Holy cow!
About a third of the
building has been blown away.
(sirens)
This is a scene from one
of the United States'
deadliest domestic attacks.
KOCO news report:
As we walked up,
I could not believe what was happening.
You really couldn't believe your eyes
and you especially couldn't believe that
it was actually happening
here in Oklahoma City.
President Bill Clinton:
The bombing in Oklahoma City was an attack
on innocent children and defenseless
citizens.
Connie Chung:
The attack came without warning and
according to a U.S. government source told
CBS News that it has Middle East
terrorism written all over it.
But it wasn't some foreign agent
that killed 168 adults and children.
This was the result of
homegrown right-wing extremism.
Timothy McVeigh: Well, am I,
am I pure evil?
Am I the face of terror
sitting here in front of you?
The Oklahoma City bombing happened years
before this Charlottesville, Virginia
attack.
Both assaults are examples
of the United States'
long running struggle with
right-wing extremism and brutality.
Hey fam,
I'm Imaeyen.
In part one of our series,
we took a look at the rise of right-wing
fanaticism in the United States and the
government's response to it.
Today,
I'm standing at a memorial dedicated to
the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing
to find out what this disaster
can teach us about our future.
This is Oklahoma.
Cowboy country. 
The birthplace of the legendary Mickey Mantle.
And the location of the
country's deadliest domestic
attack committed by one of
its own.
Water resources council hearing: Basically, 
there are four elements that I have to
receive information regarding ... (explosion)
It's been 24 years since a moving truck
filled with explosives parked near a
federal building in Oklahoma City,
destroying it and devastating a nation.
The explosion killed 168 people,
including small children
and injured 500 more.
CBS News report: The blast was catastrophic.
Half of the nine-story federal
building collapsed into the street,
an estimated 900 people inside.
This attack is one type
of far-right extremism,
which generally falls into two categories:
Hate-based, like the neo-Nazis
or white nationalists,
as we discussed in part one of our series
and anti-government,
like the men responsible for
the Oklahoma City bombing.
These are the names of the survivors of
the attack that happened at 9:02 a.m. on
April 19, 1995
Dennis Purifoy is one of those survivors
and we're on our way to meet him.
So this is where I was sitting.
The building,
as you can see here,
at one time I figured I was
115 feet from the bombing.
That's so close to you.
Yeah.
That is so close.
Here's how Purifoy's office
looked before the explosion.
Look at the date on this photo.
It was taken only a few
weeks before the disaster.
This is what Purifoy's office building
looked like after a massive truck bomb
blasted off the façade of a
building with a daycare center,
instantly killing a hundred people and
trapping dozens more beneath rubble.
I saw a flash and I don't know if it was
a reflection on the computer screen of
the actual explosion or if
it was an electrical spark.
Everything went totally dark and
I was knocked out of my chair.
That seemed to all happen at once.
A ceiling tile fell on
Purifoy, trapping him.
A coworker helped him escape.
He suffered no major injuries.
And along with a few colleagues,
got to a place where they could get help.
In the immediate aftermath of the bombing,
there were two searches.
One for the missing.
This is Elijah and he's two,
and this,
this is Aaron.
And one for the assailants.
Purifoy: It was several days before I started even
paying attention to who supposedly the
suspects were and that kind of thing.
I was going to hospitals
where coworkers were.
And then after a few days,
I started going to funerals.
I have the obits I think for
all of my coworkers in here.
Ibanga: How hard was it to go to all of those
funerals?
Purifoy:
I was,
something I really wanted to do.
I wanted to be
at every one.
One reason that it was hard is that
there were sometimes multiple ones on the
same day.
The earliest news coverage
quickly speculated
so called "Middle Eastern terrorism,"
but the bombers weren't a group of Brown
people from far off places.
They were homegrown far-right militants
motivated by their hatred of the federal
government.
This is what the bombers
actually looked like.
Purifoy: I think I was kind of in
shock like most people were.
What, what would possess Timothy McVeigh,
who was an army veteran,
why would he do such a thing?
And this was during a period where the
U.S. had seen several violent far-right acts.
The bombing attack shares the
same date as the Waco siege.
And Olympic bomber,
Eric Rudolph, planted an explosive
at the Atlanta Games in 1996.
The news media failed to link these
stories in the same way they so eagerly do
with so-called "Islamic extremist" acts.
Ibanga: How much did you know about far-right 
extremism before Oklahoma City?
Purifoy: Really nothing. I hadn't
paid attention to it.
It hadn't been in the news.
Before the bombing,
I really didn't know the extent of
far-right extremism in the country.
Once I became aware of it,
I tried to let other people know.
I talked about it,
I talked about it at church.
I didn't,
I don't know that I was on a crusade,
but I,
I was definitely interested in more
people learning about it and being aware
about it.
The plot,
Timothy McVeigh and Terry
Nichols concocted is eerily
similar to one that a trio
of white men had hoped to execute the
day after the 2016 presidential election
in Garden City, Kansas.
The militia men who dubbed themselves
'the crusaders,' schemed to kill as many
Somali refugees as possible by detonating
four car bombs outside an apartment
complex that also doubled as a mosque.
David Neiwert: They were planning to blow up
this community in Garden City,
with Timothy McVeigh-style truck bombs,
situate themselves at the exits to the
community with machine guns, and shoot
anybody who tried to flee.
So it was going to be a horrible massacre.
This is David Neiwert.
And the reason he knows so much
about what happened in Kansas
is because he's been studying far-right
extremism in the U.S. since the 1970s.
A judge sentenced those three Kansas men to
25 to 30 years in jail.
And their plot shows something Neiwert
says the nation has forgotten.
Neiwert: People understood prior to 9/11 that
terrorism could take a variety of shapes.
After 9/11,
the only kind of terrorism that people
thought of were essentially Arabs,
Muslims.
President George W. Bush:
Today we've had a national tragedy.
Two airplanes have crashed into the World
Trade Center in an apparent terrorist
attack on our country.
Bush's focus was on threats
coming from overseas.
His so-called “war on terror" didn't
address far-right figures like McVeigh,
Nichols or Rudolph.
President Bush: But we're going to smoke them out.
Our mission is to battle terrorism
and to join was freedom-loving people.
This is a long-term
battle, war.
And while President Bush literally said,
"Islam is peace" to make a distinction
between religion and acts of terror,
the country’s focus on Iraq
and Afghanistan meant that
the far-right threat that
so recently had its attention faded from
its collective memory. 
While the United States was focused on Al Qaeda and
Muslims, far-right hate was organizing and
energizing.
Daryl Johnson: Unfortunately, America
a lot of times our legislators and
even law enforcement to some degree,
are reactive.
Something significant has to happen in
order for people to actually do something
about the problem.
Former Department of
Homeland Security analyst,
Daryl Johnson,
watched as far-right extremism became
a bigger threat to the country,
particularly after
Donald Trump was elected.
Johnson: So typically during
Democratic administrations,
like Obama Administration,
Clinton administration,
we see a rise of the far right.
And then typically during a
Republican administration,
we see just the opposite.
But this time in 2016,
we had a Republican administration
coming to power and the far right has
continued to operate
at a heightened level,
which goes against all the trending that
I've seen over the past 30 to 40 years.
Johnson and Neiwert both believed
the president's heated rhetoric has
mainstreamed extremist messages.
And Neiwert says President Trump has soft-peddled a version of white nationalism
and made it more palatable
for a wider audience.
Neiwert: The people who were
committing these crimes,
were either referencing
Trump's name directly,
like shouting "Trump, Trump, Trump,”
as they beat people up or
threatened people, or using his name to say,
you know, well, 
"Trump's going to get you outta here."
This problem didn't start with Donald Trump, 
he took advantage of it,
but he definitely fueled it and it's
massively expanded because of his presidency. 
President Trump: And yes, we will
build the wall.
We've already started planning.
It will be built.
(Cheers)
Neiwert says there's a thread he's seen
connect the philosophy of far-right
extremism to its believers.
 
Neiwert: The personality type is drawn to these
movements consistently is what we call
right-wing authoritarians.
Authoritarian personalities are basically
people who want to be told what to do,
people who want an authoritarian rule
because they feel more safe and secure.
This is the role that Trump plays.
This isn't the first time
that this has happened.
The country's history is littered with
examples of far-right extremism being
overlooked,
ignored,
and sometimes even being
turned into government policy.
Think of all the violence
associated with Jim Crow.
How worried are you that people
will forget Oklahoma City?
That it'll fade from the memories?
Purifoy: I think as time goes on,
it will start fading
from memory a little bit,
but it is.
It still,
even to this day,
it's the largest domestic terrorism as
far as number of casualties in the 
United States.
I hope that we remain for many years
to come - the still - the largest domestic
terrorism incident in our history.
We can't any more just say
"It's not my business like I,
I can't pay attention to all of that."
It is our business and we have to pay
attention to it.
Right now the nation is at a place where
it's been before in confronting
right-wing fanaticism, and it's making
some of the same decisions
it's may before in governmental
policies and in news coverage.
See the governmental response isn't the
only thing contributing to this problem.
The news media,
they have culpability too. Both Purifoy
and Neiwert say part of the reason people
don't see far-right extremism as a threat
is because of how the news media has
and continues to portray it.
Purifoy: I think,
I think they should report more in-depth.
So unless you get,
unless the media provides some background,
people really do remain
pretty much ignorant about it.
The book that inspired Timothy McVeigh,
it's been inciting far-right 
violence for decades.
Purifoy: Timothy McVeigh,
he would try to convince people
for months and months and months,
his circle of friends,
he tried to convince them,
he tried to get them to read
the "Turner Diaries" and stuff like that.
The “Turner Diaries” is a racist dystopian
novel written by a neo-Nazi leader.
The book reached the pinnacle of its
popularity in 1995, once a connection to
Timothy McVeigh was made,
but there's something 1995 didn't have,
which may have limited its reach:
widespread high-speed internet.
The internet and social
media revolutionized how
right-wing extremism met
grew and conspired, and that's really
important because not all right-wing extremism
is created equal.
(Clashes)
It can be found in even
the most liberal of places.
Jason Downard: There’s people you won't know you're trained
to blend in with your community.
Hey fam,
thanks so much for watching.
Don't forget to like share and subscribe.
One of the things that was the most
intriguing to me at the Oklahoma City
memorial were the two
gates that they have.
There's one at 9:01, symbolizing the
city's innocence before the bombing,
and then there's a gate symbolizing 9:03,
one minute after the bombing and what
happens to Oklahoma City afterward.
Be sure to stay tuned for the third and
final part of our series and we'll see
you next time.
Thanks for watching.
