identifiably registered with the far-right or researchers into far-right fictions. The mix of survivalism, libertarianism, conspiracy theories and broad anti-government and anti-social positions in the narratives nonetheless serves to normalize the underlying beliefs necessary to violent accelerationism: that society will collapse, that no pro-social effort can avert this, and that left-wing positions are therefore at best useless and at worst a mask for totalitarian impulses.

Conclusions: the sprawling landscape

Our questing autoethnographic methodology led us down one of myriad pathways through far-right and extremist material and ideology. That particular pathway principally traversed the U.S. political landscape, in all likelihood because of its starting point with the novels of Pierce and Covington that sought to shape that territory. The international nature of digital book dissemination and of those novels’ violent legacy demonstrates that this is not a problem specific to the U.S.A. however. The trajectory of our quest was driven by the affordances of digital books and commercial platforms, meaning that the specific findings reflect broader patterns of material and movement that it was beyond the scope of this research to explore. Digital publication and circulation of books has significant potential to enable and even direct an ‘intellectual quest’ by a potential FRE recruit. FREs’ capacity to articulate their ideological positions at length and disseminate them easily via digital means can be bolstered by commercial recommendation algorithms, resulting in both amplification and normalization of extremist positions. This raises significant further questions for countering-violent extremism researchers and commercial book publishing and selling platforms alike around the movement of ideas and ideologies between mainstream and extreme, the function of commercial platforms and their algorithms in dissemination of extremist positions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Deakin Motion.Lab, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University.

Notes

1. Written under the pseudonym Roman McClay.

2. Originally published under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald.

3. Widely available in the Internet, for instance: https://archive.org/details/americafirstreadinglist.

4. The National Alliance also produced other media including radio, magazines, cassettes and later CDs and video games.

5. https://twitter.com/RAJeTweets.

6. Dixon’s novel, and the film adaptation, contributed significantly to the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the twentieth century (Rogin 1985).

7. Henty was considered reactionary even by his contemporaries (McMahon 2010).

8. It is also on Project Gutenberg.

9. Searching for ‘James Mason Siege’ on Amazon offers up a slew of accelerationist and other far-right material even though the book itself is not sold there.

10. We do not suggest that the more than 20 authors of the books recommended by the algorithm, including those whose work we discuss below, hold extremist views or advocate violence.

11. The comma in Rawles’ name is deliberate on his part. Odd punctuation is often used in the sovereign citizens movement.

12. We have been unable to independently verify Rawles’ figures, but there is independent evidence online of the existence of the early editions as described by him in 2009.

13. https://www.survivalistboards.com/threads/triple-ought.20318/.

14. We have chosen not to provide links to avoid driving traffic to these sites.