Terrorgram materials, which include viable bomb-making instructions, tactical and camouflage guides, and instructions on how to disable critical infrastructure such as electrical substations, water treatment plants, and dams, have been radicalized in at least one of the so-called “saints””, or mass shooter, and have allegedly been linked to a series of Attacks on the power grid in North Carolina as well as several active federal prosecutions.
“William Pierce doesn’t make bombs,” Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center told Rolling Stone a quarter-century ago. “He builds bombers.” In many ways, Terrorgram Collective now fulfills the same role and its publications have become the modern version of the Turner Diaries. Spread around the world through Telegram’s moderation-free wilderness, the group’s message of hate and violence now circulates independently of any organized group or ideology for disaffected and unbalanced “lone wolves” to latch onto as justification for future atrocities.
While the order remains firmly rooted in the past, save for a passing reference to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing on a title card, during production there was no escaping the drumbeat of resurgent far-right militancy in the United States. Kurzel, the director, remembers watching news coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection and commenting on the gallows erected in front of the Capitol building, a drawing of which appears in the book and in the law exhibit scene. “The Turner Diaries “I started to become more visible in the current environment in a way that surprised me a little bit,” he says, speaking to WIRED from his residence in Tasmania. In fact, after January 6, Amazon removed The Turner Diaries from your online inventory.
Hoult’s brave portrayal of an icy, controlled but menacing Mathews through the Order’s campaign of armed robbery, forgery, murder and armed confrontation with the FBI is one of the film’s two anchors. Aside from a striking physical resemblance to the founder of the Silent Brotherhood, Hoult studied his subject closely, imitating Mathews’ gestures and movements from old documentaries, studying texts that radicalized his subject, lifting weights, and eliminating alcohol from his diet.
“Mathews was someone who thought and planned so far in advance about what his end goal was, that I think he always kept it in sight. That’s something that Justin and I talked about, that he wouldn’t lose his mind over trivial things or things that would potentially hurt his cause. In his mind, he had somehow already planned his destiny,” Hoult tells WIRED.