McVeigh started listening to Rush Limbaugh, who was in his heyday. He was carried on more than five hundred radio stations; he published his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, which became one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time. He also started a television program. Limbaugh’s rhetoric—comparing feminists to Nazis, accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of committing untold numbers of crimes—matched and encouraged McVeigh’s views. McVeigh wrote to his boyhood friend Hodge, “As they say, ‘Rush is right,’ (double-meaning), and many people (opponents) consider his views extreme.” McVeigh also helpfully informed Hodge of the local time and station for Limbaugh’s television show.
Limbaugh’s success persuaded McVeigh that there were lots of people who shared his own worldview. Later, McVeigh would talk about his belief that an “Army” of fellow believers was somewhere out there, but he admitted that he never figured out how to reach them. What McVeigh lacked was something that hadn’t yet been invented. McVeigh needed the internet and social media—places where those of similarly extreme views could convene and plot together, as they did before January 6. Instead, McVeigh tried to use the analog tools of this time. He wrote letters—a handful to his local newspapers and his congressman and many to his friends, like Hodge, where he pressed his views. “What is it going to take to open up the eyes of our elected officials?” "AMERICA IS IN SERIOUS DECLINE. We have no proverbial tea to dump; should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports?” he wrote in a letter published in the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal on February 11, 1002. “Is a civil war imminent?” he continued. “Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that! But it might.”
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