1/ <Thread> Nearly 30 years ago, in February 1992 when I was an Air Force Captain, I attended professional military education program that all Air Force junior officers go through (Squadron Officer School, SOS). @throughlineNPR https://www.npr.org/2020/12/01/940825490/a-pack-of-wolves

2/ About a year after the first Gulf War, a lot of the talk was about that war and what had transpired, and what it meant to our future relations with the Muslim world.

3/ One of my SOS classmates, who was in the Air Force security police, remarked that we were worried about the wrong people.

4/ He handed me a copy of “The Turner Diaries,” a fictional account of how a white supremacist revolution overthrows the US government and eventually establishes a global whites-only world. “These are the people we really need to be worried about.

5/ These are the people who are going to cause us trouble, and soon.”
I read the book; it was disgusting racist, anti-Semitic garbage.

6/ And I really didn’t think that much about it.
Three years later, two Army veterans who operating as part of a radicalized white supremacist terror cell built a truck bomb with ammonium nitrate, and detonated it outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

7/ The driver of the truck, the man who detonated the bomb that killed 168 people, including dozens of children, imagined himself as the “hero” of “The Turner Diaries,” and with this attack, would be kicking off a civil war against the Federal government.

8/ Terry McVeigh was angry about the Federal government’s role in the shoot-out at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which Randy Weaver’s wife and son were killed in shoot-outs with Federal agents, and the siege at Branch Davidian compound near Waco, TX, which ended with 82 Branch…

9/ …Davidians killed along with 4 ATF agents.

10/ He believed attacking a Federal building and killing Federal employees along with their children was appropriate payback for children killed at Ruby Ridge and Waco.
McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, were quickly apprehended, tried, and convicted.

11/ McVeigh was sentenced to death and was executed in 2001.

12/ Nichols was sentenced to life without parole by the Feds and to 161 consecutive life sentences by the state of Oklahoma.
The general view of McVeigh, Nichols, and a couple other co-conspirators was that they were “lone wolves” - a small group of angry malcontents who…

3/ …acted alone. But this is not the case.

14/ As is discussed in the NPR Throughline podcast, “A Pack of Wolves,” the McVeigh/Nichols group was part of a much broader coalition of white supremacists who operated much more broadly, in loose association with other extremist cells.

15/ This distinction was missed in their trial, because of an earlier Federal trial that attempted to convict a number of other white supremacist organizers of sedition, only to see all of the defendants exonerated.

16/ So rather than try to tie McVeigh and Nichols to a broader movement, the Feds focused on convicting them of this specific crime. They were convicted because of overwhelming evidence, which is fine and good, but the broader conspiracy was overlooked.

17/ They did not operate in a vacuum. They were radicalized, they trained, they acquired the needed components for the bomb, they tested prototypes.

18/ They were part of a radicalization and indoctrination process that is not unlike that which recruits and radicalizes Islamic militants in al-Qaeda and ISIS.

19/ This is the poison that has been seeping throughout our country since at least Reconstruction, post-Civil War, but the current incarnation has been growing and spreading since the post-Vietnam War period, from the mid-1970s.

20/ And here we are now, at the end of 2020, having watched right-wing “militias” (which are really armed militants) confronting protestors, counter-protesting at Black Lives Matter marches, posting outside mosques, even swarming state capitol buildings and intimidating…

21/ …legislators. Just last month, several members of a Michigan “militia” (militant cell) were arrested and charged with conspiracy to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

22/ Just recently, the so-called Proud Boys, a right-wing militant group, roamed our nation’s capital beating counter-protesters; four were stabbed.

23/ We were all very worried about what might happen during the General Election, whether or not there would be violence from these armed right-wing militants. Fortunately there was very little violence; the election was remarkably smooth and without incident.

24/ And on December 14th, the Electoral College gave the final electoral win to Joe Biden, who will assuredly be inaugurated as the 46th President on January 20th, 2021.

25/ We’re heading into a very uncertain time, with Trump still in the WH for a few more weeks, and potentially a divided gov. These radical militants are not going away, and are encouraged by a soon to be former President. Will these be the people who will cause us trouble? /end