Hate American Made ////// The Prophet

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By an unspeakable act,

eight

the apocalypse would occur soon.

More white supremacist groups, more anti-government groups.

David Koresh, Ruby Ridge siege,

Timothy McVeigh,

more than 80 people dead.

Bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City.

Eight.

By an unspeakable act, there is so little hope left.

Hello.

Hello.

Yeah, this is Lieutenant Lynch, man.

Yeah, the 75 men around our building, and they're shooting at us in Mount Carmel.

Mount Carmel?

Yeah, tell them there are children and women in here and to call it off.

Alright, alright, uh,

hello?

I hear a gunfire.

Oh, shit.

Hello?

Who is this?

Hello?

Call it off!

Who is this?

Hello?

Yeah, this Lynch.

Hey, Lynch.

Yeah.

That's that kind of funny name there.

Oh, listen.

Who am I speaking with?

This is David Koresh.

Okay, David.

What you guys do that for?

Well, David, what

this what I'm doing is I'm trying to establish some community communication links with you.

No, no, no, no, no, no, let me tell you something.

Yes, sir.

You see, you brought a bunch of guys out here and you killed some of my children.

We told you we wanted to talk.

No, how come you guys try to be ATF agents?

How come you try to be so big all the time?

Okay, nice.

There's a bunch of us dead and a bunch of you guys dead.

Now that's your fault.

The Branch Davidians.

To talk about this Christian group known as the Branch Davidians, we first need to introduce the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church is a religious group.

It's a Protestant Christian denomination, which is distinguished by its observance of Saturday, the seventh day of the week, and the Christian and Hebrew calendar as the Sabbath.

its emphasis on the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ and the end of days.

The Branch Davidians is a fringe offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The Branch Davidians emerged from the Davidian Seventh-day community.

A guy named Benjamin Rodin established the Branch Davidians in 1955.

This is a group that are known for their apocalyptic beliefs and then in the 1990s known for their leader, a one Mr.

David Koresh.

The Branch Davidians believed in the imminent end of the world and identified the American government as the lamb-like beast of the book of Revelation.

Now, much of the Bible is open to interpretation, but with some understanding, the second beast that appears in Revelation poses as a lamb, someone who may present himself as a Messiah, but actually is a false Messiah whose speech and talk is satanic in nature.

Then I saw a second beast coming out of the earth.

It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon.

It exercised all the authority of the first beast on its behalf

and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast,

whose fatal wound had been healed.

And it performed great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people.

Because of the signs, it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast.

It deceived the inhabitants of the earth.

It ordered them to set up an image in honor of the beast, who was wounded by the sword and yet lived.

The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image, to be killed.

It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark.

which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.

This calls for wisdom.

Let Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of man.

That number is 666.

In the 1980s, David Koresh became the leader of the Branch Davidians.

As the head of the Branch Davidians, Koresh claimed to be its final prophet.

His apocalyptic Bible teachings, prophecies, including interpretations of the book of Revelation, the Seven Seals, and the End of Days, attracted various followers.

The group lived at the Mount Carmel Center, which was a large property near Waco, Texas.

And the Davidians had their own flag.

The flag depicted a six-winged serpent and a star, which resembled a star of David when viewed from afar, flying over top of the seven seals.

David Koresh was born in Houston, Texas on August 17th, 1959.

His parents were young and not married.

I would describe his upbringing as dysfunctional.

And David Koresh was not his birth name.

He was born Vernon Wayne Howe.

Wonder why he changed it.

You know what I mean, Vern?

His mother was 14-year-old Bonnie Sue Clark, and his dad was 20-year-old Bobby Wayne Howell.

And some details of Koresh's early life vary among the different sources that are out there.

Just like Jesus Jesus Christ himself, not much of his childhood is known.

After two years, his parents split up.

Eventually, little Vernon would go to live with grandma, his mother's mom, and she will briefly raise him as her own to the point of it was implied that she was actually his mother.

And they gave off this appearance, especially within

the confines of most company.

So when his mother, Bonnie, Bonnie, his actual mother, Bonnie,

would come and visit, she would pretend to be an aunt.

I mean, of course, that's strange.

We've heard of those types of scenarios before, but

this seems a little odd and a little more askew to me because

you would think that Bonnie would, when she's around, that she would just pretend to be the older sister rather than an aunt, which means she's the sister of her own mother.

Well, Bobby Wayne, his father, at 20 years old, why would he be interested in a 14-year-old?

It's just a little strange.

When he was about five years old, he did go back to living with his real mother and her new husband.

And this was after being brought up to speed on things, right?

Learning the truth about all of the family's secrets and who his real mother was.

Koresh would later say that it was around this time that a male relative started molesting him.

Koresh described his childhood as lonely, struggling with poor study skills and dyslexia, which led him to being placed in special education classes.

Some of his troubles learning actually came from poor eyesight.

He had quite poor eyesight when he was little.

He was pretty horribly bullied as well by the other boys at school.

He was called horrible names and had long-running horrible nicknames, some that are so offensive that I don't feel comfortable repeating any of them.

Some of the bullying was sexual in nature.

There was sexual assault, according to Koresh and some others, with some reports stating that he was gang raped by some older boys when he was just a small boy.

Yeah, look what you did, you bullies.

You turned this kid into a pedophile with a messiah complex.

But then he started to grow up and he got good at sports, which was a huge transformation for him and for his childhood.

His interest in sports and physical development brought him some improvements, but he still dropped out of Garland High School anyway in his junior year.

As we said, David Koresh wasn't great at school and he wasn't great at work either.

He tried various jobs, but was either fired or would eventually quit them.

At the age of 19, he he had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl who became pregnant.

The teenage mother thought that David Koresh was unfit to be the father of the kids.

So she moved away and refused to see him again.

And thus he never saw this baby, which was his firstborn.

It was his daughter.

Well, obviously, he's going to have a lot of confidence issues when you have this weird situation.

You have a young mother, so she's not able to take care of you.

You're passed off to your grandmother, and then you find out that, well, now that my mother is in a better situation, she's going to go, surprise, I'm actually your mother.

So this, I think, would lend itself to some confidence issues and maybe a lot of other issues, especially if a child doesn't feel safe.

Yeah,

him feeling safe is complicated by the fact that he was bullied because of his learning disabilities when he was a kid.

And

some of that, too, I know that bullying still goes on today and it's unfortunate and something that we are doing better about policing within our schools.

And it's carried on and migrated a bit online, quite heavily online, especially for a lot of these poor kids that get bullied over the internet and over social media.

But

I think

I hope there's a big part of me that hopes that the bullying that he experienced was somewhat a sign of the times or

more so a sign of the times than it would be today based off of his.

Well, say, I think it'd actually be harsher online because I would assume that there'd be a percentage of kids that wouldn't say it to your face.

And so it'd be a lot easier to text or type to a kid.

So I can imagine growing growing up in these times.

Yeah, harsh online, but gang rape is

pretty harsh.

Pretty downright harsh.

Yeah, but I was speaking in general.

Maybe you should pay attention.

Thank you.

So around the same time, right, David Koreshi's going through a lot of changes.

This 16-year-old girl who he got pregnant, she moves away, refuses to let him be a part of her life, and thus he doesn't get to see his daughter.

I don't know how involved he would have been anyway.

It's too tough to say.

I took a lot of looks at this part and this portion of his early life, and it's difficult to say if he would have stepped up and been

or attempted to be a legit father.

But regardless, he didn't get the opportunity to do that.

But he does start to pull some things together here, Captain.

This is when he became a born-again Christian and wanted to kind of change his ways.

He became born again in the Southern Baptist Church, and he later joins his mother's denomination, and she is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

He's 20 years old at this point.

Now he starts up a relationship with the pastor's 15-year-old daughter.

That's suspicion.

This is not something that the pastor approved of.

But Koresh wanted to marry the girl.

And so he prayed to God for answers and guidance on the matter, or at least he says that he prayed to God for answers and guidance on the matter.

And so as this story goes here, Captain, Koresh allegedly, during

this time of praying for guidance, he opens his eyes only to find his Bible sitting there in the open position.

It was previously closed before he closed his eyes.

He opens his eyes and his Bible is open to Isaiah 34, 16, which reads, Look in the scroll of the Lord and read, none of these will be missing, not one will lack her mate, for it is his mouth that has given the order and his spirit will gather them together.

So with his Bible in hand, he approached the pastor and explained the open Bible story to him, proclaiming this to be a sign from God, that it was God that wanted him to have the pastor's daughter for a wife.

The pastor wasn't so easily fooled.

He dismissed the suggestion out of hand and forbade Koresh from ever seeing his daughter again.

Well, good for him because I always said, hey, want to be Jesus boy.

How about you pray to God so you don't be a pedophile, you freaking creep.

But Koresh was like TLC T-Boss, so he creeped.

Yeah, just keep it on the download.

Nobody's supposed to know.

But Koresh gets caught and they get found out.

And this gets him expelled from the church and from the congregation as a whole.

Well, when you're looking for signs, you're going to find one.

Well,

I'll go and say this.

This is completely absurd.

Okay.

I'm not saying that he didn't open his eyes and his Bible was suddenly open.

Let's pretend that that happened for a moment.

But the reason why it is absurd, think about a Bible.

Think of how short that portion of the scripture is.

Isaiah 34, 16.

It's a whole three sentences.

So

what I'm pointing out here is how would anybody

be able to look at an open Bible that is two pages long?

appearing to be two pages in front of your face and go, oh, that's the one.

Out of these two pages, here's the three sentences that God is trying to tell to me that wants me, he wants me to read these three sentences.

Yeah, chances are he was sitting in the corner holding his Bible in one hand and pulling on his pee-pee in the other.

And this vision came to him of this

15-year-old girl, and he said, Oh, well, there's there's my sign.

Even if, even if it's one of those tiny little Bibles with maybe you only have a reading on each page, who is he to decide which of the two pages he's supposed to read or that is supposed to be the message?

So, I mean, it's completely

backwards as hell.

And I'm sure that

the pastor probably didn't need to see through that portion of the story.

He just likely didn't want this man

being with his 15-year-old daughter or handing over his 15-year-old daughter to this grown man.

And I'm not trying to justify anything that David did, but when you come from a situation where your father is 20, your mother is 14 when they have you, so that seems like a little more normalcy for you to be into somebody younger, but also anybody that is sexually abused or physically abused or they have some kind of traumatic thing that happens to them when they're younger.

they normally are attracted to people of the same age of when that abuse happened to them, if that makes any sense.

So now we're at the summer of 1981 on our timeline here, and Koresh's next move was to go out to Waco, Texas.

Remember, he's just been excommunicated from the church and congregation.

Yeah.

So this is where and when he joins this other group, the Branch Davidians.

So the summer of 1981, he goes out to Waco, Texas, where he joined the Branch Davidians.

Benjamin Rodin, who had originated the Branch group in 1955, died in 1978.

So by the time that Koresh gets there, the founder, if you will, of the Branch Davidians, Benjamin Rodin, has recently passed away, about three years prior.

In 1983, Koresh began claiming the gift of prophecy.

Around this time, Koresh began a sexual relationship with Lois Rodin.

She's the widow of Benjamin Rodin, and she's the current leader of the sect of the Branch Davidians.

Lois is 67 years old at this time.

So David Koresh was a man who clearly had issues with having age-appropriate relationships.

Well, he's going to sleep his way to the top.

Exactly.

That's what the captain did.

Koresh eventually became.

Slept my way to the bottom.

Yeah, reverse order.

Koresh eventually began to claim that God had chosen him to father a child by Lois, who the child would be the chosen one.

This is a really

interesting

and integral part of the story here that I don't think many people know about.

Right?

Because...

Because of her age, not only is she the leader, and like you pointed out, this is a strong attempt by him to create this

relationship with the leader that nobody else in the group will have.

And if he's a good boy, he'll probably get favoritism from the leader and sleep his way to the top.

But on top of that, he devises this plan.

Once they're outed, because they kind of keep this relationship secret from the group, once this

relationship is discovered, Koresh turns it into this whole thing of like, well, it's okay.

We're meant to be together.

Had another vision touching his pee-pee.

Not only that, proof of that is she's pregnant.

Are you pregnant?

I'm no doctor here, but a 67-year-old, 68-year-old woman getting pregnant would seem like a bit of a miracle to me.

Not when you have a prophet's penis.

And so what he's telling the group is that, look,

I'm more than a man.

Yeah, from the prophet Britney Spears.

I'm not a girl, not yet a woman.

And I'm closer to God and more involved with God than any of you.

And proof of that is I was able to impregnate this old woman, this older woman, and it's God's will.

God wanted this to be done.

So he's using this whole thing to separate himself, elevate himself.

from the rest of the group and eventually take over as the leader of the Davidians.

And we haven't got to that point yet, but

meanwhile, these are all lies, obviously.

The Lois was not pregnant with

David Koresh's child.

Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting when looking into this whole Waco situation is it seems like this is the start of more radical ideas coming from David.

And at this point, I don't, I don't even believe that he's going by David, right?

I think he's still Vern.

It seems like his initial teachings were positive, peace, love, a little more hippity-dippity.

And then it starts changing into this end times

prophecy.

I'm the chosen one.

I'm supposed to...

impregnate somebody so they have the chosen one.

It seems like these ideas start shifting a little bit.

It's around this time

that Lois Rodin allowed David Koresh to begin teaching his own message to the Davidians, the branch Davidians, and his message was called the Serpent's Root, which caused controversy within the group.

Lois' son, George Rodin, was intended to be the group's next leader after Lois.

But as you can see, Koresh is doing one hell of a job to wedge himself in the middle of the mother and son that were running the show so that he himself could jump rank and become the branch Davidian leader.

You're right, Captain.

He's still going by Vern at this point or Vernon Howe.

It was...

In 1990 that he filed a petition with the state of California to legally change his name.

And you have to give a reason for that.

And he stated that it was for publicity and business purposes and wanted to change his name to David Koresh.

His first name, David, symbolized a direct connection to the biblical king David, from whom a new Messiah would descend.

Then we have

Koresh.

which is a biblical name of Cyrus the Great, a Persian king who is named a Messiah for freeing Jews during Babylonian captivity.

So by taking the name David Koresh, he is,

according to online reports, professing himself to be the spiritual descendant of King David.

And of course, David Koresh, David would make sense as well,

as this group is called,

is known as the branch Davidians.

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all right.

We are back.

Cheers, mates, to the windows, to the walls.

Cheers to you, Colonel.

Cheers to you, Captain.

Body of Christ.

Twelve cans in the air.

Blood of Christ.

Now,

this is around the time that David Koresh is going to say that he's going to get some more instructions directly from the lips of God.

So, this is when he announced to the group that God had instructed him to marry a God's all up in his sex life woman named Rachel Jones.

And I hesitated there because

I don't know.

I didn't list here in my notes how old she was, her age at the time of this announcement.

But they do get married.

Yeah, they do get married.

And

she is technically

through the rest of our story and the rest of David Koresh's life, she will be his legal wife.

Now, remember George Roden,

the son of Lois, who was going to take over control of the Branch Davidians after his mother was no longer in power.

We have George Roden and David Koresh, they're essentially at this time battling for control of this sect.

Now, there's a large fire that did over $500,000 worth of damage to the compound and the property.

It's mysteriously, a mysterious arson, let's say.

And George Roden.

Yeah.

George Rodin said that David Koresh started the fire.

So you can see where they're starting to try to push and pull and get people,

get the majority to choose a side so that that person, that individual could go on to become the new leader.

So George Rodin says, David Koresh started this fire.

He's to blame for the fire.

He did all this damage to us.

He doesn't love us.

He doesn't love you.

But Koresh, in response to this, says no man

set that fire.

That was a judgment of God.

It was an act of God.

So George Roden had the support of the majority of the group at this time, and he decided to force Koresh and his small group of followers off of the property.

And they didn't do this peacefully, they did this at gunpoint.

Koresh and his 25 followers were forced off of Mount Carmel's compound and large property, and they went and set up camp in Palestine, Texas, where they lived in very rough conditions.

Think about it, they're pretty much camping out long term.

They're living in buses and tents for the next two years.

Lois Rodin died in 1986.

In 1987, George Rodin exhumed a body from there, from the group's community cemetery.

Roden said that he was just moving the cemetery.

That does happen.

In fact, the cemetery closest to my home was moved in the 1970s.

And it was almost 2,000 grave sites that were moved.

What I would do is just buy a giant boom box, turn on thriller,

and

lead the dance parade to the new

location.

Let them do the work for you.

Yeah, and be entertained in the process.

That's brilliant.

Work smarter, not harder.

George Rodin exhumed this body,

or at least Koresh claims so.

And Rodin says, no big deal.

You know, I'm in charge of the properties here.

I'm moving this grave site.

I'm going to be moving the cemetery, the entire cemetery.

I don't know the size of this cemetery.

I'm guessing it's rather small.

David Koresh has got an answer for this too.

So he claims that, no, George Rodin is not moving the cemetery.

George Rodin had actually issued a challenge to David Koresh

and to the followers.

Who could resurrect the body, right?

Who could resurrect the body would would then

prove who the leader should be because that's the powerful one.

That's the one that is doing God's will.

And so whoever resurrected the body would become the new leader, or this, as David Koresh is explaining and telling to the other followers.

And Koresh even takes this to the local authorities.

He goes to the sheriff's office to file charges against George Roden for illegally exhuming a corpse.

Yeah.

The sheriff's like, hey, no problem.

Just come back here.

We need some proof, right?

We can't just go and arrest this guy and charge him with something.

We need some evidence to back up your claims that he committed this crime.

So Koresh and a posse of about seven armed Koresh Davidians went to the Mount Carmel Center attempting to get a photograph of the body, of the exhumed body.

But George Roden wasn't dumb.

He believed that Koresh would pull some shit.

So Roden, now by himself, gets the jump on Koresh and company, and a gunfight breaks out.

By the time the sheriff and the deputies respond to this gunfight, George Rodin had already suffered a gunshot wound and was pinned down

behind a tree.

They had him surrounded.

He couldn't come out.

As a result of this incident, David Koresh and his followers were charged with attempted murder of George Roden.

Now, at the trial, Koresh explained that he went to Mount Carmel to uncover evidence of

criminal disturbance of a corpse of a crime committed by this George Roden,

the one he's accused of attempting murder on.

Koresh's followers were acquitted.

And the David Koresh portion of the case and trial, it ends in a mistrial.

So a mistrial was declared.

No real outcome there.

Nobody gets in trouble.

In 1989, Rodin, George Roden, murdered a man named Waymond Dale Adair

with an axe.

This guy's a loser.

This is after he says Adair stated his belief that he himself was the true Messiah.

Well, and think about how crazy this is.

You have a very small group of people basically worshiping and studying a small group

or a small section of Christianity, picking and choosing what they

preach.

And within this group, you have all these individuals jockeying for position, right?

So

you have multiple male individuals basically claiming that they're the chosen one.

Well, and I tell you what, this portion of the story is so

it's often not told.

No.

And what, what is

what I'm taken aback by here

is that

once you start factoring all these things in, let's okay, so we have this

battle, this infighting that's going on within these branch Davidians.

And a lot of it,

had there never been the Waco standoff and siege, I don't know that anybody would know about

all these goings on here.

No, and it's kind of sad, though, too, because

we know this event as

Waco, Texas.

Oh, remember Waco?

This is poor Waco.

This is outside of Waco.

This is not...

in the city limits of Waco, but they've been painted with this brush because they were kind of out there on their own.

If these

Yahoos would have just killed each other off,

we wouldn't have known any of this story.

They were awfully close to doing so on, it appears, would appear to be several occasions.

But

so you have all this infighting.

Now, let's

compound that with all the guns, the gunfights, the digging up of a body,

the fighting for power, the attempted murder.

This is like,

and it's all happening in Texas.

It's like the wild west of

church.

John Wayne meets Jesus Christ superstar.

So after George Rodin murdered this other man with an axe, this is after this man stated that he was the true Messiah.

George Roden's defense was that the man was sent by David Koresh to kill him.

So he was just simply defending himself.

And that's a good possibility.

I mean, we have to remember Dave Koresh was on trial for attempted murder of Rodin.

He gets off on a mistrial.

Not much after that,

a man that is now claiming to be the Messiah himself is coming after you.

It's plausible that Rodin was telling the truth that

this man was sent to him by David Koresh.

Very likely.

It would stand to reason because it goes along with a lot of the other items that we covered so far leading up to this portion of the timeline.

Ultimately, George Rodin was deemed to be insane by the courts.

So he ends up being sent away to a psychiatric hospital.

And this will allow David Koresh and his group with a lot of

the downward spiral of George Rodin, Roden was losing followers, right?

And they were all starting to go to David Koresh, who were living in tents and buses outside of Waco, not even at Mount Carmel.

But with George Roden gone, and Roden wasn't paying the taxes on the property, on the Mount Carmel property.

Well, he probably didn't believe that he had to.

Yeah, and I don't know what type of income was being generated by Rodin or his followers at the time.

Because, regardless of your beliefs, if you live here in this country anyway, and you own land, you're going to have to pay taxes on that land.

Right.

Eventually, what takes place, Koresh and his group, which is almost everybody now by this point, plus Koresh has picked up some additional followers in the meantime, they're able to pull together their funds and purchase the property, the Mount Carmel property, because of all the

it defaulting on the taxes.

I was thinking about this.

I actually think this is actually an important part of the story in the sense of we have this group that probably most of the locals are not paying attention to.

They know that they're there.

They know that they have maybe

some strange religious beliefs or teachings, but you have this property that nobody's paying taxes on.

So when they get rid of Rodin and they actually pay the taxes, you would think that the locals would be going, well, they paid their taxes, they now own the land.

And then on top of that, they find some,

and I don't know if it was confirmed or not to be a meth lab, but there's some people that were renting stuff off of Rodin.

And so then Dave Koresh goes to the authorities and says, hey, there's this drug lab or meth lab.

Can you have it removed?

So now, if you're the locals, you're probably thinking, well, at least this religious compound is changing for the better.

Well, yeah, and this, this ultimately, and this is something that's not really discussed or talked about, but the local authorities had no problem with David Koresh or his, or the branch Davidians.

And part of that was because George Roden was deemed to be wrong, right?

Even though they're breaking laws and fighting each other.

But ultimately, he gets sent away to the mental hospital.

And so, in the eyes of everybody in the community, in the county, Jefferson County,

they all believe, well, it was George Roden who was the crazy one and who was wrong.

And maybe even his mother as well.

So, whatever problem they had with the Branch Davidians, the local authorities,

the slate gets wiped clean when the Rodins are no longer around.

This act, like you said, of this meth lab, so these people that were renting from Roden,

when Koresh gets back there, they stumble on this meth lab and they do, as you said, report it to the local authorities that go in and shut it down and clean everything up.

And this is ultimately deemed to be an act of good faith by the Branch Davidians to the local authorities, where now the local authorities are going, okay, well, clearly the rodents were the problem.

If they're, you know, and so we can get along with, and we don't mind these Branch Davidians being here.

They are, they're reporting things that are illegal.

And that's kind of how things were at the local level for quite some time.

Now, that's going to start to change

because where we left off with the Koresh and his crew coming back to Mount Carmel, that's around 1989.

And it actually wasn't until the following year when Koresh changed his name from Vernon Howe to David Koresh.

Old Vern.

You know what I mean, Vern?

But we start to have some problems, right?

So

there's some rumors going on, and part of this is still some additional infighting.

So

there were branch Davidians that were no longer part of the group that when Roden was removed and when the Rodens went away, that they left the group.

And those persons were coming out and going to local authorities with complaints about David Koresh specifically and saying that he's having sex with underage girls that are members of that church and that they are stockpiling weapons.

And there's truth in these allegations.

There's also a reason to kind of hit the brakes on some of these allegations as well.

It's again some of the, there's truth in some of these allegations, but some of these allegations are just purely come about because of bad blood, where somebody who was no longer part of the community, no longer part of the Branch Davidians, decided they didn't like David Koresh and they were going to go and tattle on him.

And it gets very dicey to say what allegations were true and what allegations were completely

made up.

But they were stockpiling weapons, but part of that was their income that they were generating.

Part of their income that they were generating is

think of, think of like a guy that owns a comic shop or baseball card shop.

They're buying guns and then hoping to sell them later at an increased price to make a profit.

Now, they do believe in end times, not only end times, they believe that they're imminent, that they are closer,

that they are close.

And so part of the stockpiling of weapons is to stockpile weapons, but part of it, too, is to generate some form of income.

Well, one of their main focuses as part of their religious studies and beliefs and sermons, a lot of this was just based around the book of Revelations.

And the thing here, though, is it's Texas.

You're allowed to own guns.

But the claim is that

they are in possession of a bunch of illegal weapons.

And then,

of course, the claims that he is sexually abusing the children or some of the children within this group of the Branch Davidians.

Well, I also believe there's claims of physical abuse to some of the children as well.

Correct.

So, this is going to morph itself into

what

us, the general population, know to be of Waco.

And when we think of Waco,

what we remember and what we've heard and seen over the years.

Those are the, that's a very general

telling of what led up to February 1993.

So on Sunday, February 28th, 1993, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

are going to attempt to execute

an arrest and search warrants against David Koresh and the Branch Davidian compound.

The way this story goes, Captain, is that this was supposed to be an easily executed warrant.

The ATF wanted to see what they could find within the walls of the compound, i.e.

weapons, firearms.

They also wanted to learn what was actually going on inside those four walls.

Was there any kind of abuse by David Koresh or any of the other adults in the group?

They wanted to video,

they wanted video documentation of the intrusion for documentation purposes.

And then many suspect after the fact that they wanted to videotape this for the purpose of sending out to the media.

Because keep in mind, this is 1993.

The ATF and the FBI, the U.S.

Marshals just had the horrific horrific standoff the year prior at Ruby Ridge.

And now we all know how that went down.

So a lot of people point to this and say this February 28th execution of this arrest and search warrant was to be a way for them to clean that up, to clean up that mess and say, look, no, this is what we do.

This is how we are handling things now.

This is to save face a bit.

And we're going to go in there.

We're going to do it nice and clean.

Nobody's going to get hurt.

We're going to uphold the law.

We're going to find, detect, and see if there are any illegal activities.

And if there are, we are going to bring those persons to justice and we're going to shut down this operation quick and easy, nice and clean.

The problem here, though, that we should point out.

Part of this is for them to go in and detect potential signs of child abuse, sexual or physical abuse or what have you.

The ATF does a lot of things, but they're not in charge of that.

That's not, those are not crimes that they are to be investigating.

They hold no jurisdiction over those type of crimes.

So it befuddles me how that worked its way into the search warrant in the first place.

A judge had to sign off on that.

Well, they have an undercover agent that's...

made their way into the group, so they're getting reports from him.

But they absolutely have jurisdiction jurisdiction and have power if, in fact, the Branch Davidians are housing, purchasing, and selling illegal weapons.

But there's a couple other things that are happening here, too, because the ATF is in contact with some ex-members of David's clan, if you will.

So they are warning against the idea that this serving in the search warrant is going to go as easy as they believe because they're trying to explain to the ATF

and other law enforcement that this is kind of what David preaches about.

You might just

spark, you know, ignite things into motion that we don't even know

are

prophecies that are in David's head.

And that's exactly right.

Again, this is a group that

believes in

the teachings of end times, of the apocalypse, and that they will ultimately everybody will then be judged, and some people will go to heaven in the arms of the Lord.

And the, the, the truly wrong people who is, as this group would believe, is the majority of

mankind would go elsewhere,

would go to hell.

In fact, I believe that part of their belief system is they're,

I don't know if they refer to it as purgatory.

I know that Catholics do, but they are a big believer in purgatory or a place similar to purgatory where you go and even

after you have passed, after you have died, you would go there and wait until the actual end times come and judgment comes for all before you can ascend to heaven or descend to hell.

And so, you're exactly right, Captain.

That is what the authorities need to be informed of and be concerned of because they're taught that the end times are near and they may very likely come in, they could come in any form or fashion, truly.

But there's a possibility that one of those forms that could lead to

the apocalypse could be your own government, your own government coming after you for your religious beliefs?

So much more to get to on the siege at Waco.

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