Behind the Bastards - Part Six: The Perfect Soldier
Aired: 2019-08-22
Duration: 48:22


=== The Reporter's Story (15:14) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[00:00:41]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:00:44]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:00:47]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:00:48]  That's so funny.
[00:00:50]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:00:58]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:06]  What's up, everyone?
[00:01:07]  I'm Ago Modern, my next guest.
[00:01:09]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:01:12]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:01:15]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:01:16]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:01:23]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:01:26]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[00:01:33]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:01:35]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:01:36]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:38]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:45]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:01:52]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:01:56]  I doctored the test once.
[00:01:58]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:02:02]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:02:05]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:02:07]  My mind was blown.
[00:02:08]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:02:10]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:02:11]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:02:13]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:02:17]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:27]  What's being insulted by Sophie?
[00:02:30]  My me.
[00:02:31]  I'm Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards.
[00:02:34]  Sophie is angry at me because I fucked up and tried to start the episode before we were ready.
[00:02:39]  We don't know what's up or down.
[00:02:40]  We don't know what's up or down.
[00:02:42]  I can't stop thinking about this Perrier case that I'm going to throw.
[00:02:44]  None of us can.
[00:02:47]  I forget about it.
[00:02:48]  Cody's not sweating it.
[00:02:49]  It's like the sword of Damocles, but instead of being a sword held up by a single string or whatever the hell the sword of Damocles was, it's a case of Perrier that I'm just going to throw for no good reason.
[00:03:01]  That's true.
[00:03:02]  The only reason is that he's been saying that.
[00:03:03]  That's the best way to phrase it.
[00:03:04]  His reason is that he's been saying it.
[00:03:06]  So he hasn't.
[00:03:07]  But that's not a good reason.
[00:03:08]  No, it's not.
[00:03:09]  And it's a problem that I have.
[00:03:12]  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.
[00:03:18]  Bad advice.
[00:03:19]  There are other ways.
[00:03:20]  Nope.
[00:03:21]  I would look that up or talk to a professional before you decide to throw that Perry A.
[00:03:26]  I think I have to.
[00:03:27]  There's going to be a hotline in the notes of this episode.
[00:03:29]  When it comes to throwing things in this room, there's no professional more experienced than me.
[00:03:33]  That is true.
[00:03:33]  That is true.
[00:03:34]  Wow.
[00:03:35]  Yeah, I accept that.
[00:03:37]  I love professionals.
[00:03:38]  I've been convinced.
[00:03:39]  You should throw it.
[00:03:41]  First, let's start chapter six, The Perfect Soldier.
[00:03:46]  The 1988 seditious conspiracy trial held important lessons for the chief minds behind the white supremacist movement.
[00:03:51]  When they leaned into their patriotism, their love of an America that was white and Christian, but America nonetheless, they could draw significant sympathy from their fellow white men and women.
[00:04:00]  Swastikas and clan robes were much less useful than tearful stories of hippie protesters spitting on flags.
[00:04:06]  The 1990s saw continuous growth of both the survivalist and the American militia movement.
[00:04:11]  Neither of these things was inherently white supremacist, but Beam and his colleagues had been remarkably successful at seeding their propaganda into gun shows and conventions.
[00:04:18]  As a result, the early 90s brought them a whole crop of fellow travelers, men and women who did not identify as Nazis and had never held Klan membership, but who were also quite capable of reading the Turner Diaries and identifying with its message.
[00:04:30]  Randy Weaver is a perfect example of this new sort of recruit.
[00:04:34]  He was a former Green Beret, a patriot who loved his country and working with his hands.
[00:04:38]  He and his wife Vicky were Christian conservatives.
[00:04:40]  They fell in love with the first generation of evangelical TV preachers, men like Jerry Falwell.
[00:04:46]  They also read a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Howl Lindsay, which focused around using the Bible to predict the near future.
[00:04:53]  Lindsay's book convinced Randy and Vicky that Gog, an anti-Christian empire from the book of Ezekiel, was the Soviet Union.
[00:04:59]  You say Gog?
[00:05:00]  Gog.
[00:05:01]  I did say Gog.
[00:05:02]  Yeah.
[00:05:03]  They became more and more drawn into conspiracy theories and convinced themselves that a great and fiery apocalypse was imminent.
[00:05:09]  In a quote next from American Experience by PBS.
[00:05:12]  Concerned citizens, they set out to spread the word.
[00:05:15]  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.
[00:05:22]  This sparked the attention of a local reporter who came to do a story on them.
[00:05:25]  The Weavers, Walter learned, did not appreciate the results.
[00:05:28]  They felt betrayed, but they had never been more sure in their beliefs.
[00:05:31]  A great conflagration was coming, and they felt increasingly unsafe in Iowa.
[00:05:34]  Vicki started having visions in the bathtub.
[00:05:36]  God was speaking to her, and God was telling her to go west to find for her family a mountaintop.
[00:05:41]  They would be safe there.
[00:05:43]  Okay.
[00:05:44]  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.
[00:05:52]  Randy Weaver began to visit the compound, attending several events and making a few friends among the neo-Nazis.
[00:05:57]  The exact nature of what he believed, precisely, is unclear and heavily debated.
[00:06:02]  It seems that he identified with some aspects of Christian identity theology, and 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.
[00:06:15]  He hung around Aryan nations because he lived in the middle of nowhere.
[00:06:19]  They were the only people to hang with, and he just didn't care about their racism.
[00:06:23]  Okay.
[00:06:23]  Yeah.
[00:06:24]  He was not the kind of man who'd have joined a group like the Order, but he would come to play an important role in the next step of the white supremacist movement.
[00:06:32]  Don't hang out with Nazis.
[00:06:33]  Don't hang out with Nazis.
[00:06:34]  That's the thing.
[00:06:34]  That's the thing.
[00:06:35]  Like, you're like, you're like, okay, well, I know he's evil, but he's kind of cool in this aspect.
[00:06:40]  I'll be buds with this person.
[00:06:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:44]  That's how you help yourself.
[00:06:45]  That's how Nazis helps.
[00:06:46]  That's how you help your Nazi friends.
[00:06:48]  Yep.
[00:06:49]  Now, the FBI wound up wiretapping several of the fascists that Roundy Weaver befriended.
[00:06:53]  It was quite immediately obvious to them that Mr. Weaver had no plans to overthrow the government, spark a race war, or do anything more subversive than live off the land with his family and picnic with Nazis from time to time.
[00:07:03]  In fact, when other people in these wiretap conversations would suggest committing crimes, Randy would usually say something like, we don't really go in for that stuff.
[00:07:12]  Yeah.
[00:07:12]  Yeah.
[00:07:13]  It's a better response for lynchings than sure.
[00:07:17]  But it's not a great response.
[00:07:19]  Well, the feds knew Randy wasn't really dangerous.
[00:07:22]  They saw him as the perfect guy to approach as an informant.
[00:07:24]  He wasn't a true believer, and he was very poor.
[00:07:27]  If they could entrap him into committing a crime, they could scare him with prison time until he agreed to wear a wire and help them catch some of the big fish in the Aryan nations community.
[00:07:37]  Offer him money.
[00:07:39]  Yeah, just offer him.
[00:07:40]  Start like that.
[00:07:42]  That's the thing he said, like he's not a true believer, and he's poor.
[00:07:45]  Yeah.
[00:07:45]  Okay, so like, offer him money to help you out.
[00:07:47]  I know that's not what I do, and it just sucks.
[00:07:51]  An undercover agent approached Randy and offered him good money to illegally saw off a couple of shotguns.
[00:07:57]  Now, Randy was not a believer in the legitimacy of American gun control regulations, and he needed the cash, so he happily acquiesced and was subsequently busted for it.
[00:08:05]  The feds made their offer, and Randy refused them.
[00:08:07]  He was arrested on federal firearms charges and taken to jail.
[00:08:10]  Randy made bail, though, and he fled back to Ruby Ridge and holed up with his family and a whole bunch of guns in the hope that the federales would not follow.
[00:08:18]  They did.
[00:08:19]  But the attempted arrest did not go well.
[00:08:21]  A U.S. Marshal was shot dead by the Weaver Klan, and the authorities responded with a blizzard of indiscriminate gunfire, which killed Randy's 14-year-old son, the family dog, and his unarmed wife, Vicki.
[00:08:31]  They were trapped in the cabin with her corpse for like days.
[00:08:34]  It was horrible.
[00:08:35]  Well, this is awful.
[00:08:36]  Yeah, it's a terrible story.
[00:08:37]  A standoff ensued.
[00:08:38]  The law came in with helicopters, armored vehicles, and the kind of militarized police that look familiar to us now, but were new and terrifying back in 1992.
[00:08:47]  The media descended on Ruby Ridge, too, and the assault on the Weaver families was spread virally throughout the far right.
[00:08:53]  The Weavers were the perfect poster family to illustrate government overreach.
[00:08:56]  Footage of black helicopters hovering over Ruby Ridge and saint-like pictures of Vicki Weaver were almost tailor-made to sell the idea that the New World Order was coming for decent white Christian gun-owning Americans.
[00:09:08]  Well, yeah, handed that one out on the platter.
[00:09:10]  Yep.
[00:09:11]  Louis Beam and his fellow fascists knew a great opportunity when one came a knocking.
[00:09:15]  Later in 1992, while Ruby Ridge was still in 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.
[00:09:26]  The summit was convened by Pete Peters, a Christian identity preacher from Colorado and the head of a sizable Christian identity church, the Laporte Church of Christ.
[00:09:34]  Here's how Leonard Zeskin summarizes the proceedings in Blood and Politics.
[00:09:37]  For two and a half days, they met in committee, deliberated in plenary sessions, and engaged in the kind of one-on-one conversations known in the parlance of business professionals as networking.
[00:09:45]  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.
[00:09:53]  An YMCA facility abutting the park.
[00:09:56]  No guns were waived, and even the most heated rhetoric seemed to have the blood drained out of it.
[00:10:00]  Estes Park signified a radical shift in the tactics of the white power movement.
[00:10:04]  Like the 1983 Aryan Nations Congress, we mostly know it was discussed at Estes Park because of the things that happened after it.
[00:10:11]  The Nazis started reaching out to more moderate Americans.
[00:10:15]  Louis Beam published an article in his new magazine, ironically named the Seditionist, because he'd been declared innocent of sedition.
[00:10:22]  He called for leaderless resistance in the wake of Ruby Ridge.
[00:10:25]  Big Star One, a militia with members in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, carried out grenade launcher and mortar training exercises in rural Texas.
[00:10:32]  The Montana militia published a guidebook on how to engage in domestic terrorism.
[00:10:36]  In 1993, law enforcement across the nation found 13 explosives caches meant to be used in attacks as varied as a National Afro-American Museum in Ohio and a black church in Los Angeles.
[00:10:46]  None of this made the news in a big way because of something that happened in mid-1993.
[00:10:50]  The siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
[00:10:54]  The Branch Davidians were not a Christian identity sect, and their leader David Koresh was not affiliated with the white supremacist movement, but the ATF siege of their compound so soon after Ruby Ridge was easy for Louis Beam and his comrades to propagandize around.
[00:11:06]  Now, this is not an audiobook about the Waco disaster, and I won't even try to cover what happened there in detail.
[00:11:12]  What's important for our purposes is the end result.
[00:11:14]  On February 28th, 1993, ATF agents attempted to serve a search warrant about sexual abuse and illegal weapons charges.
[00:11:22]  People inside the compound opened fire.
[00:11:23]  Four agents and five Branch Davidians were killed, and the situation devolved into a bloody siege.
[00:11:28]  On April 19th, the FBI, who'd taken control of the situation, launched an assault on the compound.
[00:11:33]  In the ensuing melee, several fires broke out and quickly swept through the structures.
[00:11:37]  By the time the smoke had cleared and it was all over, 53 adults and 23 children were dead.
[00:11:42]  I know that many.
[00:11:43]  Yeah, it was a fuckload of people.
[00:11:46]  Yeah.
[00:11:47]  The whole tragedy was inarguably a cluster fuck on behalf of the federal government, which of course helped groups like the fascist movie people.
[00:11:55]  Yeah, so they started after Essie's Park, like reaching out to militias and stuff, and again, trying to like propagandizing directly to militias, being like, instead of just sending out like Nazi propaganda to guys who aren't going to bite in Nazis, what if we focus on like pictures of this dead woman like dead white women killed by the government and try to scare him that way?
[00:12:13]  And then, you know, if they're interested in that, maybe they'll gradually start reading some of our other projects.
[00:12:17]  Just like any kind of terrorist propaganda.
[00:12:21]  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 14-year-old girl who died in the Waco siege.
[00:12:31]  The girl was, of course, white, and her photo was captioned, Why We Fight.
[00:12:36]  There were dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of other similar pieces of propaganda.
[00:12:40]  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.
[00:12:50]  British journalist John Ronson was one of the few reporters who spent a great deal of time embedded with the fringe right during this period.
[00:12:56]  He actually visited the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound several years after the siege with Randy Weaver in Toll.
[00:13:02]  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.
[00:13:09]  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.
[00:13:14]  What happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco will never happen again under any circumstances.
[00:13:18]  If it does, there will be immediate retaliation, armed resistance from the Michigan militia.
[00:13:24]  Now, the Michigan militia in this time had about 12,000 members, which was a significant surge for it in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco.
[00:13:32]  One of those members was a young Desert Storm veteran named Tim McVeigh.
[00:13:38]  Here we go.
[00:13:39]  Timothy McVeigh was born.
[00:13:41]  Oh, wait, it's time for an ad plug, isn't it, Sophie?
[00:13:45]  Timothy McVeigh.
[00:13:46]  You know what I think about when I think about Tim McVeigh?
[00:13:49]  You really are great at this.
[00:13:50]  Thank you.
[00:13:53]  You know, there's nothing that goes with Tim McVeigh like, well, fertilizer bomb.
[00:13:59]  But other than a fertilizer bomb, no, Sophie, you're saying that's not a good ad plug.
[00:14:04]  There are a lot of things better than Timothy McVeigh, and those things are these.
[00:14:10]  Cody's great at it.
[00:14:11]  You know what does less damage than Tim McVeigh?
[00:14:14]  The products and services advertised on this show.
[00:14:18]  You got to pick one of these, Sophie.
[00:14:20]  That one's great.
[00:14:20]  All of them.
[00:14:21]  All right, perfect.
[00:14:22]  Let's roll to dick pills.
[00:14:29]  10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
[00:14:32]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:14:36]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
[00:14:42]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:14:44]  Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey.
[00:14:45]  What did it?
[00:14:46]  July 2003.
[00:14:48]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:14:53]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:14:56]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:15:05]  Everybody in the chamber ducks.
[00:15:07]  A shocking public murder.
[00:15:09]  They scream, get down, get down.
[00:15:11]  Those are shots.
[00:15:11]  Those are shots.
[00:15:12]  Get down.
[00:15:13]  A charismatic politician.

=== Guns and Radicalization (13:55) ===

[00:15:14]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:15:17]  I still have a weapon.
[00:15:19]  And I could shoot you.
[00:15:22]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:15:24]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:15:27]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:15:28]  That may have been about sex.
[00:15:30]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:15:43]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:15:47]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:15:51]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:15:53]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:15:57]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:16:01]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:16:05]  Oh my god, this is the same man.
[00:16:07]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:16:11]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:16:13]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:16:15]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:16:17]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:16:20]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:16:22]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:16:24]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:16:29]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:16:30]  Trust me, babe.
[00:16:31]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:16:41]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:16:47]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:16:51]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:16:57]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:17:07]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:17:12]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:17:15]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:17:18]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:17:20]  That's so funny.
[00:17:21]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:17:30]  Say you love me.
[00:17:32]  You know I.
[00:17:34]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:17:42]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:17:47]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:17:54]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:18:01]  From power to parenthood.
[00:18:03]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:18:06]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:18:08]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:18:10]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:18:15]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:18:22]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:18:24]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:18:30]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:18:32]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:18:35]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:18:46]  We're back!
[00:18:48]  We're back.
[00:18:48]  We're talking about how good I am at making ad plugs.
[00:18:51]  Still talking about that.
[00:18:52]  Yep.
[00:18:52]  Still talking about this good.
[00:18:54]  I can't stop talking about it.
[00:18:55]  You know, I can't stop talking about this case of Perrier.
[00:18:59]  Yeah.
[00:19:00]  Yep.
[00:19:01]  Just listen to that.
[00:19:03]  It has to be thrown.
[00:19:05]  I don't know.
[00:19:06]  There's only 10.
[00:19:06]  There aren't 12.
[00:19:08]  Yeah, there are 12, so it's safe.
[00:19:11]  It's the industry.
[00:19:14]  No, I have to.
[00:19:16]  I have to.
[00:19:17]  Well, Timothy McVay.
[00:19:20]  So, he was born on April 23rd, 1968.
[00:19:24]  McVay grew up in Pendleton, New York, and had an early childhood that was pretty standard for the 70s and 80s.
[00:19:29]  He watched Gumby and Truther Consequences.
[00:19:31]  He played Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers with other kids in the neighborhood.
[00:19:35]  Tim preferred playing the good guys as he saw them, cops or cowboys, wherever possible.
[00:19:40]  He was sickly and somewhat prone to accidents, hurting himself in all sorts of ways young boys who spend a lot of time in the woods tend to do.
[00:19:46]  Tim was an energetic boy, and he might have been someone who'd have wound up on Riddle and had he been born a decade or two later.
[00:19:52]  He was constantly in trouble for minor things, but he also had a good heart, as this story from American Terrorist, the fantastic biography of McVeigh, makes clear.
[00:20:00]  Tim was playing near the pond when he noticed one of the older neighborhood boys carrying a burlap sack.
[00:20:05]  The sack was weighted down with rocks, but the curious Tim could see there was something else wriggling in the sack.
[00:20:09]  He watched as the older boy pitched the sack out into the pond, where it quickly sank to the bottom.
[00:20:14]  What was that? Tim asked, running to the far shore of the pond where the neighborhood boy stood.
[00:20:17]  Those are kittens my dad had, the boy answered in a matter-of-fact tone.
[00:20:21]  We had to get rid of them.
[00:20:22]  For Tim, who loved animals and especially kittens, the realization of what he had witnessed hit him hard.
[00:20:26]  He cried about the incident for days.
[00:20:29]  So part of what we're trying to ask here is, you know, we talked about Robert Matthews a little bit earlier.
[00:20:33]  We talked about Louis Beam.
[00:20:34]  These are guys who were pretty brutal early on.
[00:20:36]  Matthews was a jobber of society from age 11.
[00:20:40]  Louis Beam, like, immediately wanted to fight and go to war and kill.
[00:20:44]  Tim McVeigh is a sensitive kid who's heartbroken when he sees someone being cruel to animals.
[00:20:48]  Yeah, it's confusing.
[00:20:49]  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 who might have been speared by that.
[00:21:01]  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.
[00:21:12]  This is a guy who would only have been caught by the changes made to the movement's propaganda outreach after Estes Park, I think.
[00:21:18]  That's the story we're talking about today.
[00:21:20]  Well, good.
[00:21:20]  That's an interesting story.
[00:21:22]  So Tim fell in love with guns at an early age.
[00:21:24]  His grandfather first took him shooting when he was seven.
[00:21:26]  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.
[00:21:36]  So it's pretty normal in that era.
[00:21:38]  And Tim's grandpa, everyone said, Ed McVeigh, was a stickler about firearm safety and considered safe gun ownership to be an integral part of American citizenship.
[00:21:46]  So he likes guns, but he doesn't like killing things.
[00:21:48]  He's like a target shooter and stuff.
[00:21:51]  Being small and sort of weird, Tim McVeigh was a bit of a magnet for bullies.
[00:21:54]  He developed a deep hatred of bullying and a reflexive rage at the sight of anything he saw as bully behavior, whether it came from an individual or an institution.
[00:22:02]  Tim's parents divorced when they were young.
[00:22:04]  His sisters chose to go with their mother, but Tim stayed with his father so that he would not have to be alone.
[00:22:09]  Again, sensitive kid.
[00:22:11]  After the Oklahoma City bombing, a number of pundits would try to tie Tim's parents' divorce to his evolution as a terrorist.
[00:22:17]  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 past 30 years, because of the women's movement, they've taken an influence out of the household.
[00:22:29]  Yeah, I mean, I could see that as being a formative spot for why you don't like women.
[00:22:33]  Yeah.
[00:22:34]  Which, yeah, maybe makes him a little bit more sympathetic to the kind of propaganda put out by these groups.
[00:22:39]  You see women as a...
[00:22:40]  If you start to think of the government as a bully.
[00:22:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:43]  When one reads about McVeigh, they get the feeling that had he been born later, he might have found a home within the alt-right.
[00:22:48]  For one thing, he was obsessed with the Star Wars movies and identified heavily with Luke Skywalker.
[00:22:54]  As the 80s rolled along.
[00:22:56]  Yeah, special boy.
[00:22:57]  Special boy blowing up the big evil thing.
[00:22:59]  Yeah, special dragon boy.
[00:23:01]  Yeah.
[00:23:04]  As the 80s rolled along and home computers started to become more common, McVeigh became one of the first generation of computer nerds.
[00:23:10]  He was on the internet before basically anyone else.
[00:23:13]  His handle on those early message boards was the wanderer.
[00:23:17]  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 was most involved in nascent internet culture.
[00:23:27]  It's entirely possible he came across some of Louis Beam's writings during this time.
[00:23:31]  We know for a fact that he fell in love with a book we've already talked about a lot in this series.
[00:23:35]  You want to guess what it is?
[00:23:36]  The Turner Diary.
[00:23:37]  Oh, it's Leigh Mizerob.
[00:23:39]  Oh, I love laymen.
[00:23:40]  Oh, it's beautiful, beautiful book.
[00:23:42]  But that was a lie.
[00:23:43]  He fell in love with the Turner Diaries.
[00:23:44]  You were right, Katie.
[00:23:46]  Yeah.
[00:23:46]  He first heard about the Turner Diaries from an ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine.
[00:23:50]  He ordered the book by mail and fell madly in love with it.
[00:23:53]  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.
[00:24:00]  And it's kind of possible he was telling the truth.
[00:24:02]  Again, like Randy Weaver, Tim McVeigh is definitely a racist, but that's not his motivation.
[00:24:06]  Right, you get pieces of it.
[00:24:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:09]  I really think he's probably telling the truth when he was mostly just into it because it had a lot of violent scenes and it was about like a gun control revolution.
[00:24:17]  Like the racism he could take or leave.
[00:24:19]  That's not a great sign.
[00:24:20]  That's not a great sign.
[00:24:21]  No, no, again, he has to be racist for this, but he wasn't racist enough that he wouldn't have joined the order.
[00:24:27]  Just because of that.
[00:24:28]  Exactly.
[00:24:29]  He wasn't a believer.
[00:24:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:31]  Post-Estes Park, the Turner Diaries remained one of the linchpins of white supremacist recruitment in the U.S. Ads for it in magazines like Soldier of Fortune often posed the question, what will you do if the government comes for your guns?
[00:24:43]  None of this is to say that McVeigh wasn't racist.
[00:24:45]  He grew up in a place where everyone was white.
[00:24:46]  At age 19, he got a job as a guard on an armored car.
[00:24:49]  He later recalled his colleagues expressing casual racism towards black residents on the east side of Buffalo, and eventually he adopted those beliefs and their propensity for using racial slurs.
[00:24:58]  Racism was a fact of Tim's life, but again, it wasn't like the main thing for him.
[00:25:03]  What was his main thing were guns.
[00:25:06]  During his time as a security guard, McVeigh spent most of his recreational time shooting.
[00:25:09]  He eventually got in trouble with his neighbors for doing so, and this seems to have influenced his desire to join the army.
[00:25:15]  He basically just like was an excellent recruit, and by all accounts, a very good soldier.
[00:25:22]  He fell in love with most aspects of army life, although he disliked the emphasis training placed on killing.
[00:25:27]  In a later interview, he recalled, 20 times a day it would be, blood makes the grass grow.
[00:25:31]  Kill, kill, kill.
[00:25:32]  You would be screaming that until your throat was raw.
[00:25:34]  If somebody put a video camera on that, they would think it was a bunch of sickos.
[00:25:39]  You're right.
[00:25:40]  Weird thing to say after blowing up a federal building filled with babies.
[00:25:43]  A bunch of sickos.
[00:25:44]  But a valid point.
[00:25:46]  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.
[00:25:54]  He handed out copies of the Turner Diaries to his closest comrades.
[00:25:58]  He was warned several times by friends who read the book that people would think he was fucking racist if he kept pissing this stuff around.
[00:26:04]  Good for them.
[00:26:05]  Maybe report him.
[00:26:07]  Decent friends, not great.
[00:26:09]  Not great.
[00:26:11]  The Gulf War would give Tim McVeigh his first chance to actually use guns against other human beings.
[00:26:16]  And interestingly enough, he seems to have hated it.
[00:26:19]  He was not on board with the war from the beginning.
[00:26:21]  McVeigh felt the U.S. military should only get involved in conflicts that directly affected the lives of American citizens.
[00:26:26]  He saw the U.S. intervention against Iraq as bullying, and Tim McVeigh hated bullies.
[00:26:31]  When he shipped over to Iraq, McVeigh was the gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle.
[00:26:35]  During a battle in country, he killed two Iraqi soldiers with the Bradley's very large gun and watched in horror as their bodies disappeared into a red mist.
[00:26:43]  The incident scarred him.
[00:26:44]  Unlike Louis Beam, McVeigh did not enjoy killing.
[00:26:48]  The whole war left a bad taste in Tim's mouth.
[00:26:50]  He was particularly furious when he read about the U.S. Air Force bombing of the Al Amira bomb shelter in Baghdad, which killed 300 women and children.
[00:26:57]  McVeigh returned to America much less enchanted with military life.
[00:27:01]  He focused some of that frustration on the black soldiers he served alongside.
[00:27:04]  Several of them walked around the base in black power shirts, which infuriated Tim.
[00:27:08]  He was heard several times using the N-word and had a reputation for ordering some of his black subordinates to sweep up the motor pool.
[00:27:14]  When pressed about this later, McVeigh would point out that some of his closest comrades in the military were black.
[00:27:19]  I'm going to quote again from American terrorist.
[00:27:22]  While he swore he never embraced racism, McVeigh actively explored the racist point of view.
[00:27:26]  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.
[00:27:33]  McVeigh claimed he had virtually no idea what the KKK was all about the first time he received literature from the racist group.
[00:27:39]  He was impressed by one of its pamphlets, which expressed concerns about the loss of individual rights in American society and the desire to go back to the way things were in the days of the founding fathers.
[00:27:48]  Again, that's that Estes Park stuff.
[00:27:50]  McVeigh spent $20 for the trial membership to KKK headquarters in North Carolina.
[00:27:54]  One of the enticements for joining was a white power t-shirt that McVeigh planned to wear around Fort Riley.
[00:27:59]  Why would a non-racist win a white power t-shirt?
[00:28:01]  McVay maintained it was intended to protest what he saw as the growing double standard in the Army.
[00:28:06]  He said that he never did wear the shirt, but he made no apologies for buying it then or now.
[00:28:10]  I wanted to make a point, he said.
[00:28:11]  Black guys were wearing black power t-shirts on the base.
[00:28:14]  They weren't supposed to.
[00:28:15]  I wanted to see what would happen if I wore the white power t-shirt.
[00:28:18]  McVeigh didn't renew his KKK membership when his first year was up.
[00:28:21]  He had joined the KKK, he said, because he thought the Klan was fighting for the restoration of individual rights, especially gun rights.
[00:28:27]  But the more research and reading he did, the more he realized the Klan was almost entirely devoted to the cause of racism.
[00:28:32]  Really?
[00:28:33]  Yeah.
[00:28:33]  Really, Tim?
[00:28:35]  I'm glad you did some research on that.
[00:28:37]  Well, he decided the KKK was manipulative to young people, and he didn't renew his membership.
[00:28:41]  Yeah.
[00:28:41]  Doesn't like bullies.
[00:28:42]  He didn't like bullies.
[00:28:45]  Values.
[00:28:46]  Yeah, values.
[00:28:47]  And you know, values are important.
[00:28:49]  And I personally love the values of the products and services that support this show.
[00:28:55]  That's so good.
[00:29:02]  10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
[00:29:05]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.

=== Shots Fired in City Hall (04:21) ===

[00:29:09]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
[00:29:13]  This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:29:16]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:29:17]  Somebody tell me that!
[00:29:18]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:29:20]  July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:29:26]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:29:29]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:29:38]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:29:41]  A shocking public murder.
[00:29:42]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:29:44]  Those are shots.
[00:29:45]  Those are shots.
[00:29:46]  Get down.
[00:29:46]  A charismatic politician.
[00:29:48]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:29:50]  I still have a weapon.
[00:29:52]  And I could shoot you.
[00:29:55]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:29:57]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:30:00]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:30:02]  That may have been about sex.
[00:30:04]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:30:17]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:30:21]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:30:24]  If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:30:27]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:30:30]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:30:34]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:30:38]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:30:40]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:30:45]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:30:47]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:30:48]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:30:51]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:30:53]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:30:55]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:30:58]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:31:02]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:31:04]  Trust me, babe.
[00:31:05]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:31:15]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:31:20]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:31:27]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:31:34]  From power to parenthood.
[00:31:36]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:31:39]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:31:41]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:31:44]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:31:48]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:31:55]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:31:57]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:32:04]  Find out a Mostly Human.
[00:32:05]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:32:08]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:32:17]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:32:22]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:32:27]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:32:33]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:32:42]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:32:47]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:32:50]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:32:53]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:32:55]  That's so funny.
[00:32:57]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:33:05]  Say you love me.
[00:33:08]  You know I.
[00:33:10]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:33:19]  We're back.
[00:33:20]  We're back.
[00:33:21]  And I just admitted that I would be willing to have sex with Corey Booker.
[00:33:25]  If Corey wanted.
[00:33:26]  If Corey wanted.
[00:33:27]  If Corey wanted, right?
[00:33:27]  If Corey wanted.
[00:33:28]  How we got to this conversation, we're not going to talk about.

=== McVeigh's Influences (10:10) ===

[00:33:31]  It's very inappropriate.
[00:33:32]  Does not lend anything to the episode.
[00:33:34]  Shouldn't have admitted it.
[00:33:36]  Not related to the product.
[00:33:38]  He has good bone structure, though.
[00:33:39]  I think he's cute.
[00:33:40]  And forget we said anything about it, guys.
[00:33:43]  Sophie does not think he's cute.
[00:33:44]  I don't.
[00:33:45]  Everyone has different opinions about who they find cute.
[00:33:47]  Yeah, it's not him.
[00:33:48]  We can all agree, though, Bernie's the cutest.
[00:33:52]  Bernie's cute.
[00:33:53]  Talking about bone structure.
[00:33:54]  That guy's got bones.
[00:33:56]  He's kidding a rug.
[00:33:57]  He's really cute.
[00:33:58]  He's cutie.
[00:33:59]  Yeah.
[00:33:59]  He's cutie-patooty.
[00:34:00]  He's cutting a sweetie.
[00:34:01]  Young Bernie is weird, but, you know, cute.
[00:34:04]  He got better looking as he got older.
[00:34:06]  Yeah.
[00:34:07]  Young Bernie.
[00:34:08]  His wife must really have been into radical politics.
[00:34:15]  Anyway.
[00:34:17]  Boy.
[00:34:19]  This is about your...
[00:34:20]  This is.
[00:34:22]  We're finishing this chapter.
[00:34:24]  We should finish this chapter.
[00:34:25]  Right.
[00:34:27]  So, Tim McVay, like Randy Weaver, was a perfect example of the sort of man Louis Beam was hoping to reach.
[00:34:32]  Not motivated enough by racism to have sought out the movement, but comfortable enough with racism and frustrated enough by mainstream American culture to be radicalized by the anti-gun control New World Order conspiracies peddled by the propagandists of the white power movement.
[00:34:44]  McVeigh opted not to re-enlist after his time of service ran out.
[00:34:47]  And outside of the military, McVay's life was just one frustration after another.
[00:34:51]  Despite his glowing service record, he had trouble finding work.
[00:34:54]  Civil service jobs he applied for in the state and federal government turned him down.
[00:34:57]  He convinced himself that this was because he was a young white man and thus the victim of what he termed reverse discrimination.
[00:35:04]  That's probably a better way to say a more alliterative way to say that.
[00:35:09]  Yeah, reverse racism movie.
[00:35:11]  Yeah.
[00:35:12]  Affirmative action became the focus of McVay's thwarted ambitions.
[00:35:15]  He started spending more and more time around gun shows and flirted vaguely with some militias, including the Michigan militia.
[00:35:21]  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.
[00:35:28]  The conspiracists McVeigh embraced were not quite open neo-Nazi anti-Semites, but they were kissing cousins to that kind of belief.
[00:35:35]  From American Terrorist, quote, The brother and sister's discussion sprawled in myriad directions, from the Bible to the pyramid and its crowning all-seeing eye on the back of the dollar bill.
[00:35:43]  McVeigh was reading more anti-government books and pamphlets, and he shared them with his inquisitive younger sister.
[00:35:48]  He wanted to expand her perspective, though some of the claims in the literature seemed bizarre and inconceivable to Jennifer, including one writer's contention that the government was building massive crematoriums and 130 concentration camps to exterminate individuals who disagreed with federal policies.
[00:36:02]  The authors of the pamphlets, anticipating skepticism, warned that Americans risked becoming victims of it can't happen here syndrome when it came to government usurping power from the people.
[00:36:10]  Jennifer wasn't sold on everything she read, but just as McVeigh hoped, the literature got her thinking about the government and individual rights.
[00:36:16]  She looked up to her older brother, flattered that he thought enough of her to engage her in political discourse.
[00:36:20]  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.
[00:36:27]  In the summer of 1992, he pointed to events in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, as proof positive that his theory was correct.
[00:36:33]  Now, one of the publications that McVeigh read during this period was called The White Patriot.
[00:36:38]  It was published by the former KKK leader, the attempted invader of the island of Dominica, and the founder of Stormfront, Don Black.
[00:36:45]  Oh, yes, that boy's back.
[00:36:46]  That boy's back.
[00:36:47]  Black's back.
[00:36:49]  It featured articles with titles like, Why is the Klan Opposed to Jews? and also hosted essays from William Pierce.
[00:36:56]  As McVeigh's life prospects dimmed, he grew more obsessed with guns and gun shows, traveling around the country, selling weapons and literature and survivalist gear.
[00:37:04]  The gun show circuit introduced him to more French right-wing literature.
[00:37:07]  McVeigh began to express frustration that American women were unfairly withholding sex from American men.
[00:37:12]  He called them prudish and stingy.
[00:37:15]  Yeah.
[00:37:15]  Let's take those words back.
[00:37:16]  Let's reclaim them.
[00:37:17]  Yeah.
[00:37:18]  It's weird that he keeps being the same story over and over again.
[00:37:20]  It sure is.
[00:37:21]  Yeah.
[00:37:22]  When the Waco siege began, McVeigh was instantly obsessed with the story.
[00:37:25]  He drove to Mount Carmel and sold t-shirts outside the siege lines, communing with his fellow survivalist militiamen as they worriedly waited for the outcome.
[00:37:32]  And when that outcome came, it radicalized Tim McVeigh as nothing else could have.
[00:37:36]  He read that the government had used CS gas, which McVeigh had been exposed to during his military training.
[00:37:41]  To McVeigh, this was the ultimate representation of government overreach.
[00:37:45]  Pure, vicious, murderous, bully behavior.
[00:37:48]  McVeigh didn't stop at being furious about the murder of dozens of innocent people.
[00:37:52]  He became convinced that Waco was the prelude to a mass government crackdown on gun owners and freedom.
[00:37:57]  He told one friend that he suspected the feds had purposely started fires in the compound.
[00:38:01]  The government wanted it to burn because the government couldn't win.
[00:38:03]  The public sentiment was changing, he said.
[00:38:06]  McVeigh's rage was reciprocated by the other men he met on the gun show circuit.
[00:38:10]  Men like Terry Nichols, a sovereign citizen whose beliefs were essentially descended from the posse comatatis movement.
[00:38:15]  McVeigh spent time living on Nichols' farm and crafting explosives, small homemade bombs, initially just for amusement.
[00:38:21]  But over the months that followed Waco, McVeigh's rage, the paranoia stoked by fears of fringe right-wing conspiracy theories, and his love of the Turner diaries, metastasized into a plan, a plan to bomb the Murray Building in Oklahoma City.
[00:38:34]  Man.
[00:38:35]  Yep.
[00:38:36]  It's really sad, too.
[00:38:37]  Yeah.
[00:38:38]  Don't do it.
[00:38:38]  Yeah.
[00:38:39]  Don't do it, Tim.
[00:38:40]  I got some bad news, Cody.
[00:38:43]  He do it.
[00:38:44]  He done did it.
[00:38:45]  He done did it.
[00:38:46]  The structure of McVeigh's attack was directly inspired by a passage from the Turner Diaries.
[00:38:50]  At one point, Earl Turner's cell bombs the FBI's headquarters.
[00:38:53]  Pierce goes into exhaustive detail about the device they use, a truck bomb made with 4,400 pounds of ammonium nitrate, essentially the same weapon McVeigh constructed and used to destroy the Murray building.
[00:39:03]  On the day he detonated his bomb, killing 168 people, McVeigh put together a manifesto of sorts on an envelope in his car.
[00:39:10]  It included many photocopied pages of the Turner Diaries.
[00:39:13]  McVeigh had highlighted one passage in particular from a chunk of the book where Earl Turner's cell carries out a mortar attack on Washington, D.C.
[00:39:20]  The real value of our attack today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties.
[00:39:25]  More importantly, though, is what we taught the politicians and bureaucrats.
[00:39:28]  They learned this afternoon that not one of them is beyond our reach.
[00:39:31]  They can huddle behind barbed wire and tanks in the city.
[00:39:33]  They can hide behind the concrete walls of their country estates, but we can still find them and kill them.
[00:39:38]  Blew up a daycare.
[00:39:40]  God, man.
[00:39:43]  Yeah, I really showed them.
[00:39:45]  Yeah.
[00:39:46]  There was probably a daycare on the Death Star, too.
[00:39:49]  You would think.
[00:39:50]  Yes.
[00:39:51]  Probably.
[00:39:52]  Now I'm thinking about that.
[00:39:52]  More than just.
[00:39:53]  Yeah, lots of.
[00:39:54]  Several.
[00:39:54]  It's the size of a moon.
[00:39:56]  Yeah.
[00:39:58]  Tim Skywalker Vay.
[00:40:01]  Yeah, he's the special boy.
[00:40:04]  Oh, special boys.
[00:40:06]  Kittens probably up there, too.
[00:40:07]  Yeah, a lot of a kitten.
[00:40:08]  I'm certain there were a lot of kittens up there.
[00:40:11]  In Tim McVeigh, Louis Beam and his fellow fascists had found the perfect soldier, and the perfect exemplar of Beam's concept of leaderless resistance.
[00:40:18]  He was not a lone wolf, as some foolish pretenders of journalism named him.
[00:40:21]  McVeigh was radicalized by a constellation of writers and thinkers, as well as hundreds of men he spoke with at gun shows and survivalist conventions and sitting outside the siege lines at Waco.
[00:40:30]  He was radicalized by William Pierce, who wrote the Turner Diaries, hoping desperately that someone would do exactly what McVeigh did.
[00:40:36]  McVeigh's attack prompted a response from federal law enforcement, but not the one you might expect.
[00:40:41]  While there were some crackdowns on militia cells and organizations, the Justice Department largely reacted by taking a lighter hand with white supremacists and militias.
[00:40:49]  Oh, okay.
[00:40:51]  But yes, Cody?
[00:40:57]  We'll see.
[00:40:58]  We'll see if it's maybe working.
[00:41:00]  We'll see if it stops white supremacist terrorism forever.
[00:41:04]  I didn't mean to question.
[00:41:06]  In 1996, the Montana Freemen wound up in a standoff with the federal government.
[00:41:10]  As a group, they represented a synthesis of Christian identity and posse comitatus beliefs.
[00:41:14]  They declared themselves independent of federal control and wound up in an 81-day standoff with law enforcement.
[00:41:20]  For a while, it looked like the Freeman compound might become another Waco.
[00:41:23]  But the standoff ended peacefully.
[00:41:24]  Video footage of the 23 adults and four children surrendering showed no giant armored vehicles or military-looking police.
[00:41:30]  The FBI's hostage rescue team wore sneakers and casual civilian clothing.
[00:41:34]  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.
[00:41:41]  And he may have been right.
[00:41:42]  According to American terrorist, quote, Clinton R. Van Zant, the former FBI agent who had tried without success to negotiate a peaceful end to the Waco standoff three years earlier, agreed with McVeigh, at least on that point.
[00:41:52]  Retired from the FBI and working as a security consultant, Van Zant feels that the government learned a painful lesson from the Oklahoma City bombing.
[00:41:58]  In Van Zant's words, the government realized that it must become a velvet brick, not a battering ram.
[00:42:04]  What an absolute classic tragedy, Van Zant had said soon after the conflagration at Waco.
[00:42:08]  What a total indictment of mankind's inability to communicate and relate, even though we have different religious or personal philosophies.
[00:42:14]  While Van Zant condemned the Oklahoma City bombing, he felt that Waco had started a war and that McVeigh's bombing had been not only an escalation, but a turning point in that war.
[00:42:22]  My only disagreement with Mr. Van Zant is the idea that the war Mr. McVeigh wound up fighting in had started with Waco.
[00:42:29]  This war had been going on much longer than that, at least as far back as the days of George Lincoln Rockwell.
[00:42:34]  Timothy McVeigh may have seen himself as a patriotic American, but he fought as a soldier of the American fascist movement under Generals Louis Beam and William Pierce.
[00:42:42]  The failure of the federal government and almost everyone to see this war is one reason why things have gotten so bad in 2019 as I write this.
[00:42:50]  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.
[00:42:58]  Most experts agree that Harris was the primary motivating force behind the attacks, more or less pulling Klebold along with him.
[00:43:03]  This is not often reported on, but Harris was obsessed with Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
[00:43:07]  He wrote constantly about Nazi ideology, his hatred of free speech, the press, and his desire to see mentally defective people executed.
[00:43:14]  Harris was also obsessed with Timothy McVeigh.
[00:43:17]  Dave Colin is a journalist who spent more than a decade studying the massacre.
[00:43:20]  He found regular references to Oklahoma City and McVeigh in Harris's writings before the shooting.
[00:43:25]  Colin writes, quote, in his journal, Eric would brag about topping McVeigh.
[00:43:29]  Oklahoma City was a one-note performance.
[00:43:31]  McVeigh set his timer and walked away.
[00:43:33]  He didn't even see his spectacle unfold.
[00:43:35]  Harris admired McVeigh, but desperately wanted to beat him, carrying out a larger attack and killing more people.

=== Harris and Hitler Obsession (04:40) ===

[00:43:41]  You think that will escalate things more?
[00:43:44]  You think that attitude might be accelerationism?
[00:43:50]  Now, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebel 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.
[00:44:00]  In the decades since the 1996 shooting at Columbine, it has inspired at least 74 copycat attacks, which have killed 89 people and injured 126 more.
[00:44:10]  You can draw a direct line from George Lincoln Rockwell to William Pearson Louis Beam to Tim McVay and then to Eric Harris.
[00:44:16]  By the late 1990s, it was incredibly clear that leaderless resistance as a tactic was the best weapon in the white supremacist arsenal.
[00:44:23]  But it would take the mass adoption of the internet and the era of the smartphone for Louis Beam's deadliest innovation to see its full potential.
[00:44:30]  And we're going to talk about that in the next episode of this podcast.
[00:44:33]  They're all just terrorists.
[00:44:36]  Should I throw the Perrier yet or should I wait until we're done with the whole thing?
[00:44:39]  I don't know.
[00:44:40]  I'm pretty bummed out right now.
[00:44:42]  Yeah, you're right.
[00:44:44]  Maybe it's time.
[00:44:45]  Maybe it is time.
[00:44:47]  Or maybe don't do it at all.
[00:44:49]  No, I have to do it.
[00:44:51]  I have to do it.
[00:44:52]  Sophie, what do you think?
[00:44:53]  After the last episode or now?
[00:44:54]  How about you throw it towards that couch and Sophie moves away?
[00:44:58]  I can't read your blinks, Sophie.
[00:45:01]  I think we're waiting until the next episode.
[00:45:04]  I really want to.
[00:45:07]  I want to draw this shit out.
[00:45:08]  Yeah.
[00:45:09]  I want to draw this shit out.
[00:45:10]  We're going to wait.
[00:45:11]  Don't wait for the climax.
[00:45:12]  Plug your stuff.
[00:45:15]  That's right.
[00:45:16]  Google our names, which are spell it right.
[00:45:19]  It's Katie Stole and Cody Johnston.
[00:45:22]  We have YouTube show some more news.
[00:45:24]  Podcasts, even more news.
[00:45:26]  Cody.
[00:45:27]  Twitter and patreon.com slash some more news and TeePublic.
[00:45:30]  Store all the things.
[00:45:31]  Just Google.
[00:45:31]  If you are a little interested, just like Google it.
[00:45:34]  This is what, the sixth, sixth century.
[00:45:36]  If you're still listening, you're not just talking about it.
[00:45:38]  That's why I'm not plugging everything at the end of these episodes.
[00:45:40]  Don't stop asking.
[00:45:41]  Yeah, we're not going to be able to do it.
[00:45:42]  You go to the war and everyone.
[00:45:43]  Well, like 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.
[00:45:48]  I'm not in the next one.
[00:45:49]  All right.
[00:45:51]  Podcast.
[00:45:59]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:46:07]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:46:10]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:46:12]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:46:14]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:46:18]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:46:20]  Trust me, babe.
[00:46:21]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:46:30]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[00:46:35]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:46:38]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:46:41]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:46:43]  That's so funny.
[00:46:45]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:46:52]  Listen to Nora Jones' playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:47:00]  What's up, everyone?
[00:47:01]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:47:02]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:47:07]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:47:10]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:47:11]  if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:47:18]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:47:20]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[00:47:28]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:47:29]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:47:31]  There's a lot of life.
[00:47:32]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:47:39]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:47:47]  You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
[00:47:50]  I doctored the test once.
[00:47:52]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:47:57]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:47:59]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:48:01]  My mind was blown.
[00:48:03]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:48:04]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:48:06]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:48:07]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:48:12]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:18]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:48:21]  Guaranteed human.