Oklahomans terrified of right-wing extremists 28 years after Tim McVeigh's federal building bombing
Charlotte Cisneros came of age in Oklahoma City in the wake of the bombing that killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. So, when she turned on the new Netflix documentary about Waco last month, it hit her hard. The next day, she watched as the latest school shooting unfolded on her TV screen, this time in Nashville. Among the six dead were three 9-year-olds. Her son is 8.
Most of the friends and family I grew up with in Oklahoma didn't feel unsafe, even after the state was a target of the domestic terrorist attack that left over 500 injured. Radical right, anti-government views were not the norm in the state and, if they existed, they were discussed in hushed voices and only among racist membership groups most people wouldn’t admit to being part of.
This year is the 30th anniversary of Waco, and Oklahoma City’s bombing was 28 years ago. The Columbine shooting, which happened on April 20, was 24 years ago.
A generation of Oklahomans who grew up with those major events in their lives are now raising children faced with the reality of a new kind of domestic terrorism. It isn’t about bombs that were built in rental trucks, but legally purchased weapons of war used to mow down children, their teachers or families in mass shootings in schools, while shopping or worshipping at church or temple.
“I literally am like, how do I get my son out of his second-floor window in his classroom,” Cisneros plotted. “He’s up the stairs, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad because it’s not as easily accessed, but he can’t easily escape. Then I’m like, oh my God, I’m thinking too much.”
Joyce Taylor grew up in Oklahoma, but lived in Washington, D.C. for decades before retiring back to OKC. She was thinking about jetting back to the Capitol city for a few days next week but, when she saw that the cheapest flights were on Wednesday, April 19, she decided against it. She explained to Raw Story there's too much associated with that date. Taylor also mentioned that the Boston Marathon bombing was on April 17 and Virginia Tech shooting on April 16.
"I watched every minute when they were searching," she said of the Boston tragedy. "So you just put all of that, with some wacko, ‘I’ve got to avenge this. I’ve got to avenge that.’ So, that’s why, because, between April 15th to April 20th, that’s when all this stuff has happened.”
For those that came of age in the aftermath of those massive terrorist attacks on the United States, the current age where the threat of mass shootings is becoming a part of everyday life is terrifying.
“It’s crazy that even in a small, rural school like Lomega with an overall K-12 enrollment of less than 300 you have active shooter drills,” farmer Clay Pope told Raw Story. His two youngest children attend classes there. “I’m not more scared per se. I’m not scared to go in public. I am scared about the lone killer in schools, but not to the point of panic.”
“It’s insane that kids like me see these sorts of drills as normalcy,” cut in Pope’s 13-year-old daughter Madeleine.
“I’m a gun owner,” Pope said frankly. “I grew up around guns. I’m not a huge proponent of gun control. That said, something has to change.”
What happened in Waco, mixed in with a lot of gun shows, contributed to the radicalization of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh.
"This incident got the attention of the gun rights people, Second Amendment people. What we would now consider militia people," said Dallas Morning News reporter Lee Hancock in the recently released Netflix documentary about Waco.
Clad in a red flannel shirt and a camouflage cap, McVeigh scratched the right side of his neck while sitting on the hood of his car two years before he killed 168 people.
“Just arrived today,” he told a news crew. The press was all over the aftermath of Waco, and any people protesting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' investigation into the Branch Davidians and the subsequent 51-day siege that ended in the deaths of 82 branch members became a story. ”I guess, somebody told me a lot of people are scared to put something on, you know, like this.”
McVeigh was already upset before Waco, however. His rage had been cooking for a while.
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Speaking to PBS in 2017, Hancock explained McVeigh, “came down to Waco and sold bumper stickers with pro-gun, anti-government slogans. He saw the raid as clear evidence of what the government would do to try to confiscate guns and persecute gun owners."
Photos of McVeigh show him sitting on a car selling the stickers for $1.50 each, or all four for $5.
"Fear the government that fears your gun,” one read.
"Ban Guns: Make the street safe for a government takeover."
Another featured a swastika and a hammer and sickle demanding people "get control.”
“A man with a gun is a citizen, a man without a gun is a subject.”
"The government is afraid. Afraid of guns people have because they have to have control of the people at all times. Once you take away the guns, you can do anything to the people,” McVeigh told SMU student Michelle Rauch at Waco. She later testified at his trial in 1997.
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Less than a year after leaving the military, McVeigh had watched the 1992 11-day siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Randy Weaver had come to the attention of authorities while attending meetings at the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, which emphasized God, guns and whiteness. "The only way to save America was to assert your Christian sovereignty, your white Christian sovereignty," explained writer Leonard Zeskind, in the PBS special.
"There'll be a lot of blood running one day," Richard Butler told a group of white supremacists at the compound meeting that was recorded.
The US Marshals had turned up at Weaver's ranch with a warrant for his arrest on federal firearms charges. Shots were fired and Weaver and members of his immediate family refused to surrender. Weaver's wife and 14-year-old son were among those killed during the standoff.
Ayran Nations members and their allies had shown up in support of Weaver.
“Baby killer!” one protester shouted. A sign read "Christians against tyranny.” A banner read, “whites must arm!” Another read, “Be white, be Christian, be dead!”
"Ruby Ridge, more even than Robert Matthews and The Order, became a central calling card and rallying card for the far right,” Zeskind explained. “For them, the government was after Weaver's guns and his religion. And guns and religion became the twin pillars of the white supremacist movement."
Watching the ordeal unfold, McVeigh was filled with rage. Growing up being bullied, and now watching what he considered the U.S. Marshals bullying the white supremacists, McVeigh’s anger at the U.S. government was growing.
In an interview prior to his execution, McVeigh explained, "To me, it wasn't a start of a war, it was a counterattack. The war had already been started. You think you guys can be ruthless? Let's see how you like it when the fight is brought to you."
Reporter Ben Fenwick explained that after leaving the army and failing to find a job, McVeigh "becomes more and more strident. He began paying attention to the really far-off conspiracies, like the United Nations was going to take over the United States, and he totally bought into them.”
At the same time, Fenwick explained that McVeigh began reading “The Turner Diaries,” and attending gun shows. "The Turner Diaries," is a kind of white supremacist fantasy fiction in which the main character gathers a small group of anti-government fighters to bomb the FBI building in Washington.
At that point, the “single most important place where ideas of the radical right were spread was at gun shows,” said Mark Potok, an internationally-renowned expert on the American radical right. McVeigh was engrossing himself in the ideology.
"Gun shows were sometimes more than just gun shows. The anti-government message, which cloaked itself in the paraphernalia of patriotism, was promoted and peddled at gun shows all over,” said writer Daniel Levitas.
McVeigh became one of the people selling and trading guns at the gun shows and passing around copies of "The Turner Diaries." That’s when he began to meet more members of the Ayran Nation and other white supremacy groups.
“He became embroiled in a larger movement,” said Levitas.
Six months after Weaver’s standoff, the siege at Waco began.
The Branch Davidians, an offshoot of Seventh Day Adventist Church, were a Texas cult that was around for 50 years before David Koresh came into the group and took over, claiming to be the second coming of Christ. After a time, he began molesting some of the young girls there and made rules that married women could only have sex with him and not their husbands. The cult ended up with 25 children by him.
The 51-day standoff began with concern over the guns on the compound. As ATF special agent Bill Buford explained in the Netflix documentary, 80 percent of what the agency does is related to illegal firearms.
In this case, Hancock explained, "They were converting semi-automatic assault rifles to automatics. They were making live grenades. They were getting constant deliveries. A UPS driver saw a grenade hull fall out of a broken package.”
At one point in the Netflix special, an FBI sniper photographs what appears to be a 50-caliber weapon. It can pierce Bradly Fighting Vehicles.
So the local sheriff asked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to come in. They obtained a warrant and suited up to arrest David Koresh and take the guns.
"These guys were violating all sorts of federal gun laws,” said ATF special agent Jim Cavanaugh.
A gunfight broke out that lasted over 150 minutes, leaving four ATF agents and two Branch Davidians dead.
At one of the Waco press conferences with the FBI’s Waco spokesperson, klansman Louis Beam showed up. He was known for blowing up liberal things like a Pacifica radio station. He’d used his own hand-crafted credentials to get into the press conference, despite previously being on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list.
"And I asked them if they're going to have a police state, and, uh, they don't want to hear about police state, ATF black-booted, black-suited, black-helmeted troopers carrying guns, assaulting people,” he relayed to one individual with a hand-held camera.
"White supremacists like Beam saw in this standoff the same issues that they had decided were important with Randy Weaver [Ruby Ridge],” said Zeskind. “The Branch Davidians were not white supremacists, but now a broader group in the far right sees itself in Waco, and says, 'We're being suppressed for our beliefs and our guns.'"
"Guns are the right of Americans to have,” Koresh said into the camera for one of his propaganda videos.
While Ruby Ridge was the spark to McVeigh, the flame became Waco.
Cisneros noted the Waco documentary ended with nothing more than a blurb on McVeigh.
“What are you going to do now? That’s what it felt like to me, it was a call to take some other kind of action on either side,” she said.
There were four federal building targets for McVeigh, but he decided that the best one was Oklahoma City, because some of the ATF agents that were involved in Waco had offices based there. He chose April 19 intentionally, as a nod to those in Waco who perished in the fire on the last day of the standoff.
The Alpha P. Murrah Federal Building housed the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the offices for the U.S. Secret Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs vocation rehab counseling center, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and recurring offices for the U.S. military. There was also the ATF office.
Bob Ricks, who worked as the FBI's spokesman in Waco, was now the FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Oklahoma City office.
“Bob, you know what today is?” Ricks remembers his assistant special agent in charge asking him.
“At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said what do you mean? And he said today is April 19th, which was the last day of the standoff at Waco. Then that immediately set off an antenna that we had probably a reprisal that had taken place as a result of the Waco situation.”
Herbeck described McVeigh as someone that loved guns and was taught how to shoot and how to respect guns by his grandfather. When he joined the military, McVeigh explained in one of his audio interviews that it was just another way to hone his shooting skills with the government paying for his ammunition.
McVeigh’s obsession with guns ended up being his undoing. In 1995 in Oklahoma, having an unregistered .45-caliber Glock pistol wasn’t legal. So when Charlie Hanger, the Noble County Sheriff, pulled McVeigh over for not having a tag on his car, the Glock became the reason that the trooper could arrest McVeigh, taking him to the courthouse in Perry just 75 minutes after the bomb went off.
Two days later, when McVeigh was about to be released, the FBI tracked down McVeigh’s identity through a hotel bill and found he was arrested in Perry.
It’s no wonder that after watching the Waco documentary Cisneros is growing more nervous about April 19th. Her second-grade son comes home from school after each of the shooting drills very upset, anxious, and has a lot of questions. One, she said, was why someone would want to kill him or his friends.
When he was in the first grade, it wasn’t as scary because she said she could tell him to just jump out the window.
“I told him, jump out the window, buddy, and run as far as you can,” she said.
Now his classroom is on the second floor.
Kari Watkins, the president of the OKC Bombing Museum, explained in a podcast, “The Bureau” that the 1995 bombing took on an international tone “because this decorated American soldier had turned on his own country. And I think, when you look at that, and then you look at Jan. 6, it’s raw. It’s cumbersome to think that we could be back at that same point again.”
“I’m more scared of radical individuals,” the elder Pope explained. “People I actually know who I now look askew at because of casual statements they make about politics. The casual, ‘they should lock all the Democrats up’ type of comments that they would never have said 10-20 years ago.”
At the end of March this year, former President Donald Trump held a rally in Waco. It was the middle of the 30th anniversary of the 51-day standoff. His speech was filled with anti-government ideology and extremist dog whistles.
"They're not coming after me — they're coming after you, and I'll stand in their way because in 2024, we'll have the greatest victory of them all," Trump said.
The nearly 90-minute speech explained to the audience that the “biggest threat” to the United States wasn’t China or Russia, but the government leaders.
"In many ways, these sick people are more of a threat, because we can deal with China," Trump claimed.
"The Biden regime's weaponization of law enforcement against their political opponents is something straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show," Trump said.
"I think Alvin Bragg should be arrested and thrown in prison," CBS quoted Trump supporter Darwin Vanvaale saying.
“As an Oklahoman, I definitely feel more anxiety in 2023 than the late '90s because gun control is so pervasive now. It was unlikely that you would happen to be at a location being targeted by a domestic terrorist with a truck bomb, but with shootings in schools and malls and theaters and churches and Walmarts and workplaces, there is a constant threat,” Oklahoman Tammy Palmer told Raw Story.
She noted that while Jan. 6 was terrifying, Charlottesville was the turning point for her, seeing the far-right neo-Nazis and white supremacists out and proud.”
“It’s probably a lot harder today to organize bombing a building than to just get some guns,” Palmer said.
That fear and frustration is similar to many in Oklahoma City. Directly after the bombing, the idea of someone buying the materials to craft a bomb seemed farfetched. In 2023, guns are everywhere and are less regulated than they used to be. In fact, McVeigh would not have been arrested in 2023 driving on the highway with a gun in his jacket. All of it adds up to folks feeling panicked about the new form of domestic terrorism.
After McVeigh, and seeing so many soldiers and veterans attack the U.S. Capitol in Jan. 6, the military finally recognized it has a problem with extremism.
Military.com reported just a few weeks ago about Brandon Russell, an active duty National Guardsman who made his apartment "into something of a boot camp for the three men he ushered into the neo-Nazi organization he founded, Atomwaffen Division," the report explained.
“The men used Old Glory as a doormat. A Nazi flag hung on the wall, and Russell had a framed picture on his dresser of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who had also been a soldier before becoming a terrorist,” Military.com said. “Their white supremacist group believes violence, terrorism and murder are necessary to eliminate non-white minorities and cause society's collapse.”
"I'm more nervous about sending my baby to school every day because this country refuses to do anything about the gun and mental health problem!" Tiffany Stone said on Facebook.
“It's so sad,” Stone went on. “What do I tell my 7-year-old old when she cries because she had a nightmare, after an ‘active shooter drill’ at school, that someone came to the school and killed her friends?!... So f---ing heartbreaking that I can't say ‘don't worry, that won't happen.”
Jennifer Lindsey McClintock confessed April 19th copycats are less of a fear than the mass shooters that hate liberals.
“I am more nervous generally about people targeting our local LGBTQA community in their restaurants and social clubs, or at Pride; and certainly nervous about school shootings. Those rest in my mind more,” she said.
"I didn't think of that until now," Oklahoman Ingrid Schamel wrote via Facebook about April 19th and the link to gun culture. "Also, it's just kind of life now. We all know we could go anywhere and some domestic terrorist could shoot up or do whatever nefarious plans they have. That's the sad truth of it. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood this week, but no one is really safe anywhere anymore.”
A key piece of the aftermath of Oklahoma City was the prosecution of McVeigh by now Attorney General Merrick Garland. It continues to be the largest domestic terror attack in the United States.
“I get up on my soapbox and preach the fact that we still don't have [28 years] after Oklahoma City, we still don't have a domestic terrorism law,” Frank Figliuzzi said in an episode of his podcast "The Bureau."
“This thing we call domestic terrorism we define in federal law, but we don’t have any law against,” he explained. “We have a definition, but we don’t have a law against it. That’s why in the Jan. 6 prosecutions, we see people being charged with things like trespass, assault on an officer, theft of Nancy Pelosi’s laptop, damage to property. It’s all well and good, but none of that reflecting the gravity of the threat that day and attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power in a presidential election.”
“I don’t want to do it every day,” Cisneros said about keeping her son out of school on April 19. There are just too many things that align that day, I was just like, I can’t do it.”
Then she worried that telling people about all of her fears might prompt something to happen.
She said that her son first started school, and then COVID hit. By the time he was back in the classroom, he was faced with active-shooter drills. Now he talks about how much he doesn’t like school.
“It’s too early not to like school,” she said. “It’s fun now!”
She described the days she picks him up from an active shooter drill as “bad. It’s so sad. I’m like, what are you hiding from? He says, ‘Well, if someone breaks into the school and there are bad guys you have to hide from them.’”
She confessed that their anxieties feed each other, so she’s careful not to bring up shootings or violence and that they only talk about it when he has a question, or he’s upset. Luckily, it’s only once every five or six months, with fire drills in between.
“I haven’t told him I’m keeping him home on the 19th. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him that day,” she said.