 For every president, there are certain days in your presidency you will never forget. April 19, 1995, the day of the largest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history is one of those days for me. The enormous explosion at a federal building in Oklahoma City this morning was the work of terrorists. The bomb went off just as hundreds of people had showed up for work. It was an act of cowardice and it was evil. The United States will not tolerate it and I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated. The bombing of the Alfred Pemera federal building in Oklahoma City by far right extremists killed 168 people, 19 of them children. The Oklahoma City bombing ripped the cover off a threat that had been bubbling up beneath the surface of American life for years. The anti-government white supremacist terror. Between 1980 and 2000, there were 247 domestic terror incidents. During that era, the FBI identified white nationalist extremism as the greatest threat we face. When three members of the Michigan Militia were stopped last year by police, their car contained six loaded semi-automatic weapons, three revolvers, 700 rounds of ammunition, two-way radios, and notes indicating that the men were conducting night surveillance of law enforcement officials. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, I knew we all had a responsibility to do everything we could to ensure that something like this would never happen again. Why someone would do something with this magnitude? It's just unreal. Perhaps an even greater responsibility was to urge people all across America to reassess how they talked about and thought about people who disagreed with them. Timothy McVeigh was himself motivated by that extreme rhetoric. Timothy McVeigh was arrested by local authorities. He will be taken into custody by the FBI. I thought it was my duty to help prevent that hatred from spreading to the average citizen. We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible, and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. I had to do two things that almost seemed contradictory. I had to defend the right of people to speak freely and assault the content and the predictable consequences of that kind of speech. Today I think the challenge is the same. If you just regularly dehumanize people so that they are no longer people but ugly cartoons, bad things are going to happen. Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness. Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind. Justice will prevail. A lot of life is about not so much what your opinion is but how you express it and how you relate to other people who just don't agree with you. Democracy is a hard form of government. We are now the longest lasting continuous democracy in human history, even though we're a very young country. And when you ruin democracy, when people don't have enough regard for each other to listen, learn, and chart a path forward, that's what you get. But it isn't better.