From OKC to January 6th: The Unseen Hand of Federal Manipulation in Political Narratives

Xitter by Lomez

What @DarrenJBeattie is describing here about the tactics used by the Feds in the 90’s to create convenient political bogeymen out of thin air to support Bill Clinton’s Democratic coalition is exactly what is happening now. Very few people know this history and the right is falling for this trap all over again.

Excellent @DarrenJBeattie segment on the infiltration and subversion of right-wing groups by the FedGov.

The targeting of Patriots is nothing new, going back to the illegal inception of the FBI and earlier.

Merrick Garland has been at it since the 90s:pic.twitter.com/fs35OeRHhz

— Noor Bin Ladin (@NoorBinLadin) May 21, 2024

Starting in the early 90’s, radical militia groups were artificially amplified and propped up by the Feds and their media partners like the ADL and SPLC who in the early 90’s made their money warning spooked liberals of a “gathering storm,” and which included histrionic portrayals of rw groups in shows like Law and Order and movies like Arlington Road.

As we are seeing now, they also collapsed all rw cultural expression into a single thing so that actual violent extremists like Timothy Mcveigh were lumped in with various patriot groups, christian organizations, libertarian movements, UFO enthusiasts, and just about anyone operating outside of the mainstream.

This isn’t speculation and neither did it happen organically. It was intentionally constructed. Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s advisor at the time, explicitly details this strategy in his memoir. Having lumped these elements together artificially, it was time to split. Morris used the hyperbolic and extremist language supplied by the left media apparatus to tie ordinary mainstream Republican views to these elements, even as he and Republicans themselves knew that the truly violent and extremist factions were mostly a figment of liberal imagination, a few lone psychopaths, and the product of an incompetent FBI. The idea was to make Republicans go through a series of disavowal rituals to alienate and fracture their coalition. Morris called this the “ricochet” strategy.

The damning accusation leveled against mainstream conservatives was that they were “flirting with extremists.” Well, what was an “extremist” exactly? What did that term even mean? All of these fringe elements were sufficiently blurred that most didn’t bother to ask, and like now with terms such as “fascist,” “nazi,” “white-supremacist,” “insurrectionist” ––(tag yourself)––this strategy of lumping and splitting relied on a media either uninterested in distinctions among rw positions, or, more likely, happy to assist in creating a singular shadowy villain out of the outer right. Mainstream conservatives, in the wake of OKC, buckled under the pressure and played along.

They are trying to do the same thing today, with January 6th in place of OKC, and swapping one set of empty ideological signifiers for another, but the tactics and motivations are all the same. They are going to play this game, but conservative media does not have to assist them.

(By the way, much of this history is spelled out in Jesse Walker’s great book, The United States of Paranoia.)