Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-9

Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 8 Summary: “Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Militarized Policing”

The end of the Cold War proved a seminal moment for the white power movement. Deprived of its communist enemy, it shifted focus to the so-called “Zionist-Occupied Government” (188), a term for a cabal of Jews and other globalists who had purportedly taken control of the United States. As the federal government embarked on a series of confrontations with survivalists and other heavily armed associates of the white power movement, it brought forward a heavy militarized police force, which it had also deployed in urban zones such as Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots in 1992. In the wake of Vietnam, the huge increase of the defense budget under Reagan, and the First Gulf War, the military had produced a massive surplus of equipment, much of which found its way to police departments starting in the early 1990s. This coincided with the high point of militias, many of them associated with the white power movement, although the media tended to treat it as a new phenomenon and underplayed its racist and revolutionary aspects. After President Bush used the phrase “new world order” in a 1991 speech (193), that phrase became central to the white power movement’s narrative of “a broader international conspiracy of elites (sometimes Jewish) that intended to enslave the U.S. population” (193). The Gulf War was meant to be a great victory that helped put the sting of Vietnam in the past, but many white power activists saw it as part of a Jewish plot to subordinate US foreign policy to Israel.

The white power movement received a major boost with the Ruby Ridge incident in August 1992, when federal agents laid siege to Randy Weaver’s home after he failed to appear in court for a weapons charge. A frequent attendant of the World Congress, Weaver refused to comply, and the resulting shootout and siege killed a federal agent as well as Weaver’s wife, Vicki, and young son. Weaver became a martyr, particularly because the death of his wife played on the narrative of “the vulnerability of white women” (200), and he was acquitted of all charges. An emergency summit of white power activists called for its members to “fertilize the tree of liberty with the blood of both patriots and tyrant” (203), and to use the publicity of Ruby Ridge to expand their recruitment. Just as Louis Beam was insisting that the federal government had replaced communism as the great enemy of liberty, the government undertook an even deadlier siege near Waco, Texas, with a warrant to seize weapons from a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians. After a 51-day siege during which both federal agents and cult members died, a fire broke out in the compound and killed all remaining members. Timothy McVeigh personally visited Waco during the siege, which white power activists viewed as the most salient example of the New World Order’s attacks on individual liberty. The militia movement was heavily armed, angry, and eager for revenge.

Chapter 9 Summary: “The Bombing of Oklahoma City”

On April 19, 1995, a bomb inside a Ryder van exploded next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Among the 168 dead were 19 children, who had been in a daycare center above where the bomb detonated. The bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was treated as a lone actor with his own personal reasons rather than a part of the white power social movement. He modeled the attack on one described in The Turner Diaries, and the Murrah building had already been the target of an unsuccessful white power terrorist attack.

A native of upstate New York, Timothy McVeigh joined the army after high school and served in the First Gulf War, winning many medals. While in the army, he expressed interest in joining the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, wore a “white power” T-shirt during morning jogs, and spoke favorably about Hitler. Struggling to find steady employment after failing Green Beret training and being discharged from the army, McVeigh spent time in Michigan with an old army friend with militia ties, Terry Nichols. Obsessed with guns, McVeigh frequently attended gun shows where he sold both firearms and copies of The Turner Diaries. He spent time in Elohim City, Arkansas, the site of a Christian Identity compound with close ties to the white power movement and some of its most violent actors. The FBI received warnings about Elohim City’s connections to terrorism, as well as specific warnings of the target and date of the Oklahoma City attack, but they refused to investigate it either before or after the bombing.

McVeigh timed the attack to coincide with the second anniversary of the Waco fire—which McVeigh saw as proof that a government-led mass seizure of arms was imminent (as foretold in The Turner Diaries)—and he targeted the Murrah building due to its structural vulnerabilities. Reading white power literature to motivate himself, McVeigh assembled the bomb and drove the Ryder truck to Oklahoma City, setting a five-minute fuse then fleeing the scene. He was arrested only an hour afterwards because his getaway car did not have a license plate. At his trial, the defense tried to paint McVeigh as a small part of a vast conspiracy, but McVeigh’s silence on that question made it difficult to convince the jury, and he was convicted. White power activists either lauded the bombing or dismissed it as a “false-flag” operation committed by the government to besmirch their movement, and what followed was “an almost immediate and widespread wave of violence as the militia movement, and the broader white power movement, took action around the country” (231-32). In the most notorious example of this wave of violence, Eric Rudolph set off a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics and fled into the woods for the next five years. McVeigh insisted that he acted alone until his execution in June 2001, but Belew regards the event as “the culmination of decades of white power organization” and its strategy of leaderless resistance (234).

Chapters 8-9 Analysis

Once Timothy McVeigh was identified as the man responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, the government painted him as a person living under unique circumstances that led to a unique event. His mother’s abandonment of his family at a young age, his joining the army and fighting in the Gulf War, and his flunking out of Special Forces and subsequent struggle to find steady employment made for a compelling narrative. In the popular imagination, his story was one of an all-American kid who went horribly wrong, a loner whose anti-government views curdled into obsession. As Belew points, this was in large part due to a persistent failure to recognize White Power as a Social Movement, with affiliates who didn’t necessarily share all its ideas or exhibit all its typical features. McVeigh denied being a racist and denied having been part of a broader organization. The few times he offered a rationale for what he did, he focused squarely on Ruby Ridge and Waco, both of which had triggered large-scale public disapproval. Only many years after his death did journalists gain access to tapes in which he spoke scornfully about the civilians he killed in Oklahoma City, bragging that his execution would leave the score at “168-1” (see MSNBC films’ “The McVeigh Tapes,” 2010). Beam’s strategy of “leaderless resistance” succeeded doubly, first in facilitating a mass terrorist attack and then in obscuring the broader implications of the attack.

The government had specific reasons for misrepresenting McVeigh as a lone wolf. They were desperate to secure a conviction, with previous failures such as Fort Smith weighing heavily on their minds; writer Gore Vidal found that the “FBI deliberately withheld evidence in its strategic pursuit of a single perpetrator” (229). Yet even a focus on McVeigh the individual should have included his membership in the KKK, his training with the Michigan Militia, his visits to Elohim City, and his celebration of The Turner Diaries. To call him “anti-government” may not be wrong but it is misleading, framing his position as a policy disagreement when he in fact fantasized about mass violence against a government whose lowliest agents he refused to see as human. For Belew, McVeigh stands as the most disturbing example of The Overlap Between Extreme and Mainstream Politics. Every American war produces veterans who struggle to adjust to peacetime and rationalize their discontent with fantasies of violent redemption. The American public is far more likely to be outraged when the government overreaches against white citizens than nonwhite citizens. McVeigh’s actions were so horrific that even many white power activists hedged their support, or blamed the government rather than face the consequences of their own life’s work. However, McVeigh also showed how thin the line between the mainstream and the extreme truly was. The more one learned about Timothy McVeigh, the more apparent it was how many people had lives, experiences, and feelings quite like his and could theoretically do what he did. Given that terrifying prospect, it may be easier to just treat him as one of a kind.