Forty years ago today, on May 16, 1986, the tiny town of Cokeville, Wyoming, found itself under siege. It was the culmination of years of delusions and violent, grandiose fantasies that had consumed a troubled man named David Young since he left Cokeville some seven years earlier. Before the day was out, Cokeville would come perilously close to suffering what would have been, at the time, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.
Convinced that he was the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, destined to lead a revolution in the American Northwest to bring about a "Brave New World" - and radicalized by years of exposure to right-wing extremism and anti-government fanaticism - David Young, along with his wife, Doris, took 167 men, women, and children hostage at Cokeville Elementary School, using a giant homemade bomb housed in a modified shopping cart as their leverage.
The couple demanded over $300 million from authorities in exchange for the release of their hostages. If their demands were not met, the Youngs threatened to blow up the school and kill everyone inside. The bomb had the capability to destroy the entire building, and the triggering mechanism was attached to a string tied around David Young's wrist, meaning that if anyone tried to attack him, or if a police sniper took him down, he would trigger the bomb as he fell. The situation seemed hopeless, with no way of meeting the demands of the insane hostage takers, and also no way to negotiate with them or neutralize the threat.
Ultimately, however, fate intervened. Several hours into the standoff, David Young handed his wife the triggering cord and left to use the bathroom. While he was gone, Doris Young inadvertently triggered the detonation mechanism. The bomb exploded, severely injuring Doris and setting the classroom on fire. With his planned revolution in ruins, David Young returned to the classroom, shot and killed Doris, shot and wounded a fleeing teacher, and then shot himself. Yet despite the bomb blast destroying most of the classroom, causing injuries to 79 people, all of the 167 hostages survived the explosion. The only fatalities of the bombing were David and Doris Young.
In the aftermath of the attack, several survivors would claim that, moments before the bomb exploded, angels and the ghosts of dead relatives appeared and told them to go towards the windows, shielding them from the blast. The claims of divine intervention caught on, and in the four decades since it occurred, the incident at Cokeville has been hailed by evangelical Christians and Mormons as nothing less than a divine miracle. Indeed, when this incident is discussed, it is usually in the context of the "Cokeville Miracle", proof that angels and ghosts were sent by God to protect the children and save Cokeville from disaster.
I first wrote about the Cokeville attack in 2019, and I voiced my frustration with how this incident is too often framed. Despite all the claims of divine intervention in Cokeville, the truth is much more grounded in reality, and to be honest, far more interesting.
Investigators determined that the Young's bomb suffered from a variety of critical failures that prevented total catastrophe. For starters, the container of gasoline acting as the propellant for the bomb had a hole in it, which caused the gasoline to leak out and drip onto the cans of gunpowder serving as the explosive. Not only did this significantly reduce the explosive potential of the bomb - as wet gunpowder does not explode with as much force as dry gunpowder - but it had the added effect of filling the room with gasoline fumes, causing the hostage takers to open the windows to air out the classroom. The open windows also contributed to avoiding disaster, as they allowed the blast pressure to dissipate faster and further reduce the power of the bomb.
But most significantly, police found that the wires to several of the blasting caps in the bomb had been cut with a knife, and that the bomb had only partially exploded. Later testimony from Doris Young's friends indicated that she was not an enthusiastic participant in her husband's deranged revolutionary plot, and may have attempted to disarm the bomb herself while David was out of the room when she accidentally set it off. Indeed, it seems the real "Cokeville Miracle" was heavily reliant on fate, and insofar as "intervention" was involved, it may have been none other than Doris Young herself who prevented catastrophe.
But what about all the children who said they saw ghosts and spirits appear before the blast? Well, I think we need to look at those claims with some perspective in mind. Keep in mind, most of these hostages were young children. They were children raised in a deeply religious community, thrust into a highly stressful situation, trapped in a cramped classroom with two deranged terrorists and a bomb, inhaling gasoline fumes for hours, many of them participating in group prayers during the standoff, and all of them not knowing whether they would even survive to go home that night. Call me a skeptic if you will, but this seems to me like a perfect situation that could lead itself to the creation of false memories.
Take, for instance, the McMartin School abuse hysteria, where young preschool children were relentlessly and suggestively questioned by investigators who were able to coerce false memories of ritual sexual abuse at the hands of the school staff. And while the Cokeville case was not a case of the Satanic ritual abuse panic that swept the country, I do believe that something similar may have happened here. Many of the claims of supernatural phenomena that have been associated with Cokeville did not appear until sometime after the incident, after these children had ample opportunity to be subjected to suggestive questioning by reporters, family, and priests - all of whom would have had good reason to attribute the miraculous escape of their children to divine intervention.
And, really, how much of a "miracle" was the Cokeville attack anyway? Two deranged, heavily-armed extremists took an entire school of children hostage with a bomb, set 79 of those children on fire, shot a teacher in the back, and then killed themselves. This is a miracle? I suppose the survival of all of the hostages was miraculous in a way, but, as I pointed out above, that seems to have had more to do with luck and fortunate human error than divine intervention.
Now, you may be asking, what's the harm in indulging these beliefs of divine intervention? If it helps the people of Cokeville sleep at night, why make a big deal out of the "miracle" aspect of the case?
Well, as I pointed out in my 2019 article, I think this case exposes a more insidious and dangerous aspect that seems to be constantly buried or forgotten as a result of this "miracle" discourse. If we look at the roots behind the attack on Cokeville Elementary School, we see a dangerous arc that nearly ended in disaster, and it's one that has repeated itself multiple times before and since.
It's worth looking at David Young's life to get a sense of this. David Young was a highly unstable and mentally ill man, who had for years exhibited disturbing behavior. He had once lived in Cokeville, and served as the town marshal, but his erratic behavior - including aimlessly wandering the town wearing pistols on his waist, taking nude pictures of his underage daughters and selling them, and even repeatedly propositioning his own daughters for sex - led to him being fired by the town of Cokeville in 1979 and his wife filing for divorce. David Young was left angry and bitter with the government, and he met and married Doris Young that same year, who shared his anti-government sentiments.
It just so happened that, at around the same time - as farms in the rural US were collapsing and demographics were changing - the heartland of America was being swept up in a resurging militant far-right, anti-government, and white supremacist movement that appealed to people just like David Young. Militant anti-government and neo-Nazi groups like the Posse Comitatus and Aryan Nations exploded in popularity, and among those who joined were none other than David and Doris Young, who linked up with a Posse chapter in Arizona in the 1980s.
In the Posse Comitatus, David Young's delusions of grandeur and hatred of the government were reaffirmed and solidified. He wrote extensively about his belief that he was Adolf Hitler reincarnated, destined to lead the United States into a "superior future" as Hitler had supposedly done with Germany, and would launch a "great revolution" to bring about what he called a "Brave New World" - a concept he lifted directly from the Posse's own literature.
One can get a sense of how delusional David Young had become simply by reading the opening paragraphs from his manifesto, which he entitled "Zero Equals Infinity" and distributed to the hostages at Cokeville Elementary School during the standoff:
"Seemingly, some thousands of years ago, several individuals combined,
or perceived their combination and therein created Man.
This creation was, and is, a concept; a thought or idea, neither right
or wrong (left) but a way among ways.
For the better part of the interim then, men played with Man making
love, fire, food, mores, children, Gods, language, tools, wastes, etc:
combinations of divers sorts, in almost as many directions (purposes).
Now people come and people go, but always as people, no longer as
individuals from which people had risen (or succumb). Almost as
frequently as people come and go, additional, more distant concepts
(from whatever reality is the individual/that precedes them); families,
clans, tribes, villages, towns, cities, states, and civilizations make
their brief passages and then leave the scene.
These various combinations of Man with their various concepts of
themselves invented war in order that any singular combination might
achieve dominance over other combinations. This came to pass as Man
attempts to preempt those rights of the individual. The individual
remembers reality only in learned (rather than the original and innate,
therefore false) responses to right (his combinations values) and wrong
(other combinations values differing from his own.)
History is the study of these combinations.
As a matter of record, therefore, some 2400+ years ago, Socrates, and
individual, addressed himself to an evolving concept called knowledge.
Knowledge is again a way to conceive, but conception is enlarged through
rules less combination specific. Philosophy, remote as ever, is slowly
displaced by science (mathematics, medicine, astronomy, etc.), a
disciplines observing the singular rule that a fact becomes knowledge
when it can be proved.
Proof is a concept, it suggests something that "is" on account of
itself - it "is" proven. At best a probability, at worse nonsense,
proof in any event is very distant from reality. Nevertheless it has
been the predominant concept these 2000+ years and any combination that
has competed with other combinations using it has eventually either
adopted it or ceased to exist."
Confused? I wouldn't blame you. The entire manifesto is written like this, wildly jumping between disparate topics like hydrogen fusion, metallurgy, reincarnation, Adolf Hitler, Newton, white supremacy, and the "nothingness of knowledge". It is a vomitorium of indiscernible, nonsensical madness - a testament to David Young's raving insanity if there ever was one.
But David Young's delusions were reaffirmed and fueled by his time in the neo-Nazi movement. Rather than dissuade him from his nefarious plot, his hatred of the government and grandiose worldview were emboldened. And in the end, David Young's journey through the far-right extremist movement culminated in what was very nearly the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.
This is a pattern that has repeated itself long after Cokeville, where disillusioned men with delusions of grandeur have become radicalized in extremist movements to become violent and deadly terrorists. Nine years after tragedy was averted in Cokeville, Oklahoma City was less fortunate, and a truck bomb planted by an angry and bitter young man with a hatred of the government destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building - killing 168 people, including nineteen children - in an act that he hoped would help spark a revolution. We saw it again in 2012 when Wade Michael Page - a failed marine who became radicalized by years in the neo-Nazi skinhead movement - slaughtered seven people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. And we saw it more recently in 2018, when Robert Bowers, a neo-Nazi who also believed that he would spark a white revolution against the "Zionist Occupation Government", massacred 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
What makes the situation worse today, however, is that the United States government is now itself controlled by an administration that frequently caters to the worst instincts of the American far-right. Posts on X (formerly Twitter) by the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump Administration have frequently included white supremacist dogwhistles, and, more recently, the Trump Administration has indicated vocal support for "remigration" - a concept that originated in neo-Nazi circles calling for the expulsion of nonwhite immigrants. And while the Trump Administration seems to be increasingly courting the American far-right, it has repeatedly downplayed the threat of right-wing extremism, cutting ties with or targeting nonprofit organizations - such as the Southern Poverty Law Center - that used to coordinate with the FBI to monitor far-right groups and the threats they pose. The Department of Justice has also purged its website of most resources dedicated to cataloguing the threat of right-wing terrorism, including removing a DHS study that showed that far-right extremism was the most significant domestic terrorist threat facing the United States.
But ignoring the problem does not make it go away. The threat of right-wing terrorism remains ever present and increasingly violent, and if anything they are more emboldened right now than ever before. Whether the current US government wants to acknowledge it or not, there are other David Youngs out there, and ignoring them - or, worse, relying on "miracles" - simply will not be enough to stop them.
Comments
Post a Comment