There is a long history of law enforcement besieging and attacking U.S. communities. In 1973, federal agents had a months-long standoff, with gunfire, against Native activists at Wounded Knee (itself the famous site of an 1890 Army massacre). In 1985, police bombed the Black commune MOVE in Philadelphia, sparking a fire that burned sixty-one homes and caused eleven deaths.
The siege in Waco, however, killed white people. Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota activist who’d been at the Wounded Knee standoff, wrote a blues, “Waco: The White Man’s Wounded Knee,” welcoming whites to the Indigenous experience: “Soldiers burning babies is nothing new. / It happened to us, now it’s happening to you.”
Now it’s happening to you. The Branch Davidians were actually multiracial, but they were white enough for their plight to set alarms ringing. The anthropologist Susan Lepselter, who studied U.F.O. believers in the nineties, found that, for many, Waco had “crystallized” their distrustful world view. After the event, the leader of the Heaven’s Gate movement advised his U.F.O.-believing followers to arm themselves in preparation for a lethal raid by “the authorities.” When it didn’t come, the group, in 1997, sought death another way: via mass suicide.
Two years later, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, inspired by McVeigh, attacked their high school in Columbine, Colorado. They set April 19, 1999—the sixth anniversary of the Waco fire and the fourth of McVeigh’s bombing—as “Judgment Day.” (Trouble securing ammunition pushed it back to April 20th.) They nearly succeeded in their aim to kill more people than McVeigh did. Though they’re remembered as school shooters, Harris and Klebold also planted enormous bombs, which, had they detonated, “would have killed five hundred people,” Dave Cullen writes in his 2009 book, “Columbine.”
Waco was especially meaningful to the paramilitary movement. Between 1993 and 1995, more than eight hundred militias and Patriot groups formed. These groups, important vehicles for white power, differed from the mixed-race and Israel-sympathizing Branch Davidians. Still, Waco (along with Ruby Ridge) was their rallying cry, incorporated into calls for a race war and for attacks on the state. An undercover agent working among them recalled, “There was hardly one militia member I met who didn’t mention Waco as his awakening.”
Alex Jones was nineteen during the Waco siege. As Cook explains, he was haunted by the event, and raised funds to rebuild the Branch Davidians’ church. In his twenties, Jones hosted a popular talk-radio show in Austin, yet his Waco monomania got it cancelled. So, in 1999, he launched Infowars, an outlet all his own.
At first, Jones’s ravings seemed harmless. “He was this hyper guy that we’d all kind of make fun of,” the Austin director Richard Linklater, who cast Jones in his films “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly,” recalled. But Jones collected a fervid fan base, including, notably, President Trump. “It is surreal,” Jones reflected, “to talk about issues here on air and word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later.”
