Seventeen years ago, on April 19, 1993, the FBI finished off its siege of the Branch Davidians’ home just outside Waco, Texas, by pumping poisonous and flammable CS gas into a room filled with women and children, driving a tank through the wall, throwing incendiary devices at the survivors and, most likely, spraying them with machinegun fire. The conflagration that engulfed the lives of seventy-six people of diverse international and ethnic backgrounds and of all ages, who had been brought together under the fringe but peaceful religious separatism of David Koresh, came at the end of a 51-day standoff that began when the ATF bungled a public-relations stunt in the form of an aggressive raid of the Davidian home, which had been practiced on life-size model buildings and whose planning began in the lame-duck years of the first Bush administration. Koresh could have easily been arrested without all this fanfare and violence – he was an integrated member of the town, and law enforcement had visited the Davidian home and even fired weapons with him at their shooting range – but the ATF had made sure the press would be there to witness their chivalrous swooping in and capture of this menace of Mt. Carmel. Meth lab! Weapons stockpiles! Child molesters! The excuses for this federal militarism in the heart of Texas were numerous and shifting. But when it was all done, a peaceful American community had been utterly destroyed by the U.S. government.
It was an event that crystallized and radicalized populist rightwing anger at the Clinton administration. The left, for the most part, stood by the federal government, swallowed its propaganda about how the Davidians killed themselves, had been a threat to the community, were stockpiling illegal weapons and harboring child abuse. At the White House press conference, journalists applauded the regime. Liberals mocked the religious nuts and began stoking fears that such extremists were not the last. They were thankful to be "protected" by the FBI. Only the most anti-establishment leftists joined the populist right and radical libertarians in their denunciation of this act of governmental mass murder.