Day of the Rope

The “Day of the Rope” is a white supremacist concept taken from The Turner Diaries, a fictionalized blueprint for a white supremacist revolution written in 1978 by neo-Nazi leader William Pierce (under the pseudonym “Andrew Macdonald”).  The novel influenced many violent right-wing extremists from the 1980s through the 2010s, including Timothy McVeigh.

In the novel, white supremacist rebels, having taken control of California, engage in mass lynchings of purported “race traitors” such as journalists, politicians, and women in relationships with non-white men. These murders, which take place on the same day, are referred to in the novel as the “Day of the Rope.”

By the 1990s, the “Day of the Rope” had become a concept well-known across the white supremacist movement, even to the extent that a white supremacist business selling white power music CDs and racist paraphernalia named itself “Day of the Rope Productions.”  A 1994 song from white power band Bound for Glory contained the lyrics, “Politicians to Pope, there’ll be no hope/There is no escaping the Day of the Rope.”  During the early 2000s, the term was borrowed for a series of white supremacist music compilations from Eastern Europe.

Within a few years, “Day of the Rope” became a popular white supremacist slogan on social media websites, as did the phrase “There is no escaping the Day of the Rope,” the latter even appearing on a white supremacist flyer created by the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen. Another variation is “The Day of the Rope is coming.”