Politics & Power Quote by Timothy McVeigh

McVeigh’s line is propaganda masquerading as moral philosophy: a tidy equivalence meant to bleach a mass murder into the color of geopolitics. The move is deliberate. By yoking the Murrah bombing to U.S. strikes abroad, he tries to reclassify civilians as collateral, Oklahoma City as a battlefield, and himself as a soldier rather than a domestic terrorist. It’s not an argument so much as a costume change.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it’s a bid for legitimacy through the language of statecraft: “government building,” “strategically,” “equivalent.” Those words smuggle in the premise that violence gains moral standing if it resembles what powerful nations do. Second, it’s a taunt aimed at American self-image. If the U.S. can rain destruction on faraway bureaucracies, he implies, then outrage over a smashed federal facade at home is hypocrisy, not principle.

The subtext is where the cynicism lives. McVeigh isn’t pleading for consistent ethics; he’s betting on moral fatigue. He wants the listener to feel queasy about American foreign policy, then exploit that discomfort as a solvent for his own guilt. “You did it first” is the oldest alibi in the book, sharpened into a political syllogism.

Context matters: the post-Waco, militia-movement ecosystem that framed federal authority as occupation and retaliation as patriotism. His comparison doesn’t illuminate U.S. violence abroad so much as it weaponizes it, turning critique into cover and grievance into permission.