Few saw things that way in 1993, when the public needed someone to blame. Some pointed fingers at the FBI and ATF. Others focused on the cultists and especially Koresh, who’d been preaching that the US government—which he called the forces of Babylon—would soon wage war against the Davidians, God’s chosen people. He’d been amassing weapons and training his flock how to use them in an imminent attack. They were not only ready, but eager to die in this battle, believing they would immediately be resurrected to lead God’s army. “David Koresh was manifesting the apocalypse,” says Russell.
But a growing collection of militant white-power groups were also expecting it. This loose movement launched in the late 1970s in response to the failure of the Vietnam War, which de facto white supremecist leader Louis Beam attributed to a corrupt American government. By the mid-’90s, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated the coalition had ballooned to 5 million (a number including non-member sympathizers). Whereas earlier American white-power movements like the Ku Klux Klan purported to support and serve a stronger (white) state, this modern iteration of the white supremacist movement aimed its arsenal of weapons directly at the American government and the cabal of global elites allegedly using it as a puppet.
In 1983, Beam and the Aryan Nations World Congress formally declared war on the United States, but quickly the enemy shifted to the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), an alleged organization led by Jews that purportedly controls the governments of Western nations. It coalesced after the Berlin Wall fell, and George H.W. Bush made a couple of speeches referencing the “new world order” that would appear in the wake of the Soviet Union. Anti-government conspiracists heard proof in his words of that evil cabal they already believed was working behind the scenes.
This was the environment in which Waco occurred—in which the government demonstrated an unprecedented use of force, including military helicopters and armored tanks, against its own citizens. The year prior, US marshals and federal agents had killed the son and wife of white separatist Randy Weaver during a standoff outside his rural home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, after he failed to appear in court on a weapons charge. “Ruby Ridge was the rallying cry,” Drew Dowdle explains, “and Waco was the act of war.”
Timothy McVeigh soon took the baton, detonating a fertilizer truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City tha tkilled 168 people. He intentionally made his attack exactly two years after the Waco fire; he also chose the same date as the birthday on his fake ID.
At the time of McVeigh’s arrest, he said he had worked alone—and law enforcement mostly accepted his claims. But in fact, as Showtime’s Waco series explores, McVeigh communicated with and moved among a variety of militias and cells across the country. The groups all collaborated, but hid their connections.
Koresh preached that the government was controlled by the biblical enemy Babylon, rather than the new world order. His theory about an evil and hostile government was strikingly similar to Beam’s, but the Branch Davidians were distinct in that they were a multiracial community. “One thing I find particularly heartbreaking is that the memory of those who perished at Mount Carmel [the name of Branch Davidians’ compound] has been so fully appropriated by a cause they didn’t even agree with,” explains Drew Dowdle. “To equate the Branch Davidians with a violent white-power ideology would be inaccurate, and the connection between [Waco and Oklahoma City] has added to the tragedy for those who survived.”
After Waco, the FBI became more judicious in investigations—a prudent move that nevertheless may have swung the pendulum too far. Law enforcement’s reluctance to move against the white-power movement contributed to its failure to ascertain and thwart McVeigh’s plans. By 1996, a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, the number of extreme anti-government groups had risen sharply to 858, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. By 2008, the number was down to 149. But after the election of Barack Obama, it soared again to 1,360. QAnon adherents and Alex Jones—and countless other conspiracists—are still fearful of the new world order coming to enslave us all.
Documentarian Russell believes the tendency for “certain sectors of the public to completely disavow and disbelieve institutions is the biggest challenge we’re facing as a culture.” He places the ultimate blame for the events at Waco, though, on a “failure to communicate.”
John Erick Dowdle echoes the sentiment. “Communication and empathy,” he says, “will always be far more effective tools than force and violence.”
Jane Borden
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