It started in Grand
Junction, Kansas. A white man, seething with hate and addicted to gun shows,
blended in when he rented a Ryder truck. He packed the large van with 4,000
pounds of explosives, drove a short distance to Oklahoma City, and blew the
Alfred P. Murrah federal building to smithereens. That
was April 19th. The year was 1995.
Timothy McVeigh is the deadliest
American terrorist, having killed 168 people.
In an interview conducted by an SMU
journalism student, Michelle Rausch, outside the Waco Compound in 1993, McVeigh
said a crazy thing that could pass for a Breitbart editorial today: “The government is afraid of the guns people have because
they have to have control of the people at all times. Once you take away the
guns, you can do anything to the people. You give them an inch and they take a
mile. I believe we are slowly turning into a socialist government. The
government is continually growing bigger and more powerful, and the people need
to prepare to defend themselves against government control.”
Fast forward to Kansas on April 18,
2018.
Three white men from Dodge City were
convicted in federal court of trying to blow up a local apartment building where
Somali immigrants lived. The leader called himself the Orkin man, and referred to
Muslims as cockroaches.
Later yesterday, another federal
court held in contempt Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach— the person whom Donald
Trump named to lead the so-called national voter fraud commission. Kobach
imposed unconstitutional requirements that Kansas voters appear with a passport
or birth certificate to prove that they are American citizens. He’s refusing to
back down. Will the president pardon him?
Maybe Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz was right. We're not in Kansas
anymore. We’re in a strange land where a small man blusters behind a Praetorian guard and a curtain to stir fear throughout the land.
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