How the Right Got Waco Wrong

[Occam's Banana]

Get a load of this: The New Republic is trying to rehabilitate Waco as a progressive cause célèbre.

You see, reaction to the Waco Massacre has been hijacked by misogynistic, transphobic, QAnon-ing, J6-er white supremacists for their own vile and nefarious purposes. Really, though, it ought to be "fold[ed] in" with George Floyd, et al. (no doubt in service to the noble and heroic causes of "trans rights", Antifa, etc.).

How the Right Got Waco Wrong
Militia groups have long used Waco as a rallying cry. But it was never the example of whiteness under siege that they invoke.
https://newrepublic.com/article/1702...ok-book-review
Paul Renfro (31 January 2023)

[...]

Today’s right-wing conspiracists and militias, Cook asserts, almost universally view Waco as a radicalizing event. “With Waco,” one FBI official noted, “you can go to YouTube and see women and children incinerated, the government using military tools and training against Americans.” The global “war on terror,” the Great Recession, the election of Barack Obama, and the solidification of the neoliberal order have intensified this radicalization, paving the way for the Tea Party, Trumpism, the so-called alt-right, QAnon, the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and increasingly naked expressions of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism.

Ultimately, as one Department of Homeland Security official put it, “The modern-day militia movement owes its existence to Waco,” and that movement is evolving in troubling ways. “Now they’re taking the fight to local school boards and county councils, mainstreaming ideas that would have seemed fringe a few years ago.” Militias are now “blending with QAnon,” another national security expert explained, “people who see Democrats as child-abusing predators.” It is not difficult, then, to trace a direct line between Waco and the January 6 insurrection (in which so many QAnon believers participated) or the anti-gay, anti-trans panic currently buffeting the nation.

The obscene, baseless conspiracies propagated, and racist violence perpetrated, in the Davidians’ name should anger any observer. So too should the state violence that has fueled such responses. How can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory truths?

While Waco Rising draws a clear link between the Mount Carmel siege and the right-wing movements of today, it doesn’t explore, in any meaningful depth, how whiteness has shaped the right’s responses to government “overreach.” As Belew argues, Black and brown people had been the main victims of state violence long before and long after Ruby Ridge and Waco—from the lynching of 38 Indigenous men during the 1862 U.S.–Dakota War to the violent clampdown on the 1960s Black freedom struggle, to the death and destruction wrought by the “war on terror.” Yet in the main, white power and paramilitary groups have only taken umbrage when the government sets its sights on white people—especially white women and children. To that end, far-right actors have often imagined the Branch Davidians as exclusively white.

Yet, although its highly visible leader was white, the congregation at Mount Carmel was incredibly diverse. (People of color made up about half of Koresh’s flock.) As federal agents laid siege to the Mount Carmel compound, the Davidians hung a bedsheet from a window that read, “RODNEY KING WE UNDERSTAND”—an allusion to the unarmed Black motorist whose vicious beating at the hands of four white police officers (and their subsequent acquittal) touched off the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion.

Cook never speculates on what exactly the Davidians may have meant by this. But the gesture indicates that the Davidians explicitly understood their struggle in relation to Rodney King’s. And that—far from being the example of whiteness under siege that the right imagines—Waco fit into familiar patterns of state violence and repression, to which people of color, queer people, and other minority populations were and are disproportionately subjected. We don’t have to idealize Koresh or his followers to acknowledge their victimization—or to link it to that of Rodney King, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the countless individuals ensnared in America’s “crimmigration” and carceral machinery. By articulating a broader critique of state power, one that folds in Waco, we can take away one of the right’s most powerful claims. Only then can we confront the violence that produced Waco and the violence that Waco has produced.

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/scotthortonshow/...99153588359169

[CCTelander]

Who the $#@! ever, EVER held Waco up as an example of “whiteness under siege,” whatever the hell that is? These people are insane.

[TheTexan]

I don't think race had much to do with it. Waco was really a struggle for trans rights, than anything else.

[tod evans]

What part of "$#@! the feds" is hard to understand?

[acptulsa]

Who the $#@! ever, EVER held Waco up as an example of “whiteness under siege,” whatever the hell that is? These people are insane.

Interesting how the subject of physical reality versus the consensus view always seems to arise whenever democracy is tried, isn't it? The ancient Athenians were very much into it. Who is insane, the person who rejects the physical world and the concrete artifacts of history, or the person can't or won't see the predominant opinion of the herd to which he belongs?

We have a word for governance by consensus--democracy. We need a word for reality by consensus. Demonemerty?

[CCTelander]

Interesting how the subject of physical reality versus the consensus view always seems to arise whenever democracy is tried, isn't it? The ancient Athenians were very much into it. Who is insane, the person who rejects the physical world and the concrete artifacts of history, or the person can't or won't see the predominant opinion of the herd to which he belongs?

We have a word for governance by consensus--democracy. We need a word for reality by consensus. Demonemerty?

Brother, I just don’t know.

What I DO know is that anyone who truly believes any if this crap are perfect candidates for future Darwin Awards. The society we’ve built has protected them from that eventuality so far, but I believe that if they get the world they think they want that that would change in a damn hurry. Can’t happen soon enough for me. That or the Sweet Meteor of Death. I’m ok with either at this point!

[acptulsa]

What I DO know is that anyone who truly believes any if this crap are perfect candidates for future Darwin Awards. The society we’ve built has protected them from that eventuality so far, but I believe that if they get the world they think they want that that would change in a damn hurry.

And it's all being engineered by people who seem intent on mass extermination, led by Bill Gates, a eugenicist. And the herd bleats, "Coincidences!"

[ClaytonB]

[Anti Federalist]

Ultimately, as one Department of Homeland Security official put it, “The modern-day militia movement owes its existence to Waco,” and that movement is evolving in troubling ways. “Now they’re taking the fight to local school boards and county councils, mainstreaming ideas that would have seemed fringe a few years ago.” Militias are now “blending with QAnon,” another national security expert explained, “people who see Democrats as child-abusing predators.” It is not difficult, then, to trace a direct line between Waco and the January 6 insurrection (in which so many QAnon believers participated) or the anti-gay, anti-trans panic currently buffeting the nation.

This is how you know a Marxist media organ is propagandizing you.

What "official"? What "expert"?

You really got to hand it to them though.

No lie is too big, no pile of bull$#@! too high to not go to the next level to achieve their goals.

That is why, unless we get our heads out of our collective asses and soon, they will win this war.

[Anti Federalist]

Who the $#@! ever, EVER held Waco up as an example of “whiteness under siege,” whatever the hell that is? These people are insane.

Liberty, property rights, limited government, religious freedom, freedom of assembly...just a couple of things that the Davidians were seeking.

All of those concepts are manifestations of white supremacy, comrade.

[Occam's Banana]

It is not difficult, then, to trace a direct line between Waco and the January 6 insurrection (in which so many QAnon believers participated) or the anti-gay, anti-trans panic currently buffeting the nation.

[Anti Federalist]

What the New Republic said at the time:

Larry McMurtry
/
June 7, 1993
A Return to Waco
No more cane on the Brazos

https://newrepublic.com/article/9559...-koresh-return

BOB DAEMMRICH/GETTY IMAGES
About the only thing open along Highway 84, the Sunday morning after that Monday morning when fire took the Branch Davidians, was the Central Texas Bee Supply. In Waco, eternal city of the Baptists, the Sabbath still means something; in Waco, commerce still yields to faith, at least until after church.

Bees, though, are evidently exempt from the instruction to “toileth not.” In Bellmead, the rusty suburb where I stopped, seeking sustenance, the Triangle Grocery offered “Home Made Sandwiches” and “Ammunition for Shotguns, Rifles and Pistols,” a succinct enough reminder of how it came to pass that (at last count) seventy-two people got crisped a few miles to the east. Texas is not the land of the meek, nor is it the only place in America where bullets and food enjoy a rough parity. We are not a nation that can be said to scorn ammunition, and the fact that the Branch Davidians had assembled an estimated million rounds (a figure not likely to be verified) does not, in a western context, seem particularly remarkable; nor did it mean that David Koresh and his Mighty Men were about to load up and march on Mexia, a small community some thirty-five miles up the road, distinguished mainly for having been the hometown of Anna Nicole Smith, the full-figured Guess model.

From tragedy it is seldom but a step to memorabilia. A woman at a convenience store told me that if I wanted to drive out to the roadblock where, she was confident, I would find the media, I should go east on Highway 84 and turn right at a sign that said “Elk.” I drove east a goodly distance but failed to spot “Elk.” On my second pass, though, I located the memorabilia. Two young women were piling it on a rickety table in the parking lot of the Egg Roll House Chinese Restaurant.


At that hour sales were not brisk, especially for the T-shirt that said I SUPPORT THE ATF. Another, showing David Koresh’s face in the cross-hairs of a scope sight, was captioned A SIGHT WE’VE BEEN WAITING TO SEE. The most expensive T-shirt, at sixteen bucks, showed the firecloud itself. The wittiest merely said, HI VERN, WEIRD $#@!, COME OUT. (The Vern refers to David Koresh’s real name, which was Vernon Howell.) In our time, the T-shirt has replaced the broadsheet as the favored means of commenting on natural disasters, executions and other notable events.

Not much in life is unprecedented; certainly the destruction of the Davidians was not. The only thing that distinguishes it from hundreds of other actions throughout history in which religious sects or communities have been destroyed is that this destruction occurred in the era of the Great Eye — television — so that we as a nation, and the world as a global village, were able to watch the awful event unfold. For the past 150 years at least, homely little cults have flourished in America, dotting the moral and geographic landscape. Not infrequently these small cults, whether religious or secular, have found themselves in conflict with local, state or national authority. The Mormons provide the great example, but many less tenacious groups existed or still exist; and many have been burned out, shot up and hounded out. Religious intolerance, greed for acreage and sexual envy have all played their part in these conflicts.

However exalted their ideals, in practice these communities have rarely been free of the usual human spitefulness. When not fighting their neighbors or the militia, they frequently slide into schismatic violence — sometimes tragic, sometimes farcical. The Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 is an example of the tragic: more than 100 westbound immigrants from Arkansas were killed by Mormon troops, perhaps to avenge the death of Parley Parker Pratt, the Mormon Isaiah, who had recently been slain in Arkansas. As for the farcical, it would be hard to beat the duel of the vanities that occurred in 1987 between David Koresh, then plain Vernon Howell, and the older Davidian leader Ben Roden, who, as a test of Koresh’s godhead, offered to provide a corpse for Koresh to resurrect. Suspecting foul play, Koresh came prepared, as was his right under Texas law, which permits (still does!) anyone who feels threatened to seek out his adversary and to do so armed if the threat seems heavy enough. A shoot-out occurred. Nobody was seriously hurt, but Koresh was charged with attempted murder. Sheriff Jack Harwell, the patriarchal lawman of McLennan County, arrested Koresh without getting out of his chair. The sheriff simply picked up the phone, called the Messiah and asked him to come along in. The Messiah came along in. It is not unlikely that Sheriff Harwell might have been helpful in February too. The Davidians might psych themselves up for jihad with the agents of Belial, as exemplified by the ATF; but shooting a local sheriff is something else again.

It’s easy to second-guess earnest lawmen doing their best in a confusing situation, but still it’s hard for this citizen to discern in the actions of his government in Waco even a few glimmers of rationality. From one county sheriff with a telephone to 100 agents with the backup of helicopters is quite some escalation, What were the Davidians doing to provoke that? Probably they were converting semiautomatic assault rifles to full auto. That is certainly a crime; even possessing the capability to convert them is a crime. But down here in the Fifty-Caliber Belt this particular crime is usually treated about as seriously as spitting on the sidewalk. The many people who fancy assault rifles are rarely content to be caught with half a hog; one of the selling points of these rifles is that they can be converted to full auto in a few minutes. War games are second only to sex games in this country; but war games aren’t war, and most of the converted weaponry, if it gets fired at all, is fired at shooting ranges, or at heaps of old mattresses, or into the sides of hills.

The Davidians, prior to February 28, hadn’t fired any automatic rifles, full or semi, at anyone. So why the 100 agents and the media, which we now know were alerted by the ATF? Could it be that the ATF was seeking some good publicity such as might result from a spectacular gun bust? If they could arrest some kooks with a bunch of bad rifles and a million bullets, people might stop thinking of them as hound-dog handlers with ax handles who go around busting up stills. Unfortunately, the Davidians refused to cooperate.

In the aftermath of irredeemable tragedy, the mind searches backward toward the moment when wisdom might have stayed or deflected the course of the terrible event itself. February 28 offered such a moment, but wisdom didn’t show; and neither was it in evidence on April 19, when the FBI showed to what extent it is the hammer of Hoover still. Attorney General Janet Reno, admirable as she may have been for bluntly accepting responsibility for the calamity, said nothing that smacked of wisdom in her explanation. Suggestions of recent child abuse were hardly out of her mouth before the FBI contradicted her. Perhaps the snipers were tired, was her other justification for going in; but the whole compound was surrounded by wire, and the only escape vehicle was David Koresh’s black Camaro. Who was going anywhere?

Reno essentially threw herself on the mercy of the public — O.K., I did it, stone me — and was rewarded with a wave of sentiment, obscuring the feel that she endorsed a plan born of nothing but impatience, pique and a fear of stalemate. Among the plan’s several flaws was its contempt for the will of the Branch Davidians, a fatal underestimation. Instead of stoning the attorney general, the public stoned the president, who ducked and then had to un-duck and allow himself to be chunked, slightly. The president dismissed the Branch Davidians as “religious fanatics” who, moreover, “burned themselves up.” He made it sound almost as if this level of belief were un-American, as if constancy to one’s faith until death — once a staple of many faiths — were some weird Asian practice that could scarcely be countenanced on these shores.

The uncomfortable fact is that the Branch Davidians did have a faith, and they were practicing it in a country founded on the principle of religious freedom. On the fifty-first day of the siege, tanks pounded the compound for more than six hours, squirting in tear gas, and no one came out. A sheet was hung from a window, and the message scrawled on it was WE WANT OUR PHONES FIXED, not as eloquent as the letter Colonel Travis sent out from the Alamo, but not without its poignancy.

Multinational though they were, the Branch Davidians in their last hours seemed pretty American: Koresh was royally pissed when they towed away his Camaro. When the fires started, some Davidians may have tried to get out and failed: some may have been prevented from leaving, or even been shot. But surely it is also possible that the majority of them were constant to their faith until death. It seems pretty unlikely that more than seventy people, some of them parents with children to defend, were held in the inferno against their will. The most Orwellian aspect of the final day was the FBI’s attempt to convince the Branch Davidians that they weren’t under assault, even as tanks were knocking the compound to splinters and pumping in the gas.

None of this excuses Koresh, who, as a shepherd of souls, was more than derelict in the care of his flock. Evidently he mainly liked to preach, $#@! and play the guitar, preferences that are hardly unique in the annals of dip$#@! gurus. One would give Koresh no credence at all were it not for odd bits of testimony, A black woman who left the compound unwillingly because she considered it her duty to attend a sick woman spoke on “Nightline” after the tragedy. This woman said that Koresh was a man of nobility, and she said it with a grace and delicacy that arrested one’s attention as nothing else did in an evening of shallow chatter.

I did find my way, eventually, to the roadblock on Old Mexia Road, the easternmost edge of suburban Waco. It was a lovely spring day. Bluebonnets graced the roadways and the fields, and cattle egrets, the small, elegant white birds whose arrival on the Texas range some years ago did so much to make cattle ranching visually acceptable to the doctors, the lawyers and the architects who now own most of the ranches, were present in abundance, spaced amid their herds, white on the fresh green grass, as if arranged by Monet.

Along Old Mexia Road, the tragedy seemed to be a closed chapter, and life was going on as it normally would on a sunny Sunday. Two men were putting their fishing equipment in the back of a pickup, no doubt about to head over to the Brazos a few miles away. A woman with her hair in curlers was mowing the lawn. Three boys came zipping along in go-carts. A toddler chased a dog.

At the roadblock itself, a media-weary highway patrolman disposed of me with a jerk of his thumb. A little frustrated, I circled around to the other end of Old Mexia Road. The roadblock there was manned by two officers from the Highway Patrol and one from the ATF. The patrolmen’s vehicle belonged to the Division of Weights and Licenses; no doubt in a day or two they would have to go back to weighing trucks. Curious to see what it would get me, I played my ace, Lonesome Dove. It promptly got my picture taken with the two highway patrolmen.

By the road that leads to what is left of the compound, there was a small tent that looked like a relic from a 1950s Boy Scout encampment There was a sign on it: FORT WOODY. Two road markers on the tent said, “Laredo, 400 miles” and “Amarillo, 450 miles,” plus the comment, “We’ll Be Back.” The road markers were pointing toward El Paso and Texarkana, not toward Laredo and Amarillo. I asked why the tent was named Fort Woody and was told that it was named for a dog that had started hanging around, whose name may or may not have been Woody. As if on cue, the dog appeared.

I drifted back to Highway 84 and inspected the Wings for Christ International Flight Academy, whose fleet consisted of two planes. Then I had lunch at Parks’ Family Buffet, the cleanest, most well-lighted place in that part of the world. Where the buffet began, there was a sign that read: “Don’t Waste Food. Take What You Can Eat and Eat What You Take. No Carry Out From Tables.” Thus admonished, and aware that my appetite is apt to falter when I’m expected to clean my plate, I contented myself with a small dish of turnip greens and some banana pudding. The restaurant was full, the patrons an equal mixture of black and white, most of them dressed as if they had just come from church. There was very little chatter; everyone was intent on eating what they had taken. I hung around for an hour, taking advantage of an unusually liberal policy in regard to iced tea. I didn’t hear a single person mention the Davidians.

In a mood somewhat funèbre, I drove back up the road a little distance and took a walk through the Sleepy Hollow Pet Cemetery, a nicely kept acre of ground beside the highway. It was afternoon by then, and pickups zoomed by on the highway, many of them pulling boats; people were heading for the river or the lakes. The first grave I came to in the Sleepy Hollow Pet Cemetery might, but for a vowel, have been a family member: Kristi Lynn McMurtray, 6-76, 1-9-87. The next gravestone had a cameo of a white poodle set into it: Ami, April 1972, Dec. 11, 1983: Small in Size but Big in Heart, Bert Hernandez Family. I walked on, past the graves of:

Buster, Not Just a Dog, He Was Family

Cougar., My Friend

Loving memory, My Baby Hot Shot

Rosie, At Rest

Misty, Kim’s Friend

Honey Bun

Tasha Su

Peanut

Cricket

Coach Bear Buffy

Phemie Euphemine Fayette, Too Well Beloved to Be Forgotten, Our Little Girl

It is not to trivialize the dead Davidians or the dead agents that I list these names and epitaphs from the little pet cemetery beside Highway 84, though one grieving mother of a daughter lost in the compound spoke of her child in words identical to those carved onto the gravestone of Phemie Euphemine Fayette. The great mode, tragedy, doesn’t know proportion; it will take a child as quickly as it takes a poodle, and it offers no lessons to the lesson-seeker. But the epitaphs that attempt to say what the pets of Bellmead, Texas, meant to the families that loved them, and the epitaphs, likely not dissimilar, that will eventually grace the headstones of the Davidians and the agents celebrate a common blessing and express a common pain. The blessing is attachment, whether to a faith, a community, a friend, a lover, one’s mate, one’s family, one’s pet; and the pain is its loss.

Attachment is, for many, the only root holding them in this life — and dire circumstance, or that fell scorpion Time, is always trying to wither it, or wrench it up. Like it or not, the Davidians were attached: not merely to a man who may have been, as the T-shirt claimed, a weird $#@!, or as the black woman believed, a man of nobility, but also to one another, and to belief. Once the fires started in the compound, a woman came out with her clothes in flames, then turned and tried to rush back to die with her friends. (An agent saved her.)

Well, one can say, these people were all weak, lame-brained, wacko, sick. One and all they needed to be “deprogrammed,” which I suppose means reprogrammed to a lifestyle that normal middle Americans would accept. One of the men who died was Wayne Martin (City College, Columbia, Harvard Law), who handled much of the Davidians’ legal business and was liked and respected around the McLennan County Courthouse. What program did he need to be reprogrammed to, one must wonder.

Probably when all the bodies are finally out, and all the evidence sifted from the ashes, the remains of the compound will just be scraped away. Prairie will return to prairie. Bluebonnets will bloom, and egrets dance. The fallout in Washington will be falling for a while, and in the end it may be the ATF that is deprogrammed or debudgeted out of existence. It requires, I think, no excessive cynicism about the ways of government to doubt that substantive changes of any sort will result from the destruction of the Branch Davidians. What happened off Old Mexia Road will simply be filed under that capacious heading, the Senseless Tragedy.

The category is appropriate. The Branch Davidians had more than seven weeks in which to save their own and their children’s lives. To everyone’s shock, they preferred to be loyal to their attachments, to their preacher and their faith and to one another. The FBI certainly could have spared them, and probably supposed they were sparing them, even as the tanks rolled and the tear gas spurted. Government proceeds, as perhaps it must, on the assumption that people are, within reason, predictable. (The FBI seemed to be banking on the mothers; surely when their children were threatened, the mothers would come out.) Government may proceed on that assumption, but faith needn’t; and one doesn’t have to be much of a student of the centuries of faith to realize how frequently and how absolutely this particular governmental assumption has been refuted.

The Davidians were not living within reason; they were living within belief. It may have been wacky, screwball, theologically dopey belief, based on the rantings of a false prophet, but it was still belief. In this irreligious age, it has become difficult for us to credit the fact that such a capacity for belief is still a part of the human makeup. Seventy-two corpses in a lab in Fort Worth, Texas, remind us that it is.

[Anti Federalist]

anti-gay, anti-trans panic currently buffeting the nation

The anti gay anti trans "panic" is coming from you people, a natural reaction from forcing us to call the fat man in a dress a women and having preschoolers rubbing trans queeer's dicks in school libraries.

[acptulsa]

How the New Republic got what the Right got from Waco wrong.

[sparebulb]

What the New Republic said at the time:

Larry McMurtry
/
June 7, 1993
A Return to Waco
No more cane on the Brazos

Is this the same Larry McMurtry who wrote the script for two of the best Texas movies ever: Hud, and The Last Picture Show?

Two out of three ain't bad considering that he also wrote Brokeback Mountain.

Edit: I guess it is him because he mentioned his claim to fame in Lonesome Dove.

[CCTelander]

Liberty, property rights, limited government, religious freedom, freedom of assembly...just a couple of things that the Davidians were seeking.

All of those concepts are manifestations of white supremacy, comrade.

Thank you comrade for correcting my error. Everything makes sense now.

Christ! I woke up on Bizzaro World.

[Brian4Liberty]

Militia groups have long used Waco as a rallying cry. But it was never the example of whiteness under siege that they invoke.

Straight from The Ministry of Truth. Waco was always about racism and white supremacy, didn’t you know?

[Origanalist]

I don't think race had much to do with it. Waco was really a struggle for trans rights, than anything else.

This is the only logical take on it.

[Origanalist]

Thank you comrade for correcting my error. Everything makes sense now.

Christ! I woke up on Bizzaro World.

Yes, and what's worse is that it keeps mutating and getting more bizarre.

[acptulsa]

I think it's an experiment. We convinced conservatives to love peace, and the Left decided to start hating it. The mind gamers saw that, and now I guess they want to see if making the Left hate Waco will cause conservatives to love it.

[Mach]

They scream Progressive.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Republic

Win McCormack is an American publisher and editor from Oregon. He is editor-in-chief of Tin House magazine and Tin House Books, the former publisher of Oregon Magazine, founder and treasurer of MediAmerica, Inc., and a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine

Win McCormack ownership, 2016–present

In February 2016, Win McCormack bought the magazine from Hughes[7] and named Eric Bates, the former executive editor of Rolling Stone, as editor. In September 2017, Bates was demoted from his leadership role to a masthead title of "editor at large." J.J. Gould then served as editor for just over a year[35] until December 2018. In November 2017, Hamilton Fish V, the publisher since McCormack's acquisition of the magazine, resigned amid allegations of workplace misconduct.[36] Kerrie Gillis was named publisher in February 2019 [37] and Chris Lehmann, formerly the editor in chief of The Baffler,[38] was named editor April 9, 2019.[39] Within months his management style faced public criticism[40][41] for his hiring process of an Inequality Editor, posted on June 28. Within weeks, another scandal erupted, with Lehmann facing even harsher criticism from the public and the media for his decision to publish a controversial op-ed by Dale Peck called "My Mayor Pete Problem." The op-ed was retracted, with Lehmann commenting in a separate statement: "The New Republic recognizes that this post crossed a line, and while it was largely intended as satire, it was inappropriate and invasive."[42] In March 2021, it was announced that Lehmann would be departing his role as editor and would be replaced by Michael Tomasky.[43]

The New Republic Editor

Michael John Tomasky (born October 13, 1960[2]) is an American columnist, progressive commentator, and author. He is the editor of The New Republic[3] and editor in chief of Democracy. He has been a special correspondent for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, a contributing editor for The American Prospect, and a contributor to The New York Review of Books.

From 1995 to 2002, Tomasky was a columnist at New York magazine, where he wrote the "City Politic" column. He was later executive editor of liberal magazine The American Prospect, and remains a contributing editor.[9] On October 23, 2007, Guardian America was launched with Tomasky as its editor.[10] On March 3, 2009, he replaced Kenneth Baer as editor of U.S. political journal Democracy, at which time his title at The Guardian changed to editor-at-large.[11] In May 2011 Tomasky left The Guardian to join Newsweek / The Daily Beast as a special correspondent.[12] He is the editor of The New Republic.

[A Son of Liberty]

Who the $#@! ever, EVER held Waco up as an example of “whiteness under siege,” whatever the hell that is? These people are insane.

100%

Hate to say it, but I couldn't get past the subtitle of "...whiteness under siege..." and as soon as I saw that, I checked out and couldn't be bothered with the rest of the article. NO ONE of any prominence of whom I'm aware has ever made an argument that Waco was about an attack on "whiteness".

These motherfu*kers are ghouls... they make me think of the creepy bots in the first Matrix movie that just seek ANY opening they can find to get in and destroy everything. They're DAMNABLE viruses, and it's getting time for them to be destroyed.