Terrorist Heritage

Bravo! It is about time someone pointed out the obvious in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, and Philip Jenkins does so: The threat to civil liberties, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States has always—from the Know-Nothings through the Ku Klux Klan through the White Citizens’ Councils through Father Coughlin through the militias of today—come from the right much more than the left.

And, as Bernard A. Weisberger points out in his column in the same issue (“In the News”), that included J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. That said, the only solution may be the one Mr. Jenkins advocates: careful prosecutions of individual perpetrators.