WASHINGTON –– Is the Tea Party and other anti-government movements mirroring the sentiments of the nation before the Oklahoma bombing 15 years ago?
USA Today reports that some see parallels.
“It feels a lot like the run-up to Oklahoma City,” Mark Potok, Intelligence Project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks U.S. hate groups, told USA Today. “Will we see another Oklahoma City? Nobody can really say.”
USA Today wrote that “in the months before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing…militias and “patriot” groups burst into the vanguard of a seething anti-government campaign, fueled by anger over the Clinton administration’s push for landmark gun-control legislation and federal officers’ aggressive tactics in high-profile standoffs with groups such as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.”
Then April 19, 1995, Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Edward P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that the militia organizations has dramatically grown in the last year.
“This is a broader-based and deeper kind of movement. Today, their ideas have penetrated into the mainstream,” Potok told USA Today.
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