The Order: Movie Review

[Douglas Mercer]

Douglas Mercer
January 25 2025

Make no mistake about it—the subject of the movie The Order (2024) is none other than famed American philosopher, organizer, and racial thinker, and founder of the National Alliance William Luther Pierce (1933-2002). The ostensible subject of the movie of course is Aryan Hero Robert Jay Mathews (1953-1983), his efforts at organizing the Aryan race, his “crime sprees” and his majestic death in a Ragnarok Twilight Of The Gods fiery inferno—a death worthy of Wagner; and of course their subject is the by now patent pending “concern” about White racial recrudescence supposedly symbolized by January 6—and make no mistake about it, those too are definitely subjects of this film.

But it is the specter (the specter which haunts their nightmares and vile imaginations) of William Pierce which is the golden thread which ties this film together, it is Pierce’s daunting presence with which they are obsessed. It starts out when the lawmen find the book The Turner Diaries at a “murder” scene dropped there like a calling card, and soon the book shows up with a father reading it to a child (like the wonderful fairy tales of old meant to instruct), then it appears at an Aryan Nations compound, and finally an anonymous caller drops the book off at a lawman’s home for his edification. Then we get the awed and worried looks as they enumerate those famous six steps ending in the even more and justly famous The Day Of The Rope.

We also see a mishmash of the famous National Alliance Convention at which Mathews spoke (September 1983). We see a hall of White men and women and we see behind the speaker’s podium the words National Alliance Convention and a Swastika. And here we get the conflation they engage in—Pierce had moved well past Rockwell’s use of National Socialist symbols and never would have had unfurled the Swastika (not that he rejected this hallowed symbol but due to him being a canny man). He also had no truck with Christianity and the so called Identity Movement and its spurious and puerile resurrection of the late nineteenth century British-Israeli fantasy.

But their “devil” is in their details and one must say chapeau for them having done their homework. For the voice that introduces Richard Butler (who never spoke at a National Alliance Convention) is unmistakable—make no mistake about it my brothers. In the credits they list the voice as “nazi speaker” but to anyone who has heard Pierce’s voice via Kevin Alfred Strom’s seminal AI voice reconstructions, the voice is plain as day, the voice is clear as a bell, the voice is unmistakable—it is the voice of William Pierce, they have ventriloquized him. To all who have known Pierce through his writings the voice is always rather shocking. Kevin Alfred Strom as a to the manner born broadcaster for instance has the Voice Of God, a deep bass swell, rich and perfect, strong, soothing, and comforting, rolling across the mind like a sweet flowing and never-ending river.

And yet Pierce, as hard and steely and tough as any man who ever was, had a rather high voice and it’s flinty and it seems to catch at times—a stark contradiction to the power of his soul. And yet as the voice rolls on, and one becomes accustomed to it, the voice takes on another characteristic, a hard driving and staccato, implacable and relentless, like nails on a tin roof, like so many bullets being fired from a place where endless bullets are in store. And soon what one took to be a crotchety warble befitting a schoolmarm becomes in one’s ear a portent of a dire death knell---but not for us.

The fact is however that the words this voice speaks are: it is my great honor to introduce to you a leader that has done yeoman’s work to bring us deliverance, Reverend Richard Butler. And they have done their schoolwork to mimic Pierce’s voice. And I can say true that the number of people in America if you let them see this movie scene with the National Alliance banner who could recognize this voice as Pierce’s is certainly no more than several thousand. And yet as they got the history wrong, as they conflated the timelines, as they changed the names (surely not to protect the innocent!) as they got the chronology wrong, as they pell melled and helter skelterd the details of the saga, it was inordinately important to them to get the voice of Pierce (the “nazi speaker”) just so and perfectly correct, like a planted egg for the connoisseur of taste.

That is because this great man, the greatest since Hitler, our leader, our father, our friend, our kinsmen, is so inordinately important to them. Why he has been dead near a quarter of a century now, and yet he enflames and ensnares their imaginations, he obsesses them; in public they write him off as an evil man, as a crank or a kook or (better!) a domestic terrorist, they trot his son out to revile him. But their feral preoccupations belie their statements; they know deep down that in William Pierce they have found their bête noire, the one who has seen through their cheap tricks and tawdry lies, and has a plan and a vision, and created an organization to defeat them.

No, make no mistake about it my brothers. They are very scared of William Pierce. As well they might be. Forget about the canard of January 6, that is just a smoke screen, so much smoke and mirrors, they know very well that a bunch of fumbling and bumbling amateurs blowing shofars and wearing stupid spirit animal costumes with their faces stupidly painted hold no threat to them. But William Luther Pierce (sage and hero) and his inheritors, strong, organized, disciplined men with self-control and a plan for the far future, that is a horse of another color. William Pierce frightens them. So much so that they made a big Hollywood movie about him. The year was 2024.

***

The movie The Order was meant to be a chilling portrait of evil; what it is is noting of the sort. In the movie the hunter of evil aptly bears the name Husk for he is a husk of the man just as the air of defeat and fear hangs over the “victors” in the movie. Husk is alone, is alienated, his wife has left him and taken his two daughters and absconded, he can’t even get them on the telephone. He puts their pictures on his work desk but he knows they are lost to him; when he calls them he gets the message: “the number you are calling had been disconnected……” Husk represents current America, a husk of a country, a defeated country, the connections have been cut, the family is broken.

This theme (intended or inadvertent) is symbolized by cigarettes, for what shows forth is America as a cancerous growth addicted to life destroying. The first time we see Husk he is driving his car along a two-lane highway through a clean pristine and magical and majestic landscape, this is America The Beautiful at its most awe inspiring, the place which those dedicated to White Homelands have chosen as their abode, far from the corruption and sewer like filth of the Jewish cities. As Husk pulls into a parking lot in the small town we get a telling detail; his left hand dangles over the door of the car and he is holding: a cigarette. Like a leitmotif the cigarette functions in the film as a symbol of death, defeat, and despair. Husk is rarely without one, he smokes them nonstop, his link up with the deputy is affected by a lighter with a Marine emblem on it (America as cancerous).

The most important scene in the movie is when the two leads (played by Jude Law as Agent Husk and Nicholas Hoult as Mathews) meet near a hunting ground, a symbol in itself: hunter and hunted. Husk has been trying to hunt Elk but has had no luck. Mathews is in his truck and when Husk walks up to him he unthinkingly and immediately lights up a cigarette. He offers Mathews one who says “no thank you sir,” the very picture of courtly politeness. Then Husk says he has had no luck hunting, they seem to be hiding.

Mathews quickly says “maybe it is the smoke” and mockingly mimes smoking by putting two fingers back and forth near his mouth. Husk is not understanding and says “what?” Mathews says they like the fresh air they smell you coming for miles. Is that so? say Husk, with a bemused look on his face. Both know these words are only subtext, proxies for the truth of what is going on the brief conversation. And all throughout the movie while Husk smokes his cancerous addictions the men and women of The Order are shown in contrasting images of wonderful light and open spaces, with life and energy, and happiness, and balloons, with many children all about, participating in family festivities perfectly wholesome. Husk meanwhile lives an empty and barren room, puffing away, the very picture of despair, as the hunting goes on.

***

And so in this movie they eschew what is canonical in the truth and they switch up the facts, and they give William Pierce a lot more than a walk on or bit player role, much more than a cameo; and what they are doing is art, what they are doing is the making of myth—and that is fine, the truth in the end is not played out by the recitation of dry events but of their eternal ramifications. Here is the myth that they propose: a lone hero representing the government, a bit long in the tooth, down and out, trying to slow down, a sad and bedraggled man, rises to the occasion and battles and defeats the seething malcontents, the throwbacks of race thinking that are festering under the surface of America.

But good try as is said. When it come to the artist and the mythmaker don’t listen to the words from his mouth, look at what his hands have created. For here is the myth they tell: beneath the placid exterior of an addicted and cancerous and foul America erupts reams and realms of untold beauty and truth, hard, hardy, steeled, and stalwart men, dedicated to their race. The contrast between the two sides could not be starker.

Indeed, when Husk gets there he leaves a forlorn message to his family who will never hear it. He says it feels empty, he pops some pills, and smokes the inevitable cigarette and he says you should see the landscape, “it’s just like they said, it’s really something.” He cannot even describe it as majestic or awe inspiring, or breathtaking, but can only say: it’s just like they said. Out the window he then sees some wholesome young girls walk by in a perfectly formed line and says his girls could come up here and go hiking—and then with defeat in his voice says—or not. This is a man in despair, he has found paradise but all he sees is evil.

For the myth that in fact they are telling is a telling one: a lost man, a man without family, a man addicted, goes forth to defeat what is noble and decent and full of energy and full of life, and not knowing any better calls it evil; in the end the true evil forces overwhelm the good by the ludicrously sheer force of numbers; but when those flames erupt you see that truth is always in the eye of the beholder provided that the beholder is able to see straight, to see through the miasma and phantasmagoria of deceptions, and delicately parse the foulness of their myth.

The Order was made by them but was unknowingly made to order for us and in disentangling the intentions and the results we appropriate it and own it. As for the manifold lies they tell all one can say is we are not in hiding, and they will never hunt us down, for we can smell them from miles away. Smell them by the always malignant and cancerous smoke they invariably trail in their wake. We will meet on a hunting ground, they have that much right; and what one can be proof positive of is that the best men will win when the flames which call us on towards the path from which there is no return rise higher and higher. One who looks well enough can see it clearly in the distance, though the smoke. They put an end to Robert Jay Mathews but that was only the beginning; of what they have no idea. But all will see it true as the drama unfolds and reaches it perfect climax.

Just wait until the smoke clears--when their foul smoke no longer gets in our eyes. For when it comes to the Jews they like to play their funny games with our stories and our heroes, with our myths and our legends, and when they do they play with fire but always get burned.

[Douglas Mercer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kkyyci6brM

[Douglas Mercer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu4-RRhs9aM

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