Business Insider: “Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who backed former President Donald Trump’s voter fraud claims following the 2020 election, wrote a column in which he defended the Oklahoma City bomber when he was 15 years old, according to a report from the Kansas City Star. The Kansas City Star reported that following the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Hawley wrote a column for his hometown paper, The Lexington News, in which he warned against calling anti-government militia members domestic terrorists. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols – the men who carried out the bombing that killed 169 people – had ties with the Michigan Militia, an anti-government group dating back to the 1990s.”

“‘Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,’ Hawley wrote about militia groups. ‘Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings.’ ‘Feeling alienated from their government and the rest of society, they often become disenchanted and slip into talks of ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the federal government is out to get them,’ he added. Also in the column, Hawley said former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman was being unfairly depicted as a racist after his use of racial slurs became known during the OJ Simpson trial. ‘In this politically correct society, derogatory labels such as ‘racist’ are widely misused, and our ability to have open debate is eroding,’ he wrote.”