Part Six: The Perfect Soldier

that I'm none of us can sweating. It's like the sort of Damocles, but instead of being a sword held up by a single string or whatever the hell was sort of Damocles was, It's a case of perry A that I'm just going to throw for no good reason. That's the only reason is that he's been saying. His reason is that he's been saying it. But that's not a good reason. No, it's not. And it's a problem that I have, and like with a drug problem, the only way to really get over it is to do

the most dangerous version of it you can possibly do. Advice, there are other ways. Nope, I would look that up or talk to a professional for to decide to throw that. I think I have to do this episode. When it comes to throwing things in this room. There's no professional more experience than me. Yeah, I accept that. I love professional. Convinced you should throw it first, Let's start chapter six,

The Perfect Soldier. Yeah. The night Seditious conspiracy trial held important lessons for the chief minds behind the white supremacist movement when they leaned into their patriotism, their love of an America that was white and Christian but America. Nonetheless, they could draw significant sympathy from their fellow white men and women Swasti cousin clan robes, who are much less useful than tearful stories of hippie protesters spitting on flags.

The saw continuous growth of both the survivalist and the American militia movement. Neither of these things was inherently white supremacist, but beeman As colleagues have been remarkably successful at seating

their propaganda into gun shows and conventions. As a result, the early nineties brought them a whole crop of fellow travelers, men and women who did not identify as not season had never held clan membership, but who were also quite capable of reading the Turner Diaries and identifying with its message. Randy Weaver is a perfect example of this new sort of recruit. He was a former Green Beret, a patriot who loved his country and working with his hands. He

and his wife, Vicky were Christian Conservatives. They fell in love with the first generation of evangelical TV preachers, men like Jerry Folwell. They also read a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by how Lindsay, which focused around using the Bible to predict the near future. Lindsay's book convinced Randy and Vicky that Gog, an anti Christian empire from the Book of Ezekiel, was the Soviet Union. God

I did say, God Yeah. They became more and more drawn into conspiracy theories and convinced themselves that a great and fiery apocalypse was intimate, imminent and a quote next from American Experience by PBS concerned citizens, they set out to spread the word. They were unable to find a church that approached these matters with what they felt was the appropriate level of seriousness, so they held their own

Bible studies with like minded friends and neighbors. This sparked the attention of a local reporter who came to do a story on them. The Weavers, Walter learned, did not appreciate the results. They felt betrayed, but they had never been more sharing their beliefs. A great conflagration was coming, and they felt increasingly unsafe in Iowa. Vicky started having visions in the bathtub. God was speaking to her, and God was telling her to go west to find for

her family a mountain top. They would be safe there. The Weavers moved to a place that would later come to be called Ruby Ridge in Idaho, not far from Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound. Randy Weaver began to visit the compound, attending several events and making a few friends among the neo Nazis. The exact nature of what he

believed precisely is unclear and heavily debated. It seems that he identified with some aspects of Christian identity theology, and it's safe to say he was racist by normal people standards. But it's also fair to say that Randy Weaver was not really a Nazi or even an ideological white supremacist. He hung around Arian Nations because he lived in the middle of nowhere. They were the only people to hang with,

and he just didn't care about their racism. Ok. Yeah, he was not the kind of man who'd have joined a group like the Order, but he would come to play an important role in the next step of the white supremacist movement. Don't don't hang out with that's the thing. That's the thing. Like you're like, you're like, okay, well, ever, I know he's evil, but he's kind of cool in this aspect. I'll be buds with this person. Yeah, that's how.

That's how, that's how. That's how Nazis has Nazi friends. Ye. Now, the FBI wound up wire tapping several of the fascists that Roundy Weaver befriended, was quite immediately obvious to them that Mr. Weaver had no plans to overthrow the government, sparker race war, or do anything more subversive than live off the land with this family and picnic with Nazis

from time to time. In fact, when other people in these wire tap conversations, which are just committing crimes, Randy would usually say something like, we don't really go in for that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's a better response for lynchings than sure, but it's not a great response. Well, the FEDS knew Randy wasn't really dangerous. They saw him as the perfect guy to approach is an inform. He

wasn't a true believer and he was very poor. If they could entrap him into committing a crime, they could scare him with prison time until he agreed to wear a wire and helped him catch him up a big fish in the Arian Nations community. Awful offer money, yeah, just offer him start like that. Yeah, he's not a true believer and he's poor. Yeah, okay, so I offer money to help you out. That's not what they do

and it just sucks. Like yeah. An undercover agent approached Randy and offered him good money to illegally saw off a couple of shotguns. Now, Randy was not a believer in the legitimacy of American gun control regulations and he needed to cash, so he happily acquiesced and was subsequently busted for it. The Feds made their offer and Randy refused them. He was arrested on federal firearms charges and

taken to jail. Randy made bail, though, and he fled back to Ruby Ridge and hold up with his family and a whole bunch of guns and the hope that the federal allies would not follow. They did but the attempted arrest did not go well. The U. S. Marshall was shot dead by the Weaver clan and the authority He's responded with a blizzard of indiscriminate gunfire which killed Randy's fourteen year old son, the family dog, and his unarmed wife Vicky. They were trapped in the cabin with

her corpse for like days. It was hard. Yeah, it's a terrible story. A standoff in suit. The law came in with helicopters, armored vehicles and the kind of militarized police that looked familiar to us now, but we're new when terrifying. Back in nineteen two, the media descended on Ruby Ridge too, and the assault on the Weaver families was spread virally throughout the far right. The Weavers were

the perfect poster family to illustrate government overreach. Footage of black helicopters hovering over Ruby Ridge and sat like pictures of Vicky Weaver were almost tailor made to sell the idea that the New World Order was coming for decent, white Christian gun owning Americans. Well, yeah, he handed that one out on the platter. Yep. Louis Beam and his

fellow fascists knew a great opportunity when one came a knocking. Later, in nineteen ninety two, while Ruby Ridge was still in the news, the leading minds of the white supremacist movement gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, for a summit on how precisely they could use this tragedy to their advantage. The summit was convened by Pete Peters, a Christian identity preacher from Colorado and the head of a sizeable Christian identity church,

the Lapport Church of Christ. Here's how Leonard Zeskin summarizes the proceedings in Blood and Politics. For two and a half days, they met in committee, deliberated in plinary sessions, and engaged in the kind of one on one conversations known in the parlance of business professionals as networking. They made decisions in the name of Jesus Christ and Yahweh, sang onward Christian soldiers, and otherwise conducted themselves in a manner of quiet resolve appropriate for their surroundings, and y

m c a facility abudding the park. No guns were waived, and even the most heated rhetorics seemed to have the blood drained out of it. Estes Park signified a radical shift in the tactics of the white power movement, like the through Aryan Nations Congress. We mostly know it was disgusted at Estes Park. Because of the things that happened after it, the Nazis started reaching out to more moderate Americans.

Louis Beam published an article in his new magazine ironically named the Seditionist because he'd gotten been declared innocent of sedition. He called for leaderless resistance in the a of Ruby Ridge. Big Star one militia with members in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, carried out grenade launcher and mortar training exercises in rural Texas. The Montana Militia published a guide book on how to engage in domestic terrorism. In nineteen, law

enforcement across the nation found thirteen explosives. Cash is meant to be used in attacks is varied as a National Afro American museum in Ohio and a Black church in Los Angeles. None of this made the news in a big way because of something that happened in mid nineteen, the siege of the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were not a Christian identity sect and their leader, David Koresh, was not affiliated with the White

Supermansist movement. But the a t F siege of their compounds so soon after Ruby Ridge was easy for Louis Beam and his comrades to propagandizes around. Now, this is not an audio book about the Waco disaster, and I won't even try to cover what happened there in detail. What's important for our purposes is the end result. On February nine, a t F agents attempted to serve a search warrant about sexual abuse and illegal weapons charges people

inside the compound open fire. Four agents, five branch Davidians were killed, and the situation evolved into a bloody siege. In April, Mnintaine, the FBI, who taken control of the situation, launched an assault on the compound. In the ensuing melee, several fires broke out and quickly swept through the structures. By the time the smoke had cleared and it was all over, fifty three adults and twenty three children were dead. Not many. Yeah, it was a funkload of people. Yeah.

The whole tragedy was in arguably a clusterfuck on behalf of the federal government, which of course helped groups like

the Fashions more people. Yeah, so they'd started after ss park like reaching out to militias and stuff, and again trying to like um propagandizing directly to militias, being like, instead of just sending out like Nazi propaganda to guys who aren't going to bide in Nazis, what if we focus on like pictures of this dead woman, like dead white woman killed by the government and try to scare them that way, and then you know, if they if

they're interested in that, maybe they'll gradually start reading some of our other terrorist propaganda. So Kirk Lyons, a close friend of Louis Beam and a white supremacist militia leader himself, sent out an issue of his group's fundraising newsletter that featured a photo of a spiling fourteen year old girl who died in the Waco siege. The girl was, of course white, and her photo was captioned, why we Fight. There were dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of other similar

pieces of propaganda. Gradually, day by day and month by month, explicitly fascist white supremacist groups began to wrap their ideological claws around the militia movement and suck in ever more patriots. British journalist John Ronson was one of the few reporters who spend a great deal of time embedded with the fringe right during this period. He actually visited the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound several years after the siege

with Randy Weaver in Toll. They wound up having a conversation with several members of the Michigan Militia who were there taking part in a vigil for the people who died at Waco. One of these people told him, we are here to ask for these people's forgiveness for sitting around on our butts and watching it on TV. What happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco will never happen again under any circumstances. If it does, there will be immediate retaliation,

armed resistance from the Michigan Militia. Now, the Michigan Militia in this time had about twelve thousand members, which was a significant searche for it in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco. One of those members was a young Desert storm veteran named Tim McVeigh. Here we go. Timothy McVeigh was born. Oh wait, it's time for an ad plug, isn't it. Sophie. You know what, I think you really are great at this. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

You know there's nothing that goes with Tim McVeigh like well, fertilizer bomb. But other than a fertilizer bomb. No, Sophie, you're saying that's not a good ad plug. Um, there are a lot of things better than McVeigh, and those things are the ease. You know what does less damage the Tim McVey the products and services advertised on this show. You gotta pick one of these, Sophie. That one's great. All right, perfect, let's roll to Dick Pills. We're back.

We're back. We're talking about how good I am at making ad plugs. Start talking about that. Still talking about this is good. I can talking about it. You know. I can't stop talking about this case of perry A. Yeah, yeah, just listen to that. It has to be thrown. I don't know. There's only ten. There aren't twelve. Yeah, there aren't. So it's safe. It's you it. No, I have to I have to. Well. Timothy McVeigh so uh. He was

born on April. McVeigh grew up in Pendleton, New York, and had an early childhood that was pretty standard for the seventies and eighties. He watched Gumby and Truth or Consequences. He played cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers with other kids in the neighborhood. Timberford playing the good guys

as he saw them, cops or cowboys wherever possible. He was sickly and somewhat prone to act sentence, hurting himself in all sorts of ways young boys who spent a lot of time and in the woods tend to do. Tim was an energetic boy, and he might have been someone who'd wound up on riddle and had he been born a decade or two later. He was constantly in trouble from minor things. But he also had a good heart, as this story from American Terrorist, the Fantastic Biography of

McVeigh makes clear. Tim was playing near the pond when he noticed one of the older neighborhood boys carrying a burlap sack. The sack was weighted down with rocks, but the curious Tim could see there was something else wriggling in the sack. He watched as the older boy pitched the sack out into the pond, where it quickly sank to the bottom. What was that, Tim asked, running to the far shore of the pond where the neighborhood boy stood.

Those are kittens, my dad had The boy answered, in a matter of fact tone, we had to get rid of them. For Tim, who loved animals and especially kittens, the realization of what he had witnessed hit him hard. He cried about the incident for days. So part of what we're trying to ask here is, you know, we talked about Robert Matthews a little bit earlier. We talked about Louis beat. These are guys who are pretty brutal.

Early on, Matthews was a drop of society from age eleven. Uh, Louis Beam like immediately wanted to fight and go to war and kill. Tim McVeigh is a sensitive kid who's like heartbroken when he sees someone being cruel to animals. Yeah, it's confusing. He's not the kind of guy who would have wound up joining George Lincoln Rockwell's Nazi party, which both Matthews and Beam are the kind of guys speared by that um. The story of Tim McVeigh is the story of how a young mind got enraptured with this

kind of terroristic apocalyptic ideology. Who wouldn't have gotten caught in the first iteration of it. This is a guy who would only have been caught by the changes made of the movement's propaganda outreach. Interest is park. I think that's that's the story we're talking about today. Well, good, that's interesting. So Tim fell in love with guns at an early age. His grandfather first took him shooting when

he was seven. This probably sounds crazy to some people, particularly in Los Angeles where we read this, But I started shooting at the same age that Tim did, when I was a little kid living in fucking rural Oklahoma. Um, so it's pretty normal in that era. And Tim's grandpa, everyone said Ed McVeigh was a stickler about firearm safety and considered safe gun ownership to be an integral part of American citizenship. So he likes guns, but he doesn't

like killing things. He's like a target shooter and stuff like. He's yeah, being small and sort of weird. Tim McVey was a bit of a magnet for bullies. He developed a deep hatred of bullying and a reflective rage at the side of anything he saw his bully behavior, whether it came from an individual or an institution. Tim's parents divorced when they were young. His sisters chose to go with their mother, but Tim stayed with his father so that he would not have to be alone since the kid.

After the Oklahoma City bombing, a number of pundits would try to tie Tim's parents divorce to his evolution as a terrorist. This would seem to be an overstatement, but he did tie his mother leaving his father to broader social trends, later stating in an interview that in the past thirty years, because of the women's movement, they've taken an influence out of the household. Yeah. I mean, I could see that as being a formative spot for why

you don't like women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which maybe makes him a little bit more sympathetic to the kind of propaganda put out by these groups. If you start to think of the government as boy yeah yeah. When one reads about McVeigh, they get the feeling that had he been born later, he might have found a home within the alt right. For one thing, he was obsessed with the Star Wars movies and identified heavily with Luke Skywalker as the eighties. Yeah, special Boy, Special Boy, blowing up

the big evil thing. Yeah, special dragon Boy. As the eighties rolled along and home computer started to become more common, McVeigh became one of the first generation of computer nerds. He was on the Internet before basically anyone else. His handle on those early message boards was the Wanderer. We can't know everywhere McVeigh went in the early Internet, but it's unlikely to be pure coincidence that Timothy grew obsessed with survivalism and the Second Amendment during the years he

was most involved in Nassan internet culture. It's entirely possible he came across some of Louis Beam's writings during this time. We know for a fact that he fell in love with a book we've already talked about a lot in this series. You want to guess what it is, Turner Diary. It's rob Oh I lovely. Oh, it's beautiful, beautiful book. But that was a lie. He he fell in love with the Turner Diars. You were right, Katie, Yeah, God, yeah. He first heard about the Turner Diaries from an ad

and soldier of Fortune magazine. He ordered the book by mail and fell madly in love with it. Now for the rest of his life, he'd insist that the book's gun rights advocacy was what drew him to it, not its depiction of a genocidal worldwide race war. And it's

kind of possible he was telling the truth. Again, like Randy Weaver, Tim McVeigh is definitely a racist, but that's not his motivation, just like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I really think he's probably telling the truth when he was like mostly just into it because it had a lot of violent scenes and it was about like a gun control revolution. Like the racism he could take or leave. That's not great. He has to be racist for this, But he wasn't racist enough that he wouldn't have joined

the Order just because of that, exactly. Yeah, yeah yeah, post Estes Park, the Turner Diaries remained one of the lynchpins of white supremacist recruitment in the US. Ads for written magazines like Soldier of Fortune often posed the question, what will you do if the government comes for your gun. None of this is to say that McVeigh wasn't racist. He grew up in a place where everyone was white, at age nineteen, he got a job as a guard

on an armored car. He later recalled his colleagues expressing casual racism towards black residents on the East side of Buffalo, and eventually he adopted those beliefs and their propensity for using racial slurs. Racism was a fact of Tim's life, but again it wasn't like the main thing for him. What was his main thing? We're guns. During his time as a security guard, mcveah spent most of his recreational

time shooting. He eventually got in trouble with his neighbors for doing show so, and this seems to have influenced his desire to join the army. He basically just like with guns. Yeah, McVeigh was an excellent recruit and by all accounts, a very good soldier. He fell in love with most aspects of army life, although he disliked the emphasis training placed on killing. In a later interview, who We're called twenty times a day, it would be blood makes the grass grow. Kill, kill, kill. You would be

screaming that until your throat was wrong. If somebody put a video camera on that, they would think it was a bunch of sickos. You're right thing to say after blowing up a federal building filled with babies, but a valid point on base. McVeigh continued to read far right literature, devouring conspiracy theories about the United States and the United Nations conspiring to steal the freedoms and guns of Americans. He handed out copies of the Turner Diaries to his

closest comrades. He was warned several times by friends who read the book that people would think he was a good stuff around, good for them, maybe report him all. Yeah, the go for would give Tim McVeigh his first chance to actually use guns against other human beings, and interestingly enough, he seems to have hated it. He was not on board with the whar from the beginning. McVeigh felt the U. S Military should only get involved in conflicts that directly

affected the lives of American citizens. He saw the US intervention against Iraq as bullying, and Tim McVeigh hated bullies. When he shipped over to Iraq, McVeigh was the gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle during a battle in country. He killed two Iraqi soldiers with the Bradley's very large gun and watched in horror as their bodies disappeared into a red missed. The incident scarred him. Unlike Louis Beam, McVeigh did not enjoy killing. The whole war left a

bad taste in Tim's mouth. He was particularly furious when he read about the U. S. Air Force bombing of the a La Mira bomb shelter in Baghdad, which killed three hundred women and children. McVeigh returned to America much less enchanted with military life. He focused some of that frustration on the black soldiers he served alongside. Several of them walked around the base and black power shirts, which

infuriated Tim. He was heard several times using the in word and a reputation for ordering some of his black suppordinates to sweep up the motor pool. When pressed about this later, McVeigh would point out that some of his closest comrades in the military were black, a quote again from American terrorist Well. He swore he never embraced racism,

McVeigh actively explored the racist point of view. He had already begun selling copies of the Turner Diaries at gun shows, and because of the racist content of the book, McVeigh wound up on a mailing list for the ku klux Klan. McVeigh claimed he had virtually no idea what the KKK

was all about. The first time he received literature from the racist group, he was impressed by one of its pamphlets, which expressed concerns about the law some individual rights in American society and the desire to go back to the way things were in the days of the Founding Fathers. Again, that's that st this park stuff. McVey spent twenty dollars for the trial membership to KKK headquarters in North Carolina.

One of the enticements for joining was a white power T shirt that McVeigh planned to wear around Fort Riley. Why would an on racist wan a white power T shirt? McVeigh maintained it was intended to protest what he saw is the growing double standard in the army. He said that he never did wear the shirt, but he made no apologies for buying it then or now. I wanted to make a point, he said. Black guys were wearing black power T shirts on the base they weren't supposed to.

I wanted to see what would happen if I wore the white power T shirt. McVeigh didn't renew his KKK membership when his first year was up. He had joined the KKK, he said, because he thought the clan was fighting for the restoration of individual rights, especially gun rights. But the more research and reading he did, the more he realized that the clan was almost entirely devoted to the cause of racism. Really too, I am glad you did some research on well. He decided the KKK was

manipulated to young people, and he didn't renew his membership. Yeah, he didn't. Don't values yea, values, you know, values are important, and I personally love the values of the products and services that support this show. That was so good. We're back. We're back, and I just admitted that I would be willing to have sex with Corey Booker m cot core We wanted how we got to this conversation we're not going to talk about. It's very inappropriate. Does not lend

anything to the episode. Shouldn't have admitted it not related to the products. He has good bone structure. Though I think he's cute, forget what he said anything about it. Guys, Sophie does not think he's cute. Everyone has different opinions about who they find cute. Yeah, it's not him. We can all agree, though. Bernie's the cutest talking about bone structure. That guy's got Bonesteeah, he's cutie. Young Bernie is weird, but you know cute. He got better looking as he

got older. Young Bernie. His wife must really been into radical politics. Anyway, boy, this is about your uh we're finishing this Chaplin chapter right, um. So. Tim McVeigh, like Randy Weaver, was a perfect example of the sort of

man Louis Beam was hoping to reach. Not motivated enough by racism too have sought out the movement, but comfortable enough with racism and frustrated enough by mainstream American culture be radicalized by the anti gun control new world order conspiracies peddled by the propagandists of the white Power movement. McVeigh opted not to re enlist after his time of service ran out, and outside of the military, mcveigh's life was just one frustration after another. Despite his glowing service record,

he had trouble finding work. Civil service jobs he applied for and the state and federal government turned him down. He convinced himself that this was because he was a young white man and thus the victim of what he termed reverse discrimination. That's probably a better way to say It's like a more illiterate way to say that, yeah, reverse Yeah. Affirmative action became the focus of mcphigh's thwarted ambitions.

He started spending more and more time around gun shows and flirted vaguely with some malicious including the Michigan militia. He started sending his sister Jennifer stories he'd read about the Rockefeller family and their supposed control of most of the organs of state power. The conspiracist McVeigh embraced were not quite open neo Nazi anti Semites, but they were kissing cousins to that kind of belief from American terrorist quote.

The brother and sisters discussions sprawled in myriad directions, from the Bible to the Pyramid and its crowning, all seeing I on the back of the dollar bill. McVeigh was reading more anti government books and pamphlets, and he shared them with his inquisitive younger sister. He wanted to expand

her perspective. Though some of the claims in the literature seemed bizarre and inconceivable to Jennifer, including one writer's contention that the government was building massive crematoriums in a hundred and thirty concentration camps to exterminate individuals who disagreed with federal policies. The authors of the pamphlets, anticipating skepticism, warned that Americans risk becoming victims of it can't happen here syndrome when it came to government usurping power from the people.

Jennifer wasn't sold on everything she read, but justice McVeigh hoped the literature got her thinking about the government and individual rights. She looked up to her older brother, flattered that he thought enough of her to engage her in political discourse. McVeigh believed that the federal government intended to disarm the American public gradually and take away the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. In the summer of nineteen nine two. He pointed to events in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

It's proof positive that his theory was correct. Now. One of the publications that McVeigh read during this period was called The White Patriot. It was published by the former KKK leader The Intempted Invader of the Island of Dominica and the founder of Stormfront on Black Yes, that Boys Back, That Boy's back, Black's Back. Uh. It featured articles with titles like why is the Clan opposed to Choose? And

also hosted essays from William Pierce. As Musphay's life prospects dimmed, he grew more obsessed with guns and gun shows, traveling around the country selling weapons and literature and survivalist gear. The gun show circuit introduced him to more French right wing literature. McVeigh began to express frustration that American women wore unfairly withholding sex from American men. He called them

brutish and stingy. Yeah, take those words back, let's reclaim them. Yeah, it's word that he keeps me the same story over and over again. Yeah. When the Waco siege began, McVeigh was instantly obsessed with the story. He drove to Mount Carmel and sold T shirts outside the siege lions, communing with his fellow survivalist and militiamen as they wordly waited for the outcome. And when that outcome came, it radicalized

Tim McVeigh as nothing else could have. He read that the government had used cs gas, which McVeigh had been exposed to during his military training. To McVeigh, this was the ultimate representation of government overreach, pure vicious, murderous, bully behavior. McVeigh didn't stop it. Being furious about the murder of dozens of innocent people, he became convinced that Waco was the prelude to amass government crackdown on gun owners and freedom.

He told one friend that he suspected the FEDS had purposely started fires in the compound. The government wanted it to burn because the government couldn't win. The public sentiment was changing, he said. Mcveigh's rage was reciprocated by the other men he met on the gun show circuit, men like Terry Nichols, a sovereign citizen whose beliefs were essentially

descended from the Posse Coomatatus movement. McVeigh spent time living on nichols farm and crafting explosives small homemade bombs, initially just for amusement, but over the months that followed Waco, mcveigh's rage, the paranoia stoked by fears of fringe right wing conspiracy theories and his love of the Turner Diaries potastasized into a plan, a plan to bomb the Murray Building in Oklahoma City. Man, Yep, it's really sad too. Yeah, don't do it. Yeah, don't do it. Tempt, that's in

bad news. Cody. He do it. He did it, He done did it. The structure of mcveigh's attack was directly inspired by a passage from the Turner Diaries. At one point, Earl Turners sell bombs the FBI's headquarters. Pierced goes into exhaustive detail about the device they use, a truck bomb made with pounds of ammonium nitrate, essentially the same weapon McVeigh constructed and used to destroy the Murray Building on the day he detonated his bomb, killing a hundred and

sixty eight people. McVeigh put together in manifesto of sorts on an envelope in his car, and included many photo copied pages of the Turner Diaries. McVeigh had highlighted one passage in particular from a chunk of the book, where Earl Turner cell carries out a mortar attack on Washington, d C. The real value of our attack today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties. More importantly, though,

is what we taught the politicians and bureaucrats. They learned this afternoon that not one of them is beyond our reach. They can huddle behind barbed wire and tanks in the city, they can hide behind the concrete walls of their country estates, but we can still find them and kill them. Blew up a daycare, god, man, Yeah, I really showed them. Yeah, there was probably a daycare on the death start too. You would think. Yes, seven was the size of the

moon families. Tim's a Walker Vey special boy. Uh, special boys. Yeah, a lot of kitten I'm certain there were a lot of kittens up there in Ti McVeigh, Louis Beam and his fellow fascists had found the perfect soldier and the perfect exemplar of Beam's concept of leaderless resistance. He was not a lone wolf, as some foolish pretenders of journalism

named him. McVeigh was radicalized by a constellation of writers and thinkers, as well as hundreds of men he spoke with a gun shows and survivalist conventions and sitting outside the siege lines at Waco. He was radicalized by William Pierce, who wrote the Turner Diaries, hoping desperately that someone would do exactly what McBay did. Mcveigh's attack prompted response from federal law enforcement, but not the one you might expect. Well,

there were some crackdowns on malicious cells and organizations. The Justice Department largely reacted by taking a lighter hand with white supremacists and militias. Okay, but yes, Cody, we'll see sybe were if it stops supremacist terrorists. I didn't mean. I didn't mean to a question. The Montana Freeman wound

up in a standoff with the federal government. As a group, they represented a synthesis of Christian identity and posse Coomatatius beliefs that declared themselves independent of federal control and wound up in an eighty one day standoff with law enforcement. For a while, it looked like the Freeman compound might become another Waco. Put the standoff ended peacefully. Video footage of the twenty three adults and four children surrendering showed

no giant armored vehicles or military looking police. The FBI's hostage rescue team wore sneakers and casual civilian clothing. McVeigh would go to his Grave convinced that the lighter hand used on the Montana Freeman was the result of his attack on Oklahoma City, and he may have been right. According to American terrorist quote, Clinton are Van's aunt, the former FBI agent who had tried without success to negotiate a peaceful into the Waco standoff three years earlier, agreed

with McVeigh at least on that point. Retired from the FBI and working as a security consultant, fan Zant fields that the government learned a painful lesson from the Oklahoma City bombing. In vin z Ants were the government realized that it must become a velvet brick, not a battering ram. What an absolute classic tragedy, van Zant had said, soon after the conflagration at Waco. What a total indictment of mankind's and ability to communicate and relate, even though we

have different religious or personal philosophies. While van Zant condemned the Oklahoma City bombing, he felt that Waco had started a war, that mcveigh's bombing had been not only an escalation, but a turning point in that war. My only disagreement with Mr van zandt is the idea that the war, Mr McVeigh wound up fighting and had started with Waco. This war had been going on much longer than that, at least as far back as the days of George

Lincoln Rockwell. Timothy McVeigh may have seen himself as a patriotic American, but he fought as a soldier of the American fascist movement under general's Louis Beam and William Pierce. The failure of the federal government and almost everyone to see this war is one reason why things have gotten so bad in twenty nineteen. As I write this, McVeigh would be joined on down through the years by dozens of other angry young men, men like Eric Harris and

Dylan Klebold, the infamous Columbine Shooters. Most experts agree that Harris was the prime ry motivating force behind the attacks, more or less pulling Cleibold along with him. This is not often reported on, but Harris was obsessed with Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He wrote constantly about Nazi ideology, his hatred of free speech, the press, and his desire to see mentally defected people executed. Harris was also obsessed with Timothy McVeigh. Dave Colan is a journalist who spent more

than a decade studying the massacre. He found regular references to Oklahoma City and McVeigh and Harris's writings before the shooting. Colin writes quote in his journal, Eric would brag about topping McVeigh. Oklahoma City was a one note performance. Mcveigh's had his timer and walked away. He didn't even see his spectacle unfold. Harris admired McVeigh, but desperately wanted to beat him, carrying out a larger attack and killing more people. Do you think that well, less great things more? You

think that attitude might be accelerationism. Now, Eric Harris and Dylan Cleebold did not succeed in their goal, or in Harris's goal of topping Timothy McVeigh, But Harris may yet manage to beat mcveigh's high score. In the decades since in the shooting at Columbine, it has inspired at least seventy four copycat attacks which have killed eighty nine people

and injured a hundred and twenty six more. You can draw a direct line from George Lincoln Rockwell to William Pearson, Louis Beam to Tim McVeigh, and then to Eric Harris. By the late nineteen nineties, it was incredibly clear that leaderless resistance as a tactic was the best weapon in the white supremacist arsenal. But it would take the mass adoption of the Internet in the error of the smartphone for Louis Beam's deadliest innovation to see its full potential.

And we're gonna talk about that in the next episode of this podcast. Terrorists should throw the period yet? Or should I wait until we're done with the whole thing? I don't know. I'm pretty bummed out right now. Yeah, you're right. Maybe maybe it's time, Maybe it is time, or maybe don't do it at all. No, I have to do it. I have to do it. Sophie, what do you think after the last episode? And now? How about you throw it towards that couch? And Sophie moves away.

I can't read your your blink, Sophie, I think we're waiting until the next episode. I really want to everything. I want to draw this ship out. Yeah, I want to draw this ship out. I'm gonna wait wait for the climax. Plug your stuff. Uh that's right, Google our names which are spell it right? It's Katie Stole and Cody Johnson. Oh we have YouTube show some more news, podcast, even more news Cody, Twitter and Patreon, dot com, slash some more news and t public or all the things

Google if you are interested, just like google it. This is what the six six. If you're still listening, I'm not plugging everything at the end of these episodes. We're not to And now we're going to do it at the last one because it's the last one. But we've already done it every time. I'm not in the next one. All right. Podcast