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militia movement
Trump Rally in Waco Called Not a Dog Whistle, But a 'Blaring Air Horn' to Far-Right
"There's not really another place in the U.S. that you could pick that would tap into these deep veins of anti-government hatred—Christian nationalist skepticism of the government," said one extremism expert.
Mar 24, 2023
While former U.S. President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign insists it is purely coincidental that his planned Saturday rally in Waco, Texas falls during the 30th anniversary of a deadly 51-day siege targeting a religious cult, some Texans and extremism experts aren't buying it.
Since law enforcement—including Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents—carried out the botched operation at a Branch Davidian compound near Waco from February 28 to April 19 in 1993, the event has been a source of anti-government sentiment for the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and U.S. militia movement members.
"When Donald Trump flies into Waco on Saturday evening for the first major campaign event of his 2024 reelection quest, dog ears won't be the only ones twitching," the Houston Chronicle editorial board argued Thursday. "Trump doesn't do subtle; dog-whistle messages are not his style. The more apt metaphor is the blaring air horn of a Mack 18-wheeler barreling down I-10."
"'Waco' has become an Alamo of sorts, a shrine for the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and other anti-government extremists and conspiracists."
"The GOP-friendly city of Waco—Trump won McLennan County by more than 20 percentage points in 2020—has every right, of course, to host a former president, the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but 'Waco,' the symbol... means something else entirely," the board stressed. "'Waco' has become an Alamo of sorts, a shrine for the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and other anti-government extremists and conspiracists."
The twice-impeached former president faces potential legal trouble in multiple states and at the federal level for everything from a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to trying to overturn his 2020 electoral loss and inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump, a documented serial liar, took to his Truth Social platform last weekend to say that he would be arrested Tuesday—as part of a New York grand jury investigation into the hush money—and call for protests. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Thursday that Trump "created a false expectation that he would be arrested."
In a Truth Social post on Friday, Trump
warned of "death and destruction" if he is indicted—which led the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to charge that "he's not being subtle, he's threatening prosecutors with violence."
The Chronicle board tied Trump's legal problems to his Waco trip:
Thirty years later, the anti-government paramilitary groups feeding off lies about the "deep state" and a stolen election periodically visit the modest, little chapel on the site of the sprawling, ramshackle building that burned to the ground. Although the Branch Davidians had nothing to do with anti-government conspiracists, chapel construction was funded by loud-mouthed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Militia members and conspiracists know exactly what Trump's Waco visit symbolizes. They have heard him castigate the FBI and the "deep state," particularly after agents searched for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. How they'll respond to his remarks, particularly if he shows up as the first former president in American history to face criminal charges, has law enforcement in Waco and beyond taking every precaution. What he says will likely set the tone for the presidential campaign to come. Every American should be concerned.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote Friday in an email to The New York Times that Waco was chosen "because it is centrally located and close to all four of Texas' biggest metropolitan areas—Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio—while providing the necessary infrastructure to hold a rally of this magnitude."
The Chronicle board noted other local options, writing that "the Waco Regional Airport and an expected crowd of 10,000 or so fit the bill. Of course, Temple or Belton or Killeen (home to Fort Hood) would have fit the bill, as well—without the weight of symbolism."
The Texas newspaper was far from alone in sounding the alarm about Trump's upcoming trip to Waco.
"Waco is hugely symbolic on the far right," Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told USA TODAY. "There's not really another place in the U.S. that you could pick that would tap into these deep veins of anti-government hatred—Christian nationalist skepticism of the government—and I find it hard to believe that Trump doesn't know that Waco represents all of these things."
"Waco has a sense of grievance among people that I know he's got to be trying to tap into," Beirich added. "He's being unjustly accused, like the Branch Davidians were unjustly accused—and the deep state is out to get them all."
The newspaper pointed out that "though Trump has held more than 100 campaign rallies and similar events, and mounted a near-daily schedule of them during his campaigns, this week's appears to be the first one ever held in Waco."
Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center, also rejected the Trump campaign's suggestion that the trip isn't connected to the 1993 standoff and what means to many members of the far-right.
"Give me a break! There's no reason to go to Waco, Texas, other than one thing," Squire told USA TODAY. "I can't even fathom what that's about other than just a complete dog whistle—actually forget dog whistle, that is just a train whistle to the folks who still remember that event and are still mad about it."
Even some right-wing figures are openly making the connection, as TIMEreported: "Posting on the messaging app Telegram, far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called the rally in Waco 'very symbolic!' A few MAGA influencers on social media noted the choice of location, with one calling it 'a meaningful shot across the brow of the deep state.'"
Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University associate professor of history and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, wrote in a Friday opinion piece for CNN that Trump's trip is "a provocation of historic significance."
"When Trump became president in 2016, rather than becoming synonymous with the federal government as previous chief executives had done, he styled himself as both its victim and its adversary, promoting conspiracies about the deep state and encouraging supporters to keep him in power by any means necessary," Hemmer highlighted. "In choosing Waco as the kickoff site for his campaign rallies, he has signaled that his courtship of extremist groups will continue, and that he sees his role as a pivotal figure in the far-right mythos as central to his efforts to retake the presidency."
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How Fears of Abolition Shaped the Second Amendment
Little did Madison, Jefferson, or Henry realize that one day in the future, weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as "persons" by a dysfunctional Supreme Court, would use his slave-patrol militia amendment to protect their “right” to manufacture and sell guns to individuals who would use them to murder schoolchildren
Jun 12, 2019
"Give me liberty or give me death." --Patrick Henry
Article 1, Section 8, of the proposed Constitution had southern slave owners concerned about the future of their economy.
Slavery can exist only in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
If the antislavery folks in the North could figure out a way to disband those southern militias--or even just to move the militias out of the states--the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery--and the southern economic and social systems--altogether.
These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned more than 300 slaves), and the southern Christian evangelical Patrick Henry (the largest slaveholder in the state of Virginia).
Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8, of the newly proposed Constitution--which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia--could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.
This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape the American South and join his forces. "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto the pocket flaps of the escapees' jackets. During the war, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army.
Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.
At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Patrick Henry laid it out: "Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8, of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power 'to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States.' . . .
"By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither--this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory."
George Mason expressed a similar fear: "The [slave patrol] militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution]."
Henry then bluntly laid it out: "If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress. . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."
And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry?
"In this state," he said, "there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free."
Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given to the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. He knew the majority in the North opposed slavery, and he worried that they'd use the Constitution to free the South's slaves (a process then called "manumission").
The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing): "[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission," said Henry. "And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?
"This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper [proposed Constitution] speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it."
He added, "This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress."
James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid. "I was struck with surprise," Madison said, "when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves. . . . There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not."
But the southern fears wouldn't go away.
Patrick Henry even argued that southerners' "property" (slaves) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be a disaster for them: "In this situation," Henry said to Madison, "I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone."
So Madison, who had (at Jefferson's insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft to one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias.
His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
But Henry, Mason, and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state" and redrafted the Second Amendment into today's form:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Little did Madison, Jefferson, or Henry realize that one day in the future, weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as "persons" by a dysfunctional Supreme Court, would use his slave-patrol militia amendment to protect their "right" to manufacture and sell guns to individuals who would use them to murder schoolchildren.
This excerpt originally appeared in the new bookThe Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment by Thom Hartmann.
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