Unclear and Present Danger - In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco

Episode Date: July 9, 2022

For episode 19 of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watch “In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco,” a ripped-from-the-headlines-style movie about the siege at Waco. They use the movie as an occasion to discuss right-wing extremism, abuse and overreach among federal law enforcement, and how both played themselves out in American culture.Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieLinks from the episode!New York Times front-page for May 23, 1993“Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America” by Kathleen BelewAmerican Experience: Ruby Ridge“Waco: The Rules of Engagement,” a 1997 documentary on the siege and its fallout.

Everybody is so obsessed with power and politics. He was a man of seduction. Do you want to live in paradise? I don't do anything. A master of manipulation. If I'm a man like any other, and what have you got to fear? Will you follow me?

Yes. The more he's adored by his followers. Will you die for me? The more powerfully but that is. Will you kill for me? Yes. And sometimes I hate the things I have to do. Welcome to Episode 19 of Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political

and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamal Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. My name is John Gans. I'm a freelance writer and I write a substack newsletter called Unpopular Front and I'm working on a book

about American politics in the early 1990s. Today we are talking about in the line of duty, ambush in Waco, a 1993 made for television movie starring Tim Daly, William O'Leary, Neil McDonough, and Jerry Ryan. It was directed by Dick Lowry, who spent his career making these kinds of

movies for the networks. Here is a short plot synopsis. A short, very insensitive plot synopsis. I apologize ahead of time. Religious fanatics are barricaded in a building and surrounded by police, but they're not going to surrender. They prefer to die. Before we get started, you should watch the movie, and it is available for free for streaming on Peacock. Before we get to the meat of her conversation, let's look at the New York Times page for the day of release, May 23rd, 1993. Okay, let's look what we got here. So the big headline is allies announced strategy to curb fighting in Bosnia.

U.S. offers planes, not men. So the U.S. is edging towards intervention in the Bosnian war, which was a big part of Clinton's foreign policy. You know what? I have to admit that my timeline of the Bosnian-Serbian conflict is not very good. So I don't know if this is pre-Shreber or needs our post. I think it's pre, but it's clear that, you know, there's atrocities being committed in civil wars in that region, and the Clinton administration is trying to figure out a plan of

intervention. Clinton Jabbs Democratic critics of his budget and tax package, striking back at Democratic senators who have challenged his budget and tax package, President Clinton today, accused protecting wealthy special interests and bucking under to the big oil lobby. Well, if that doesn't really sound like Bill Clinton to you, that's because term one, Bill Clinton was a little different from term two or the pre-running for president, Bill Clinton's certain ways. He kind of turned a little bit to the left in some ways to get elected with taking in the second half of the campaign, a slightly more populous line than his old business-friendly.

DLC one and he kind of continued some of that left-wing turn in the White House and the conventional wisdom is it didn't do him any favors and then he tacked back to the right in the second term and the end of his first time in the second term what else did we got here evidence amounts of rigged bigening and milk industry for you three companies are convicted of price fixing and contracts for schools in the military and I don't think that would get a A1 top of the fold these days for many youths carrying knives keeps fear away looking at a legal way to protect themselves and this is about you know severe urban crime in in the early 1990s and uh people's efforts to try to survive in tough neighborhoods um hope and violence as can bodean election begins i think this

may have been the first election after the civil war and the genocide unearthing early cemeteries new york turns out politics oh this is a very famous is this what i think it is no okay This is not the slave cemetery, no. For decades and even centuries, they've lain beneath layers of landfill, brick, concrete, and asphalt, largely forgotten at the swarm of progress transformed the Hamlet called New Amsterdam

into the nation's largest city. Now the dead and their hidden cemeteries have risen to the center of an emotional debate over the city's neglected past. So this is about the discovery of the remains of enslaved Americans in downtown New York, which was a big story in certain ways began or was part of a long ongoing discussion about

reckoning with the past and national monuments and paying respects to those sorts of stories so yeah that's the paper definitely the the the the main one is that reflects it for our podcast as the as the inching towards intervention in the in the Bosnian War but some very interesting things going on that what i find a little surprising um is that we have not seen any there been no friday headlines at least since these movies tend to come out on Fridays about the uh the waco siege or ruby ridge for that matter yeah we haven't seen anything on the front page and i was just looking to see if there's anything in the in the paper proper and there isn't uh and that's interesting and a little funny

because this tv movie it's very much very clearly churned out very quickly after the siege uh concludes the siege concludes in april and this thing is released in may so they likely started filming they started writing kind of right when the thing began maybe a little after maybe after became national news yeah they did they did do it during the thing which is kind of crazy right right i mean this is kind of straight from the headline style filmmaking and so it's just it's striking to me that we don't see anything in the paper although this was as we will discuss. This was a big national story and a very significant national story. I mean,

it is kind of, I mentioned Ruby Ridge just a minute ago, but you could think of it as the second part and what would end up being kind of like a almost like a unified or a single story going from Ruby Ridge to the Oklahoma City bombing a couple of years after this. Yeah, you're right. I went back to April around the time of the events itself. This movie, we should know, only goes up to the first attempts by the feds to breach the compound in waco it does not include the infamous fire that killed so many people there right i think it killed what close to 80 people i think 76 people is the official death toll yeah um and it mentions it in the in this in the kind of the text at the end of the movie and the postscript but this this movie was you know made in the heat

of it. And as it turned out, the screenwriter later said that he regretted some of the decisions made in the movie and he thought it was kind of propagandistic. Jamel and I, I think both watched some other material for this movie, watch some documentaries about these events. So should we start, should we go back to Ruby Ridge or just talk about the militia movement? How should we put this in context? Yeah, let's actually start with the movie first. Because there's not much to it. And so we can kind of start with that and then go to the larger context. So this is a television movie. We've done. one of these before. It looks like a television movie, although its production values seem like a little

higher than you would expect. It has a bunch of actors you'll immediately recognize as your character actors from various places. I mentioned it stars Tim Daly as David Koresh. And Tim Daly, you'll recognize from Wings if you watch that sitcom. And Neil McDonough, who sort of shows up in everything, he's kind of like a very, you know, he's a guy that works, as I like to put it. And you'll notice the Dad from the Wonder Years is the kind of the main ATF agent in the film. And Jerry Ryan, who famously was 7 of 9 on Star Trek Voyager, the former Borg, and infamously was the wife of an Illinois senator who their divorce proceedings forced him to drop out the race because there are some unseemly stuff that she accused him of.

And his dropping out of the race left Republicans since 2004, left Republicans without a standard bearer uh to run to they they run alan keys and alan keys his opponent in that race is barraq obama right so there's uh you know it's too much to say that barraq obama wouldn't have won that race had uh ryan dropped out although there's incumbent the advantages and everything that he would have had ryan but jerry ryan certainly in this weird way help glide the path for barraq obama it's sort of just one of the random things of american history what a funny piece of history there. But the movie itself, as you said, John, it covers more or less the formation somewhat of the compound at Waco. It kind of tracks a couple different characters, you know,

a young girl who is supposed to be David Koresh's next wife or something, a young man who becomes like a true believer, the ATF agents, and then David Koresh, and it sort of attempts to trace their feelings and their beliefs and their activities up to the point of the the initial siege. Now, the problem, as the screenwriter, I think, correctly alluded to, is this feels very pro-ATF propaganda. And in fact, the subtitle, or the main title, actually, for this is in the line of duty, which as I was doing a little research, it was like apparently a series of TV movies, kind of ripped in the headlines of TV movies that are, right, that were propaganda. And so watching this, what you'll see are the Brant's Divideans

portrayed as, you know, almost completely unsympathetic, just sort of insane religious nuts who were itching to get into a shootout with the federal government. And, you know, subsequent investigation from the government as well as, you know, from independent sources from journalists have really, suffices to say, thrown a lot of cold water on that narrative of the branched of what happened at Waco. Oh, so I, this, if this was propagated, it worked on me because I saw this movie as a kid. I, the reason why I wanted to do this movie is because it was one I actually remembered watching.

I watched this on TV when I was sick from school, like many of these movies, or some weekend afternoon. And I was fascinated by it because I was sort of already interested in right-wing extremism, I guess. And I thought, you know, the movie just completely worked on me on my child's mind and being like, yeah, those people were crazy. The ATF was heroic and right to try to stop what was going on there and so and so forth. So, and, you know, only later, I mean, it's only been actually, I kind of never, I mean, this is

embarrassing to admit, but it's only been fairly recently that I kind of like looked into more about what happened in the siege and was kind of revised my opinions about it a little bit. So it was effective propaganda, probably more effective on children than maybe somebody who regularly read a newspaper or watched the hearings about it or something like that. But just to give a little more context to the listeners, there was a compound of a kind of a very radical fringe breakoff of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, led by this guy, David Koresh, who thought he was a kind of prophetic or messianic figure. And they were, and he had a kind of apocalyptic millenarian vision.

I mean, this is the as old as America, this sort of thing, these communities popping up. This is just about as American as a cat's. They're arming themselves. It's unclear. The ATF is obviously what they get their interest in it. But then the ATF also sort of implies or tries to bolster their case by the probability that, you know, David Koresh was sexually abusing young, well, girls in the compound and kind of treating them as his biblical style wives based on.

the kind of Old Testament interpretation that he had. And eventually this led to the tragic events where the ATF tried to storm the compound. Two officers were killed. And then the FBI kind of took over from them and very aggressively assaulted the compound. A fire was lit. It's unclear. Who lit it? There's many different accusations.

It's clear that the FBI used ridiculously excessive force. They did unbelievably provocative things to harass the people in the, compound that were really abusive and then there was this terrible fire in which you know people died including many of the children that were on the compound and and this was part of a a series of government actions federal government actions that created a kind of a narrative and built into the mythology of the far right um the first which of which was ruby ridge which was the government trying to go after far right extremists in the Pacific Northwest or just the Northwest region that ended up with a siege of this guy that they

tried to turn into an informant and eventually that had a tragic end as well. I have very mixed feelings about all this because on the one hand, you know, I think you have to separate the Branch Devidians out from the right-wing extremists like Randy Weaver and some of the people who kind of sympathize with the Branch Devidians and kind of like rallied to the cause or took this as the sign of the federal government's new world order evil plan because you know these are people whose whose beliefs and politics i find abhorrent and i kind of dedicated myself to opposing in a certain way at the same time i think it's really difficult to justify the behavior of the federal government in a lot of these cases and it's

obviously abusive it's obviously extremely stupid i think more than anything perhaps it's stupid and incompetent. But yeah, I mean, we can talk about the Randy Weaver documentary because there were some things about that and I thought were a little overly sympathetic to the to the Weavers. But it's a difficult material, an interesting material to deal with because I'm a civil libertarian and I believe, I don't believe we should have a police state. On the other hand, you know, the politics of these people is pretty abhorrent and frightening. And we can see what happens now when it kind of grows out of control. So I was wondering what you thought about all that when you're watching this stuff. Yeah. So I've seen, I've seen the Ruby Ridge documentary right with

it aired. So this is to be revisiting that. And this, the Waco movie here is new to me, but I did watch the Waco miniseries from a couple of years back. That starred, that starred, Tawa Kish, which is a great miniseries. And also, that one is much less, it's less propaganda, and I'm much more sympathetic both to the Brandtivians and to the people in the FBI and the ATF who were really trying to push not to unleash all this force and harassment. You're right to say that this is complicated and difficult stuff because in both cases, I think, you can make the strong argument that the federal government acted in ways that are frankly kind of insane, right? sort of beginning with, with Ruby Ridge and with the siege in Waco, these sort of aggressive attempts to get illegal guns out of the hands of these people, and like really aggressive, sort of like not, not trying to kind of do this on the down low or find some way to take care

of it. Part of the context, I think, has to be said, is going back to Jonestown in the 1970s, right? There have been these high-profile instances of cults or separatists, whatever you want to call them, going to mass violence. these millennarian movements, you also have, and this is probably more relevant to Ruby Ridge, in the 80s, you have like these white supremacist killings. There's a Jewish radio host who is murdered. Yeah. I think that's in 1980 before.

I mean, I think the Ruby Ridge documentary goes into this. And this is, I think, part of in the background of all of this. And maybe we can talk about this a little later. I think in the larger cultural background in the United States, sort of thinking about the fallout from Waco in particular. but how just really kind of supercharged the militia movement and how it's supercharged kind of this right-wing, you know, apocalyptic thinking. Kind of in the background in a weird way is at the end of the Cold War, in the seeming end of history, and the fact that we're about to hit the year 2000, sort of going to go to a new

millennium, did feel like it sparked this sort of wave of apocalyptic thinking. For me, it's best represented by the very popular series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and The Left Behind series, which are sort of an extremely, you know, theologically problematic rendition of the Revelation of St. John. It's not called the Book of Revelations. This is like a sticking point for me. The Revelation of St. John, the final book of the Christian Bible, or the final book of the Christian Bible that is most commonly used in the West.

And, you know, there's like this belief that's sort of like, you know, we're living in the end times kind of thing. And I think this, this was just sort of in the air in American culture. And so obviously when things like that are just in the air, there are these kind of like extreme versions of it as well. And I think you can, I think you can understand at least what's happening in Waco with the Brands Davidians. In addition to being, as you said, part of a real American tradition, right? Like from the start, the people who have come to this country of. their own free will have some percentage of them have basically had these sorts of end times religious beliefs and going off to form these community utopian communities separate from the rest of society yeah right sort of the hey in the 19th century especially sort of in the antebellum the pre-s of war era sort of a heyday of utopian communities throughout the American and what they would have referred to as the west for us it's the Midwest in places like indiana and Ohio. Western New York State.

Yeah, Western New York State. These utopian communities, the Mormons obviously are kind of like the great success story in terms of their ability to grow and survive. But the Mormons were a similar kind of both utopian community and kind of a millennarian cult.

And I'm not using cult in the pejorative sense of using cult in kind of the religious studies sense as a small, discreet religious grouping. Mormonism is a cult that became a religion as we understand it in the same way that in the first century

CE Christianity was a cult, that by 4th or 5th century C.E. was a religion as we understand it. So I just want to be clear. I'm not referring to Mormons as cultist or anything. I'm kind of using the actual precise meaning of that term. But anyway, all of the stuff with Ruby Ridge

is sort of fitting into this this kind of strange moment in American cultural life that I think is sort of forgotten in a lot of how people, a lot of people remember the 90s. We were talking about this with the sniper movie too. And I say the sniper movie is sort of, you know, you can kind of fit this into this, at least with the malicious static, as we said, in that episode. But all of this is happening in this kind of strange cultural moment, as well as in this moment of heightened distrust against the government, which gets us back to to Ruby Ridge, which the origins of that. And I think we should talk about it at least a little bit

because the events at Ruby Ridge do influence how the ATF respond to Waco, because the ATF was on the ground in Ruby Ridge. And what that is, is Randy Weaver. He is this ex-soldier. He takes his wife and kids up to Ruby Ridge, which is the name of a geological formation in Idaho. and there weaver they set up you know a homestead they kind of do their thing weaver kind of gets in with the white supremacist that are kind of infest Idaho um the state known for a active active population of white supremacist groups and it's through this that he comes onto the radar well he's been on the radar of the ATF for a while but he really comes to the radar of the ATF because the federal government is investigating these groups and keeping tabs on them and an informant basically

sells randy weavers and shot off sawed off shotguns and he convinces randy weaver to sell him sought off shotguns and then that's what that's what gets him the federal charge right that's what gets him the federal charge yeah it's well you know it started off from this ham-fisted okay so there's this area nations group up in idaho that has this Ku Klux Klan Nazi camp there and they have these fucking festivals. It's all very creepy. But they're actually, the federal government has some reason to be investigating them

because these groups were all associated with this wave of white nationalist terror that kind of happened in the U.S. in the 80s and 90s. You talked, there was assassinations and so on and so forth. And they were trying to, I think, basically infiltrate this group and went about it in a very stupid way, which was to try to get this fellow, a lever in trouble by, you know, implicating him in a crime, I mean, this is what the feds do,

which we can talk about too, by implicating him in a crime and then turning him informant. Now, anybody who chose this guy who's obviously like a hardcore ideologue, our hardcore anti-government to turn into informant seems extremely stupid. So he just refused to cooperate. He refused to cooperate with the court order. And then there was media stories about how he was defying the government. I mean, they probably could have just ignored him if there wasn't the media stories or just, you know, but the media stories embarrassed the federal government having to take this approach where they put these kind of paramilitary troops that,

doing the surveillance of him and creeping around his house and camouflage and stuff like that, basically confirming this guy's paranoid ideology about the government in entirety, you know. Right. So it just seemed very stupid. horrible ending to this thing where you know his kid gets killed and i have no look the the documentary about it which i thought was very good in some ways and interviews his daughter which was obviously you know her life was destroyed by all this soft metals that this guy is a committed white supremacist and they try to say well he was sort of in the orbit of them but you didn't quite share their ideology that's bullshit because he was wearing like this anti zog shirt right zong stands

for Zionist and to occupy government. It's an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. He's a clear white supremacist idea log. Maybe he's not a member of Aryan nations because he's kind of such a, you know, anarchist weirdo that he doesn't want to be a part of any group. But the efforts to kind of downplay that are nonsense. And also it's part of the reason why he didn't want to cooperate with the federal government. So I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the politics of this man.

And I think he was raising his children to believe in all this. But the ATF sniper shot his wife. They killed his son. And this family, not without reason, believed that they were kind of being hunted down and murdered by a government death squad. And this created a local outrage. It created a lot of sympathy for these people, which I think extended their sympathy. Like their narrative is like, the government's coming for you.

And it kind of became a perfect propaganda opportunity for them because it really confirmed their narrative. So, again, it's very difficult because I obviously think the politics of this guy is awful, but like, you know, the way the government behaved was, first of all, stupid, second of all, pretty criminal and horrible. And this was like part of the government's kind of attempt to crack down or try to get serious about this wave of right-wing extremism, but they did it in such a dumb way that it just made everything worse. I mean, that's kind of the judgment I came away from. I think that's right. And when we're thinking about Waco, sort of for the Branch Davidians, my understanding is that the anti-government paranoia is already there. It's not really connected to any of this white supremacist, anti-Semitic stuff.

It very much is more of a classic American millenniarian movement separated away. But for the ATF, their experience in Ruby Ridge, led them to be very aggressive with the branchedividians. There was no sort of sense that they should moderate their approach. Knowing that the Brinth Savidians were armed and armed with illegal machine guns sort of makes that the ATF sort of heightens the decision that we need to really go and strong. And the movie portrays all this and shows the ATF kind of really both trying to crack down on guns, but really making an early decision that they're going to go in hard against the branched

and despite the fact that local law enforcement were like, these guys, they're weirdos, but like they're not hurting anyone. They're not hurting anyone with their weapons. The child abuse is obviously hurting people, and the child abuse is actually what leads Janet Reno, the Attorney General at the time, and Bill Clinton to sign off on the FBI's aggressive tactics and raid to get the kids out. But so for Waco, Ruby Ridge is relevant for the ATF. But then two years after Waco, there's the Oklahoma City bombing.

Timothy McVeigh is the primary suspect, primary culprit for that. And for McVeigh and the people who helped them, Ruby Ridge really is kind of their alimaux, right? That's the thing that they are looking back to as an example of the federal government being oppressive. and overbearing and dangerous to liberty, freedom, however you want to put it. And what's difficult here is are the ideologies in play? I mean, Timothy McVeigh used to sell copies of the Turner Diaries, which were sort of this lurid, ultra-right-wing fantasy in which kind of, you know, all the assorted enemies you can imagine blacks, gays, Jews, you know, Muslims, like everyone who isn't a straight white Christian

is basically either like executed or enslaved. And these white supremacist freedom fighters, you know, destroy the government and reestablish American freedom. Kind of, kind of real sick stuff. Yeah, it's a Nazi fantasy. Yeah, right, genocide fantasy. And, And with Ruby Ridge, this is very much part of the atmosphere over there. Again, not so much with Waco. But it's also hard to look at those two events, Ruby Ridge and Waco, and say that the federal government enacted in some sort of responsible way. I mean, very clearly did not. And I don't, I don't, I don't actually think you need to be all that sympathetic to either groups of people to recognize that this, this was like a classic abuse of power.

The thing is, is that these are very high profile, and they are, I think, very important for thinking about where America was culturally in the 1990s. I think they're very important for thinking about how the federal government begins to think about and react to right-wing extremism. But in the 80s, you had not by the federal government, but by the Philadelphia police, the move bombing, which is like very similar, right? So a very similar kind of thing. law enforcement moving in on what they perceived as or people who were very well may have been some sort of separatist groups sort of extremists and then using kind of extreme violence to try to subdue them and get them out and there's a story to tell here about how law enforcement local state and federal if they ever had it had lost sort of all sense of proportion all sense of

discretion and sort of is committed to like an absolute desire to get people on the other side to obey regardless of what it takes and we can kind of see this play out in the present with any number of incidents but i think that on the large scale you know the move bombing and waco specifically ruby ridge is difficult i think you can slot it in here too um yeah well it's the militarized part of it too right right you know they had a tank they were dressed in all these they had these little Commando outfits in Ruby Ridge, and they were dressed in, you know, the U.S. Marshals and the ADF or whatever at Ruby Ridge were all in the little green men suits and with camo paint and stuff like that, like they were in the movie sniper or whatever.

And then at Waco, they have these tanks and helicopters, and it's like they're, it's like Vietnam, you know, they're like, it's like something out of, uh, apocalypse now, you know, when they're trying to do the raid on this place. So the militarized response is just so excessive and stupid and also you talk they had they showed in the in the waco documentary watched you know footage of the soldiers talking or that the soldiers with the FBI guys the swap guys talking and they're all these fucking moronic macho meatheads raised on the kinds of movies we've been watching or maybe from it from the 80s and just get this this attitude like oh we're going to get these people we're going to kill these people these are you know like american other american citizens at the end of the

day, uh, whether or not you like their views. Um, and, you know, it's just, it's just like, yeah, the culture of policing becomes so it's, it's both really violent and excessive and also extremely stupid and like, and unable to respond normally to things like, you know, use judgment and just be like, well, maybe if we back off a little bit, like we can find a clever way to resolve this situation, which was sort of how the local law enforcement was still dealing with a lot of these stuff there, like, well, these people are a little strange, but maybe there's a way we could convince him to come out or something like that. Like, just sort of a more low-key approach to everything. And then there's these kind of meathead feds who are just like, we got to get in there

and use a tank and so and so forth. It's just like cops have always had been repressive and especially in the United States have issues with racism. But there's another thing going on here with this paramilitary shit, which is, you know, another level of being disturbing and and frankly stupid because it's just not appropriate to the circumstances. So from a political standpoint, if, okay, let's say they said, you know, it's true in a certain extent that the federal government is treating these, is after these people because they view it as a political problem. It is a political problem. They're not the, not the branch of Vian people so much. Probably that's something that's weird, but we should tolerate. But I don't know. Maybe the

wild abuse thing is where it goes too far but there but there's something very noxious about these you know white white supremacist terrorist groups it is and it's a political problem because you know we're supposed to live in a multiracial democracy these people kind of strike at the heart of that and you know we have to find some way of dealing with them is the national security state i mean on some level yes if they're doing you know crimes but is the national security state the way to go well apparently not because um you know they this inflamed and built sympathy for them and were sort of built in propaganda for them

and and confirmed to other people you see we told you about the government we see told you about the new world order so from a political perspective extremely stupid way of dealing with it extremely counterproductive way of dealing with it and you know what i think what really did more harm to all these white supremacist groups and and sort of you know temporarily i mean they're they're unfortunately their reach still exists but sort of temporarily restricted their reach was actually civil suits by Southern Poverty Law Center and stuff like that it bankrupted them. So the use of civil society organizations to isolate them to use the legal system against them. But it's not clear to me, you know, as satisfying as it might be on some

stupid level to use to bring in the troops against them to be politically the most effective thing. you know, it seems like having a softer touch or being a little bit more low key is more intelligent. So I just think that, you know, what they did was just wrong in a number of ways, but also just from a purely Machiavellian political perspective, just stupid and counterproductive. You know, as we've been talking, I've been thinking about a really terrific book from the scholar Kathleen Ballou, title of Bringing the Warholme. home. And it is about, it's sort of about this period of American history. It is about

the groups and people at River Ridge, about Oklahoma City. I believe she brings in Waco a little bit. But bringing the war home is also specifically about the ways that the United States intervention in Vietnam, one of the consequences of it was at least a group of former soldiers who came back extremely disillusioned with the United States, who came back susceptible to extremist ideologies, and became kind of part of the nucleus of a far-right movement in the United States, that we see part of it in Ruby Ridge, we see part of it in Oklahoma City,

and we continue to see the kind of offshoots and the descendants of that original far-right movement or that particular iteration of the far-right movement today, in all sorts of groups, like the Oathkeepers, like the Proud Boys, I mean, sort of like the whole sort of, the whole sort of subterranean part of the Trump movement, I think has, you know, both direct ties back to these groups, but also you might, I mean, I guess it gets to call them spiritual ties. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. They're good way to describe this, but sort of part of the same lineage of ideas and

of movements. This gets to sort of what you're saying, John. that the federal government's response to these extremists response to these legal guns and everything did far more to convince a good chunk of people that these groups were right in some sense and did far more to maybe disseminate and make these ideas stronger. And then also encourage these groups sort of take different approaches to organizing. One argument she makes in the book is that these groups have really been at the forefront of the kind of a leaderless digital organizing that we associate with left-wing groups, but that the far right has been very much part of this, very much on the vanguard of technology,

and utilizing technology to spread their ideas and to build connections and that sort of thing. And you see all this as an offshoot from these events as well. That's absolutely correct. And, yeah, I mean, if you look at the reach of the far right, and you consider this part of the same process that led to Trump and where we're at now, obviously these efforts really did not do much of good and in fact may have inflamed the problem in certain ways and made the narrative more attractive and convincing to people there's two larger critiques you can work this into you know the larger critique of

clinton era liberalism which was we're going to just basically go along with with with Reagan's domestic policy stuff the continued sort of gutting of the American dream and, you know, destruction of the welfare state and so and so forth. At the same time, we're going to rely on, you know, policing in the national security state to deal with these, these, you know, political problems, which might have deeper and more structural roots that should be dealt with in different ways. So that's, you know, you could say, like, well, this is part of the whole failure, not necessarily that they could have seen it coming but but just in retrospect a failure of the whole you know the democratic

party's reign of governance in this time and the other thing is something we often discuss about vietnam in this movie like there's the right-wing rebellion that comes from vietnam which is the disillusion with the government you know right-wing it's a relationship to the to mainstream power is complicated because it's both like needs to position itself as rebellion but it's also kind of shoring up the status quo or, you know, react, wanting to go back to an earlier dispensation. And what comes out of Vietnam is like, you have these people who are both militarized

and become militants, but also are disillusioned with the government and have very negative attitudes towards politics and kind of wanted to carry out the war in a different way and a more radical way. And this is definitely the offshooting of that kind of right wing dissatisfying. To say it's anti-war is not quite right, but the right-wing dissatisfaction with the way the Vietnam War was fought.

I mean, this guy, Weaver, was a green beret, which is interesting that, and we've discussed, you know, how the ideology and mythology surrounding elite forces kind of can have a fascist resonance. But it's kind of on both sides. It's like these two things are kind of building, building off of each other. It's like there's the dumb and repressive, authoritarian. state worship of SWAT guys and so on and so forth. And then there's these militia guys.

And it's all sort of like the same energies. You could see a critique coming of being saying, well, this is what comes out of America's imperial wars, is that you have these different free-floating fascist energy. And sometimes it's on the side of the government. And sometimes it's in these anti-government forces, but it's, you know, it's bad all around. I don't want to both sides American politics,

but there are moments where you observe things and you're just like, this seems insane. Like this entire situation seems insane, right? It seems like every participant is insane. And you're like, well, there's eventually going to be someone with sense that will show up and deal with this like, you know,

a rational person who takes things seriously and is not guided by some bonkers thoughts and so on and so forth. And that person just never shows up. This is another myth that the movies we watch, propagate and liberals love is the competent adult is going to come in and set things straight, make the right compromises, is very clever about dealing with things and seized through the situation and takes things in hand. But, you know, that's not the way things work in the

real world as we've watched, as this stuff makes clear. And the way this worked out in the political sphere is very depressing because we watched all that. There's a footage in the one of the Waco documentaries about the hearings about it. And, you know, like, the Democrats are defending the Clinton administration, which is sort of their job, you know, like, that's the way our political system works. The party is defending its president. And they also have a political, they're also politically opposed, you know, on some level to the extremism that these groups have.

But they're trying to demagogue and the Republicans are doing the same thing. You know, they have some sympathy with it. These are their constituents at the, are extreme. So they're trying to make it seem as if, like, look, we have your back a little bit against the government. So the political theater of it is super interesting, but not extremely reassuring about the possibility of someone kind of dealing with this in a constructive way. I mean, I see what they're all doing. I see the political reasons why they're doing it. I understand that this is the way politics works and this is not something you can always avoid. Like, yeah,

there's a demagogic or there's a performative aspect of these things and through that you know maybe something will good come out of it but it was a little bit like i was watching chuck schumer in those tapes and i was like come on man like some of the things you're saying here are really verging on bullshit and uh or being actually bullshit but i had the same feeling you know watching the witnesses who were kind of politically sympathetic to the i guess now in historical retrospect we can begin to come to a clear judgment but it's very difficult to judge things without those, you know, desire to, you know, play to your crowd and to make sure your constituents know that they, you know, you've got their back and so on and so forth.

Yeah, I just think that this is, and this has been their frame our entire conversation. I just think these events in Waco especially are just, it's difficult to come to a conclusive kind of indefinitive opinion or conclusion here. Precisely because, on the one hand, you know, by all accounts, Koresh was kind of a, you know, megalomaniac. And he, I think the evidence is clear that he was sexually abusing young girls. And you want, you want there to be intervention to stop that stuff, right? You want there to be intervention to protect those kids.

But do you want the intervention to take the form that did? Do you want the intervention to, you know, start off with guns blazing? and you certainly don't want that intervention to end with nearly 80 people, including about 20 children, dying, not just dying, but dying, like one of the worst ways to die, like right in fire, smoke inhalation, suffocation, fire. And it's, for me at least, it's just sort of, it's hard to talk about these events. Well, like maintaining sympathy for victims, for the many people there who are basically innocent of anything who were part of this religious community that we may find strange and

bizarre, but it was meaningful for them and who died as a result of it. So sympathy for them should have recognizing the wrongdoing and the law breaking that was happening and recognizing that, you know, at least the abuse needed to be taken care of, but then having total condemnation for how the federal government approached it. One thought I've had while we've been talking is one of the hopes after the end of the Cold War was sort of that there'd be a peace dividend, that we would begin to demilitarize, they would begin to sort of shift our attention back home and begin to use some of the wealth we have to improve the United States, right, to improve, you know, social services, to improve infrastructure, all of these things. and the militarization of the federal law enforcement response, I think, is one of the signs that that just never happens. And that instead of a peace dividend, much of the infrastructure built up to support American foreign policy, that's what gets turned inwards, both in terms of federal law enforcement, but also in terms of state local law enforcement. And if we ever, if this podcast ever goes long enough that we're dealing with post-9-11 stuff, this is a big part of the post-9-11 story as well, kind of the expansion, the militarization of local and state law enforcement through grants and aid from the federal government.

And that what the 90s perhaps should have been a sign of, or at least these events of the 90s should have been a sign of, is how you cannot actually expand the national security state and hope for it to sort of like, evolve itself with its own volition. Now, once expanded, it just, the infrastructure, the ways of doing things become spread throughout the entire system. And so it's not just that the military is one way. It's now that all these federal law enforcement agencies are as well. I mean, the fact that there are so many federal law enforcement agencies is itself sort of like a question worth unpacking, like FBI, ATF, DEA, the, the, the, the, the,

massive expansion of the federal law enforcement apparatus is, I think, part of the post-Cold War story, because part of that expansion is part of the attempt to find or take care of new threats, right? Like, the expansion of the Drug Enforcement Administration has to be tied up in the attempts to control the drug trade in South America. And that sort of the resources dedicated to that are part of the, you know, quote-unquote peace dividend of the Cold War, turning attention from abroad to closer to our borders. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're on to something there for sure. I think that, yeah, the problem is that the post-Cold War moment, domestic amenities become paramount.

So it's these domestic threats, but it's also in the consciousness of the people who are the, you know, on the extreme right that the big threat now is the government itself and the government as standing for minorities or protecting minorities or so and so forth. And they both have a kind of distorted vision of what the problems are, obviously. But yeah, I think there is a way in which these are all kind of like fires started by the sparks that shot off of the military industrial complex and the national security state i mean a lot of these people who are in these right wing militias as you know kathleen villos book points out were and we've seen now with randy weaver and so and so forth were former military timothy mcbaugh was in the military you know and you would

you would expect these experiences to make them kind of interpolate them in mainstream american ideology no um they get a very extreme and twisted version of it the real villain here more than any of the individuals is maybe the militarization of the society that in other places I think perhaps we may on this podcast be slightly too tolerant of because we see it in its opposite light as creating a kind of multiracial meritocracy or a kind of model for a welfare state or a more expansive way of caring for the population so but I think this kind of exposes us to the darker side of, you know, American military power and so on and so forth. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's right. I think it's right. I think it's time to wrap up. So we haven't spent

much time talking about the TV movie as a movie. So I'll just quickly say that it's, it is a effective piece of propaganda. Like, it works. Yeah. Worked on me. It's put together pretty well. and moves pretty quickly. It's, you know, for being a television movie, it's well directed. And, you know, if, I think it works best, less as a film to check out and more sort of a cultural product from this era that kind of help you get into the mindset of where Americans may have been at this exact moment. So it's worth watching for those reasons. Not a great piece of art. Not a great piece of art, but sort of a fascinating cultural product of this, of this moment.

Much in the same way. I mean, I feel like this really is kind of a back-to-back with the sniper episode. Like much in the same way as sniper. This is a worthwhile piece of, you know, cultural effemera. What do you think? Last thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I think you're right on the money. It's really interesting piece of history because it kind of gets very much into the mentality of the moment

and the way, you know, there was all this kind of propaganda for the federal government's law enforcement. agencies, trying to make them look heroic and doing the right thing. And I think that that's just like, I don't know if anybody assumes this anymore, but you know, there was a time where we're like, well, we don't have state propaganda in America, but it's kind of works through the private sector. It's privatized. It works through the private sector. So yeah, I mean, it's very interesting.

I had, it really worked on me as a child and gave me a very clear and simplistic under interpretation of the events in question, which definitely favored the federal government and then growing up a little bit and learning more about it. It's been interesting to revise, like, how that worked on me. And maybe, you know, you should think about what you're letting your kids watch. But yeah, that's pretty much it. It's not a great, it's not a great piece of art, but it's a very interesting piece of propaganda from that time period. Okay. That is our show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available and iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, and Google Podcasts, and wherever else podcasts are found.

If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review. It does help people find the show. And as I say, every time we do try to look at them and kind of figure out where people stand on this show. You can reach out to both of us on Twitter. I am at Jay Bowie. John, you are. I'm at Lionel underscore trolling. And I always forget to mention this, but we have a Twitter page for the show.

It's at UnclearPod. Still trying to figure out exactly how to use the thing. But as time goes on, I'm sure I will figure that one out. You can also reach out to us over email at Unclear and Present Feedback at Fastmail.com. For this week in feedback, we have an email from Dustin. It's titled Gundem Thoughts. Hey, Jamel and John. first off, love the show, and appreciate you both taking time from your busy schedules to make it.

I look forward to every episode as a chance to relive or discover a new film. I'm writing because your opening music reminds me of the Zeta Gundam opening credits. Have you all ever thought about tackling any of the Gundam series or more realistically a subset or movie series? I think there's a lot of interesting ground there in terms of military sci-fi, but not sure if that's out of the podcast per view of the 90s. Thanks again for the show. I picked out this email, mostly because I'm a big Gundam fan. Gundam, for listeners you do not know what it is, is a military science fiction series that dates back in the late 70s in Japan.

The thing that brings you in is it sort of like, oh, this is a future where war is fought with giant humanoid robots that blow stuff up. Very cool. But the actual conceit of it is that war is horrible and inhumane and warps people's sense of morality and destroys people. and it kind of illustrates this in the original series they're making your protagonist, a 16-year-old kid who happens to be very gifted

using these machines, but over the course of the show, it kind of ends up destroying a psyche. And each Gundam series more or less deals with some element of this. And some of them get very, very dark. So there's one very famous and very well-regarded

kind of mini-series in this series called Mobile Sword Gundam, the war in the pocket about, it takes place during the same time period of this original series but it is about a young boy who befriends two soldiers on the opposite sides

and you kind of watch how those relationships develop and how the war affects them. It's all very, very sad. So there are a couple Gundam series that come out in the 90s. Zeta Gundam is one of them, I believe. I'm not sure how relevant they are to the show

But there is some very recent Gundam stuff that might have something worth commenting on. I'm not sure. So I'll revisit those recent things and I'll think about it. But I think if you are interested in Japanese animation at all, and if you like military sci-fi, I'm going to highly recommend any of the Gundam series, but especially the original series 1979 and some some stuff within that same general universe the miniseries that follow it's all it's all very good and like quite sophisticated and and pretty interesting so john i have no idea if this is any of this means anything i you know i i never really got into anime i thought it was kind of cool

when i was young but uh i never really cultivated a fandom for it so it's a little beyond me i'd be it If you want to watch it, I'd be game to check it out because I've never really had much exposure to that kind of stuff. It would be fun, just have a reason to see what it was all about. But, yeah, I don't really know. It's the robots, right? Right, right, right. This one, and sort of the thing is that, like, you know, prior giant robot series, Mecca series, prior to Gundam 79, tended to be kind of like Power Rangers-esque is the best way to describe it. Like, one, you know, one giant robot, colorful, you know, led by a bunch of teenagers, fighting big,

monsters, that kind of thing. And then Gundam brings a real military element to it. So these are mass-produced machines. This is war. These are soldiers. That kind of thing. I see. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Dustin, thank you for the email. And we will think about, we'll think about the Gundam stuff. Episodes come out every other Friday. So we will see you in two weeks with in the line of fire, the Wolfgang Peterson directed Clint Eastwood vehicle. with one of the great villain performances from John Malkovich. Oh, yeah. I think this movie rules, and I'm really looking forward to watching it.

Here's a quick plot synopsis. Veteran Secret Service agent Frank Harrigan is a man haunted by his failure to save President John F. Kennedy while serving protection detail in Dallas, Texas. 30 years later, a man calling himself Booth threatens the life of the current president, forcing Harrigan or Horrigan to come back to protection detail to confront his ghost from the past. This is available to stream on Netflix, Hulu, and Pluto TV, and it's also available for rent and purchase on Amazon and iTunes. Our producer is Connor Lynch, and our artwork is from Rachel Eck. For John Gans, I am Jamal Bowie, and this is unclear and present danger.

We will see you next time. Thank you.