A few weeks ago, on the April 19th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, Raw Story detailed the evolution of fears among Oklahomans to terrorism taking the form of mass shootings. The same ideologies shared by bomber Timothy McVeigh when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building are on the rise again 28 years later.
Legal analyst and author Jeffrey Toobin has penned a new book about America's anti-government extremism from McVeigh to the militia movements, the extremists that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, and Donald Trump's call to the extremists at Waco on the 30th anniversary of the shootout with government agents.
A New York Times review, of Toobin's book begins with the Trump rally, calling it "the dog whistler heard 'round the world."
"He was issuing a call to the far-right fringe that was earsplitting, even by his own standards. It wasn’t simply the location but also the timing: a month shy of the 30th anniversary of April 19, 1993 — a date that marked the fiery, deadly end of the 51-day standoff between the F.B.I. and David Koresh at his Branch Davidian compound near Waco," The Times says.
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The language Trump used was all about the "deep state government" and while he didn't specifically bash the American government or the federal government, he used his opponent, Joe Biden, as the representation of the U.S. government. It has been reinforced by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has been trying to hold hearings on the Democratic president weaponizing the government against the right. The hearings haven't worked out very well, but it's the "doomsday" language the GOP, including Trump, has been using for months to court anti-government sentiment and stoke anger and fear.
Ruby Ridge in 1992, Waco, and his months traveling to gun shows were the key to radicalizing McVeigh, who was already losing faith in America after killing Iraqis in the first Gulf war, Operation Desert Storm. The former two "became a galvanizing moment for the radical right," specifically.
Toobin's new book, "Homegrown," adds to the ongoing conversation about the growing domestic extremism elements in the United States amid Trump's MAGA movement and just how dangerous things have become. Toobin was the legal analyst who covered McVeigh's trials in Denver and in Oklahoma for The New Yorker. So, his book looks at McVeigh's “place in the broader slipstream of American history.”
Toobin explains that Merrick Garland, then a Justice Department prosecutor, stripped away any extemporaneous details deemed "clutter" that left McVeigh looking as if the trial was only about him and not the ideology he was pushing.
The Times review explains that the book's first part walks through McVeigh's life and his pathway to extremism, which began with a simple obsession with guns he would shoot with his grandfather. In an interview McVeigh gave before his execution, he confessed that he liked the idea of joining the military because he could hone his gun skills with free ammunition. He became an excellent shot.
After killing a few people, he viewed the military in a different light and began to question why the U.S. went to war in the first place. Someone gave him a copy of the anti-government book "The Turner Diaries" which glorified white supremacy and terrorism. After being discharged, he failed to fit into normal society and had hoped his service would lead him easily into another job. It didn't. So, he sat around in the family home, watching as the Ruby Ridge shootout unfolded.
At gun shows he really began to meet the neo-Nazis and white supremacists that only confirmed the ideas he was cooking. While Ruby Ridge was the spark, Waco became the flame. The subsequent assault weapons ban of 1994 was what the extremists warned would happen, and the idea of the government taking away people's guns was born and spreading quickly. In McVeigh's mind, the government's actions were leading them to act. He thought of himself as a patriot standing up to the tyranny of the federal government. A freedom fighter. It's a language that became much more public with the Charlottesville riot and again after the 2020 election.
“The argument was worse than nonsensical,” Toobin writes. “It was offensive.”
The book "repeatedly draws a 'direct line' (as promised on the jacket copy) between the Oklahoma City bombing and the insurrection on Jan. 6," The Times writes, "at multiple points, Toobin interrupts his brisk narrative with some galumphing sentences reminding the reader of parallels that are glaringly obvious. The more intriguing parts of the book come from his descriptions of all the legal wrangling, much of it informed by 635 boxes of case files donated by Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s showboating attorney, to the University of Texas in 1999. Toobin describes how the lawyer and his client grew to dislike and mistrust each other. After McVeigh criticized Jones in 'American Terrorist,' a book by two Buffalo News reporters, Jones claimed 'a right to defend himself by disclosing his client’s confidences.'"
Garland wanted to focus only on the two men, and “actively discouraged the idea that McVeigh and Nichols represented something broader — and more enduring — than just their own malevolent behavior,” Toobin writes. “This was a dangerously misleading impression.”
The Times saw it as a tale of caution that it inadvertently provided cover for the same kind of anti-government extremists to operate in public without being linked to the ideology that led to a bombing that killed 168 people including 15 small children.
