And maybe you remember, too, that sense of vertiginous shock some people felt when we got our first look at the man who planted the bomb and discovered him to be, not a swarthy Muslim with a heavy beard and hard-to-pronounce name, but a clean-cut, apple pie-faced young white man named Timothy McVeigh. People could not have been more nonplussed if Richie Cunningham had shot up a shopping mall.
But the tragedy was to contain one last surprise. It came when we learned why McVeigh committed his atrocity. It seems he hated the government.
That revelation was our introduction to a world whose very existence most of us had never suspected. Meaning the so-called patriot movement, the armed, radical right-wing extremists who refuse to recognize the authority of the nation's duly constituted and elected government. Maybe you remember the news reports of how they spent nights and weekends drilling in the woods, playing soldier in anticipation of the day ZOG -- the Zionist Occupied Government -- ceded the country to the United Nations and soldiers of the New World Order came rappelling down from black helicopters to seize everybody's guns. Maybe you remember how crazy it all sounded.
But that was then. Twenty years ago, the idea of anti-government resistance seemed confined to a lunatic fringe operating in the shadows beyond the mainstream. Twenty years later, it is the mainstream, the beating heart of the Republican Party. And while certainly no responsible figure on the right advocates or condones what he did, it is just as certain that McVeigh's violent antipathy toward Washington, his conviction that America's government is America's enemy, has bound itself to the very DNA of modern conservatism.
Pitts goes on to quote a number of politicians and pundits who are now spouting the exact same language that once issued forth from the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge fame.
It is not often that I read something that is so obviously true that I am shocked I did not realize it myself, but this is one of those articles.
Yes that is exactly what is happening today, the ravings and rantings of paranoid lunatics has now become the language used, not just by Tea Party protesters, but also supposedly serious candidates for public office. Including candidates running to be the next President of the United States.
Gee no wonder some of these conservative candidates have argued so aggressively against DHS for identifying the sovereign citizen groups as the most dangerous to the American people. They already know that, but they don't want the rest of the country to recognize that their supporters are also our greatest threat.
