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Atlantic
18-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
What to Do With the Most Dangerous Book in America
Recently, I was invited to the Dalkey Book Festival, in Ireland, to speak at a session titled 'Books That Changed the World.' I assumed that, as a Shakespeare scholar, I was expected to talk about the global impact of the First Folio. Instead, frightened by what has been happening in America, I decided to choose a book that is changing the world right now. For that, I turned to a 1978 novel I had long heard of but never read: The Turner Diaries, by William Luther Pierce, a physicist and the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. I knew that that the novel had once served as a deadly template for domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who drew from its pages when he planned the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, and Robert Jay Mathews, whose white-supremacist gang took its name, the Order, from the novel; a member of the Order killed the Jewish radio host Alan Berg. I also knew that it had inspired John William King, part of a group that dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, to death behind a pickup truck. As King shackled Byrd to the vehicle, he was reported to have said, 'We're going to start The Turner Diaries early.' The book is a vile, racist fantasy culminating in genocide, but it isn't just a how-to manual for homegrown terrorists. What has been labeled the 'bible of the racist right' has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before. Literature can be mind opening, but it can also be corrosive, and there is no exaggeration in saying that The Turner Diaries and books like it have played a part in spreading hateful ideas that now even influence government policy. Seeking a copy online, I was led directly to Amazon. I was surprised to find the book available on that site, which had reportedly stopped selling it after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Before then, according to a New York Times article about the ban, Amazon had marketed the book alongside a warning identifying it as 'a racist, white supremacist fantasy.' Amazon had justified the sale of what it acknowledged to be an 'infamous work'—one that has now reportedly sold as many as half a million copies—because of the novel's 'historical significance and educational role in the understanding and prevention of racism and acts of terrorism.' I found that to be a sound policy; I would no more ban offensive books, which need to be studied and analyzed, than I would prevent scientists from investigating infectious pathogens. It was only after reading the novel that I fully grasped why Amazon had previously decided to remove it from its site after a mob of Donald Trump's supporters attacked the Capitol. Proud Boys had helped organize and lead that assault, encouraged a few months earlier when Trump was asked during a presidential debate to condemn the group and replied: 'Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!' The month before the January 6 attack, in a livestreamed video, Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader, described government officials as 'evil scum' who 'deserved to die a traitor's death'—to which another leader, Ethan Nordean, replied, 'Yup, Day of the Rope.' That was the name that Pierce gave, in The Turner Diaries, to the day when enemies are lynched, 'a grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one' orchestrated in hopes of 'straightening out the majority of the population and reorienting their thinking.' The appearance on January 6 of a gallows with a noose hanging from it outside the Capitol visually reinforced the allusion to that defining moment in the novel. Biggs and Nordean were later sentenced for their roles in the assault to 17 and 18 years in prison, respectively. (Trump commuted their sentences.) The Turner Diaries tells the story of Earl Turner, who, in the closing years of the 20th century, participates in a revolution that begins as a race war in the United States and results in the annihilation of nonwhite people (and those aligned with them) from the planet. It is told through a series of diary entries that Turner makes from September 16, 1991, to November 9, 1993, the day he pilots an airplane into the Pentagon in a suicide mission. July 19, 1993, is an especially exciting day for him, as Turner witnesses 'what surely must be one of the biggest mass migrations in history,' the evacuation of Black people, Latinos, and immigrants at 'a rate of better than a million a day.' Once nonwhite people are gone, he writes, the 'air seems cleaner, the sun brighter, life more joyous.' The diary entries are framed by a foreword and an epilogue, said to have been written in 2099 and reflecting back on these world-changing events. The novel, which is horrifying and heartless, slowly acclimates readers to greater levels of violence and hatred, with healthy doses of propaganda justifying large-scale murder. Black people are depicted as rapists and cannibals, Jews as rapacious and controlling, and white people who believe in a multicultural society as race traitors who also deserve to die. I purchased the $30 paperback, now in its third edition, the first to be published under William Pierce's name rather than his pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald. The book was advertised on Amazon, shockingly, as a 'futuristic action-adventure novel.' The pitch for the book had gotten a thorough makeover, the stain of extremist violence whitewashed by a seemingly innocent, policy-based appeal. Amazon no longer warned customers that The Turner Diaries was infamous; it offered only the publisher's description of the novel as one 'that warns us of how American society might unravel if the immigration and racial policies being pursued then—which are being pursued to an even greater extent today—were allowed to continue.' This language, which existed on sales pages before January 6, also appears on other sites where the book has remained available online, including Books-A-Million and On Amazon, the book's publisher, which is presumably the creator of the alarming description, was listed as the innocuous-sounding Cosmotheist Books. A search for the publisher leads to the National Alliance, which invites new members committed to 'a thorough rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values.' Amazon was sharing profits from the book with a neo-Nazi organization, one that I was now indirectly funding. That the book had appeared for sale again on Amazon now that Trump is president again didn't strike me as all that surprising. The start of Trump's second term calls to mind familiar themes from the novel. I am not suggesting that the president or those in his immediate circle have read it—only that the book, now in circulation for roughly half a century, has informed the thinking of people who yearn to 'make America great again' by expelling immigrants and appealing to white grievances. In The Turner Diaries, those who have governed America are blamed for granting 'automatic citizenship to everyone who had managed to sneak across the Mexican border,' and liberalism is derided as 'an essentially feminine, submissive world view.' Anger is also directed at the mainstream media: 'One day we will have a truly American press in this country, but a lot of editors' throats will have to be cut first.' When the current Trump administration reportedly pushed out two Black military leaders, General Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Lieutenant General Telita Crosland, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's broader calls to rid the armed forces of DEI, I couldn't help thinking of Turner's lament that the U.S. Army was more than 40 percent Black, and that 'the day will come when we must make our move inside the military.' In May, Trump invited white South African refugees to America. When asked by a journalist why he had done so, he repeated the sort of discredited claims of white genocide that fill the pages of The Turner Diaries, while blaming the press for covering it up: 'It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about.' (South Africa does have a very high murder rate, but overwhelmingly, the victims are Black.) The roundups and expulsions in the novel rhyme with the Trump administration's error-prone but unapologetic deportation strategy. Some purges in The Turner Diaries are based on mistaken identities and false accusations, but 'there was no admitting to the possibility of mistakes'; acting with 'arbitrariness and unpredictability' was part of the plan. On June 15, Trump posted on Truth Social words that echo the novel's xenophobic rhetoric: 'We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities' to 'reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.' It may be a coincidence that the Los Angeles metropolitan area, to which Trump has deployed Marines and the National Guard, is the site deliberately chosen in the novel to trigger the violent clashes that foment militarization in the country. I would be interested to know whether Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser responsible for overseeing the recent harsh immigration roundups in Los Angeles, has read Pierce's novel; we do know that he sent emails to Breitbart News recommending Jean Raspail's 1973 The Camp of the Saints, a novel that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries. ' The center's website still warns about the dangers of both books. Recently, I went back to Amazon, only to discover that The Turner Diaries had disappeared: By early June, the site had erased all traces of the novel. The title had even vanished from my browsing history. I reached out to Amazon; a spokesperson referred me to content guidelines prohibiting the promotion of 'hate speech' and confirmed that the title had been discovered and removed. What they wouldn't tell me is why it had been briefly available, even on Amazon's sites in Germany and Canada, countries where The Turner Diaries has been banned. I wondered whether the books' appearance was a subversive act by an employee who holds extremist sympathies, or was perhaps authorized by someone who had seen Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, squelch the endorsement of Kamala Harris in The Washington Post (which he owns) and donate $1 million to Trump's inauguration. But this is speculation. What is badly needed is transparency. The Turner Diaries may remain invisible to many Americans, but its effect on what is happening in the country today is plain to see.
Los Angeles Times
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
California man was member of white supremacist terror group with ‘hit list' of officials, feds say
A 24-year-old California man gathered private information on federal officials for an assassination hit list that he shared with other members of a terrorist group known as the 'Terrorgram Collective,' according to an indictment unsealed in federal court Wednesday. Noah Jacob Lamb targeted people the group felt were 'an enemy of the cause of white supremacist accelerationism,' and included their photograph, home address, and in some of cases, photos of their spouse, as part of the hit list, according to the federal grand jury indictment. Targets were listed on cards that were shared in private Telegram channels and group chats, federal officials said. Those cards included an image of a rifle and a short description of why the targets would be eliminated, according to court documents. Lamb was arrested Tuesday afternoon and is in custody in Sacramento County. He faces eight charges, including conspiracy and soliciting the murder of federal officials. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney. In September, officials indicted Dallas Humber, 34, of Elk Grove; and Matthew Allison, 37, of Boise, Idaho, for their roles in allegedly circulating several 'Terrorgram' videos and publications that promoted carrying out specific crimes, including a list of assassination targets, according to court documents. Humber and Allison were accused of leading the group and working together with others to distribute a digital publication known as 'The Hard Reset,' which provided instructions for making napalm, thermite, chlorine gas, pipe bombs and dirty bombs. Humber allegedly narrated the publication and disseminated it in audiobook form. They each face 15 counts for soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, according to the U.S. Justice Department. According to prosecutors, Lamb's contribution included recommending that the list begin with a quote from 'The Turner Diaries,' a novel about a militia plot that has become a 'foundational text of accelerationism' among white supremacists and violent extremists. Prosecutors say Lamb and his co-conspirators were inspired by the novel and wanted to make their own list. Their alleged targets included politicians, state and local officials, business leaders, advocates and others. 'Individuals on the list were targeted because of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity, including federal officials,' Michele Beckwith, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, said in a statement. 'The U.S. Attorney's Office will work tirelessly with our partners in law enforcement and in the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute those who commit such violations of federal criminal law.' Authorities say Lamb worked with his alleged co-conspirators from November 2021 through September 2024. In January, the State Department designated the Terrorgram Collective and three of its members as specially designated global terrorists. They included a Brazilian national, a Croatian resident and a South African man. The group was linked to an October 2022 shooting outside an LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia, a July 2024 planned attack on an energy facility in New Jersey and a knife attack at a mosque in Turkey. Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.
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)
