Thirty years ago today on April 19, 1995, a truck bomb detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, resulting in the deaths of 168 people in what is still the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in the United States.
Bill Clinton was President on that day, and today he spoke at a memorial event and connected the dots between an extremist movement in 1995 to Trumpism today.
Clinton suggested that ideas that were extremist in 1995 have now become more established.
The far-right radical and 26-year-old military veteran who blew up a federal building was caught by the FBI two days after the devastating attack. The deaths of 168 victims included 19 children who were in a day care directly above the place where McVeigh parked his truck filled with explosive material. It is believed he targeted those children as revenge for the children killed at a religious compound in Waco, Texas.
McVeigh wanted to strike at what he saw as a corrupt, secretive cabal running the US government – what Donald Trump and his acolytes refer to as the Deep State, and are now busy destroying.
McVeigh believed the U.S. had no business influencing countries around the world or meddling in foreign wars when white working-class Americans from industrial cities such as Buffalo, his home town, were suffering. Sound familiar?
His favorite book was a white supremacist power fantasy called The Turner Diaries, which blamed a cabal of Jews, black people and internationalists for perverting America’s true destiny. Sound familiar?
He believed in ordinary citizens taking up arms against a tyrannical government because that is what was done when the founding fathers fought for independence. When he was caught by police he was wearing a t-shirt with a T. Jefferson quote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Sound familiar?
But that kind of threat to the government today is non-existent with Trump in the Oval Office. The enemy is within.
It’s hard to imagine McVeigh, who was executed by lethal injection in 2001, objecting to the administration’s campaign to hollow out the international aid agency, kick career prosecutors and government watchdogs out of the Department of Justice, or vow to refashion “broken” institutions such as the FBI.
More at The Guardian
