Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind Page B

withdraw into the mountains. A few robbed bank trucks. But Estes Park was a new departure, in part because the urgency of Randy Weaver’s and Kevin Harris’s coming trial loomed over virtually every point.
    Another unique aspect of this gathering was its truly collaborative leadership. Despite Pete Peters’s role in convening the meeting, there was little planned agenda or preapproved list of speakers. By contrast, at Peters’s summer Bible camps he was the unchallenged chief, and each speaker in each time slot had been arranged in advance. At Estes Park a group of men made decisions ad hoc, during the proceedings.
    Although the militia movement in the 1990s eventually traced directly back to the Estes Park meeting, the most singularly significant aspect of the meeting was less the initiation of the militia than the participation of such men as Larry Pratt. Temple and others like him had nosed their way into groups such as Moral Majority or lobbied legislatures on gun issues in the past. But in those instances, others outside the movement had set the political agenda. On this occasion, however, it was Pete Peters’s tent, it was Louis Beam welcoming the guests, and it was Chris Temple setting the strategy. And it was the likes of Larry Pratt walking in on an expanded white nationalist turf. The shift that had manifested itself with the collapse of the Soviet Union continued. Much like Pat Buchanan’s adopting the rhetoric of David Duke and Willis Carto’s
Spotlight
, a number of activists and organizations associated with Christian conservative causes adopted a more militant opposition to the status quo. A new Christian nationalism emerged, distinct yet entwined with the post–Cold War white nationalism. And a mixture of guns with religion burst like the muzzle flash of a .38 revolver. No metaphor intended.

33
Inferno at Waco and Randy Weaver Wins at Trial
    April 19, 1993. A helicopter and tanks and armored personnel carriers driven by FBI agents began a military-style assault on a seventy-seven-acre compound populated by a religious sect known as the Branch Davidians. After hours of gunfire and tear gas, a fire started and swept from one building to the next. The origins of the fire remained in dispute, as did the exact number of deaths from the fire. But at least seventy-six Davidians died altogether, including twenty-one children. For hundreds of thousands of Americans they became symbols of the federal assault on gun rights and religious beliefs.
    The Branch Davidians started as an obscure splinter of the Seventh-Day Adventists, itself one of the hundreds of smaller Christian sects that abound in a land that prides itself on religious liberty. They established a religious commune called Mount Carmel outside Waco, Texas, and garnered little interest from government authorities until 1987, when a fight for control of the sect ended in a gun battle. Eight Davidians were charged with attempted murder; they included a young man who later changed his name to David Koresh. A deadlocked jury ended in acquittals, and Koresh emerged as the unquestioned guru of the Mount Carmel cult.
    Davidian theology focused on an arcane set of revelations and End Times prophecies. Except to the most trained eschatological eye, it was an unfamiliar and inaccessible set of beliefs. But as Koresh transformed the commune into a heavily armed walled fortress, it began to recognizably resemble camps like the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord compound James Ellison once controlled on the Arkansas border. The Davidians shared none of Identity’s theological preoccupation with Zionist Occupied Government or the belief that spiritual grace was attained via biological race. In fact, a mix of approximately one hundredvaried multiracial souls from Australia, the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and the United States inhabited the commune in mutual and complete obeisance to Koresh’s supposedly God-inspired will.
    Early in 1992 a Texas state