Today’s right-wing conspiracists and militias, Cook asserts, almost universally view Waco as a radicalizing event. “With Waco,” one FBI official noted, “you can go to YouTube and see women and children incinerated, the government using military tools and training against Americans.” The global “war on terror,” the Great Recession, the election of Barack Obama, and the solidification of the neoliberal order have intensified this radicalization, paving the way for the Tea Party, Trumpism, the so-called alt-right, QAnon, the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and increasingly naked expressions of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism.
Ultimately, as one Department of Homeland Security official put it, “The modern-day militia movement owes its existence to Waco,” and that movement is evolving in troubling ways. “Now they’re taking the fight to local school boards and county councils, mainstreaming ideas that would have seemed fringe a few years ago.” Militias are now “blending with QAnon,” another national security expert explained, “people who see Democrats as child-abusing predators.” It is not difficult, then, to trace a direct line between Waco and the January 6 insurrection (in which so many QAnon believers participated) or the anti-gay, anti-trans panic currently buffeting the nation.
The obscene, baseless conspiracies propagated, and racist violence perpetrated, in the Davidians’ name should anger any observer. So too should the state violence that has fueled such responses. How can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory truths?
While Waco Rising draws a clear link between the Mount Carmel siege and the right-wing movements of today, it doesn’t explore, in any meaningful depth, how whiteness has shaped the right’s responses to government “overreach.” As Belew argues, Black and brown people had been the main victims of state violence long before and long after Ruby Ridge and Waco—from the lynching of 38 Indigenous men during the 1862 U.S.–Dakota War to the violent clampdown on the 1960s Black freedom struggle, to the death and destruction wrought by the “war on terror.” Yet in the main, white power and paramilitary groups have only taken umbrage when the government sets its sights on white people—especially white women and children. To that end, far-right actors have often imagined the Branch Davidians as exclusively white.
Yet, although its highly visible leader was white, the congregation at Mount Carmel was incredibly diverse. (People of color made up about half of Koresh’s flock.) As federal agents laid siege to the Mount Carmel compound, the Davidians hung a bedsheet from a window that read, “RODNEY KING WE UNDERSTAND”—an allusion to the unarmed Black motorist whose vicious beating at the hands of four white police officers (and their subsequent acquittal) touched off the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion.