By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, April 30, 2020
One of the things that good people of Waco would like the
world to know is that the events depicted in Waco, a television series about the Branch Davidian standoff and
massacre in 1993, did not actually happen in Waco. Waco is Chip and Joanna
Gaines and Baylor University — David Koresh’s Mount Carmel compound was out
there in the unincorporated county.
It is a testament to the cultural force of Netflix that
it has captured the public imagination with Waco,
a television miniseries that actually aired two years ago on a foundering
competitor channel but that is, for all most people know, a fresh Netflix
production. If it wasn’t on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, did it really
happen?
The Branch Davidian story is shocking, and it has not
lost its power to alarm. For those who do not remember the 1990s (which are
turning out to be a decade of our history almost as fiercely contested as the
1960s), the events depicted must seem both unlikely and grotesque: an ATF
publicity stunt that turned into a bloodbath, a siege, and, finally, a
horrifying fire that took the lives of 76 people trapped inside the compound,
including 25 children and two pregnant women.
I was present as a young student journalist for some of
that drama, although, as was true for most of the media there, what I saw was
mostly other media, a fantastical display of lights out in the otherwise dark
countryside, a scene having the atmosphere of a kind of grim county fair. A
couple of photographers with whom I worked at the University of Texas newspaper
were detained by authorities for crossing the police cordon in pursuit of a
better shot. (The photographers from my college newspaper staff, a rowdy but
gifted bunch, went on to collectively earn four Pulitzer prizes in photography
their first few years out of college.) It was a little like an NFL game: You
want to be there in person, but you really get a better view on television.
It was, above all, confusing. The confusion is with us,
still.
One the great losses at Mount Carmel, beyond the
unnecessary and therefore unforgivable loss of human life, is that David Koresh
and the others who died there were never put on trial — and neither was the
ATF. (A handful of Branch Davidian survivors were convicted on charges ranging
from voluntary manslaughter to resisting arrest; civil suits by survivors
against the authorities have mostly come to nothing.) Instead of the gold
standard of a criminal trial under American law — imperfect but nonetheless one
of the great unsung achievements of American life — we got the Danforth report,
a dozen competing narratives warped by political allegiances and motivated
reasoning, paranoia, myth, self-reinforcing biases, and a great deal of
dishonest bureaucratic ass-covering.
And so the wound remained open, and festered.
David Koresh was no stranger to violence: He’d earlier
been tried on attempted-murder charges after a shootout
over control of the Mount Carmel compound. Koresh gained control of Mount
Carmel only after a rival faction leader, who had unsuccessfully challenged
Koresh to a resurrection contest
after digging up the corpse of one of his followers, was obliged to plead
insanity in an axe-murder case.
Koresh was a lunatic. He may or may not have been guilty
of the federal firearms charges that were the subject of the warrant the ATF
was there to serve. The ATF, which to this day defends its actions at Mount
Carmel, says that it was moved to action in part by the fact that the Branch
Davidians had acquired 136 firearms, 700 magazines, and 200,000 rounds of
ammunition — none of which is illegal, and none of which is even especially
surprising given that a federally licensed firearms dealer was based on the
premises, out of which the Branch Davidians operated a commercial firearms
business. The ATF charged that the Branch Davidians had components that would
have allowed them to produce illegal weapons. That is true. It is also true of
any American who owns both a shotgun and a hacksaw, as the ATF knows all too well.
The weapons case was weak, but the Branch Davidians, a
bunch of goofy rustic cultists out there in the boonies, presented an
attractive target for the Clinton administration.
Koresh almost certainly was guilty of sexually abusing
young girls, but he was not charged with those crimes.
He could have been, easily.
Instead, the ATF staged an assault, complete with
helicopters and other military swag, for the benefit of the cameras and,
through them, congressional appropriators who were giving the agency the hairy
eyeball after the fiasco at Ruby Ridge. Koresh and his parishioners were well
known to and in some cases friendly with the local sheriff and his staff, and
Koresh was far from being a recluse holed up in his compound: He was a jogger
and sometime musician who frequently was out and about in town unaccompanied.
He could have been brought in quietly by a couple of locals or discreetly by
the feds, but doing it quietly and discreetly would have defeated the purpose
of the operation the ATF nicknamed “Showtime.”
The assault was bungled, and the bungling compounded by
lies. The ATF had lied about the presence of a methamphetamine lab in the
compound in order to secure helicopters (used purely as props for dramatic
purposes) from the military under the increasingly militarized practices of the
so-called war on drugs; in fact, there were neither drugs nor even drug
charges. Federal authorities subsequently lied to Congress and investigators
about the use of incendiary devices in the assault and later were obliged to
engage in some very vigorous handwaving when confronted with physical evidence
to the contrary. Damning pages from a report to Congress went missing with no
explanation. As Newsweek put it at
the time, the federal authorities “concealed and may have lied about relatively
minor mistakes, and fueled a conspiracy when there didn’t need to be one.”
Much of the following discussion was about who fired
first: Waco proposes (as one ATF
agent reported at the time) that the first shots were fired by ATF agents
killing the Branch Davidians’ dogs — and suggests that the rest of the agents
on the scene, who had not been expecting to hear those gunshots, opened fire in
panic and kept firing until they ran down their ammunition. But the real issue
is not who fired first; the real issue, as Waco
emphasizes, is that the federal government under the Clinton administration
staged a military operation instead of a law-enforcement operation, that it did
so for purely political reasons, and that in doing so it created a situation
that was far more combustible than the one it was, in theory, attempting to
police.
The Clinton administration was succeeded by the George W.
Bush administration, which constructed a theory of unlimited presidential power
in a “war on terror” in which the battleground is literally everywhere. The
Bush administration was succeeded by the Barack Obama administration, which
claimed for itself the power to assassinate American citizens as part of that
same unceasing war. Barack Obama was succeeded by Donald Trump, who declared
himself to be in possession of authority that is “total.” The pissant mayor of
New York City has threatened to permanently shut down churches and synagogues
that violate the city’s coronavirus social-distancing mandates. Many
Republicans agree with my National Review
colleague and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy that “there
was no good-faith basis for an investigation of General Flynn,” that the
case against him was part of a political operation masquerading as a
law-enforcement operation. Many progressives take it as an article of faith
that local police routinely murder
young black men with no consequence, and Joe Biden recently suggested that the
Trump administration intends to execute what amounts to a coup d’état by canceling the election.
There is a strain of unreasoning paranoia in American
public life, and it is a serious problem — but it did not come from nowhere.
It came, at least in part, from Waco.
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