The Branch Davidians appeared to see a kinship between their struggle and those of other victims of state violence; one of their bedsheet messages read “Rodney King We Understand.” In the decades since, the people who have got the most mileage out of the tragedy have told a narrower story, one of a powerful and oppressive federal government waging war on gun-loving, God-fearing citizens. (In this fable, the Davidians are implicitly coded as white, even though at least two dozen of them were not.) Timothy McVeigh travelled to Texas during the siege, where he sold bumper stickers with slogans like “Fear the Government That Fears Your Gun” and “A Man with a Gun Is a Citizen, A Man Without a Gun Is a Subject.” McVeigh, who was already steeped in white-supremacist rhetoric, became obsessively focussed on Waco. On the second anniversary of the fire, he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City. Five years later, Alex Jones attached himself to efforts to rebuild a church in Mount Carmel. Jones was then twenty-five, had recently been fired from his job as a talk-radio host in Austin and had just launched Infowars. He led a memorial service, during which other speakers referred to the events in 1993 as “our second Alamo.” “All of it—it’s all about public opinion,” Jones told a reporter that day. A few months later, Jones would release a video, “America: Wake Up or Waco,” in which he claims that F.B.I. agents intentionally machine-gunned women and children. The film follows the template that Jones has used successfully ever since—using the government’s real failures to build a paranoid mythology that he bends to sinister ends.
That mythology, and its attendant rhetoric of grievance and aggression, is politically ascendant in many parts of the country, even as its most vocal proponents consider themselves beset on all sides by enemies. Earlier this month, congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene staged her own mini-confrontation with the A.T.F., showing up at a gun store in Smyrna, Georgia, during a routine inspection. “This is a prime example of Joe Biden and the Democrats weaponizing federal agencies to silence and intimidate their political opponents,” she tweeted later. “I fear this is just the beginning and they are directly targeting our Second Amendment and our right to protect and defend our families.” Koresh and his followers wanted to be left alone; the growing cohort of self-identified Christian nationalists want control of school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. The kind of tactical-firearms training that the Davidians used to prepare for their war with Babylon is now a significant nationwide industry, one that attracts dentists and real-estate agents to weekend classes on urban combat. And there are twice as many privately owned firearms in the U.S. as there were when the Waco siege took place. ♦