Timothy Mcveigh Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

government finally made amends for its actions at Ruby Ridge.

When I was writing The Between during that tumultuous time after Hurricane Andrew, I wondered if a white supremacist as the story’s villain might feel too “old fashioned.” I naively thought perhaps the sacrifices of my parents and the people they worked with in the civil rights era had created a world where the violent racism referenced in my book might not ring as true. Then the Oklahoma City bombing happened the same year The Between was published, carried out by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, and white supremacy and racism gained prominent voices from the highest level of the United States government. On January 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol to try to invalidate the presidential election—in large part because they did not want Black votes counted. Like

The second stage of insurgency, which the CIA calls the incipient conflict stage, is marked by discrete acts of violence. Timothy McVeigh’s attack in Oklahoma City could be viewed as the very earliest attack, in some ways years before its time. The insurgents’ goal is to broadcast their mission to the world, build support, and provoke a government overreaction to their violence, so that more moderate citizens become radicalized and join the movement. The second stage is when the government becomes aware of the groups behind these attacks, but according to the CIA, the violence is often dismissed “as the work of bandits, criminals, or terrorists.” Timothy McVeigh seemed to many Americans a lone wolf actor. But McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, were suspected members of the Michigan Militia. In 2012, the number of right-wing terrorist attacks and plots was fourteen; by August 2020, it was sixty-one, a historic high. The open insurgency stage, the final phase, according to the CIA’s report, is characterized by sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes, as well as hit-and-run raids on police and military units. These groups also tend to use more sophisticated weapons, such as improvised explosive devices, and begin to attack vital infrastructure (such as hospitals, bridges, and schools), rather than just individuals. These attacks also involve a larger number of fighters, some of whom have combat experience. There is often evidence “of insurgent penetration and subversion of the military, police, and intelligence services.” If there is foreign support for the insurgents, this is where it becomes more apparent. In this stage, the extremists are trying to force the population to choose sides, in part by demonstrating to citizens that the government cannot keep them safe or provide basic necessities. The insurgents are trying to prove that they are the ones who should have political power; they are the ones who should rule. The goal is to incite a broader civil war, by denigrating the state and growing support for extreme measures. Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized country on the edge of anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

(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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mothers and fathers walk may walk away from each other, but a grandfather was someone you could count on.

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.

McVeigh was not “antigovernment”; he was a right-wing extremist who defined his politics in opposition to the federal government of President Bill Clinton.

Indeed, the amount of right-wing political violence—especially bombing conspiracies and mass shootings—amounts to one of the lesser told stories of the first Black president’s tenure in office. As with the Oklahoma City bombing, these acts of terror were not random lightning strikes by demented individuals; they were targeted political acts of right against left.

McVeigh failed to find his army because he had no efficient way to locate and mobilize potential allies; in other words, McVeigh didn’t have the internet, in particular social media. As it turned out, there was an army of McVeigh’s heirs out there, but it took the invention of cyberspace for the soldiers to find one another.

The insurrection on January 6, and much else in the contemporary conservative movement, show how McVeigh’s values, views, and tactics have endured and even flourished in the decades since his death. That makes the story of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing not just a glimpse of the past but also a warning about the future.

The Green Berets were everything for McVeigh; he had no plan B. As was his pattern, McVeigh would later insist that he never wanted to be in Special Forces all that much anyway—just like he dropped out of college because he knew more than his teachers. (In the same spirit, years later, he said he knew more about criminal defense than his lawyers in the bombing case.)

he would say that he was turned off by their “snob” lifestyle—the same word he used to dismiss the suburbanites who were buying houses in Lockport. It’s not clear whether he was offended, or just disparaging what he knew he could never have.

Indeed, according to one study, right-wing extremism was responsible for 76 percent of all extremist murders in the United States from 2009 to 2019. (Islamic extremists were responsible for 20 percent, and left-wing and Black nationalists 3 percent.) A comprehensive study of the years 2000 to 2018 by Rachel