NCJ Number
182059
Journal
Intelligence Report Issue: 97 Dated: Winter 2000 Pages: 8-39
Editor(s)
Mark Potok
Date Published
2000
Length
32 pages
Annotation
This article reviews key events on the radical right in the 1990s.
Abstract
The 1990s was a decade virtually unprecedented in the history of American extremism. Standoffs with law enforcement officials at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and near Waco, Texas, helped to ignite the modern militia movement, while the 1995 truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City showed the world just how deadly convinced antigovernment zealots could be. The Internet became a principal venue of race hatred. Neo-Nazis, once shunned by even hard-line Klansmen as an ideology that their fathers had died fighting, became a central part of the white supremacist movement. Although the extreme right had left a trail of bloodshed across the Nation in the 1980s, in the 1990s the pace and severity of radical activity--and of domestic terrorist conspiracies--overshadowed the events of the previous decade. The article recapitulates developments from the birth of the “New World Order” in a 1990 presidential speech to the dawning of the new millennium, which was supposed to-- but did not--bring revolutionary chaos. Tables