The Far Right is upon us.

All editors have a story that got away, the one they wish they'd published in time. So it is with us. The first thing we thought of when we heard about the Oklahoma City bombing was, "It's those Waco avengers that Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons were warning us about."

Since late last year, Berlet and Lyons had been trying to interest us in a story on the dangers of the far-right militias. The authors had sent us a first draft, which we sent back, and they were in the process of revising it when the terrible explosion went off.

Berlet himself had warned the readers of The Progressive about the far right in the cover story of our October 1994 issue, "The Right Rides High." "The major ultraconservative organizations and dogmatic religious and political movements pose a grave threat to democracy in America," he warned, and he cited "the militant, overtly racist far right that includes the white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and armed rightwing revolutionaries."

In that same issue, Loretta J. Ross pointed up the links between the anti-abortion fanatics and white supremacists, who, she said, "are working together toward a common vision of a white, Christian, American revolution."

So these hate groups were not unknown to us, or to our readers, or to the readers of other alternative magazines. Covert Action Information Bulletin published a prescient story in its spring issue entitled, "Angry White Guys with Guns: The Rise of the Militias," which came out weeks before the Oklahoma City bombing. It warned that "an armed confrontation between the government and the militia members seems increasingly likely."

"The militias represent a smoldering rightwing populism - with real and imagined grievances stoked by a politics of resentment and scapegoating - just a demagogue away from kindling an American fascist movement," wrote author Daniel Junas. "The militia movement now is like a brush fire on a hot summer day, atop a high and dry mountain ridge on the Idaho panhandle. As anyone in the panhandle can tell you, those brush fires have a way of getting out of control."

The Covert Action article contained an arresting photo of a smiling girl at a Michigan Militia rally holding a sign that said, Janet Reno Makes the Reason for the Second Amendment Deathly Clear!! That same photo, taken by Bruce Giffin, appeared in The New York Times's "Week in Review" section after the bombing.

There were other Cassandras calling. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for Democratic Renewal, Political Research Associates, Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith had been ringing the alarm bells, as had many local anti-racism groups, but hardly anyone seemed to be listening.

Before the bombing, only Keith Schneider of The New York Times and Phillip Weiss of the Times Magazine gave the hate groups any significant coverage. The rest of the media were lost.

And they remained lost immediately after the bombing. In some of the most irresponsible media coverage in recent memory, the networks ran with stories implicating Arabs or Islamic fundamentalists or Middle Eastern terrorists. There was absolutely no factual basis for these reports; it was just vicious, bigoted rumor-mongering. And the same old "terrorist experts" were trotted out to offer their authoritative theories as to why the bombers were probably Middle Eastern.

The newspaper columnists didn't bother to wait for the facts before they reached their conclusions, either. Barely hedging, A.M. Rosenthal of The New York Times wrote: "Whatever we are doing to destroy Mideast terrorism, the chief terrorist threat...