A Nation Shattered: How One Blast Made Hate’s Cost Visible
Thirty years ago this month, a young veteran and far-right fanatic blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Almost immediately, the whole world expressed its anger at the tragedy and the ideology that motivated his act.
A crowd yelled “baby killer” and other derogatory things as the 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in handcuffs from a rural Oklahoma courthouse where the FBI had brought him two days after the explosion. His eyes were icy, and he had the same crew cut as when he was in the military.
An hour and a half south, 168 bodies were discovered, just above the spot where McVeigh had parked his moving truck laden with explosives and ammonium nitrate. Along with the nineteen young children in the daycare, most of the passengers were former government employees who worked in administrative roles.
It was likely the children who were his primary target.
In his campaign, then-President Bill Clinton rallied the country by pledging “swift, certain, and severe” punishment. His attorney general promptly stated her intention to seek the death penalty. The country’s fixation with right-wing militia groups ended when a countrywide assault weapons ban enraged gun rights activists and sparked discussions about the oppressive methods of federal law enforcement.
The Attack That Fractured Its Own Movement
Firefighters pulled lifeless newborns from the rubble, shocking even McVeigh’s fellow right-wing passengers. Before the bombing, they had been chanting about a government takeover, but many of them imagined that it would include things like nighttime building fires or assaults on federal judges who had enraged the movement.
“Didn’t he case the place?” said McVeigh’s companion, who couldn’t believe what that person had claimed. Arizona instructor who had McVeigh as a student once said, “The bastard has set the Patriot movement back 30 years.”
Echoes of Extremism: When the Fringe Becomes Familiar
Even though it has been there for over 30 years, the movement has not only been reinvigorated, but it has also climbed to the forefront of American politics.
Just as Donald Trump and his allies are attempting to deconstruct the Deep State, McVeigh aspired to assault what he saw as a clandestine, corrupt organization dominating the US government.
Before Trump’s America First ideology won him tens of millions of blue-collar votes in November, McVeigh believed the United States should stay out of foreign conflicts and not expand its influence globally while white working-class Americans in industrial cities like Buffalo, his hometown, were suffering.
A white supremacist power fantasy that McVeigh loved, The Turner Diaries, accused a group of Internationalists, Jews, and Black people for destroying America’s genuine destiny. Trump’s battles on immigration and diversity, equality, and inclusion are coded manifestations of this dream.
McVeigh believed that average people like himself had an obligation to fight a repressive government system, even if it meant killing innocent people, since the country’s founders had done the same during the American Civil War. His T-shirt said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” a quotation by Thomas Jefferson that he was wearing when he was detained.
At the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Republican member Lauren Boebert—who is linked with QAnon—expressed the same sentiment as she chanted in support of the rioters as they dashed through the parliamentary hallways, pelting uniformed police officers with rocks and blood. “It’s 1776 today,” she tweeted.
From Margins to Power: The Mainstreaming of Militia Rhetoric
Political insiders from the ’90s remember the parallels. “The words [McVeigh] used, the arguments he made, literally sound like the mainstream today,” Clinton himself said in a recent HBO documentary. Claiming victory!
Now that Trump and Elon Musk, who share similar views, are cleaning house within the government, the extreme right is no longer a physical threat to the US government, at least not in terms of the executive branch. It’s hard to believe that Terry Lynn McVeigh, who was executed by lethal injection in 2001, would have opposed the Trump administration’s plans to remove professional prosecutors and government watchdogs from the DOJ, dismantle the foreign aid organization, or promise to fix “broken” agencies like the FBI.
Janet Napolitano, who oversaw the federal investigation into the bombings in Arizona in 1995 and went on to head the DHS under Obama, said that “their beliefs and values are allied.” ” The idea that some prominent US politicians today have terrorist intentions is far-fetched. It has to be very clear. But today there’s a common notion among many that the country is run by a small group of elites who are trying to remove our guns.
The present and past members of the ruling elite are still legitimately worried about far-right threats, whether it’s because they have been singled out for “retribution” by President Trump or because groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have branded them as enemies of the Deep State.
Some examples of such threats during Trump’s presidency include an attempted abduction of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a hammer attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Protesters who support Trump have collaborated with the government to engage in a campaign of cyberbullying against people they perceive as political opponents and their families. This includes whistleblowers, college campus demonstrators, and former coworkers who have betrayed the president.
Experts in national security, such as Napolitano, are concerned that this may not be the last step. Particularly worrying to them are judges whose rulings conflict with official policy objectives. “All of those far-right organizations have been granted permission,” according to her. “Just as purging from DoJ and the FBI sends a terrible message, pardoning all of the January 6 defendants sends a terrible message about the rule of law in this country.”
Lost in America: How a Disillusioned Veteran Became a Domestic Terrorist
When McVeigh left the army in 1991 after serving in the first Gulf War, the world was a very different place. He hit the road in his Chevy Geo Spectrum to sell copies of The Turner Diaries and army surplus supplies at gun fairs around the nation after bouncing from one dead-end job to another and accruing thousands of dollars in sports gambling debt. This was what a marginal life was all about.
McVeigh belonged to a group of so-called “angry young men” who were impacted by the decline in industrial and defense contracting employment at the conclusion of the Cold War and who turned to firearms, gun culture, and extreme politics that bordered on paranoia for comfort. Speaking of black helicopters and jack-booted government goons, one violence prevention organization famously dubbed the gun exhibitions “Tupperware parties for criminals.” McVeigh admitted to the public that the government had implanted a computer chip in his butt.
Some of the most vocal complaints of the movement were very legitimate. McVeigh maintained a record of the raids carried out by federal law enforcement agencies under the guise of the War on Drugs, as well as the innocent individuals who were unintentionally or mistakenly involved. He was horrified when the federal government surrounded a cabin in the mountains of Idaho in October 1992, murdering the 14-year-old kid and his wife of a far-right survivalist who had refused to serve as an informant. The following spring, he was once again horrified by a second poorly executed raid at a religious complex outside of Waco, Texas, It led to a deadly fire that killed more than 80 men, women, and children.
In Washington, these incidents were often seen as operational errors that needed to be fixed via internal after-action reports and legislative examination rather than as signs of serious structural decay. As a seasoned military gunner, McVeigh had driven Bradleys in the Gulf and was aware of their lethal potential, Therefore, he was shocked to see Bradley combat vehicles coming to end the siege of Waco. He saw their use on people, particularly children, as a heinous act that demanded retribution.
Strong evidence indicates that McVeigh targeted the childcare center as retaliation for the children who perished at Waco, despite his subsequent denials to the contrary. Danielle Hunt, the center’s operator, told the FBI that she recalled McVeigh coming to visit four months before to the explosion while posing as an active military member with his own little children. She said that he stared at the windows and repeatedly remarked, “There’s so much glass,” and asked a lot of odd questions regarding security.
The Accomplice Who Walked Away
Together with his buddy and fellow veteran Michael Fortier, who ultimately struck a deal with prosecutors in return for testifying against McVeigh at trial, the FBI verified that McVeigh was in Oklahoma City at the time.
According to current FBI archives, Fortier did not feel sympathy for the deceased children when investigators initially showed him their photos. Instead, he sprung from his chair and shouted: “This is about Waco! The parents in question did not murder their own children!
Kenneth Williams, one of the first FBI agents to interrogate Fortier, said, “These guys were just evil people.” Williams still feels that Fortier should have been sentenced to far more than the 12 years he and the government agreed upon.
When Even Terrorists Feel Regret: A Nation Still Haunted by Oklahoma City
The extremist far right quickly gave up on its goal of overturning the government by force, mostly due to the children. McVeigh even began to question if he should have chosen targeted assassinations of federal officials rather than indiscriminate death, even though he had planned to be seen as a hero and martyr to the cause.
In the decades that have passed, a large portion of the intense emotion surrounding the bombing has been forgotten. Few Americans under 30 have much, if any, knowledge of Oklahoma outside of the state. That seems like a wasted chance in the Trump era for the nation to comprehend the kind of anger and despair that have been brewing for decades in “rust belt” towns and rural communities across the heartland.
Justice Narrowed: What the McVeigh Trial Chose Not to See
The US government’s inability to provide a complete account of McVeigh’s identity, the subculture he joined, and the profound ideological roots that underpinned his foolish behavior throughout his trial is partially to blame for that missed chance. Prosecutors decided to portray McVeigh as a single genius with substantial assistance from just one individual, Terry Nichols, a fellow army veteran who eventually admitted to assisting McVeigh in purchasing and assembling the bomb, mostly due to trial convenience.
Frank Keating, the governor of Oklahoma at the time of the bombing, said after the trials that “two evil men did this, and two men paid.” But few in the government and prosecution team thought that all of the plotters had been apprehended or that those who had been discovered had necessarily been given the appropriate penalty.
Williams said, “Fortier was one of the people who got away with bloody murder.” Williams was a former FBI agent.
The Clues Left Cold: How the Government Avoided the Bigger Picture
A radical religious compound in eastern Oklahoma, a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, and Louis Beam, the then-leading propagandist for the anti-government right, were among the promising lines of inquiry that the government abandoned. In 1994, Beam was reported to have stated that “some kid” was going to blow up a building in Denver, Dallas, or Oklahoma City in retaliation for Waco.
When the mandate from above was to get the death sentence at all costs, the justice department feared that pursuing one or more of these leads and pointing to a larger plot would undermine the case against McVeigh. “A strategic decision was made at some point to focus and get a clean, straightforward case against McVeigh, and not chase every rabbit down its hole,” Napolitano said.
From Oklahoma to 2025: The Story We Ignored, and the Future It Warned Us About
Thus, the larger narrative—that of a heartland America that was desperate and distrustful of its government, and of a tiny but rising minority that was prepared to accept the possibility that it would eventually have to use force to overthrow the dictatorship in Washington—went mostly unreported. We now understand the significance of that tale and its inevitable direction in 2025.
Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed — And Why It Still Matters was written by Andrew Gumbel (William Morrow, 2012).