day of the rope

English

Etymology

• From an incident in Chapter 23 of The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. In the novel, the Day of the Rope was a day in which tens of thousands of white Americans were publicly hanged for being "race criminals" because of acts such as miscegenation or collaborating with Jews.

Proper noun

day of the rope

1. The start of a period of time when the white supremacist community believes it will (or, according to some, has already begun to) take violent vengeance on people of other ethnicities or those it considers race traitors.
   • 2010, Kenneth Womack, John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel, page 136:

     "How will we know when the Day of the Rope has arrived? you ask Timothy McVeigh. You're being serious for a change. Sincere, even. “ According to Pierce, the Day of the Rope is a grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one.

   • 2020 June, Benjamin Lee, Kim Knott, “More grist to the mill? Reciprocal radicalisation and reactions to terrorism in the far-right digital milieu”, in Perspectives on Terrorism, volume 14, number 3:

     Although these calls are not inherently violent, they feed into a well-established right-wing trope of the ‘day of the rope’, a point when scores will be settled against political opponents.

   • 2020, Rakib Ehsan, Paul Stott, Far-Right Terrorist Manifestos: A Critical Analysis, page 16:

     By declaring the Day of the Rope, Earnest clearly hopes others will follow him to action and, presumably, commit mass murder.

   • 2022, A Antifa, “Bill Fisher: A Case Study in the GOP Mainstreaming of White Power”, in Turning the Tide:

     Under his online persona of "Preston Brooks," Fisher references "the Day of the Rope," a white supremacist fantasy of mass murder, and repeatedly calls for lynching.

   • 2022, Marc Hermann-Cohen, “Gab as Disseminator of Antisemitic Conspiracy Myths and Enabler of Offline Violence”, in Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, volume 5, number 1:

     the day of the rope is coming for the wicked.