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sense of adventure. It became the inspiration for a band of white racists building a guerrilla army during the 1980s. And an ex-army gunner turned drifter carried it around in his pocket before being charged with blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Although gun rights were prominent in the story’s beginning, this was manifestly not a “militia” book. The militia movement, when it did appear in the mid-1990s, was open and public in its gun carrying. The fighters in this novel belong to secret organizations with tight leadership structures. Clandestinity is the lesson here, even more than the necessity of maintaining your very own .50-caliber machine gun in tip-top shape.
    The immediate success of Pierce’s novel paralleled an uptick in the National Alliance’s prospects. It added a few new highly effective cadres to the hard-core outfit Pierce had been building. “One thing decidedduring this period was that if we could not be a large organization, we would, at least, be an elite organization,” he wrote. “We stuck to the straight and narrow path, and we gradually began to pick up the sort of people we wanted.” 8 Pierce looked for people he regarded as intelligent and capable of working for long periods of time without becoming disheartened. And they did more than just sell copies of
The Turner Diaries
through the mail. Members distributed literature at an Oktoberfest celebration in Baltimore, on street corners in Alabama, door to door in Philadelphia, and among high school students in Chicago—all venues that produced new members. A few dedicated cadres purposely joined other organizations on the far right, such as the John Birch Society, and recruited activists attracted by the National Alliance’s ideological consistency and relative sophistication. The increased membership resulted in increased revenues, which were quickly converted into more literature, increased staff, a new computer system, and other projects. 9
    Several Carto-related enterprises also grew during these years. 10 Liberty Lobby transformed 25,000 readers of its monthly newsletter into 150,000 paid subscribers for a weekly tabloid entitled
The Spotlight
, known at its beginning as
The National Spotlight
. The first edition appeared on September 17, 1975. 11 Neither Carto’s name nor any of his pseudonyms were printed on the masthead, but repeated evidence in court testified to his firm control over the publication. The tabloid became Liberty Lobby’s most significant organizational advance since moving to Washington, D.C. It claimed the mantle of muckraking journalism and made money at the same time. Through its pages Liberty Lobby sold everything from vitamin tablets and silver coins to survival-ist handbooks and religious tracts. Before the Internet made all things available everywhere,
The Spotlight
’s classifieds and display advertisements became the one place that local propaganda groups found a national market. Carto and Liberty Lobby obviously relished the prospect of using the tabloid to gain hegemony over all the movement’s different factions. 12
    It did indeed become the movement’s most widely circulated publication. The muckraking claims, however, rested heavily on the only slightly veiled contention that Jews controlled the mainstream media. “Your newspapers, wire services, radio and television networks are controlled by big multinational business organizations and certain ‘minority’ pressure groups,” the first editorial read. 13 Apparently Carto’s readers thought much the same.
The Spotlight
rode the right-wing revival to ever larger numbers, and by 1980 paid circulation had reached more than three hundred thousand. Adding to its impact, 410 radio stations broadcast Liberty Lobby’s daily program. 14 To keep all the gears turning, Cartonow controlled a D.C. staff of forty working in a three-story building near Capitol Hill.
    A new breed of self-styled Christian patriots also sprang up in