the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt eleven)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Notwithstanding the political posturing, right-wing extremist violence not only persisted but accelerated. Indeed, the amount and degree of such violence offers a hidden history of the Obama years. The roll call of such acts runs into the dozens. Days after the 2008 election, a Marine corporal at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina was arrested and charged with planning to kill Obama as a “domestic enemy” in “Operation Patriot.” In January 2009, a Boston white supremacist raped and shot an African immigrant and then killed her sister when she tried to intervene. He then killed a homeless African immigrant, and he was arrested before he got to a synagogue for a planned mass shooting. In May, a member of the right-wing vigilante group Minutemen American Defense in Arizona murdered a man and his young daughter during a home invasion to steal funds for his anti-immigrant activities. Also in May, a “sovereign citizen” (which Terry Nichols also claimed to be) named Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who provided abortion services. In June, a white supremacist attacked the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., shooting and killing a security guard. This was all in the first six months of the Obama presidency.

The pace of extremist violence never slackened in the Obama years. A tax protestor burns down his home, boards his private plane, and flies it into the building that contains the IRS offices in Austin, Texas. A pipe bomb at an Islamic Center in Jacksonville, Florida. A handgun attack on security guards at the Pentagon. Firebombs at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Madera, California. (Among other attacks on Planned Parenthood operations.) Four “sovereign citizens” in Alaska plot to murder state and federal employees. Another “sovereign citizen” in Texas tries to hire a hit man to kill a federal judge. A Georgia militia plot to poison employees and bomb offices of the ATF and IRS in Atlanta. A different Georgia militia plot to kill a onetime accomplice whom the perpetrators feared would become an informant. In Spokane, a white supremacist’s bomb at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade malfunctions at the last minute. Another white supremacist kills six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Militia operatives in Minnesota plot to bomb the local police and (in a separate scheme) steal military IDs for use in militia operations. A shooting rampage aimed at Transportation Security Administration officials at Los Angeles International Airport. A plot to bomb government buildings in Katy, Texas. Three North Carolina extremists assemble bombs to fight the federal government. A plot to bomb the federal courthouse in Elkins, West Virginia. A man in New Hampshire tries to buy rockets and grenades “to bring forth the original constitution.” A white supremacist named Dylann Roof guns down nine parishioners in a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof leaves behind a manifesto that reads like updated McVeigh: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well, someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”