Waco The Big Lie (1993) and Waco II the Big Lie Continues (1994) Review

➡ The text discusses a podcast episode where the hosts, Sean and Chris, review two documentaries about the Waco siege in 1993. The documentaries, created by Linda Thompson, present a sympathetic view towards David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, challenging mainstream narratives. The hosts discuss various aspects of the documentaries, including the portrayal of the Waco area as a hotspot for gun regulation issues, the alleged exaggeration of accusations against Koresh by the media, and the claim that three ATF agents were killed by friendly fire. The episode also touches on the ‘Clinton body count’ conspiracy theory.
➡ The video discusses a controversial event where agents were allegedly killed by friendly fire, not by the people inside the house they were attacking. The video suggests that the agents were unprepared and made many mistakes, including possibly shooting each other. The creator of the video, Lena Thompson, argues that the official story – that the people inside the house started the shooting – is false. She believes the agents were the aggressors and the people inside were merely defending themselves.
➡ The text discusses the controversial actions of the ATF and FBI during the Waco incident, suggesting that they used false information to justify their actions. It criticizes the agencies for bending rules and laws to suit their needs, and questions the validity of their claims about David Koresh and his followers. The text also reviews a documentary about the incident, noting its focus on certain footage and its potential shortcomings. Despite these, the text recommends the documentary for its informative content and potential to change viewers’ perspectives.
➡ The documentary suggests that the son of David Koresh, Cyrus, was secretly removed from the scene during the Waco incident, and that the footage was doctored to hide this. It also claims that children were shot at from helicopters, and that the public was misled about the situation inside the compound. The documentary also alleges that the investigation into the incident was biased, as it was conducted by people who had been involved in a similar event in the past. Lastly, it criticizes the focus of the investigation on Koresh alone, rather than on the entire incident and all the people who died.
➡ The documentary discusses the misinformation spread by the ATF about the Davidians, including false claims about their weaponry and the ATF’s supposed element of surprise. It also highlights the ATF’s use of military coordination and the media’s role in perpetuating these lies. The documentary criticizes the ATF’s handling of the situation, including the shooting of a man named Mike Schroeder who was not at the compound during the initial conflict. Lastly, it questions the credibility of the witnesses used by the ATF and FBI in court, suggesting that they were unreliable.
➡ The text discusses a documentary about the Waco incident, highlighting the role of media and politics in shaping public perception. It mentions the Cult Awareness Network, funded by the Anti Defamation League, which was used to sway public opinion. The text also discusses the use of psychological operations and military-grade frequency weapons during the incident. Lastly, it mentions a TV movie that was released shortly after the incident, which portrayed the events in a way that favored the government’s narrative.
➡ The text discusses a documentary about the controversial event at Mount Carmel, comparing the government’s explanation to the Chicago fire theory. The author appreciates the documentary’s thoroughness and new evidence, despite some deficiencies. They argue that regardless of one’s opinion on the event, the government’s actions were irregular and illegal. The text ends with a promotion for a comic about Stanley Kubrick and the moon landings.

The only reason that they even stopped firing originally was cuz they ran out of bullets. Under the docks. Yeah, under the docks. Under the docks. Under the docks. Yeah, under the docks. Welcome back to under the Docks where we check, check out the flick and tell you does it sink or does it swim? I’m Sean. Chris. This is Paranoid America and it is Waco Month and we’re kicking off Waco Month with a D double feature which is going to be Waco the big lie from 1993 and then Waco 2. The big lie continues as it always does.

And that one’s from 1994. Both of these documentaries are from Linda Thompson and she’s got a wild Wikipedia page. FYI. The first documentary, which is Waco the Big Lie 93, that one came in at 31 minutes and it came out right like right around the actual Waco event, same exact year and everything. So the big lie two that came out, that one is 87 minutes long. So that one’s an hour and a half. So really it made sense to watch both of these. I think we’ll probably just do them in order. We’re going to do both of them today, but we’ll do Waco 1 first and we’ll talk about Waco 2.

So let’s, let’s get it. I. Plotting the course is actually pretty easy for the first documentary. Big Lie 1 is about a half hour long. And ultimately Linda Thompson is sympathetic to David Koresh and sympathetic to the Branch Davidians. So we, we definitely get a completely different aspect than whatever the mainstream version of this would be. So the premise that she goes through is here’s what you probably have heard about David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and Waco and ATF and FBI. Here’s what you’ve heard about all that stuff, but here’s the truth behind all that.

So we’re kind of, we’re kind of going back to our roots with some conspiracy breakdown, right? This is the bread and butter. This is where we get down and dirty. And I actually haven’t seen these films. So when I saw this it was pretty new. Like, you know, I’ve seen a lot of the newer like 2000ish type of documentaries with Waco. And I was like, oh wow. Like this Linda lady is like the real deal as far as like, I wouldn’t want to piss her off, right? Like it seems like when she gets like focused on something, she’s not letting go.

Well, spoiler alert showed on Painkillers no longer with us. You don’t have to worry too much about it anymore. Like, like I said her, her Wikipedia page is a wild ride. But and I’m actually curious going into Waco Month here, what is your just off the like before you saw any of these documentaries, what was your impression of David Koresh and Waco off the Cuff? I would say that basically he’s kind of a weird guy that like is in like kind of a cultish leader. Like and I still feel that that he. They overstepped their bounds.

Like I’ve already been on that like for a long time of like yeah, the ATF and the federal government way stepped way out of bounds on this one before. But I, yeah, I didn’t have a great image of David Crash. So this documentary is probably not going to be the most unbiased, objective view of this. This is very much an insider. I’m not going to say it’s pro David Koresh. It’s just very sympathetic in that way, in a way that no other media was when this came out again in 1993. So this is like some really OG material.

So some of the, the basic claims of this movie are that the accusations of adultery and abuse and worse things that you can’t say on most platforms that all of those things were basically inflated by the media and then adopted by the government because it helped their case to pain David Koresh and the Branch Davidians as just absolute nutty weirdos and that they were in like weird sex cult stuff and maybe a bunch of just bumpkins out in the middle of nowhere when in reality they had like people there with PhDs. They had people that had flown from UK, flown from Australia all over the world and, and we’ll actually figure out more why those people did that in, in the second version of this episode.

However, in, in this particular documentary they’re talking about that. They’re talking about how Waco had higher than normal gun prosecutions compared to the rest of the country. That was an interesting thing that they kind of dropping here that the pre David Koresh they already were a hot spot this particular area of ATF and FBI just busting people for all sorts of gun regulation issues. So they, they, they had the makings of a perfect storm in in some ways. I don’t know, I don’t know if you picked up on that, but that seemed like a relevant note that they do a good job of stressing that Waco was already a weird anomaly and they also the timing right like it was Bill Clinton first getting into office after Ruby Ridge About a year ago before this, so.

And then what, a couple years before Oklahoma City. So it’s like in this weird time period. And it’s like almost like it was handpicked, right? Like you said, there was statistics to back up, like, the gun violence and gun arrest and, and how many registered guns. Like, all these things to where it could loop out. And then you have this, like, charismatic character that’s like, yeah, I’m Jesus Christ, bro. Like, you know what I mean? I’m Jesus Christ. He didn’t know that. And then people are following him, and then you hear that they have, like, an arsenal of weapons and they’re crazy cultists.

Like, and, and the guy thinks he’s Jesus. So I think putting all that together, it, you know, I’ll get a little further into it, but it is the foreshadowing of what we’re seeing now, to me, like, the complete foreshadowing of like, hey, let’s start this domestic terrorism stuff. So I think in its, in its brevity, but its strength and its weakness is that this documentary of at some point eventually focuses on one very minute event of the. The entire Waco Sie. That’s when a handful, I think it’s like three or four guys break into a window, and then all hell ensues.

At this point, you see, they break it down. They show you, like, individual bullets hitting the side, like, numbering them all out, like, okay, let’s rewatch that again in slow motion. We do that a few times. And since this is essentially a half hour documentary that kind of takes a lot of this and, and focuses it and puts it in like, a microscope. And Linda Thompson also makes a few claims that I didn’t realize were some fundamental conspiracy lore that, that now has lasted for four, you know, going on four decades. And one of those is this whole Clinton body count.

This is 1993, and she’s contributing names to this Clinton body count that had been growing for a while, right? But in 1993, this is like a perpetuation of something that we still hear about right now in 2025. Right. And one of those claims is that on this video that three of the ATF agents that enter this window end up getting shot by friendly fire and like a grenade gets thrown in after they’re in this room and they all die. Right? And then they end up all being on private security details for Bill Clinton when he was on the campaign trail.

So now you’ve got just, I guess, what are the coincidences? I would say they’re probably pretty high, just because if Bill Clinton went through this particular area, then of course they’re going to get contracted in order to be private security detail. So if something goes down in the same area that Bill Clinton was also in, you might have a high level. But I also just love the concept that this just. It adds like, a three more bricks to the foundation of the Clinton body count conspiracy. Yeah. Especially because we were younger, right? Like, I was in.

I don’t know, I think I was maybe like 8 to 10 in 93 somewhere around there. And I wasn’t like, hey, yeah, Waco. I wasn’t really familiar with it until I got a little bit older and started researching it a little bit more. But seeing that, I was like, yeah, this is the foundation. This is the beginning the. Or the origin story of the Clinton body count. Like, we got the background. Like, it’s like we got a prequel to the body count. And. And now it’s just flowing through because this was what, 1993. That’s on their detail.

And then just to go back to, like, the window segment, because I did, like, now. Not gonna critique too much. I get it. It’s 1993. Like, you’re like, oh, my God. Like, this technology is horrible. Like, when they’re zooming in and stopping, you’re like, you really, really have to, like, all right, hold on, I gotta pause it myself because it’s getting too blurry and. And meshed into that, like, infrared 1993, grayish, like, lens that they have over it. Like, that’s a partial part that you gotta. But once you get it, you can start seeing it. And again, you could tell she threw this together herself.

And part two, I think she gets a lot more credit on that one. But on this one, that window part, it is interesting, though, that how it does show, like, that there was editing, right? Like, when you see the click, like, roll through, you could see it was edited to where there’s four guys on the balcony. Now there’s just one guy at the window. And the ATF people are claiming that, like, oh, well, they started shooting at us. So then, like, they killed the guys in there, but it was all friendly fire. Like, that’s what they’re proving in this video is that, like, hey, look, he’s not paying attention.

He throws the. The. The flashbang inside of this small room where the agents just went into. And it points out that he was in another direction and may have not seen them go into the window. Then they shoot back at him. He. He shoots back at them. Then he gets hit. And I think there’s just a cluster of like friendly fire that got them killed. And then, you know, in the part two, it goes a little bit more detailed on the body count part. That gives the lure of us conspiratorial heads here. Here’s one of the challenges and I’ll save some of this for when we’re doing like a proper critique of it.

One of the challenges is so much of it is based on footage that was shot. But that footage that was shot she. In 1993. She’s not pulling this into a nice nonlinear video editing suite. This is basically someone with a VCR that’s kind of like pausing and then freeze framing and superimposing some stuff on top the best you could in 93. And one of those scenes where she. We keep going back and forth all has to do with this window. Because the window has something like over like 10 or 12 different bullet holes that just like show up on the video.

And she’s trying to show the trajectories, which is a little challenging because even when she’s like, look, here’s this one come from this direction, a lot of it I’m just like, I’ll take your word for it. But I’m looking as hard as I can and I. I don’t see enough clarity to. To know that that’s the exact trajectory for sure. There’s just bullet holes just popping up. So here’s the contention, right? The official story is that all these bullet holes are coming from inside the house and shooting outwards at the agents that are either breaching the window or the guy that’s still on top of the roof that’s outside the window.

When this documentary by Lena Thompson, this is trying to show that no, a majority of these bullets are all going from the outside in and a lot of them are coming from a helicopter overhead which she claims has mounted guns. And trying to show you that like as soon as these agents went into the window, they’re getting f. Even if someone was inside shooting back out, they’re getting shot from both sides. At this point. There’s. There’s no way that there’s not a whole lot of friendly fryer and like crossfire happening. So that’s kind of where this entire video hinges and it’s trying to.

It. This feels like she thought she had a smoking gun. She thought she had, you know, red handed evidence proof. And if I just release this, everyone will kind of know. And I don’t necessarily think that it’s 100% that. But this is, I mean this is one person’s half hour breakdown of. Here’s just an example and I’ll give you the more relevant bullet points here. So it shows footage of agents shooting at the house as four agents climb ladders to the roof, which is unsafe. There’s a, a lot of slop. You’re going to notice a lot of sloppiness throughout all these Waco documentaries that as the agents are approaching, there’s no bullets hitting the ground or near the cars.

So if they were like outside shooting out. So one of the, the contentions of this documentary is that the people inside of the compound were not shooting at the ATF agents or at least they didn’t start any of the shooting. And that a majority of this all was, was directed inwards. That one of the agents on a ladder accidentally shoots himself. You actually show this accidentally shoots himself with his 9 millimeter sidearm and like has to fall back down the ladder and get back out to safety. But like there’s a very much I’m hearing Benny Hill and like Keystone Cop kind of comedy music.

As this is all happening. We talked about these three agents that go into the room and never come back out. And they’ve been on the, the Clinton body count. I thought that was just an interesting anomaly. And then there’s this quote, right? So I, I do want to mention that I tried doing research on these three guys. Like were they really, were they actual security detail for the Clinton or it was just like a random. Because if you put this in to Chad, GBT or Google or anything conventional, they all say it’s just unfounded conspiracy. So I do just want to say for the record, I did some research and I found an actual quote from Bill Clinton himself.

And this is the quote from Bill Clinton, Todd McKean and Conway LeBlue of New Orleans, Steve Willis of Houston and Robert Williams from my hometown of Little Rock. Three of those four were assigned to my security during the course of the primary or general election. So he, he and three of those names are the guys that died allegedly in the room that we see on the footage here. So this kind of all hyper focuses on that. So the, the reality is that yes, they did do the security detail. So that part’s not unfounded. If you do just a precursory search of that, you’ll see things like that’s been debunked.

That was never true. This is Bill Clinton admitting that it was true. That’s a real smoking gun. And I Agree with you. I think the whole premise of this movie, in my opinion, the. The. The plot is she’s trying to prove that the reason why they had this heavy force on the Branch Davidians is because they shot first. They started all this war, and those guys died. Right. So to prove the brutality, I think that. That she’s saying that the ATF is like, well, we had to. Look, they killed four of our agents, and they were putting that in the spotlight of the media of, like, these four agents died being brave against this terroristic, cultish, Jesus, fake Jesus guy that’s terrorizing Waco.

And I think that’s the picture they wanted to paint. And now, I don’t necessarily think this. It was the smoking gun. I think you could see some things for sure. Like you said, sloppiness. Definitely looks like they may have been shooting each other. That’s what I kind of, like, saw it. Like, I was like, oh, this guy threw a flashbang. There’s like, atf. It looked like a bunch of dummies, right? Like you said, like a bunch of dummies. And like the Simpsons, or we’re watching south park, you know, like, where they throw a flashbang and then they’re just shooting each other, and they’re like, they.

They kill each other. And she kind of wants to prove that. That the inside. The. The Branch Davidians were. Were peaceful and that maybe if they did res. They were just responding. Not like, you know, on the defense and not on the offense. All right, so speaking of what’s. I guess, what are your hidden treasures of this movie? What are the best parts of it? To me, the best parts are the guy shooting himself, like, with the meter, like, because it. That’s probably the best of the slip, because the old footage and not being able to throw it.

Like you said, she’s probably doing it herself. It’s D Dyi in 1993. You know what I mean? It’s on a whole different level. And she just slows it down. And I’m like, I didn’t know that. I never really seen that before. The. I’ve seen a couple other documentaries of this, but they don’t really focus on that. That part of it. And it’s kind of like, dang, these guys really didn’t seem to know what they were doing. I agree. There’s also some really, really good interviews in this documentary for. For a half hour. Man, they really do pack it in.

I think that’s probably one of the biggest hidden treasure in this. Rarely will you find a documentary that’s a half hour long, and they can pack in. We’re going to talk about it for as long as the entire documentary is itself. Right. So there is something interesting about that whole element. But they’ve got this quote from an ATF agent, and he’s talking, and this is on video, I believe. I don’t think this is them just like repeating the quote. And he says, the people I put in jail have more honor than the top administration of this organization.

Talking about the atf, specifically about how Waco went down and that everything about it was essentially based on a lie or misinformation or bad information, and that the ATF just kept doubling down over and over again and. And FBI as well. So the. The general dynamics of how the ATF and the FBI interacted, they don’t really go into detail in this particular documentary. So I’m going to leave it out, too, because we’ll get into it in the second half of this one. But that she also, Linda Thompson makes a really good case about how the ATF claimed that Koresh was running a meth lab.

And between all of these other weapons claims that weren’t necessarily strong enough to get the warrant and justify everything going on, it was a combination of this false meth house claim in addition to they’re doing something with the kids in there. So now all of a sudden, it’s kind of like, all right, well, we do have rules and regulations, but if you’re. If we’re talking drugs and kids, then I’m. I’m sure we can bend a few rules here and there. That was sort of the general sentiment. And now this is just picking apart, at least in like, a very superficial way of like, okay, now here’s the.

The legal problems with all this. And here’s evidence of ATF members themselves that are fully aware of how horrible this event shows that they were willing to just bend laws as they wanted and have, like, a. A Keystone Cop operation. Right. I’m. I’m literally hearing, like the. I’m hearing, like, the circus music as some of these are going off. And the only reason that they even stopped firing originally was because they ran out of bullets. Right? Like, they would have kept going, but they literally ran out of bullets. And. And to me, the criticisms I would have with this movie would be a little bit like, I mean, it’s a lot to put into 30 minutes, but it’s a little slow at times.

Like, you’re like, Dang, this is 30 minutes, and it seems like an hour and A half. And you’re like, dang. She kind of talks slow but you could tell it’s her. She’s getting her footing. And I have a hunch that she’ll get better in the next one. Yeah, Same thing. I guess for the only overboard really is that she. It really does feel focused so much on this window footage. And even as I’m watching it and I’m thinking like, let’s say I’m on your team. Let’s just say I’m like waving the David Kresh did nothing wrong flag.

And I’m watching this documentary. Even with all that grace, I’m still like, I don’t know if I see the unequivocal proof that these kind of claims really require. So in that. In that regard, I think it falls a little bit short. Especially for how hyper focused this is on that one scene that it. This is essentially reanalyzing like the Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination where it’s like, let’s look at every single frame in incredible detail for a few minutes for each frame and you’re still like twisting your head and squinting and like, I don’t know, I kind of see it.

All right, Waco the big lie number one from 93. It’s a half hour long sink or swim. I’m gonna say swim on this one for sure. It’s not like a huge swim. But it’s not. I wouldn’t call it Phelps level, but it’s like, okay, this has a lot of information. Like you said in 30 minutes and it won’t be for everybody because not everybody can watch these kind of documentaries. Like I’ve noticed that by like trying to get like people around me like my girlfriend or something like, hey. And like some they can get sucked into and some are just like information and you have to want the information.

But I give it a swimming. This might come as a surprise, man, but I fully give this a swim. 100. Even with all the shortcomings, the relative to how long it is and how much information is covered and how much of that is new information that actually checks out when you look it up. Like all of those things are exactly what I look for in a documentary. And especially if we’re going to talk about the sub genre of 80s 90s, early 90s conspiracy theory documentaries, this one is one. If you haven’t seen it, you absolutely have to see it.

And it’s. It’s not an endorsement of the editing skills or the. The skills and actually crafting a good like commercial documentary, but you want to have your mind blown and just completely change your worldview in a half hour. This is one of those documentaries I think, that can do that. On the horizon. I guess let’s just start the Big Line too right now. You know, I’m gonna tune in next week or anything. The Big Lie 2 is essentially a hour and a half long continuation of the Big Lie one. Same lady, Linda Thompson, she’s the one that breaks us down.

And this one is a little bit more focused. So I’m just gonna jump right into the major claims. One is that why did the government lie at all? Like, what was the intent of the COVID up and why did it get to this point? And the claim that Linda makes through this documentary is because kids died. Essentially, once kids die in a conflict, there’s, it’s a PR nightmare and it just sticks and people are going to feel a certain way about it. So in order to, to push this narrative, the, the true fact According to, to Waco2 was that the government caused all these kids to die through crushing them through suffocation, through just the building catching on fire and burning.

It even gets into more detail in some of the future documentaries. But essentially that the government caused this horrific tragedy and they start trying to blame it. Like, oh well, they were end times apocalyptic cult. So of course, you know, they, they were bringing this on themselves and they were pouring gasoline on themselves. And that’s sort of the premise and that they, that they were out gunning us. That was actually in some of the, in the, the corpor scenes, they were like, guys, you’re the atf. You had a helicopter in the sky. They didn’t outgun you.

And they even have ATF agents that are like, yeah, we weren’t outgunned. I mean, we’re the, we’re the atf. But in the actual public sphere where people at home are reading and watching these, hearing these congressional hearings, that’s the part that they’re hearing. They’re hearing the lie part. And that’s the reason was because it went so bad and so many kids and women and old people died here that the government had no, they had no other option other than to just completely make this about these like horrific things that the cult was doing. And they wanted to emphasize that like, the only reason we’re trying to break in there is to save them is because they’re so crazy that they will kill themselves.

Right? They, they were putting that narrative out there. These are, this is a cult. They don’t understand. They’re following David Koresh and they, whatever he says goes. And they were like he’s dying so he’s going to kill all of them. So they kind of like leaned on that heavily in the media and people bought it up because the, the official narrative was like, hey, we’re trying to get these guys out of here. They’re escalating it. The whole point was that they were covering up their mistakes. And I think because of Ruby, Ruby Ridge happening before this and they kind of mentioned that a little bit is why they were like on their toes, right? Because they’re like oh dang, not again.

Like, oh, we were just like in this mess and PR nightmare. We got to figure it out. This is just them hitting the like continue button. Like re replay stage one one. Like they just like okay, here we go again. And, and so there are some very specific claims made in this documentary that I wasn’t able, I didn’t prove or disprove any of these. I just didn’t have the capacity to be able to definitively know whether some of these claims are true. Because they make a really good point that once, once Caramel Mount Carmel burns down, right? Once the, the compound that the Davidians are living in burns down, that’s it, like no one cares anymore.

They move on to the next story and this becomes like a weird relic that people don’t really talk about and they just easily accept the official narrative. So some of those things that got buried in, in time that she’s pointing out in 1994, almost like she realizes this is the stuff that’s going to be swept under the carpet. So one of those is that in the footage that, that we see in this documentary, there’s a kid outside of the compound right before the ATF just starts like wildly firing at the side of it. And then the kid kind of disappears.

And, and she claims that that was Cyrus Koresh, the eight year old son of David Koresh. And I mean this is a big deal because Koresh itself means Cyrus. So he named like this is the kid that he names after himself, his eight year old kid. And he probably got taken out according to this documentary. And you see agents kind of like whisking this small little body off of the the scene. So that’s one of these big claims is that that even the, the photos and the footage that got released to the public don’t show this kid being there.

And, and that when she compared the negatives of the video to the video that actually got published, that the negative was unaltered so clearly, someone went in and doctored footage to make sure that they didn’t show the son of David Koresh getting taken out early on in this. And that was because it would have caused obvious uproar against the ATF’s actions. So this is one of the many different things that got kind of swept under the rug. Another one was children being fired down on by helicopters. They claim that there was no fire in the. In the.

No mounted guns in the helicopters, that they had. Some of the kids that survived this draw pictures for psychiatrists. And in these pictures that the kids from the compound were drawing, they were drawing bullet holes in the ceiling, showing that there was bullet holes coming from the ceiling, which is something, again, that they, the atf, like, vehemently still denies about all this. They talk about how showing Janet Reno lying and saying that Koresh wouldn’t send in footage of the kids, when in reality they did send in footage. They gave them a camera that the. The different Davidians passed around.

And it was like, hey, here’s me and my family. We’re from, you know, this country. And here’s my kids. And hey, kids, say hi. And it was like a very casual, non alarmist, non weird. And that they realized if they show that to the public, then the public’s gonna be like, oh, these people are like, me and you. This is Joe Everyman. I don’t want these. Anything bad to happen to them. So they actually intentionally decided to not show that to the public, while at the same time claiming that they refused to show any sort of footage of people inside, which was like, this guy won’t even let them talk to the outside.

Are they even alive? Who knows, right? That was kind of the vibe. And they also had that other one where they’re like, well, they won’t send anybody outside, but they’re like, if you send anybody outside, we’ll shoot you. Like, so it was like all these little lies of where you couldn’t really do anything about it. But it was public perception. They were trying to mold the. The masses into like, hey, ATF good, David Koresh bad. In the simplest terms, they were really trying to do anything and everything. Not to give him any validity to being like a, hey, maybe, you know, maybe they are, like, kind of going overboard.

And that’s why they kept on the, like, kids, hey, we’re trying to save the kids. Hey, there’s drugs there. They have, like, this arsenal. Like, they made it seem as if they had an army there. Like, they have an army of people that are devoted to David Koresh, that at any minute he can activate them and they will take anybody down. And they even played it up as if, like, hey, we. We got outgunned, like you said. But, like, as soon as we went to the door, we were just in suits, like, hey, you know, we want to just talk.

And then they just started boom, boom, boom, firing. And then what could we do? We take cover. We’re trying to. They even show like an instance. Like, it doesn’t show it, but you could kind of hear. And it’s like you said, it’s a lot of these claims you can’t really prove because I wasn’t there. And it’s like I can get a couple people that might, like, say, yeah, that did happen. And then two other go, no, that didn’t. But they claimed that they killed the dog, right? They. You could kind of hear a. You hear a gun sound and you hear a dog, but I didn’t really hear a yelp, but I’m like, I don’t know, maybe they hit it right in the head.

I don’t. I don’t. I don’t know from that. From that standpoint. I feel like that’s just a natural ceremony for whenever the ATF begins a raid. Like someone has to shoot a dog and then the rest of the operation starts. It’s like a. Like a crossing the. The equator ceremony that the Navy does right there. Like christening. Yeah, it’s the champagne bottle right before the ATF goes on a raid. The. The number two claim that this documentary makes is that the atf, which I guess I didn’t really know this, or at least I didn’t remember that it technically falls under the Treasury Department.

And that the. There was three people specifically involved with the investigation of this entire Waco event, and that those three people were involved in a previous event on the government side. And they. She names them. They’re supposed to be independent investigators. And this was all under the Secretary of Treasury, Lloyd Benson. And Lloyd Benson hires Edwin Guthman, Henry Reuten Jr. And Willie Williams, which is an awesome name. And all three of those names that were involved in this investigation to Waco were also involved in something called the move firebombing in 1985, which was this. This headquarters that was where they had a bunch of counter revolutionary, sort of like social right movement radicals that all died in a fire.

Eerily similar to Waco. I had never heard of this before watching this particular documentary. So here you’ve got. On the independent investigation, it’s Supposed to be like, did the government, you know, overreach, and did they cause a mass tragedy when maybe it could have been avoided? That three of those independent investigators were directly involved, two of them in official means, and one of them, I believe, was, like, a reporter that was able to report on that move, firebombing in Philadelphia. They reported on it in such a way that everyone kind of became a little bit chummy enough that now they’re.

They got the band back together again to talk about Koresh years later. So that was a really interesting detail that she. She goes pretty deep into. And the move, firebombing, like, they literally, like, from a helicopter, dropped a bomb on their facility. It was like, I think, an apartment complex, and they. They just bombed it. Yeah. It was something that’s not talked about a lot, but it’s briefly mentioned in some conspiratorial circles. You know, like, it’s the far, far, far distant cousin of Ruby Ridge. But you don’t hear it as much because it was, like, kind of like a black pantherish communist movement.

So they’re like, yeah, the commies, man. You know, like, we’re just. It’s commies, and people are like, all right, we’re not really worried about infringing our rights, and they’re communists. I think. More evidence that she does a good job of explaining that this whole thing was rigged is that this is the effect. They call this the blue book report on Waco. Right. And because it has a. Had a blue cover originally when they put it out, and this was supposed to be an invest. Investigation into Waco. That’s actually what it’s usually referred to as by name, but that’s not what’s printed on the actual cover.

On the COVID of the Waco blue book, it actually says investigation of Vernon Wayne Howell, AKA David Koresh. So the investigations, not as much about Waco and the compound, the people within it, and it entirely focuses just on David Koresh himself, which I did think was like, that is kind of interesting. Like, why. Why is this entire investigation just one person, the guy leading this entire compound, and not on all the people that died. Like, he was just one of many people that died here. Right. So I thought that that was a good point that she’s making.

I also thought, like, I. Not to get too much into it, but, like, one thing that’s influential about this film is that this was played at Timothy McVeigh’s trial. Like this. This film is that impactful that this built this case of something totally different. So she did a very thorough job of painting a picture of what. And even they used it as far as saying, like, hey, look, the government overreach. That’s why Timothy McVeigh snapped. Yeah, this. This was a popular sentiment. And I think that Linda Thompson was just the person that put this into a documentary.

And everyone that was commiserate with everyone that was, like, sympathetic to what she was sympathetic to, they’d see this and be like, yeah, yeah, it’s pretty much how we feel. And this became kind of part of conspiracy meat and potatoes, especially for militia and for people that follow the Ruby Ridge to Waco to Oklahoma City trajectory. Right. So. So all of this is. Is things that you probably haven’t heard before, and if you have, it came from this documentary. The other. The third thing that she brings up is all of these ATF lies. And there’s so many, as you can predict, that I can’t even go through all of them.

I’ll bullet point a few of these. For example, one of the most obvious lies were that the Davidians had more guns and firepower than the atf, which was comically false. However, it was repeated so often that if you’re just a guy going to work and reading the paper and just living your normal life thousands of miles away from Texas, you hear that once and you’re like, wow, someone should really do something about that. Right? This is completely untrue. It almost seems silly that you have to even mention that the ATF probably has, like, armories filled with guns that are bigger than Mount Carmel itself, but that.

That was one of the first official lies that was easy to disprove, but enough people jumped onto that and enough media outlets jumped down to that. They’re just like, oh, wow, someone really needs to do something about these guys. Also, they mentioned the ATF had armored vehicles, helicopter, and military coordination. Specifically, the military coordination predated the raid. It wasn’t like the military had to get called in later after things started going wonky. They were. They were coordinated. And they mentioned the exact page numbers in this documentary, which I love. Page 73 in the blue book talks about agents coordinated with Fort Bragg Army Special Forces unit.

78 mentioned Special Forces. Page 37 mentions William Buford and Army Special Forces combat vet. Page five mentions Colonel Rod Paschel, a retired Delta Force commander. Wade Ishimoto, retired Delta Force Intelligence Op so, like, coming with the receipts, she mentions that they lied about the. This element of surprise. I’m gonna be honest. I understand the premise. So the element of surprise thing was that the ATF thought they were going to go in, have the element of surprise, bum rush them things over in 15, 20 minutes. And it couldn’t have gone any easier when in reality it ends up being like a 51 day holdout with like multiple shootouts and all.

It gets way out of control. So the, the reason like, oh, it got out of control because we lost the element of surprise. But none of this was true because the ATF themselves were already seeding things in the media saying like, hey, on this day and time, you might want to have the cameras ready and rolling because something’s going to go down. So the element of surprise was like they shot themselves in the foot with this whole premise. But again that, and I guess. And the reason I don’t really understand it is that I don’t understand how the ATF losing the element of surprise justifies any of the following events.

Yeah, well then they sent, they made it seem like if they surprised them then they would have got them off guard, but they were just sitting there waiting. So the picture to me that the ATF is trying to paint is that there’s just like 30 to 50 guys in front of this like front door, just armed to the gills, like, you know, Rambo with like just bullets draped all over you, you know, like just rounds and just like where just they’re non stop, where they’re like, oh my God, like a little mini army is in this facility.

Like, because you know, they kept emphasizing of like their artillery and like they, they got 50 cows, you know what I mean? They’re like, hey man, you know what they got in there? Like they, they had to paint the picture that they were so dangerous. And the element surprise part is also funny because they even mentioned in the film how if you see how like the whole ranch style was like you can see from all angles if anybody was coming up. There was no like hills to hide behind trees. Like you’re gonna be like, oh hey look, some cars are coming up.

Like we could see them from a distance. And obviously if they were this whole militia style like cult which they were trying to paint in the, which maybe they were, they weren’t. Like, I, I think a lot of that is false in my opinion. Like, I think they were cultish like, of what I would think. But I mean, I think some Christians are cults. I mean, like, like there’s a lot of people that I think are culty. Like, I don’t necessarily think they’re bad people. I, I think this militia aspect is kind of like just because them being from Texas and being cool with having guns and wanting to protect themselves and importance of the Constitution.

That’s more where I think saw them lying in a militia, like waiting for the atf. You know, they kept saying that, you know, they were ready for judgment day. And in the judgment day, David Koresh knew was going to be that, you know, like a government fighting the government. And that’s how he was gonna die in. In this documentary, both of them, Waco 1 and 2, Big Lie. I think Linda Thompson does a good job of. Even though she’s being sympathetic, at no point does she really do like, go out of her way to justify or defend Koresh or the Davidians.

All she focuses, she hyper fixates on here’s all the things that the government did wrong, here’s all the things they lied about, here’s all the ways that they completely bumbled this, either willingly or intentionally or unintentionally. Right. But like she hyper fixates on that. So it’s almost like, who cares like whether you think that they were innocent or they were crazy and they were doing the worst things ever to children and that, you know, like that they brought this on themselves and reporting gas down. Even if you believe all that, it doesn’t excuse all these lies and all this pre planning and all this other like, like highly conspiratorial behavior on behalf of the government.

So. And then one of the examples of like all these lies that that comes up, she also fixates on a guy named Mike Schroeder. So Mike Schroeder is a branch divinium, but he’s not at the compound as this is all popping off. So he hears about it on the radio and turns around to get there and he’s blocked that. ATF already has the pathway back to Mount Carmel blocked off like 300 yards from the entrance, right? So he’s trying to get into Mount Carmel and he gets passed through the security detail. According to this documentary, this is the part where it’s like, I want to hear a few different angles on this, but the documentary version is he gets through the security detail, the checkpoint, and as he’s walking towards Mount Carmel, they shoot him in the back and he dies.

And they’re basically saying seven times in the back, by the way, and that he, when he was shot, he wasn’t even on Mount Carmel property yet because he was making his way towards that. So the documentary is like, well, why did they even let him get through there just to shoot him in the back and clearly, if he’s shot in the back seven times, then he was not posing a threat. And he didn’t come from the compound because he died so far away from the compound surrounded by these agents. So it is. It does seem realistically true that he was not there.

Heard about it on the radio, came back, was like, let me get to my people in my mind. I’m wondering, like, did they say, like, halt, like, stop, don’t go. And then he just, like, runs anyways. And then again, in, like, this chaos and the Keystone Cop nature of everything, I could see them just being like, I just shoot him in the back seven times. Like, we. We don’t have to worry about anyone knowing about this. Like, we’ve got this lockdown. The military trained us on this. And it’s purely my opinion, but I think that, like, that’s believable only because I felt like these cops, this ATF agents, they were like, you killed our brothers.

Anything. Anything goes. Now. That’s how I felt like, even seeing, like, other films later on and stuff I’ve seen before this of where they’re just, like, you know, stroking each other off. Like, we were just doing this for our fallen brothers, like, kind of deal. So I can almost see anything on the line. The. The other major claim is that the ATF and the FBI later on, they all rely on unreliable witnesses in court. And she sort of, like, systematically shows you, here’s why this person is incredible. Here’s why this person. So some of those examples is Mark Brualt was one of these eyewitnesses that was claiming of seeing them, you know, doing illegal things with guns and maybe drugs and maybe, you know, like, harming people.

That one of these guys that the government completely relied on for his eyewitness testimony was legally blind. You know, that was kind of wild to me. Like, I’ve. I’ve seen comedy movies where that’s, like, the whole thing that hinges on this one juror, right? And like. Or this one witness in a trial. That was the guy. That was the guy at Waco. They actually had one of those guys there. And that also, there was this cult awareness network. And the cult awareness network is one of the driving factors of selling the public on, like, we need to end this.

That. You know, this is the premise of the Simpsons character, the. The preacher’s wife. It’s like, won’t somebody think of the children, right? This is the cult awareness network. And that the cult awareness network that I learned, according to this documentary was just a subsidiary of the ADL they were essentially funded by the Anti Defamation League, so therefore became this, like, highly political mouthpiece. But that did a great job of putting, like, a mom or a grandma up there on the screen so that you’re like, oh, they’re just trying to save people from Colts. When in reality it was a completely different, like, politicized angle.

So I. I thought that was really interesting the way that they. They kind of show, and this is what the entire case was built on, was the claims of these very unreliable witnesses. Yeah, the blind person was the. I totally forgot about that until you reminded me, because I laughed when I heard that too, because I’m like, you couldn’t make a better meme, like, if you set this up. Like, I’m like, no way, man. This it. It’s just so simpsonish. I think you. That’s. I don’t think you could even get any better than that. That’s exactly what it is.

This cartoon, like, beginning of Psyops, right? We’re like, oh, well, now we have media everywhere. Maybe we’re not that good at science. Like, you could see, like, the beginning stages, you know, the stuff that worked in the 60s and 70s and 50s when you didn’t have cams everywhere and media and people talking about it like, it was a lot easier. And I felt like they were like, not on their aame on the psychological operations, Hidden Treasures and overboard moments for Waco 2, the big lie continues. What are your hidden treasures? One of my favorites parts of this whole film is like, well, first I’ll go with.

I loved how she was bringing up a ton of penal codes and, like, actually showing the law of, like, hey, this is actually illegal for you to do this, and the government actually using military on. On citizens. And she kind of went back and forth and even explained, like, where they kind of can do this, but they can’t do that. I thought that was great. I loved the part where she goes, oh, if you want more of the footage, here’s the guy that runs the news place. Call him up. And she throws his phone number right there to just like.

That’s where I was like, oh, man, you don’t really want to mess with that, Linda. Because she’s like, yeah, just call him up. That’s what. Don’t you wonder why you haven’t seen the full footage? And the last real big hidden treasure for me was when she starts explaining that immediately a week after the Waco incident, that NBC plays like a live action, or. I don’t think you call that right. An interpretation of what happened at Waco. And they immediately make, you know, David Koresh, this crazy, like cultish leader. And like the way the ATF agents as heroes just trying to save America.

And I thought that was interesting because I was too young to know that. And her putting that in there, I’m like, oh yeah, dang. Wow. They were immediately trying to. They’re like, yeah, we, we messed up, guys. We’re gonna have to not only work it as far as the news agencies, they were like, let’s put out this little movie, man. Everybody needs this dramatization and they’ll feel a little bit better. So I’ll say that that’s probably my hidden treasure too. And I’ll. There was a smaller one where they mentioned these, these PSYOP devices, these frequency weapons that they were beaming.

And this Again, this is 1994 talking about the mill, the FBI and the ATF using military grade frequency weapons in order to like scramble the brains of the people inside. In addition to like legitimate psychological operations where they’re blasting music and stuff. But this is separate. This is not blasting music. This is actual audio weapons. So I thought that one was big. The other one, like you mentioned that there was a made for TV movie that was an hour and a half long, that was a full dramatization of the entire Waco event that comes out a week after Mount Carmel burns down.

So the original raid, where, you know, they lost the element of surprise, that happens. And then 51 days go by throughout the course of this standoff and like all these different shootouts until the actual compound burns down. So within 51 days they had fully produced with legitimate actors lighting all that. And like you were saying earlier about like the guys with the bandoliers of bullets, like Rambo style. There is an I went and watched this entire, this hour and a half long dramatization I watched. It was on YouTube, you can find it. And it actually shows them 80s action villain style with a bunch of guys holding automatic weapons, like right inside the front door.

So as the ATF is walking up, they just unload and you see ATF agents like getting blasted backwards like 80s action movie style. And. And it was just wild because the amount of time that it takes to script and, and cast and shoot and edit and make sure it clips for commercials because it, when you watch it on YouTube, it’s missing all the commercials. But it’s like. And here’s the commercial break, right? And like all of that was pre formatted and ready to be delivered a week after the Compound burnt down. So it’s just wild how much information the media, not just the news media, but like the entertainment.

Like they had the movie ready to go of okay, here’s how we’re gonna show it off to the world. And, and it just worked I guess in the, in the 1990s, everyone just kind of took whatever the TV movie vers. And in 1993, like you said, you couldn’t just assemble, you had to actually have a whole crew. It wasn’t like we had iPhones and little cameras in our pockets. No, this was actual, hey, put them on set. So they, they do paint a lot. That’s one of like, I’d say more of the hidden treasures as well is that they kind of have this dig of like, hey, they were planning this like this.

It was a psychological operation. And from having all this other knowledge that we know now because we have, you know, the decades after this has happened. But re watching this and you’re like, oh, this was the beginning stages of these psyops because you can see what they were testing on them and it sounded like they planned it all out. You just have a movie ready to go. You just have like these press releases like and things that would take so much time that they already had shifted the narrative. Even when they were talking about the raid, they were talking about doing the raid forever.

And like how you were talking about how they were training with Delta Force and stuff of that nature. And I also. One of the, the big details that we’ll get into in, in following documentaries this month but was about how the building burned down and that was it planned, they burned it down on purpose? Was it a misfire from some of the tear gas they were trying to inject in close quarters? Did that get ignited? Did the Branch Davidians themselves set a fire so that they could bring on this self fulfilling prophecy? All that find out next week on under the Docks.

Right. Well, well, one of, one of the biggest hidden treasures here was they actually show this guy Richard Scruggs of the Justice Department at a press briefing and someone’s asking about that about like, you know, sir, I’ll paraphrase. Like sir, did the military or did atf, you know, shoot napalm? Did they cause this fire? And here’s why we asked. Here’s this thermal imaging, here’s all this evidence that shows that you guys pretty much started the fire. And, and here’s Richard Scruggs Department of Justice and he’s like, yeah, that looks bad. We’re looking into it. Like I Was like, oh, my God.

If, like, that would have. If that were in the 20, you know, tens or 2000s, that would have been a clip that just gets showed everywhere. But this is something that you won’t see outside of this documentary. And in. In that case, it almost feels like this admission of guilt. I realized that you can’t read that far into it, but, man, it was just like, yeah, yeah, I don’t. I don’t have any. Like, PR hasn’t prepped me for this particular question, and I know we don’t have a good answer for it yet. They’re like, yeah, we pretty much burnt this building down.

And the. The other one, the. I want to remember this one. I don’t know if you ever heard of the. The Chicago fire theory that, like, Ms. O’ Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern and that burned down Chicago. And. But. But basically, Linda Thompson, the one that made both these documentaries, at the end, she’s kind of giving this whole summary of events, and she talks about the. The ATF and the FBI and the government’s explanation of how Mount Carmel burnt down and why everyone died inside. It was basically their new version of the. Miss o’ Leary’s.

Miss o’ Leary’s cow theory. So I just thought that was like, such a perfect example because not only is there this level of. No, there’s. There was orchestration and there was like, corruption and conspiracy, but there was a level of, like, just bumbling, dumb, Keystone coppery that kind of is summarized perfectly with that analogy. It’s that time, sink or swim. Swim all the way. This is a classic. This is now in the classic vault. This is like, we gotta have some kind of like, golden swim or something that, like, puts you in the elite level of loose changes and the.

The zeitgeist. I don’t know. Zeitgeist. I don’t know. I’m not gonna put that over there. Let’s. Let me backtrack on that. But this film really puts it together because it’s so much good evidence. There’s so, like, you. If you watch the first one, you might go away. Like, man, I wish there was more. And then you get this as the second punch. I loved it because it almost seemed like out of spite, like, she was like, oh, you didn’t believe me on the first one. Let me go a little thorough because now I have time. And now more evidence has come to light.

She has more flow footage. It’s just, to me, a great job. And even at the end, because I watch it on YouTube. It really gave me the nostalgic feel where it showed the tape like, like, you know, the end of a VHS tape where you just see static and like it’s like the, the, the, the role is ending. That, that just was the, the sugar on top of this, like great, great masterpiece. I’ll say. This is definitely a Michael Phelps for me or something. It’s got like a vapor wave feel to it. A little bit like that retro feel.

Yeah, yeah, same here, man. The first half hour, you know, part one was a swim and this one delivers. It doubles down. It goes into all the extra detail that you were probably hoping for in part one. It gets into a lot of that. And I wanna, I wanna say that with a caveat of warts and all. Like there are some deficiencies in this. There are some things where I realized that Linda was like, here’s the evidence, here’s the proof. It’s, you know, it’s undeniable. And I’m watching it. I’m just like, I’m on your side. I think I’m on your side.

But I don’t see this like smoking gun, red handed stuff at least for a hundred percent of the claim she makes. If you go into this with an open mind and you start out with like, I don’t know, maybe Koresh and those Waco idiots deserved what came to them. I think by the time you finish watching this, you should at least come away with like, it’s irrelevant whether or not or like what happened to those people. But what the government did was highly irregular and illegal and a gross injustice of power. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s not like they have to follow these, these laws, right? You can’t bring the entire government, the entire ATF and FBI into a courtroom and like find them guilty of something.

That’s not how it works anymore. But this, this shows you almost like that when we saw Police State from Alex Jones like pre 911 where it’s like, my friend, you’ve got no idea how bad it’s actually about to get. Like the things you’re complaining about are prophetic, but at the time it seems just like wackadoo claims of like someone on the, the street corner talking about the apocalypse, right? Like they almost like you being sympathetic to Waco makes you seem like you’re in a culture. And I think that this is a great job of being like, all right, again, who cares if I’m in the cult or not? Here’s what the government did isn’t that messed up.

On the horizon. Next up is another Waco documentary. Imagine that it’s Waco April. Wait, wait. Roll acro. I don’t know how. It’s. It’s the rules of engagement from 1997, which is just another comprehensive doc about the entire Waco event. So let’s check that out. You know what you got to do? Go to kill the mockingbirds.com paran american.com like share subscribe Peace. Docks. Under the docks under the docks? Yeah, under the docks. Ready for a cosmic conspiracy about Stanley Kubrick, moon landings and the CIA? Go visit NASA comic.com NASA comic.com CIA Stanley Kubrick put us on that’s why we’re singing this song go visit NASA comic.com go visit NASA comic.com.

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