Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

Presenting startling new biographical details about Timothy McVeigh and exposing stark contradictions and errors contained in previous depictions of the "All-American Terrorist," this book traces McVeigh's life from childhood to the Army, throughout the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the period after his 1995 arrest until his 2001 execution. McVeigh's life, as Dr. Wendy Painting describes it, offers a backdrop for her discussion of not only several intimate and previously unknown details about him, but a number of episodes and circumstances in American History as well. In Aberration in the Heartland, Painting explores Cold War popular culture, all-American apocalyptic fervor, organized racism, contentious politics, militarism, warfare, conspiracy theories, bioethical controversies, mind control, the media's construction of villains and demons, and institutional secrecy and cover-ups. All these stories are examined, compared, and tested in Aberration in the Heartland of the Real, making this book a much closer examination into the personality and life of Timothy McVeigh than has been provided by any other biographical work about him.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Conspiracy Theories, Politics, Biography, Crime, True Crime

720 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

Reviews

[Larry Ggggggggggggggggggggggggg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Idk man jolly west doesn’t just show up in someone’s life

[cruis'n esoterica · Rating 4 out of 5]

from 2011 to 2015 i attended shawnee state university, a miniscule and foundering public institution in appalachian ohio, where i studied history under local crank, exorcist, and folk hero Mark Mirabello. most of Mirabello's non-academically published works are essentially glossaries, haphazard descriptions of events and institutions and entities, and his class periods worked similarly. students loved him (and still love him, presumably) not just because he taught the easiest electives on campus, but also because he was immensely kind, weird, and funny, lending a sense of didactic quasi-academicism to folktales and conspiracy theories in a way that hadn't yet found its niche on youtube.

reading this book took me back to those now-mostly unremembered classrooms. Aberration is everything a lot of similarly-footnoted work cries out for. it's stunningly well-researched, but willing to read between the lines and get polemical, always avoiding bland, regurgitative argument for the sake of argument. it's tightly structured, gradually and meticulously unspooling the events at hand, but also stuffed with lengthy-but-necessary digressions. finally, it's smart, clear, and academic, but never balks at cracking a joke or forgoing edits when they might otherwise make the text feel less human; the run-ons and mistakes throughout don't distract you as much as they remind you that the author is genuinely passionate about this subject, clattering away at a keyboard in a dark room amid file cabinets, microfiche, etc.

by way of summary, this is a biography of timothy mcveigh that grounds itself in the various sublimated/hidden ("fringe" is a bit too conclusive) histories of his life, their relationship to various pop cultural themes, and how they weave into the historiography of mass terror writ large. it decisively concludes that various powerful parties were involved in mcveigh's gradual collapse--which is explored in deeply personal detail, prioritizing elements of his psychological and physical wellbeing--while negotiating with its main character's manifestly disturbed understanding of his own reality. the narrative naturally spirals off from its central plotline into lengthy investigations of the roles these powerful parties have played in american politics, culture, and the cultivation of so-called conspiracies and fringe movements.

this is kind of a story that, in an appropriately schizoid way, just keeps on spiraling, going deeper and deeper and deeper. the factoids and asides never stop coming. i adore how each section is sort of grounded on establishing how Everything really does seem Connected, then walking you back, confronting the evidence, providing background for the behaviors and motives and data, revealing how flawlessly all the events and their connective tissue just happen to coincidentally align--maybe. i love the humanities student flair for blending pop culture and reality, the constant reminding that TV and movies inform the truth and the truth informs them in return (in another instance of wonderful editorial underreach, almost every section begins with several extremely on-the-nose quotes from Don Delillo, Twin Peaks, Deleuze and Guattari, The X-Files, and other social media generation favs).

dark stories about dark characters that unfold in punchy, romantic, consumer-friendly ways basically form the groundwork of all our culture nowadays. this is a dark story about dark characters that just unfolds. unsettling waves of information push you through the narrative, which not only surges through the strange truths immediately surrounding the mcveigh case, but also UFOs, higher ed, Men in Black, nanotech, hypnosis, mass shootings. shadows are everywhere and everything is obscured. that said, it's so heartening to read a big, complicated book that doesn't have to rely on building a season of television or a compelling podcast ep to tell a grim, confusing story. it's also heartening to read a dense, academic work that doesn't feel the need to shy away from speculation, anger, or faith. at times, however, i'll admit that i skimmed a bit, and the lack of brevity could get a little exhausting.

after graduating from shawnee, i started a cute and cozily funded path toward a history PhD, but i discovered that Mark Mirabello types were pretty hard to come by among the academic rank-and-file. i figured out some things about the nature of historian as concealer rather than revealer, but more importantly, things just got boring, and i eventually headed back home. but i still yearn for the old faith i had in historians as folklorists, storytellers, transmitters of a truth that's truer than true. when i encounter a book like Aberration, it reminds me that revelation really is possible, that research really can be productive, and that--if we approach events as both skeptic and scholar--perhaps we really can reflect on what actually Happened and Why.

(21 september 2025 update and side notes: dr. mirabello died on 24 november 2024, just a few months after retirement. as unreal as he was, without him shawnee is an unreal place. oddly enough they’ve seen some success recently: enrollment is up this fall after spiraling for years (a 2018 lawsuit from a right-wing professor, a grim prognostication of culture wars to come, set the university back not just an entire year’s recruiting budget, but an entire year’s budget entirely). like many less-than-R2 colleges, they nervously point at how commuter- and military-friendly they are; footnotes for bigger colleges and fire sale indicators for ones in their shape. they did secure a D3 football team, which will play in the old home of the Detroit Lions, who believe it or not were the Portsmouth Spartans around a century ago.

i returned for a walk through campus back in june 2023. there were dust motes, there was bird poop on all the signs. typical for a dormant summertime campus. but: in massie hall, home to every mirabello course, the posters hadn’t changed. the furniture hadn't changed; it was all falling apart. the pepsi pictures on the vending machines were pale from stagnant sunlight. “the walls were lined all yellow-gray and sinister,” gord downie once wrote about a man wrongfully imprisoned. “it’s a museum and we’re all locked up in it after dark.”

i read the Aberration ebook during my three-year stint as an academic advisor, a blessed but fruitless job that frequently asked nothing of me for weeks at a time. i say "my stint" rather than "a stint" because at the moment it's uncertain whether new academic advisor job openings, at many institutions, will ever exist again. there is no "mcveigh is all of us" interpretation of this book that would be sincere or anything but corny in the most grim and laughable ways, but i worry that we are all becoming bound by insane trappings, caught up in increasingly fictionalized, disturbed memories in pursuit of nonexistent futures. somehow not even three years later Aberration is exponentially more relevant, more affecting, more ominous, and every time somebody likes this review i end up recalling how singular it is. mirabello and mcveigh may be gone but the scuttling, nightmarish machinery of the crank and the terrorist's minds sprawls horribly unbidden into our material plane.)

[Henry Begler · Rating 5 out of 5]

tremendous book. a long weird trip into the heart of all the dark shit that was floating around between the end of the cold war and 9/11, a fascinating and under-discussed period. i really think this is superior to almost any book of the last 10 years on terrorism or extremism. you would think coming out on this tiny conspiracy-minded publisher would mean there’s some interesting stuff among a lot of crank stuff (kind of how i found sinister forces) but it’s very sober and never advances any wacky conclusions, it just puts the pieces out there and lets you interpret them for yourself. also 5 or so years after its publishing the pendulum has really fully swung back from islamic extremism to extreme right/white nationalist terrorism and the ongoing FBI coercion involved has become even more obvious. i guarantee there is far less ‘misinformation’ in this book than in tons of mainstream books about trump/russia, iraq etc. but there’s no way to come away from this without some serious questions. there are a ton of long digressions into other subjects like the gulf war, mkultra, the militia movement, UFOs and etc but they’re essential for understanding the period as a whole. it can be a little rambly and discursive but it all comes together by the end. and the amount of research that has gone into this is staggering, i really feel like it’s a public service. but it’s a lot of fun (as fun as such a dark subject can be) to read as well. really glad to see this is finding an audience as an underground classic among certain strains of internet weirdos. if we actually had a meritocracy this would be elevated way above the insipid NYT/vox line on “extremism” and “radicalization”.

also w/r/t literary merit it weirdly reminded me of the nick tosches bio of dean martin, where it takes a central subject (mcveigh in this case) who is just a total black hole, an unknowable void of contradictions, and builds a book out of everything surrounding him to explain capital-A America.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredibly informative and exhaustively sourced review of underdiscussed info on Timothy McVeigh and the crazy unethical shit government organizations did before, after, and during the events of the Oklahoma City bombing. Super revelatory re: how the military nurtures racist extremism and devalues human life, the way strategic goals of the FBI are prioritized over the right to a fair trial or free access to information, how official “anti-terrorism” efforts in the US often involve informants supplying people with a plot and funding and harassing them into participating, gulf war syndrome and the broader context of experimentation on US soldiers, the value of carefully investigating conspiracy theories, and so much more... just the wildest read and would recommend to anybody

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible investigation that I very badly wish received more mainstream recognition.

I urge those who generally consider themselves averse to "conspiracy-theory" to give this book a chance. There is no unwarranted speculation or incoherent rambling. Painting works hard to ensure that her investigation retains both a venerable integrity and a solid foundation: nearly all of her information concerning McVeigh comes from the internal memos and documents of McVeigh's defense team, and when it doesn't it either comes directly from the mouths of the defense team itself, or directly from the mouths of McVeigh's friends, family, and associates. This is easily one of the most exhaustively and meticulously researched things I have ever come across.

Painting dissects both the unambiguously documented as well as the more ambiguous, possibly apocryphal lives of Timothy McVeigh (the latter with a noted restraint that is explicitly reiterated each time), and in doing so weaves a brilliantly contextualized and insightfully constructed narrative that utterly destroys the Oswald-like mythological portrait of America's "face of terror." As someone who wasn't yet alive in 1995, this book presents an opportunity to relive those crucial first days and months of strange eyewitness accounts, disappearing surveillance footage, and bizarre public relations that are inevitably lost on the Wikipedia article — see obligatory philosophical quote about the malleability of history and its participants.

This volume goes far, far beyond shallow "conspiracy-theory": fundamental questions about the nature of America, the motives of our leaders, and the institutions that ostensibly keep us safe are posed in the internal dialogue of an expansive yet coherent detailing of the highly disturbing internal affairs, evasions, obfuscations, and sometimes even blatant crimes of the various three-letter-acronyms that have become so (perniciously?) ubiquitous.

For her hand in attempting to keep this country accountable to what are supposedly its principles, Dr. Painting deserves the utmost approbation.

[Joe Whitcomb · Rating 2 out of 5]

A real shame that a person with this much access to real and important information about McVeigh and the role of security services in the bombing is instead more interested in UFOs, the X Files, Tracy Letts, and spurious insinuation. I would respect that last element if she ever took the time to isolate a narrative and outline a thesis. Instead she improbably tries to maintain five theories at once, largely because, despite the more fantastical schizoid ideations tellingly lacking in tangible evidence, she can not bring herself to simply cast them aside. That’s not to say they’re to be dismissed out of hand- it is just to say any book that relies purely on this sort of hearsay and digression is not worth reading. And that’s a real shame, because the tangible things I did learn are extremely important and should be more widely known in history and culture.

[Guido Colacci · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a fact based revelation of truths that the media WILL NOT DARE TOUCH. If you're really interested in knowing about McVeigh, who he was, what he did and didn't do, who was behind his actions and whether what the media says happened actually happened or did it just "appear" to happen, then you need to read this book. Ms Painting does an amazing job of getting to the truth and telling it. She does NOT try to convince you of the facts that are there but just pulls back the curtain. A GREAT READ!

[King Ludd · Rating 3 out of 5]

90s conspiracy revue featuring Pynchon and DeLillo quotes; basically catnip for those familiar with the various OKC narratives. Glad that Painting divorced her text from the more obnoxious aspects of A Noble Lie, though telling she never delves into the well-documented historical partnerships between various intelligence agencies and right-wing groups.

It's a shame TrineDay can't afford a decent copyeditor. That said, this book is undoubtedly a class above their usual product.

[b̴̜͍̮̘̫͚̺̎́̈̆͜͠͝ę̶̦̜́ń̸̯̫̣͑ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’M NAUSEOUS! 😌

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a sprawling, unfocused book. There’s a lot of new information here, much of it interesting and potentially important, but there are also a lot of digressions that, while not unrelated to the story, they divert from the author’s ability to draw a clear thesis.

There could be a great thesis here, but you have to find it in the wall of data and multiple theories. To her credit, Painting doesn’t really go down the tinfoil hat rabbit hole and explores (mostly) more plausible ways in which the official OKC narrative doesn’t fit the facts. But I wish she had isolated and developed a more clear thesis and narrative with which to structure her book.

[Bruce Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book very hard to rate and I’m still not sure that it wouldn’t change an hour from now. Going into it, I was a bit leery of it. I worried I was walking into a conspiracy theory web. And after reading it, I’m not sure if I did or didn’t. There is a lot of information spattered over the 1000 pages. Much of the information was interspersed haphazardly and failed to create a storyline that was cohesive. For me, this created a sense that after all the supposed research the author had no conviction as to the truth. The author says as much when she states; “even after years of historical and investigatory research, when it comes to the majority of McVeigh’s stories, I cannot claim to know what absolute certainty where truth, deception, fantasy, and conflabulation begin and end.”
However, the book did provide some information I didn’t know as well as legitimate thoughts to ponder. Anyway………

[Tim H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tough one to rate. The book is well-researched and contains a lot of very interesting information but it suffers from going too deep into rabbit holes... there's a lot of content on Star Trek, X-Files, UFO history, movies, etc. Not that these topics were off-topic necessarily, but the sheer number of pages devoted to them makes parts of the book a slog to get through and doesn't add much to points that were already made previously.

Overall I'm glad I read it but it would have been great had it been cut down to about 300 pages.

[Carter Sutherland · Rating 5 out of 5]

FBI Agent During Phone Sex: “oooohhh yeaahhh that’s sooo hooottt!!! Your dad has a gun… ooooohhhh, your a sovereign citizen, yeah you are baby… let me sell you a bomb 🤤🤤🤤

[Will Roelke]

had to remove my rating because it’s just one of those books that makes you go insane in real life. hard to rate. i liked it and would recommend it to maybe two people i’ve ever met in my life

[Wes Gable · Rating 4 out of 5]

very fun title to say in full, which is one of the more important qualities in a book. overall a good time, quite long, thorough, and sprawling but I enjoyed all of the context passages and digressions which made this a fuller text than a strict history. gotta love conflicting narratives and the analysis of truth. not as “conspiratorial” as it seemed, although I’m curious about what specifically kept this outside of a traditional publication company. there were definitely a few typos that slid through the cracks as a result. huuuuge nonfiction guy these days.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

A+ for effort, B+ for readability. Mammoth shaggy beast of a book, dogged investigative journalism x cultural studies dissertation vibe.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best, most fascinating and disturbing non fiction books I’ve ever read.

[James Marlowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

when i was in fourth grade, i was taken on an elementary school field trip to see the downtown of the city i grew up (roughly five miles south of the vastly different suburb i also grew up in). the trip lasted all day & ended at the replica log cabin of the man credited w/ founding the city. after we’d boarded the buses & gone about half a block, almost as an afterthought, a parent/chaperone told us that we were driving down the same street the thirty-fifth president of the united states of america had been assassinated many years (sixteen? many? in dallas tx, yes) before. the year was 1979 & i was either nine or ten years old at the time. my shitty little brain exploded & i was never the same. though it was a uniquely formative moment in my life, it wasn’t till years later—but not that many—that i began to realize the import of the incident. still, i do remember, or recall, or fucking know, even if only dimly, i felt changed.

my ex-wife gave me the nickname “unnecessary context boy” on our second date. that’s what they call a two-fer right there.

anyways, i’ve spent, wasted & wallowed much time in the forty-six years since that day gazing, staring & poking into an abyss i cannot seem to look away from. if i had a nickel for every book i’ve read in some way related to understanding why this world is so fucked, i’d have, at the least, several thousand bucks to show for it. sadly, all i have is a head full of knowledge nobody really wants to hear. i get it. i got it many, many years ago. but being a fucking lunatic about shit you truly believe doesn’t take long to solidify opinions of folks who don’t want to hear it yet kind of or have to coexist w/ you, contextually speaking.

the point? i guess it’s to say—getting back to the whole abyss thing, the years of gazing into it, nietzsche’s words re: doing it, so on & so forth—this. that no other book i’ve read has ever left me so shaken as this one right here. but, far from just the abyss gazing back into you, reading this was more akin to having the abyss kicking the living shit out of you, or fitting yer soul for its own exoskeleton, other stupid things.

some things:
possibly the best sourced book i’ve personally read, w/ notes (in much smaller text) running to over a hundred pages;

the ’select bibliography’ lists over 500 sources (ballparked);

the ‘master document bibliography’ has a brief introduction to the ’stephen jones oklahoma city bombing archive,’ explaining what & where it is—a building i custodianed/janitorized for several months a few lives ago at the university of texas at austin—as well as her access & use of, & here i quote “(t)o my knowledge, as of 2012, i am the only person to have gone through the entirely publicly available stephen jones collection at the university of texas,austin, a task that took me approximately four & a half years;”

the ‘master document bibliography’ consists of seven sections (eg. ‘select list of internal jones team memorandum & reports,’ ‘select list of fbi 302 database forms,’ ‘select military records’) chronologically broken into mostly weekly, sometimes daily reports, memorandum, interviews, etc;

& a goddamned exceptional index, ‘& in english too, so I can die with a smile on my face without feeling' like the good lord gypped me.’

it’s been awhile so pardon any excess.

probably/hopefully/possibly/ maybe an actual review of some sort to come, but for now this testament to the power of this book is all i can manage.

[Canyon Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a 3.5/5 kind of book. It's all over the place, which I can dig, but is certainly hard to follow. I don't know that I'd recommend it. Only to those really interested in esoteric parapolitics.

As for Trine Day: This book is ugly as hell. It's really turned me off from exploring other publications from them. The bottom page margin is <.20inch, which is just ridiculous. Especially for such a large book. Also, why does every subchapter have a *list* of quotes? Did anyone proofread this book? Page 162 bounces from referring to the United States as both "USA" and "U.S." - there's more examples of this type of inconsistency but I can live with it.
What I can't live with is the fact that the version of this book that i own is missing seemingly hundreds of citations because of a publisher's error that found the epilogue in between the endnotes, and the endnotes reprinted after the epilogue actually concludes, essentially removing dozens of pages of interest from the book. I'm talking specifically about the transition from page 562 to 515 (the final page of "McVeigh's Imperceptibly Bind Chains"), which republishes the epilogue once more to page 562, then leaps to page 611, placing us in the Notes section for Chapter 4 - therefore, the Notes from Chapters 1-3 are missing.

And believe me, I get it - you're a small publisher, not a lot of financial / actual support, etc. but this is a mess and I feel bad for the author.

Some questions/concepts I wish were further explored:
-Why spend 50+ pages reviewing "lone wolf" acts of terror to not similarly investigate possible John Does/similar occurrences of allegations about John Does in "lone wolf" acts of terror?
-What was the nature of the conflict of interest that prevented Otto & Coyne from representing McVeigh? They seem to have gathered rather important context for the bombing in the immediate aftermath of his arrest only for it to stall out immediately afterwards.

Fun read, annoying read, confusing read, etc.

[Nick Padula · Rating 4 out of 5]

That title’s a mouthful, huh? Well, it’s a reference to Don DeLillo’s classic conspiracy-filled novel Libra which is a fictionalized account of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life leading up to JFK’s death. There’s definitely some interesting thematic parallels between DeLillo’s 1988 book and this one. There’s also some interesting parallels between Oswald and Timothy McVeigh which Dr. Painting definitely digs into with this.

This does so much more than a simple retelling of McVeigh’s life. There’s already plenty of books that do just that, so it’s good to have more than a straightforward biography. It goes into a bunch of contradictory stories within his life that may or may not be true. Some of these contradictions are dished out to the public by McVeigh himself. Rather than taking a concrete stance on McVeigh and if he was really a lone wolf or not, Painting presents all the possible facts and lets the reader draw their own conclusion. One thing is pretty clear after reading this: The mainstream story has a looootttt of holes in it.

Also, anytime Dr. Jolly West shows up in a story, you know some crazy MK-Ultra mind control shit is about to go down. Dude is sinister! McVeigh saying to his defense attorney “I’m not brainwashed” without any kind of prompt or context sounds suspiciously like someone who got brainwashed. Just saying!

Now where’d I leave my tinfoil hat 😉

[Ben Ingraham · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It seems you can't go anywhere these days without a fed trying to hand you a bomb and some blueprints." God tier stuff here. All the most essential evidence about the McVeigh case in the first and final 50 pages of this one, and the rest is just endless digressions, some of which worked for me (UFOs, biological experiments on Gulf War soldiers) and some of which didn't (mind control microchips), but I think they are all equally essential for getting Painting's worldview of security state paranoia between Cold War and War on Terror. I can't imagine someone finishing this book that isn't already incredulous to federal law enforcement and counterterrorism, so I don't really know what to "do" with all of this information, but what a wild ride. Like a great Jazz recording, each typo is essential. I love how clear it is that she did the index herself at the last minute. Amazing

[Ethan Clemons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zoo wee mama, the FBI really did all that.

[Jack Hayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Painting offers a compelling, incredibly footnoted account of the winding turning life as well as the formative influences that shape McVeigh’s life. The Oklahoma City bombing appears here as a distinctly postmodern event—arguably the second of its kind, following the assassination of JFK—marked by fragmentation, competing narratives, and institutional opacity. Most striking is the sustained obfuscation, till this day, by the FBI, ATF, and CIA, a pattern shown clearly in the epilogue.

McVeigh’s biography is further from him suffering from schizophrenia, a diagnosis made by the VA. Thus, McVeigh is an unreliable narrator. Especially since he and the FBI painted him as a lone Wolf.This raises the unsettling question of whether he was a “watched wolf.” He is certainly not a lone wolf in the sense presented by either McVeigh himself or the Justice Department. Painting resists that simplifying narrative and instead situates him within a wider network of actors, failures, and silences.

Painting does not romanticize or excuse McVeigh’s actions. What McVeigh did is unequivocally atrocious, and he did carry out the bombing. Yet Painting insists that moral clarity does not require intellectual complacency. There are unavoidable questions: Why were bomb squads reportedly told to stand down on the day of the attack? Why do relevant surveillance videos remain hidden by the FBI? Who was the actual bomb maker, still unnamed? What are we to make of John Doe #2, the Aryan Republican Army bank robberies that may have helped fund the plot, the informant who knew about McVeigh and was told to ignore him and then intimidated into silence, or the broader context of PATCON? How should we understand the reported meeting between Jolly Joe West and McVeigh, or McVeigh’s own belief that he was a rogue agent acting outside his handler’s control?

Acknowledging these questions does not mitigate McVeigh’s guilt. It does, however, challenge the idea that justice is served by closure alone. If government secrecy becomes the default response to atrocity, the result is not stability but a breeding ground for speculation, distrust, and deeper cover-ups. The pursuit of truth—however uncomfortable—remains a public obligation, not a concession to conspiracy.

91% Butt Microchip
.

[ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

probably the best parapolitical book i have ever read. despite its intricate sourcing, Painting refrains from offering the “definitive tale” of the bombing—because the bombing, much like any other historical instance of its magnitude (JFK, 9/11, RFK, COINTELPRO, MKUltra), cannot be fully understood. this is due in large part to the measures that federal law enforcement agencies take to capture, and then either withhold or destroy, evidence about the events.

i cannot say now which of the four proposed “Wolf narratives” Painting explores i hold to be true—though i can say confidently that McVeigh was not a “Lone Wolf”, as his own mythmaking and that of the federal government would have you believe. there are connections here to MK—to its bottomlessly evil master, Dr. Louis Jolyon West—that give some credence to the most imaginative of these theories (the “Experimental Wolf”), but probably not enough to win me over. what cannot be overstated is that it is definitely true that Timothy McVeigh was rubbing elbows with hundreds of violent white supremacists and dozens of federal informants—and that many of those hundreds and dozens had intimate knowledge of the plans to bomb the Murrah building (if they did not provide strategic or material resources themselves). this should haunt all of us, especially given that in the wake of OKC, the FBI has created a massive anti-terrorism force that, in many instances, provides supposed perpetrators with ideology, weapons, explosives, and opportunities to put them all into practice—just to arrest them and therefore “foil” the plot. this is not me getting on my conspiracy soapbox—this is true, and has been reported on, and has not made as many waves as it should.

i leave you with a quote, to that point, from Painting’s conclusion:

“[Some] more heated and less frequently posed questions [are]: at what point does a plot to entrap become a sanctioned plot to kill, directly or through an intentional looking away? At what point does a so-called terror plot become an FBI plot? Or the plot of another national security-minded agency? Where does the boundary lie?”

[Nick Holstead · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There is much here that is holy, an aberration in the heartland of the real.”

Ok so I feel unclean and unwell after completing this. I certainly cannot imagine obsessively and researching a subject this dreadfully dark and stomach turning for upwards of a DECADE.

In this truly exhaustive, unrelenting piece of journalistic research - and using the framework of the Murrah Bombing - Painting takes you down a horrid rabbit hole into the black heart of some of the darkest and depraved shit humanly imaginable. With the backdrop of the Murrah Bombing removed even, the details surrounding McVeighs life – the shadowy figures on the margins, the WP Groups (Elohim City, OK is somehow a place that exists??), Calspan, Three letter agencies…. and particularly the time detailed in the Gulf are more than enough to turn your stomach.

And that’s all this is – the details. Painting never tries to guide you anywhere, if anything, she gives equal air to almost every single fact presented throughout the entirety of the 700+ pages. In doing so – she never feels inclined to *solve* the case. Like the GOAT (Donny D), she is more interested on why and how this *could* have happened, not exactly how it did or didn’t happen.
Ultimately – Timothy McVeigh existed as a blank canvas that reflected the very worst and most extreme aspects of the Americanoid 90s. Today he remains as a prism with which the American conscious can project their ideals, beliefs and notions about the world. An American aberration.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book, although I’m not sure I’d classify it as much as a book, or a thesis that’s been expertly organised. Regardless, loved it. Clearly the product of over 10 years research by Painting, and it constructs a clear narrative, exploring the many inconsistencies with the official version of events, and clearly shows that there are many facts that were purposely withheld showing that this version is impossible. It explores the other alternatives that even McVeigh himself put forward at times, The Guilty Agent, Experimental Agent, Lone Wolf (official), Pack of Wolves, and Pack of Watched Wolves.

The book shows McVeigh’s life story, and matches up events that were not shown at the trial, in the media, or any biographies, and how they demonstrate that there were larger forces at work. Painting rarely tries to lead the reader in any particular direction? Only to show that there is far more to the events in April 1995 that is officially acknowledged. She also details other surrounding events, such as the FBIs PATCON operation, that even operated out of CALSPAN where he was a security guard. PATCON only came to public light in 2007, 6 years after his execution.

The epligoue wraps things up well, explaining how attorney Jesse Trentadue, when investing his brother Kenneth’s death in custody, with possible connections to the bombing, has been continually blocked even in 2015 from having documents and details released, and to this day (2024) the FBI won’t release the security footage of the Ryder Truck outside the Murrah Building. As the top review on this site says, Jolly West doesn’t just show up in someone’s life.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly well researched and written book about timothy mcveigh and the okc bombing, exploring all the different narratives that have been told about the bombing with a basically fortean approach. Recommended to anyone interested in parapolitics related subjects.

[Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 | schmilz mein gehirn baby

ein non-fiction buch über domestic terrorism das für seine epigraphen don delillo, thomas pynchon und twin peaks zitiert macht mir schon eine menge spaß und ich fands auch sehr nice, dass es die zu dem fall existierenden erzählungen eher als erklärbare kulturelle phänomene statt als um jeden preis zu beweisende/widerlegende theorien begreift (auch wenn das u.a. dazu führt, dass ich für meinen geschmack ein paar seiten zu viel über aliens lesen musste)

[Jack Stonecipher]

Holy smokes

[Cary Brecher · Rating 5 out of 5]

key to understanding the way our government operates. so in depth and wide ranging it deserves to be parsed with extreme care. strage e malinconia……