Today is the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Since my family lives here in OKC, almost everyone we know over a certain age has a personal story to tell about that day. The people known as “Truthers” tell another story altogether, though.
[Alex] Jones grew up in the Dallas suburbs, just two hours’ drive from the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel. In 1993, when Jones was barely out of high school, a seven-week Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) siege ended in the incineration of 76 cult members. Jones remembers being transfixed by the congressional hearings into the fiasco, which were broadcast by C-SPAN. The episode turned Jones into a full-time crusader against the United States government.
Koresh and his followers, Jones believed, were harmless innocents who’d been murdered by Attorney General Janet Reno and cynical ATF agents looking to boost their agency’s profile. “I remember watching the TV screen and seeing that famous footage of the ATF loading their video cameras before going in,” Jones told me. “They were going to lose their funding. This was [a] PR stunt. They were about to be abolished. That’s why they did it.”
Two years later, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, an act intended to incite a popular revolt against the U.S. government. But Jones concluded the bombing actually was a part of a conspiracy, hatched by the feds themselves, to quash the nascent states’-rights movement.
The above is quoted from a profile of Alex Jones by Jonathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers. On page 113 of that book, Kay note that “alleged false-flag attacks that have become Truther talking points” include “the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and Israel’s attack on an American intelligence-gathering ship called the USS Liberty during the Six Day War of 1967.”
We often tend to think of the “Truther” movement as something that got started after the 9/11 attacks of 2001, but the willingness of modern conspiracy theorists to blame the U.S. government for perpetrating false flag attacks (even when more plausible perpetrators are openly boasting about committing the selfsame act of terror) goes back at least as far as 4/19/1995.
In case you are feeling adventurous, you can see how deep the rabbit hole goes over at Infowars.
As for me, I’ll be watching the memorial concert on Youtube.
