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Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
MAGA returns to a faithful fantasy to tune out trouble for Trump
There has been much attention rightly paid to Project 2025 during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. However, not enough attention has been paid to modern America's original manual of hatred, 'The Turner Diaries.' First published in 1978 and recently banned by Jeff Bezos' Amazon following the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, thanks to the combined minds of Steve Bannon and Steve Miller, this racist dystopian novel about a white supremacist insurrection undergirds the Trumpian worldview. In a nutshell, the book is an apocalyptic tale of genocide against racial minorities set in a near-future America. This narrative successfully captured 49.8% of the voting electorate in November 2024. First introduced in 2015 after Donald and Melania Trump came down the Trump Tower escalator to announce his bid for the Republican nomination, the premise was always focal to his three political campaigns and his first term of abuse, lawlessness and corruption. Soon after the failed coup d'état on Jan. 6, 2021, this narrative became the core message of Trumpism. At the same time, the persecution or victimization of the wannabe strongman became the core message of Trumpism. It is why Trump was returned to the White House instead of going to prison for his traitorous crimes against the US Constitution and the American people. This same narrative also captured and underlined the anti-constitutional 6-3 decision by the MAGA majority of the U.S. Supreme Court granting Trump and subsequent presidents criminal immunity from prosecution. I am not alone in making the obvious connections between Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, and the words and deeds and beliefs of Timothy McVeigh and company who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building back in April 1995. McVeigh's bombing killed 168 people, 19 of whom were children, and the rest were federal office workers providing government services. Like other military veterans of the First Iraq War, McVeigh did not believe that the U.S. should become entangled in foreign wars at a time when his white-working class buddies back in Buffalo, NY, were suffering from the earliest waves of deindustrialization in America. McVeigh was part of an emerging rightwing militia movement that was going after or attacking a corrupt group of people that they believed were secretly running the government from within. They also believed that it was on the ordinary citizens of America to take up arms against a tyrannical ruling order, no matter what the cost to innocent lives might be. With the rise of Trumpian propaganda and disinformation, this radical conspiracy theory about a deep state and its enemies from within was going viral and eventually became the hegemonic mainstreaming narrative. Whether or not Trumpists have read the 'Diaries' authored by the 1974 founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, not unlike McVeigh or The Order before him and other militia types such as the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, those who voted for Trump in 2024 along with the MAGA crowd, all share the 'good old boy' white power fantasy described in the pages of the 'Diaries.' It inspired a slew of violent crimes by The Order in the 1980s, McVeigh's bombing of the federal building back in 1995, and Trump's assault on the Capitol after he lost the 2020 election. It has also accounted for why the Always Trumpers still support the Liar-in-Chief to this day and why they believe in the falsehoods that the election was 'rigged' and 'stolen' by the Democrats. It is also consistent with the justification for Trump keeping one of his campaign promises to exercise executive clemency and to provide full, complete and unconditional pardons to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Which he did on day one of his new administration to the tune of some 1500 convicted felons, including leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy by juries of their peers and were serving 18- and 22-year sentences, respectively. Trump also signed the ominous executive order Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens, signed on his 99th day in office as part of his assault on sanctuary cities. If all of the parts of this order are successful, they would also usher in pathways to a police state. For example, Trump's twin 'other' wars on immigrants and on diversity, equity, and inclusion recipients are visible expressions of the same old conspiracy theories operating to defeat the cabal of Jews, African Americans, and internationalists that have allegedly been stealing the US' true identity and manifest destiny. These are the folks, as well as anyone else who disagrees with Trump's dystopian vision, that are presently being silenced, removed or eliminated at whatever cost this might have for our 'on the ropes' democratic republic. All of these declarations or projections and talking points by the MAGA forces are part and parcel of the same old lies about 'paid' protestors attending rallies to protest Trump and Elon Musk. Something that both Donald and Elon are well-steamed in, not to mention their extensive knowledge about buying both candidates and votes. Perhaps nothing captures Trump's authoritarian agenda better than ICE's illegal kidnapping and disappearing of hundreds of people or DOGE's firings or dismissals of some 250,000 federal workers – all without any due process of law. All of which makes perfect sense in the Trumpian schemes to dismantle and emasculate USAID worldwide and to the Secretary of State Marco Rubio's rationale for the proposed 'redesign' of the State Department to diminish or do away with human rights programs and others targeting war crimes or the strengthening of freedom and democracy. Namely, that of reversing the 'decades of bloat' and seeking to eradicate the ingrained thinking of globalism or of a 'radical political ideology' that Rubio now believes represents the antithesis of Trump's attempt to realign world power under the imperialistic banner of 'America First.' For nearly five decades, the 'Diaries' have been the right wing's favorite go-to conspiracy theory and many of the driving forces behind Trumpian authoritarianism today can be traced back to the hateful thesis of the 'Diaries.'
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘The bomber's words sound mainstream. Like he won!' Oklahoma City's tragedy in the time of Trump
The world's first reaction to the young military veteran and far-right radical who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago this month was near-universal revulsion at the carnage he created and at the ideology that inspired it. A crowd yelled 'baby killer' – and worse – as 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in chains from a courthouse in rural Oklahoma where the FBI caught up with him two days after the bombing. He had the same crew cut he'd sported in his army days and stone cold eyes. An hour and a half's drive to the south 168 people lay dead, most of them office workers who had been providing government services, along with 19 young children in a day-care centre directly above the spot where McVeigh parked his moving truck packed with ammonium nitrate and other explosives. The children were, most likely, his prime target. Bill Clinton, then president, rallied the country by vowing justice that would be 'swift, certain and severe'. His attorney general wasted no time announcing she would seek the death penalty. Whatever flirtation the country had been entertaining with rightwing militia movements in the wake of a national assault weapons ban that enraged gun rights activists and controversies over the heavy-handedness of federal law enforcement came screeching to a halt. Even elements of the radical right, McVeigh's fellow travellers, were stunned by the sight of firefighters pulling dead babies out of the wreckage. Before the bombing, they had been full of heady talk of war against the government, but many of them imagined this would involve an attack on federal judges who had displeased the movement, or blowing up a building at night. 'Didn't he case the place?' one acquaintance of McVeigh's asked incredulously. 'The bastard has put the Patriot movement back 30 years,' lamented an erstwhile mentor of McVeigh's from Arizona. Fast-forward those 30 years, and the movement is not only very much revived but has moved from the outer fringes of American politics to the very centre. McVeigh wanted to strike at what he saw as a corrupt, secretive cabal running the US government – what Donald Trump and his acolytes refer to as the Deep State and are now busy dismantling. McVeigh believed the US had no business extending its influence around the world or becoming entangled in foreign wars when white working-class Americans from industrial cities like Buffalo, his home town, were suffering – an early expression of Trump's America First ideology that won him tens of millions of blue-collar votes last November. McVeigh's favourite book, a white supremacist power fantasy called The Turner Diaries, blamed a cabal of Jews, black people and internationalists for perverting America's true destiny – a sentiment now finding coded expression in Trump's twin wars on immigration and on diversity, equity and inclusion. McVeigh believed it was up to ordinary citizens like him to take up arms and fight against a tyrannical ruling order, no matter the cost in innocent lives, because that was what the country's founders had done during the American civil war. The T-shirt he wore when he was arrested carried a quote from Thomas Jefferson: 'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.' During the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, the QAnon-friendly Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert expressed much the same as she cheered on the rioters smashing and bloodying their way past uniformed police officers into the halls of Congress. 'Today is 1776,' she tweeted. The parallels have not been lost on political veterans of the 1990s. Clinton himself observed in a recent HBO documentary: 'The words [McVeigh] used, the arguments he made, literally sound like the mainstream today. Like he won!' The threat the far right poses to the US government is no longer a physical one – not when it comes to the executive branch, anyway – since the radicals intent on cleaning house now have like-minded leaders like Trump and Elon Musk doing it from the inside. It's hard to imagine McVeigh, who was executed by lethal injection in 2001, objecting to the administration's campaign to hollow out the international aid agency, kicking career prosecutors and government watchdogs out of the Department of Justice, or vowing to refashion 'broken' institutions like the FBI. 'Their beliefs and values are allied,' said Janet Napolitano, who in 1995 played an administrative role in the bombing investigation as US attorney for Arizona and went on to run the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama. 'It is a far cry to say that there are people in political power in the United States now who want to blow up federal buildings. We have to be very clear about that. But the notion that the country has somehow been stolen from them, that it's run by elites, that they are trying to take away our guns – that has become a very accepted view among many.' Present and former members of the governing class still have reason to fear threats from the far right, either because they have been tagged as Deep State enemies by groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, or because they have been identified by President Trump as targets for 'retribution'. Those threats, in the Trump era, have included a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a hammer attack on the husband of then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi. In concert with the administration, activists sympathetic to Trump have engaged in doxxing and other forms of harassment at people deemed to be political enemies and their families, including whistleblowers, college campus protesters and former associates turned critics of the president. Seasoned national security experts like Napolitano fear it may not stop there, however, and worry particularly about judges who have issued rulings hostile to administration interests. 'Those far right groups – they've all been given permission,' she said. 'Pardoning all the January 6 defendants sends a terrible message about the rule of law in this country, just like purging from DoJ and the FBI sends a terrible message.' It was a very different world when McVeigh washed out of the army in 1991 following his service in the first gulf war. After bouncing from one dead-end job to another and racking up thousands in sports gambling debts, he hit the road in his trusty Chevy Geo Spectrum to sell army surplus supplies and copies of The Turner Diaries at gun shows around the country. This was the very definition of a marginal existence. McVeigh was part of a cohort of so-called 'angry young men' who felt the brunt of a downturn in manufacturing and defence contracting jobs at the end of the cold war and found their solace in guns, gun culture, and radical politics verging on the paranoid. Talk at the gun shows – which one violence prevention group memorably nicknamed 'Tupperware parties for criminals' – obsessed over black helicopters and jack-booted government thugs. McVeigh himself told people the government had inserted a computer chip in his backside. Some of the movement's loudest grievances were entirely genuine. McVeigh kept a list of raids that federal law enforcement agencies conducted in the name of the War on Drugs and the innocent people caught up in them through error or inadvertence. He was appalled when the feds besieged a cabin in the Idaho mountains in October 1992, killing both the wife and the 14-year-old son of a survivalist who had refused to act as an informant on the far right. And he was appalled all over again the following spring by a second botched raid at a religious compound outside Waco, Texas, culminating in a deadly fire that killed more than 80 men, women and children. In Washington, these events were not generally viewed as indications of deep structural rot, but rather as operational screw-ups to be addressed through internal after-action reports and congressional review. McVeigh, though, was shocked by the sight of Bradley fighting vehicles moving in to force an end to the Waco siege, because he'd driven Bradleys in the Gulf and, as a decorated military gunner, knew just how deadly they could be. Using them against civilians, including children, struck him as an abomination that cried out for revenge. Despite his later protestations to the contrary, compelling evidence suggests that McVeigh targeted the daycare centre as revenge for the children who died at Waco. The centre's operator, Danielle Hunt, told the FBI she remembered McVeigh visiting four months before the bombing, pretending to be an active member of the military with his own young children. He asked a lot of strange questions about security, she recalled, looked at the windows and said, over and over, 'There's so much glass'. The FBI confirmed that McVeigh was indeed in Oklahoma City at the time, along with his friend and fellow veteran Michael Fortier, who ended up cutting a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony against McVeigh at trial. When agents first showed photographs of the dead children to Fortier, he showed no empathy for them, according to contemporary FBI records. Rather, he jumped out of his seat and exclaimed: 'This is about Waco! Those parents did not kill their own children!' 'These guys were just evil people,' said Kenneth Williams, one of the first FBI agents to question Fortier. To this day, Williams believes Fortier should have received a far harsher sentence than the 12 years he and the government agreed on. Largely because of the children, the radical far right soon abandoned its dream of overthrowing the government by force. Even McVeigh, who hoped to be seen as a hero and a martyr to the cause, came to wonder if he shouldn't have opted for targeted killings of federal agents instead of indiscriminate slaughter. Much of the high emotion surrounding the bombing has been lost in the intervening decades. Outside of Oklahoma, few Americans under 30 know much if anything about it. In the age of Trump, that looks like a lost opportunity – for the country to understand the nature of the disillusionment and rage building for decades in 'rust belt' cities and in farming communities across the heartland. Part of the reason for that lost opportunity is the US government's failure at trial to tell the full story of who McVeigh was, the subculture he moved in, and the deep ideological wellsprings that led to his act of folly. For reasons largely dictated by courtroom expediency, prosecutors chose to depict McVeigh as a lone mastermind, with significant help from only person, another fellow army veteran named Terry Nichols, who later confessed helping McVeigh to purchase materials for the bomb and to assemble it. 'Two evil men did this, and two men paid,' the Oklahoma governor at the time of the bombing, Frank Keating, said when the trials were over. Yet few in government or on the prosecution team believed that everyone involved in the plot had been caught, or that those who had been identified necessarily received the punishment they deserved. 'Some people got away with bloody murder, Fortier being one of them,' Williams, the former FBI agent, said. Related: 'More than just a crime story': the Oklahoma City bombing and a rise in domestic terrorism The government dropped several promising lines of investigation – into a radical religious compound in eastern Oklahoma, into a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, some of whose members later accused others of involvement in the bombing, or into Louis Beam, at the time the chief propagandist of the anti-government right, who was reported to have said in 1994 that 'some kid' was going to blow up a building in Denver, Dallas, or Oklahoma City in revenge for Waco. The justice department's fear was that following one or more of these leads and pointing to a wider conspiracy would weaken the case against McVeigh, when the directive from above was to obtain the death penalty at all costs. 'At some point,' Napolitano acknowledged, 'a strategic decision was made to focus and get a clean straightforward case against McVeigh, and not pursue every rabbit down its hole.' And so the wider story, of a heartland America desperate and cynical about its government, of a small but growing minority willing to embrace the notion that one day it might have to take up arms against tyranny in Washington, went largely untold. In 2025, we know at last how important that story was, and where it was destined to lead. Andrew Gumbel is the author of Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed – And Why It Still Matters (William Morrow, 2012)
The Guardian
19-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘The bomber's words sound mainstream. Like he won!' Oklahoma City's tragedy in the time of Trump
The world's first reaction to the young military veteran and far-right radical who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago this month was near-universal revulsion at the carnage he created and at the ideology that inspired it. A crowd yelled 'baby killer' – and worse – as 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in chains from a courthouse in rural Oklahoma where the FBI caught up with him two days after the bombing. He had the same crew cut he'd sported in his army days and stone cold eyes. An hour and a half's drive to the south 168 people lay dead, most of them office workers who had been providing government services, along with 19 young children in a day-care centre directly above the spot where McVeigh parked his moving truck packed with ammonium nitrate and other explosives. The children were, most likely, his prime target. Bill Clinton, then president, rallied the country by vowing justice that would be 'swift, certain and severe'. His attorney general wasted no time announcing she would seek the death penalty. Whatever flirtation the country had been entertaining with rightwing militia movements in the wake of a national assault weapons ban that enraged gun rights activists and controversies over the heavy-handedness of federal law enforcement came screeching to a halt. Even elements of the radical right, McVeigh's fellow travellers, were stunned by the sight of firefighters pulling dead babies out of the wreckage. Before the bombing, they had been full of heady talk of war against the government, but many of them imagined this would involve an attack on federal judges who had displeased the movement, or blowing up a building at night. 'Didn't he case the place?' one acquaintance of McVeigh's asked incredulously. 'The bastard has put the Patriot movement back 30 years,' lamented an erstwhile mentor of McVeigh's from Arizona. Fast-forward those 30 years, and the movement is not only very much revived but has moved from the outer fringes of American politics to the very centre. McVeigh wanted to strike at what he saw as a corrupt, secretive cabal running the US government – what Donald Trump and his acolytes refer to as the Deep State and are now busy dismantling. McVeigh believed the US had no business extending its influence around the world or becoming entangled in foreign wars when white working-class Americans from industrial cities like Buffalo, his home town, were suffering – an early expression of Trump's America First ideology that won him tens of millions of blue-collar votes last November. McVeigh's favourite book, a white supremacist power fantasy called The Turner Diaries, blamed a cabal of Jews, black people and internationalists for perverting America's true destiny – a sentiment now finding coded expression in Trump's twin wars on immigration and on diversity, equity and inclusion. McVeigh believed it was up to ordinary citizens like him to take up arms and fight against a tyrannical ruling order, no matter the cost in innocent lives, because that was what the country's founders had done during the American civil war. The T-shirt he wore when he was arrested carried a quote from Thomas Jefferson: 'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.' During the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, the QAnon-friendly Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert expressed much the same as she cheered on the rioters smashing and bloodying their way past uniformed police officers into the halls of Congress. 'Today is 1776,' she tweeted. The parallels have not been lost on political veterans of the 1990s. Clinton himself observed in a recent HBO documentary: 'The words [McVeigh] used, the arguments he made, literally sound like the mainstream today. Like he won!' The threat the far right poses to the US government is no longer a physical one – not when it comes to the executive branch, anyway – since the radicals intent on cleaning house now have like-minded leaders like Trump and Elon Musk doing it from the inside. It's hard to imagine McVeigh, who was executed by lethal injection in 2001, objecting to the administration's campaign to hollow out the international aid agency, kicking career prosecutors and government watchdogs out of the Department of Justice, or vowing to refashion 'broken' institutions like the FBI. 'Their beliefs and values are allied,' said Janet Napolitano, who in 1995 played an administrative role in the bombing investigation as US attorney for Arizona and went on to run the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama. 'It is a far cry to say that there are people in political power in the United States now who want to blow up federal buildings. We have to be very clear about that. But the notion that the country has somehow been stolen from them, that it's run by elites, that they are trying to take away our guns – that has become a very accepted view among many.' Present and former members of the governing class still have reason to fear threats from the far right, either because they have been tagged as Deep State enemies by groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, or because they have been identified by President Trump as targets for 'retribution'. Those threats, in the Trump era, have included a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a hammer attack on the husband of then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi. In concert with the administration, activists sympathetic to Trump have engaged in doxxing and other forms of harassment at people deemed to be political enemies and their families, including whistleblowers, college campus protesters and former associates turned critics of the president. Seasoned national security experts like Napolitano fear it may not stop there, however, and worry particularly about judges who have issued rulings hostile to administration interests. 'Those far right groups – they've all been given permission,' she said. 'Pardoning all the January 6 defendants sends a terrible message about the rule of law in this country, just like purging from DoJ and the FBI sends a terrible message.' Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion It was a very different world when McVeigh washed out of the army in 1991 following his service in the first gulf war. After bouncing from one dead-end job to another and racking up thousands in sports gambling debts, he hit the road in his trusty Chevy Geo Spectrum to sell army surplus supplies and copies of The Turner Diaries at gun shows around the country. This was the very definition of a marginal existence. McVeigh was part of a cohort of so-called 'angry young men' who felt the brunt of a downturn in manufacturing and defence contracting jobs at the end of the cold war and found their solace in guns, gun culture, and radical politics verging on the paranoid. Talk at the gun shows – which one violence prevention group memorably nicknamed 'Tupperware parties for criminals' – obsessed over black helicopters and jack-booted government thugs. McVeigh himself told people the government had inserted a computer chip in his backside. Some of the movement's loudest grievances were entirely genuine. McVeigh kept a list of raids that federal law enforcement agencies conducted in the name of the War on Drugs and the innocent people caught up in them through error or inadvertence. He was appalled when the feds besieged a cabin in the Idaho mountains in October 1992, killing both the wife and the 14-year-old son of a survivalist who had refused to act as an informant on the far right. And he was appalled all over again the following spring by a second botched raid at a religious compound outside Waco, Texas, culminating in a deadly fire that killed more than 80 men, women and children. In Washington, these events were not generally viewed as indications of deep structural rot, but rather as operational screw-ups to be addressed through internal after-action reports and congressional review. McVeigh, though, was shocked by the sight of Bradley fighting vehicles moving in to force an end to the Waco siege, because he'd driven Bradleys in the Gulf and, as a decorated military gunner, knew just how deadly they could be. Using them against civilians, including children, struck him as an abomination that cried out for revenge. Despite his later protestations to the contrary, compelling evidence suggests that McVeigh targeted the daycare centre as revenge for the children who died at Waco. The centre's operator, Danielle Hunt, told the FBI she remembered McVeigh visiting four months before the bombing, pretending to be an active member of the military with his own young children. He asked a lot of strange questions about security, she recalled, looked at the windows and said, over and over, 'There's so much glass'. The FBI confirmed that McVeigh was indeed in Oklahoma City at the time, along with his friend and fellow veteran Michael Fortier, who ended up cutting a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony against McVeigh at trial. When agents first showed photographs of the dead children to Fortier, he showed no empathy for them, according to contemporary FBI records. Rather, he jumped out of his seat and exclaimed: 'This is about Waco! Those parents did not kill their own children!' 'These guys were just evil people,' said Kenneth Williams, one of the first FBI agents to question Fortier. To this day, Williams believes Fortier should have received a far harsher sentence than the 12 years he and the government agreed on. Largely because of the children, the radical far right soon abandoned its dream of overthrowing the government by force. Even McVeigh, who hoped to be seen as a hero and a martyr to the cause, came to wonder if he shouldn't have opted for targeted killings of federal agents instead of indiscriminate slaughter. Much of the high emotion surrounding the bombing has been lost in the intervening decades. Outside of Oklahoma, few Americans under 30 know much if anything about it. In the age of Trump, that looks like a lost opportunity – for the country to understand the nature of the disillusionment and rage building for decades in 'rust belt' cities and in farming communities across the heartland. Part of the reason for that lost opportunity is the US government's failure at trial to tell the full story of who McVeigh was, the subculture he moved in, and the deep ideological wellsprings that led to his act of folly. For reasons largely dictated by courtroom expediency, prosecutors chose to depict McVeigh as a lone mastermind, with significant help from only person, another fellow army veteran named Terry Nichols, who later confessed helping McVeigh to purchase materials for the bomb and to assemble it. 'Two evil men did this, and two men paid,' the Oklahoma governor at the time of the bombing, Frank Keating, said when the trials were over. Yet few in government or on the prosecution team believed that everyone involved in the plot had been caught, or that those who had been identified necessarily received the punishment they deserved. 'Some people got away with bloody murder, Fortier being one of them,' Williams, the former FBI agent, said. The government dropped several promising lines of investigation – into a radical religious compound in eastern Oklahoma, into a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, some of whose members later accused others of involvement in the bombing, or into Louis Beam, at the time the chief propagandist of the anti-government right, who was reported to have said in 1994 that 'some kid' was going to blow up a building in Denver, Dallas, or Oklahoma City in revenge for Waco. The justice department's fear was that following one or more of these leads and pointing to a wider conspiracy would weaken the case against McVeigh, when the directive from above was to obtain the death penalty at all costs. 'At some point,' Napolitano acknowledged, 'a strategic decision was made to focus and get a clean straightforward case against McVeigh, and not pursue every rabbit down its hole.' And so the wider story, of a heartland America desperate and cynical about its government, of a small but growing minority willing to embrace the notion that one day it might have to take up arms against tyranny in Washington, went largely untold. In 2025, we know at last how important that story was, and where it was destined to lead. Andrew Gumbel is the author of Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed – And Why It Still Matters (William Morrow, 2012)
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Yahoo
The Story Behind 'Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror'
The Oklahoma City bombing left 168 people dead. Credit - Courtesy of Netflix Thirty years ago, a truck bomb went off at a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children, in the deadliest domestic terror attack in the U.S. 'In Oklahoma, they're used to twisters, those ugly storms that arrive across the prairie to savage the towns, tear them apart and leave, tossing houses behind them,' TIME wrote in a special issue after the April 19, 1995 bombing. 'To live there means understanding that nature is not evil, only whimsical. Human nature, on the other hand, proved incomprehensible at 9:02 Wednesday morning.' The perpetrator was Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government ex-Army soldier who served in first Gulf War, who received the death penalty and was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. Three decades later, the documentary Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror looks back on that day, featuring interviews with law enforcement involved in the case and victims of the attack. Viewers will also hear McVeigh's voice throughout the documentary, sourced from snippets of nearly 60 hours of interviews the journalist Lou Michel conducted with McVeigh while he was in a federal prison in Colorado. In the documentary, people who processed McVeigh in the criminal justice system, like the jailer who took his fingerprints, and the highway patrolman who pulled over McVeigh in an unrelated traffic stop about an hour after the bombing, talk about the moments that led to McVeigh's arrest. The officer who pulled him over on the highway, Charlie Hanger, remembers McVeigh telling him that he had a loaded weapon, to which he responded, 'so is mine.' Because McVeigh had a loaded weapon and was driving without license plates, he was taken into custody. While McVeigh was in custody, the FBI was compiling evidence that connected him to the scene, including a piece of the truck that blew up the building. It had a number on it that allowed police to trace the vehicle to Elliott's auto body shop in Junction City, Kansas. People who had seen him at the auto body shop worked with sketch artists to produce sketches that FBI agents took door-to-door in the city. A hotel owner said the sketch reminded him of a customer named Timothy McVeigh who had recently checked into the hotel. Authorities were able to search the name in a database of people recently arrested and raced to the Noble County courthouse in Perry, Oklahoma, where McVeigh was standing in front of a judge. McVeigh was part of a fringe movement of American extremists who were incensed by a botched FBI raid in Waco, Texas, that left 76 dead on April 19, 1993. Carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing on the same date two years later was an act of revenge on the federal government. 'Waco started this war. Hopefully Oklahoma would end it,' McVeigh told Michel from prison. McVeigh was one of many extremists inspired by The Turner Diaries, a book in which the main character blows up the FBI headquarters with a truck carrying similar explosives to the ones that McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing. He worked with Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who had served in the Army with McVeigh, to pull off the plot. Nichols, who helped McVeigh build the bomb, is in prison for life, without the possibility of parole. Fortier, who was aware of the plot, accepted a plea deal in exchange for testifying in McVeigh's trial, and was released in 2006. Excerpts of Michel's interviews with McVeigh reveal a man who is still bitter from enduring bullying as a young child. 'Because I was so short, nobody used to pick me for the teams,' McVeigh explains. 'They started calling me Noodle McVeigh because I was thin as a noodle.' Michel says in the documentary, 'Guns made him feel secure.' McVeigh told Michel he had no regrets about the bombing: 'Am I remorseful? No.' The documentary features devastating accounts from survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing. Amy Downs, who worked in the federal office building, was buried alive. 'I was still in my chair upside down buried in about 10 feet of rubble,' she recalls. She remembers her right hand sticking out of the debris, a rescuer trying to determine whether she was alive by asking what color shirt she was wearing, and when she said green, a hand grabbed her hand. Downs later became CEO of the credit union she was working for at the time of the bombing. A six-month-old baby, Antonio Cooper, was one of the 168 people killed that day, in a daycare center located at the site of the bombing. His mother, Renee Moore, worked in downtown Oklahoma City and would see him everyday at lunch. The day of the bombing was the first time she didn't get to go see him. That night, while rescuers were continuing to search for survivors, it was very cold and rainy, and she recalls thinking, 'Lord please don't let my baby be in that building cold and hungry and hurt. It was the worst night ever.' Moore still lives in Oklahoma City and had another son, Carlos Jr. She says in the documentary that McVeigh got off easy by being executed under the death penalty in 2001, that he deserved to suffer for longer in prison. 'He's taking the easy road out,' she says. 'We have to live with this; he doesn't.' Write to Olivia B. Waxman at
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Yahoo
It's Been 30 Years Since Timothy McVeigh Carried Out The Oklahoma City Bombing
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." 1968–2001 Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist who perpetrated the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Raised in New York, McVeigh developed an interest in guns and anti-government sentiments as a bullied teenager. He served in the U.S. Army with distinction in the Persian Gulf War but grew increasingly disillusioned with the government after his discharge. Following months of planning, on April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, resulting in 168 casualties and another several hundred wounded victims. He was apprehended shortly after the bombing and was executed in June 2001 at age 33. The Oklahoma City bombing remains the deadliest instance of domestic terrorism in American history. FULL NAME: Timothy James McVeighBORN: April 23, 1968DIED: June 11, 2001BIRTHPLACE: Lockport, New YorkASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus Timothy James McVeigh was born on April 23, 1968, in Lockport, New York, to Mildred and William McVeigh. He grew up nearby in the working-class town of Pendleton with his sisters, Jennifer and Patricia. After his parents divorced, McVeigh lived with his father and developed an interest in guns through target practice sessions with his grandfather. It was during this time he read The Turner Diaries, an anti-government tome by neo-Nazi William Pierce. The book described a bombing of a federal building and fueled McVeigh's paranoia about a government plot to repeal the Second Amendment. Tall, skinny, and quiet, McVeigh was bullied as a teenager. He was also very bright, even earning a partial college scholarship after graduating from high school in 1986, though he only briefly attended a business school before dropping out. In 1988, McVeigh enlisted in the U.S. Army and became a model soldier, earning the Bronze Star for bravery in the Persian Gulf War. He received an invitation to try out for the Army's special forces but gave up after only two days and was discharged in 1991. McVeigh initially returned to New York but soon took up a peripatetic lifestyle. He followed the gun-show circuit, selling weapons and preaching the evils of the government along the way. He periodically spent time with Army buddies Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who shared McVeigh's passion for guns and hatred of federal authority. Two events involving the FBI's actions against separatists added fuel to McVeigh's anger toward the government. First, in the summer of 1992, white separatist Randy Weaver was engaged in a standoff with government agents at his cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He was suspected of selling illegal sawed-off shotguns. The siege resulted in the death of Weaver's son and wife. Then, in April 1993, federal agents surrounded the compound of a religious organization called the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, to arrest their leader, David Koresh, on illegal weapons charges. On April 19, McVeigh watched on television as the FBI stormed the compound. The resulting firestorm killed dozens of Branch Davidians, including children. In September 1994, McVeigh put into motion his plan to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. With accomplices Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, McVeigh acquired tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and gallons of fuel to form a highly volatile explosive. McVeigh chose the Murrah Federal Building because it provided excellent camera angles for media coverage. He wanted to make this attack a platform for his anti-government message. On the morning of April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the FBI siege on the Branch Davidian compound, McVeigh parked a Ryder truck loaded with the explosive substance in front of the Murray building. People were coming to work and on the second floor, children were arriving at the day-care center. At 9:02 a.m., the explosion ripped the entire north wall off the building, destroying all nine floors. More than 300 other buildings in the immediate area were damaged or destroyed. In the rubble were 168 deceased victims, including 19 young children, and another 650-plus wounded. The bombing remains the deadliest domestic terrorism event in U.S. history. Early reports suggested that a Middle Eastern terrorist group might have been responsible, but within days, McVeigh was considered the primary suspect. He was already in jail, having been pulled over shortly after the bombing for driving without a license plate. The police office conducting the traffic stop discovered McVeigh was carrying an illegally concealed handgun and arrested him. When the FBI searched his car, they found an envelope full of excerpts from the The Turner Diaries. Nichols soon surrendered to authorities, and the two were indicted for the bombing in August 1995. Following a five-week-long trial that began in April 1997, McVeigh was convicted after 23 hours of deliberation, and he was sentenced to death. The following year, Nichols was sentenced to life in prison. After testifying against both McVeigh and Nichols, Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 1998 and was subsequently released in 2006. While on death row, McVeigh was interviewed for a biography, American Terrorist by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck. McVeigh spoke of the bombing with some pride, referring to the young victims as 'collateral damage.' Meanwhile, his requests for an appeal and a new trial were rejected. On June 11, 2001, following an attempted stay of execution, federal prison authorities executed McVeigh by lethal injection. He died within minutes, and his body was cremated. His death marked the first federal execution in 38 years. The 33-year-old's final statement was the poem 'Invictus' by William Ernest Henley. McVeigh didn't recite it but rather gave a handwritten copy of the poem to the prison warden before he was executed. McVeigh has been the subject of a number documentaries over the years. In 2017, PBS released the documentary film Oklahoma City about McVeigh's beliefs and experiences leading up to the bombing. His criminal trial was the focus of an episode of the 2018 Oxygen docuseries In Defense Of, in which his attorneys were interviewed about their legal defense in his case. In 2024, HBO released the documentary An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th, which explored the rise of anti-government sentiment and domestic terrorism through the lens of McVeigh's thoughts and actions. That same year, the movie McVeigh portrayed how the terrorist, played by Alfie Allen, devised his plan to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Two new documentaries, which came out in April 2025, also explore the devastating events surrounding the bombing. While National Geographic's Oklahoma City Bombing: One Day in America focuses on rescue efforts and stories of survivors, Netflix's Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror delves into the investigative efforts that led to McVeigh's arrest and conviction. Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! You Might Also Like Nicole Richie's Surprising Adoption Story The Story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Her Mother Queen Camilla's Life in Photos
