Politics & Power Quote by Timothy McVeigh

“Borrowing a page from U.S. foreign policy” is a self-authorization trick: McVeigh cloaks a private act of mass violence in the language of statecraft, as if terror can be upgraded into “policy” by adopting the right rhetoric. The phrasing is bureaucratic on purpose. “Additionally” and “I decided” flatten moral gravity into the tone of a memo, the way institutions launder brutality through procedure. It’s not just evasion; it’s mimicry. He’s trying to sound like the thing he claims to oppose.

The subtext is a nasty inversion of civic legitimacy. By framing himself as a rational actor “sending a message,” he positions the government as a foreign adversary and himself as an insurgent diplomat. That’s the ideological move at the core of anti-government extremism: redefine your own country as an occupying regime, then treat violence as communication rather than murder. “Becoming increasingly hostile” is doing heavy lifting, too. It suggests escalation and self-defense, a narrative where the state forced his hand. The passive drift of the sentence implies inevitability: hostility rises, messages must be sent.

Context makes the cynicism sharper. McVeigh’s worldview was shaped by rage over federal actions like Ruby Ridge and Waco, filtered through militia movement paranoia about tyranny. The irony is that he reaches for U.S. foreign policy as both indictment and template, criticizing American power while borrowing its logic of coercive signaling. It’s a rhetorical heist: steal the language of governments to naturalize the very act that places you outside civilization’s bounds.