On January 6, 2021, supporters of former President Donald Trump—many toting crosses and Trump flags, some with tactical gear and guns—smashed their way into the U.S. Capitol building, seeking to stop certification of Joe Biden’s victory. As we watched the mayhem on TV, perhaps the question that crossed my mind also occurred to you: How the hell did we get here?
One obvious answer involves Trump’s bogus election fraud claims, the logical endgame of a presidency built around grievance, paranoia, and wild falsehoods. But as one-time New Yorker legal reporter and former CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin shows in Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, the road to January 6 can be traced back at least a quarter century to the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, including 19 children. The perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, embodied the anti-government, gun-obsessed, white supremacist rage evident on January 6—a politics of rage that has moved from the fringe to very near the center of conservative politics (think Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or of course, Trump himself). Though McVeigh was executed in 2001, Homegrown, released May 2, shows that his story is very much a story for today. Moreover, though the bombing took place north of the Red River, it is both a Texas story and a national one.
