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What a difference a few years makes. In the late 1990s, picking up a book or news story about "terrorism" usually meant encountering the same range of white, domestic, far-Right extremists. Whole shelves were devoted to titles like America's Militia Threat, or Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only the Beginning. These books told of Terrorists Among Us, of The Birth of Paramilitary Terrorism in the Heartland. Paranoia reached a peak in the 1999 film Arlington Road, which depicted a vast conspiracy of lethal bombers and assassins: the audience is told that subversives can be anywhere, and even your pleasant next-door neighbors might turn out to be deadly enemies of national security. As the film's publicity warns, "Your paranoia is real!" On the other hand, suggesting that radical Muslim terrorists might pose any kind of threat invited charges of racism and "Islamophobia." Salon mocked the idea that Osama bin Laden might be "a cerebral Islamic Dr. No moving an army of terrorist troops on a vast world chessboard to checkmate the United States."
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And then came September 11. Suddenly, the threat of far-Right extremists was forgotten, and those shelves of books devoted to the phenomenon looked about as relevant as tracts urging Southern secession. We can argue that the reaction went too far. No one interested in terrorism or extremism can avoid reading the two critical novels by William Pierce ("Andrew MacDonald"), The Turner Diaries and Hunter, which together offer a detailed blueprint for fascist revolution in the United States. The Oklahoma City bombing followed almost precisely the Turner Diaries account of the destruction of the FBI Building in Washington, D.C. Reminding us that terrorism fantasies are not a Muslim prerogative, the book ends when the hero flies a nuclear-armed aircraft on a suicide mission into the Pentagon. Both books still circulate in the hundreds of thousands, and both have enthusiastic readers; though law enforcement does not yet seem to have discovered the equally dangerous Hunter. Far Right terrorists are not a figment of the imagination, and they might well stage a comeback, probably in alliance with Islamism: that coalition has been powerfully in evidence in European conflicts since the 1970s. Among the most vocal American critics of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 were William Pierce and David Duke. In The Terrorist Next Door, Daniel Levitas includes a photo of demonstrators from this time with placards reading "No Jews = No War."
Having said this, we can certainly doubt the significance of the American ultra-Right, which was unquestionably exaggerated for political ends during the 1990s. This is a common enough historical phenomenon. Throughout American history, we find a series of such scares, in which egregious acts of violence are used to condemn legitimate movements, whether Red (Left) or Brown (Right). Conservatives tried to use the activities of Weathermen and radical bombers to discredit the Peace movement of the 1960s; liberals cite the violence of Klan and militia groups to condemn nonviolent right-wing groups. Steven Chermak has written an excellent account, of the 1990s version of this phenomenon, in his Searching for a Demon: The Media Construction of the Militia Movement (Northeastern Univ. Press, 2002). Illustrating his theme, Salon (again) argued that "Timothy McVeigh would most likely have existed even if America's mainstream conservatives did not preach a gospel disturbingly similar to his. … But while it would be unfair to blame right-wing ideology for McVeigh, it would be myopic not to see the connection between them. Call it collateral damage."
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