Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat

In October 1994, six months before the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal office building killed 169 people, lawyer Morris Dees wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno, alerting her to the danger posed by right-wing militia groups, whose ranks were swelling with fanatical racists, neo-Nazis and other extremists. Dees had been monitoring violence-prone organizations for 14 years as investigator and chief trial counsel for the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center based in Alabama. Written with reporter James Corcoran (whose Bitter Harvest tracked white supremacist meddling in the early 1980s farm crisis), this chilling expose gets deep inside the paranoid mentality of antigovernment hate groups, documenting the growing links among paramilitary units, white supremacists and neo-Nazis who preach armed confrontation. Dees traces Oklahoma bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh's ties to the militia and super-patriot underground, and he delineates striking parallels between the actual bombing and the fictional bombing done by McVeigh's hero in neo-Nazi William Pierce's 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries. (Apr.)