Why the Siege of Waco Gave Rise to the Age of Conspiracy Theories and Donald Trump

David Koresh was a man ahead of his time. After the calamitous 1993 fire at Waco, Texas, which saw 76 of Koresh’s followers killed after a long FBI siege, the cult leader turned from a freak and a nobody to a saint of the far right, which saw the tragedy as a black omen of America’s future. When Donald Trump kicked off his 2024 presidential campaign in Waco last month, it was as if the place had become a holy shrine, a successor to Plymouth Rock or the Alamo. But much darker. Soon, the conspiratorial right believes, the federal government will come for all of us just as they came for the Branch Davidians in Texas.

As the thirtieth anniversary of the fire approached, with the country plagued with premonitions of violent unrest, even civil war, journalist Stephan Talty set out to discover what drove David Koresh. Why did he feel compelled to lead his people into a lethal confrontation with the FBI? And what could it mean for Americans today? After three years of research, Talty discovered that Koresh and his lieutenants were often bewitched by the same conspiracy theories that fuel Trump’s fans. Koresh and the Branch Davidians were among the early patients of a then-hidden contagion that has since spread to every corner of the country.

In an exclusive excerpt from Talty’s new book, “Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco,” Koresh and his desperate followers face the full power of the federal government — and reveal to horrified FBI negotiators their belief that America was the new Babylon.

[A note on the numbers: there are various counts of the dead. 72 killed in the fire, 76 if you include the 4 Branch Davidians found in tunnels underneath the compound, with bullet wounds from the initial ATF raid. And then 6 more victims found outside the compound — 2 Davidians killed in the raid, and the 4 ATF agents who died. 76 is the number Talty used in the book.]

On Sunday afternoon, March 28, 1993, David Koresh was in a bitter mood. Dressed in a white tank top and jeans, he lay on the second floor of the Branch Davidian compound, his back propped against a wall, on the phone with the FBI. They had cut off the electricity, so the dark interior of the building was lit by candles, and quite cold.

The phone line snaked out of the compound, across land where FBI snipers studied the compound windows, and connected to a phone at a temporary headquarters a few miles away. There, a team of five negotiators — primary, secondary, technical adviser, note taker and team leader — sat in a minimally furnished room, listening and talking.

It was exactly one month into the siege at Waco, and Koresh felt the FBI was messing with his manhood. They’d invaded his home, scoffed at his Bible teachings, and rutted the land around his home with their tanks. Agents had given him the finger and even pulled down their pants to moon his followers. He was fed up.

“You boys are murderers,” he said. “My country has dealt with me and people I love in a way that’s not right … What you’ve done about it is you’ve disrespected my personage … You’ve disrespected my religion.”

David’s outbursts alternated with Bible studies, which the negotiators tried to stop in their tracks. Most times, he wore them down and spoke on the Scriptures for as long as he could stay awake. In their daily press conferences, the FBI began implying — sometimes stating it plainly — that David was a conman, an imposter who pretended to be a man of faith. The negotiators knew that this was false. David couldn’t stop speaking about God.

David’s mood could turn easily, the FBI had found. At times, he seemed to want to befriend the negotiators, guys mostly in their thirties and forties. In his drawling voice, he even told them he loved them. David had an old-boy charm about him that could work on your mind. He wished he could meet up one day with the FBI agents, he said, have a beer or two. Maybe they’d ride their motorcycles around Lake Waco.

There were times, too, when their talks seemed more like therapy than negotiations. David’s mind roamed back to his childhood in the small towns of Texas, his family life, schooldays. He talked about what things might have been like if he’d done something differently here or there. Maybe he could have been a true-blue American hero, like the FBI’s own Eliot Ness. 

David: “If the president of the United States had come to me one day and says, you know, ‘I want you to work with the United States of America, you’ve been a good citizen. I’ve seen your report cards … You’ve been a good citizen and I want you to work on a tactical force with the FBI and I want you to help deal with, with bad guys and everything and I’d like to give you this position …’ ”

Across the staticky phone line, his voice was warm.

“I would have been so honored and so proud… ,” he went on, “that somebody would have overlooked my apparent bad English and bad history. You know what I mean?”

It was almost touching. But as the siege wore on, David’s view of what the government was doing only grew darker. The FBI truly was the Army of Babylon; the signs were everywhere. The Bible had foretold what was to come, and it was grim.

David: Now, the Fifth Seal, you know, in Isaiah 26, it says we have a strong city. Salvation will guard our plentiful walls and bulwarks… It says trust in the Lord, for the Lord is everlasting strength. So bringeth down them that dwell on high …

Negotiator: David—

David: I know it sounds like poetry to you, doesn’t it?

Negotiator: No, listen, I just want to—

David: You all are going to kill us.

For David and his lieutenants, politics was spiritual warfare by other means, and in the FBI’s actions they saw Satan at work. Steve Schneider, David’s second in command, returned to this theme again and again. “All of us — all my life — I will tell you the truth — I’ve been a patriotic, an extremely patriotic person,” he told the FBI. “Very conservative. I’ve always backed this government. I’ve always backed the officials, the people in it. All my life. I’ve always — I thought it was the most awesome nation, the Constitution, its principles.

“But I’ve seen powerful men eroding that away. When I was taking history through the years, there were just too many dimensions that were left unanswered that did not make sense. And then I met an admiral of the United States Navy who started showing me documentation about the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, all these organizations of which you have all this power-hungry money people like the Rockefellers behind it all.”

He told the negotiators that, since around 1920, the Council on Foreign Relations—“sixteen or eighteen… of the greatest industrialists, politicians, meaning congressmen, international bankers”—met regularly to decide where the world would go next. And then there was the Federal Reserve System. Private bankers coining our money. Manipulating the economy. It was a dirty deal, for sure.

The siege at Waco was already acting as a bright beacon for the far right, Second Amendment absolutists, and those who felt Washington was out of touch and oppressive. Alex Jones, the future right-wing radio host, was a high school senior in Austin, a hundred miles away, as the siege unfolded. He was already delving into conspiracy theories, but as he watched the nonstop coverage on CNN, it “confirmed his belief in the inexorable progress of unseen, malevolent forces.”

He would soon start his first call-in radio show, featuring screeds against the federal government in his trademark bellow. Years later, Jones’s abortive plan to rebuild the Waco compound as a sacred memorial and alt-right Alamo would launch him to national fame.

Steve struck another theme that would live on long after Waco. He believed that what was happening to the Davidians would soon happen to all Americans. “It was warned by God in the writings of the Bible,” he said, “and by great men like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson, Madison, what could come of this country if the men and women of this country weren’t vigilant for freedom. You know, government has taken control and it’s taking greater control, more freedoms are being taken from us, you and I. Let me say, I’ll probably be in trouble for it but I believe ATF has been brought about as an agency to take away those freedoms slowly but surely, insidiously … 

“You’ve got this maniac organization … on the loose. They’re terrorists. They should be dealt with as such. They should be investigated … Everybody is guilty until proven innocent, that’s what you’ve shown over and over again.”

Steve insisted that the government was planning a massacre at Mount Carmel. Why, the FBI negotiators asked. Why would the government kill its own people? To force gun control on all Americans, Steve said. “We’re taking a twilight trip here to the Auschwitz camp.”

For the far right, Waco made a secret world visible. “Waco became a door,” wrote Sharon Ponder, a frequent contributor to right-wing websites, “and a finger of God for the nation.” The far right not only gained a set of martyrs, the legitimacy of its enemies — the ATF, the FBI — was publicly weakened.

A year after the tragedy, in 1994, the first major militia sprang up in Michigan. Smaller, loosely organized groups had convened in other states before, but the Michigan militia attracted thousands of members and drilled them in antigovernment ideas. Many more such outfits followed. And they didn’t merely lie in wait. In the early nineties, the FBI was opening about a hundred domestic terrorism cases a year. At the end of the decade, it was ten times that. By the mid-nineties, militias were operating in every state in the union, with as many as 250,000 total members. Waco had indeed been a door, and millions walked through it and into a world where conspiracies grew like wild bamboo. Ordinary people — your mailman, your doctor, your husband or daughter — learned that America was being corrupted and sold to evil ones.

Another watershed came just eleven days after Waco. On April 30, 1993, the computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee released the source code for the first-ever web browser, which he called Mesh. It allowed people to search the Internet, for free. Simply typing in the words “Waco” or “David Koresh” linked people who’d felt unheard for most of their lives and invited them into a glorious movement that was going to right the many wrongs of the world. 

The actual David Koresh and the actual Branch Davidians were barely acknowledged by the militia movement. David would have been mortified to learn that he’d become hugely famous and millions of people recognized his name, but almost none of them knew what he believed in, or cared. One of the reasons David gave to the FBI for not coming out of the compound was that Americans were vulgar: People weren’t going to ask him about the Seven Seals, he feared, they were going to ask him about having sex with teenagers. 

He was right, of course. Nobody remembered the letters he sent out from the compound; no one started the Church of David Koresh. What really mattered, what moved millions of people about his story, was that a tyrannical government, in their eyes, had murdered him in cold blood. David would never have wanted to be a victim — it was weak, and his purpose was to avenge the martyrs, not to become one — but that’s what he ended up as.

Uncannily, though, this new movement did get something right about him. His narcissism, from an early age, guided him everywhere he went. David refused to accept the judgment of others; he refused to accept anything that didn’t exalt him. The true facts of his life were intolerable to him. He needed a place where he could live with some degree of self-love. He created it, and it sustained him for years.

The men and women who took up his cause often do the same. They see portents and signs of the government’s despotism in small, everyday things. They tend the narcissist within and seek out leaders who are egotists themselves, and who are capable of this same kind of fabulous world-building. They demote reality and make it serve them. 

David told people that he was the Messiah and that God wanted him to sleep with young girls and own fully automatic rifles. If you’re close to God, then everything you do is allowed. Those on the conspiratorial right have followed a similar pattern: if the cause is right, nothing in it can be wrong. Nothing inside you is corrupted; everything points toward future glory. Those who doubt and hate you serve only the devil.

As with David, the conspiratorial right sought a battle in which their world and the sordid world of Satanic power and decadence would collide, and a winner would be declared at last. David’s came at Waco, the movement’s came at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The two events sprang from the same American soil, which has for centuries been crisscrossed by men and women who believe that violence cleanses the land for something infinitely more wonderful.

Excerpted from the book Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco by Stephan Talty. Copyright © 2023 by Stephan Talty. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

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