Speaker 1: M what's being insulted by a Sophie My me. I'm
Speaker 1: Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards. Sophie is angry at
Speaker 1: me because I funked up and tried to start the
Speaker 1: episode before we were ready. We don't know what's up
Speaker 1: or down here. We don't know what's up or down.
Speaker 1: I I can't stop thinking about this perry A case
Speaker 1: that I'm none of us can sweating. It's like the
Speaker 1: sort of Damocles, but instead of being a sword held
Speaker 1: up by a single string or whatever the hell was
Speaker 1: sort of Damocles was, It's a case of perry A
Speaker 1: that I'm just going to throw for no good reason.
Speaker 1: That's the only reason is that he's been saying. His
Speaker 1: reason is that he's been saying it. But that's not
Speaker 1: a good reason. No, it's not. And it's a problem
Speaker 1: that I have, and like with a drug problem, the
Speaker 1: only way to really get over it is to do
Speaker 1: the most dangerous version of it you can possibly do. Advice,
Speaker 1: there are other ways. Nope, I would look that up
Speaker 1: or talk to a professional for to decide to throw that.
Speaker 1: I think I have to do this episode. When it
Speaker 1: comes to throwing things in this room. There's no professional
Speaker 1: more experience than me. Yeah, I accept that. I love professional.
Speaker 1: Convinced you should throw it first, Let's start chapter six,
Speaker 1: The Perfect Soldier. Yeah. The night Seditious conspiracy trial held
Speaker 1: important lessons for the chief minds behind the white supremacist
Speaker 1: movement when they leaned into their patriotism, their love of
Speaker 1: an America that was white and Christian but America. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: they could draw significant sympathy from their fellow white men
Speaker 1: and women Swasti cousin clan robes, who are much less
Speaker 1: useful than tearful stories of hippie protesters spitting on flags.
Speaker 1: The saw continuous growth of both the survivalist and the
Speaker 1: American militia movement. Neither of these things was inherently white supremacist,
Speaker 1: but beeman As colleagues have been remarkably successful at seating
Speaker 1: their propaganda into gun shows and conventions. As a result,
Speaker 1: the early nineties brought them a whole crop of fellow travelers,
Speaker 1: men and women who did not identify as not season
Speaker 1: had never held clan membership, but who were also quite
Speaker 1: capable of reading the Turner Diaries and identifying with its message.
Speaker 1: Randy Weaver is a perfect example of this new sort
Speaker 1: of recruit. He was a former Green Beret, a patriot
Speaker 1: who loved his country and working with his hands. He
Speaker 1: and his wife, Vicky were Christian Conservatives. They fell in
Speaker 1: love with the first generation of evangelical TV preachers, men
Speaker 1: like Jerry Folwell. They also read a book called The
Speaker 1: Late Great Planet Earth by how Lindsay, which focused around
Speaker 1: using the Bible to predict the near future. Lindsay's book
Speaker 1: convinced Randy and Vicky that Gog, an anti Christian empire
Speaker 1: from the Book of Ezekiel, was the Soviet Union. God
Speaker 1: I did say, God Yeah. They became more and more
Speaker 1: drawn into conspiracy theories and convinced themselves that a great
Speaker 1: and fiery apocalypse was intimate, imminent and a quote next
Speaker 1: from American Experience by PBS concerned citizens, they set out
Speaker 1: to spread the word. They were unable to find a
Speaker 1: church that approached these matters with what they felt was
Speaker 1: the appropriate level of seriousness, so they held their own
Speaker 1: Bible studies with like minded friends and neighbors. This sparked
Speaker 1: the attention of a local reporter who came to do
Speaker 1: a story on them. The Weavers, Walter learned, did not
Speaker 1: appreciate the results. They felt betrayed, but they had never
Speaker 1: been more sharing their beliefs. A great conflagration was coming,
Speaker 1: and they felt increasingly unsafe in Iowa. Vicky started having
Speaker 1: visions in the bathtub. God was speaking to her, and
Speaker 1: God was telling her to go west to find for
Speaker 1: her family a mountain top. They would be safe there.
Speaker 1: The Weavers moved to a place that would later come
Speaker 1: to be called Ruby Ridge in Idaho, not far from
Speaker 1: Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound. Randy Weaver began to visit
Speaker 1: the compound, attending several events and making a few friends
Speaker 1: among the neo Nazis. The exact nature of what he
Speaker 1: believed precisely is unclear and heavily debated. It seems that
Speaker 1: he identified with some aspects of Christian identity theology, and
Speaker 1: it's safe to say he was racist by normal people standards.
Speaker 1: But it's also fair to say that Randy Weaver was
Speaker 1: not really a Nazi or even an ideological white supremacist.
Speaker 1: He hung around Arian Nations because he lived in the
Speaker 1: middle of nowhere. They were the only people to hang with,
Speaker 1: and he just didn't care about their racism. Ok. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was not the kind of man who'd have joined
Speaker 1: a group like the Order, but he would come to
Speaker 1: play an important role in the next step of the
Speaker 1: white supremacist movement. Don't don't hang out with that's the thing.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. Like you're like, you're like, okay, well, ever,
Speaker 1: I know he's evil, but he's kind of cool in
Speaker 1: this aspect. I'll be buds with this person. Yeah, that's how.
Speaker 1: That's how, that's how. That's how Nazis has Nazi friends. Ye. Now,
Speaker 1: the FBI wound up wire tapping several of the fascists
Speaker 1: that Roundy Weaver befriended, was quite immediately obvious to them
Speaker 1: that Mr. Weaver had no plans to overthrow the government,
Speaker 1: sparker race war, or do anything more subversive than live
Speaker 1: off the land with this family and picnic with Nazis
Speaker 1: from time to time. In fact, when other people in
Speaker 1: these wire tap conversations, which are just committing crimes, Randy
Speaker 1: would usually say something like, we don't really go in
Speaker 1: for that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's a better response for
Speaker 1: lynchings than sure, but it's not a great response. Well,
Speaker 1: the FEDS knew Randy wasn't really dangerous. They saw him
Speaker 1: as the perfect guy to approach is an inform. He
Speaker 1: wasn't a true believer and he was very poor. If
Speaker 1: they could entrap him into committing a crime, they could
Speaker 1: scare him with prison time until he agreed to wear
Speaker 1: a wire and helped him catch him up a big
Speaker 1: fish in the Arian Nations community. Awful offer money, yeah,
Speaker 1: just offer him start like that. Yeah, he's not a
Speaker 1: true believer and he's poor. Yeah, okay, so I offer
Speaker 1: money to help you out. That's not what they do
Speaker 1: and it just sucks. Like yeah. An undercover agent approached
Speaker 1: Randy and offered him good money to illegally saw off
Speaker 1: a couple of shotguns. Now, Randy was not a believer
Speaker 1: in the legitimacy of American gun control regulations and he
Speaker 1: needed to cash, so he happily acquiesced and was subsequently
Speaker 1: busted for it. The Feds made their offer and Randy
Speaker 1: refused them. He was arrested on federal firearms charges and
Speaker 1: taken to jail. Randy made bail, though, and he fled
Speaker 1: back to Ruby Ridge and hold up with his family
Speaker 1: and a whole bunch of guns and the hope that
Speaker 1: the federal allies would not follow. They did but the
Speaker 1: attempted arrest did not go well. The U. S. Marshall
Speaker 1: was shot dead by the Weaver clan and the authority
Speaker 1: He's responded with a blizzard of indiscriminate gunfire which killed
Speaker 1: Randy's fourteen year old son, the family dog, and his
Speaker 1: unarmed wife Vicky. They were trapped in the cabin with
Speaker 1: her corpse for like days. It was hard. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a terrible story. A standoff in suit. The law came
Speaker 1: in with helicopters, armored vehicles and the kind of militarized
Speaker 1: police that looked familiar to us now, but we're new
Speaker 1: when terrifying. Back in nineteen two, the media descended on
Speaker 1: Ruby Ridge too, and the assault on the Weaver families
Speaker 1: was spread virally throughout the far right. The Weavers were
Speaker 1: the perfect poster family to illustrate government overreach. Footage of
Speaker 1: black helicopters hovering over Ruby Ridge and sat like pictures
Speaker 1: of Vicky Weaver were almost tailor made to sell the
Speaker 1: idea that the New World Order was coming for decent,
Speaker 1: white Christian gun owning Americans. Well, yeah, he handed that
Speaker 1: one out on the platter. Yep. Louis Beam and his
Speaker 1: fellow fascists knew a great opportunity when one came a knocking. Later,
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety two, while Ruby Ridge was still in
Speaker 1: the news, the leading minds of the white supremacist movement
Speaker 1: gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, for a summit on how
Speaker 1: precisely they could use this tragedy to their advantage. The
Speaker 1: summit was convened by Pete Peters, a Christian identity preacher
Speaker 1: from Colorado and the head of a sizeable Christian identity church,
Speaker 1: the Lapport Church of Christ. Here's how Leonard Zeskin summarizes
Speaker 1: the proceedings in Blood and Politics. For two and a
Speaker 1: half days, they met in committee, deliberated in plinary sessions,
Speaker 1: and engaged in the kind of one on one conversations
Speaker 1: known in the parlance of business professionals as networking. They
Speaker 1: made decisions in the name of Jesus Christ and Yahweh,
Speaker 1: sang onward Christian soldiers, and otherwise conducted themselves in a
Speaker 1: manner of quiet resolve appropriate for their surroundings, and y
Speaker 1: m c a facility abudding the park. No guns were waived,
Speaker 1: and even the most heated rhetorics seemed to have the
Speaker 1: blood drained out of it. Estes Park signified a radical
Speaker 1: shift in the tactics of the white power movement, like
Speaker 1: the through Aryan Nations Congress. We mostly know it was
Speaker 1: disgusted at Estes Park. Because of the things that happened
Speaker 1: after it, the Nazis started reaching out to more moderate Americans.
Speaker 1: Louis Beam published an article in his new magazine ironically
Speaker 1: named the Seditionist because he'd gotten been declared innocent of sedition.
Speaker 1: He called for leaderless resistance in the a of Ruby Ridge.
Speaker 1: Big Star one militia with members in Texas, Oklahoma, and
Speaker 1: New Mexico, carried out grenade launcher and mortar training exercises
Speaker 1: in rural Texas. The Montana Militia published a guide book
Speaker 1: on how to engage in domestic terrorism. In nineteen, law
Speaker 1: enforcement across the nation found thirteen explosives. Cash is meant
Speaker 1: to be used in attacks is varied as a National
Speaker 1: Afro American museum in Ohio and a Black church in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. None of this made the news in a
Speaker 1: big way because of something that happened in mid nineteen,
Speaker 1: the siege of the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas.
Speaker 1: The Branch Davidians were not a Christian identity sect and
Speaker 1: their leader, David Koresh, was not affiliated with the White
Speaker 1: Supermansist movement. But the a t F siege of their
Speaker 1: compounds so soon after Ruby Ridge was easy for Louis
Speaker 1: Beam and his comrades to propagandizes around. Now, this is
Speaker 1: not an audio book about the Waco disaster, and I
Speaker 1: won't even try to cover what happened there in detail.
Speaker 1: What's important for our purposes is the end result. On
Speaker 1: February nine, a t F agents attempted to serve a
Speaker 1: search warrant about sexual abuse and illegal weapons charges people
Speaker 1: inside the compound open fire. Four agents, five branch Davidians
Speaker 1: were killed, and the situation evolved into a bloody siege.
Speaker 1: In April, Mnintaine, the FBI, who taken control of the situation,
Speaker 1: launched an assault on the compound. In the ensuing melee,
Speaker 1: several fires broke out and quickly swept through the structures.
Speaker 1: By the time the smoke had cleared and it was
Speaker 1: all over, fifty three adults and twenty three children were dead.
Speaker 1: Not many. Yeah, it was a funkload of people. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The whole tragedy was in arguably a clusterfuck on behalf
Speaker 1: of the federal government, which of course helped groups like
Speaker 1: the Fashions more people. Yeah, so they'd started after ss
Speaker 1: park like reaching out to militias and stuff, and again
Speaker 1: trying to like um propagandizing directly to militias, being like,
Speaker 1: instead of just sending out like Nazi propaganda to guys
Speaker 1: who aren't going to bide in Nazis, what if we
Speaker 1: focus on like pictures of this dead woman, like dead
Speaker 1: white woman killed by the government and try to scare
Speaker 1: them that way, and then you know, if they if
Speaker 1: they're interested in that, maybe they'll gradually start reading some
Speaker 1: of our other terrorist propaganda. So Kirk Lyons, a close
Speaker 1: friend of Louis Beam and a white supremacist militia leader himself,
Speaker 1: sent out an issue of his group's fundraising newsletter that
Speaker 1: featured a photo of a spiling fourteen year old girl
Speaker 1: who died in the Waco siege. The girl was, of
Speaker 1: course white, and her photo was captioned, why we Fight.
Speaker 1: There were dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of other similar
Speaker 1: pieces of propaganda. Gradually, day by day and month by month,
Speaker 1: explicitly fascist white supremacist groups began to wrap their ideological
Speaker 1: claws around the militia movement and suck in ever more patriots.
Speaker 1: British journalist John Ronson was one of the few reporters
Speaker 1: who spend a great deal of time embedded with the
Speaker 1: fringe right during this period. He actually visited the ruins
Speaker 1: of the Branch Davidian compound several years after the siege
Speaker 1: with Randy Weaver in Toll. They wound up having a
Speaker 1: conversation with several members of the Michigan Militia who were
Speaker 1: there taking part in a vigil for the people who
Speaker 1: died at Waco. One of these people told him, we
Speaker 1: are here to ask for these people's forgiveness for sitting
Speaker 1: around on our butts and watching it on TV. What
Speaker 1: happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco will never happen again
Speaker 1: under any circumstances. If it does, there will be immediate retaliation,
Speaker 1: armed resistance from the Michigan Militia. Now, the Michigan Militia
Speaker 1: in this time had about twelve thousand members, which was
Speaker 1: a significant searche for it in the wake of Ruby
Speaker 1: Ridge and Waco. One of those members was a young
Speaker 1: Desert storm veteran named Tim McVeigh. Here we go. Timothy
Speaker 1: McVeigh was born. Oh wait, it's time for an ad plug,
Speaker 1: isn't it. Sophie. You know what, I think you really
Speaker 1: are great at this. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: You know there's nothing that goes with Tim McVeigh like well,
Speaker 1: fertilizer bomb. But other than a fertilizer bomb. No, Sophie,
Speaker 1: you're saying that's not a good ad plug. Um, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of things better than McVeigh, and those
Speaker 1: things are the ease. You know what does less damage
Speaker 1: the Tim McVey the products and services advertised on this show.
Speaker 1: You gotta pick one of these, Sophie. That one's great.
Speaker 1: All right, perfect, let's roll to Dick Pills. We're back.
Speaker 1: We're back. We're talking about how good I am at
Speaker 1: making ad plugs. Start talking about that. Still talking about
Speaker 1: this is good. I can talking about it. You know.
Speaker 1: I can't stop talking about this case of perry A. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just listen to that. It has to be thrown. I
Speaker 1: don't know. There's only ten. There aren't twelve. Yeah, there aren't.
Speaker 1: So it's safe. It's you it. No, I have to
Speaker 1: I have to. Well. Timothy McVeigh so uh. He was
Speaker 1: born on April. McVeigh grew up in Pendleton, New York,
Speaker 1: and had an early childhood that was pretty standard for
Speaker 1: the seventies and eighties. He watched Gumby and Truth or Consequences.
Speaker 1: He played cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers with
Speaker 1: other kids in the neighborhood. Timberford playing the good guys
Speaker 1: as he saw them, cops or cowboys wherever possible. He
Speaker 1: was sickly and somewhat prone to act sentence, hurting himself
Speaker 1: in all sorts of ways young boys who spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time and in the woods tend to do.
Speaker 1: Tim was an energetic boy, and he might have been
Speaker 1: someone who'd wound up on riddle and had he been
Speaker 1: born a decade or two later. He was constantly in
Speaker 1: trouble from minor things. But he also had a good heart,
Speaker 1: as this story from American Terrorist, the Fantastic Biography of
Speaker 1: McVeigh makes clear. Tim was playing near the pond when
Speaker 1: he noticed one of the older neighborhood boys carrying a
Speaker 1: burlap sack. The sack was weighted down with rocks, but
Speaker 1: the curious Tim could see there was something else wriggling
Speaker 1: in the sack. He watched as the older boy pitched
Speaker 1: the sack out into the pond, where it quickly sank
Speaker 1: to the bottom. What was that, Tim asked, running to
Speaker 1: the far shore of the pond where the neighborhood boy stood.
Speaker 1: Those are kittens, my dad had The boy answered, in
Speaker 1: a matter of fact tone, we had to get rid
Speaker 1: of them. For Tim, who loved animals and especially kittens,
Speaker 1: the realization of what he had witnessed hit him hard.
Speaker 1: He cried about the incident for days. So part of
Speaker 1: what we're trying to ask here is, you know, we
Speaker 1: talked about Robert Matthews a little bit earlier. We talked
Speaker 1: about Louis beat. These are guys who are pretty brutal.
Speaker 1: Early on, Matthews was a drop of society from age eleven. Uh,
Speaker 1: Louis Beam like immediately wanted to fight and go to
Speaker 1: war and kill. Tim McVeigh is a sensitive kid who's
Speaker 1: like heartbroken when he sees someone being cruel to animals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's confusing. He's not the kind of guy who would
Speaker 1: have wound up joining George Lincoln Rockwell's Nazi party, which
Speaker 1: both Matthews and Beam are the kind of guys speared
Speaker 1: by that um. The story of Tim McVeigh is the
Speaker 1: story of how a young mind got enraptured with this
Speaker 1: kind of terroristic apocalyptic ideology. Who wouldn't have gotten caught
Speaker 1: in the first iteration of it. This is a guy
Speaker 1: who would only have been caught by the changes made
Speaker 1: of the movement's propaganda outreach. Interest is park. I think
Speaker 1: that's that's the story we're talking about today. Well, good,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. So Tim fell in love with guns at
Speaker 1: an early age. His grandfather first took him shooting when
Speaker 1: he was seven. This probably sounds crazy to some people,
Speaker 1: particularly in Los Angeles where we read this, But I
Speaker 1: started shooting at the same age that Tim did, when
Speaker 1: I was a little kid living in fucking rural Oklahoma. Um,
Speaker 1: so it's pretty normal in that era. And Tim's grandpa,
Speaker 1: everyone said Ed McVeigh was a stickler about firearm safety
Speaker 1: and considered safe gun ownership to be an integral part
Speaker 1: of American citizenship. So he likes guns, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: like killing things. He's like a target shooter and stuff like.
Speaker 1: He's yeah, being small and sort of weird. Tim McVey
Speaker 1: was a bit of a magnet for bullies. He developed
Speaker 1: a deep hatred of bullying and a reflective rage at
Speaker 1: the side of anything he saw his bully behavior, whether
Speaker 1: it came from an individual or an institution. Tim's parents
Speaker 1: divorced when they were young. His sisters chose to go
Speaker 1: with their mother, but Tim stayed with his father so
Speaker 1: that he would not have to be alone since the kid.
Speaker 1: After the Oklahoma City bombing, a number of pundits would
Speaker 1: try to tie Tim's parents divorce to his evolution as
Speaker 1: a terrorist. This would seem to be an overstatement, but
Speaker 1: he did tie his mother leaving his father to broader
Speaker 1: social trends, later stating in an interview that in the
Speaker 1: past thirty years, because of the women's movement, they've taken
Speaker 1: an influence out of the household. Yeah. I mean, I
Speaker 1: could see that as being a formative spot for why
Speaker 1: you don't like women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which maybe makes
Speaker 1: him a little bit more sympathetic to the kind of
Speaker 1: propaganda put out by these groups. If you start to
Speaker 1: think of the government as boy yeah yeah. When one
Speaker 1: reads about McVeigh, they get the feeling that had he
Speaker 1: been born later, he might have found a home within
Speaker 1: the alt right. For one thing, he was obsessed with
Speaker 1: the Star Wars movies and identified heavily with Luke Skywalker
Speaker 1: as the eighties. Yeah, special Boy, Special Boy, blowing up
Speaker 1: the big evil thing. Yeah, special dragon Boy. As the
Speaker 1: eighties rolled along and home computer started to become more common,
Speaker 1: McVeigh became one of the first generation of computer nerds.
Speaker 1: He was on the Internet before basically anyone else. His
Speaker 1: handle on those early message boards was the Wanderer. We
Speaker 1: can't know everywhere McVeigh went in the early Internet, but
Speaker 1: it's unlikely to be pure coincidence that Timothy grew obsessed
Speaker 1: with survivalism and the Second Amendment during the years he
Speaker 1: was most involved in Nassan internet culture. It's entirely possible
Speaker 1: he came across some of Louis Beam's writings during this time.
Speaker 1: We know for a fact that he fell in love
Speaker 1: with a book we've already talked about a lot in
Speaker 1: this series. You want to guess what it is, Turner Diary.
Speaker 1: It's rob Oh I lovely. Oh, it's beautiful, beautiful book.
Speaker 1: But that was a lie. He he fell in love
Speaker 1: with the Turner Diars. You were right, Katie, Yeah, God, yeah.
Speaker 1: He first heard about the Turner Diaries from an ad
Speaker 1: and soldier of Fortune magazine. He ordered the book by
Speaker 1: mail and fell madly in love with it. Now for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life, he'd insist that the book's
Speaker 1: gun rights advocacy was what drew him to it, not
Speaker 1: its depiction of a genocidal worldwide race war. And it's
Speaker 1: kind of possible he was telling the truth. Again, like
Speaker 1: Randy Weaver, Tim McVeigh is definitely a racist, but that's
Speaker 1: not his motivation, just like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: really think he's probably telling the truth when he was
Speaker 1: like mostly just into it because it had a lot
Speaker 1: of violent scenes and it was about like a gun
Speaker 1: control revolution. Like the racism he could take or leave.
Speaker 1: That's not great. He has to be racist for this,
Speaker 1: But he wasn't racist enough that he wouldn't have joined
Speaker 1: the Order just because of that, exactly. Yeah, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: post Estes Park, the Turner Diaries remained one of the
Speaker 1: lynchpins of white supremacist recruitment in the US. Ads for
Speaker 1: written magazines like Soldier of Fortune often posed the question,
Speaker 1: what will you do if the government comes for your gun.
Speaker 1: None of this is to say that McVeigh wasn't racist.
Speaker 1: He grew up in a place where everyone was white,
Speaker 1: at age nineteen, he got a job as a guard
Speaker 1: on an armored car. He later recalled his colleagues expressing
Speaker 1: casual racism towards black residents on the East side of Buffalo,
Speaker 1: and eventually he adopted those beliefs and their propensity for
Speaker 1: using racial slurs. Racism was a fact of Tim's life,
Speaker 1: but again it wasn't like the main thing for him.
Speaker 1: What was his main thing? We're guns. During his time
Speaker 1: as a security guard, mcveah spent most of his recreational
Speaker 1: time shooting. He eventually got in trouble with his neighbors
Speaker 1: for doing show so, and this seems to have influenced
Speaker 1: his desire to join the army. He basically just like
Speaker 1: with guns. Yeah, McVeigh was an excellent recruit and by
Speaker 1: all accounts, a very good soldier. He fell in love
Speaker 1: with most aspects of army life, although he disliked the
Speaker 1: emphasis training placed on killing. In a later interview, who
Speaker 1: We're called twenty times a day, it would be blood
Speaker 1: makes the grass grow. Kill, kill, kill. You would be
Speaker 1: screaming that until your throat was wrong. If somebody put
Speaker 1: a video camera on that, they would think it was
Speaker 1: a bunch of sickos. You're right thing to say after
Speaker 1: blowing up a federal building filled with babies, but a
Speaker 1: valid point on base. McVeigh continued to read far right literature,
Speaker 1: devouring conspiracy theories about the United States and the United
Speaker 1: Nations conspiring to steal the freedoms and guns of Americans.
Speaker 1: He handed out copies of the Turner Diaries to his
Speaker 1: closest comrades. He was warned several times by friends who
Speaker 1: read the book that people would think he was a
Speaker 1: good stuff around, good for them, maybe report him all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the go for would give Tim McVeigh his first chance
Speaker 1: to actually use guns against other human beings, and interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: he seems to have hated it. He was not on
Speaker 1: board with the whar from the beginning. McVeigh felt the U.
Speaker 1: S Military should only get involved in conflicts that directly
Speaker 1: affected the lives of American citizens. He saw the US
Speaker 1: intervention against Iraq as bullying, and Tim McVeigh hated bullies.
Speaker 1: When he shipped over to Iraq, McVeigh was the gunner
Speaker 1: on a Bradley fighting vehicle during a battle in country.
Speaker 1: He killed two Iraqi soldiers with the Bradley's very large
Speaker 1: gun and watched in horror as their bodies disappeared into
Speaker 1: a red missed. The incident scarred him. Unlike Louis Beam,
Speaker 1: McVeigh did not enjoy killing. The whole war left a
Speaker 1: bad taste in Tim's mouth. He was particularly furious when
Speaker 1: he read about the U. S. Air Force bombing of
Speaker 1: the a La Mira bomb shelter in Baghdad, which killed
Speaker 1: three hundred women and children. McVeigh returned to America much
Speaker 1: less enchanted with military life. He focused some of that
Speaker 1: frustration on the black soldiers he served alongside. Several of
Speaker 1: them walked around the base and black power shirts, which
Speaker 1: infuriated Tim. He was heard several times using the in
Speaker 1: word and a reputation for ordering some of his black
Speaker 1: suppordinates to sweep up the motor pool. When pressed about
Speaker 1: this later, McVeigh would point out that some of his
Speaker 1: closest comrades in the military were black, a quote again
Speaker 1: from American terrorist Well. He swore he never embraced racism,
Speaker 1: McVeigh actively explored the racist point of view. He had
Speaker 1: already begun selling copies of the Turner Diaries at gun shows,
Speaker 1: and because of the racist content of the book, McVeigh
Speaker 1: wound up on a mailing list for the ku klux Klan.
Speaker 1: McVeigh claimed he had virtually no idea what the KKK
Speaker 1: was all about. The first time he received literature from
Speaker 1: the racist group, he was impressed by one of its pamphlets,
Speaker 1: which expressed concerns about the law some individual rights in
Speaker 1: American society and the desire to go back to the
Speaker 1: way things were in the days of the Founding Fathers. Again,
Speaker 1: that's that st this park stuff. McVey spent twenty dollars
Speaker 1: for the trial membership to KKK headquarters in North Carolina.
Speaker 1: One of the enticements for joining was a white power
Speaker 1: T shirt that McVeigh planned to wear around Fort Riley.
Speaker 1: Why would an on racist wan a white power T shirt?
Speaker 1: McVeigh maintained it was intended to protest what he saw
Speaker 1: is the growing double standard in the army. He said
Speaker 1: that he never did wear the shirt, but he made
Speaker 1: no apologies for buying it then or now. I wanted
Speaker 1: to make a point, he said. Black guys were wearing
Speaker 1: black power T shirts on the base they weren't supposed to.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see what would happen if I wore
Speaker 1: the white power T shirt. McVeigh didn't renew his KKK
Speaker 1: membership when his first year was up. He had joined
Speaker 1: the KKK, he said, because he thought the clan was
Speaker 1: fighting for the restoration of individual rights, especially gun rights.
Speaker 1: But the more research and reading he did, the more
Speaker 1: he realized that the clan was almost entirely devoted to
Speaker 1: the cause of racism. Really too, I am glad you
Speaker 1: did some research on well. He decided the KKK was
Speaker 1: manipulated to young people, and he didn't renew his membership. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he didn't. Don't values yea, values, you know, values are important,
Speaker 1: and I personally love the values of the products and
Speaker 1: services that support this show. That was so good. We're back.
Speaker 1: We're back, and I just admitted that I would be
Speaker 1: willing to have sex with Corey Booker m cot core
Speaker 1: We wanted how we got to this conversation we're not
Speaker 1: going to talk about. It's very inappropriate. Does not lend
Speaker 1: anything to the episode. Shouldn't have admitted it not related
Speaker 1: to the products. He has good bone structure. Though I
Speaker 1: think he's cute, forget what he said anything about it. Guys,
Speaker 1: Sophie does not think he's cute. Everyone has different opinions
Speaker 1: about who they find cute. Yeah, it's not him. We
Speaker 1: can all agree, though. Bernie's the cutest talking about bone structure.
Speaker 1: That guy's got Bonesteeah, he's cutie. Young Bernie is weird,
Speaker 1: but you know cute. He got better looking as he
Speaker 1: got older. Young Bernie. His wife must really been into
Speaker 1: radical politics. Anyway, boy, this is about your uh we're
Speaker 1: finishing this Chaplin chapter right, um. So. Tim McVeigh, like
Speaker 1: Randy Weaver, was a perfect example of the sort of
Speaker 1: man Louis Beam was hoping to reach. Not motivated enough
Speaker 1: by racism too have sought out the movement, but comfortable
Speaker 1: enough with racism and frustrated enough by mainstream American culture
Speaker 1: be radicalized by the anti gun control new world order
Speaker 1: conspiracies peddled by the propagandists of the white Power movement.
Speaker 1: McVeigh opted not to re enlist after his time of
Speaker 1: service ran out, and outside of the military, mcveigh's life
Speaker 1: was just one frustration after another. Despite his glowing service record,
Speaker 1: he had trouble finding work. Civil service jobs he applied
Speaker 1: for and the state and federal government turned him down.
Speaker 1: He convinced himself that this was because he was a
Speaker 1: young white man and thus the victim of what he
Speaker 1: termed reverse discrimination. That's probably a better way to say
Speaker 1: It's like a more illiterate way to say that, yeah,
Speaker 1: reverse Yeah. Affirmative action became the focus of mcphigh's thwarted ambitions.
Speaker 1: He started spending more and more time around gun shows
Speaker 1: and flirted vaguely with some malicious including the Michigan militia.
Speaker 1: He started sending his sister Jennifer stories he'd read about
Speaker 1: the Rockefeller family and their supposed control of most of
Speaker 1: the organs of state power. The conspiracist McVeigh embraced were
Speaker 1: not quite open neo Nazi anti Semites, but they were
Speaker 1: kissing cousins to that kind of belief from American terrorist quote.
Speaker 1: The brother and sisters discussions sprawled in myriad directions, from
Speaker 1: the Bible to the Pyramid and its crowning, all seeing
Speaker 1: I on the back of the dollar bill. McVeigh was
Speaker 1: reading more anti government books and pamphlets, and he shared
Speaker 1: them with his inquisitive younger sister. He wanted to expand
Speaker 1: her perspective. Though some of the claims in the literature
Speaker 1: seemed bizarre and inconceivable to Jennifer, including one writer's contention
Speaker 1: that the government was building massive crematoriums in a hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty concentration camps to exterminate individuals who disagreed with
Speaker 1: federal policies. The authors of the pamphlets, anticipating skepticism, warned
Speaker 1: that Americans risk becoming victims of it can't happen here
Speaker 1: syndrome when it came to government usurping power from the people.
Speaker 1: Jennifer wasn't sold on everything she read, but justice McVeigh
Speaker 1: hoped the literature got her thinking about the government and
Speaker 1: individual rights. She looked up to her older brother, flattered
Speaker 1: that he thought enough of her to engage her in
Speaker 1: political discourse. McVeigh believed that the federal government intended to
Speaker 1: disarm the American public gradually and take away the right
Speaker 1: to bear arms under the Second Amendment. In the summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen nine two. He pointed to events in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
Speaker 1: It's proof positive that his theory was correct. Now. One
Speaker 1: of the publications that McVeigh read during this period was
Speaker 1: called The White Patriot. It was published by the former
Speaker 1: KKK leader The Intempted Invader of the Island of Dominica
Speaker 1: and the founder of Stormfront on Black Yes, that Boys Back,
Speaker 1: That Boy's back, Black's Back. Uh. It featured articles with
Speaker 1: titles like why is the Clan opposed to Choose? And
Speaker 1: also hosted essays from William Pierce. As Musphay's life prospects dimmed,
Speaker 1: he grew more obsessed with guns and gun shows, traveling
Speaker 1: around the country selling weapons and literature and survivalist gear.
Speaker 1: The gun show circuit introduced him to more French right
Speaker 1: wing literature. McVeigh began to express frustration that American women
Speaker 1: wore unfairly withholding sex from American men. He called them
Speaker 1: brutish and stingy. Yeah, take those words back, let's reclaim them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's word that he keeps me the same story over
Speaker 1: and over again. Yeah. When the Waco siege began, McVeigh
Speaker 1: was instantly obsessed with the story. He drove to Mount
Speaker 1: Carmel and sold T shirts outside the siege lions, communing
Speaker 1: with his fellow survivalist and militiamen as they wordly waited
Speaker 1: for the outcome. And when that outcome came, it radicalized
Speaker 1: Tim McVeigh as nothing else could have. He read that
Speaker 1: the government had used cs gas, which McVeigh had been
Speaker 1: exposed to during his military training. To McVeigh, this was
Speaker 1: the ultimate representation of government overreach, pure vicious, murderous, bully behavior.
Speaker 1: McVeigh didn't stop it. Being furious about the murder of
Speaker 1: dozens of innocent people, he became convinced that Waco was
Speaker 1: the prelude to amass government crackdown on gun owners and freedom.
Speaker 1: He told one friend that he suspected the FEDS had
Speaker 1: purposely started fires in the compound. The government wanted it
Speaker 1: to burn because the government couldn't win. The public sentiment
Speaker 1: was changing, he said. Mcveigh's rage was reciprocated by the
Speaker 1: other men he met on the gun show circuit, men
Speaker 1: like Terry Nichols, a sovereign citizen whose beliefs were essentially
Speaker 1: descended from the Posse Coomatatus movement. McVeigh spent time living
Speaker 1: on nichols farm and crafting explosives small homemade bombs, initially
Speaker 1: just for amusement, but over the months that followed Waco,
Speaker 1: mcveigh's rage, the paranoia stoked by fears of fringe right
Speaker 1: wing conspiracy theories and his love of the Turner Diaries
Speaker 1: potastasized into a plan, a plan to bomb the Murray
Speaker 1: Building in Oklahoma City. Man, Yep, it's really sad too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't do it. Yeah, don't do it. Tempt, that's in
Speaker 1: bad news. Cody. He do it. He did it, He
Speaker 1: done did it. The structure of mcveigh's attack was directly
Speaker 1: inspired by a passage from the Turner Diaries. At one point,
Speaker 1: Earl Turners sell bombs the FBI's headquarters. Pierced goes into
Speaker 1: exhaustive detail about the device they use, a truck bomb
Speaker 1: made with pounds of ammonium nitrate, essentially the same weapon
Speaker 1: McVeigh constructed and used to destroy the Murray Building on
Speaker 1: the day he detonated his bomb, killing a hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty eight people. McVeigh put together in manifesto of sorts
Speaker 1: on an envelope in his car, and included many photo
Speaker 1: copied pages of the Turner Diaries. McVeigh had highlighted one
Speaker 1: passage in particular from a chunk of the book, where
Speaker 1: Earl Turner cell carries out a mortar attack on Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. The real value of our attack today lies
Speaker 1: in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties. More importantly, though,
Speaker 1: is what we taught the politicians and bureaucrats. They learned
Speaker 1: this afternoon that not one of them is beyond our reach.
Speaker 1: They can huddle behind barbed wire and tanks in the city,
Speaker 1: they can hide behind the concrete walls of their country estates,
Speaker 1: but we can still find them and kill them. Blew
Speaker 1: up a daycare, god, man, Yeah, I really showed them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was probably a daycare on the death start too.
Speaker 1: You would think. Yes, seven was the size of the
Speaker 1: moon families. Tim's a Walker Vey special boy. Uh, special boys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of kitten I'm certain there were a lot
Speaker 1: of kittens up there in Ti McVeigh, Louis Beam and
Speaker 1: his fellow fascists had found the perfect soldier and the
Speaker 1: perfect exemplar of Beam's concept of leaderless resistance. He was
Speaker 1: not a lone wolf, as some foolish pretenders of journalism
Speaker 1: named him. McVeigh was radicalized by a constellation of writers
Speaker 1: and thinkers, as well as hundreds of men he spoke
Speaker 1: with a gun shows and survivalist conventions and sitting outside
Speaker 1: the siege lines at Waco. He was radicalized by William Pierce,
Speaker 1: who wrote the Turner Diaries, hoping desperately that someone would
Speaker 1: do exactly what McBay did. Mcveigh's attack prompted response from
Speaker 1: federal law enforcement, but not the one you might expect. Well,
Speaker 1: there were some crackdowns on malicious cells and organizations. The
Speaker 1: Justice Department largely reacted by taking a lighter hand with
Speaker 1: white supremacists and militias. Okay, but yes, Cody, we'll see
Speaker 1: sybe were if it stops supremacist terrorists. I didn't mean.
Speaker 1: I didn't mean to a question. The Montana Freeman wound
Speaker 1: up in a standoff with the federal government. As a group,
Speaker 1: they represented a synthesis of Christian identity and posse Coomatatius
Speaker 1: beliefs that declared themselves independent of federal control and wound
Speaker 1: up in an eighty one day standoff with law enforcement.
Speaker 1: For a while, it looked like the Freeman compound might
Speaker 1: become another Waco. Put the standoff ended peacefully. Video footage
Speaker 1: of the twenty three adults and four children surrendering showed
Speaker 1: no giant armored vehicles or military looking police. The FBI's
Speaker 1: hostage rescue team wore sneakers and casual civilian clothing. McVeigh
Speaker 1: would go to his Grave convinced that the lighter hand
Speaker 1: used on the Montana Freeman was the result of his
Speaker 1: attack on Oklahoma City, and he may have been right.
Speaker 1: According to American terrorist quote, Clinton are Van's aunt, the
Speaker 1: former FBI agent who had tried without success to negotiate
Speaker 1: a peaceful into the Waco standoff three years earlier, agreed
Speaker 1: with McVeigh at least on that point. Retired from the
Speaker 1: FBI and working as a security consultant, fan Zant fields
Speaker 1: that the government learned a painful lesson from the Oklahoma
Speaker 1: City bombing. In vin z Ants were the government realized
Speaker 1: that it must become a velvet brick, not a battering ram.
Speaker 1: What an absolute classic tragedy, van Zant had said, soon
Speaker 1: after the conflagration at Waco. What a total indictment of
Speaker 1: mankind's and ability to communicate and relate, even though we
Speaker 1: have different religious or personal philosophies. While van Zant condemned
Speaker 1: the Oklahoma City bombing, he felt that Waco had started
Speaker 1: a war, that mcveigh's bombing had been not only an escalation,
Speaker 1: but a turning point in that war. My only disagreement
Speaker 1: with Mr van zandt is the idea that the war,
Speaker 1: Mr McVeigh wound up fighting and had started with Waco.
Speaker 1: This war had been going on much longer than that,
Speaker 1: at least as far back as the days of George
Speaker 1: Lincoln Rockwell. Timothy McVeigh may have seen himself as a
Speaker 1: patriotic American, but he fought as a soldier of the
Speaker 1: American fascist movement under general's Louis Beam and William Pierce.
Speaker 1: The failure of the federal government and almost everyone to
Speaker 1: see this war is one reason why things have gotten
Speaker 1: so bad in twenty nineteen. As I write this, McVeigh
Speaker 1: would be joined on down through the years by dozens
Speaker 1: of other angry young men, men like Eric Harris and
Speaker 1: Dylan Klebold, the infamous Columbine Shooters. Most experts agree that
Speaker 1: Harris was the prime ry motivating force behind the attacks,
Speaker 1: more or less pulling Cleibold along with him. This is
Speaker 1: not often reported on, but Harris was obsessed with Adolf
Speaker 1: Hitler and Nazism. He wrote constantly about Nazi ideology, his
Speaker 1: hatred of free speech, the press, and his desire to
Speaker 1: see mentally defected people executed. Harris was also obsessed with
Speaker 1: Timothy McVeigh. Dave Colan is a journalist who spent more
Speaker 1: than a decade studying the massacre. He found regular references
Speaker 1: to Oklahoma City and McVeigh and Harris's writings before the shooting.
Speaker 1: Colin writes quote in his journal, Eric would brag about
Speaker 1: topping McVeigh. Oklahoma City was a one note performance. Mcveigh's
Speaker 1: had his timer and walked away. He didn't even see
Speaker 1: his spectacle unfold. Harris admired McVeigh, but desperately wanted to
Speaker 1: beat him, carrying out a larger attack and killing more people.
Speaker 1: Do you think that well, less great things more? You
Speaker 1: think that attitude might be accelerationism. Now, Eric Harris and
Speaker 1: Dylan Cleebold did not succeed in their goal, or in
Speaker 1: Harris's goal of topping Timothy McVeigh, But Harris may yet
Speaker 1: manage to beat mcveigh's high score. In the decades since
Speaker 1: in the shooting at Columbine, it has inspired at least
Speaker 1: seventy four copycat attacks which have killed eighty nine people
Speaker 1: and injured a hundred and twenty six more. You can
Speaker 1: draw a direct line from George Lincoln Rockwell to William Pearson,
Speaker 1: Louis Beam to Tim McVeigh, and then to Eric Harris.
Speaker 1: By the late nineteen nineties, it was incredibly clear that
Speaker 1: leaderless resistance as a tactic was the best weapon in
Speaker 1: the white supremacist arsenal. But it would take the mass
Speaker 1: adoption of the Internet in the error of the smartphone
Speaker 1: for Louis Beam's deadliest innovation to see its full potential.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk about that in the next episode
Speaker 1: of this podcast. Terrorists should throw the period yet? Or
Speaker 1: should I wait until we're done with the whole thing?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm pretty bummed out right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right. Maybe maybe it's time, Maybe it is time,
Speaker 1: or maybe don't do it at all. No, I have
Speaker 1: to do it. I have to do it. Sophie, what
Speaker 1: do you think after the last episode? And now? How
Speaker 1: about you throw it towards that couch? And Sophie moves away.
Speaker 1: I can't read your your blink, Sophie, I think we're
Speaker 1: waiting until the next episode. I really want to everything.
Speaker 1: I want to draw this ship out. Yeah, I want
Speaker 1: to draw this ship out. I'm gonna wait wait for
Speaker 1: the climax. Plug your stuff. Uh that's right, Google our
Speaker 1: names which are spell it right? It's Katie Stole and
Speaker 1: Cody Johnson. Oh we have YouTube show some more news, podcast,
Speaker 1: even more news Cody, Twitter and Patreon, dot com, slash
Speaker 1: some more news and t public or all the things
Speaker 1: Google if you are interested, just like google it. This
Speaker 1: is what the six six. If you're still listening, I'm
Speaker 1: not plugging everything at the end of these episodes. We're
Speaker 1: not to And now we're going to do it at
Speaker 1: the last one because it's the last one. But we've
Speaker 1: already done it every time. I'm not in the next one.
Speaker 1: All right. Podcast