Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism with Jeffrey Toobin

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s been 28 years since the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured hundreds more. At 9:02 a.m. on April 19th, 1995, a bomb built by Timothy McVeigh, an American domestic terrorist, exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building. It remains one of the deadliest acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. The motivations for the attack, its deleterious effects, and the longstanding impact on right-wing movements, including the January 6th insurrection, is the subject of “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.” The book, written by journalist and lawyer Jeffrey Toobin, is based on nearly a million previously unreleased materials. Toobin joins WITHpod to discuss what often drives extremists, ominous parallels between McVeigh and more recent insurrectionists, the role of social media in the incitement of anti-government violence, and why the book is a “warning for the future.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	One of the things I always try to be careful about when I talk about McVeigh's background is a lot of
0:05.7	people have many similar aspects to McVeigh in his background who don't become terrorists or
0:14.1	criminals of any kind. I think there is something about McVeigh and I have no hesitation about
0:22.8	simply calling it evil. I mean, there was something, you know, deeply evil about this guy,
0:28.0	but at the same time, there were many things about him that were very typical of both people in
0:36.4	his position in life and then people who turned out to be right-wing extremists of today.
0:47.2	Hello and welcome to Wise This Happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.
0:50.5	Well, as I speak to you, June 21st, 2023, Donald Trump has now been indicted for a second time.
1:03.5	You probably know this. You've been anywhere other than Rip Van Winkling and he has been
1:11.2	indicted in federal court this time on 37 counts having to do with violations, the Esmanage Act,
1:15.8	and conspiracy to commit obstruction. One of the things that's interesting is in reaction to
1:21.6	this and it hasn't started with these indictments but it's been something a consistent theme. I'm
1:25.9	actually going back years now in the Trump-Maga era is a growing animus on the part of the right-wing
1:34.2	towards the FBI. At a certain level, they are there's somewhere we're talking about defunding
1:41.3	the FBI. You have to defund the FBI. Get rid of the FBI. The FBI is now called the Deep State.
1:47.4	The Deep State is this coinage is actually taken from scholarship. I think about the Turkish Republic
1:53.5	and particularly the way that the post-Auto-Turkish Republic had a center in the armed forces there
2:00.0	that would fairly routinely overthrow democratic governments to make sure that the country did not
2:06.6	steer away from Auditor Xvision. That Deep State concept has been imported and so you've got this
2:13.3	really common sort of attacks, political attacks on the FBI. Now what's funny about this, of course,
2:19.5	is there's a kind of ideological vertigo that this will induce. The idea is that the FBI is a
2:26.0	bastion of like woke libs and so they're out to get your favorite president because he's an
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