The Market Fundamentalist

The person convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing was Timothy McVeigh. Was McVeigh in any sense a person who believed in the principles of the Tea Party, or had an anti government philosophy?

Ex President Clinton wrote:

> We should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them. On that April 19, the second anniversary of the assault of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, deeply alienated and disconnected Americans decided murder was a blow for liberty.
Clinton and his administration took to blaming talk radio (Rush Limbaugh) and the 1990’s Militia Movement as being the direct cause, or at least the inspiration, for McVeigh’s act. They proposed legislation that was very similar in tone to the Patriot Act that was passed after 9-11.

The strategy worked, to a degree. Clinton and his policies had been routed by the so called Republican Revolution in 1994 that took back the House under Newt Gingrich. Clinton was in big trouble politically, largely because he and his unofficial “co president” Hillary Clinton had overreached on health care reform. It was with his advisor, then Democrat, now Republican Dick Morris, that Clinton conceived the “blame the Republicans, constitutionalists, and “Hate Speech” for what McVeigh did” strategy that succeeded in helping him get reelected to a second term in 1996. See http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/How-Clinton-exploited-Oklahoma-City-for-political-gain-91267829.html

Will it work this time as well? Will the people actually in power, ie the Democrats, succeed in blaming the people who are out of power, ie the Republicans, the Tea Party, the libertarians, constitutionalists, etc for violence? Violence that hasn’t even occurred yet?

First of all, let’s take a look at McVeigh. Was McVeigh a kindred spirit to the Tea Party?

Study after study on the new Tea Party movement shows that they are of two subgroups: followers of Sara Palin, and followers of Congressman Ron Paul, in their general outlook. The followers of Palin are generally Jacksonian in foreign policy ( militant out of national pride and HONOR, but not solidly neocon, ie not so much interested in nation building and spreading democracy via war to remake the world) and socially conservative. The followers of Ron Paul are generally non interventionists in foreign policy, and do not care for the government to dictate personal morality. Well, Jeffersonian in outlook..

Both of these elements in the Tea Party are united in a belief in LESS GOVERNMENT, through LESS GOVERNMENT SPENDING and DEBT, and also in LOWER TAXES, particularly lower taxes through lower tax rates, not so much by tax deductions for social engineering purposes.

Was McVeigh of similar mind?

The evidence states otherwise. McVeigh himself stated his most influential political ideas came from the “Turner Diaries”, a tract written by one William Pierce in 1978. The book has a scene where a truck bomb is used to destroy a federal building. http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/turner_diaries.asp.

But the Turner Diaries did NOT advocate less government. It advocated MORE GOVERNMENT. William Pierce wanted a totalitarian racist, white supremacist government.

In other words, Timothy McVeigh, based on the book he cites (and the FBI reports pages were found in his vehicle when he was arrested) was a NEO_NAZI.

Can a movement that desires LESS GOVERNMENT be the same as a movement that wants MORE GOVERNMENT?

If you suffer through the experience of actually reading The Turner Diaries, as I did, you will find that author William Pierce did not support anything remotely resembling limited government; indeed, he explicitly repudiated limited government conservatism inthe book.

Rather, Pierce promotes the establishment of a totalitarian state modeled on Hitler’s (the book refers to Hitler as “the Great One”). There is absolutely no evidence that McVeigh’s attack or Pierce’s book were motivated by concerns about “American freedom” understood in a libertarian or conservative sense or that they sought to strike “a blow for liberty.” Rather, they were motivated by a desire to suppress Jews and non-whites and establish a Nazi-like “Aryan” state. Likewise, the original German Nazis also supported unconstrained government power, including in the economic realm. They weren’t the National Socialist Party for nothing.