Mcveigh Quotes

They toured the new hospital, the renovated and expanded McVeigh Home, and the (named without apparent irony) Bay View Home for the Blind and Helpless.

Both David Koresh and Timothy McVeigh fell in the fight for freedom, the right of the Americans to be left alone.

Authority is not a substitute for truth.

Every one of us can honestly claim that "worst of sinners" title. No, it isn't specially reserved for the Adolf Hitlers, Timothy McVeighs, and Osama bin Ladens of the world. William Law writes, "We may justly condemn ourselves as the greatest sinners we know because we know more of the folly of our own heart than we do of other people's." So admit you're the worst sinner you know. Admit you're unworthy and deserve to be condemned. But don't stop there! Move on to rejoicing in the Savior who came to save the worst of sinners. Lay down the luggage of condemnation and kneel down in worship at the feet of Him who bore your sins. Cry tears of amazement. And confess with Paul: "I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life" (1 Timothy 1:16)

Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.

So when I feel most lost I choose to remember those things that help me survive. I choose love.

For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: “the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives,” he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric’s ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn’t want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school. Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.” Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.” The audience—for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization—was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things—buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully. “During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they—and not the secular government—have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality,” Juergensmeyer wrote. He pointed out that during the same day as the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, a deadlier attack was leveled against a coffee shop in Cairo. The attacks were presumably coordinated by the same group. The body count was worse in Egypt, yet the explosion was barely reported outside that country. “A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center,” he explained. Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.

I have always enjoyed this part of the journey the most - the passing through of places where one would never wish to stay but that hold a strange, eerie beauty all of their own. There, with the heavens open wide above, streaked with silent stars and constellations, so vast and beautiful, then I would feel that our journey was not purposeless after all.

Gun-carrying men are not just motivated by crime and insecurity but also by a loss of American values, a loss of masculine dignity, and a loss of confidence in the state.

This was something they could not take from us - the freedom to imagine, to create new worlds beyond this one.

He is leaving a trail of golden thread, and later, in the quiet of my room, I will stitch it into a tapestry that will bind me to my past.

Even a man accused of the worst act of terrorism ever committed in this country - especially such a man - is entitled to the best possible defense. This concept is a cornerstone of our justice system.

The trial of hapless Timothy McVeigh shared many things in common with the “trials” of other scapegoats from the past. Like Bruno Richard Hauptmann, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan, McVeigh received inept legal representation. Stephen Jones presented almost no defense, resting after only three and a half days and just twenty-five witnesses. Even establishment talking head attorney Alan Dershowitz would criticize the incompetent defense McVeigh received.

He often liked to do this with a book – just flick through from start to finish, soaking up the pictures, catching the rhythm of the words, the sense of direction for where a story was headed – but he didn’t like to look too closely at the words, and he never raced ahead and read the last page.

and confused if someone does not appreciate their niceness. Others often sense this and avoid giving them feedback not only, effectively blocking the nice person’s emotional growth, but preventing risks from being taken. You never know with a nice person if the relationship would survive a conflict or angry confrontation. This greatly limits the depths of intimacy. And would you really trust a nice person to back you up if confrontation were needed? 3. With nice people you never know where you really stand. The nice person allows others to accidentally oppress him. The “nice” person might be resenting you just for talking to him, because really he is needing to pee. But instead of saying so he stands there nodding and smiling, with legs tightly crossed, pretending to listen. 4. Often people in relationship with nice people turn their irritation toward themselves, because they are puzzled as to how they could be so upset with someone so nice. In intimate relationships this leads to guilt, self-hate and depression. 5. Nice people frequently keep all their anger inside until they find a safe place to dump it. This might be by screaming at a child, blowing up a federal building, or hitting a helpless, dependent mate. (Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, was described by acquaintances as a very, very nice guy, one who would give you the shirt off his back.) Success in keeping the anger in will often manifest as psychosomatic illnesses, including arthritis, ulcers, back problems, and heart disease. Proper Peachy Parents In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that those who had peachy keen “Nice Parents” or proper “Rigidly Religious Parents” (as opposed to spiritual parents), are often the most stuck in chronic, lowgrade depression. They have a difficult time accessing or expressing any negative feelings towards their parents. They sometimes say to me “After all my parents did for me, seldom saying a harsh word to me, I would feel terribly guilty complaining. Besides, it would break their hearts.” Psychologist Rollo May suggested that it is less crazy-making to a child to cope with overt withdrawal or harshness than to try to understand the facade of the always-nice parent. When everyone agrees that your parents are so nice and giving, and you still feel dissatisfied, then a child may conclude that there must be something wrong with his or her ability to receive love. -§ Emotionally starving children are easier to control, well fed children don’t need to be. -§ I remember a family of fundamentalists who came to my office to help little Matthew with his anger problem. The parents wanted me to teach little Matthew how to “express his anger nicely.” Now if that is not a formula making someone crazy I do not know what would be. Another woman told me that after her stinking drunk husband tore the house up after a Christmas party, breaking most of the dishes in the kitchen, she meekly told him, “Dear, I think you need a breath mint.” Many families I work with go through great anxiety around the holidays because they are going to be forced to be with each other and are scared of resuming their covert war. They are scared that they might not keep the nice garbage can lid on, and all the rotting resentments and hopeless hurts will be exposed. In the words to the following song, artist David Wilcox explains to his parents why he will not be coming home this Thanksgiving: Covert War by David Wilcox

The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among “the most powerful corporations on the planet” — hence the state’s relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other. The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny—namely, the domestic aspects of the “War on Terror.” Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state’s bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained—short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government’s reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely — an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. At the same time, law enforcement was also obsessively pursuing — and sometimes fabricating—cases against environmentalists, animal rights activists, and anarchists while ignoring or obscuring racist violence against people of color. What that shows, I think, is that the left/right imbalance persists, but sometimes other biases matter more.

The other thing Lenny loved was the smell of a book. If you held it up to your nose, you could smell it, like it had an energy all of its very own. You didn’t get that much with things anymore – most things were fake. Fake chairs, tables, rugs, pictures, fake flowers – Lenny had noticed that, how much wasn’t real. That was one of the things he loved about Miss Julie’s house – she had it full of old furniture – things someone had made by hand, old things built to last, put together with love.

But do you think our futures are already determined for us?” “Why are you asking all of this? What’s going on?” I let out a small laugh. “Remember when we were in the hallway?” He nodded. “Well, Thirteen tried telling me that I couldn’t escape my fate and that there was no point in fighting the inevitable.” “Do you think it is inevitable?” he asked. “Me?” I scoffed. “No. Nothing is ever guaranteed. One minor adjustment can alter everything. Nothing is ever set in stone. As of right now, we’re all on one path: we’re all stuck inside of this hell that we’re trying to escape, and it may seem like the outcome has already been determined for us, but it hasn’t. The smallest of things could change everything. A death. Deception. Anything could force us to follow another path, and you know what? We determine that path, not fate.” “What path do you see yourself on?” Colton hopped up onto the computer desk, tucking his hands underneath his thighs. “I see us starting new lives outside of this place, far from McVeigh and his men,” I answered honestly. “But I know not all of us will make it out of here. There is still more pain to come our way, but there is also happiness if we allow for it.

Everyone who had worked with the KGB, including Gary, knew of McVeigh. McVeigh was a disgruntled U.S. Army vet, and had tried to join every terrorist organization in the world, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. McVeigh was considered too unreliable to be taken seriously. When Al Qaeda expanded its operations, McVeigh went to Afghanistan clandestinely, and trained with the terrorists of Al Qaeda, but, didn’t become an actual member of the terrorist group. When he returned, McVeigh decided to blow up one of the federal buildings in one of the Great Plains states, because he thought New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago was just too obvious of a choice. He decided on the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, because it housed fourteen federal agencies, all of which he wanted to destroy. He had help from a co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, who thought McVeigh was a supporter of the militia movement.

A couple months later, McVeigh was indicted on 11 federal counts, including conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, use of a weapon of mass destruction, destruction by explosives, and eight counts of first-degree murder. The federal government decided to seek the death penalty for the first time in over twenty years. In 2001, he was executed.

we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma. america did not give out his family’s addresses or where he went to church. or blame the bible or pat robertson.

government finally made amends for its actions at Ruby Ridge.

Confronted with social collapse and chaos people had to learn a new mentality (conventionally called “consciousness”).  In other words, subjective experience was a product of several centuries of learning new ways to navigate cultural complexity, not a consequence of biological evolution.

I composed a little poem, just now. I do not like Miss Bennet, E. I do not think that she likes me. I wish that she would go away And take her sister Jane today. (There! How accomplished is that?) ⸎ No, I do

I composed a little poem, just now. I do not like Miss Bennet, E. I do not think that she likes me. I wish that she would go away And take her sister Jane today. (There! How accomplished is that?) ⸎

While this atrocity “set off a tide of anguish nationwide” (as the Times put it), it struck a particularly painful chord in one midwestern town, reawakening memories of a tragedy that had left a deep and lasting scar on the community. The town was Bath, Michigan, site of the worst school massacre in US history. Perpetrated by a respected citizen, admired by his neighbors and active in local affairs, it claimed more than forty victims, thirty-eight of them children. That carnage was committed not with firearms but with explosives, which also made it the deadliest act of domestic terrorism before Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. It climaxed, moreover, with a horrific suicide bombing.

The uniting philosophy in these cases isn’t religious, but patriarchal. Just as McVeigh envisioned a federal government emasculating the sovereignty of men, school shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis saw his advances being rejected by a female classmate as a nullification of his masculine sovereignty, leading him to kill ten in the Friday, May 18, 2018, high school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. Again, as men are taught that emotions are for women and the only acceptable means of communication is anger, their aggrieved entitlement is routinely finding an outlet in senseless violence.

The terrorist who conceptualized, built, and delivered the 4,500-pound ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO) bomb detonated at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran. A white supremacist, McVeigh had self-radicalized and devoted his life after his military service to becoming a full-time terrorist. He came to believe that a race war was imminent in the United States and that he had a role to play in starting it.

She laughs. We laugh. Laugh and laugh like I’ve never seen my Mummy laugh before. I’m a good boy. She makes my heart hurt happy. My Mummy loves me. We don’t say that in our house either.

Quoting from Theodore Kaczynski's letter to the author: My speculative interpretation is that McVeigh resembles many people on the right who are attracted to powerful weapons for their own sake and independently of an likelihood that they will ever have a practical use for them. Such people tend to invent excuses, often far-fetched ones, for acquiring weapons for which they have no real need.

a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.

McVeigh then drove the 1,300 miles to Arkansas, where he met up with Nichols, and they looked at property they might buy together, perhaps to start a blueberry farm.

Convicting McVeigh and Nichols, while necessary, would do little to stop the forces that propelled their terrible mission. In the years after 1995, those forces endured, flourished, and burst forth, among other places, at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Several of the plotters to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 met on Facebook and then used private Facebook group chats to plan the attack

(In my interview with him, Garland not only refused to draw any comparisons between McVeigh and the Capitol rioters, he refused even to utter the words January 6.)

McVeigh had been thinking about the movie Clear and Present Danger, which was based on the novel by Tom Clancy. “In the movie, the bad guys deliver a bomb with a helicopter, but they drop it on a truck, to make it look like it was a truck bomb,” McVeigh told Nigh. “We could say someone did the same thing here—that it was really a helicopter bomb.

Jones recognized that McVeigh never came to terms with a fundamental contradiction—that he wanted the world to know that he bombed the Murrah building, and he also wanted to be acquitted of the bombing.

The two men were among the earliest, and certainly the most prominent, examples of the link between modern right-wing extremism and the armed forces. This connection carried forward to the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. About 7 percent of the adult population are either veterans or active-duty service members, but approximately 15 percent of those arrested belonged to those groups. Those charged with more serious crimes, like sedition, consisted overwhelmingly of veterans.

Shortly before the 2020 election, the Bureau’s agents arrested the conspirators before they had a chance to put their plan into action.

As the sociologist (and MacArthur fellow) Jennifer Carlson has observed, “Gun-carrying men are not just motivated by crime and insecurity but also by a loss of American values, a loss of masculine dignity, and a loss of confidence in the state.

In the 1980s, the NRA, and the conservative movement, embraced the idea that the Second Amendment endowed individuals with a right to bear arms.

In the popular imagination, Michigan calls to mind the urban grit of Detroit, but this is misleading: Michigan is Detroit—attached to Idaho. The great mass of the state is rural, agricultural, and a hotbed of right-wing extremism. This has been true for decades, going back to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the success of Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest, in the 1930s.

At first, the Army was all that McVeigh hoped. Soon after he arrived in basic training, his skill as a marksman earned him a commendation as a sharpshooter.

At the time, in the 1980s, this was an extreme view—that the Second Amendment existed to provide individuals with a violent check on the federal government.

The prevalence of veterans among the extremists raised the question of whether the military attracted those predisposed to violent political action or whether service in the armed forces radicalized those who might not otherwise turn to terror.

Blood makes the grass grow! Kill! Kill! Kill!

As for the customs at Fort Riley, a lot of soldiers were racist, sexist, and obsessed with guns—and so was McVeigh.

political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, or other government or independent counts.

As usual with Trump, he and his supporters (and later his lawyers) could parse his words with enough precision to argue that he did not explicitly encourage the carnage on January 6—which included five deaths, countless injuries, and hundreds of arrests of people who thought they were doing what Trump wanted them to do.

I have no sense of Steven's words; all I know is that if he is the spokesman for empire, then empire is an ugly, dissolute thing. His voice is like the whisper of the devil. Sugarcoated words, designed to make what is evil palatable so that more evil can be committed. Listening to him is like listening to the clean, efficient turning of the wheel at my uncle's bacon factory.

There is always a betrayal," he says. "We all have to let something go-in order to be free." I lean my head back against his shoulder and shut my eyes. To be free. Is that what I am? Free? "Who have you betrayed?" I ask. "I have betrayed so many people that for a long time I did not know myself." "Tell me." "I used to wash dishes in the kitchen, before you were born. I remember the brown ceramic sink, propped up on stilts. The tap leaked, a constant dripping of water. Over the years it had made a small dip in the ceramic, rough to touch. One day I came in and a small crack had spread itself across the sink. Eventually it would be two halves. That was how it was with me.

But to remain too long, rooted in one place, even one place so beautiful, that was not the Imuhar way – for a man who wanders is free. His home is the desert: the sky, the stars. He is not tethered, neither to place nor possessions, only to the desert sands – that is home and that is what he carries in his heart.” – Lenny by Laura McVeigh

But to remain too long, rooted in one place, even one place so beautiful, that was not the Imuhar way – for a man who wanders is free. His home is the desert: the sky, the stars. He is not tethered, neither to place nor possessions, only to the desert sands – that is home and that is what he carries in his heart.

He loved to lie there, swaddled in blankets, looking up at the sky streaked with stars. He could almost feel the earth tip and spin, or perhaps, he thought, it is me that is spinning. The sky stretched vast overhead, the stars so clear in the desert night that he felt as if they watched over him and he wanted to stay in the desert forever.

Sometimes you have to try a thing: even if it seems impossible, you have to try.

It’s the things we don’t know, don’t rightly understand, that frighten us most.

The beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?

Later, claiming responsibility for the killing, the IRA said the man had been killed because he was supplying the Security Forces with fruit and vegetables.  McVeigh would not be the only person to die for such a tenuous reason – many businessmen would be murdered in cold blood for similar ‘activities’. Throughout

Entre los varios miles de estadounidenses condecorados por su papel en la liberación de Kuwait había un artillero de un vehículo de combate Bradley que recibió la Estrella de Bronce y muchas otras condecoraciones. Timothy McVeigh, un joven y prometedor soldado, intentó entrar en las Fuerzas Especiales estadounidenses, pero no lo admitieron, y dejó el ejército, amargado, el 31 de diciembre de 1991.9 Murió ejecutado el 11 de junio del 2001 por el atentado con bomba en la ciudad de Oklahoma del 19 de abril de 1995, en el que perdieron la vida 167 estadounidenses.