Nation’s Deadliest Domestic Terrorist Inspiring New Generation Of Hate-Filled ‘Monsters,’ FBI Records Show

A week before 36-year-old Timothy Wilson decided to blow up a Kansas City-area hospital that was already reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, he considered attacking a slew of other targets instead, including several local mosques, a synagogue and an elementary school filled with Black children.

But, according to FBI records, before the avowed white supremacist from Raymore, Missouri, picked his final target in March, Wilson texted an associate with a particular question: “How did McVeigh do it?”

More than 25 years ago, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people and injured nearly 700 others when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, making him the most ruthless domestic terrorist in U.S. history.

Fortunately this time, Wilson's associate was actually an undercover FBI agent, and Wilson was stopped before he could carry out his bloody assault.

In the past three years, the FBI has arrested a few hundred Americans suspected of ties to domestic terrorism or violent white supremacy. And, as the nation confronts a surge in racially motivated violence, the FBI uncovered references to McVeigh in several of those investigations, according to an ABC News review of court records and government documents.

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“A mass casualty event like the Oklahoma City bombing is … meant to provoke further violence," noted Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian who has studied the development of modern white supremacy. "It’s meant to incite people, to awaken them to what people in this movement see as a state of emergency confronting the white race.”

The ABC News review of cases invoking McVeigh is part of “Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us,” an hour-long documentary premiering Tuesday on ABC News Live that examines white supremacy’s violent comeback.