To be afraid is appropriate, not crazy

Friends online, seeking to contextualize the El Paso massacre, pointed to this PBS documentary. (I snagged it from Netflix, but it is readily available in many outlets.)

It's a good, thorough, narrative of the sequence of events -- the ATF storming of Ruby Ridge, the incineration of the Waco Branch Davidians -- that formed the 1990s catalogue of government offenses that right wingers used to justify organizing in violent militias and, eventually, the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma's federal building. That domestic terrorist act killed 168 people, of whom about 100 were low level government employees and many of the others children in a daycare center. The film asks an all too contemporary question.

How could somebody get to that state in their life where they would be so angry and upset they would do something like this?

Joe Hersley, FBI agent

The perpetrator, Tim McVeigh, wanted to start the "next American revolution." A disgruntled failed soldier who loved guns, he drifted into neo-Nazi circles and became convinced that "the only way government is going to get the message is with a body count ..."

In the film, that indefatigable researcher of the right-wing, Leonard Zeskind, answers what we are now asking about El Paso suspect Patrick Crusius: was McVeigh some kind of sick sociopath, or did he come out of an identifiable right wing milieu?

There was no massive conspiracy, that much is true, but the idea that Timothy McVeigh was a lone killer, that is wrong headed. because it absolves the movement from which it all sprang. Timothy McVeigh was not on his own, he was the creation fo the white supremacist movement. He carried the Turner Diaries around and read it to people. He lived at the gun shows. He met neo-Nazis ... and the idea that there was no connection between the white supremacist movement and the events in Oklahoma City is patently false. There was a strong connection ...

And now we have a president who vibes with white nationalists ...