I just watched the Waco on Netflix. It was surprisingly even handed and didn't paint the ATF or FBI in a very good light.
I think the problem, and we still see this today, is that the government just decides to curb stomp certain people for breaking the law. Then when things go south, they blame all of their poor decisions on the criminal suspect. "I wouldn't have had to kill all these people if you hadn't broke the law and brought me out here in the first place."
The original ATF raid was meant to be a display of force when they could have just as easily scooped Koresh up the next time he came into town to buy groceries- they had an informant literally in his house who snuck off right before the raid started.
Then, it seemed like the FBI's hostage rescue team was constantly undermining the negotiation team. They interviewed the lead negotiator, and he was basically pushed off the case because he kept butting heads with the tactical guys, and after he left not a single person walked out of the compound before they burnt it down.
You're missing the real reason those people all died.
Hillary Clinton had recently intervened in the political process to the point of having been allowed to choose the attorney general despite not holding any office herself. She selected her croney Janet Reno.
They set out from the beginning to slaughter those people so that 'muh first female AG" could look tough. The Branch Davidians were murdered for the sake of girlbossing.
Literally heard this straight from the mouth of one of the members of HRT that was there. The whole thing could have ended day 2 by the Clintons and Reno had other ideas
Do they talk about the front door of the compound, that mysteriously went missing while in the Texas Ranger evidence locker? Do they mention how the BATF ran completely out of ammo on the initial raid, because those fucking cowards were cowering behind their cars out front blindly firing into the compound?
The Waco raid was my awakening moment. Fucking BATF cowboys staged a raid for the cameras, and got their nuts shot off for their trouble. The siege was typical DC directed bumbling. Even back then, people who worked in D.C. thought the midwest were nothing but redneck cousin fucking hillbillies.
No one, at any level, paid sort of a professional cost for the monumental fuck up that was Waco. No one.
See, those of you who became politically aware after 9/11 don't really remember Bill Clinton's 2 terms. His administration was the start of the really fucked up politicized shit that federal cops do now as a matter of routine. If you think about it, it makes more sense, because the senior agents in leadership positions now all were junior federal agent men back then, and the few bad apples that Clinton brought on set the tone for how federal agencies were going to hire and promote.
For example, how many of you know that Isacc Asimov's kid, David, was caught in 2001 with a collection of child porn that was the most ever seized in CA at the time? Thousands of VHS tapes, thousands of disks. David walked with probation thanks to a plea deal worked out with the prosecuting attorney. The US Attorney who handled that case?
Robert Mueller.
A lot of us are too young to have been politically aware before Bathhouse Barry's debut to be fair. It wasn't so easy to get access to information before the internet became part of life. Waco is historical to a lot of us. I imagine it was quite the experience living through the beginning. This shit is all a lot of us have ever known.
This is an oft forgotten point. Pre-internet, it was hard to have a real good idea of any event unless you were above a certain age and physically around to witness.
Which, wasn't a problem for things that were neutral or written about extensively by numerous opposing parties. But if it was contentious, or a narrative was built around it, then the information was basically being passed around orally by guy's you were not likely to trust.
Art Bell (F) was probably one of the most significant mainstream sources of a counter-narrative to Waco. Yeah he was kinda a boomer lolbert, but the Feds fucking up Waco was a bit of a hobby horse for him. And he had a massive audience.
Of course you had to be listening to him at 2am to hear it, in between the guys talking about alien and Elvis sightings. So perhaps I see your point there...
Art (and him having Alex Jones on at the time) is exactly where I got my anti-big government awakening. It just took me a while to realize that both sides want big government.
Apparently there was quite the discussion on usenet in the late 90s, about all the crazy stuff that happened during Clinton's 2 terms. A blogger I read, Billy Beck, was part of it, and has talked about it off and on over the years. Apparently it was quite... caustic.
Billy Beck is the one that in 2009 coined the phrase, "All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war," which you see on the mast head of many blogger web sites.
TBH in the 90s, the only people really talking about Waco and Ruby Ridge were people like Art Bell, Alex Jones, Texe Marrs, Jim Tucker, and Militia groups.
They do touch on this. They interview one of the reporters who was tipped off to the raid and was the first on the scene. They show a bunch of footage of the ATF dead and injured being hauled away and you can hear the ATF agents cussing out the cameraman and telling him to "turn off that fucking camera."
In the interview the reporter comments that they didn't seem to have a problem with the cameras when they called them there because they thought it was going to be a slam dunk before they got bitch slapped by the Branch davidians.
Waco was way, way worse than what the Netflix documentary shows. The U.S. government intentionally murdered all of those people, and the media helped the government cover it up, by claiming the Davidians were cultists harming children.
Good thing the feds saved the children by setting them on fire.
I'd like to add some sources for you, but if I edit my first reply you won't get a notification for it. So, I'm adding a new reply.
Read this 4chan summary first, as it gives a quick rundown of the bullshit the Feds did:
https://i.4cdn.org/tv/1679498664162891.png
Here are 3 videos on the Waco siege:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZwFxWb0y7w
https://www.bitchute.com/video/mJzUWoaY4R3c/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/8Hf3uOUWZTAv/
If you think the government would never do all that, read up on the bullshit surrounding Ruby Ridge. Or, read up on what the federal government did at the Oregon wildlife refuge standoff (and the bullshit starting decades prior):
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2016/01/03/full-story-on-whats-going-on-in-oregon-militia-take-over-malheur-national-wildlife-refuge-in-protest-to-hammond-family-persecution/
Or, check out political conspiracies, like the Gulf of Tonkin (used to get us involved in Viet Nam), or the "babies in incubators" lie (used to get us into the first Iraq war), or the chemical weapon attacks in Syria lie (faked by media or used by the "rebels", not Assad), or what happened with Libya and Gaddafi, or how Obama and NATO supported the Muslim Brotherhood (a terrorist organization) in Egypt to overthrow the government, or how the U.S. government knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor (but let them, to give us casus belli to enter the war the American public didn't want), or how the CIA was/is smuggling drugs into the U.S., or how our own troops were used to guard poppy fields in Afghanistan, or how we invaded Afghanistan right before the Taliban were going to eliminate all poppy production, or how the U.S. opioid epidemic occurred almost right after the invasion of Afghanistan, or how ISIS was created by the U.S. and Israel (the CIA and Mossad trained, funded, armed, and ran the "rebels" all across the Middle East during the "Arab Spring"), or how the U.S. government experimented on people without their knowledge (multiple times), or operation Mockingbird (the government and globalists are in control of mainstream media to propagandize the public), or...etc.
To properly understand the world and what happens, you need a proper understanding of conspiracies, information you won't find through mainstream media or government/globalist controlled institutions.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the Branch Davidians even broke the law.
The ATF/FBI claimed there was child abuse going on there but nothing was ever proved. Good thing the government was there to burn all the children to death to stop the abuse though.
AFT raid was for suspicion of possessing unregistered machine guns. The BATF never proved that in court.
Weapons charges. They said they were converting weapons to full auto and making explosives. Hard to tell if it's true; the footage they air of the original fire fight clearly has automatic weapons fire, but you can't tell which side it's coming from.
One of the agents interviewed said he heard an M60 and it wasn't theirs, so take that for what you will.
I was under the impression that all their weapons were legal. They had a member with an FFL I think but he was out (buying more weapons) at the time of the raid.
You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to buy full auto, and pay a $200 tax on each. If you make them, you need a special license too. A regular FFL can't sell Class 3 weapons or make them.
Need a SOT, I think. Even then, you need a customer base that can legally buy automatics, and you're only allowed to build dealer samples, since you can't put them on the now-illegally-closed illegal-from-day-one registry.
Brandon Herrera and Ian McCollum have both explained it (I think Ian had an interviewee explain it), but I don't remember all of the specifics.
FFLs with a SOT can manufacture "dealer samples" for demonstration and media purposes. This has been interpreted to include TV, movies and YouTube. Their FFL could own as many machine guns as he could afford and could have even formed a trust that actually owned them which could have included all the adults in the compound. That means any one of them could legally possess and use them wherever legal and safe.
As was the situation in the UK with Jean Charles de Menezes.
He was shot in the face with hollow-points at point-blank range at least half a dozen times because of a fuck up.
That, honestly, is just the way the Met rolls.
After the Met killed Ian Tomlinson, their friends in the media made a big thing about how the brave policemen were beating back feral crowds of rioters to try and save Tomlinson from the baying pack of savages.
Total bollocks, all of it. Tomlinson got smacked around by the Met on an otherwise-empty street and died from an internal bleed shortly after.
everyone involved in waco and ruby ridge should have been executed for their gross incompetence and demonstrated malice.
They weren't incompetent. They were crafty. They accomplished all their goals and were able to convince people that it was all a series of unfortunate events that they were forced into when they actually engineered everything. Our enemies are intelligent, perceptive, patient, dedicated and evil. They might have some useful idiots that they use for cover but never make the mistake of thinking that the people behind events like Waco are fools. They most certainly are not.
It was like one of those action movies with a hostage situation, and the negotiator keeps getting overruled by the police captain because this is his operation that's going to put him in the spotlight and give him a chance for that big promotion, and he's got a huge chip on his shoulder so they keep butting heads and tells the guy to get the fuck outta there because he knows what he's doing and the negotiator probably has bad rep at the station for some stupid thing from way in the past. Then the captain makes a mistake and one of the hostages gets shot or something and finally the negotiator is like "You fuck this up man, they're not gonna take your badge. They're gonna have your head. I know how guys like this think. Let me talk to him.", and finally the captain relents and lets the negotiator do his thing and he saves the hostages and the captain has egg on his face but they're all on the same team and the good guys won in the end.
Except the complete opposite happened and everyone died. It's ok it still worked out in the end because the captain became the Attorney General of the United States.
David Koresh was a nutcase and a cult leader.
But what was done to him was still criminal.
He definitely was but what happened was crazy. And like I mentioned before they could’ve arrested him any number of times. He jogged frequently around the area
I say that about every single drug dealer (or not as the case may be) that they kick down the door of. With the cops, I assume it's less fun/convenient to bust the guy outside. Basically, if you call the SWAT team you can plan when to bust the guy. If you wait him out, you'll be waiting. They don't want to do waiting so they do a raid. They also get more evidence this way, but to me that wouldn't be worth officers' lives, not to mention bystanders.
That is surprising. Since it’s Netflix was Koresh played by a black guy? Kidding but that is good to hear that they are talking about how the govt handled that. It’s weird because they could’ve arrested him at any time before all that
Its not as good as it seems. This is a case where the tide clearly turned against their narrative, so everyone can churn out a vaguely "against" the government angled piece to pretend they don't have an obvious bias.
Waco is nearly impossible to defend at this point, so they stopped trying and instead just make it sound like ambiguous, depersonalized organizations like the FBI and ATF (or the "negotiation team and hostage rescue team") fucked up, instead of naming names and demanding accountability from guys who still have positions and taxpayer funded lives. Because even when they give the name, they don't point out how some of them have horrible histories that make their very attendance a point of problem and went on with their respective organizations to continue these same actions.
Because that would be actually attacking how the government handled it, instead of just treating it as a footnote of history.
Well said. I was in 6th grade when that all went down and didn’t actually look into it til I was 22 in the Air Force. I was shocked
I remember the Rules of Engagement documentary made some years ago to be good as well.
Also for a contemporary counter-narrative, look up old Art Bell Coast 2 Coast episodes. At the time he used to be more of a traditional right-wing talk radio broadcaster and had much to say about how that was handled.
Wendigoon has a great video about Waco as well.