“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. “If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so,” he argued. “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have,” he concluded.

Or might have—there’s just no proof. These grave comments (and more of their ilk) appear in a list of “Spurious Quotations” featured on the visitors’ website for Monticello, where Jefferson famously indulged in the tyranny of slavery. Each is a wild paraphrasing at best and invented from whole cloth at worst, though one suspects this hardly matters to the truthers, militiamen, secessionists, etc., who share and repost them online. It’s not even especially important which wig-wearing moral hypocrite of a founding father is supposed to have said this stuff, the aggrieved rhetoric is all. What counts is that a true patriot from centuries ago, an expert in these matters, has eloquently summarized and justified their rage.

When American maniacs do boil over and decide to take what they often call revolutionary action, it often means the innocent will die—in bombings, chemical attacks, or, most commonly, mass shootings. The victims will not be considered innocents by the killer, who has cloaked them in the air of an existential threat. This radicalism, as well as what could be called the Jefferson paradox—caring so deeply about an aphorism that you fail to see its phoniness—were seemingly forefront in the mind of Jared Lee Loughner, who targeted U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the 2011 Tucson shooting that left six people dead. According to a friend, Loughner had held a grudge against Giffords since she had made an inadequate reply to his riddling question at a public event. “What is government if words have no meaning?” he’d asked.

Loughner was also allegedly interested in lucid dreaming and alternate realities, the idea of being able to control and shape another universe, which squares well with delusions of revolutionary glory. Everything is a nexus, history always headed down a path parallel to the one it ought to follow. Loughner might well have become fascinated by the Alternate History Wiki, which provides, among other speculative works, a timeline for the Failed American Revolution. In this version, “British soldiers capture Revere, Prescott and Warren as they head towards Concord to warn the residents that the British are coming to seize the arms hidden there.” After their weapons are sacked in that city and Worcester, the rebels suffer a string of defeats, and the colonies never cohere in a way that presents a true threat to the crown. With the uprising quashed, Britain consolidates power in North America. The real fight is a turf struggle with Spain.

It follows from the writings and ramblings of homegrown terrorists that they believe they can direct the course of the future with simple atrocity, or perhaps avert something like British hegemony, but to what end? What do they want the world to look like, and do they even think we can save it? Ted Kaczynski’s typewritten manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, was quite specific about how civilization had veered off the road a while back—when the roads were still dirt, in fact. The word revolution appears ninety-four times, industrial an even hundred if you don’t count the title, and when you combine the two you get “abnormal conditions” that necessitate (you guessed it) “a revolution against the industrial system” that “may or may not make use of violence.” Yet while Kaczynski has provided a motive and rationalization of his activities as the Unabomber, the end of his nearly novel-length tract includes this stunning turn:

Throughout this article we’ve made imprecise statements and statements that ought to have had all sorts of qualifications and reservations attached to them; and some of our statements may be flatly false. Lack of sufficient information and the need for brevity made it impossible for us to formulate our assertions more precisely or add all the necessary qualifications. And of course in a discussion of this kind one must rely heavily on intuitive judgment, and that can sometimes be wrong. So we don’t claim that this article expresses more than a crude approximation to the truth.

The text doesn’t matter so much as intent. So why the concession to political language, let alone sensitivity? Perhaps the war on reality doesn’t provide solid, sensible targets, and myriad institutions—schools, bureaus, political figures—are judged more influential or emblematic than they really are. Investigative journalist Nick Turse wondered after the Columbine bloodbath whether the murder spree carried out by high schoolers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold was “the radical protest method of choice in America today” and cautioned against characterizing the pair as “anything less than the latest incarnation of disaffected insurgents.”

A similar line of thought clearly resonated with Seung-Hui Cho, who killed thirty-two people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007. His manifesto reveals a messianic bent with allusions to Jesus Christ and other Biblical bombast; it also describes his massacre as part of an ongoing rebellion. “Millions of deaths and millions of gallons of blood on the streets will not quench the avenging phoenix that you have caused us to unleash,” he wrote. “Generation after generation, we martyrs, like Eric and Dylan, will sacrifice our lives to fuck you thousand folds [sic] for what you Apostles of Sin have done to us.” So much for the “lone shooter” myth we like to tell ourselves.

But are these spasms of violence then just stages in a continuous conflict? Eric and Dylan, of course, were inspired by (and hoped to surpass) the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. Timothy McVeigh, an architect of that plot, described his 168 murders as revenge for the deadly federal sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco, which he viewed as symptomatic of an incurably rotted state. His own attack, he wrote, was “morally equivalent” to the first U.S. invasion of Iraq. In the prosecution’s opening statements at McVeigh’s trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Hartzler found time to remark that McVeigh, on the day of the bombing, had worn a T-shirt bearing the quote THE TREE OF LIBERTY MUST BE REFRESHED FROM TIME TO TIME WITH THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS AND TYRANTS. That line, as it happens, Jefferson actually wrote.