But in all of this detail, there is little discussion of McVeigh’s ideology. We learn, briefly, how he was angered by the sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Tex., but those aren’t placed in a larger context of white power activity. We learn that McVeigh read and drew from “The Turner Diaries” — a lurid fantasy of apocalyptic “race war” by the neo-Nazi author William Pierce — but we’re left in the dark about his ties to larger networks of white power activists. At one point, McVeigh is described as an antigovernment extremist, but even this obscures the depth of his white supremacist, nativist and anti-Semitic ideology and commitment to revolutionary violence against the state.

It makes sense that a memorial would not want to focus too closely on the perpetrators. But there’s no way to understand McVeigh or his accomplices without looking deeper. As the historian Kathleen Belew notes in “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” “McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state, belonged to the white power movement. He acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives and supported by resistance cell organizing.”

That understanding of McVeigh and Nichols as part of a movement with well-defined goals and a theory of action — which itself fits into a history of ideologically driven hate networks — is important if the mission of the Oklahoma City memorial is education as much as remembrance. And in visiting the site and museum, I was troubled by shallow treatment of that context. Are visitors making the connections between past and present? Do they see the relationship between the violence in Oklahoma City and the shooting of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 or the murder of 11 Jewish worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018? Do they see McVeigh as a singular threat or as an important antecedent to our present-day white power killers?

In the manifesto he released, the accused Christchurch shooter made frequent references to “white genocide,” the idea that nonwhite immigration and mixed-race relationships constitute a genocidal threat to “white” people. He recites the “14 words” — a white supremacist mantra — and elsewhere posted images of a gun with the number 14 written on it. As Jane Coaston noted in Vox, the term “white genocide” was coined by David Lane, a white supremacist responsible for the murder of a Jewish radio host in 1984. He, like McVeigh, was also inspired by William Pierce. Again, the museum devotes some space to this movement and those ideas — copies of Pierce’s books “Hunter” and “The Turner Diaries” are on display — but they are overshadowed by exhibits that focus on the experience of the bombing and its aftermath.