The collateral tragedy of Timothy McVeigh
McVeigh was a right-wing white supremacist who loved guns, explosives, and “white power” with the same level of hatred he had for the federal government, law enforcement, and the “New World Order.”
The New World Order term was coined by Republican President George H.W. Bush on September 11, 1990 as he described his vision of a post-Cold War world.
The Patriot Movement, led by white supremacist Patriots like McVeigh, saw the term as coded message that a cabal of Jews, socialists and wealthy elitists were taking over the world, particularly in America, and would ultimately impose some form of government not controlled by white people.
The so-called Patriot Movement spawned right-wing, white supremacists and Neo-Nazi type militia groups across the country, beginning in Montana and spreading into Michigan and Minnesota. These hate groups can now be found in every state in this country.
McVeigh was a fixture, as were other former military personnel, in that hate-driven movement that formed these “private militias” to wage war against the New World Order
In August 1992, McVeigh watched as fellow white supremacist Randy Weaver engaged federal law enforcement in an 11-day standoff in Ruby Ridge, Idaho that left Weaver’s wife and 14-year-old son dead, as well as a U.S. Marshal.
Between February 28 and April 19, 1993, McVeigh watched the Waco Siege that ultimately left anti-government religious cult leader David Koresh and 74 of his Branch Davidians followers dead, as well as five federal law enforcement officers.
McVeigh swore revenge against the federal government, or the “New World Order,” he believed was responsible for Ruby Ridge and Waco.
On April 19, 1995, on the second anniversary of the fiery end of the Waco Siege, McVeigh left a truck packed with 4800 pounds of explosive material near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Courthouse in Oklahoma City. The ensuing explosive blast killed 168 people, including 19 children in a daycare center in the building.
“What the U.S. government did at Waco and Ruby Ridge was dirty,” McVeigh told the authors of “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing” in any interview from his federal death cell. “And I gave dirty back to them at Oklahoma City.”
The godfather of the “white power, white supremacist” Patriot Movement—which today is represented by the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and Boogaloos—McVeigh would be a true Patriot in today’s political and social climate. He would have led the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 intent on hanging the Vice-President and murdering the Speaker of the House.
Today many congressional leaders, conservative-right wing talk show hosts, and the leaders of all the white supremacist groups in this country hail the more than 700 people arrested in the wake of the Capitol assault as “Patriots.”
One day in the not too distant future, Timothy McVeigh will also be hailed as a true “Patriot” by the white warriors of hate because he destroyed a federal courthouse named after a Democratic federal judge appointed to the bench by none other than greatest liberal president of all time, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
That, my friends, is the collateral tragedy of Timothy McVeigh.