Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing

Stuart A. Wright is the Assistant Dean for the College of Graduate Studies and Research and a Professor of Sociology at Lamar University. Dr Wright received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1983. He is the author of Leaving Cults: The Dynamics of Defection and editor of Armageddon in Waco. He has published more than thirty articles or book chapters in scholarly venues and has become a widely recognized expert and legal consultant. Dr Wright worked with US Congressional subcommittees in 1995 investigating the government's role in the Waco siege and testified in House hearings. Following the highly publicized hearings, he was retained as a consultant by defense attorneys in the Oklahoma City bombing trial of Timothy McVeigh. Dr Wright has received numerous grants and research awards.

"Why did “domestic terrorism” on the scale of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing occur? [Patriots, Politics, and the Oklahoma City Bombing] shows how convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators rose up from an increasingly militant Patriot social movement that promoted “leaderless resistance” by “phantom cells” in a spiraling “war” with U.S. law enforcement agencies – themselves increasingly militarized through gun raids and the war on drugs. By exploring the deep historical connections of the Patriot movement to Cold-War anti-communism, racist opposition to the Civil Rights movement, the anti-tax movement, the farm crisis, and opposition to gun control, Stuart Wright’s gripping and forceful account brings to light the social dynamics of a deeply troubling variant of right-wing political culture that America needs to understand and confront." John R. Hall, University of California – Davis, Author, Apocalypse Observed

• 1. Codicil to a Patriot profile; 2. Patriots, political process, and social movements; 3. Historical context of Patriot insurgency; 4. The farm crisis, threat attribution, and Patriot mobilization; 5. State mobilization: building the trajectory of contention; 6. The gun rights network and nascent Patriots: rise of a threat spiral; 7. Movement-state attributions of war: Ruby Ridge and Waco; 8. Patriot insurgency and the Oklahoma City bombing; 9. Patriot movement demobilization and decline.