Fascinating interview with Richard Booth on the Oklahoma City Bombing, April 19, 1995

Fascinating interview with Richard Booth, here and here.

Thank you to Senor Jose

If this piqued your interest like it did when I heard about Terrence Yeakey, here is a deep dive that I'm still in the midst of doing with @booth_okc on the OKC bombing.  It was Yeakey's story that inspired me to do this series. https://t.co/ig4ankUKYH

— Senor Jose (@SenorJose2020) August 11, 2022

 

Here is No Way, Jose!'s channel.

He starts with ID'ing Idabel, Oklahoma investigative writer, J D Cash, who wrote for the McCurtain Gazette and did some excellent reporting on the Oklahoma City Bombing.  

Oklahoma City and What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters, Roger G. Charles and Andrew Gumbel, 2013.  Reached out to various researchers, various academics, and started collecting documents and by 2014 to 2016, I had amassed a huge collection and donated documents and archives to Scott Horton at the Libertarian Institute and he put them all online to make them searchable.  Other researchers, Jesse Trentadue, Wendy Painting, 

Timothy McVeigh's favorite book was The Turner Diaries, William Luther Pierce, 1978.  Another book he really liked was called The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America's Violent, Anti-Government Militia Movement, Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt 1990.  He wrote the story of a terrorist group called The Order.  And most people when they look at the Oklahoma City Bombing, they completely miss this context.  

14:35. McVeigh was reported to have been seen at Waco.  

Important part of the context here.  You had an FBI hostage team kill women and children.  Horuchi murdered Vicki Weaver, Randy's wife and child.  And you had Waco occur that next April, April 19, 1993, where they burned Americans and American children using tanks and flame throwers, an environment where you had the federal government acting in accordance with their true scorched earth policy nature.  Especially on the gun show circuit, you would see a lot of videos about Waco and Ruby Ridge being sold, which served as a motivating factor for McVeigh in Oklahoma City.  He considered the bombing to be revenge for Waco.

McVeigh chose the Murrah Building after he learned it had a day care in it.  Gives you some insight, I suppose, into his mind. This would be his revenge for the slaughter of the children at Waco. Throughout the country at the time, the militia was a very big and burgeoning movement. Within these militia groups they were just as outraged as an average, Midwestern white family might view Waco (April 19, 1993: the Mount Carmel Center was incinerated on April 19, 1993) or Ruby Ridge, August 21, 1992, totally outrageous.  Date was no coincidence, April 19, Patriots' Day, the holiday celebrating the start of the Revolutionary War.  Also, the same date as Waco.  The main difference was that these were radicals advocating for violence.  

17:30. What about the role of white supremacy? Was it just an inflammatory tag to create a convenient scapegoat and self-hatred among whites, or was McVeigh truly motivated by it?  

When this happened, Timothy McVeigh was being characterized as a militia guy, attending militia meetings, but the truth is that Timothy McVeigh was not a militia guy. He was not a member of any militia.  He had been to a couple of militia events, but at one them he was kicked out, meaning that they didn't like the kind of talk they heard from him.  

18:55. He was equated as a militia member in the media at the time, who were trying to demonize the militia movement in the country by associating them with McVeigh.