Last Update on the Left - Episode 8 - Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage - An Interview with Jeff Guinn

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Speaker 7 That's when the cannibalism started.

Speaker 1 Last update on the lab.

Speaker 7 Hey, folks.

Speaker 1 Hi. How you doing? How you doing, sir?

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah, we can hear you great.
How you doing today?

Speaker 7 Doing fine. Thanks for letting me be on your show.

Speaker 1 Dude, can I say before we begin, just a buddle, you're not going to hear from me again normally, right? Because I'm the funny one. I sit in here to the side.

Speaker 1 You are an extremely intelligent, good man. We love your work here.
We are unabashed fans of your work. I've read a lot of your books.
You're very smart. I'm the stupid one.
So now I'm going to

Speaker 1 fade into the background.

Speaker 7 Why do I think that might be a cruel trick?

Speaker 1 No, we're good here, but this is in a gotcha place. Yeah.
No, it's like we're like, I'm such a huge fan. Road to Jonestown, go down together.
Like, I, I'm a massive fan of your work. I really am.

Speaker 1 But it's just, you're.

Speaker 7 It's nice of you to say. I appreciate it, guys.

Speaker 1 Always butter them up first. That's what I've heard.
This book as well, this new Waco book, like it's just okay.

Speaker 1 So, and we're going to be talking about, and I still like, I'm saving your Manson book for a special, like, I don't know why. I was like, one of these days, I'm saving it for when I need it.

Speaker 1 Like, when I need it for my soul, like, I'm saving your man because I know it's going to be so incredible.

Speaker 7 Well, Charlie hated it, so

Speaker 1 maybe that's a recommendation. I don't know.

Speaker 7 He actually posted my home address and contact information on the website his followers kept up for him. He was so pissed.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Was he offended?

Speaker 7 Well, I found his sister and his cousin and was able to get a lot of information about his childhood that didn't sort of match up with what Charlie tried to present as his poor blighted kid.

Speaker 7 And so he sent me a letter telling me, you know, that better not get published.

Speaker 7 And when it did, he was unhappy, but it was a good thing in a way, because, you know, these books, sometimes people get mad about them.

Speaker 7 The Waco book is a good example.

Speaker 7 And they will say something to the effect of, well, we know how to handle your kind.

Speaker 7 And I can say, truthfully,

Speaker 7 I've been threatened by Charlie Manson. Do you think you scare me?

Speaker 1 That's a good intro. And that's where we're going to start this interview.

Speaker 1 Today, we have with us one of our favorite authors. You've heard us talk about

Speaker 1 his books on this show again and again. We're so happy to have on the show Jeff Gwynn, author of the new book, Waco.
Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 7 It's a real pleasure. Thanks for letting me be on.

Speaker 1 Of course. Well, I mean, well, the books that you've written, you've wrote, you know, you wrote Road to Jonestown, which, you know, I consider to be the definitive work on the Jonestown tragedy.

Speaker 1 You wrote, you know, a book about Bonnie and Clyde, Go Down Together. You've written books about Charles Manson.
And of course, your new book is about Waco.

Speaker 1 Like, what is it that makes you seek out these stories that are so big, so legendary, and most of all, like so confusing to most people?

Speaker 7 Well, I'm not actually attracted just to tragedy. I don't look for something that's got a lot of death, you know, a lot of sadness involved.

Speaker 7 What I am interested in is things that happen, iconic events that take on a life of their own afterward

Speaker 7 and change the way we, as a country, as a society, tend to look at things. To a certain extent, the reaction to Jim Jones in Jonestown

Speaker 7 was based on what had happened with Manson some years ago. People had already decided crazy cult, weird followers,

Speaker 7 kill people for no particular reason.

Speaker 7 And the word cult began taking on a much more horrific sort of meaning to most people than it originally was intended to have.

Speaker 7 And when you get to Waco and the events that happened there, and as I researched it, the people in the FBI,

Speaker 7 in ATF,

Speaker 7 even some of the surviving branch Davidians talked about the things that happened in Waco in part were based on folks thinking, if we don't do something, it's going to be another Jonestown

Speaker 7 when it would never have been that. But people equated all of them the same way.

Speaker 7 So having written about Manson,

Speaker 7 having written about Jim Jones, in modern American history, there's sort of a big three here.

Speaker 7 deservedly or not.

Speaker 7 And I thought the 30th anniversary, let's take a look at David Koresh and Waco.

Speaker 7 Let's try to see how much the past played into the things that happened there and the similarities with the Branch Davidians and their leader and the differences between Jim Jones and People's Temple, Charlie Manson and the Manson family, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, because they are all very different.

Speaker 1 Well, we know that David Koresh was much physically cuter than Jim Jones. He was probably, I probably, if you were going to list him by hotness,

Speaker 1 I would put him above Jim Jones. But that's one of my sort of the side realizations.
Yeah, Jim Jones was a little too much for Roy Orberson.

Speaker 7 You may feel that way yourself, but Jim Jones would have thought he damn well knew better.

Speaker 1 Can I ask you a dumb question before we get deeper into like, is there a big difference?

Speaker 1 Like, obviously, you get into these stories that are now like in your own research, you seem to be revising them for us. Like, these are common, big, these are big, important stories to,

Speaker 1 but you said these important parts of the American, our American history, especially modern American history.

Speaker 1 And what is like the core difference between like the way this information is portrayed and the information that people carry versus what actually happened?

Speaker 1 Like, I feel like that's where you're seeing it butt up against where it's like they use Charles Manson's face to scare people, but you don't actually really know.

Speaker 1 He was actually more so like a fully institutionalized, not very skilled cult leader that, you know, like, but on one, but he was this American boogeyman that ended the hippie movement, like on this, a bigger, broader scope.

Speaker 7 Well, the thing that that's always important to remember is that a lot of what many people consider to be history is just mythology.

Speaker 7 And that all of us, whenever something big happens, we put our own sort of personal spin on it.

Speaker 7 As communications expand,

Speaker 7 technology expands,

Speaker 7 with the internet now, for just about any

Speaker 7 important activity or individual in modern history,

Speaker 7 any hour of the day or night, you can read something new from someone claiming, well, I know exactly what all this is about.

Speaker 7 And a lot of people think they're experts. One of the things I always have going for me in my books, I say this and people think I'm joking and I'm quite serious.

Speaker 7 I never want to write a book where I think I know everything that happened.

Speaker 7 Because if I do that, when I'm doing my research, I'm only going to be looking for things that reinforce what I already think.

Speaker 7 I'm lucky in that my ignorance is so wide.

Speaker 7 There's so many things I know I don't know about, from Manson to Jim Jones to Waco,

Speaker 7 that I can go in

Speaker 7 sort of like a blank slate, and whatever I find is what I'm going to write. I never go in thinking I'm going to prove this, that, or the other thing.

Speaker 7 I'm just going to go in, get all the facts I can, and let the reader decide what he or she wants to think. My job is not to tell you what you have to think.
My job is just to give you the information.

Speaker 7 that helps you make an informed opinion.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's one of the reasons why I love you as a writer. And that's why you've been such a huge influence on this podcast as well, because, you know, we approach things much the same way.

Speaker 1 And that's the thing, is like when you're going, because a lot of these stories

Speaker 1 so much of them are is unknowable. Like we can't really know what happened inside the Branch Davidian compound.
We can't know what happened during a Charles Manson acid trip.

Speaker 1 You know, like, and we can't really know, we can't know a lot about what actually occurred in those last moments in Jonestown. We don't know what happened in the room before Jim Jones died.

Speaker 1 But when you're writing these books, like how

Speaker 1 do you discern

Speaker 1 what you want to put in that book? How do you discern what sort of information you deem to be like, this is worth knowing, this is worth writing about?

Speaker 7 One of the advantages of writing narrative nonfiction is that I think any writer who's presenting something like this has the obligation not just to have the chapters themselves, but the chapter notes.

Speaker 7 What I want to make certain of is when anybody reads a book of mine and they think, wait a minute, you know, where's this coming from?

Speaker 7 I want to make sure they know it's not from the author's imagination.

Speaker 7 That's why in the notes to every chapter, everything I present as a fact in any chapter will be in those notes so a reader could go to the same place and look for themselves.

Speaker 7 What I always tell people who say, and for every book, there will be people who say, well, I think you made this up.

Speaker 7 You know, I don't think it actually happened that way.

Speaker 7 And what I always tell them is, you don't have to believe me. Look in the notes.
You can see where I got this and you can look for yourself.

Speaker 7 Readers deserve to know

Speaker 7 that people who claim claim to be historians aren't just taking a few facts and making the rest up out of their imaginations.

Speaker 7 And of course, there's always some readers who won't believe it anyway. I once had a guy on a call-in show identify himself as the gentleman from Tennessee.

Speaker 7 And I said, well, do you have a question about my book? And this is the Waco book. And he said, I don't have a question.
I have a statement.

Speaker 7 I thought, well, this is going to be fun yeah

Speaker 7 i said well okay what's your statement

Speaker 7 every page is full of lies

Speaker 7 there's nothing but lies in that book

Speaker 7 it's a disaster it's horrible never should have been published

Speaker 7 and i said you know i'm really pretty careful in my books and in the chapter notes to say exactly where i got everything so let's do this tell me one thing you read in my book that you're claiming i made up And he said, oh, I didn't read your book.

Speaker 7 I didn't have to.

Speaker 1 Thank you, sir. Thank you for buying my book.
No. I mean, you know, just like send him a free one.

Speaker 7 Hey, as long as he bought it, he can say what he wants. Exactly.

Speaker 1 That's what I say.

Speaker 1 Bye from North Way.

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Speaker 1 When you're interviewing people in all these extreme situations or you're reading about stuff, obviously, you know, people lie, you know, to you.

Speaker 1 How do you, how do you realize how how do you just know that they're lying, or do you print it anyway and say, that's just what this person said? Or how do you go about that?

Speaker 7 I never take anyone's word for anything. And when I talk to college writing courses about these books of mine, I say, if your mama says you were born on a Friday, check just in case.

Speaker 1 Now, a lot of times

Speaker 7 you can't be sure.

Speaker 7 There are people in the same place at the same time who are claiming something completely opposite. Now, what does that mean?

Speaker 7 Well, human nature is that if you're part of a group in a terrible, chaotic situation, any two people there are going to remember parts of it differently.

Speaker 7 And when that happens, what I try to do is say, okay,

Speaker 7 here are the conflicting reports. And this is what each side says.
And sometimes there's a third group. Like in the Waco book, ATF agents, and believe me, I talked to almost three dozen of them.

Speaker 7 Everyone's swearing. The Branch Davidians fired first.
Right. They have no doubt.
The Branch Davidians. And again, when I interview folks, I'm doing this over a period of years.

Speaker 7 I get to know them a little bit.

Speaker 7 And just like you guys, you've interviewed so many people. You can probably get a sense when somebody is BSing you after a while.
You just, you feel like, yeah, maybe not.

Speaker 7 But I'm talking to people on both sides who I'm convinced truly believe what they're saying is right.

Speaker 7 So I put both sides of it in the book, who fired first, whether the helicopters fired or not. But I also talked to a half dozen members of the local media, reporters.

Speaker 7 TV cameramen who were right there the whole way.

Speaker 7 Every one of them, everyone,

Speaker 7 and I interviewed them separately. You never interview two people together, so they reinforce each other's stories.
Every one of those folks said the firing began from inside Mount Carmel.

Speaker 7 The Branch Davidians were firing first on ATF.

Speaker 7 Now, what I ended up doing in the book was giving both sides ATF and Branch Davidian.

Speaker 7 And then I point out that a third group, the ones who aren't affiliated either side are unanimous, the Branch Davidians fired first. But readers, again, they can make up their minds.

Speaker 1 How many Branch Davidians survived after the incident?

Speaker 7 Nine got out alive,

Speaker 7 all adults.

Speaker 7 There were some that had come out during the whole standoff.

Speaker 7 And there were a few others, Paul Fada in particular, who was away at a gun show selling some of those illegal weapons that morning.

Speaker 7 But you had ultimately about, oh,

Speaker 7 20 people who had been Branch Davidians, were either in there during the siege and barely escaped with their lives, or were affiliated with the Branch Davidians, but didn't happen to be in there at the moment of the raid.

Speaker 7 and didn't get trapped in there.

Speaker 1 When you spoke to them, were they still like in the group or they do they have a lot of them moved away from their belief system?

Speaker 7 Here's something that's a little unique about people in this book, okay?

Speaker 7 When I did the Manson book and I've tracked members of the Manson family, including some of the convicted murderers who were still in prison, every one of them.

Speaker 7 said, oh my God, I was so stupid with Charlie Manson. I was a dumb kid.
There were a lot of drugs. You know, I spend every day

Speaker 7 thinking what a fool I was.

Speaker 7 I have spent so much time with former members of People's Temple,

Speaker 7 a couple of whom escaped that day in Jonestown,

Speaker 7 others who were in the Guyanese capital city and weren't in Jonestown that day.

Speaker 7 Every one of them, when I look back, how could I have been taken in by Jim Jones?

Speaker 7 Though they stress, and it's a fact, that they were part of People's Temple not out of personal greed or looking for power, but that they were trying to help make the world a better place.

Speaker 1 Because they really did have a beautiful beginning. It just went back.
They did.

Speaker 7 But the branch of Idians who survived, one of the big worries I had writing this book, while I was writing it, I found out about Cyrus Teed.

Speaker 7 I devoted months.

Speaker 7 to tracking him and I finally found documents in an archive in a little Florida college where he had written all the same prophecies and got published things about them that David Koresh would later say were his.

Speaker 7 What worried me when I talked to surviving branch Davidians,

Speaker 7 and they all still

Speaker 7 felt connected to David Koresh, every one of them. They might deplore one or two things he did, particularly involving 10 and 12 year old girls.

Speaker 7 But in general, they felt that he had loved his followers.

Speaker 7 He believed what he was saying, and they believed him.

Speaker 7 And so I made a deal with the archivists of Florida Gulf Coast University, which is, by the way, where all those T documents are.

Speaker 7 And anybody watching this program who wants to know more about Cyrus Teed, you can read for yourself how he was Quresh before David Koresh with the exact same prophecies.

Speaker 1 That's fascinating. Even with the same name, Cyrus, you know, to Koresh.
Yeah, it's incredible.

Speaker 7 The thing I was worried about when I'm talking to these folks, Paul Fadda, Kathy Schroeder, you know, all of them, I knew at some point I would have to tell them about Cyrus Teed.

Speaker 7 And if they believe what I'm telling them, that then this takes away the belief system they've had sustaining themselves all these years.

Speaker 7 They believe that everything they've gone through, and they've all gone through a lot,

Speaker 7 was

Speaker 7 something righteous, that David Koresh really is the Lamb. He's coming back, just like Revelation said.
And this is how they've withstood all these years afterward.

Speaker 7 So what I tried to do was I first went to interview them, and I didn't mention Teed yet until we'd really established sort of a relationship. where that had a chance to give their side of things.

Speaker 7 And I know felt confident that I would put what they said in the book the way they said it and then i got back in touch with everybody because i wanted to know them to know in advance i didn't want them to read the book afterward and hey jeff gwynn never told us that he thinks he proved david wasn't a real prophet and there was this teed guy

Speaker 7 and so i would contact them and say look

Speaker 7 i've found this out I would not put it in the book if, you know, it wasn't something that could be verified.

Speaker 7 And I wanted you to know in advance, I told them about Cyrus Teed, and I had made a deal with the archivists at Florida Gulf Coast University that if any former Branch Davidian contacted them to see whether these Teed materials were real, that I would pay to have copies made of everything and sent to that Branch Davidian so they could see for themselves.

Speaker 7 But I got the same response every time.

Speaker 7 Well, you may believe that, but we know better because we knew, David,

Speaker 7 we don't have to see anything. It wouldn't matter what you showed us.

Speaker 1 We would know better. They weren't impolite.

Speaker 7 They weren't threatening.

Speaker 1 Damn. And in a way, can you blame them?

Speaker 7 This is what they staked their lives on. They lost spouses, friends.
Some of them lost children.

Speaker 7 And all these years later, I couldn't expect they're going to say, well, thank you for proving we were absolutely wrong.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 We've come across that with Scientology, too, where there's a lot of people after the fact that believe that the core teachings of Scientology were just sort of manipulated by David Miscavige after the fact that L.

Speaker 1 Ron Hubbard was a pure being and there was stuff to learn from him. But you're like, you start to realize like, no, as soon as you look at his storyline, it all falls apart.

Speaker 1 So you're, you have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. You've given up your family.
You're living in Clearwater.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 7 your whole life's over and what do you do then i you know i guess that's what they i guess that's that that's the sunken cost fallacy or the term well the thing is as hard as it is we've got to always remember people's motivation why they do the things they did and because the fbi and because atf never bothered ahead of time to find out what Quresh taught or what the branch dividians believed, that was a big part of the tragedy that follows.

Speaker 7 I mean, if you read, and there's so many thousands of pages of the negotiation tapes, and I read every page, I mean, you have to.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 over and over, Koresh or Steve Schneider or some of the other branch Davidians would be trying to explain in a very long, complicated way to the FBI, but this is what we believe.

Speaker 7 this is why we're doing this and the fbi simply said it's all bible babble

Speaker 7 that's what they decided

Speaker 7 so they never knew why the branch davidians

Speaker 7 thought they would be honored to die at the hands of babylon if they'd understood that and talking to atf people now, they agree with me.

Speaker 7 If they'd known that, never would would have done that kind of entry. They just would have surrounded the place and said, hey,

Speaker 7 come on out and talk when you feel like it. None of this had to happen.

Speaker 7 It wasn't entirely ATF's fault. It wasn't entirely FBI's fault.
It wasn't even entirely the Branch Davidian's fault. But none of them thought it was necessary to understand the other side.

Speaker 7 And whenever we get that situation, tragedy is certain.

Speaker 1 And that's, I mean, that's one of the things about this entire story is that to me, it just, just, it does seem like a tragic comedy of errors, just over and over again, just one thing, like just things just keep popping up.

Speaker 7 And that makes me so goddamn mad and frustrated. Yeah.
And it's true, not just in this book, but pretty much all the ones that deal with tragedy. People don't want to understand the other side.

Speaker 7 And as communication and the means of communication continue to increase in our culture, it's not bringing anybody together. It's dividing us further.
For God's sake, look at America now.

Speaker 7 And yet there's an article in the New York Times a couple of years ago. This is a fact.
And again, don't take my word for it, guys.

Speaker 1 No, we won't. It's true.

Speaker 7 Good. I'm glad.
The New York Times published a story about certain evangelistic Christian Christian leaders who are beginning to think that Donald Trump is the reincarnation of King Cyrus

Speaker 7 of the Old Testament, and that he is the ordained one by God

Speaker 7 to lead us.

Speaker 1 No, it's Guy Fieri. If it was anybody, it was Guy Fieri.
That's where they were wrong. Because Guy Fieri is joining everyone across the country in a love of thick stick and like meals.

Speaker 7 But see, here's the, this is the thing.

Speaker 7 You guys can have your show and bring people on to talk. People like me can write books and try to say, look, these are the facts, decide for yourselves.
But you're always going to have those people

Speaker 7 who have what I think we need to call deliberate ignorance. Let's not let the facts get in the way of what I believe.

Speaker 7 And particularly the group that says, God puts in my heart what is right.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 7 You know, leave your facts out of it. But that also goes for in Waco, ATF, and FBI saying, you know, all these people, they're just idiots, obviously.
We don't need to understand what they think.

Speaker 7 So it cuts both ways.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, you know, and concerning, you know, what the ATF's motivations were,

Speaker 1 do you believe that they, you know, because there was, of course, the 60-minute story that was about to come out right before that, in which there was going to be, you know, allegations of like sexual abuse and sexual harassment within the ATF?

Speaker 1 And there was also the rumor that Bill Clinton was about to fold the ATF into the FBI and the ATF kind of... needed to make a big splash.

Speaker 1 Like, do you think that that was the ATF's main motivation for doing what they did?

Speaker 7 Don't forget Ruby Ridge

Speaker 7 fall of 1992 when ATF and FBI combined supposedly to get a dangerous white nationalist and ended up killing his wife and one of his sons.

Speaker 7 And it was a horrible thing and gave the public the impression that these are two agencies of the government that will just go out there and start shooting people.

Speaker 7 ATF clearly saw Waco as an opportunity. We can do this so well all all by ourselves.

Speaker 7 And they've got their budgetary hearings coming up in a couple of months after that when they got to go before Congress and convince them, don't take our money away, you know, don't fold us into the FBI.

Speaker 7 And that's part of it. And of course, it's not something that puts them in a very good light.
This is an opportunity. But it is also true

Speaker 7 that the Branch Davidians were breaking a very serious gun law by converting semi-automatic weapons to automatic illegally,

Speaker 7 and that they were, even among themselves, talking about using the weapons themselves

Speaker 7 in their battle against Babylon,

Speaker 7 and people had to die in order for David's prophecies to come true.

Speaker 7 So ATF has always been a great punching bag.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 7 I mean, the NRA has basically made its reputation and millions for years ragging on ATF.

Speaker 7 But it's also true that how were they ever going to be popular? Any of you ever read a novel by a great writer named T. Jefferson Parker?

Speaker 1 No. No.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 7 If you haven't, remember his name. He writes some great what people would call mystery books, but he has a hero in one of them who's actually an ATF agent.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 7 this guy,

Speaker 7 you know, Charlie Hood, member of the ATF, and Charlie realizes

Speaker 7 Americans hate ATF

Speaker 7 because ATF enforces rules involving alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. And almost all Americans like or love even at least one among alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.

Speaker 7 So, yeah, ATF screwed up. And I think that's in the book and there's no denying it.
But the FBI screwed up. And by God, the Branch Davidian agenda,

Speaker 7 which was violent and meant people were going to have to die for them to achieve what they wanted,

Speaker 7 if the Branch Davidians hadn't done the things they did and left all the clues out there that they did,

Speaker 7 ATF never would have gotten involved.

Speaker 1 Well, the Branch Davidians, like I remember reading in your book where you talked, you said that David Koresh at one point said 1995 is going to be a big year.

Speaker 1 Like something's going to happen in 1995. Do you think that David Koresh, like either consciously or subconsciously, set up the conditions for something like this to happen?

Speaker 1 Like did you, did he get, in other words, did he get what he wanted?

Speaker 7 Okay, let's let's talk about the one thing demagogues slash prophets all have in common.

Speaker 1 Okay. Okay.

Speaker 7 When you're a prophet, when you're saying,

Speaker 7 I have the powers beyond human ability, and this is going to happen at some point, well, it better happen because prophets have to deliver.

Speaker 7 People are only going to follow them for a certain amount of time. Charlie Manson

Speaker 7 decided he better get this helter-skelter deal going.

Speaker 7 because he'd been promising his followers, and if it didn't happen, they were going to start to walk away.

Speaker 7 Jim Jones had to have his followers believing that the government was out to get them, just like Jones had said would happen someday.

Speaker 7 You got to leave the comforts of America and come to the jungle in Guyana.

Speaker 7 David Koresh is keeping people in an absolute hellhole.

Speaker 7 All the surviving Branch Davidians talk about how Mount Carmel was a cruddy, huge shack on top top of a barren hill that's infested with fire ants.

Speaker 7 They ate crappy food.

Speaker 7 They had to get up the crack of dawn, listen to David Koresh preach. All the women had to submit sexually to Quresh.

Speaker 7 All the men had to give up their wives. And all the time, Koresh is saying, we're doing this because that's what God wants.

Speaker 7 And within a couple of years, finally, the apocalypse is going to come, the second coming, and we're going to be the ones who are exalted.

Speaker 7 Now, how many years are they going to sit around and have David say any time now?

Speaker 1 Yeah, when's the exaltation coming?

Speaker 1 Yeah, looking for that.

Speaker 7 So in 1992, he starts talking about, well, we can't exactly know the time, but I'm getting the sense.

Speaker 7 that it might be around 1995. Three years is a while, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a good, it's a long time to maybe build up.

Speaker 7 You can kick that can maybe you can figure out i i have to think based on what i've learned about prophets slash demagogues and you know i've spent quite a few years of my life doing in-depth stuff on this i'm you know yes damn

Speaker 7 if the atf doesn't come after david kresh

Speaker 7 and child protective service has already started an investigation about children being mistreated possibly and so forth the fbi has already had complaints about people being held against their will.

Speaker 7 If it hadn't been the ATF and their investigation, something would have popped. And if it hadn't happened from an outside source, David Koresh, who I do think truly believed what he was spouting,

Speaker 7 then Koresh one morning would have waked up and decided God has put it in his heart that the Lamb and his followers have to take it to the Babylonians,

Speaker 7 and that would have happened.

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Speaker 1 That's fat. I do want to ask because we've had this question.
Maybe I'll get it from your head.

Speaker 1 How far, like we do, we talk about cults.

Speaker 1 My favorite about a cult leader, like a leader, specifically, and maybe not even just a profit, but like a cult leader, they kind of have to keep one foot in the con game and kind of maybe one foot half outside the con game because you're you're kind of dealing with the logistics of running your cult, I think, is difficult.

Speaker 1 At what point do you think that Jim Jones was a true believer in his own work? And do you think that he ever

Speaker 1 like, do you think that he had any cracks in that? That he thought that what he was doing was not real, or if that's why where the drugs came in, like, do you think that helps prop up somebody's?

Speaker 1 I mean, I know it helps my confidence. Drugs are great for that.
So, I don't know if Jim was like, it was just like that for him.

Speaker 7 Any demagogue usually will use some fragment of truth and build it into something much greater. Now, Jim Jones had this in common with Charlie Manson,

Speaker 7 with David Koresh,

Speaker 7 and with certain political leader we might name, but won't.

Speaker 7 They all have the same thing. The first thing they do is declare there is this awful problem and I am the only one

Speaker 7 who can solve it. You have to follow me because nobody else can possibly do it.
And Jones said that, as Manson did, as Koresh did.

Speaker 7 The second thing they have to do is separate their followers from people who are going to say something different, that the only voice the followers can hear is their own.

Speaker 7 For Manson, it was the Spahn Ranch. For David Koresh, it's Mount Carmel.

Speaker 7 For jim jones it ends up being a compound in the guy and jungle and guys i have cut my way in there with a machete and that is serious jungle believe me yo no that is i don't know how these like these literally just church people just went and made a town but then comes the next thing that they do and jim jones did these things just like the other two

Speaker 7 You begin by declaring the media to be your enemy.

Speaker 7 That you can't read newspapers. You don't want to watch TV because it's all lies.
I'm the only one telling you the truth.

Speaker 7 And then you separate the followers from their outside families who might be skeptical.

Speaker 7 You know, you're either part of us or you're part of them. Yeah.
So you isolate the people.

Speaker 7 And then you have a deadline of some sort. This terrible thing is going to happen soon.

Speaker 7 And the requests, Jones's requests or Manson or Koresh's,

Speaker 7 get weirder and weirder.

Speaker 1 Yeah. More bizarre.
And that's what we talk, when we talk about cults so much is like, you can always tell when a cult leader is slipping is with that's when they up the ante.

Speaker 1 The cult leader always, they have to keep upping the ante. And sometimes the cult, sometimes the cult will up the ante for them.

Speaker 7 But there always is this escalation, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Now,

Speaker 7 demagogues are part of everyday life in America and everywhere else. Every politician is at least in part a demagogue.

Speaker 7 Here are these horrible things that are happening, and it's going to get worse unless you elect me, unless you vote for me. The opposition is ruining everything.

Speaker 7 I'm going to save you, but I need your vote now.

Speaker 7 In churches, Religious leaders, to a certain extent, have to be demagogues. I'm the one who's telling you exactly what God wants and the things you've got to do, unless you want to go to hell.

Speaker 7 I mean, your soul's in jeopardy, but I'm here for you.

Speaker 7 But then the Joneses ratchet it up and more and more and more, and nothing is ever going to be enough.

Speaker 7 And yet, I heard one story about Jim Jones that stopped me dead in my tracks as I started thinking by the time he gets to California, he's in Ukiah

Speaker 7 and the drugs are starting.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 And he's getting weirder and weirder.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Was this the moment when Jim Jones really checked out in terms of, I believe we're making this a better world and trying to make the world a more equitable place?

Speaker 7 Because he did amazing things in Indianapolis, which people tend to forget.

Speaker 7 If you've read Road to Jonestown, you'll notice that I have talked a lot to a guy named Tim Carter,

Speaker 7 a Vietnam veteran who came, joined the temple, and in Jonestown saw his wife and toddler's son die in front of him from ingesting the flavorade and would have died there himself, but Jones gave him a task of getting some money out.

Speaker 7 and trying to get it to the capital city.

Speaker 7 And I sat with Tim Carter in his apartment in the northwest for a week while he told his story and he would break down sobbing

Speaker 7 or he would start raging at himself

Speaker 7 how did i believe this and gloria my wife died you know my little boy you know why did i do it why did i do it and i was you know it was intense yeah yeah and it was a week

Speaker 7 and i started you know you can stay objective in what you research and write but you have some personal feelings of course

Speaker 7 and then he said but all of a sudden he just stops and he said but there was this one weird thing in san francisco people's temple the big building the church that they built there yeah

Speaker 7 above the auditorium there were some apartments

Speaker 7 where older members

Speaker 7 would live, kind of, you know, protected space for them. And these were really elderly folks, most of them poor black people who, you know, had been living in complete squalor.

Speaker 7 And being part of the temple meant they were respected. They had a clean place to live.
And what Jones would do is his, his

Speaker 7 sermons would last for hours, hours and hours. And he had a little bucket he'd relieve himself in behind his pulpit now and then.

Speaker 7 But yeah, I know. But every once in a while, he'd let the choir take over and do a couple numbers, and he would kind of slip backstage, you know, take a deep breath, whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, get his oxygen. And

Speaker 7 Carter, during one of these performances, was backstage doing something or other.

Speaker 7 And Jim Jones ducks back behind the curtains for a minute.

Speaker 7 And Carter's watching Jim Jones and just thinking, you know, what's he going to do? You know, is he going to sneak a cigarette, have a drink?

Speaker 7 And instead, behind the stage, there was this little staircase, you know, that led up to the apartments. And a much older lady who is a member of People's Temple apparently had been out shopping.

Speaker 7 And she's got a couple of heavy bags and she's starting up this staircase. Carter sees it.
He doesn't see anything, but Jim Jones sees her and he rushes over and takes the bags from her.

Speaker 7 and carries them upstairs and opens the apartment door and gets her settled before he comes down. And he didn't have to do that.
Nobody's watching somewhere at some level.

Speaker 7 And that's what makes Jim Jones such a contradiction.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 7 For all the horrible things he did, and they were horrible and unforgivable.

Speaker 7 Every once in a while, there'd be this little glistening moment when... where there's no benefit to himself and he thinks no one's watching, he does something for someone, one of his followers.

Speaker 1 So fast.

Speaker 7 And you have to factor that in, too.

Speaker 1 I mean, do you think that's there's something in all three of these men, all three of these like big cult leaders? Like, is it, there was a quote, there was a two out of three, not Madsen, of course.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Manson, but yeah, he was more of, we called him boutique cult.

Speaker 1 That's what he had. Lower seat.
But there was this

Speaker 1 quote from the book. I think it was

Speaker 1 Kathy Schroeder. Is it Schroeder or Kathy Schrader?

Speaker 1 Schroeder. Schroeder.
She said, David was an asshole. He was arrogant, but he was not manipulative.

Speaker 1 Like, how much truth do you think is in that statement? And how does that sort of relate, I guess, back to Jim Jones and what you just told us?

Speaker 7 I think David Koresh

Speaker 7 plagiarized Cyrus T,

Speaker 7 but I don't think he knew he was doing it.

Speaker 7 He was nurtured by the previous leader of the Branch Davidians, Lois Rodin.

Speaker 7 And we know, and it's documented, that Lois crib from Cyrus Teed

Speaker 7 years before she even met Vern and Wayne Howell, who would become David Kresh.

Speaker 7 Lois is dying of breast cancer.

Speaker 7 She believes in the mission of the Branch Davidians.

Speaker 7 And her crazy son, George, looks like he's going to take over. And Lois is praying that some savior will emerge.

Speaker 7 And here it's 21-year-old Vernon Wayne Howell, Howe, who I write in the book, by secular standards, wasn't qualified to lead a one-man parade.

Speaker 1 Now, out of nowhere,

Speaker 7 this guy, Vernon,

Speaker 7 suddenly returns from Israel, claiming that he has been given these great visions. He's Queresh.
the reincarnation of Cyrus. He's the lamb from the book of Revelation.

Speaker 7 He's going to lead his followers in the final battle against Babylon, and they'll be exalted for it, which is the exact same thing Cyrus Teed had been saying.

Speaker 7 But if he believes that, and you've got to remember, he has believed from the time he's a kid that God is there with him,

Speaker 7 that God finally communicates with him every once in a while.

Speaker 7 All you guys, if you get out much and you have friends who are part of a fundamentalist church, and if you haven't, maybe you should, just to hear the other side of things.

Speaker 7 You are going to see people who truly, honestly believe, and if you put them on a lie detector test, it would say it was true, that God has told them this or that.

Speaker 7 They've had this vision and angels appeared. They believe it.

Speaker 7 So Poresh was an asshole. Kathy's right.
I've listened to tapes.

Speaker 7 You know, he was the lamb. Everybody else was beneath him.
If he wanted sex with your wife, well, the Bible said you have to honor the lamb. He gets sex.

Speaker 7 Nobody else can smoke, but the Bible said smoke emerged from God's nostrils. He gets to smoke.
All these different things.

Speaker 7 And yet, and yet, every time they challenge him, and they do, he finds something in the Bible and presents it to them in such a way

Speaker 7 that they decide they can't argue with him. It has to be right.

Speaker 7 And if you think they're ignorant, in this book, I consulted three of the most esteemed biblical scholars in the country, Catherine Wessinger, James Tabor, and J. Philip Arnold.

Speaker 7 The last two actually got involved in the siege after a while.

Speaker 7 Every one of them, and these are people who have studied the Bible their whole lives, have written extensively on it.

Speaker 7 If one of the big TV networks is doing a special on religion, they'll be the ones called in to explain it. They say David Koresh stunned them.
He saw things in the Bible they'd missed completely.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 was he delusional?

Speaker 7 Yep.

Speaker 7 Was he a demagogue? Yep.

Speaker 7 Was he an idiot savant? Absolutely not. For whatever reason, he had that down cold.
And that is what mattered. Remember, all his followers, pretty much, came from the Seventh-day Adventist church,

Speaker 7 where the belief is that God sends human messengers from time to time.

Speaker 7 They have been imbued with this

Speaker 7 from childhood. And out of all the people they've heard,

Speaker 7 they think David Koresh.

Speaker 7 fits it. They're not like those drug addl kids with Benson.

Speaker 7 They're not even like the people in People's Temple Temple who didn't really care about God one way or the other, but were committed to social change.

Speaker 7 These are people who spent their whole lives trying to understand the Bible and in their minds, learn what God wants them to do.

Speaker 7 And here's the man who can do it. So yeah, he's an asshole, but he never ever tries to trick them.

Speaker 7 He always uses the Bible and will talk with them, talk it out,

Speaker 7 until finally they see his side.

Speaker 7 But he wasn't like Manson saying, well, if you don't understand me, that's because you're not sophisticated and advanced enough to do it. It's your ignorance.

Speaker 1 Do you think it helps that you're already born into that? I was reading, I've been following the Chad Daybell, Lori Vallo case. I think it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 But what they say to each other is ludicrous, like talking about death percentages.

Speaker 1 Like he is a, the way we now know Mormonism works is that it helps franchisees, like little profit franchisees, to create their own little little religions.

Speaker 1 And I guess that if you have a base that you believe that all this is actually to the letter real, it's much easier to jump off of that material.

Speaker 7 Everybody who followed David Koresh was predisposed to believe.

Speaker 7 And he did not so much play to that

Speaker 7 as

Speaker 7 focus

Speaker 7 on that.

Speaker 7 And because he did,

Speaker 7 because he lived

Speaker 7 pretty much what he preached,

Speaker 7 and because the Bible said you had to give honor to the lamb,

Speaker 7 and that one of the messiahs was going to be a sinful messiah, and Quresh

Speaker 7 told everybody, I'm not perfect. I don't have any other powers.
I can't turn water into wine. I can't raise the dead.

Speaker 7 All I can do is open the seven seals, bring about the end of days, and lead you to the glory of God. And we're all going to get swept up in the wave sheath,

Speaker 7 and we're going to be the exalted in the new thousand-year kingdom.

Speaker 7 And these were people who, through their background, through their own seeking and beliefs, it fit.

Speaker 1 So fascinating. I think the last question that I have for you,

Speaker 1 and it does fit into, I guess, belief,

Speaker 1 the fire,

Speaker 1 how the fire started. In the book, you present

Speaker 1 four different theories as far as how the fire started, you know, like that the Branch Davidian started, that the ATF started it.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 this fourth more theological theory that I found fascinating, could you talk about that for a little bit?

Speaker 7 Sure.

Speaker 7 Waco, you know, the subtitle of the book is Legacy of Rage.

Speaker 7 And I write in the book about how so much of what's dividing us today grew out of Waco.

Speaker 7 From Timothy McVeigh two years to the day blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City to the people who stormed the Capitol, their different groups, you know, in 2021, January, their leaders originally got into the militia movement because of Waco.

Speaker 7 And a big part of that, a big part

Speaker 7 of the visceral angry reaction to Waco from a lot of people is that the government just decided to kill off

Speaker 7 some gun-owning Christians who hadn't gone out to bother anybody.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 just like the gentleman from Tennessee, they don't need to read anything that would tell them differently. They just know.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 When we look at Waco, if everything had ended peacefully, would would we be talking about it today? No.

Speaker 7 But it didn't.

Speaker 7 And how it ended, there are only a couple of possibilities. The first is that the FBI that last day just decided they're going to burn all these people up, get rid of them.

Speaker 7 Well, that's easy for a lot of people to accept because it fits what they want, but it's absolutely ludicrous. For the FBI as well as ATF, particularly after Ruby Ridge only a few months before.

Speaker 7 The best way for this to end would be peacefully, absolutely no bloodshed.

Speaker 7 And the FBI did so many stupid things. I mean, we could kill a whole day just talking about those.
And I should use the word kill.

Speaker 1 It's in poor taste.

Speaker 7 But the main thing is, no, they didn't do it because they would have had no reason to do it. The second thing is was complete accident, maybe.

Speaker 7 You got tanks smashing into this rickety house, haven't parted the roof in, electricity's off, they've got Coleman lanterns for warmth and life.

Speaker 7 A lantern gets knocked over in the place as a fire trap, whoosh, up it goes. And that's certainly possible.

Speaker 7 Third possibility, the Branch Davidians themselves decided they were going to, as a group, die and translate up because that fit what they believed.

Speaker 7 They're setting the fire, but they don't think of it as suicide, the end of their lives, but freeing them to go up and do the next thing.

Speaker 7 And so those were the three possibles that I thought

Speaker 7 things were limited to until I'm doing the research. And I've spent so much time with those biblical scholars I told you about.
And one of them, Phil Arnold, is an absolute genius.

Speaker 7 And he, before I started looking at Cyrus Teed, had been trying to track it down. And if I succeed in the book, it's because he's the guy that showed the way.

Speaker 7 And I just kind of jumped in at the end and found some things.

Speaker 7 Phil Arnold said that he thinks there was something that was never considered. David Koresh, right up to the end, believes he is the Lamb.
He is the chosen of God.

Speaker 7 In the days coming up, to this final end, he's writing about the seven seals.

Speaker 7 He's doing what the Lamb is supposed to do, revealing these things. And as soon as it's all written, he'll get that passed out, and then he and his followers will come out.
The FBI don't believe that.

Speaker 7 If we look at the passages in the Bible that were favorites of Quration, and they're noted in the book,

Speaker 7 It's how God promises that he will save Jerusalem with a wall of fire

Speaker 7 where the believers will not be touched, or that God says he will protect his followers with fireworks and fire, and they will walk through unhurt.

Speaker 7 Now, if you're David Koresh and you believe you're the lamb and you're really in the spiritual mood and you're surrounded, right?

Speaker 7 One way or another, this is about to be over.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Babylon's here. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Right. This is it, for better or worse.
Well, what's the best way? You got, you know, you're on TV.

Speaker 7 You know, everybody in America is watching.

Speaker 7 What if there's a fire, but it's a holy fire and God uses this wall of flames to protect them from the agents of Babylon?

Speaker 1 That's fascinating.

Speaker 7 Yes, but you see, they would believe that could happen.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And that they wouldn't be hurt, that the fire would go and they'd like walk out and be like, see, it's all real.

Speaker 7 Right. Absolutely.
What's you got to lose? Think about it.

Speaker 1 My God. I mean,

Speaker 1 when you put it that way, that almost seems like the most plausible thing. That's very interesting.
Either that or an accident. You know,

Speaker 1 seem like the two most plausible things.

Speaker 7 I note in the book, if you look in the chapter notes,

Speaker 7 after three and a half years of working on this 24-7.

Speaker 7 After talking to hundreds of people, having read countless thousands of documents and even reading the Bible, the King James Version that Koresh used,

Speaker 7 read it through four times.

Speaker 7 I truly believe that at the last, just personally,

Speaker 7 at the last minute, Koresh thought it was going to be holy fire.

Speaker 7 And he was going, God was going to prove in this way that David Koresh was right and everybody else was wrong.

Speaker 1 That's fascinating. Wow.
That's really interesting. And I guess I'll just add like, you know, you don't have to answer this, but you could decide if you want to mold this over.

Speaker 1 What do you do with the critics who say that you got into writing nonfiction for the money and the sex?

Speaker 7 Well, I would say one out of two ain't bad.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 7 when I wrote a book called The Last Gunfight.

Speaker 1 about the okay chorale and the gunfight that wasn't a gunfight and didn't happen in the okay chorale yeah that's so sad yeah it's boring right now because it's sad because it didn't happen

Speaker 7 well uh i didn't get a real great response from a you know a lot of wild west historians

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 7 you know some of them were pretty sharp in in their criticism which is okay i mean talk about belief systems again yeah one of the reasons i write these books is i write books about something i don't have a belief system about

Speaker 7 but there are people who've devoted you know their life, maybe they work at Walmart during the week, but at night and on the weekends, they're researching Tombstone in the OK Corral for the great book they're going to write someday.

Speaker 1 I know the Wild West

Speaker 1 American mythology.

Speaker 7 Right. Well, here comes this interloper, right?

Speaker 7 This outsider, this guy who never has written about cowboy history before, and he's trying to say Wyatt Earp wasn't a hero. And it wasn't a real gunfight and, you know, and all this stuff.

Speaker 7 And they pissed him off.

Speaker 7 So I risked my life. There was a group called the Wild West History Association.

Speaker 7 And these are nice folks who are devoted to that history. And at their conventions, they like to dress up, you know, saloon girl costumes and little cowboy stuff and everything.

Speaker 7 And they're all working on, you know, self-published books. And I was asked to come in and talk to them about trying to write for a larger audience.
And I had the feeling this would not end well,

Speaker 1 and I was right.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God! Now,

Speaker 7 these are lovely people, okay,

Speaker 7 gathered in a little

Speaker 7 New Mexico auditorium, and they're nice folks. They're the kind, if they pass you, you know, and your car's got a flat on the side of the road, they're going to stop and want to help.

Speaker 7 You know, they're nice people.

Speaker 7 And I got introduced, and you could feel the hatred.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 7 I started to to talk

Speaker 7 about

Speaker 7 how

Speaker 7 history

Speaker 7 only is made better by sharing it with people.

Speaker 7 That a lot of us, when we write history, make the mistake of just writing for ourselves and 10 of our friends.

Speaker 7 And there was grumbling.

Speaker 7 And, you know,

Speaker 7 I didn't see any flaming torches lit yet, but the possibility was there. And so I just said, look, it's obvious that if I talk, I'm not going to say anything you want to hear.

Speaker 7 So let's talk with each other. You know, what do you want to ask me? What do you want to say? And a guy stood up and said, do you deny that you write your books for personal financial reasons?

Speaker 7 And my answer was this.

Speaker 7 What I do for a living, I love. What I would always want want to do is pick some subject I want to know about and travel and spend years finding out and write about it.

Speaker 7 And I make enough money from my books that I get to do that.

Speaker 7 There probably are not 200 writers in America who just make enough money from their books that they don't need a day job or some other form.

Speaker 7 of getting income and i've been extremely lucky i'm not a great writer but i'm a lucky one And I have been able to spend the last 20 years doing nothing but picking subjects I want to know more about

Speaker 7 and going out and finding what there is to find. I said, so yes, I don't apologize for it.
And wouldn't you do the same thing if you could?

Speaker 7 And he muttered, fuck you. And that was

Speaker 1 technically you're darn tooting. And I hate doing that.

Speaker 7 I waved. I said, well, take care.
Everybody get home safely.

Speaker 1 And I got the heck out of there. Yeah, yeah.
You're running out of town. What a great conversation.
Thank you so much, sir. Thank you so much, Mr.
Gwit. We appreciate you so much.

Speaker 1 Everything about you.

Speaker 7 Look, thank you for reading my books. Thank you for letting other people know about my books.
I owe you guys. Take care, and I hope I keep writing things you enjoy.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes, we will continue to use all of your imaginations.

Speaker 1 Same to you, buddy.

Speaker 1 Welcome to North Way.

Speaker 1 I hope you Gwynniaks are satisfied.

Speaker 1 Because you just got pure, unadulterated, main line.

Speaker 1 Jeff Gwynn, can you handle it? Uncut.

Speaker 1 I can't tell if I feel smarter or dumber. We're dumber.

Speaker 1 We are stupider than that man.

Speaker 1 Yes, you may have been proved. You have been made smarter, but we have all been proved dumber.

Speaker 1 Yeah. He's a thinker.
No, he's incredible.

Speaker 1 He talks with the same amount of engagement that he writes with.

Speaker 1 I was hanging on every word. Every single word.
He did fantastic stories. He did a lot of work.
My God. Patience.
That man has lots of patience.

Speaker 1 I will say nothing as thoroughly as the author of the book, speaking with the Sasquatch, who told him about the actual nature of the Sasquatch through various meditative conversations with the Sasquatch actually projected to him.

Speaker 1 I understand what that guy's guy's saying more,

Speaker 1 but Jeff's pretty good. Jeff's incredible.

Speaker 1 This has been Last Update on the Left, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.
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Speaker 1 Thank you so much for listening, everybody. Helgen.

Speaker 1 Hey, Satan.

Speaker 1 Helgen. Help.
Oh, yeah. Always.

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