On Koresh – Rachel Monroe in the New Yorker:

‘The federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound, thirty years ago, was flawed from the start. The Branch Davidians were a fringe offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and, in the early nineties, they were led by David Koresh, a charismatic long-haired man who believed that the end of days was imminent. The Davidians lived on a compound called Mount Carmel, twenty miles northeast of Waco, and were well known to local law enforcement, who considered them relatively benign.’

(…)

‘The fifty-one-day siege that followed deteriorated into the most dangerous kind of conflict, one in which both sides felt as though they were backed into a corner. This was much more true for the Branch Davidians, of course, who were barricaded in a compound with plenty of canned food and bullets but a dwindling water supply. But the federal agents surrounding them also felt a sense of desperation. The raid, intended as a show of A.T.F. competence, had instead devolved into a prolonged spectacle of defeat. “The hostages were not those Davidians in there,” Bob Ricks, the F.B.I. special agent in charge of the operation, said later. “The hostage in this whole process was the F.B.I. We had to respond to the demands of David Koresh. We were like actors in his play . . . In the final analysis, everything rested under the control of David Koresh.”’

(…)

‘Weeks into the siege, Koresh claimed that he would surrender peacefully as soon as he finished writing a treatise on the Book of Revelation. Davidians had been communicating with the outside world via messages painted on bedsheets, hung out of windows. Then they displayed one reading “Let’s Have a Beer When This Is Over.” Instead, the tactical faction received approval to end the situation more rapidly. Early on the morning of April 19th, federal agents rammed the Mount Carmel building with tanks and pumped tear gas into the holes they had created. Around noon, someone reported seeing flames. Agents expected to see people flooding out of the building to surrender, but only nine did; more than seventy others, including two dozen children, were crushed as the building collapsed, died by suicide, or were killed in the fire. (One toddler died of a stab wound to the chest.) The government’s heavy-handed, deeply flawed approach enabled Koresh’s transmutation into a martyr.’

(…)

‘ Timothy McVeigh travelled to Texas during the siege, where he sold bumper stickers with slogans like “Fear the Government That Fears Your Gun” and “A Man with a Gun Is a Citizen, A Man Without a Gun Is a Subject.” McVeigh, who was already steeped in white-supremacist rhetoric, became obsessively focussed on Waco. On the second anniversary of the fire, he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City. Five years later, Alex Jones attached himself to efforts to rebuild a church in Mount Carmel. Jones was then twenty-five, had recently been fired from his job as a talk-radio host in Austin and had just launched Infowars. He led a memorial service, during which other speakers referred to the events in 1993 as “our second Alamo.” “All of it—it’s all about public opinion,” Jones told a reporter that day. A few months later, Jones would release a video, “America: Wake Up or Waco,” in which he claims that F.B.I. agents intentionally machine-gunned women and children. The film follows the template that Jones has used successfully ever since—using the government’s real failures to build a paranoid mythology that he bends to sinister ends.’

(…)

‘Koresh and his followers wanted to be left alone; the growing cohort of self-identified Christian nationalists want control of school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. The kind of tactical-firearms training that the Davidians used to prepare for their war with Babylon is now a significant nationwide industry, one that attracts dentists and real-estate agents to weekend classes on urban combat. And there are twice as many privately owned firearms in the U.S. as there were when the Waco siege took place.’

Read the article here.

I went to Waco in 2018 and spoke with the successor of Koresh.

See here.

And yes, war with Baylon i.e. the federal state attracts dentists and real estate agents, it’s not a hobby for lunatics anymore. It became mainstream.

Reason and reasonability are not that attractive. Just read novels. (Or watch movies.)