August 22, 2019 • 34 mins
Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston for a reading of Chapter Six of Robert's. 'The War on Everyone.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M what's being insulted by a Sophie My me. I'm
Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards. Sophie is angry at
me because I funked up and tried to start the
episode before we were ready. We don't know what's up
or down here. We don't know what's up or down.
I I can't stop thinking about this perry A case
that I'm none of us can sweating. It's like the
(00:25):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:51):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:58):
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.
(03:19):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:04):
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,
(04:25):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:28):
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
(05:50):
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
(06:12):
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
(06:32):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:13):
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
(07:34):
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.
(07:58):
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
(08:20):
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
(08:43):
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.
(09:04):
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
(09:25):
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
(09:46):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:28):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:15):
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,
(11:37):
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.
(12:06):
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.
(12:27):
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.
(12:49):
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
(13:11):
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
(13:33):
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.
(13:53):
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
(14:16):
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,
(14:38):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:21):
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
(15:41):
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
(16:02):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:43):
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.
(17:04):
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
(17:27):
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,
(17:49):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:31):
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
(18:53):
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
(19:14):
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,
(19:35):
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
(19:57):
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
(20:17):
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
(20:38):
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,
(20:58):
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?
(21:19):
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
(21:39):
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,
(22:00):
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.
(22:20):
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,
(22:43):
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,
(23:03):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:49):
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,
(24:09):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:13):
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
(25:34):
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,
(25:58):
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
(26:20):
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
(26:42):
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
(27:04):
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
(27:26):
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
(27:48):
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
(28:08):
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
(28:28):
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.
(28:49):
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
(29:09):
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,
(29:32):
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
(29:58):
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.
(30:20):
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.
(30:42):
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.
(31:04):
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,
(31:26):
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
(31:47):
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
(32:09):
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
(32:31):
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
(32:53):
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,
(33:13):
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
(33:37):
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.
(33:58):
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
(34:20):
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
(34:41):
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
M what's being insulted by a Sophie My me. I'm
Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards. Sophie is angry at
me because I funked up and tried to start the
episode before we were ready. We don't know what's up
or down here. We don't know what's up or down.
I I can't stop thinking about this perry A case
that I'm none of us can sweating. It's like the
(00:25):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:51):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:58):
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.
(03:19):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:04):
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,
(04:25):
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
(04:46):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:28):
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
(05:50):
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
(06:12):
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
(06:32):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:13):
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
(07:34):
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.
(07:58):
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
(08:20):
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
(08:43):
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.
(09:04):
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
(09:25):
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
(09:46):
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
(10:07):
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
(10:28):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:15):
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,
(11:37):
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.
(12:06):
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.
(12:27):
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.
(12:49):
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
(13:11):
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
(13:33):
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.
(13:53):
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
(14:16):
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,
(14:38):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:21):
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
(15:41):
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
(16:02):
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
(16:22):
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
(16:43):
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.
(17:04):
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
(17:27):
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,
(17:49):
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
(18:09):
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
(18:31):
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
(18:53):
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
(19:14):
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,
(19:35):
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
(19:57):
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
(20:17):
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
(20:38):
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,
(20:58):
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?
(21:19):
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
(21:39):
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,
(22:00):
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.
(22:20):
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,
(22:43):
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,
(23:03):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:49):
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,
(24:09):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:13):
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
(25:34):
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,
(25:58):
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
(26:20):
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
(26:42):
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
(27:04):
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
(27:26):
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
(27:48):
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
(28:08):
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
(28:28):
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.
(28:49):
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
(29:09):
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,
(29:32):
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
(29:58):
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.
(30:20):
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.
(30:42):
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.
(31:04):
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,
(31:26):
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
(31:47):
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
(32:09):
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
(32:31):
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
(32:53):
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,
(33:13):
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
(33:37):
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.
(33:58):
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
(34:20):
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
(34:41):
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
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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