Texas to monitor U.S. military, fears hostile takeover!

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The feds were the lunatics in this case, just FYI and all. You're right with Waco, though.

Do you know Randy Weaver's record? He was a militant racist, and the rest of his family were hardly sane people, either. I am sorry that his wife and son were killed, but that hardly changes who is was. My home town of Spokane Valley isn't many miles from Ruby Ridge on the other side of the state line with Idaho, and I recall what had happened there very well. A group of racist fanatics calling themselves the Phineas Brotherhood, who could have been Randy Weaver, had robbed a bank in my neighborhood not many years before. Weaver, the Phineas Brotherhood, the Order, the Aryan Nations, and whatever other race warriors who dirtied the reputation of my part of the country, were all cut from the same cloth, so forgive me if I'm not that sympathetic when the feds finally come down on them like a ton of bricks.

I should put it better:

The incident itself wasn't due to lunacy by Weaver (unlike Waco; though I'm going with the assumption that the suspects fired at the officers first). The police clearly overstepped and used excessive force over a very minor crime. Sawing down the barrels of a couple of shotguns is completely victimless and should be met with a small fine via the mailbox (if it's to be illegal), rather than what amounts to a military raid with military ROE.

Whatever club Weaver was a part of, has little bearing on the actual incident.

Maybe Texas will finally have the secession it's been wanting for years.

Actually, Weaver's "club" had everything to do with the numbskull idea of entrapping him with the sawed off shotgun. Because he was a radical racist with connections to the Aryan Nations, the Feds thought they could compromise him into turning informant. Weaver didn't bite, and still, the feds decided to prosecute instead of forgetting him and moving onto another target. When Weaver was given the wrong court date, instead of trying to sort it out, he just said, "f*ck it," and went home (not the brightest thing to do, but these anti-government types are hardly the founding fathers of old, intellectually). And as he had so convincingly lied about being former special forces in the army, and that he had threatened his neighbors at gun point in the past, local law enforcement had been too frightened to arrest him, so the feds were called in. The rest is history. Did the feds create a situation which blew up? Of course they did. But to say that Weaver would have just lived his life peacefully had this never happened is probably not true, as he was a true believer in white supremacy and the "coming race war."

Agreed.

Well, I'm someone from outside of Texas who would like to ENCOURAGE secessionist elements there. Seriously, I think Texas needs to leave the union and declare itself as the official homeland for all paranoid, rightwing, TeaParty dipshits in the US.

Let 'em all move to Texas and do whatever the hell they want.

Everybody wins.

Beam me up, Scotty! There's only delusional life here in Texas.

They were the bad guys at Waco. They didn't listen to the advice of their behavioral analysts or the their experts on cults. Instead the leader of the operation acted entirely based off his stereotyped perception of cults. If they had actually listened to the people who are hired by the government to make sure such events don't get violent, it probably wouldn't have gotten violent.

If there was a valid federal warrant for the arrest of David Koresh, and it was feared that he and others at the Branch Davidian compound were armed, why didn't the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ask the local law-enforcement agency to serve the warrant while arresting him when he traveled at least once daily from the compound to the nearby merchants to buy supplies? Like too many no-knock warrants these days, the FBI et al. overthought the simple and botched this arrest by turning it into a media circus resulting in the unnecessary deaths of dozens of people. There were several questionable actions taken by the federal agents ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege#Controversies ). U.S. "Attorney General Reno had specifically directed that no pyrotechnic devices be used in the assault." The many mistakes taken by her and her subordinates added fuel to the calls within the Clinton administration and elsewhere for her resignation.

Most importantly for this discussion, even The X-Files character, Alvin Kurtzweil, M.D., reminded us that "[t]hese people don't make mistakes!" While the Siege at Waco rolled on day after day, the world was force fed a media diet of how cunning the compound residents were to be able to flummox the federal agents into making mistakes. No, it was nothing of the sort. The siege was intended, in my opinion, starting with what would have been a simple arrest of Koresh.

Even the otherwise whitewashed Danforth Report (2000) claimed that federal agents had lied about their "use of pyrotechnic devices at the complex, and had obstructed the Special Counsel's investigation." At the very least, there was enough blame to go around ... including the federal officers and agents involved. But, I can't sympathize too much. They started it all.

To quote Comprehending Cults: The Sociology of New Religious Movements, which it a textbook from the University of Waterloo.

That was in the chapter about people's views of cults, which is very interesting. People actual assess the level of brainwashing a group does and the severity of the indoctrination process on the name of the group alone.
If you present people with three identical scenarios, but only change the name of the indoctrinating group then they'll be harsh in description against the groups by response based on the general popularity of the group.
^the reasoning being "Well, millions of people join the catholic church, so the indoctrination process must be benevolent. But I haven't heard of this group, so the indoctrination process must be malevolent."

According to Tabor, Sullivan and Docharty, the agents ran of "patience" and "stopped listening and decided to apply the tactics of psychological warfare to the Davidian Compound. The power and water were cut off, communication was blocked, and the men, women and children were bombarded with bright light and loud noises including the sounds of rabbits and lambs dying throughout day and night."

Does it sound like a good idea to make an apocalyptic Christian Cult listen to sounds of animals dying, especially lambs? (lambs having special significance to the Davidians.) Any sociologist would say that the cult would likely interpret that as the apocalypse itself.
Koresh was open to talking, the behaviorist experts and cult sociology experts all agreed that the best path would be to open up talks with various church leaders to discuss theology. Koresh spoke to the FBI and ATF for hours prior to the seige, the agents couldn't talk to Koresh at his level and yet refused to send someone who could effectively communicate to him gain access. (Wright, Ammerman, Sullivan, Docherty.)

The key to preventing a cult from suddenly erupting into violence is to not disrupt the group's control over it's boundary and to not give a perception that such a disruption is eminent.
In the case of the People's Temple, the mere arrival of Congressman Ryan and a few hostile ex-membersof the Temple was enough to precipitate the final act of mass suicide (Galantar.) However, the federal agents completely acted in contrary to this principle with their tactics in direct disregard of the experts.



In other words, it wouldn't of happened if the officers didn't... fan the flames.

All that is needed then, is for someone within the Clinton administration, its Department of Justice or the FBI to cook up the idea to "order" one or more of the agents to act in ways that contravene his, her or their years of training.

Certainly, Docharty's research showed that quite a few of the officers considered the cultists to be too delusional to be reasoned with at any level. Considering the popularity of anti-cult groups at the time period that got large amounts of media coverage with disinformation. It was during a time where both judges and juries would routinely deny the religious freedoms of such groups in many parts of the country. It is very likely that some fundamentalist christian was in a critical area of the operation and manipulated it.

"Texas, it's like a whole other country"

from a Texas tourism ad.