MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said the U.S. military presents a greater terror threat than illegal immigrants.
O’Donnell referenced military veteran Timothy McVeigh, the domestic terrorist behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, to support his argument.
“No one who has ever crossed the southern border, in the history of the existence of the southern border, has killed more people in this country than Timothy McVeigh, who was born in Lockport, New York, the northwest part of the state, into a White Roman Catholic American family with roots in this country that go back farther than Donald Trump’s roots in this country. The New Orleans terrorist, like Timothy McVeigh, reached the rank of sergeant in the United States Army.”
“The simple fact is, this country has suffered more deadly terrorism at the hands of American-born citizens who are veterans of the United States military than people who have crossed into this country at the southern border,” O’Donnell said. “It is very clear from the evidence that if you want to worry about terrorism in this country, the United States Army is a much bigger problem than the southern border.”
“No one crossed the southern border attacked the Capitol on January 6th four years ago, but several veterans of the United States military violently attacked the Capitol on January 6th in an act of terrorism intended to terrorize Congress into violating the Constitution and not certifying Joe Biden as the elected president of the United States,” he said.
A December 2023 report from the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) found “no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States as a whole.”
“IDA found reason to believe that the risk to the military from widespread polarization and division in the ranks may be a greater risk than the radicalization of a few service members,” the report said. The IDA recommended that the Department of Defense “focus its efforts to prevent prohibited extremist conduct in ongoing education and training in core values such as loyalty, respect, duty, honor, and mission, emphasizing from recruitment all the way to separation that these values are inconsistent with prohibited extremist activities.”
