If one was trying to understand how we arrived in the political moment we are in — with Donald Trump improbably on the precipice of a second term as president of the United States despite all manner of disqualifying, unfit behavior, most seriously being the incitement of the January 6, 2021 insurrection to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election — a good place to start is the 1990s. At least in my estimation, and I’m sure a more astute, longview political scientist could correct me, the 1990s is where firebrands like Rush Limbaugh took to the airways, Newt Gingrich’s firebrand legislative style was ascendant, and Fox News was created with firebrand heavyweights like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. America has had firebrands on the airwaves before (Google Charles Coughlin), who made the fever swamps on the fringe mainstream, but I think there is something to be said for a multitude of them, including in actual political power, operating simultaneously. These firebrands convinced millions of conservatives that they are the victims of coastal elite, evil Democrats, who want to destroy not just their way of life, but America itself, i.e., Democrats represented an existential threat to the country. Often imbued in this rhetoric was violence, including arguing for a new 1776 and/or that a second American Civil War was imminent. Add a Black man becoming president in 2008 with a man who made his political career doubting said Black man’s citizenship, and it shouldn’t surprise to true conservatives that the conservative movement, the Republican Party, was never actually interested in conserving anything (again, they hate the present-day version of America and seek to blow it up, metaphorically and as we’ll see, literally) but their own perceived victimhood grievances. This is my long-winded way of saying, you can, as Jeffrey Toobin does in his 2023 book, Homeland: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, draw a rather compelling line from the fever swamps-made-mainstream of the 1990s through to McVeigh to the rise of the Tea Party movement (ostensibly about government spending, but I’m not remotely convinced) to Trump’s ascendancy to Jan. 6. Toobin’s thesis is that right-wing extremism is a product of this aforementioned ecosystem, these fever swamps, and partly because of this very ecosystem, and partly, obviously, the events of 9/11, the federal government took its eye off the most salient, increasing threat to Americans: right-wing extremism. McVeigh wasn’t, as contemporary accounts and history seem to paint him, a lone loser, Toobin argues, but a product of this ecosystem, and importantly, his views in many ways became ascendant with the rise of Trumpism. Imbued within Trumpism is the normalization of violence, that violence itself is a justifiable means to an ends in our body politic. For example, If Mike Pence, the former vice president, needs to die to stop a perceived unjust election result, then that is the price to be paid. Toobin’s compounding thesis, then, is that McVeigh’s story was covered (by himself included) as a crime story rather than a political story when it ought to have been the latter.
Timothy McVeigh and his right-wing extremist ilk always like to evoke George Washington and 1776. The infamous Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 did as well. Yet, as Toobin notes, how can these people claim the mantle of 1776, where our Founders sought to establish a democracy, when they intend to dismantle one? Certainly, whether McVeigh or the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, they fashion themselves as the ultimate patriots, but there is nothing patriotic about killing fellow Americans, first and foremost. Secondly, I wonder what these people actually like about America. At least with McVeigh, we know he was in the KKK, so, we can make an educated guess there about what he “likes” about America. Toobin puts it more succinctly: How can they profess to love their country while hating everything about contemporary America? To be clear, the firebrands of the 1990s, as now, bemoaned contemporary America and its direction, too. That bemoaning is tethered to a progressing erosion of their status in America, mostly culturally (they bemoan the erosion of this more than even recognizing the gaining of political power).
McVeigh was motivated to carry out a bombing for three reasons Toobin says: 1.) He was obsessed with guns, and the Clinton administration’s ban on semi-automatic weapons via the 1994 Brady bill pushed him over the edge; 2.) The belief in needing a new 1776, again something echoed by the Jan. 6 insurrectionists; and 3.) The aforementioned belief in the power of violence to motivate the body politic. He fervently believed by bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that he would instigate a revolution of a sort. Indeed, McVeigh said he targeted the “heartland” rather than a major city precisely to stir an uprising among the masses. Of course, a fourth motivating factor for the Oklahoma City Bombing was the Waco siege on April 19, 1993. Two years later to the date, intentionally, McVeigh bombed the Murrah building. He was even set up outside of the siege selling bumper stickers. Toobin also clarifies contrary to contemporary and historical characterizations of McVeigh that he wasn’t a survivalist or even an anti-government type. He was a right-wing extremist. Similar to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, these extremists don’t yearn for “no government.” They’re yearning for a government reflective of them and responsive to their needs. A government that punishes their enemies, who are on the left. That’s why it’s right-wing extremism. I would also argue, as Toobin does peripherally, McVeigh was primed for violence by what primes a lot of young men to violence: loneliness and listlessness (again, it fascinates me how much projection occurs, wherein white men will bemoan “others” who are getting handouts from the government or are lazy, but who themselves, can’t keep a job and don’t want to keep a job), which creates the yearning to Be Someone, even if by becoming that someone, you must kill and maim scores of innocent men, women, and children.
What I learned from Homeland — and I learned a lot because I didn’t know much in the way of specifics about the bombing or McVeigh — is that McVeigh didn’t act alone. His co-conspirator was Terry Nichols, who was also steeped in The Turner Diaries, and who, like a lot of these young, wayward men, was “sleeping” with an underage girl. The red flag for these types is that they are with underage girls and/or are misogynistic. In other words, Nichols and McVeigh were incels before incel was a term in vogue to describe such men. Importantly, too, as with the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Nichols and McVeigh were relatively middle class, or at least, grew up that way. These weren’t poor, uneducated people, as we sometimes think of criminals. Michael Fortier and his wife also were culpable in the bombing scheme; Fortier and his wife essentially could have, and obviously should have, blown the whistle on McVeigh’s whole plan, given how much of it he shared with the couple.
Interestingly, also like on Jan. 6, McVeigh saw the police as an extension of the state he hated (as currently constituted). He intended to kill any police who interfered with his mission. Similarly, the Jan. 6 insurrectionists are on video throughout the ordeal arguing that the Capitol Police should be on their side or that what they are doing is for the police. And of course, they were willing to harm scores of police officers who were in their way (and they did). That said, when the time came, McVeigh didn’t shoot the cop who pulled him over. That cop was fortunate because of what McVeigh just did, and because he was carrying a loaded weapon.
An important, albeit touchy discussion to have that Toobin addresses, is the military to right-wing extremism pipeline, given Nichols and McVeigh were both in the military, and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists had a number of former military (and law enforcement) members involved. Notably, the Department of Homeland Security released a report during the Obama years that was quickly rescinded after right-wing whining and crying about this very issue. That’s partly why Toobin argues the government took its eye of the ball of right-wing extremism and its ascendancy. McVeigh was a loser, though, flunking out of the Green Berets two days in, and being rejected by the U.S. Marshals (he thought so because he was white). To Toobin, such incidents were just further inciting incidents for McVeigh’s actions. Attacks on his perceived manliness, as it were.
I will say, the police work to uncover McVeigh’s plot and arrest him was well-done. I have no issues or complaints there. They did everything via normal, laborious police work. And McVeigh was arrested barely 70 minutes after the bombing because of a missing license plate on his car. The moment when the small town sheriff was told by the FBI that he was holding the OKC bomber, I actually had a goosebumps. What an incredible confluence of events. The police also had the fortune of the VIN quite literally falling out of the sky on a metal piece of the Ryder truck, which allowed them to quickly track down the truck, and collect actually decent eyewitness testimonials. I especially can’t get over how dumb Nichols was to think he could talk his way out of prison, but also, that he idiotically, as a hoarder, kept the receipt for the two tons of fertilizer he purchased!
The throughline from McVeigh to Jan. 6 gets a little on the nose when you realize Merrick Garland, now the United States Attorney General, oversaw both investigations, quietly, often irritatingly quietly, in Toobin’s assessment. He wishes then and now, that Garland was more forceful and all-encompassing with his investigation. (And perhaps, that he moved quicker.)
It was difficult to listen to the portion of the book that dealt with the aftermath of the bombing. Of the 21 preschoolers at the daycare housed in the federal building, 15 died. I just Googled the famous Fields-Baylee photo, and it’s horrific. It looks like something out of a warzone. What’s particularly horrific to consider is that McVeigh’s bomb was intended to be even bigger, but he had to improvise with the ingredients. Still, 168 men, women, and children died. Unnecessarily, obviously, because of this man’s belief that anyone inside a federal building was culpable. Culpable for what exactly resides only in the fever swamp-addled brains of people like McVeigh. The reverberations are staggering: 324 buildings were damaged in the blast, but more significantly, because of the aforementioned death toll, 30 children became orphans, and 219 children lost at least one parent. What’s bone-chilling, and illuminating, to remember is that the Oklahoma City Bombing isn’t actually the deadliest homegrown attack in American history; heck, it’s not even the deadliest in Oklahoma. That belongs to the 1921 Tulsa massacre, which claimed upwards of 300 dead and hundreds more injured. Even now, if you Google that question, OKC comes up and is listed as such, according to the FBI.
The trial aspects of Toobin’s book were interesting. I particularly liked, I believe, one of the prosecutors saying of McVeigh, “You may be at war with your country, but your country is not at war with you.” Again, these right-wing extremists think they are in the trenches of a war with the federal government, but it’s simply not the case. I wasn’t fond, though, of Stephen Jones, the lead defense attorney (of a team of like 33 defense attorneys!) for McVeigh because he seemed to use Garland’s steadfast intent for a fair trial to the max by grifting off of taxpayer money to travel around the world. More than $20 million was spent on McVeigh’s defense. Perhaps most notably, though, is how the nascent victims’ rights movement clashed with the trial and the judge’s wishes. So much so that Congress and President Clinton intervened.
Overall, I found Toobin’s book unnerving, to say the least, but astute in the throughline he convincingly establishes from McVeigh to Trump and the events of Jan. 6. I can imagine some would find that a ghastly throughline — McVeigh bombed and murdered scores of people, after all — but Toobin’s point is that the animus that motivated McVeigh, which was thought to be on the fringe and an outlier, is the same animus that motivated the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and is mainstream in the Republican Party, particularly as expressed with its figurehead, Trump. In that way, I find Toobin’s book a necessary read and a clarion call to take right-wing extremism and its ascendancy more seriously.
Milam's Musings 