The Waco siege’s long shadow

In July 2021, police arrested a Virginia man, who was charged with breaching the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection. According to the Justice Department, the man, Fi Duong, continued to stake out the Capitol in the weeks and months after the riot and discussed plans for building and testing bombs. (Duong has pleaded not guilty.) He had stockpiled “multiple firearms and boxes of ammunition,” the government asserts, and at one point told an undercover informant that he was worried about new gun-control regulations that might be imposed by President Biden’s nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. If police came to take his guns, Duong told the informant, his home might become “Waco 2.0.”

Duong’s reported comment was a reference to the 1993 standoff between federal agents and a small religious group, the Branch Davidians, just outside Waco, Tex. - a debacle that ended with 86 people dead. Almost as soon as the siege ended, “Waco” became a watchword for libertarian and far-right groups and a call to arms for those, like Duong, anxious about perceived government tyranny.

February will mark the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the standoff. The 25th anniversary, in 2018, saw a slew of documentaries and news coverage, including a scripted miniseries airing on Paramount Plus. But five years further on, the memory of Waco has particular resonance in the wake of Jan. 6.

The 1993 siege helped spark the American militia movement, a trend toward far-right paramilitary organizing that received new prominence when groups like the Oath Keepers marched into the Capitol that day in 2021. And the fumes of conspiracy and paranoia that swirled around Waco feel all too familiar in a contemporary political environment haunted by lies about the “deep state” and a stolen election that led thousands of people to attack the U.S. Congress.

Anniversaries can lend themselves to strained or hackneyed efforts to connect the commemorated event to more recent developments. But in the case of Waco, unfortunately, no such strain is necessary. In 1995, in an act of terrorism inspired by rage over the government’s handling of Waco, Timothy

McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The Justice Department official who oversaw the investigation of that bombing, Merrick Garland, is now presiding over the Jan. 6 investigation in his role as attorney general. Paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, whose members have been charged in connection with their roles in the attack on the Capitol, originated in a surge of far-right distrust of the federal government after Waco. In the two years since the insurrection, a number of militia groups present that day have splintered, but their ideologies persist.

Two new books, “Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias” by Kevin Cook and “Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage” by Jeff Guinn, look back on the 1993 catastrophe from the standpoint of 2023.