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To be fair, you yourself did have to fight against a few chuckleheads here, and more people who were willing to But Arbery Might Have Stolen Something Before. But, yeah, even among pretty extreme parts of the right-wing, the McMichaels were nowhere near the cause celebre that people imagine.
Interesting, but I'll note that it doesn't actually call the fed actions Red tribe. Renfo says, instead:
And the book agrees :
While there's a lot of lurid reviews of Cook's work as talking about the Red Tribe's devolution into 'conspiracy theorists' -- and Cook does spend nearly a third of the book on that -- the other two thirds of the book are split between talking about Koresh and the Davidians were fuckups (not always fairly) and how the feds fucked everything up. Which makes the contrast pretty awkward, given the extent the theorists were sometimes right, even in his telling.
That's far from an unbiased or neutral telling, especially if you're familiar with the finer details. Cook takes every Democratic party deflection at face value (and literally mentions Freeh once in the entire book, not merely believes that the Davidians lit the fire but so certain he quotes someone calling any other possibility barmy) to pretend the FBI was manipulating everyone around them, but he does at least mention some of the multitude of lies (no flammable CS gas until oops there was) and destroyed or lost evidence (the steel door and three disappearing cameras are mentioned, though not some other records), and the absolute atrocity of a show trial the surviving Davidians received.
But for all my criticisms, it's also not saying they were Red Tribe behaviors. Cook's story is that they're just The Feds.
I want to say someone making a more dedicated argument specifically about the raid 'really' starting with local Red-Tribe-On-Red-Tribe fighting, though I can't find it in my records and I'm pretty sure it was long enough ago it couldn't have been this specific article or book. The weakman is just that the investigations started under Bush I's ATF (just as Ruby happened before the 1992 election even happened), but that struggles with the extent these orgs were clearly trying to support major policies among the then-ascendant left side of the aisle. Steelman was something about the intra-Davidian battles getting pushed up to the state, and the state indirectly pushing them to the feds, and the feds were stuck holding the bill... but that still runs into the problem of how the feds actually handled things.
I'd quibble that this is a moderately recent development: there were some parts of the early anti-abortion movement and anti- that were similarly bloodthirsty and tolerated, and it took a pretty sizable effort by both the more moderate bits of the religious right and some lawfare by leftists to shove it into a box. The Days of Rage did also have the MOOVE bombing and some amount of tolerated targeted violence that direction, even if it's often overstated by Zinnian tellings.
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