Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has long been sensitive about the idea that burgeoning right-wing activism in the 1990s -- particularly radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh -- helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, even though right-wing activism indisputably influenced McVeigh beliefs and motivations. Tim Graham whined about this yet again in his May 5 column:
One way you can tell our most undeservedly prestigious media outlets are liberal is that Liberalism with a capital L has never been blamed for anything heinous. Mass killing – like the more than 60 million abortions since Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion – would never be blamed on their political movement.
On April 19, 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma was blown up by a truck bomb, killing 168 people, including 19 children. It took just two days after the FBI tied Timothy McVeigh to the bombing for those prestigious media outlets to blame conservatives. The Sunday shows were unofficially indicting a “climate” of rhetoric.
Why is Graham bizarrely portraying abortion as "mass killing" akin to terrorism? Is he trying to justify the murders of abortion doctors like George Tiller and Barnett Slepian?
What is prompting Graham's revival of an ancient grievance is the release of a new book:
That old smear is now being renewed by liberal legal pundit Jeffrey Toobin, who is shamefully associated with the words “Zoom masturbation incident.” He has a new book titled Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. The publisher touts his thesis with a blurb from The New Yorker, Toobin’s long-time employer before the indecent incident. “In Toobin’s view, it wasn’t just militarism that made McVeigh—it was Republicanism." The book reviewers hailed it as “depressingly relevant” to today.
Politico’s “Playbook” team helpfully promoted Toobin’s statist thesis, warmly touting “Jeff emailed Playbook with a preview.” Toobin explained his book is meant to show “that the conventional view of McVeigh — as an ‘antigovernment’ ‘lone wolf’ — is wrong.” He was “part of the conservative movement opposing Bill Clinton’s federal government, not all government,” and that’s just like today’s conservatives “seen most dramatically on January 6, 2021.”
Just as the media-Democrat complex have been using January 6 as a political weapon against Republicans in the post-Trump era, they used McVeigh to re-elect Clinton.
Graham made no effort to prove pointing out the fact that McVeigh's extremism was of the right-wing variety is a "smear" -- it's not a smear if it's true, after all. Instead, he descends yet again into Clinton Derangement Syndrome:
Of course, Toobin would make Clinton the “hero” of his book -- two exposed sexual harassers trying to remake themselves into noble public servants. But as The New Yorker piece on Toobin’s book pointed out, McVeigh was obsessed with the disastrous Waco standoff in 1993, which ended in a federal raid that caused the deaths of 76 people, including 28 children. Was President Clinton the “hero” of that fiasco?
Graham blaming Clinton for what happened at Waco would seem to confirm that this was a right-wing talking point at the time -- and, thus, not so far from McVeigh's extremism as he would like us to believe.
Graham concluded with a boilerplate rant:
The liberal elite’s first draft of the Clinton presidency was ridiculously self-serving, and Toobin is providing the second verse, same as the first. That doesn’t make it accurate.
In the broadest sense, this is why liberal journalists cannot be trusted. They offer no respect to conservatism as a legitimate philosophy. How can you tell conservatives to trust you at the same time you associate them with domestic terrorism? Toobin is underlining the problem. Liberal journalists don’t want the conservatives to trust them. They only want conservatives to be defeated and exiled from Washington, scattered to their cartoonish fringes.
Graham is a right-wing activist and denier who wants liberals defeated and exiled, and he provides no reason anyone should trust him.
