Despite these obstacles, the extremists persisted. In July 1995, three months after the bombing, Michael Gray, who was a longtime friend of Randy Weaver’s (the central figure in the Ruby Ridge saga), was arrested in Washington State for plotting to bomb the federal courthouse in Spokane. He had stolen blueprints to the courthouse and planned to build a fertilizer bomb like McVeigh’s. In September 1995, Charles Polk was arrested after trying to buy large quantities of C-4 explosives to bomb IRS buildings throughout Texas. Two months later, Willie Lampley, who was a leader of the Oklahoma militia, and three others were charged with conspiracy to bomb gay bars, abortion clinics, and an Anti-Defamation League office in Texas. Georgia militia members were arrested for stockpiling bombs. Militia members from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were charged in a plot to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint center. On April 12, 1996, a white supremacists named Larry Shoemake shot eleven Black people, killing one, in Jackson, Mississippi, before dying in a fire he had set. (The Turner Diaries “was like an eye opener for him,” his wife later said.) On July 27, 2996, Eric Rudolph, a white supremacist, set off a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the Olympic Games. Over the next two years, he detonated three more bombs, at gay bars and abortion clinics, and then disappeared into the woods. (He was caught in 2003.) On June 7, 1998, three white men killed James Byrd Jr., a Black man, by dragging him behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early,” one of the killers was reported to have said during the assault. Apart from the Olympic bombing and the Byrd murder, these investigations drew little national attention, largely because they took place far from big cities, with their concentrations of media outlets. It was not a full-fledged national rebellion, as in The Turner Diaries, like McVeigh wanted, but he did set off a string of attacks on his enemies.
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