From McVeigh to MAGA, we haven’t learned our lesson about hate speech

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America did not do enough to silence and soundly defeat the white supremacist Christian Identity movement after April 19, 1995.

Timothy McVeigh was convicted and executed for the murder of 168 people, but the ugly forces of hate that radicalized him grew steadily after McVeigh’s execution nearly 20 years ago, and on January 6, they tried to overthrow the United States government. 

Between 2017 and 2019, the first two years of the Trump Administration, the number of hate groups in the country rose 55 percent according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s annual The Year in Hate study.

While good people like Kari Watkins at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum have devoted their lives to exposing the kind of hate that fueled both the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing and last week’s attack, we now have insurrectionists in our congressional delegation. 

Opinion by George D. Lang

On Tuesday, U.S. Representative Markwayne Mullin, R-Oklahoma, resisted going through the metal detectors in the U.S. Capitol, just six days after the armed mob occupied the same space. He complained that it was his “constitutional right” and “they cannot stop me.” Clearly, Oklahoma has gone from capturing and punishing anti-government zealots to electing them. 

Why is it that this man-baby does not understand the grievous error of his ways? Mullin was 17 when McVeigh bombed the Murrah building, so he was ostensibly aware of what happened in Oklahoma City.

And yet, Mullin signed onto the amicus brief supporting Texas v. Pennsylvania along with 125 other traitors who hoped to see the presidential election overturned. He along with his cohort deserve to be expelled from Congress under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. 

Additionally, newly elected 5th Congressional District Representative Stephanie Bice should be willing to renounce the sedition and speak out against Qanon conspiracy spreaders like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, but she refuses to do so.

I cannot understand how someone can represent Oklahoma City in Congress while supporting the attempted violent takeover of our nation. Anyone elected to the 5th should be a beacon illuminating the dangers of anti-government rhetoric, and it is shameful that Bice is seemingly going the other way. 

I am increasingly convinced that Oklahoma needed to be more definitive in its condemnation of radical anti-government actions. As a thought experiment, I Googled the bombing along with the words “senseless act,” and found a bottomless trove of opinion pieces, retrospectives and even boilerplate from government agencies that described McVeigh’s bombing as “senseless.”

No one who spends months bunkered down with white supremacist creeps as they plan the bombing of a government facility is being “senseless” — they worked hard at their evil plan.

Sadly and maybe catastrophically, a lot of people with presumably good intentions turned the bombing into a generalized tragedy rather than presenting it as an unequivocal attack on the government and the people it serves. 

Our commemorations of the bombing often grappled with unimaginable loss without addressing the horror of what right-wing reactionary monsters inflicted on our city and our loved ones. Many of us forgot how important it is to assign blame where it belongs. 

And now, we have owners of advertising companies and nurseries and barbershops and other seemingly benign Oklahoma companies going to Washington, D.C. to disrupt democracy and install their vile leader as president for life. Too many Oklahomans participated in this gross act of sedition last week to think that we did our best to remember the worst. 

Oklahomans should not accept any of this as normal, nor accept the actions of our delegation as anything close to rectitude. We received a terrible lesson in the evils of hate speech and violence 25 years ago, and we need to stop being senseless about it. 

We need to deliver the hard slap of truth to the people who think it is fun to threaten our systems of government and the people working within them. It is lesson time.

Author Profile

George Lang has worked as an award-winning professional journalist in Oklahoma City for over 25 years and is the professional opinion columnist for Free Press. His work has been published in a number of local publications covering a wide range of subjects including politics, media, entertainment and others. George lives in Oklahoma City with his wife and son.