Sigh. I'd been hoping to stay out of this, but OK.

The answer is "it's complicated."

Buckle up for a (hopefully) short thread. https://twitter.com/tweetsintheME/status/1314935927899385858

Three things are true:

1) McVeigh was fixated on a notorious piece of WS propaganda

2) McVeigh associated with/admired a number of white supremacists

3) McVeigh isn't documented to have talked to his friends about WS as a driving factor in his life or the OKC bombing

1) McVeigh was obsessed with The Turner Diaries, which is rabidly white supremacist. It's hard to tolerate without being at least WS adjacent.

But he was first attracted to it because of its theme of gun confiscation, which attracted many in the Patriot movement at the time.

The Patriot movement has spent a lot of mental energy trying to rewrite Turner as a less racially focused work. I wrote about this . A lot of racists in that movement may not be ideological WS. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-patriot-movements-new-bestseller-tests-their-anti-racism

The gun confiscation theme is a huge part of this, and McVeigh also loved a lesser-known and not-ideologically-racist novel called Unintended Consequences which focused more squarely on that issue.

2) McVeigh's associations with and admiration for white supremacists are not widely understood. I wrote about this here.

tl;dr He hung out with a lot of white supremacists but also a lot of Patriot/militia types. At minimum, he was cozy with WS.

https://archive.org/details/BergerNSSPPATCON

3) During his trial and in most other investigations, there was a remarkable lack of documentation that showed McVeigh expressing WS sentiments, using their terminology or contextualizing his actions as motivated by WS.

It's hard to attribute this to being merely self-serving in his legal defense. IIRC no trial witnesses described him talking about ideological racism except by default when recommending Turner to basically everyone he knew.

Nevertheless, in sum, looking at the Turner focus, and his admiration for/association with figures like Kirk Lyons, Louis Beam, Andreas Strassmeier and (probably) Dennis Mahon, it's hard to conclude that he *wasn't* a white supremacist.

But there's some room for debate here.

tl;dr McVeigh was a pedestrian racist and probably had ideological white supremacist leanings, but it's not as cut and dried as people would like it to be.

Let conclude by saying I get why this is frustrating for so many of you. People lie all the time, and we have to figure out what they're about. At some point you have to look at the record, the actual evidence.

In this case, the record shows:

McVeigh explicitly expressed antigov/progun sentiments

The OKC bombing was explicitly motivated by Ruby Ridge and Waco, as seen not just in his words but in his actions.

Most people are more than one thing, and he was clearly engaged with WS, but his main drivers were