Richard Jay Mathews, leader of the early 1980’s white supremacist terrorist organization “The Order,” saw multiculturalism as a scourge. The dystopian future he imagined, he wrote in a letter shortly before his death, was one where his son “would be a stranger in his own land, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan in a country populated mainly by Mexicans, mulattoes, blacks, and Asians.” This troubled Mathews so much that his group advocated for an entirely white region through mass extermination. As in Nazi Germany or the mythical 1850s North Carolina in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, The Order wanted to get rid of all non-whites in the Pacific Northwest.

Responsible for numerous robberies as well as the religiously-inspired murder of Denver radio personality Alan Berg, The Order was the loose inspiration for the 1988 Costa-Gavras film Betrayed, in which an FBI agent is sent to investigate a midwestern farmer (played by Tom Berenger) for the murder of a prominent Jewish radio host. They called the creed they subscribed to the “Northwest Territorial Imperative.” A concept popular amongst white nationalists, the Imperative sought to make the five-state region of Oregon, Idaho, Washington, Wyoming and Western Montana into a “White American Bastion.” The group was ultimately destroyed in a series of federal round-ups and raids, which led to 75 convictions; Mathews himself was shot dead in his burning home during a standoff that found echoes in the infamous Waco siege a decade later. When The Order was in its heyday one could count the number of armed white supremacist groups in America on two hands. Now, there are at least 600.

In Oklahoma City, Barak Goodman’s exhaustively-researched new movie, this history is just a tiny sliver of the background to the worst act of homegrown terrorism this country has ever seen. On April 19, 1995, former soldier Timothy McVeigh—a lifelong mediocrity who had grown up in the lily-white suburbs of Buffalo, New York—parked a Ryder truck containing a five ton fertilizer bomb in front of the Edward P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh lit a fuse and fled to a getaway car he had stashed several blocks away. Unfortunately for McVeigh, the car didn’t have license plates on it and he was arrested after a routine traffic stop for a completely unrelated and far less serious crime. One of the dozens of shocking details Goodman’s movie reveals is how close McVeigh was to being released before the FBI tracked him down at the nearby jail with questions about his involvement in the bombing.

When The Order was in its heyday one could count the number of armed white supremacist groups in America on two hands. Now, there are at least 600.

There is a grisly timeliness to Oklahoma City’s release now, when the far right is at a turning point. Revisiting this story of homegrown American terror feels as zeitgeisty as both of 2016’s televised accounts of the O.J. Simpson tragedy did. Are there more Richard Jay Mathewses lurking out there in the American night, emboldened by a political moment when their views are receiving broader mainstream media coverage and are tacitly embraced in the corridors of power? Or will they find themselves cast out into the fringes of American society, to strike at the system in the vicious, subterranean ways our leaders like to associate with Islamic extremists?

Oklahoma City makes clear that McVeigh’s actions did not occur in a vacuum: He had a whole tradition of white supremacist thought to draw upon. He was inspired by William Luther Pierce’s 1978 futuristic white nationalist novel The Turner Diaries, which depicts a right-wing insurrection against a tyrannical, overreaching government that devolves into a nuclear tinged race war in which Jews, gays and non-whites are done away with. McVeigh was outraged by the events at Ruby Ridge and even more so by the Waco Siege—which occurred on the same date two years prior to the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh deliberately planned his bombing to take place on this anniversary, as an act of retribution against the U.S. government.