Two Minutes Past Nine attempts to understand the ideology behind the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Timothy McVeigh, one of the people behind the attack, might have set the fuse, but the violence was rooted in deeper anti-government sentiment and bigotry. The reporter Leah Sottile details the grievances of far-right thinkers who inspired McVeigh, such as William Pierce. Many of the people Sottile reports on accept, if not embrace, the idea of a race war. They view guns as sacrosanct and believe the feds are coming to confiscate them. This may seem like well-trodden ground, but Two Minutes Past Nine contends that to know America, one must comprehend the forces behind far-right movements. Sottile argues that the anti-government movement is a tradition that extends back to John Wilkes Booth. McVeigh wasn’t an aberration; he was a cornerstone of the grand American experiment that we can’t choose to ignore.