Historically High - David Koresh and The Branch Davidians

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Oh David....where do we start with David, the Davidians, Waco, the Siege?!! There's a lotta meat in this loaf if you catch my drift...its not a sexual thing...I just mean there's a lot about this guy that you can sink you teeth into...again not a sexual thing. It's a fucking insane story about Cults, Polygamy, Armed Conflict with the Government and all at the center is David Koresh. Let's get to it. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

That's something too, I think, like, annex this state or get rid of this state and people are just like fucking casual about it. You're like, I don't think you really understand maybe what that state contributes. And I think that goes for a lot of states. If people are like, Florida wants us to succeed and everyone's like, we're fucking let them be like, you guys got to understand that like, first of all, no. That's a ridiculous concept. That would never occur. Like just the logistics of that alone. We fought wars to stay together.

We're not just going to annex. The other thing, too, is you really think anybody in that state is really going to say, the majority of that state is going to say, yeah, let's get out of here. Do you know what, like, I don't know if this sounds pro-government, but do you know what, like, government, as far as nationwide government provides you as far as services and funding? Like, you're literally hit by a fucking hurricane every three years. I think we talked about this, right?

Oh, Florida can kill by hurricanes every year. Yeah. And there's damage every single year. What are you going to do, like, when you're, you're going to do, like, you're supposed to be self-sufficient in your own thing? Like, are you, do you, do you, do you think you could keep yourself together? Well, the other part about that is, how people become third world nations is because they have to survive that kind of shit

without federal, like, funding to, for disaster relief. Or you just become everybody else's bitch. Like, if Florida, if Texas or anything like that dropped off, maybe not Texas because they would all try to shoot their way out. But like if Florida annexed themselves, what's to stop them from being like, okay, well, now Mexico wants Florida. And Florida's like, no, we don't want that. They're like, hey, guess what, bitch, you're cut off from the U.S. too bad.

Florida's not going to stand up to anywhere like that. And then you think the U.S. is really going to step in and be like, we just broke up. You know, you're being like, save us. You said fuck NATO. So NATO's not going to help you out. You said, fuck America. America's not going to help you out. I love the California argument because I get, I've just kind of accepted, like, Florida,

or California is probably like 20 years ahead of us in technology and thought process. Like we do need to start looking at electric shit. We do need to start worrying about putting solar panels and shit like that. California is that sibling that's kind of like, they're kind of hippie, dippy, a little bit, if that makes sense. But they have like, and they can have some like kind of radical ideas. You know what California is? California was the relative that was talking about like Bitcoin, like at Thanksgiving,

the year before it like blew up. And I'm not saying that I don't know. I don't know what fucking cryptocurrency is. I don't believe in it. Like, I don't know. I don't understand enough about it. But it sounds like just made up money. And the fact that it's valued so high,

I'm like, how did you just invent? I'm like, that's the greatest scam ever if this actually is a thing. But they have that idea. Or they're the first one that showed up with an electric car. And then all of a sudden they were like, gas prices started to go up and they were like, how much did you pay for that?

And he's like, this much? And then you see three electric cars. cards of Thanksgiving the next year. So California kind of seems like the one that's kind of weird until they have a good idea. And then you're like, oh, okay, there's some stuff coming out of there. Well, not to mention cutting off California, it's the fourth biggest economy in the world. So we're talking country sizes. Yes.

And that's just in California. So if you're like, oh, we don't want California in America anymore. Let's kick your ass out. Boom. You just lose the fourth biggest economy in the world. And that's on the rankings with the U.S. as well. So we're going to take a hit there. Here's the thing, too.

Texas is the same way. Here's the thing, too, that I don't think... And I think this will go actually into the topic today. People don't understand that with the military, that they're like, you know, we're going to have a standing military and everything. Okay, the population of California is pretty big. And if part of the condition of California is succeeding was that there was mandated military service for certain males over, like certain people,

they could have as many troops gathered up as our current standing military does. No, no, no, because remember we talked about this in a previous episode that our standing military is not super huge in any given time. That's why it's a rarity if you actually do see a veteran, even though you think you see them all the time, that it's like, oh, you're, you're that lower percentage that is doing that duty. So, like, you've, you've served in a smaller sect of people, like, I don't think that they would be like a warring. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is this. If they were forced into military action. What I'm also saying is that being the fourth largest economy in the world, with militaries,

how much of the innovation in military is fueled by private sector businesses? Lockheed Martin. I'm trying to think of some, Lockheed is the only one that really comes like, what's the one that was, oh, fucking. Are you talking about military? The military industrial complex, but like weapons designers and builder. So Lockheed was the airplane designer. and builds all like the is.

Then you have Halliburton. It's Halliburton, right? Halliburton's oil, but they do fucking everything, too. There's a couple other like military. Ammo companies, different things like that. The design weapons and everything. But those people are also, those are private businesses, which means that someone else can pay for their services as well,

which means California having the fourth largest economy. What's to say they don't just outbid for a couple of those? Or what's to say that they don't go into Silicon Valley and like, hey, we need attack drones that can drop fucking anything that you want and they just fight the battle in the air. Yeah. If we can send out 70,000 attack drones, that's probably going to be more effective than just boots on the ground. I think what I'm trying to say is that it's just very short-sighted is when people make those arguments. It's very off the cuff without ever thinking of like the realistic ramifications. And I'm not saying it'd be like California would like rule the

world or anything. I'm saying that... Well, part of being an American is embracing everything that gets thrown at us. And not to mention, even if they are the weird cousin at Thanksgiving, they're still contributing, like, I want to say for every dollar that they send to the federal government and tax money, they get like 82 cents back. So they're providing... They're propping up some other states.

A lot of states. So, I mean, they're doing their part. Even if they are the weird cousin or whatever, they're still providing a very valuable service for a country that needs that. I mean, if they started slapping an import or export tax on 25% of the country's vegetables and fruits and shit, it would make a ton of money. But we'd have to do it. You know who else seems like would be like the weird cousin at Thanksgiving? This guy, Vernon Wayne Howell.

He sounds familiar, but I don't, I'm not recognizing the name. I don't recognize the name. What was his, uh, the name that he's known by? of David Kresh, which I like when a cult leader changes their name because they take on this whole new identity. There's a lot of guys that did it. How many people know, though, if you were to go and ask somebody and they know actually about the branched of Vidians and they know they've heard the name David Kresh, how many would actually know that that wasn't even his real name? Because that's, I didn't know that wasn't his real name. Oh, really?

No, I didn't know that was his, yeah. A lot of them just hit up really since it's like. Like when we did Anton LeVay and his name was, like his middle name was Anthony and that's why he chose Anton and then you have to. What was his real name? It was something horribly embarrassing, wasn't it? Yeah, it wasn't, wasn't anything good. All right. Well, also Vernon Wayne Howell, that doesn't have like, you can't, that's like VWA chain isn't even.

Oh, his was way better. What? Oh, I guess that was his, because his middle name was Zenzabar. that's right. What was his real name? Howard Stanton-Lavay. Okay. That's right.

It was Howie. Howie-Lavay. Vernon, though, was not much better. So I could see why you would change your name. But also, did you read into how the name came about? He took David for King David. And then... Which do you think that that was also kind of...

when he took that name, that was a way to put him in a very like identifiable position within the Davidians? They take a lot of, like a lot of the David's stories out of the Bible is a lot of what they learn about. So it's kind of like an ode to that. I don't think it's necessarily like a David versus Goliath choice that he made. No, I don't think that. What I'm saying, though, is he was so, that's kind of the fascinating thing. is like a lot of people know about Waco. And you learn about the standoff of Waco,

and we're going to get into that too. But learning about, like, LeVe himself and not just how he grew up, but kind of some of the moves that he made. So he wanted to take over that section of the Branch Davidians. He wanted to be their prophet, their leader. And to do that, I mean, he picked the name David. David. I mean, I thought it was a situation where at one point in my life,

when I heard the Davidians, I thought they called himself the Davidians because he was their leader and his name was David. Oh, really? Yeah. Like, if you didn't, imagine you didn't know about this, and you're like, this guy's name is David Koresh. He's the leader of the branch Davidians.

What does that sound like? It sounds like they're just, are beholden to him as a prophet. That's what I mean. That never even still, like, crossed my mind. Yeah. Huh. So, I think that was part of the reason

he would take the name David is because he always had it in his head that he was going to be the leader of this. What do we want to refer to this as? It's a cult. It's a movement technically, but it's a cult. Does anybody in a cult recognize that it's a cult? In a real cult? I guess in the lower positions.

If you're in the higher positions in control, you're like, oh, yeah, this is a cult. But this one is so weird because David, David had these things called Mighty Men. And one of them, like his right or left hand man was a lawyer that was a practicing lawyer. So he understood law. He was a Harvard

educated man, I want to say. That's what I'm saying is that's how I think it gets lost as a cult. Because I understand that this situation was a cult. But this branched off of like an actual recognized religion, like Seventh-day

Adventists. And then you had this branch off of the Davidians and then you get this one where it's the branched dividians so it's like a division of a division of a division but because you're coming off of a I guess a legitimized religion it's not like you're starting a cult from scratch it's not that hard you're coming in he came into something that already had a structure to it and simply I think turned it into a cult I don't think he started a cult no he just took a lot of malleable minds and then kind of shaped him to what his his way is i was going to get into it a little later but we can kind of talk about this before we talk about him okay because i find it

very interesting just with the way that religions work there are like end time religions and then which preach the second coming they preach the rapture you're reading into revelation a lot and then there's regular religions kind of like um different sex of christianity that don't really focus on the second coming. They just focus on like the. It's the afterlife. It's getting, there's no end right now. It's just about your life. The end of your life is what you're trying to live. That's the message, I guess. Yeah, instead of a doomsday, it's just being as good of a person here now so you can get to heaven. Like you're not worried about the rapture or anything like that. And, uh, Seventh Day Adventism came from something called Millerism, which was a guy named William

Miller and he was just always trying to predict when Jesus would come the second time. So he would fire out a date. That date would get close. He'd be like, uh, that's not going to happen. This, I think I've brought this up to you before, this always, because this is a common theme within these, like, cult slash religions. It always reminds me off parks and wreck where in the town in Pawnee, there's this small, like localized religion called the

reasonable lists. Is that later seasons? Yeah, it is. It's like season three or four when they first like come in on it. You got to get Parks and Rec that show. You got to kind of give the first season a pass because it's finding its footing.

And then season two. Look at season two is the like the start of it because that's when it finds kind of it's, it's a good show. Yeah, we've watched, I think all of them maybe up to like season four or five. But so, But anyway, these are reasonable.

It's basically a cross of like, kind of like Elron or Scientology. So basically this guy wrote a, I'm getting off track here, but it's going to play back into this because this is how ridiculous all this stuff can be. This guy wrote a book about organizing your office, and it was called Organize It.

And he got really famous, because it was this book that a whole bunch of offices throughout like the 70s used. Because isn't that what Elron Hubber, someone got their start at? They did a book that was like a business. related book, and then their next one was just bad shit crazy. Elron is a fiction writer.

I know, but I want to say he did something like that. I'm pretty sure he was just straight fiction because that's where he, you basically told everybody, hey, I'm going to write this book and turn it into a religion. Like, fuck you, dude. Gotcha. So this guy, he's like, so he had an idea about organizing stuff. And that was a big hit. And he's like, in addition to the idea about organizing stuff, he happened to also think

that the universe was ruled by a 50-foot lizard with a volcano for her face called Zorp. And so he wrote a second book. And it was called Organize It to Engage with Zorp. Do I don't we not remember this? I don't know. It was hilarious. But anyway, in the book, there's a guy that's now like the leader of that movement and he keeps predicting the end of days when Zorp will come and devour everyone's souls. And so they rent a place in the park where they basically just kind of hang out and just like smoke weed and watch the stars. And they like bring this, it's called like the nectar of something. And what it really is is it's just like a, jungle juice type fucking alcohol drink. It's just and they and so but when it doesn't happen you know they're like oh I misread

the texts it's supposed to happen on this day can we make another reservation at the park and that's we still see this shit front and center today Lori Vallow Chad Daybell the ones that killed the kids they were a part of a LDS offshoot that believed in

the end days they believed that they were the two shepherds that were supposed to to lead the 144,000 into the rapture and make it through to the end. And that was how they were going to start their thing, was in it to 144,000 people. That's why they went to a rural area. That's why they were trying to bring everybody in. Like, just the whole thought process behind that is there's such a sliver between religion and cultism that once you jump that small little bit, you're just full-blown.

Like, there's no cult light. Here's the thing, though. is a religion, a cult that just gets so big that it's not taboo anymore. Religion has redeeming qualities. I don't think cults do. Yes, they do. Colts have redeeming qualities? Just listen.

There are probably, okay, here's the thing, is if it doesn't have a redeeming, oh, okay, yeah, I guess you've been, God damn it. I thought I was going to go somewhere with this. What I was going to say is, you were about to blow my mind. No, no, no, no, what I was going to say is, is something wouldn't have the ability to get big enough if it didn't adopt some redeeming quality. So I'm saying what could start out as a cult technically, that could grow. And if that

got big enough, maybe that people would find redeeming qualities within it. Like, what was the thing with, um, you would consider it a cult the thing with the guy up in Oregon? That they had the Netflix documentary on that was Schwarmie or, oh, fuck, what was his name? Oh, you're talking about Harry Krishna's. Not Harry Krishna's. It was, Jesus, what was this thing called? There was an entire Netflix show on it. It was a while ago.

That was old Netflix, I want to say. That was like when they first started dipping their toes into real documentaries. No, this thing was, it was more recent. It was like five or six years ago. You're talking about that they lived up in a little convent up in Oregon. But they turned it into like a city and then they took over the... Well, they came down into. the town and tried to take over the town.

What was that called? Cult in Oregon. I want to say they were Harry Krishna's. It wasn't Harry Krishna's. We'll go into Harry Krishna's. Rajne Purim? Yeah. That's not Harry Krishna's.

I want to say that was... Ranjish was Rajneesh was the... Like the religious leader. That's right. Yeah, they had that big huge village and they... Okay, anyway. But yeah, what I... I guess what I'm getting at is

maybe the, because if you look at religions, they do do have redeeming qualities, but they also do require you to exhibit cult-like behaviors. Like, you've got to take the bad with the good. You're all balancing.

Christianity has its entire history. With bloodshed and fighting over, and fighting in the name of God and killing other people because they believed in other gods. But the thing is, is they had so much staying power that they were able to morph into something more palatable. People over time forgot about all that shitty stuff that they did in the name of God.

And now because they donate and they built churches and they have this beautiful message and all this kind of stuff, all of that's forgiven. If a cult gets longevity or gets far enough down the line and gets big enough, I think that that's going to be from a business standpoint. Because that's what religion kind of comes down to. People are trying to get as many followers. it's the same thing a business model. A cult is only going to get bigger at a certain point if they have a more positive message

that reaches out to more people. A broader message that brings people in to make them bigger and more profitable. So cults normally get snuffed out at the cult phase of it because what happened in this scenario and how many cults end up getting snuffed out by like government intervention,

government intervention. I'm not saying, that they shouldn't because this shit is crazy. What I'm just saying is that I think that really thinking about it, every religion has started off as a small offshoot that could be considered a cult by the

larger dominant religion of the time. You think Christianity was originally when it first started in that small group, it was probably recognized as a cult. Because they all followed this one guy and

he was known to do some crazy shit apparently. at the time it when you start looking at it that way I can see how you would kind of picture it as kind of one and the same like the Venn diagram there's a big overlapping in the center

the biggest part about something being a cult over religion is the actual physical hold that that cult has on you because if you just stop going to Catholic Church you're going to get maybe like one or two calls and they're going to be like hey where are you You're like, yeah, not really into it.

Correct, but I think initially a lot of religions start out like that. And then they branch out to become more casual. You don't think that you were just like able to leave the church. You would probably be persecuted if you left the church. Yeah, but I think a lot of these people that helped start it were so invested that they just lived that. That was their life. Imagine if that was just your job. Like a lot of people that followed, I think like, you know, Jesus around.

Because I'm sure he was at some point a real person. I believe that. But there were a group of people that followed him around and that they just slept, you know, slept and ate and breathed Jesus. And that was their job. They were devoted to him. Exactly. I think there were casual Jesus followers, though. It's like, oh, he's in town.

I'll go see him talk. But I'm not going to follow him anywhere. Correct. And so with this one starting out, so how did the, like, how did that guy end up starting the seventh day advantage? Like, where did he get that? Sorry, I'm getting back into the actual talk. Yeah. So back into it, William Miller had something.

He said basically that Jesus was going to come 1843, 1844. He kept fucking up, fucking up. He was wrong. He was wrong. Then October 22nd, 1844, is like, this is it. Jesus is going to fucking be here. I bet my life on it. Yep.

The whole group got together. And I want to say there was like a hundred thousand of them, like a fairly large size. That many? Yeah, he had a decent following. How did he? Okay. So what was his Obviously he's not going to gain

Followers at all Regardless of the amount If he doesn't have like a message So what's the whole what's his whole spiel What's his his gimmick? Preparation for the second coming Okay and that by oh You're gonna be saved in the rapture

If you follow me Gotcha only my followers as part of this Are going to be okay You're gonna die if you don't follow me Exactly we're preparing ourselves to a set Threat of threat of death okay that day is called the great disappointment because they got together they were all hanging out yeah and like they literally watched the sun come up the next day they're like is that is that jesus oh it's the sun

okay so it's the day after they expect him like he was going to rise over the mountain top and they would be able to see him from the distance like it was it going to be a tiny like to scale jesus or just like giant jesus is being resurrected like is it an earthquake and then he falls down are we talking like galactus from like Marvel G where he just like comes over the earth he's like oh oh Jesus is here just a gigantic Jesus form I I don't I didn't get that far into how he was going to come back but it's called the great disappointment because that was basically like the end of the Millerism and then as he lost followers they moved into a

seventh day Adventist and seven day Adventist like a sect of his followers did or he did okay so he had nothing to do with the seventh day adventist no they were just an offshoot that continued kind of a they liked hanging out together like hey let's just keep this rolling without the crazy dude I we're gonna espouse some of his beliefs we're gonna believe that there is a rapture we're just gonna believe that we don't

really know when it's coming so we're gonna try to be prepared all the time okay and their Sabbath day I believe is Saturday I'm not super caught up on Adventist I know that they're a little kooky but fuck who isn't the only thing I remember from the place that was

where I grew up was that their church didn't have any windows. And I thought that that was a little bit weird. Mm-hmm. Kind of like Mormon Church is always a frosted windows, so you can't see it and don't know what's going on. Well, Mormon Church is, from my experience, the actual meeting place within the church is never visible

for even from the windows from the outside. No. It's surrounded by hall, hallways, and then there's doors leading into, like, the main... There's classrooms, and then there's the Sacramento Hall. My only experience is knowing I'm going up and shooting hoops. They have gyms in them? Yeah.

there's a reason for it, man. It's fellowship. You're doing. Yep. So after that, there was another sect that broke off called the Davidians from the Seventh-day Adventists. And the Seventh-day Adventists just kind of let it happen because you really can't do anything about it.

So the offshoot is the Davidians followed more of King David's part of the Bible, more of the Old Testament shit, put a lot of effort into that, but also the same time. That's the thing, too, is most of the doomsday. it's all Old Testament. And it has to be, because the New Testament's more of like a chronological, like there's nothing as scary. It's fluffy compared to the Old Testament. It's like, God's like, uh-uh, you don't fucked up.

Have some plague. If you're just strictly reading the Old Testament, you're going to have a bad time. I want to ask a question, but I don't want it to derail this because I felt like we just got back on. We can cut it. It's fine. Okay. with Old Testament and then going over into New Testament, do you think that we're recognizing this as a book of fiction,

just a very apparently well-written book of fiction with amazing staying power? Okay. Do you think that the offshoot when they wrote the New Testament, they were looking at it and they were like, man, God's been kind of an asshole throughout this whole first book. So maybe in the second book we have him do something that makes it see. like a big sacrifice he's doing for us to like kind of because we need to get God back, you know, looking like on the pillar, the glowing figure that we need to be, not this vengeful guy

that's just killed half the fucking world's population through like floods and shit and then let a guy on a boat and all that kind of shit and everything, like all the famine and everything. He's turning villages into pillars of sand. At the end of the Old Testament, man, he kind of sounds like a bad guy. I'm just saying, but he needed a comeback story in the New Testament. they're like what he's going to do is he's going to send his only son down here to die for all of our sins. All the bad shit that we do, he's sending his son down there. Doesn't that like, I was really thinking about this the other night.

Why? What's the rationale that he did that? That he sent his only son to die for what we're doing? Like, I don't understand that. Jesus is more of like a tool used as far as somebody that you can say has absolved the world's sins because Jesus took all of our sins upon himself and that's why he was sacrificed. Yeah, but he wasn't like sacrificed. He was killed by people. So like if he was going to be sacrificed and God wanted to redeem himself, why would he just have the people that he was dying for kill him? like that kind of did

no he that's what I'm saying that's what he had done what I'm saying is that's not a sacrifice he's just letting us kill his kid like he had to die for all of our sins yes I understand but we did it it wasn't like God was like now I'm going to take my son

and show how much I love all of you and absolve you all of your sins I'm going to kill my son it wasn't a Canaan able type thing where it was like I know Cana Naval were they were brothers right but like father something. I want to get back to David Kresh, because I feel like this could rabble.

I just don't understand that whole concept of it. The whole starting point of it, for that, it's shaky. I don't want to read the rest of the book because it's the first part's bad. There's just, there's kind of like great resets in religion.

Like you're going to run into, they do that in comic books. Yeah. Except for they're not putting you all in a boat with two of every animal and then cleaning, cleansing the world. That's been done in a comic, I'm guessing.

Or someone Oh, I guess Thanos snapped and killed half the people, so Yeah, and people have gone and harvested creatures from other planets To create them in zoos or preserves and then try to destroy it Oh, Brainiac does that. Brainiac grabs all the knowledge from worlds and then destroys the planets. And it's Superman. Sure.

Anyway, getting back to the Divideons. So yeah, we have Davidism that spawned from the Seventh-day Adventists. Then the branch Davidians were just literally, a branch of Davidians that separated themselves from the Davidians and called themselves the branch Davidians because it's kind of like LDS and LDSR like Latter Day Saint, Latter Day Saint reorganized. Keep the name but just add another thing to the name for recognition to give it legitimacy, I guess.

To separate us enough, but we're still kind of under that same umbrella. So technically it's all still Seventh-day Adventism, but there's just certain different beliefs that get taken down. and the branch Davidians, it's so wildly interesting how Koresh kind of found them as far as how he infiltrated their whole game and then took over. So we've been calling him David the whole time. His real name, as we alluded to in the beginning, was Vernon Wayne Howell. He's born August 17, 1959, so not long ago. I have a feeling that had he not died the way that he died, he'd probably still be alive today.

Yeah, probably. It'd probably be old, but he'd be fairly, he'd still be with it. His parents were Bonnie Sue Clark, who was 14 years old, and his dad is Bobby Wayne Howell, who's 19, so there's already a little bit of weirdness going on. Luckily, Bobby got infatuated with another teenager and took off before Vern was born. Then he gets abandoned by his mom at 4, which can't be great. he gets left with his aunt and his mom goes and she ends up kind of marrying an abusive ex-con that wasn't real good for her. Comes back into his life when he was seven and she kind of always still plays a little bit of a role in his life,

but kind of like from the outside. I think it probably could be because of the abandonment kind of in the beginning. He has a tough time trusting her enough to really be somebody that he leans on. So he's always kind of searching for a little bit of a mother figure, but he also got left so young that he has, it's kind of like he knows how to use older people, but he has an infatuation with younger people. Okay. Which will, it's, well, I think they're for different reasons. I think his infatuation with the older people is probably a mother figure thing. And then this infatuation with, I don't know what the infatuation with the younger people is.

I think it was because, in going through his life, life. Like he dropped out of school in high school. He was dyslexic, so he always kind of felt like he was on the outside. Like he got pulled out of his classes and then put in special classes. So he was separated from his peers even more. On top of that, he was a religious nut kind of from an earlier age. Yeah, I think he, I think one of the things that his mom would tell him is, you know, being in the special classes and everything, that kind of hit him because he was, he got bullied for that. And his mom would tell him it's like, would tell him that, you know, it's not an issue.

You're just special. You have another, you have other gifts. And so I think part of that is he felt like his other gifts for spiritual type gifts. And that's why he got, he saw religion as a, as a safe place, which I think a lot of people do. And I like looking at this. I'm not saying any of this. You have to get down to who the person is, like kind of psychologically, I think. And I think that's kind of the cool thing about this is just trying to figure out how he becomes

this guy that we're all going to know about from like how he developed. So I think part of it was that he found religion as a safe place and he almost found answers. He found like a like a North Star. He could kind of aim toward and yeah, he memorized scripture. He would preach, you know, schoolmates to schoolmates, which that sounds weird in itself, right? Like standing up during class and like he would be at recess getting these guys. attention and trying to do it, which that person's always going to be weird. Just because you're young and it's not really

like a social thing that you do as a kid trying to preach religion to other kids. Yeah, at any point in our country was that ever a normal thing? Like you're at recessed and you're all playing and you see like literally three kids huddled around and one of them just like preaching.

Staying on top of plastic milk crate and he's talking about Jesus. Jesus, why don't they just fucking play tag or something? That's going to push you away. That's going to kind of alienate you. So I think his need to want that kind of relationship and then like his fanaticism

really kind of fought each other because he wasn't later on in his life he tends towards kids real hard. And I want to say it's because he never grew out of the social understanding of like just because you didn't get a crack at it now. Like as you get older and you make adult friends, that'll be okay.

You always kind of are looking for that. He had this weird thing where and I'm saying weird not like weird ha ha ha ha like weird I'm saying like fucking weird where I don't think at a certain point he like the maybe because when he was a teenager and growing up he didn't have like girlfriends

or things like that or he felt like because I know that he ended up like when he was 19 he knocked up a 15 year old who terminated the pregnancy the first one yeah the first one what I'm saying is I don't think he ever got out of that phase where his proclivity sexually evolved

with his adult. He was socially stunted at a younger age. Yeah, like he was attracted to that. It never like matured past that. That fucking so like as he became an adult it was still he still fucking somehow thought that was okay. Well he really kind of blended that into his beliefs because the 15 year old that he got pregnant he he didn't believe really in sex outside of marriage, obviously being a religious person. Then once it did happen,

he was really guilt-stricken by it. He was really torn down by it, ends up finding out that she's pregnant. Before he can really have a say to it, she's like, I took care of it, which I don't know how that worked back then, but I'm probably pretty sure it was easier. I took care of it.

They end up getting together, and he moves into her parents' house with her. and he doesn't believe that premarital sex is bad anymore, but he refuses to use... He had an awakening in like that fucking, like, two-month span. He's like, oh, this feels good. Yeah. And I didn't get smited by God.

Yeah. So in his belief of premarital sex is okay. That's a hard pivot. Yeah. Real quick. I think you wake up, you're like, wait, I didn't get punished for this. Maybe it's okay. You said you weren't.

That was two months ago, man. Come on. I'm a different person now. This is me now. I've grown. He wouldn't use protection. He wouldn't use contraceptives. He didn't believe in contraceptives by religious standards.

He was a man of principle and he knew where to draw the line. He's like, I wasn't, two months later, he might have been okay with contraceptives. I don't know. I finally found something that makes my dick feel good. Why would I want to put something over it that numbs it? Yeah. I just, you've let me have steak. I'm not going to go back to eat on dogs.

He ends up knocking her up again. and then he ends up getting kicked out, right? Yeah, her dad is just like, enough. You're not going to be a part of this kid's life. You can't be here. And he had hard feelings towards them because they kicked him out. And he's like, well, so you're cool with letting me stay in her bed, but you're not cool with me getting her pregnant?

It's like, yes, there's a very defined line between those two things. Like, if you're not responsible enough to make sure that you don't get her pregnant again, you're not responsible enough to sleep in her bed. Here's the other thing. I'm not at all on Team Koresh here. what I'm saying though is like what the fuck is that dad even thinking those parents even thinking like

you finally got your daughter to a point where you can get her away from this guy she's not pregnant anymore separate that get your fucking daughter away from this fucking dude who knocked her up pull the weed at the root don't keep water in it and then you're like oh instead I'm gonna have her

have him move in and then be able to sleep in my daughter's bed not expect this like he somehow is gonna fucking be smart about it? No, you just gave them now an opportunity to have sex all the time. You turn them into rabbits. And I'd like to say that's where the weird finishes with his childhood,

but no, because he goes back to living with his mom. They end up going to her it's not a ward, like her congregation, and he starts to develop a very fine taste for the pastor's daughter. Are I talking to

the pastor's daughter like is this like the town in footloose? I've never seen it. So the pastor's daughter is hot. I think this one was underage. I'm pretty sure she was underage. Okay. Just in the way it talks about it.

Well, I mean, if we're talking about the movie Footloose, technically in the movie Footloose, they're still in high school, but the actresses are all, we've had this discussion before. You've got to separate the character from the actress. Julianne Howe, remember the chick from Dancing with the Stars, the Hot One? You never saw her?

I never saw Dancing with the Star. Stars. I know, but she was like actually... Is she the one-legged lady? No. Like, she was one of the professional dancers. Oh. But she was like on... She's pretty famous, man. You've probably seen her in something else. She had movies? Yeah. Yeah. Probably. She's in the

fucking Footless movie. I've ever seen that. Okay, I understand that. What I'm saying is she has been in movies. Okay. But she's like, she was like 25, I think, when she did that. Oh, no, she was old. You have a 25-year-old on screen and you're like, okay, that's hot. You know they're supposed to be playing a character that's like 17 or 18. Okay.

Does that make sense? Yeah. It's that weird like... Later Hermione Granger. Exactly. It's the Hermione thing. The Hermione effect. Yes.

So anyway, he ends of having an infatuation with the preacher's underage daughter. This dad actually is like, fuck no. Get the fuck out of here. And normally kicks him out of like... Because he goes up to the pastor. And he's like, hey, I think I got... Doesn't he try to do that I got a message from God that I'm supposed to be with your daughter? He closed his eyes.

He prayed to God. He opened up his Bible. He looks down. He opens his eyes. And the first thing, basically, like, I don't know what the verse was. It's like, she needs to be mine. He shows that to the past. The past is like, yeah, that's not how it works.

I've been running this game for a while, dude. I know how this works. Like, you can't pull this trick on me. Get away from my daughter. That's my textbook boy. Yep. And he doesn't let up. He continues to pursue her.

So eventually he just gets. completely kicked out. Like he just, he's out. Yeah. Initially he was getting kicked out of like, when he would try to approach like the pastor about this, he was like,

go home for the day. And eventually then he was like, don't fucking come back, you fucking weirdo. Yeah, stop staring at my underage daughter. This is getting weird. I know you've already fucked this up once.

I'm not going to let you do it to her. Yeah. So he goes off to California and basically, like he, he, for so many of these cult leaders, and I don't know what it is. And Anton LeVay,

like I would consider it, maybe not a cult. Like Satanism probably wasn't a cult. It was just more of a religious movement, but he was a leader. And then Charlie Manson, obviously being musically inclined. Koresh was very musically inclined.

He was a decent guitar player. He was a decent singer. And I think he kind of honed those skills more in California back in the hippie times. And he was able to learn kind of a redeeming skill that helps him later on in life. Because they, the branch Davidians have like a house in California.

while Mount Carmel's going on down in Waco. Music is like a, it's like a weird appetizer to kind of get people around the table. It's like the ladies that used to sing on the sides of the mountains, and then it would draw the ships in. The sirens. Sirens, yeah. Yeah. And so from a, you know, from a distance, it sounds really nice and everything. So basically you're sitting there, the appetizer gathers everyone around.

You play some music. That's the main dish. And then dessert, once they're there, maybe you've been passing around something drinking. you start to talk about stuff. And all of a sudden, a few of those people that are sitting around get up and leave because they hear what you're saying is crazy. A little bit later, maybe one or two other people get up and leave, and you're left with three people there at that group.

And all of a sudden, those people like what you're saying. And you're like, you know, I have a place. Why don't we go back and you guys can hear me talk about a little bit more? That's how you get fucking Charles Manson, and that's how you get fucking cult leaders and shit. It kind of like is a social inn. Did Jim Jones play? he had i don't know if you can have a name like jim jones and not playing an instrument

well i think that's because there's a the rapper jim jones now too no i don't think i so i didn't know that oh i he had some sort of musical abilities his was more of like a a socialism kind of deal where he wanted to build like a perfect society okay and we'll do a jim jones episode this caresh is deep into colt but he's sort of i don't know if i'd call him colt light Like, he never, they never had a massive impact. Yeah, that's true. Their populations were never gigantic. But he hones his craft, moves back to Texas, and he kind of starts to fall in with the Branch

Davidians. And the Branch Davidians, like we say, they're an offshoot of Davidianism, Seventh-day Adventist. And the Branch Davidians in 73 were taking. over by a guy named Benjamin Rodin. And he had control of this new sect. He had control of Mount Carmel. They had moved off away from Mount Carmel to form this place called New Mount Carmel. Which one is the one where everything goes down in Waco?

Is that the original Mount Carmel or the New Mount Carmel? Okay. So New Mount Carmel was this area outside of Waco actually. It's in another, technically another city, right? I think so. But it's just kind of the whole area is called Waco. Exactly, yeah. So it might be like Waco.

I don't know. Anyway, so Mount Carmel was basically like this big huge plot of land where the, what was his name? Rodin. Yeah. Rodden had set up basically like a commune. And it was basically this big, just like a big house. But kind of had wings and areas, had a bunch of like underground, like a huge basement in it. Some of the buildings were two-story, had a bunch of land around it.

They had a pool in the backyard. And it could apparently, I mean, I don't know how crammed your, putting these people in there, but it can hold quite a few people. I would say it's more like a compound than a commune. Yeah. Because it had like a turret. It had a gun tower in it. It had a watch tower.

It had a cultural hall where they would come and meet. And these people were like the real preacher types. Like they would go on and on and on outside sermons three, four, five hours. In Texas, that sounds like shit. I don't know what their air conditioning situation was. I was going to say, yeah. They, towards the end, when Koresh is in power, he's the only one with AC. So as the leader, I guess it's good to be the leader because everybody else is surviving outside of it.

But when the Rodents have it is when Vernon, David, comes in. And it's after Benjamin is sick and the wife, Lois Rodin, there was something that David had like kind of an epiphany about and it was something that he really felt strongly about and it was the feminine voice of the Bible. So like you have God the father, but you also have like a mother spirit that kind of speaks in the same way. And she's kind of like she can be a leader too. And he really took a liking to that. I think it was probably because more of his infatuation with women.

Yeah. But Lois, after Benjamin, the husband gets sick, she kind of takes that as like her cue to take over the branch. Yeah. And because we're talking about a very patriarchal society at this point. It's you always listen to the males. Well, they had a son. And the whole thing was is the son, do you remember what his name was? George.

George. George plays a very big role in this. So the son George Roden, she didn't think that he was a good fit or he was capable of taking over the church. Oh. So she didn't. That's why she actually took over. It's because she didn't believe that he was a worthy successor. Oh, at that point.

Yeah. So that's why. Yeah. Is that what you read? Yeah. I just always felt like it was her chance at the power of ground. No. Because she had been living under this patriarchal society with her husband.

with her husband for so long. No, because as soon as what ended up happening is, so I'm just going to keep calling him, it's hard to go between Vernon and David, because they're the same guy. So I'm just going to, he takes on the name David at some point when he first starts getting in with the Branch Divideans.

It's later on. Okay. We'll just call it David until we get up to that way. So David ends up moving into Waco, and he says he has this vision where he is, He himself is not like the prophet to help survive end of days or whatnot. But he believes that he has a rule to play in that. And he goes to Lois, who at this point is now in control.

And he's kind of come around and ingratiated himself, I think, with this. He's living at Mount Carmel, isn't he? Yeah. And really kind of before he gets his epiphany, which we'll talk about that because it seems kind of odd, he just basically fell for everything that she was saying and came to her. He's like, I want to be your right-hand man. I want to follow you around. I don't know if he necessarily fell for it.

Oh, they were in a sexual relationship. I understand that. But what I'm saying is that I don't think that it was necessarily not his plan to do that. I think he saw his path as that was part of his path to get into control. I don't think it was just like she saw him and was like, that works out that's too clean. that all, he just happens to get hooked up with this branch and the woman in power just happens to groom him and like take it. No, that's part of his plan, man. You think?

Yes. Because the way that I took it and the way that I've always kind of felt about it was he believed that they were going to usher in the second coming. So they needed to create the leader. Correct. But he came, he had that vision and he used that as part of his fuel to seduce her and to get in good with her. Maybe this is where we diverge because everything that I've seen was he wanted to procreate with her to create the son that carries on into the second coming. Correct, but he also saw it as his way to be the leader of this church. Well, there was scriptural doctrine that he had that he believed, because I want to say it was, it wasn't Abraham, but it was a religious figure who had a child when they were 99.

And they had it or the male was 99. The woman was like 80. So he believed that that was his role in the relationship was he would be even though the age difference was so off. He believed that Lois could still bear the sun that would basically be the person to usher in the second coming. I'm just saying it wasn't like it might have been in combination. She might have thought she was doing it to him. He might have thought he was doing it to her. But I firmly believe and we can disagree on that because it's not going to affect what happens. No. But I think that his plan was to also. he saw that she was not letting her son take over and she probably confided in him throughout their relationship that that was the case and he saw that he had an opening to get in there and lead and have this following. Yeah, it absolutely could be that way. Look at what he did when he took over.

It wasn't just like he found himself in this and then all of a sudden took all this power. He had a plan for this. He wanted this. Well, his plan to me has always kind of seemed like it it was sort of separate and then it like the past diverged do you feel like he fell into the plan he just fell into the fortunate like he not that he got lucky but like he had this plan but he didn't like what am i trying to say part of it happened by chance or just out of his good luck i there's some about cult leaders where they get to a certain point and they get to a certain like

standing in a group. And once they get to that standing, they try to start feeling out like how deep their powers are. And Lois, as she's getting older, kind of steps away from the pulpit and starts letting David take over to give the sermons and everything's like that. So he's starting to gain that kind of a strong foothold that he's got. Lois's go ahead. And then he has this defining moment where he, she was 14 years old. Her name was, where is it? Rachel Jones.

And the Jones family were followers in the branch Davidians underneath Lois. But they obviously took a liking to David. David goes to him and says, I had this vision. Your daughter and I need to marry. Once we marry, then we'll be able to usher in the second coming. She'll have my children. I need a tribe of children that will be, I think it was 22 that he said, which he ended up blowing past that number.

but he basically said this is what I need I need your 14 year old daughter we need to reproduce and the family was like okay because in Texas like the age of consent you had to be I think it was like 18 without permission or maybe 16 but at 14 you could still get permission from the parents to marry I can tell you right now man I don't think that these are the type of people being in this situation and agreeing to it that the law is going to be the thing that stops them no I appreciate you saying that that's what the law was but I don't think these people recognize it. Well, they actually, her father went down and signed the marriage certificate that he was okay. Well, at least they could legitimize it, but I don't think that that would have been preventative.

I think they just wouldn't have been married. I think they would have been married with whatever laws of marriage or whatever they had. Well, this was, when this happened, as soon as he did that, Lois and Georgia's like, no, bro, you're, you're done. You're out of here. Well, here's the thing, too, is I don't think we mentioned how old the difference was between Lois and David when he came in. So Lois was 61 and David was 22. So that to me, that...

A 39 year difference is a hell of a difference. So, you know, after they end up, after this happens with his 14-year-old, George actually forces David out of Mount Carmel at gunpoint. Before he did that when he was questioning his power, because he was angry that he wasn't getting the shine that David was. He actually challenged him to a duel. That was after. No, he did it at the first.

first time. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So when he does it the first time, he's like, you think you're God, I think I'm God, we're going to raise somebody from the dead. Whoever can raise somebody from the dead is going to be the leader. And David was like, no, bro, that's, you're fucking crazy.

Which for Koresh to call somebody crazy, you got to be really out of your mind. And so he ignores it and continues on. George, George challenges him to the duel. Yep. And George is like all raised a person from the dead. Yeah. Okay. He had some very mental deficient.

I was going to say that sounded like David, but okay. No. So they end up leaving and they go to a place called, where was it? Texas always blows my mind. It's Philadelphia, Texas, wasn't it? Palestine. Palestine, Texas. Where in the world?

That's crazy to me. It's Bible country, man. There's a lot of places. Like, look at Corpus Christi and there's so many towns in Texas that I'm guessing are named after biblical stuff? Palestine just doesn't seem like a welcoming place in Texas. Depends on who founded it, man.

True. Another just very shitty place and he ended up taking some of the followers with him. And the followers that he did take were basically living in like plywood boxes. And it's fucking hot.

It's a fucking shanty town is what it is. And David would be out there preaching sometimes for 10, 12 hours a day, which the heat sucks, but Texas in the cold at night is pretty fucking unbearable because it's just barren. And then David's got to be out there making the rounds, you know, through his congregation, because then in 86 he marries another 14-year-old. So he's got two 14-year-olds. Oh, and a 12-year-old.

So not sure exactly how those conversations went, but I'm guessing that those did not, one of those did not get signed. Yeah, this is my whole point is I don't think this shit would have stopped. No. So what ends up happening after this is Lois dies and George fully takes over at Mount Carmel. So his numbers start to kind of dwindle. People start to migrate towards David because they were somebody that they knew was a direct connection to Lois in that way. And also maybe for the simple fact that to some degree maybe Lois did recognize that George didn't have, man, you can't be a leader if you're not charismatic. And I'm not saying and I'm not saying charismatic. There's, levels, charisma is a spectrum, man. You can be evil charismatic Hitler.

You can be great charismatic. I don't know anyone to use for that example. Matt Damon. Matt Damon. Oh, Matthew McConaughey. Very. Ryan Reynolds. Yep.

Rob McElheny. Absolutely. All those guys. The Rock. Okay, there we go. There's our spectrum is Hitler and the Rock. Yeah. So, George, she probably recognized that some of Georgia's deficiencies were just that lack of

charisma and being all to all. hold a congregation together. That's why some people can't be preachers. You got to be able to there and be able to talk and be convincing and be, you know, eloquent. Be personable too. Yeah, exactly. So that's also, if you still have David that is still within the area and you have people leaving Mount Carmel because they don't like what message George is sending, they have a place to, a natural place to go. And don't they end up, this is where the second duel of resurrecting bodies or something like that comes in. So a body gets dug up or something like that from the cemetery out at Mount Carmel.

They have their own cemetery. I don't know if it was their cemetery or if it was just a random cemetery. It was an 84-year-old lady that have been dead for like a number of years, like 10, 15 years. But George is the one that does it, right? Yeah, he goes and digs her body up and then he brings her back to Mount Carmel. He brings it into the like cultural hall, sets it up, goes and talks to David. Hey, got a dead person. Because he realized at this point that David's stealing his followers.

And he's like, if I don't take out Koresh and kind of reestablish myself as the power, the one true leader, I'm going to end up losing everything. There has to be like a grand gesture for me to show these people. And David does what smart people do. And he's like, okay. This is one of the times where you actually see that there's some intelligence behind what he's doing. Or he's like, I'm not going to battle you. I'm just going to call the cops and tell him.

tell him you were a grave robber and then you're going to get arrested. He desecrated a body. And they're going to take you out of play and then I'm just going to move in. And he goes to the police. The police tell him that they need evidence. So David gets a band of his guys and they break into Mount Carmel. Armed. Uh-huh.

Armed. Uzi. Yeah. So David himself had an Uzi on him, which I don't know when Uzi's were a big deal. Like whenever I think of an Uzi, I think like 80s Russian kind of weapons. Yeah. or like um air force one sneaking on the plane jet mom the yakuza yep uzi's that kind of thing they all had submachine guns when they broke onto the compound there was a firefight that broke out

george ended up getting hit and wounded but then he ran away uh they of course all get arrested um everybody goes to trial they all get acquitted somehow and i'm just i'm gonna assume that the acquittal is just because it's texas i don't know and texas is just like yeah you guys figure it out yourselves. Like, we're not going to interview on this. It was an okay corral situation. Like, did you make yourself known that you had weapons? Like, we yelled, we have guns.

He's like, all right. It was just a mutual combat rule. Yep. And during this, when David gets on the stand, he, like, fully breaks down and cries. Like, he becomes a human, and all of his followers see these human qualities. His, one of his wives at this point was... He doesn't become a human. He exhibits a moment of...

Human-like behavior. Yes. There you go. He is just... Such a narcissist that I don't know if you played this up in order to try to gain favor. You think that this was all a plan for him to cry on the stand? I think he's an opportunist, man. Like he went in to try to use the police to take out his rival.

I don't think you're giving him enough credit for his intelligence. And I'm saying that in kind of a somber way of saying like, it's unfortunate this guy was this intelligent because this is what led to everything. but I think if he saw an opportunity, he took it. And I think that he had this planned. His emotional intelligence was higher than his actual intelligence. No. When we get into the raid, he just gets dumber and dumber and dumber. But at this point, when he cries on the stand, one of his wives sees it,

and it's like the first time that she's ever seen an adult cry or like a man cry. And so she immediately falls in love of the more. They all end up getting acquitted. George is just mind-fucked at this point, ends up trying to kill somebody else and gets arrested on an attempted murder charge, goes to jail, Mount Carmel's taxes start building up, building up, building up. I think they might have owed some from before, too. I think there were some back taxes as well. But David saves up enough money. He pays the bank note on the taxes.

It immediately moves into Mount Carmel. And George ends up... That's why I'm saying. He planned. Like for someone to have all of this just fall into place like this, I'm not saying he planned to have George attempt to murder someone else. But the way that he set this up, there was definitely some planning behind it. It was George getting arrested again was kind of the happy accident. It was kind of like he was going to long play it and then George might have sped up the process a little bit.

He knew that George wouldn't be able to, like, because if anything, even if George didn't go to jail, he wasn't being able to pay taxes probably. And the more following numbers, it was just a time game. Exactly. Yep. He just had a way to him out. So George ends up just like David follows him around for the rest of his life, basically, in his mind. And he ends up killing his roommate and goes to prison. And when they sent it, before they send him to prison, obviously he goes to trial.

They find him mentally unfit. He spends the rest of his night in a nut house or the rest of his life in a nut house. Thankfully for him, he outlives David. So maybe there's a win there for him. I hope that maybe that was like he was living in a mental institution, but at least he baby out of life. I don't think that he would consider that when. Okay. Before we go any further, I do have to go to the bathroom.

Okay. All right. Well, we take a break from class and take care of some business. You can also take care of some business. If you don't follow us on Instagram or Twitter already, our Instagram handle is historically high pod. That's historically high POD. And our Twitter is historically high.

That's historically H-I. All right. And back to our show. All right. So getting back at it. So this is the point. Once he takes over Mount Carmel, this is when he actually changes his name to David Koresh. Mm-hmm.

He, excuse me, just a sec. Adam had to get a little something on his tummy. Turns out recording early and drinking early are two tough things. It means a good day. Yeah, luckily the marijuana is helping even things out. But he changes his name to David Koresh. Like we talked about earlier, he took the name David from King David. He takes Koresh from, I want to say it was a...

So, Koresh is the biblical name of Cyrus the Great, a Persian king who is named the Messiah for freeing the Jews during the Babylonian captivity. And then the first name David, of course, symbolizes the lineage directly to the biblical King David. So very strategic. Fairly self-important name. In how he chose his name. He gives himself a lot of credit by naming himself David Koresh. In that process, he also comes up. up with something that he calls the new light revelation. Well, here's the thing too. So for those that

don't know, so King David, the legend is that that's who the new Messiah would descend from is in that line of King David. So he was basically putting himself in line to say, hey, it could be me. If it's not me, I need to make a lot of people in my line to make sure that one of these, can you imagine if that's your justification for trying to like talk to these families and be like, well, I got to have sex with your underage daughter because, you know, if the Messiah isn't me, then the Messiah could be the child that I make with your daughter. Like, you could be the family of the Messiah.

Like, what do you, I'm trying to put myself into that mindset of like, where are you as a parent and as an adult that you hear this and it somehow makes sense? I don't have that part of me, I guess. No, and I don't think it's, I've said this multiple times about other things, but like Tom Brady, I'll never be devoted to anything and love anything as much as Tom Brady loves football. Yeah.

And I've made my peace with that. I'll never be as deeply ingrained in something and believe in something to just go ahead and toss away all my values as these people were. And I'm sure when you're dealing with a situation where you're talking about like the second coming and end times and revelation and all that good stuff, that it scares you enough to know that you're willing to hedge your bets. It's kind of like lost, like sunk cost, basically. It's like a sunk cost analysis.

You've put so many eggs into this basket that you almost have to see it through because coming out of this situation, you're going to be... There's nothing for you also on the outside. You're going to be so much worse off trying to come out of it because you've been gone for so long that you almost, have to try to see it through and be like, this sounds crazy to me, but I've already come this far. I might as well finish. And you're so immersed in it all the time. Like mass immersion has got to be something that cults, and it is something that cults you use, you know, to a T is basically

you just don't really give the people that are following you a break to think about anything else. Everything is centered around what's good for the commune or what's good for the religion or what's good for, you know, the... David himself. David himself. And so by keeping people focused on this, you don't allow outside distraction in to let them know, hey, there's other options. Or you don't really give them an opportunity to look for answers or questions, I guess, to the answers you're giving them. They just have to take what you're saying is gospel. And he figured it out, Ted's in the way there, he figured it out that after he comes up with this New Light Revelation,

so the New Light Revelation was something that I'm sure he had concocted way before this. and he calls everybody over they're having basically like a sermon during the sermon he plays up the act he kind of stops for a second he looks up at God everybody's like oh what's he doing and he proclaims that God

just spoke to him and told him that in order to grow the tribe basically they needed or he needed to annul every single marriage and separate every single husband and wife from each other and separate the children

and that all of his male members were no longer allowed to have sex because that was like a sin of the flesh. But he was allowed to have sex with any of their former wives in order to procreate, to grow the population, because his lineage was the lineage that needed to continue on. Yeah, of course he's from the line of David. He's going to birth the Messiah, like, step aside, you cuck. I got to plow your wife to try to make our next Lord and Savior. You want to continue to make halflings or you want the real deal? And in doing that, he also separated their living quarters.

The only time that they were allowed to ever be around each other was during Bible study. So keeping those two separate, they have such a tougher time being able to talk in private about things like that you would talk with your mate about. Because if you're talking to your mate like at night before bed about something and you can kind of bounce ideas off of each other, The separation of males and females stops that. So if you do have any doubt in your mind or if you have any questions about like this new light revelation or anything like that, you don't have your partner to bounce that off of to try to be like, hey, is this shit sound crazy to you? Because it kind of sounds crazy to me. That's exactly what it is. It's separation of any independent thought or any type of situation that you can bounce ideas off.

It might be questionable ideas or, you know, ideas questioning the teachings. That's what I'm saying. He's not a stupid person. Despite, despite, you know, the dyslexia, I think that's why he was, you know, it wasn't that he was put in these special classes as a kid. It's because back then they didn't understand what dyslexia really was. They weren't equipped to handle and misunderstand. Oh, you just mixed your letters up sometimes. That doesn't, we talked about this before.

Well, I can't remember which episode it was in, but you were talking about how you don't even, these days, you don't even really hear too much about dyslexia outside of maybe just talking about a kid or something. because if you have it as an adult, your mind has learned to compensate for you to recognize words. It's like those people, have you seen those people? I think I do this due degree where when you're reading,

you can read faster because you look at the first two or three letters of the word and you can tell based on what the previous words were, what that word is. People that have learned like how to skim

or kind of predict. Exactly. It's like predictive. It's not predictive text because that's when you type out something. But basically it's a reading version of predictive text. And so you can gather

information like that. I think he just he's been in this life so much and he knows at this point psychologically what he's able to get away with that there's no one been up to this point. There's no one really that's questioned ever challenged him aside from George and even when he left he wasn't leaving on its own

he brought followers with him which in his mind was just a way of saying oh I am right these people are coming with me I didn't lose. I just haven't gained everybody yet. I haven't sold everybody on what I'm selling. And so now that he basically, people don't have an option now. It's just him. Yeah, George's out of the picture.

Lois died a while ago. These are just his people. Those are who he needs to lead. They don't have anywhere else to go. No. I think he did hedge his bets a lot on that was if you can push him over. When we talk about the siege, I'll kind of get into where I think that maybe he, like his hubris was outweighed his intelligence.

But so he goes into this whole new light doctrine. He already has eight wives. Eight fucking wives. And not many of them are older than 18. Like it's a very young, young man's game, young, young woman's game that he's playing. And he, once they kind of have this new light doctrine, he just starts fucking like crazy. He is all over these women. He's taken different wives, or not wives, but he's basically taking different mates.

And he's procreating like crazy. Like his children are the amount of them, I think, had this whole siege thing not happened, he would kind of have a larger line than would be okay with. And I don't know how I would take being like the son of David Koresh at this point in my life. If I knew that that's what my dad did, I don't know. Because you don't want to fall into the demonizing part of it. because he's your dad and you never really knew him. But at the same time, there's still sex out there who believed that he was the true Messiah,

that he stood up, excuse me, to the government, like, that he was still, he's still spoken about favorably in different circles that aren't good circles. You have to, like, it would take a lot of, I don't know if I can imagine someone that's that mentally well adjusted, that that isn't something that's, like, strongly affected their life. You're always going to be in therapy. Well, here's the question, though, too. And this is going to jump forward a little bit, but we're going to cover the information anyway,

is how many of his actual kids made it out? I don't know how many of them made it out. I think some of them did because he had a, there were, like I said, there were different areas that they would have, like, communes. Like, they had a house in California that was the parents' house of a wife that he had had had, that they had walked away from basically like the colt. And I know that she had had kids. I don't know if she escaped with the kids

or if they stayed on the compound with David. But I think there were people that got out. So there's still probably a few of his kids, but a lot of them died in the siege. So as they're on the compound now, and as they're, they obviously need money, they need a way of funding this whole, fun farm that they got going on.

He has people that are out working in the public and then bringing their wages back to him. One of the big things that they get into, and I'm sure it's a huge industry in Texas, was they created something called the mag bag, and it was basically an arms dealer where they would be getting guns in and they would be going to these private seller shows.

Well, they're not private. It's like when you do a... I don't even know how to compare. You know, sometimes around here we do, like the RV show down at the expo. It's like a gun convention. That's all it is, but they have these all the time. And Texas is so big, and these are going on all the time, so much that it was basically,

they didn't have a brick and mortar place, but they would go around to these gun shows and sell. They would, and that's why it's like a, because they're selling these guns privately. They don't have, like, a store open. That's why I mean. Yeah, but that's why it's private is, it's like they're, they're just selling out of their license at these shows. They don't have like a full store store that. you can go get things out. Correct, yeah.

But they get real privy to being able to alter guns. And the family that got away that lived in California, they were still so under his tutelage kind of that they had, yeah, they had a conversion kit for a, to make a gun an automatic. And it was like a machine gun. It was like to make an automatic machine gun.

Yeah. After they kicked all the Davidians out there, they actually held that for him to come pick up because they thought that he would want it. Yeah. So that kind of leads and that's leading into basically the Waco siege and kind of the leadup of what brought it on. So because they have a hand and they're getting some of their money from basically arms sales, but at this point it's kind of legal arms sales. There's kind of suspected that they might be stockpiling arms at this point.

and I'm not sure who this really comes under, like who first kind of brings this to the attention. I don't know if there was a government agency at this point that was kind of like had an eye on potentially like extremists. Well, we just talked about this previously. Maybe there was still a group that was looking at these smaller, like what they could consider extremist groups or cults or something like that at this point. But it drew the attention of the, I don't know if local law enforcement was ever really aware of it. they started bringing in like grenade casings through like FedEx in the mail. You know how they first got picked up on the radar. So essentially a box broke open and a FedEx driver,

the box that broke open that was being delivered up to Mount Carmel was full of grenade casings. It was a UPS guy. It had semi-automatic rifles in it and had grenade casings. I don't know if it was the actual rifles themselves, but what I know it was is the whole reason that it drew so much attention once the ATF, which is the alkybal alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. They're the, essentially the legal, what would you consider them, the enforcement agency for it? The government arms of regulating alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.

So what ended up, they kind of found through their research and also through like testimony of people that lived around the areas, they had some people talking about hearing automatic weapons fire from the Divideon complex. somebody that mentioned it was also a former soldier and he's like, I was in Vietnam. I know what automatic fire sounds like because they also had firing ranges. They had built firing ranges out at the complex. So what they were doing is they were taking these weapons that were semi-automatic rifles. And I guess with like AR-15s, if you take an AR-15 rifle, but then you swap out with an M-16 receiver, the M-16 receiver would be what like the military used.

it's the weapon that you always see in Vietnam movies. It's the machine gun, except it's like the all-black classic one. It's the one that, like, a lot of people use this logo, you know, when they put the stickers up and everything. It's the M-16. So if you would take the receiver and the firing mechanism off that and put it onto an AR-15, it would become fully automatic. They had a way of doing this with rifles.

They could also do this, I think, with pistols, a couple of the pistols that they had at the complex. So this actually gets the attention of the ATF, and they start kind of looking, into them. They even send in like someone under cover. They had also had a lot of just from like pending court cases about people that had left in like kidnapping and child abuse, different people that have escaped from the Davidians that tried to bring charges against them. There were charges of child neglect. There were charges of child abuse, which obviously we know is going on because he's

fucking underage girls. Well and that's in it's not even the weapons thing. I mean that was part of the reason that they were allowed the attorney general allowed them to perform the siege or the raid. It wasn't even the weapons. It was because they were, there were still children in there. And there had already been so much proof of, like, child abuse and child neglect and everything, that that was kind of the catalyst, or what they used as the reasoning to get, because they had to get presidential approval for this. The attorney general actually went to, who was president this time? Clinton. Clinton. So Janet Reno had to go to Clinton, and he initially declined the raid and said, this needs to be done as a negotiation and everything. She then had to

go back once the raid was already under or no before the raid happened a second time and was like hey at this point we're worried about the children the kids and he's like do what you think is best that was definitely a major driver like you were talking about with the surveillance the ATF actually moved agents in next door to wakea or moved next door to mount carmel in waco across the street or something yeah i don't know how big the compound was but i'm assuming it was probably fairly sizable. From the pictures, it looks like there's a lot of space around. I'm not sure how near to the main road or the next houses, but this is like rural Texas. This is not, you know. And if your your neighbor's moving in of a certain style of life, like I don't think it was like a male and a female

agent. I think it was just a couple of male agents. So it sort of gives your position away. And these agents that had moved in next door started actually going over and attending like Bible study. and Koresh said that he knew that they were, this is where I get into like, Koresh's hubris was outweighed his intelligence. Because he said that he knew that they were ATF agents and he knew that they were there spying on them. But he believed so much in his words

and what he was saying and what he was preaching that he actually believed that even though they were ATF agents that he could get a hold of him and he could sink his claws into him and that he could make them believe what he believed to try to flip an ATF agent. which a lot of people in the public, you have the ability in kind of the strength of them not knowing what you do. But as soon as you start bringing people into Bible study

that have prior knowledge of the child abuse and the weapons and the guns, you're not going to buy into his bullshit. No, well, he believed himself, he believed in himself that much that he could flip an actual ATF agent. Well, here's the thing, too, is he did talk to a few agents, but then they actually sent in this undercover agent, Robert Rodriguez, is who Koresh learned his identity and he chose not to reveal that fact or anything until the actual day of the raid. So kind of like you're saying this hubris, I don't know if he believed that

he could turn this guy into someone who was going to be, you know, a double agent and kind of be on his side or if he was just so confident that he could hide everything from this guy that eventually they wouldn't see anything and then they would just say there's nothing to, you know, there's nothing going on here. I think you lean towards kind of the first, because the beginning bungle of this whole thing, in looking back on it, I don't really remember having this thought,

but when they talk about how the raid was botched, I kind of disagreed until it really came back to this thought. But basically, before this started, a couple days before, there were FBI agents because the FBI wanted to be involved, but there were more. ATF agents that had flooded into the rural area of Texas. So as those hotels fell up, the local newspapers and media are starting to figure out that

there's something big going on. They end up getting... The local media knows that, like, the Divideons are out here already. Yeah. But I'm sure... No, they're kind of weird. Know that that could be what's going on. So local media gets a hold of it.

And on the day of the raid, a reporter gets lost. And as the reporter gets lost, they do the logical thing. They asked the postman where they're going. Postman turns out to be David Koresh's brother-in-law. So David Koresh's brother-in-law is the mailman calls David Karech. He's like, hey, there was a reporter out here looking for you guys saying that there was going to be a raid today. Kersh finds out about it. He lets everybody else know.

He actually told Rodriguez that he knew what was going on and he knew what he was. And he let him leave under his own volition. That to me makes me think that he really thought like, okay, this is what needs to happen. If you're not going to believe in me, that's fine. You can go fight your side of the war because ultimately he believed that they were going to have to go back and fight, I think, in Israel for their freedoms when the rapture came. But then he started to realize during, I think it was a Persian Gulf War that was happening right around there, that their fight was actually going to take place at home in Waco against the government instead of against the New World Order. Okay.

Okay. So you don't think that you don't think that his process was that he was going to just get out of this. You thought he realized that it was either he was going to come out victorious in this or everyone was going to die? That this was going to be the persecution that then led into the second coming.

Okay. I really think just through everything that he said to the ATF and the way that he tried to preach, he knew that this was coming. He knew, what are you looking for? No, my pen. He knew kind of that this was going to have to happen. And he was preaching to his people on Mount Carmel about it.

Because they were training children with firearms. They were training the men with firearms. They knew that there was going to be an armed conflict. It's guerrilla warfare. Yeah, he basically knew coming from all of the different raids, or not different raids that had been done, but the investigations, he knew when the ATF was sending people in, that it was eventually going to have to end this way.

well it's i think it's a combination of him knowing that his time is probably his days are probably numbered a little bit but also um a false sense of i don't know grandeur or like his place uh what do you call that not he was going to have to a martyr a god complex he was going to have to be a martyr for his cause and he was going to have to even if he gets killed everybody that's a branched of it on the outside he thinks he's going to be like okay well he was preaching this and then it came for fruition, he has to be the guy that we should be listening to. Well, and here's the thing to you, can you imagine being Rodriguez and you know that he knows and he's like, you can leave? Can you imagine what that feeling would be like, like, walking out

and like walking to your car just waiting to get shot in the back? Yeah. He basically knows it's go time and he's got nothing to lose. You've been in there. You know kind of what the, how crazy these people are for him. You've seen the devotion. And so you're thinking like, first of all, you probably thinking it's a, trick like he's just let me walk away now he's going to shoot me in the back shoot and just as you get close to your car you're like it's it's going to happen right as i get to my car and then trying to get your keys and trying to fuck man he knows that i know what's going on here and i'm of no of no consequence

to him he can kill me and it's not going to cause him any extra issue like that's a it had to be in the most scary thing coming out of there and instead of the ATF he goes back obviously to their place to their house, whatever it was that they were living in, tells the ATF, hey, David knows what's going on. They know that the rate is coming today. And they had a no-knock warrant. So they didn't have to go up to the door and knock. They were going to break their way in. ATF's like, fuck it. We're still going to run the plan today. This was our idea. Like, instead of gathering yourself, because if you pull off that day, you do have the element of surprise again. Like, it may not be Monday. It may not be Tuesday. It could be Wednesday. Like, no. Yes and no. Here's the thing. Is if,

If you're giving them, yeah, they know that you're on the way and they can prepare between the time that they know now. But even if they call it off, they know that your plan is to raid. So at that point, regards of how long you wait, I mean, unless you're willing to wait a year, maybe more, they're going to be on high alert. And they're also going to have the opportunity to bring in additional resources and bring an additional, like, either if they need weapons, they can, do more training, they can fortify more. You know, I think that at this point, they, one, I think they underestimated people's devotion to him, and I think they probably also underestimated the level of resistance that they were going to be able to put out.

It could be. That's, I guess they really would just be on high alert after that. My thinking would have been, had they held off for like a month, you would have gotten a month into maybe making people question like hey you said that it was go time they haven't shown up here in a month like maybe their belief would be waning because he was wrong about the raid that day

to where they would be caught more off guard but he would have had the ability to call in reinforcements they would have still known they would have sent their people back out into the city to be able to see like hey these people are still here it still could be happening at any time I don't even know if that would have occurred

I don't know if he would have let people leave because if they are going to raid don't know what the reason being that they wouldn't maybe start picking people up if they're going to raid anyway. Yeah, I just think at that point they felt they had the resources committed to it and that if they didn't do it, that any amount of surprise was going to be completely lost. Their resources, the way that they planned this whole thing just seems like it was, excuse me, like they had a lot of time to plan it, but when it came right down to it, like they didn't

have medical at the ready to think that they were ever going to need them in case there was a firefight that happened. So you had a staging area which had like fire tracks and that type of thing, but you didn't have medical on standby in case one of your agents get shot to be able to take care of it. No, here's some of the kind of the preparation that they had leading up to the raids. You kind of understand what the government's position on or what their, I guess, their strength was in this scenario. So the search warned it commanded the search to occur on or before February 28th and 93 in the day. Daytime between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., which that's kind of funny to me that it states that because it's like, it reminds me of like when you get cable repair or something. They're like, we'll be there between the hours of eight and five.

You have a window. Yeah, this window was fucking 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. The ATF also made the claim that Koresh was possibly operating a meth lab, which is kind of ties back to something that we didn't mention previous. When he took over Mount Carmel after George left, they found a meth lab in Mount Carmel. Carmel and he had the whoever was doing the transfer of, you know, the property after they found that, he had the police come in and clean that out. But the reason why they said, I think the ATF made that claim, I don't know what information they had on it, but it was to establish a drug nexus and obtain military assets under the war on drugs policy. So because essentially there was a meth lab,

they were able to, I think that's how they got a hold of some of the like armored vehicles. Huh. Because they had like Bradley fighting vehicles. At some point they had Abrams tanks. Yeah. That's. So they had to have known bringing a tank in that they were going to have, that they were going to meet some sort of resistance.

But I don't know if they brought that. Keep in mind, this is a siege that lasted 51 days, almost two months. And dependent on how it went. Because of course, there were times during the standoff that no action was occurring during certain days. Most days. Most days, exactly. There were only a few days. because it wasn't like, hey, we're just going to knock down a wall with this tank and then back off and wait for a week.

It was activity going on. If they were taking action, it was to be immediate action. And that's that same day that they launched the raid, it was, they were just met immediately with fire. Yeah, so it was March 1st, 93, had the code name, Showtime. The ATF later claimed that the raid was moved up a date to the 28th, essentially, in response to, the Waco Tribune heralds the sinful Messiah series article, which is another thing. So apparently the Waco Tribune had this story about David Koresh that they had been like sitting on for a while under pressure from the government. And they were like, don't put this out there because they were

afraid that it was, it would draw attention. Even if it was like, so I think their fear was, even though this was the Waco Tribune, as soon as the media got a hold of this that there was a siege, then people would be just like grabbing for articles to try to get information. about this, the Waco Tribune Tribune would be like, hey, we have this huge article that we just wrote and it would give the nation a lot more visibility into what

the Branch Trividians were. So I don't know if they were worried it would cause like sympathy or blowback or something, but what ended up happening is the it was released on that date. And I'm sure he wasn't too bummed, or Koresh wasn't too bummed about it. Oh, no. I mean, I'm sure

he had other things to think about at this point. You have time to kind of sit in basketball. on it or in it. He wanted the national attention. And after that first day of the raid, they, I read somewhere that like actual gun fights and fire fights with like the ATF and the FBI and all that stuff,

they last around like two minutes. This shit lasted for two hours. And the only reason that the ATF had to pull back. And one of the things that I really think that like the branched Davidians, knowing that they were stockpiling shit, this was like a big advantage. Because the ATF actually started running out of ammunition to where they had to pull back while the Davidians were still firing at the same rate. So the ATF wasn't even prepared enough to be able to go in to fight these people that

were stockpiling ammunition. Like that, that to me is crazy that they were that prepared. Well, check this out. So while not standard procedure, the ATF agents had their blood type written on their arms or neck after leaving the staging area before the raid, because it was recommended by the military to facilitate speedy blood transfusions in the case of injury. So they fucking knew, because also, calling in the military, they knew the severity of this. They knew what they were going up against.

So it's daylight. They go to actually serve the warrant, or go to, like, breach and serve the warrant. And basically, I want to say, let's see. How many people ended up dying the first day? There were six Davidians that died the first day. There were four ATF agents and there were 16 ATF agents wounded. That's a lot. And one of them, the Branch Davidian people that died during the initial was five.

There was a lady that was coming home from work that day that didn't know. Well, during this raid, wasn't this the raid? The very first, that's where Koresh got shot, isn't it? Uh, yeah, I would think it's he never comes out and actually admits that he gets wounded until later on. He took one in the hip and it was like in the back and it ended up going to his hip, but it was a fairly decent shot. And then there was one of the wrists that he took to, I think. They refused medical attention after they'd kind of brokered the ceasefire. During the actual raid, Koresh and a couple other people had called into the local police department.

And the local police department didn't have a straight line to the ATF where this was going on. So as Koresh was trying to talk to the local sheriff's department, they're like, whoa, they didn't give us enough warning to have a connection here. We're trying to get a hold of them to try to broker this ceasefire. So I'll just kind of do a breakdown of the initial raid kind of what popped it off. So just because everyone's listening to this, I don't know if anyone can pull up on their phone a picture of the Mount Carmel compound. So basically it's like it looks like a big house. It's got almost like a wall around it. It looks like in kind of a courtyard and surrounds the pool.

Part of it is two-story. So, and then most of it, I think, is just one-story or a little bit taller buildings. They had an outpost where you had a lookout in it. Yeah, and it's almost U-shaped. So it all connects. So what ends up happening is the ATF brings in helicopters. They have a team that goes out to the kennels during this raid to shoot the dogs. Kind of fucked up.

I don't know. So, and then they have like another team that's going to breach the door. There's been a lot of like discrepancies about who actually fired first. A lot of people say it was the Davidians fired first. A lot of people say that it was, you know, there's a lot of accounts. What I'm saying is that the, of course, the official line is that they fired first and then the ATF returned fire. Always. There's been some studies of like the actual structure on the doors that were fired upon first and the way that the door was actually like the shots, the splintered the wood.

their exit wounds going to the interior and then at one point during the investigation that door disappears after everything ends that door was able to be taken so I don't know exactly like what the deal with that is but this raid isn't just like

bashing doors they have guys that are like on the roof that are trying to go down through windows into areas trying to capture Koresh and they had helicopters that they were using like as aerial distractions all of those took incoming fire.

Yeah, it was during the first shots. Koresh was wounded, shot in the hand and the stomach. The Branch Davidian, his name was Wayne Martin. Like you said, he called emergency services pleading for them to stop shooting, asked for a ceasefire. He was saying, that's them shooting, that's not us, during the recordings that they were able to gather. Which, of course, doesn't hold up.

The first casualty or ATF casualty was an agent who made it to the west side of the building before he was wounded. They took cover, they were firing at the helicopters. There were guys that were trying to come down either through skylights or through windows from the roof, like rappel down or the climbing the roof with ladders. I mean, it sounds like it was a full, like think of a domestic, what am I trying to say here, like a SWAT team doing a rate and everything like that, just swarming the compound. And the fact that they were repelled and had to back off just due to the, like you were saying, they started running out of ammunition. like they completely underestimated the situation. Trying to serve a warrant that's a no-knock warrant like this

and trying to limit casualties, I don't know if maybe they just didn't expect this kind of a fight to happen. But these people, to remind everybody, they've been stockpiling for years. And after the fires... And practicing. Yeah, and practicing. Yeah, exactly.

After the fire that will get to, they said that they recovered 300 semi-automatic rifles. Did you see how many rounds of ammunition? Uh-uh. So they called them, I can't remember what they call it. It's not expended ammunition because that's after you use it. It's ammunition that,

like the fire, it makes it detonate, which can you imagine, I'm going to tell you the number, and then you can imagine all of this, like, ammo popping off. 1.9 million rounds. Million? Yes. How did everybody not get,

I guess the propulsion's a little bit different, but how did everybody outside just, not get shredded by 1.9 million bullets when the fire started. Well, you got to imagine no one even approved when there's a fire like that, especially in this kind of scenario, fire departments aren't trying to put it out. The whole thing's burning because it's unexpected.

You're not expecting the way that this happens. It's not like a fire starts and like get the fire rescue up here. The fire happens and they're trying to find out if people are coming out. They're still worrying about the gunfire. The fire happens so quickly in the scenario that they don't even approach the area until the fire. has died down, which means that all the ammo has already been expound. And it's

also, remember, it's up on like a little bit of a rise. And so all the ATF agents are kind of downhill. So the firing can't fire at that trajectory. I'm like, I'd be surprised if, can you imagine like being in the distance though, if that stuff popping off

and firing off into the distance and everything? Like it's lucky it was so secluded. Like people could have been hit by that shit. And that's that's a little bit towards the end of it. So over the standoff, after they pull back, there's a line of communication between David with the ATF. Of course, the FBI sweeps in, seeing how badly bungled the raid was. FBI takes over, and for 51 days, they're going back and forth, communicating with Koresh.

Koresh says, I want, I believe it was, I want you to get my message out nationally. A Christian TV channel picked it up, and they were allowed to film something to put out to the masses. And overnight, this becomes like an instant sensation. As soon as the media gets a hold of it, and as soon as everybody shows up, it's being broadcast around the world. Within a day, it was like the biggest news on TV. It was shown on all the news stations at night. He really got the press and the pub that I think that he wanted. And he would go back during these times when they were talking and trying to negotiate,

he would just immediately start breaking into what they just call Bible Babel, because he would be talking about trying to justify and make justifications for what they were doing, what their mission was, and why they needed to come out of this okay. Which, I think he knew that he was going to die at that point. He wasn't going to make this out live, so the more he could get his message out,

I truly think that he believed in that more than he believed in what he was doing. And there's certain things that psychologically, some of the visions that you can have in some of these delusions of grandeur can be caused by like seizures, basically that happened, I think, in your temporal lobe, where you would be able to have these visions and most of the time they're religious, sometimes there are other things, most time they're religious. I think that he had maybe not being a doctor, obviously I can't say, and they didn't know,

but he had maybe had enough of these seizures to where he really did believe, like if he died, he would die and go to heaven. He wasn't just in this for strictly, like, personal gain. He was into it because he knew that he needed to die. I think it was a healthy mix of both. Yeah. I think it was. So, well, I mean, after the ATF kind of botched this, that's when the FBI actually took over and took command, using, of course, the deaths of federal agents as justification for it.

And the FBI hostage rescue team, the HRT, that they brought in, was actually headed by the same guy Richard Rogers, who had previously been the head. of the Rubey Ridge incident. So he was criticized for that, but apparently not too much. I don't know what criticism. It's probably like, hey, don't do that again. And then he gets another job. So he's down here doing this. So at first, the Divideon's actually had telephone contact with local news media.

And during the initial part of the siege, Koresh gave the phone interviews and then the FBI cut off his communication to the outside world. So for the next 51 days, communication, all of that went through telephone. to a group of 25 FBI negotiators. That seems like a lot just for one. I know. But check this out. So the final Justice Department report that they did on this

found that the negotiators criticized all of the tactical commanders, like the guys that put the FBI and everything like that, for undercutting the negotiations. So I don't know if they were sabotaging it. I don't know if they were just, you know, if they had it in their minds that they needed to take action. I'm guessing after that first raid and seeing like the loss of life on their side,

I don't think negotiation was probably their number one priority at that point. They got showed up. They got taken out and pushed back by a mob of people. Like it wasn't, these people are trained tactical fighters and they were stopped by a group of Wahoos and a compound. Well, I mean, in the first few days, the FBI thought they were making real headway with him because they actually negotiated an agreement that all of them would peacefully leave. all they would have to return for a message is for a message from David Koresh being broadcast on national radio so they were like cool you release everybody we'll get this broadcast on national radio they actually did that and then after that Koresh then told the negotiators that God had told them to remain in the building and wait

and that was his move every single time they would get close to a deal there would always be something to get pushback well but then he would give them like little things because he you know had he just completely bailed on their agreement, they wouldn't be willing to offer him anything in the future. So despite him being like, they told me to wait in the building, the negotiators managed to facilitate 19 kids being released,

ranging in age from five months to 12 years old without their parents. And even after that, 98 people were still in the building. There were people that were so devoted to the cause to where it didn't matter. They knew that they wanted to see the end game here. It's kind of that sunk cost analysis. that we were talking about.

They knew that they were in it this far. David had been preaching about something like this happening for years. So they knew, just based on what they knew, they knew that David was speaking the truth now, but he really had the insider information being smart enough to know that they were going to come after him eventually. So it's kind of like you throw no shit to the wall with something sticks, you're going to get people that are beholden to you.

And the people that they had pulled out, and a lot of people went to jail, but even to this day there's still people that believe that what happened was what Koresh was saying. Like that he's still the prophet. They still have the martyr. Yeah, he was a martyr. And this whole raid, it just plays back and forth because they did some pretty brutal shit to these people. They did like multiple hours straight noise over big microphones of dying rabbits.

Yeah, they used a whole bunch of things that they had probably determined. were good psychological warfare through like Vietnam and everything. It was, I want to say, it was rabbits like being killed. There were some other sounds that they used that were proven like psychological like deterrence and everything. They were basically just trying to keep them awake at night and basically, what would you call that? Just drive them into sleep deprivation, start getting them to turn on David.

And that's where I play back and forth is like I hear that and I think that's cruel and unusual. Here's the same time. It's a compound where some guy is fucking children. That's what I'm saying is like, I don't think at any point, I don't know if their order of doing things was necessarily the right order.

But at the point when they got those 19 kids out, of course they started interviewing all of the kids, like getting them with social workers. And, you know, they'd been physically and sexually abused long before the standoff even occurred. Their whole lives. Exactly. And so that was finally the justification that basically

offer the FBI and, you know, And they offered to Clinton and Reno. And they were like, this is why we need to go ahead and use tear gas and just gas these people out of here. So we can get, there's still children in there. We got to get everyone out right now. And tear gas officially up to this point, I'm pretty sure they probably had some studies on this they weren't talking about. They had never tested tear gas on children. So they didn't know the effects that would be the tear gas would have on kids.

Well, and check this out too. So during the siege, FBI sent in a video camera to them. and in the videotape made by David's followers, Koresh introduced his children and his wives to the FBI negotiators, including several minors who claimed to have had babies fathered by Koresh. They said he had fathered perhaps 14 of the children

who stayed with him in the compound. And they found out they were able to do DNA tests on the kids afterwards. We'll get to kind of that dark part right at the end. But they, yeah, they... Well, the tape was never even released, anything like that because the negotiators had determined that it would cause or it would create sympathy for a correction them. And that's what he was going for. I think the whole time was the

sympathy. Putting out the sermons, different things like that, you're not going to get the masses, obviously, because they probably think that you're a kook. But it does garner sympathy with anybody that's willing to listen to basically a religious prisoner, which he tried to portray himself as. He had a, I guess, Passover is still like a very, important holiday to Adventists and to Davidians. So, excuse me, coming around then, he said that after Passover, he would end up leaving. He would surrender. They would all come out.

Passover comes and goes. Passover is not the end point. He still says that Jesus has more time for him. I misread the signs. And this was where it goes all the way back to Millerism. Like the great disappointment, like he was trying to choose these. dates to tell these people. He's buying time, man.

Yeah. And they had enough provisions on site. They said that the inside of the compound and all the people that were still alive could live up to another year. So this was a waiting game where they had to start figuring out. Like if these people can live here for a year, we obviously can't let this go on any longer. Oh, yeah. Well, and I mean, eventually what they did is they had like nine of these Bradley, they call them Bradley fighting vehicles.

Basically, they're armored transports, but they have like a gun on top, like a big 50 Cal or something like a cannon. And they had nine of these things out there. And they were basically using them to like run over and clear the area, like, mow down any fences, moat down any of the cars that they had out there. And they were just driving them around the complex, just taking out any obstacles for maybe like the next, the next raid. And these things even had on them, they had like the tear gas launchers.

They were called C-EVs. combat something vehicles. Yeah, combat engineer vehicles. Yes, and they had the, the turrets on the front. Oh,

no, they had, this was an addition. They had nine Bradley's and five of these CE. Oh, they had 14 of these. They're playing the day of the raid,

or I guess, think of that, 14 military, armored military vehicles, out there just driving around to smash and shit. 51 days, that many casualties,

that many wounded. They know that they're not going to go, peacefully and they know there's a good chance. I don't know how much ammunition they thought that they had, but I bet they knew after that first day, like, these guys aren't slowing down the firing rate. They probably got a lot of shit.

So they had like three water storage tanks on the roof of the main building. Well, during the initially ATF raid, those had been damaged. So they were down to like, I don't know if it punched a hole in the bottom of it or anything like that. But so they already were going to be short on water. And then eventually the

FBI cut all the power and water to the compound. So like sewered. and basically survived those inside to survive on rainwater and stockpiled MREs. So like those meals ready to eat that they serve in the military, like their dehydrated meals. Yeah. They knew that they were still going to have a long longevity with this whole standoff. Eventually they just knew that after 50 days, 51 days, whatever, they had to pull something off. Well, there was a bunch of criticism, too, kind of at the tactics that they were doing.

So basically what they considered the tactics were a, like, oh, what did they call it? It was like a sleep and peace and disruptive sound. There was a term for it. I can't remember what it was. Probably just deprivation. So, yeah, the point is this is they were trying to have sleep disturbance and drive someone crazy when they already viewed the people that they were going up against to be crazy to begin with. They're like, why would you try to go ahead and take any type of rationalism that these people had?

and then force them to lose that. Do you think you're going to get the results you want? Two negatives aren't going to make a positive in this situation. I don't think at least because keeping crazy people up at night's just going to drive them crazier. And to know, like, at night, they would be shining spotlights in windows to try to keep people up, the noises that they're playing, the disturbances and all that kind of stuff. That's made to try to push you towards insanity, not to bring you back to sanity to want to leave the compound. And all you're doing is seeing as you're the victim, basically, because the government's picking on you.

They're doing all these terrible things to you. All you've done to them is just try to defend your territory. So it has the opposite effect. And there were different times they told them not to go up into the bird's nest because they didn't want the Divideans to show like an aggressive strategic position to be able to fire on them if they just wanted to get some rounds off. They actually took children up there into the bird's nest as they. were surveilling them and they would hold the children up to the windows. To show for the cameras that were going to be on it and everything. Because you know that even though there was an area around the complex where, you know,

the military was operating and where the government was operating, that the same way that you get footage, any other vantage point probably had national media sitting there with fucking telephoto lenses trying to take photos of anything and everything. Because you can look online and you can see that kind of stuff. Hottest story in the country. So, you know, at this point it's kind of getting toward the end of, you know, the siege and everything or what we'll get we're going to know is going to be the end of the siege and they were just basically saying that they had had people that were like theological like

studying like professors and stuff like that who studied like apocalyptic how would you say apocalypticism apocalyptic and koresh had basically during this whole thing during all of his bible babble they were i mean they had people studying all this kind of stuff back at the fbi i and everything. And actually speaking to him over the phone. Yeah. And so they had determined, like, listen, this guy is completely committed to this end of time thing. This isn't going to, they're not going to get his followers, his devoted followers to do anything but follow him. So the likelihood would increase for violence in a deadly outcome. They also noticed that the negotiation, you know, discussions with him were becoming more difficult. He'd proclaimed that

he was the second coming of Christ. He'd been commanded by God in heaven to remain at the compound. at one point they were talking about using snipers just to kill him another key branched dividian leaders and then they were kind of concerned that if that happened there would be a mass suicide even though you know because Jim Jones had happened in 78 and he repeatedly denied any plans for mass suicide when they even confronted him about it or asked him about it

which he's lied about everything else what exactly like of course he's but like what have you shown up to this point that makes us even believe that that's off the table. Well, not to get into it because it's just a very long drawn-out talk, but he wanted to change the name to something like the opening of the seventh seal. And basically in Revelation, there's seven- That's what he called them like in private. There's seven seals that need to be open for the second coming,

and different things happened with these seals, and he was supposed to be the one that was opening these seals in order to bring the rapture. he was telling the government all of this about how they're the ones that are helping him to open these seals. So he wasn't like just get out of here and leave us alone. He was actively agging these guys on. And after you get lied to so many times, you just finally have to make a move. You have to act.

And I think Janet Reno finally got the go ahead from Clinton on it. Yeah, so she kind of, the way she made her case is a little bit questionable. So she made the FBI's case to Clinton recalling there was an operation. in 85 called the Covenant the Sword and the Arm of the Lord. It was like a siege in Arkansas, I guess, which ended without loss of life by a blockade without a deadline.

And Clinton was like, why don't we just do that tactic against the Branch Devidians? And Reno basically counter with, listen, the FBI hostage rescue team, they're tired of waiting, standoff is costing us a million dollars per week. And honestly, the Branch DeVidians could hold out longer.

And that, you know, chances of sexual abuse and mass suicide were imminent. And he basically was like, okay, I mean, do what you feel is best in this scenario. And that kind of gave the go ahead for the assault that took place on April 19th, 1993. Thank God it wasn't a day later. Well, dude, so the FBI, the hostage rescue team, their arms included 50 caliber rifles and the armor combat engineering vehicles. And they were basically what they were going to do is they weren't going in their,

it was an assault, but they weren't going in there to kill. It wasn't like an assault, like your assault in the fucking Taliban headquarters or like a raid or anything like that. What they were going to do is they were using these armored vehicles. They were going to punch holes in the walls with these armored vehicles because it was like stuck over stone walls. It wasn't like a wood. I don't think it was a wood structure. Maybe it was. It was wood.

They were just looking for entry points for the tear gas, but they were also going to break open holes in the wall for escape. So they wanted to flush them out. They had to give them a way out, so I think what they were going to do is the strategy was to punch the holes in the walls to pump the tear gas behind them and then punch the holes in the walls of the direction they wanted them all to fan out so they could keep an eye on people. They wanted a safe exit point to where they could be taken into custody and they could be taken care of. Unfortunately, in doing so, there were fires that were started around the compound and I don't know how flammable. tear gas is, but I'm assuming that it's decently flammable? Well, it's not that. It's, so,

you know, sometimes when you see someone throw tear gas in a movie, you see that initial spark. Uh-huh. And then all of a sudden, you see the, like, sparks to kind of ignite it, and then the gas starts. So there's a couple different types, apparently, of tear gas grenade. There's a pyro-kinetic or pyro-technic tear-grass grenade,

and then there's also ones that just are just the gas. So if there was something flammable, I'm not saying just that spark, but apparently these can create a lot of heat, a little bit of explosion before it creates the gas. If it was to fall into some paper or something flammable, it could potentially start a fire. From everything that I read, which, again,

we're going off of what the government's saying. And as we've made clear over many episodes, the government always, or doesn't always tell the truth. I have stuff from other news sources too. Well, from what I heard was the turrets that punch the holes from the CEVs were actually the ones that were funneling, the tear gas in. So it wasn't necessarily by like grenade that they're

throwing the tear gas in. They're pumping it in through a machine. No, they fired off a lot of tear gas rounds. They were firing up rounds too. So that definitely could have started the fire. Oh yeah. What they did is they basically because it wasn't just they pumped gas and this was just the initial raid. So what they had done is this didn't all

take place over. I mean the initial assaulted but then what they did is they would pump the tear gas in at low pressure to begin with to see if they could just get a few people out because they weren't going to full blast them and just be like because maybe they couldn't see at that point. If they just hit them with like the full force of it, they might not have been able to find their way out. So part of it is the plan started like an increasing amount of tear gas to be pumped in over two days to increase the pressure. Two days?

Yes. Jesus. And so on let's see. So I'm just kind of looking at the time frame on it. Yeah, their hostage rescue team delivered 40mm C.S. grenade fire from grenade launchers. So those have to fire in And then I don't know if those are It does say that some of them were the pyrotechnic ones

So there was something to cause sparks There was something to cause sparks But here's the thing though The stuff we're going to talk about here in a second Yeah there were sparks But there was also Do you have anything on there about all the spreading of the fuel Around the place?

I do know that as they were firing in Initially there were like fuel fuel holders okay so they when they were delivering some of the part of the negotiations is they would

after they cut off some of their supplies and everything they had to make sure the children could get supplies the government's not gonna so they were shipping in milk and all that they were sending in milk

and what they did is they had bugs in the milk containers and milk cartons so they were able to get information from inside here and listen into them during a lot of the conversations and again

depending on what information you believe, this could have been information fabricated to blame the fires on them and not being caused by the actual assault. So great assault here. But the other side of the story is that it was either caused like we talked about with the grenades by the assault team

or they said over the course of time, they would hear like talking about like spreading the fuel around or like taking these canisters and containers down. And they said after they did the investigation, they did find a bunch of like accelerant in all these types of places. They were able to pinpoint the three points where the fires had started. So based on that and the fact that there's that evidence, and I don't know how trustworthy, of course, that evidence is.

It's possible it could have been one or the other. It could have also been that that fuel could have been set off by the pyrotechnic grenade rounds. And so. Or any of the gunfire going on. There's a million different ways that these fires could have started, which, I don't know who to blame. I don't know if there really is somebody to blame because this wasn't ever going to end peacefully.

But the way that it does end is these areas catch fire. They don't have the fire trucks staged to be able to come in and put out these fires as they're going. So they spread a couple hours after the fires had started. There was an entire back wall of one of the compound houses that just completely falls apart, just completely disintegrates. and it all, before they can get these fires out, everything just gets engulfed. And if you watch like any of the old videos or any of the documentaries on it,

the way that the fire is licking out of all these windows, it's a very hot raging fire. Like there's no, there's no safe way to end this. Well, there's not, but here's the other thing too. So in the basement, they had this reinforced concrete room

that was like a bunker down there. And that's where they found like Koresh and like a lot of his like his children and I guess his wives and everything. I mean, they found people all over, but they were basically in a fucking oven. Yeah. They were being cooked alive. And that sort of lends into the total deaths that they found of the Branch of Edians of 76. And this was post-fire once they got everything out.

There were 22 kids like you say that were found in the bunker. 14 of them had DNA matches to crash. So 14 of his children died in these bunkers. And as they're going through the bodies, they found that there were 20 that had been shot and one that had been stabbed. So basically mercy killings, like you were talking about... I read that about the kid.

That... Like, what the fuck? Yeah, dude, that's... As far as the mercy killings or just how many kids he had? Just all of it, man. Yeah. But that... The mercy killings to me,

kind of like you were talking about, about being in that oven and in that heat, there is something to say like... Yeah, but like... That's okay, but that, yeah, but you're planning it. It's not like you're in a fire, like a forest fire and you get it surrounded and like the fire's coming to get you.

You're basically taking all of them in there today. It's not, you're killing them. It's not a mercy kill. You're just killing. You've just set them up to be killed and you're now just killing them in a different way. You set up the situation in which they're perishing in. And you're only taking them out because of that.

Well, and here's the other thing, too, man, is like the, like, flame spots, like, this fire happens so quickly that I do believe, like, to some degree, there was probably a situation in there that it was set up to burn faster. They wouldn't all be down there in that during this assault if, you know. You have also this stockpiling of propane that they had and all these other flammables that they are spreading fuel around. They had explosions occur during this. I mean, there was an explosion on the left side of the compound. roof collapse, just the entire compound

essentially was leveled. And the only reason that, you know, they were able to actually go in and identify is because again, they were in this basement after they got all this stuff

cleared off that they were able to find these bodies. And when they found Koresh, he had not only the gunshot wounds from the ATF, he had one between the eyes. He died next to his lieutenant,

his kind of second command, And was it Martin? You were talking about? He also had a gunshot. So they're assuming that this was a murder, suicide, in order to not die of either exfixiation or being burned to death or anything like that. So they took that way out.

They didn't just shoot and stab the kids in order to mercy kill. They did it to themselves, too. So this is where we kind of get the government interference. and like we've been talking about for the last couple minutes, the government story isn't always the story. There's always certain things. There are some that are. But in this situation,

I think that there was so much back and forth that there was no way they were ever going to take the blame for what happened. Like, here's the other thing, too, that I don't get about this. So the job of this during the raid, and I understand to a degree they have, I don't know what the communication was like between, like, Koresh and the negotiators with he was like hey we're all fortified in this room all the kids are in this room and they had an idea to believe that all the kids were safe or like just the people in there

but you're taking literally you're taking tanks and you're punching holes in walls and knocking down walls just under the assumption that there's no one fucking behind those walls or standing in those rooms you're not going to smush some kid with a tank yeah like I understand that at this point that it's the reasoning for, I don't know, this is one of those things where like, there's no, there's no good guy in this scenario. You almost have to get down into the mud and be as shitty as there to take care of it. And I, I'm not always pro-government intervention in these things because I do think that the sanctity of saving a life is very important.

I just don't know if it really would have mattered. Like how long would this have gone on for there to be a peaceful resolution? It just never would have happened. And so unfortunately, you've got to get down into the mud and you've got to play that game with them, which ultimately makes him look better because there is this government questioning of their practices and their procedures. I just, I feel like sometimes when you run into a situation like this, you kind of have to get down with them and finish it off. It's not the right outcome. It's not the one that you want.

But what's the other choice? What's plan B? I guess this is, I guess this is the thing to take away from this is, if anything, this is a standoff between David Koresh and the government. Because I think, how many of these people do you think were, like, optimistically, I guess, percentage wise, how many of these people do you think were like, I don't really want to be in here? Do you think there were any? Like the kids of course. Like that's like okay then I'm just going to focus on the kids and say like like that's so like for them to involve like children. This always hits me more like with kids since having a kid.

Just like the simple fact of like how do you how do you choose that life for your kid? If you think that it's the best thing for you, you're going to want the best for your kid. And unfortunately, when you deal with people that fall into these kind of mind-bending scenarios, they're not the victims. Their children are the victims because they were never got to choose. I didn't know this, but apparently Joaquin and River Phoenix were in a sex cult when they were younger. I think I've heard something about that. We'll cover the people that they were a part of eventually in their cult. But you don't realize the damage that you do to children.

Obviously, River Phoenix was a very depressed person. He had a lot of shit going on. And Joaquin, I don't know how he's still survived, but even just dipping your toe into something that's going to change your kid's psychological behavior, because all those kids that got released, their parents stayed. So they were orphans as soon as this whole fire happened.

Sexually assaulted and abused orphans. Yep. And now they have to figure out their way on the outside without their parents, without, hopefully their families and shit took them in. But they're going to carry this. throughout their life. Like, I don't know if it's better to die in the fire than have to live through this

and try to deal with that trauma. Well, I'm going to say live through it and try to try to just... Because you're still alive. Try to just carry it in the smallest bag you can. Yeah. Like, I know that's asking a lot, and I'm not meaning to gloss over that and everything, but, like, at least give your life has an opportunity. You weren't, you, you didn't have the opportunity to choose if you wanted to live that life,

you know? Now you have the opportunity to make it back. better and to make it out and to be the success story. I'm sorry to say, but like, it can't get worse. And honestly, for those kids that did lose their parents and everything, maybe that was the best thing to happen to them. Does that make, is that really good to say? Yeah, a fresh start because those parents weren't ever going to take them down the road

that was going to be good because they didn't the first time. I'm going to, you know what? I don't care if that sounds. I'm going to, that's going to be my, that's going to be my happy note to end the episode. Is that good for those kids that got out? Yeah. And they had a new lease on life. They were hopefully taken care of.

And I don't know. I mean, what financials could they ever glean from it to try to start a new life. But hopefully the counseling and everything is free and has been continued because those kids have had a long, long life already. All right, man. You got anything else? Nope. I think we're covered. All right.

Thanks for joining us again, guys. Later. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that. subscribe and like button follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like.

Please follow us on our social media, Adam, hit them with it. Our Instagram is historically high pod, historically high POD, and we are on Twitter at historically high. That's historically H.I. All right. And if you guys want to send in any feedback suggestions, hit us upon those two, or you can even do it on Gmail. It's historically high podcast at gmail.com.

Thanks again. Peace.