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You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Domestic Insurrection Open Thread: Remember the Oklahoma City Bombing?

Domestic Insurrection Open Thread: Remember the Oklahoma City Bombing?

by Anne Laurie|  April 19, 20229:55 pm| 12 Comments

This post is in: domestic terrorists, Investigations Into Violent Extremist Attacks, Republican Venality

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April 19 is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest mass attack on the U.S. between Pearl Harbor & 9/11. Many people still don't realize it was an act of organized terrorism perpetrated by the white power movement, which still threatens our democracy today (1) pic.twitter.com/QUejutHfyZ

— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) April 19, 2022

Since then, white power activists and those in unlawful, private armies have stormed the Capitol on Jan 6 and laid siege to school boards and statehouses (3)

— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) April 19, 2022

It was too easy to accept McVeigh’s self-aggrandizing ‘lone wolf who wreaks hell’ framing to look at his allies:

… [T]he bombing remains misunderstood as an example of “lone wolf” terrorism. People repeat the words of the bomber Timothy McVeigh, an avowed white-power advocate who before his execution pointed out how scary it was that one man could wreak “this kind of hell.”

But in fact, the bombing was the outgrowth of decades of activism by the white-power movement, a coalition of Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads and militias, which aimed to organize a guerrilla war on the federal government and its other enemies.

Its network of activists spanned regional, generational, gender and other divides. Membership numbers are hard to pin down, but scholars estimate that in the 1980s the movement included around 25,000 hard-core members, 160,000 more who bought white-power literature and attended movement events, and 450,000 who read the literature secondhand.

These hundreds of thousands of adherents were knit tightly together. As a historian of the movement, I have spent a decade connecting threads among thousands of documents, including original correspondence and ephemera of activists, government surveillance documents, court records and newspaper reports.

From the formal unification in 1979 of previously antagonistic groups under a white-power banner, through its revolutionary turn to declare war on the government in 1983, through its militia phase in the early 1990s, the white-power movement mobilized through a cohesive social network using commonly held beliefs. Its activists operated with discipline and clarity, training in paramilitary camps and undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting and weapons trafficking…

To say nothing of the threat this presents, we have not reckoned with April 19, 1995, and the families it devastated. (5)

— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) April 19, 2022

I thought you were exaggerating about the McVeigh/Hawley part, but then I realized I forgot about this news story. https://t.co/2fKj6D87dz

— Mr. Robert Dobalina IV (@doctorjonp) April 19, 2022

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Reader Interactions

12Comments

  1. 1.

    FelonyGovt

    April 19, 2022 at 10:28 pm

    I remember it. One of my clients was based in OKC at the time and I was getting real-time reporting. Interesting how white supremacist terrorists are always “lone wolves”. ?

  2. 2.

    Feathers

    April 19, 2022 at 10:45 pm

    I remember well. My dad worked for the DOT and his office lost several people and someone’s child in the daycare.

    I’m going to have to look back into the details, but I remember not too long after the attacks, Gingrich and the House Republicans calling a grandstanding committee investigation into the Waco (or perhaps Ruby Ridge?), which is of course what McVeigh claimed was his motivation.

    That was when the Republicans became dead to me as an electoral party. I haven’t voted for a single one since.

  3. 3.

    catclub

    April 19, 2022 at 10:48 pm

    Josh Hawley. wow.

    Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who backed former President Donald Trump’s voter-fraud claims following the 2020 election, defended militia members in a column after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, when he was 15 years old, The Kansas City Star reported.

    The Star reported that following the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Hawley wrote a column for his hometown paper, The Lexington News, in which he warned against calling antigovernment militia members domestic terrorists.

    Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the men who carried out the bombing that killed 168 people, had ties to the Michigan Militia, an antigovernment group dating back to the 1990s.

    “Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” Hawley wrote of militia groups. “Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings.”

  4. 4.

    jonas

    April 19, 2022 at 10:50 pm

    I bet if the House offered a resolution today condemning the Oklahoma City bombing, it might garner 2/3 of Republican votes, at most. Quite frankly, a resolution *honoring* Timothy McVeigh might get more votes these days. Paul Gosar would sponsor it. The GOP is nothing but stone cold Nazis — or moral squishes who don’t give a shit that most of their colleagues are stone cold Nazis — so who knows?

  5. 5.

    Ohio Mom

    April 19, 2022 at 11:04 pm

    I went over to McVeigh’s Wikipedia page to refresh my memory. Where have I heard this story before, the friendless, bullied, not-too-smart aimless boy who grows up to be fascinated with guns?

    He found a cause, a purpose for his life and camaraderie in the militia movement, the movement found a stooge, and too many people found themselves dead, maimed or bereaved.

  6. 6.

    laura

    April 20, 2022 at 12:13 am

    The shock of it all- the intent to park the bomb adjacent to the childcare facility, the images of death and destruction, the sheer audacity of war against your own Country, the defenders, the worshippers and copycats, the infiltration of or willing supporters in law enforcement and the military, the sorrowful solemn memorial and the diligent prosecution of the perpetrators.

  7. 7.

    sab

    April 20, 2022 at 2:41 am

    It has always amazed me how that bombing completely disappeared from public notice.

  8. 8.

    coozledad

    April 20, 2022 at 7:03 am

    And then Frazier Glenn Miller and Gordon Ipock lived to see a white supremacist president.

    https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/frazier-glenn-miller

  9. 9.

    Geminid

    April 20, 2022 at 8:36 am

    @Ohio Mom: I think that Mcveigh built and placed the bomb himself, with Terry  Nichols’ help. But I think there was an intellectual author of the crime, probably a militia chief.  McVeigh was a good soldier and took the responsibility, and he knew how to keep any mentor out of it.

  10. 10.

    Andrew

    April 20, 2022 at 9:30 am

    I lived in Oklahoma City at the time of the bombing.  I was working in Edmond, just to the north, when the shockwave from the explosion hit our building.  I later worked inside the perimeter, caring for the SAR dogs.   What I fear is that this attack is fading more and more into memory.   It was overshadowed–in some ways, rightfully so–by the 9-11 attacks, but I really think people don’t want to consider that homegrown Americans are just as capable of terrorism as any actor from any other nation or group.  This was a deliberate, politically motivated attack to avenge what happened in Waco the year before.

  11. 11.

    Andrew

    April 20, 2022 at 9:32 am

    The fact that this post is a day old and my comment above is only #10 supports my argument about the Murrah bombing fading from memory.

  12. 12.

    Citizen Alan

    April 20, 2022 at 10:09 am

    @Geminid:  I used to say I was sad that Timothy mcveigh got the death penalty because I wanted him to live for the rest of his life in prison and watch as America rejected his views. How naive I was. Now I suspect that if he were still alive, trump might well have pardoned him.

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