Investigations Into Violent Extremist Attacks

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…

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Domestic Insurrection Open Thread: Remember the Oklahoma City Bombing?Post + Comments (12)