Homegrown Quotes

“Gun-carrying men are not just motivated by crime and insecurity but also by a loss of American values, a loss of masculine dignity, and a loss of confidence in the state.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“he would say that he was turned off by their “snob” lifestyle—the same word he used to dismiss the suburbanites who were buying houses in Lockport. It’s not clear whether he was offended, or just disparaging what he knew he could never have.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“The Green Berets were everything for McVeigh; he had no plan B. As was his pattern, McVeigh would later insist that he never wanted to be in Special Forces all that much anyway—just like he dropped out of college because he knew more than his teachers. (In the same spirit, years later, he said he knew more about criminal defense than his lawyers in the bombing case.)”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“Indeed, according to one study, right-wing extremism was responsible for 76 percent of all extremist murders in the United States from 2009 to 2019. (Islamic extremists were responsible for 20 percent, and left-wing and Black nationalists 3 percent.) A comprehensive study of the years 2000 to 2018 by Rachel”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“The insurrection on January 6, and much else in the contemporary conservative movement, show how McVeigh’s values, views, and tactics have endured and even flourished in the decades since his death. That makes the story of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing not just a glimpse of the past but also a warning about the future.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“McVeigh failed to find his army because he had no efficient way to locate and mobilize potential allies; in other words, McVeigh didn’t have the internet, in particular social media. As it turned out, there was an army of McVeigh’s heirs out there, but it took the invention of cyberspace for the soldiers to find one another.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“Indeed, the amount of right-wing political violence—especially bombing conspiracies and mass shootings—amounts to one of the lesser told stories of the first Black president’s tenure in office. As with the Oklahoma City bombing, these acts of terror were not random lightning strikes by demented individuals; they were targeted political acts of right against left.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“McVeigh was not “antigovernment”; he was a right-wing extremist who defined his politics in opposition to the federal government of President Bill Clinton.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“In the popular imagination, Michigan calls to mind the urban grit of Detroit, but this is misleading: Michigan is Detroit—attached to Idaho. The great mass of the state is rural, agricultural, and a hotbed of right-wing extremism.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“As usual with Trump, he and his supporters (and later his lawyers) could parse his words with enough precision to argue that he did not explicitly encourage the carnage on January 6—which included five deaths, countless injuries, and hundreds of arrests of people who thought they were doing what Trump wanted them to do.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“Shortly before the 2020 election, the Bureau’s agents arrested the conspirators before they had a chance to put their plan into action.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, or other government or independent counts.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“Jones recognized that McVeigh never came to terms with a fundamental contradiction—that he wanted the world to know that he bombed the Murrah building, and he also wanted to be acquitted of the bombing.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“(In my interview with him, Garland not only refused to draw any comparisons between McVeigh and the Capitol rioters, he refused even to utter the words January 6.)”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“McVeigh had been thinking about the movie Clear and Present Danger, which was based on the novel by Tom Clancy. “In the movie, the bad guys deliver a bomb with a helicopter, but they drop it on a truck, to make it look like it was a truck bomb,” McVeigh told Nigh. “We could say someone did the same thing here—that it was really a helicopter bomb.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“Several of the plotters to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 met on Facebook and then used private Facebook group chats to plan the attack”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“Convicting McVeigh and Nichols, while necessary, would do little to stop the forces that propelled their terrible mission. In the years after 1995, those forces endured, flourished, and burst forth, among other places, at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“As for the customs at Fort Riley, a lot of soldiers were racist, sexist, and obsessed with guns—and so was McVeigh.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“At the time, in the 1980s, this was an extreme view—that the Second Amendment existed to provide individuals with a violent check on the federal government.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“Blood makes the grass grow! Kill! Kill! Kill!”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“At first, the Army was all that McVeigh hoped. Soon after he arrived in basic training, his skill as a marksman earned him a commendation as a sharpshooter.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“In the popular imagination, Michigan calls to mind the urban grit of Detroit, but this is misleading: Michigan is Detroit—attached to Idaho. The great mass of the state is rural, agricultural, and a hotbed of right-wing extremism. This has been true for decades, going back to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the success of Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest, in the 1930s.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“The prevalence of veterans among the extremists raised the question of whether the military attracted those predisposed to violent political action or whether service in the armed forces radicalized those who might not otherwise turn to terror.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“The two men were among the earliest, and certainly the most prominent, examples of the link between modern right-wing extremism and the armed forces. This connection carried forward to the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. About 7 percent of the adult population are either veterans or active-duty service members, but approximately 15 percent of those arrested belonged to those groups. Those charged with more serious crimes, like sedition, consisted overwhelmingly of veterans.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“In the 1980s, the NRA, and the conservative movement, embraced the idea that the Second Amendment endowed individuals with a right to bear arms.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“As the sociologist (and MacArthur fellow) Jennifer Carlson has observed, “Gun-carrying men are not just motivated by crime and insecurity but also by a loss of American values, a loss of masculine dignity, and a loss of confidence in the state.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

“McVeigh then drove the 1,300 miles to Arkansas, where he met up with Nichols, and they looked at property they might buy together, perhaps to start a blueberry farm.”
― Jeffrey Toobin, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism