How Waco Became a Right-Wing Rallying Cry

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Barack, Washington, Wickenden, News, Obama, Politics, Wnyc, Lizza, President

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Donald Trump recently staged the first major rally of his 2024 Presidential campaign in Waco, Texas. Thirty years ago, a botched federal raid on the compound of the Branch Davidians—a heavily-armed splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventist Church dominated by the charismatic David Koresh—led to a harrowing fifty-one-day siege. Just twenty miles from Waco, this standoff ended with federal tanks, tear gas, a fire, and more than seventy dead. Trump’s people claim the rally’s timing is coincidental, the location chosen for its convenient travel from four major Texas metropolitan areas. But in the past thirty years the siege of Waco has become a rallying cry for right-wing extremists from Timothy McVeigh to Alex Jones. Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers Texas and the Southwest. She joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about what happened in 1993, and how its mythology remains a galvanizing political force thirty years later.

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0:48.2	You're listening to The Political Scene, a show about current events and the political forces driving them.
0:53.7	I'm Tyler Faggett and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.
0:57.3	This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the siege on Waco, Texas, a 51-day standoff
1:02.7	between Branch Divideans and Federal agents, which resulted in dozens of deaths.
1:07.7	On March 25th, Trump held his first major campaign rally in Waco. So they're not coming after me. They're coming after you. And I'm just standing in their way. And I'm going to be standing in their way for a long time. Before the event, Trump's niece Mary tweeted, It's a ploy to remind his cult of the infamous Waco siege of 1993 where an anti-government cult battled the FBI.
1:28.6	Scores of people died.
1:30.1	He wants the same violent chaos to rescue him from justice.
1:33.5	The history of the Waco Siege has been reduced to simple political narratives, but the
1:37.5	reality is incredibly complicated, leaving arguments about gun rights with fears of an increasingly
1:42.1	militarized police.
1:43.8	My colleague Rachel Monroe has written a piece about the siege and about the mythology that it spawned.
1:49.1	Hi, Rachel. Thanks so much for being here today. Thank you for having me.
1:52.6	So this spring marks the 30th anniversary of the Waco siege. And before we get into the details of everything that happened there, I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the significance of Waco today and how the event has sort of transformed in the modern political imagination.
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