Thursday, April 23, 2020


How To Virtue-Signal Your City Into A Slum

© Brian Cates 2020

If you followed the American news media last summer, you've noticed an increasing number of news stories coming from America's largest cities that all exhibit a common theme: rampant dysfunction in providing for public safety and health.

In Baltimore, the eyes of the nation turned there when President Trump singled out a member of Congress, Rep. Elijah Cummings, for having the most crime and 'rat-infested' district in America. Subsequent investigation turned up the facts that Cummings district does indeed have a notorious rat problem, as well as huge piles of trash and high crime rates.

In Philadelphia, the eyes of the nation turned there when a violent criminal engaged in a hours-long armed standoff with police, in which he sent six officers to the hospital. Of course it turned out this was a career criminal who shouldn't have been out in the first place. The mayor then used the media attention garnered by this to...plead for more gun control. Which struck a lot of people watching as being exceedingly strange. If your criminal control isn’t working, it’s doubtful pursuing more gun control is going to be effective.

In Chicago, another bloody weekend unfolded in a long string of bloody weekends. It's not exaggerating to call this city a literal war zone. Officer Anthony Gugliemi, who handles public relations for the Chicago Police Department, put out a series of posts on his Twitter account that revealed just what a farce law enforcement is currently dealing with in that city.

On the weekend of May 31st – June 3, 52 people were shot in Chicago. 10 of those people died. Meanwhile the Chicago PD apprehended 19 criminals on gun charges and...by Monday afternoon of June 3rd, 11 of these people were already back on the street. Of that 11, 7 were convicted felons and 6 had previous gun-related convictions on their record. Calling this situation a 'revolving door' doesn't quite do it justice.

In Portland, Oregon a journalist and several other people were assaulted on camera by an organized and violent gang of masked thugs that are being allowed to roam around free on the city's streets by the mayor and the chief of police.

And in San Francisco an incident was captured on a security camera when Ms. Paneez Kosarianfard was violently assaulted by a homeless man.

Whereas you and I would look at this poor fellow grabbing a woman at random on the street while clearly in the grip of schizophrenic episode as a clear public safety issue that needs addressing, the civil system went to work and promptly put him right back out on the street, much to the alarm of his victim.

It was widely assumed – even by the victim in her media interviews – that the judge must have seen the video of the incident in question before making her ruling. It now turns out this was not the case. How dysfunctional is a court system where VIDEO of the incident exists, but it somehow does not make it into the courtroom?

Everybody has compassion for the homeless, many of whom are in that condition because of mental health problems. I’m quite certain Ms. Kosarianfard is also someone who has compassion for the homeless. But what Ms. Kosarianfard is primarily concerned about right now is being able to walk about her own neighborhood without being assaulted by a mentally ill person who really should be off the streets.

The problems in San Francisco with the explosion of the homeless population there, along with other public safety issues has started to garner national attention. Public health officials are now throwing around fun words like 'bubonic plague' as they try to raise the visibility of this growing crisis.

What all of these news stories demonstrate is a breakdown of civil order. Civil services that citizens pay for are supposed to provide order that keep the city safe, clean and well managed. S0 why are so many large urban cities becoming increasingly dangerous, unhealthy, and decayed?

There is one common trait with Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Portland and San Francisco: they are all run by Democrat political machines that have been in power for decades.

Philadelphia's last Republican mayor was in the 1950's. Chicago's was in the 1930's. Baltimore's last Republican mayor left office in 1967. Portland's was in 1980. And San Francisco's last Republican mayor was in 1964.

It can't be that Democrats in power in a city ipso facto causes these problems, though. Plenty of major cities in America have had Democrats in power for decades, and they don't have the same rampant homeless or sanitary health problems plaguing places like San Francisco.

Five of the last six mayors of Dallas, Texas have been Democrats. Houston last had a Republican mayor in 1982. The last Republican mayor in Boston left office in 1930. Only 2 of the last 9 mayors of Phoenix AZ have been Republican, 7 have been Democrats.

It would seem to depend on what **kind** of Democrats are in power in these large urban cities. In red states such as Arizona or Texas, the Democrats who win elections would be considered not really all that much different from Republicans in places like San Francisco or Chicago. Not all Democrats are in the same place on the political spectrum.

The common theme I see at work here is that the political machines in charge of places like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco are all far on the Left of the political spectrum.

The further one goes to the far Left or the far Right on the political spectrum, it's my belief that one gets further and further detached from reality. And for this reason it's hard for the radical extremists of the far Left or the far Right to actually come up with workable solutions to solve urban problems when voters hand them power by electing them into office.

As a perfect example of what I am talking about, the current governor of California – and former long-time mayor of San Francisco - Gavin Newsom and his fellow political class elites are presently far more concerned with **changing words** used to describe convicted felons so no one's feelings get hurt than they are with cleaning up the unsanitary conditions and dangers their citizens are currently facing.

What is it that causes a political elite class to be so out of touch that it is constantly scanning the horizon for new windmills to joust while their cities continue to spiral out of control?

What leads a Governor or a mayor to constantly be babbling in front of cameras about plastic straws, global warming or how 'hurtful' the word 'felon' is when their city is literally having feces piling up on the sidewalks and tent cities expanding to cover new blocks?

After decades of observing the phenomenon of city leaders ducking real problems to spent most of their time blathering about small or imaginary ones, I finally came across a book that perfectly encapsulated what I was seeing.

Economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell wrote a book entitled “Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy”.

In this book, Sowell demonstrates convincingly that a predominantly Progressive political elite class sees the crafting of social policy chiefly as an avenue to engage in self-congratulation rather than as a mere tool to fix problems and make improvements.

As radical as you might find this, public safety or finding workable solutions to problems is not the uppermost issue on the minds of the far Leftist elite who run San Francisco or the state of California. Their focus is on using public policy to shine the batsignal of their own imagined moral superiority. There are real world consequences when voters continue to make the mistake of putting people into important jobs who don't function in the real world with the rest of us. It's been manifest to many observers for years that the priorities of the political class in California are way out of kilter.

As an example, let's look at the “compassionate” decision of the city of San Francisco several years ago to begin allowing homeless people to defecate and urinate in public without any consequences.

There is not a single city, town or municipality in Texas that I am aware of where a person who defecated in public and left their feces on the street would not be arrested. In San Francisco, this kind of behavior has become so common that a social media app now exists that allows the user to see where all the current piles of feces have been allowed to accumulate on the streets.

When you celebrate and even encourage a breakdown in civil society by not punishing anti-social behavior, you will end up getting far more of it. So when the authorities in San Francisco made the decision to no longer punish people for defecating in public, they were tacitly assenting to a breakdown in the civil order. Once you've opened that door in one place, it's awfully hard to ever get that particular door closed again...and to keep other doors from opening elsewhere.

Before you take a fence down, you need to fully understand why it was built and placed there to begin with. San Francisco took the fence down, and is only now coming to grips with the consequences.

Now the homeless and sanitation problems have grown to such immense proportions the usual methods and excuses used to hide or deflect from how bad the problems really are no longer work.

Like taking hundreds of the homeless people in your city and giving them a one-way bus ticket out of town, for instance.

Recently when pressed on the homeless issue Governor Newsom made the absurd claim that much of California’s homeless problem is due to the state of Texas busing it’s homeless to places like San Francisco.

As any real research into this issue will demonstrate, Newsom has it exactly backwards; large urban areas that cannot control their homeless populations started busing them into the heartland states long ago. California has been giving hundreds of homeless persons one-way bus tickets to other states such as Texas for years now. Records show more than 21,000 homeless people were bused from one place to another in the US from 2011 to 2017.

Instead of fixing their own city’s broken social policies and laboring to restore civil order, the far Left politicians opted to use busing the homeless out of town as a safety valve. Nobody has to admit they were wrong or change the bad policies they put into place, and so no one's feelings got hurt. The problem was kept at a manageable level for a few years longer this way.

But the scandal that San Francisco now faces is that the homeless population has grown to such massive proportions that busing a couple hundred of these poor souls out of town to other locales no longer suffices.

I recently did a column for The Epoch Times in which I wrote about the fact that in the United States there hasn’t been a coherent policy in dealing with mentally ill people for some time now. There was a movement to push de-institutionalization of the mentally ill beginning in the 1950’s that has now led to this current situation in which the streets of America’s large urban cities are now crowded with people who really should be in some type of managed care facility.

Things are now in such a sad state in the United States when it comes to dealing with the mentally ill who are homeless where cities are just sending them back and forth on buses with one way tickets to nowhere. This has got to change.

The final factor in why this absurd and intolerable situation continues is that there is a class factor in play here. The political elite class is literally walled off from the rest of the community in these urban cities. All these city officials live in gated communities with armed guards and I assure you all the civil services in their ritzy neighborhoods are working just fine. The trash gets picked up like clockwork, and nobody is leaving piles of their feces or dirty needles on the sidewalk in Pacific Heights or Nob Hill.

The noble elite anointed ones leave these gated communities in the morning, driven in limousines to their important jobs at city hall, where they spend most of their time absorbed in virtue-signaling minutiae before being driven home again to the safety of their manors. And nothing really changes or gets better for the people on the streets.

Until voters wake up, these same people living in their own gated bubbles will keep on endlessly signaling their precious virtue and focusing on the windmills on the horizon as the feces and the dirty needles and the homeless tent cities cover more and more of these communities. Conditions in these cities will continue to deteriorate until new leadership is placed in charge.

That's the brutal truth.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

The Elusive Mr. Comey

Fun fact: After going back over former FBI Director Jame's Comey's testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8th, I've noticed something amazing. 

Recall what was happening.  An FBI Director who'd been fired by President Donald Trump had been called to testify before the Committee after an admission he'd taken memos with him from the FBI and had given at least 1 of those memos to a friend to leak on his behalf to the New York Times.  

In over 2 hours of testimony in which he answered questions from Senators, Comey manages to never tell the Committee:

1) how many memos there actually are.  

That's right. He mentions he had 'nine' conversations with Trump that he summarized in his memos, so the Senators assume there must be nine memos.  You can see this in some of the questions Comey is asked, like this one: 



At no point in any of his testimony does Comey volunteer in his answers just how many of his memos there actually are.  

In fact, it's not until over a month later it's revealed in this report by The Hill that the number of Comey memos is SEVEN, not nine, as several of the Senators were assuming.

Comey manages to never tell the Committee

2) how many of these memos that he took with him contained classified information.  

In that exchange above, Senator Heinrich kinda sorta MAYBE invites Comey to directly tell the Committee how many of these memos were written so as to be classified - that is, how many were written on classified devices and now many contained classified information. 

Comey declines to state exactly how many memos contained classified information. He seems to imply two memos were classified, but does not really provide a number. 

Naturally, the subject of just how many documents with classified information that he took without authorization from his last isn't an issue Comey wants to go into great detail about, so he doesn't.  He just kinda offhandedly says he believes there possible could be two classified memos.  

In fact, according to The Hill's report, four of Comey's seven memos contained information that was classified at the 'Secret' & 'Confidential' levels.   

And as far as I can see, none of the Senators on the Intel Committee ask Comey the obvious follow up question to the admission that some of these memos contained classified information:  

"Wait, you thought it'd be OK to take classified documents with you after you were fired?" 

Comey is a long time federal prosecutor. He's been in government service for awhile. He knows quite well what happens to people to take documents with classified information without authorization. 

But wait! There's another issue where it's just truly amazing that NONE of the Senators that questioned him were able to get a straight answer: 

Comey somehow manages to never tell the Committee: 

3) how many memos did he actually give to Richman.

Ponder that.  

These are the THREE QUESTIONS THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN SETTLED FROM THE START.  If the people questioning Comey had been on the top of their game. 

Which they clearly were not. 

So this post is a window into why I don't really expect much from Congressional hearings.  I've been watching these things for decades.  During all the grandstanding and posing for the cameras that goes on, hardly ANYBODY ever seems to ask the right questions. 

And a shifty, clever guy like Comey will take advantage of that every single time.  

He walked out of that room without having really told them ANYTHING. 







Thursday, July 13, 2017

Why Special Counsel Robert Mueller Can't Avoid Charging  James Comey With Theft of Classified Information

[It's Because Comey's Already Admitted To Committing The Crime Under Oath]

First, let me explain why Special Counsel Robert Mueller is going to charge Comey with theft of classified information, since there's really no reason to do any further investigation on that.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller

Read this revealing exchange during Comey's public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8th. 
Former FBI Director James Comey, admitting to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8th that he took classified documents with him after he was fired

Comey took 7 memos with him when he left the FBI after being fired by President Donald Trump on May 9th. 

Documents that contain classified information by their very nature are not 'personal papers'.  They do not belong to a private individual and cannot be retained by that individual once their employment ends. 

But we didn't need this revelation from The Hill to know that several of the memos Comey took with him from the FBI contained classified information.  As you can see from the above exchange with Senator Martin Heinrich [R-New Mexico], Comey openly discussed the fact that at least TWO of the memos he had in his possession weeks following his firing from the FBI were written so as to be classified and contain classified information.  Comey clearly states that 1 of the 7 memos was written down immediately following a classified briefing at Trump Tower. 

Comey has publicly admitted - under oath, mind you - that he

1) took documents containing classified info with him after being fired as FBI Director
2) gave 4 of these documents - 1 of which likely had classified info in it - to a person with no security clearance, Columbia Law Professor Daniel Richman.

That's not just 1 illegal act, that's TWO separate illegal acts.

Mueller's investigators have had more than 1 & 1/2 months to determine:

1) how many memos Comey took with him from the FBI
2) how many of those memos that Comey illegally took with him contained information that was classified
3) which particular 4 of the 7 memos Comey handed off to Richman, and if 1 or more of those memos contained classified information.

In point of fact Mueller's investigators know exactly which 4 memos Comey gave Richman, since Richman has now given them back.


And if one of those 4 memos contained classified information, there is no way Comey avoids being charged for this.


Former CIA Director General David Petraeus

Petraeus had jotted down classified information in what he considered a 'personal' journal. He then showed the contents to his biographer - and  mistress.  

IMPORTANT: Petraeus' journal was not 'marked' classified.  It didn't need to be.  A document containing classified information is classified by it's very nature, not just because somebody marked it as containing classified information.  
David Petraeus with Paula Broadwell

Petraeus' mistress, Paula Broadwell, as it so happens, had a national security clearance, but could only have viewed such sensitive material in a secure facility, not in a private home.

Note that none of the classified info in Petraeus' journal was EVER leaked to media. He just SHOWED it to an authorized person at an UNauthorized location.  Petraeus attempted to argue the journal was his own personal papers.  Sound familiar?

The court rejected that defense.

Petraeus was fired, charged, tried, convicted & sentenced to 2 yrs probation and a 100k fine.

Now consider this: at the time Petraeus committed this crime he was STILL the CIA Director. He still had legal access to the classified info.  What got him in trouble was SHOWING that classified info to someone authorized to see it at an unsecure location, a private residence. 

Comey did something FAR worse.

Comey had lost the job as FBI Director. He'd been FIRED. He no longer was supposed to have ANY access to these documents with classified information. His taking them with him upon leaving the FBI adds a whole new offense beyond what Petraeus did. 

Petraeus got a 2 years probation & 100k fine for showing Broadwell classified info he still had legal access to BUT he showed it to her an an illegal location.

Comey can't say that. He no longer had legal access to any of these memos, much less the rumored 4 that were classified. He committed an act of THEFT by taking these documents even before he ever showed them to anyone else. 

Just ADMITTING he took memos that had classified information in them was bad enough.  If Mueller's investigators have discovered 1 of the 4 memos Comey gave Richman had classified info in it, Comey's crime would be far worse than Petraeus' and it would require a more severe sentence. 

Not only did Comey illegally take documents with him from the FBI, he compounds the crime by handing them off to Richman.

People who keep harping on the fact the one memo that Richman anonymously leaked to the New York Times was one of the 3 memos that wasn't classified are missing the point. NONE of these memos had to be leaked for Comey to have committed two illegal acts. 

Now, all this is public record.  Comey's already admitted to all this. He took classified documents with him from the FBI.  Richman has given the 4 memos back to Mueller's investigative team. It wouldn't take long to determine if 1 or more had classified info.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, who never EVER admitted to doing anything illegal at all during the email scandal, Comey has already admitted to theft of classified documents under oath.  

How many more months of investigation would be needed to determine if Comey had illegally taken classified information with him and then given someone with no security clearance access to some of it? 

Mueller's investigators already have all the evidence they need to make such a determination.  

Action should come soon. 

Monday, May 1, 2017

THE SKINHEADS ARE COMING, THE SKINHEADS ARE COMING!
Why The Left's Breathlessly Anticipated Wave Of Racist Domestic Terrorism Has Failed To Materialize Since the Mid-1980's

Brian Cates 
May 1, 2017

Netflix just debuted two shows well worth your time to watch:  The PBS American Experience episodes on Ruby Ridge & Oklahoma City.  I have thought for many years that someone needed to do a documentary detailing how Ruby Ridge, Waco & Oklahoma City were all related.



The Ruby Ridge episode reveals many details about that armed standoff Randy Weaver and his family had with the FBI on that remote mountain in Idaho that resulted in 3 deaths.

I watched the Ruby Ridge episode first, & thought it would have been better to explain Robert Matthews & The Order in detail instead of in passing.  You really don't understand why federal authorities were in such a big hurry to get informants in place with the Aryan Nations without this detail.

However, Robert Matthews & the ultra-violent white supremacist group he founded is discussed in great detail in the Oklahoma City episode.  Due to extensive media coverage, far more people know about Ruby Ridge, Waco & Oklahoma City than remember Matthews & The Order.  But as this American Experience episode on Oklahoma City makes clear, without Matthews & what he did, there is no Ruby Ridge or Waco.  And without Ruby Ridge or Waco, there is no Oklahoma City.


In the early 1980's, Robert Matthews founded a violent white supremacist group called 'The Order' that committed many armed robberies & killed one person, Denver radio personality Alan Berg.  After rolling up most of the members of the group, law enforcement tracked Matthews to a cabin in Washington state.  Surrounded by federal agents, Matthews chose to die rather than surrender. After a fierce hours long gun battle, the cabin he was in burned down with him inside of it.  The Order was totally broken.
If you want to know why some in our government have been warning about a forthcoming tidal wave of right wing racial violence you can trace that right back to Robert Matthews and The Order in the late 1980's. The idea of violent racial-obsessed terrorists on our own soil began with Robert Matthews.

Now, don't get me wrong. Matthews was dangerous.  But all Matthews & his tiny group of about 10 members did was rob a bunch of banks & armored cars & kill exactly one person.

When you stack that up against the crimes committed by the Weather Underground & the Black Panthers & other violent LEFT groups, it's not much. In just an 18 month span, in 1972/1973, radical Leftists in America unleashed a domestic terror campaign that has never been equaled.  Over 2,500 bombings occurred.  And it must be recall that Weather Underground radicals joined the Black Liberation Army in committing the armed robbery of a Brinks truck that killed three people, a *single* incident that immediately moves them past The Order in the number of people actually killed by their crimes by a factor of two.  

But the IDEA was fostered, there are MANY of these militant racist groups out there, and we have no idea what they are planning. Are they still just a bunch of white trash losers meeting in faraway compounds in the woods talking fantasies OR was Matthews a foretaste of a coming trend of racist radicals who have decided to put the talk of revolution and violence into actual action?  It appears top law enforcement officials in D.C. decided to answer that by saying 'Better safe than sorry'.  

From the mid-1980's to the mid-1990's, Bob Matthews & The Order were the reason federal agencies began preparing  to turn back a supposed tidal wave of forthcoming white supremacist domestic terrorism.  The feds became desperate to get informants inside the white nationalist movement before the anticipated violence could get going.
Federal agents made the mistake of viewing Randy Weaver as if he were Bob Matthews 2.0

As the PBS American Experience episode on Ruby Ridge shows in great detail, this is what led to the fiasco up on that mountain in Idaho in 1992.

Randy Weaver & his family never joined the nearby Aryan Nations cult. They did, however, occasionally visit.  After he sawed off some shotguns for an FBI informant, they tried to get Weaver to cozy up to the Aryan Nations & inform for them. Weaver refused. The federal firearms charges were then filed against him. The Weaver family's response was to completely isolate themselves. Randy Weaver refused to come down off the mountain & appear in court.
Long story short, sheer incompetence by the government led to 3 people needlessly dying. 

Now bear with me here.  It's gonna look like I'm going off on a tangent, but I'm not.

After playing up the supposed very real threat of many violent white supremacist groups preparing to attack at any time, the feds, as they are wont to do, overreacted.  To prepare to handle the numerous violent domestic terror groups they expected to show up, the ATF formed a very large, very expensive raiding team.  After staffing, equipping & training this very large raiding team, several years went by & it was noticed there were no real threats emerging.  The expected 'wave' of ultra-violent right wing domestic terrorists refused to make their expected appearance.
"Man after 5 years of training, I'm getting bored, how about you guys?"

Bob Matthews and The Order he founded burned up in 1984.  By 1988 the federal agencies were staffed, equipped and ready for the coming threat they foresaw.  As 1988 turned into 1989, then into 1990, which then turned into 1991 & then 1992 & then finally 1993, it was finally noticed this very expensive, very large ATF raiding team wasn't doing much of anything.

The ATF actually wanted to INCREASE the funding for this raiding team. But they had to justify it. There was beginning to be push back to their funding requests.  Congress was telling the federal agencies like the ATF "Why are we funding this very large team that never does much of anything?"

Somebody at the ATF decided they needed to find a real, legitimate threat big enough to warrant a full scale raid by the entire ATF team.

And the ATF picked David Koresh & the Branch Davidians outside of Waco, TX to be the threat they needed for a showcase raid.
Yeah, this crazy guy and his followers. They'll do!

And that's how Waco happened, folks.  The American Experience episode on Oklahoma City discusses Waco, but leaves all this funding background out.

They show an ATF agent giving a single statement explaining why they raided this compound the way they did, with a full scale armed SWAT-style assault.  

1)  There was a good case to make that the Branch Davidians were illegally converting semi-auto rifles into fully automatic rifles.

2) And some evidence that they were making their own hand grenades, which is also a federal weapons felony.

However, as troubling as those crimes were, what justified a full scale armed assault on a compound holding numerous women & children?

This is the simple excuse that an ATF agent voices in the documentary: Koresh had had these followers of his isolated out there a while.  And Koresh had been preaching about a soon-to-arrive Armageddon which hadn't come yet. So to keep his followers under his control,  he might get impatient & do something violent himself.

That's it, apparently.  
That's the justification.

Koresh & his followers had a lot of guns, he was preaching the end of the world and he MIGHT do something crazy 'soon'.  For that reason a large scale raid was approved for the Waco compound.   Because one day, some day, who knows, Koresh *might* become violent towards the world outside the Mt. Carmel compound.
Yeah, we all saw this movie, right? 

Explaining the REAL reason for the raid might have made the ATF look kind of bad: "Well we have this large raiding team we want more funding for but it doesn't do much of anything so we decided to have a big showcase raid to protect our funding." 

Now let's look at the raid itself. It was botched from the start. Local news was tipped off about it.  A reporter looking for the Branch Davidian compound asking for directions to it actually ended up tipping off a friend of Koresh's.

As mind-boggling as this is going to sound, once the ATF agents in charge realized Koresh had had almost an hour's warning of their raid they decided to proceed anyway.  And they didn't change hardly anything in the original plan.

This plan actually called for - I am not making this up - heavily encumbered ATF agents in 60 pounds of gear carrying ladders up to the building, then CLIMBING UP THE LADDERS & entering the building from the roof through the 2nd floor windows.
After breaking this window, an ATF agent realizes there is a thick black blanket nailed into place over it to slow any entry into the room. 

If you're going to do that even WITH the element of surprise, you had better be fast.  

They weren't fast.

It took these agents forever to place ladders, climb up them, get the windows open, and then start climbing through. And they are UNDER FIRE the entire time they are doing this. The Davidians are already behind defensive positions with guns pointed. 

It's a miracle the ATF only had 4 agents killed following this plan.

Bad leaders following a bad plan they stuck with long after they should have abandoned it got 4 ATF agents and 6 Davidians killed.

Here's some incomplete footage from the raid.  These agents were under fire from multiple directions the entire time they were climbing up these ladders & trying to get in through the windows. 
Altogether there were 76 agents for this showcase raid that turned into an utter fiasco.

In all the Congressional hearings that followed this outrage, it was revealed the ATF could've arrested Koresh without this show of force.  Because Koresh often rode into town on his motorcycle.  By himself. They could have arrested him at any time that way.

In the taped phone calls with FBI negotiators, Koresh himself keeps bringing up the fact he was absolutely amazed the ATF opted for a full scale armed assault on a his compound instead of just approaching him when he was in town. 

But if the feds did that, how do they justify the huge expense of their big raiding team? No, they need a real large, armed threat.  So they engineered one. They'd take the Davidians by surprise, parade them for the cameras, bring out all the guns they had, go 'see?'.  "Look at all the guns this large, violent extremist group had. They were planning something, you know! Good thing we stopped them now!'  And the ATF would've been lauded and applauded and there would've been promotions & larger funding and so on. 
Instead over 85 people ended up dead in what is still one of the biggest government blunders of all time. 

Now, while this was a paranoid religious sect that *was* heavily armed, they were *not* a clear & present danger to the surrounding public.  The ATF deciding to risk an armed confrontation with these people was completely unnecessary.  It was all done for show.  There is no indication that if law enforcement had peacefully come to the compound, talked about illegal weapons, violence would have ensued.

It's been 25 years since this happened. How many times since then has there been a large armed federal raid on an big extremist group in the US involving 70+ agents?  If there were any, I missed them.

At least in all the hearings that followed this utter fiasco, the government seems to have learned some important lessons.  Nothing close to a Waco raid has ever occurred since on American soil.  
After Obama was elected & the Tea Party formed, once again we were endlessly told a huge wave of right wing extremist violence was coming. For months after the Tucson shooting, people who had to know better kept trying to tie the lunatic responsible for that crime to the Tea Party and Obama's political opponents.  This trickle of 1 lunatic here, then another lunatic there a few years later is always supposed to turn into a towering wave of extremism.

Robert Matthews & The Order led directly to the Weaver tragedy at Ruby Ridge.  

Then the Feds building up their raid teams to handle a huge wave of white supremacist terrorism that didn't materialize led to Waco.  

And Waco led directly to Oklahoma City.  
Nice going, you fucking jerk

*One* asshole named Timothy McVeigh decided to be that 1 man wave of right wing terrorism.

I can't tell you how relieved those people were who'd been predicting that a huge wave of right wing domestic terrorism was coming that McVeigh finally showed up and fulfilled all their prophecies.  

Because of McVeigh, the narrative that a huge wave of white supremacist domestic terrorism will soon manifest itself will never die.

And THAT'S how the PBS American Experience episode on Oklahoma City ends: repeating that exact same narrative. Despite the fact he only had the most casual of associations with skinheads & white power fanatics, it's claimed he was 'one of them'.
McVeigh wasn't a Christian either, but that doesn't stop the Left from endlessly painting him as a 'right wing Christian terrorist'.

The Oklahoma City bombing was 23 years ago. There has been no widespread wave of white power/anti-gov't terrorism.  But that hasn't stopped some people from constantly claiming it lurks just out of sight, over the horizon & will arrive soon.
Don't misunderstand.  I'm not downplaying what McVeigh did. I'm saying it was 23 years ago. There is no big threat of a suddenly emerging white power terrorism movement.  The threat is minimal. Is it possible there could ever be another McVeigh? Yes. Is it likely there will be 'many' McVeighs?  No.
Guilty as hell and free as a bird.

But for 30 years since Bob Matthews roasted to death in that cabin in 1984 I've watched the narrative grow about racist domestic terrorism.  The same gov't & political types that sell this narrative always downplay & ignore actual real domestic terrorism from the Left.  The same universities that now lionize former hyper-violent 60's radicals such as the Weather Underground & the Black Panthers sell this narrative. Few people even remember the biggest wave of domestic terrorism in modern times in America was unleashed on this country in the 1960's and 1970's by THE RADICAL LEFT. There were over 3,000 domestic acts of terrorism, mostly bombings perpetrated by radical Leftist revolutionaries. 

I've met skinheads.  They are morons. They don't control anything, they can't even win local elections, much less realistically affect the outcome of national ones. White Power has no power. Political or otherwise. Quit listening to political activists disguised as journalists claiming differently to you. 
Yeah, be sure to keep your eyes on THESE losers...
and ignore these guys trying to suppress speech on a campus near you.

Meanwhile the radicals on the LEFT who do have real, actual power & influence, what are THEY doing?  They use their influence in Washington D.C., in academia & Hollywood to sell this narrative about right wing domestic terrorism.  Usually by skinheads.

The threat from these skinhead types is minimal. Just because they are more visible now does not mean they are more dangerous than they were in the past.

Right now the Left is on a quest to limit free speech through threatening violence. Just ask Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro or Charles Murray.  And like a magician trying to distract you with a waving of the hand, while they do this they wail about 'growing right wing terrorism!'

There have always been right wing extremists and racists and there's always been far left revolutionaries & anarchists.  One side is always seeking more political power by playing up the dangers of the other sides worst extremists.

That American Experience episode on Oklahoma City was doing great right up until the end when it tied McVeigh to the white power movement and falsely claimed he 'came out of' that movement. 

The White Power movement is a joke. It's not a legitimate threat. It produced exactly ONE organized violent threat in 30 yrs: The Order. To give the threat greater weight, people want to claim McVeigh was something he was not. He was a loner.  McVeigh may have had contact with some white power groups, but he never joined one & in the tapes I heard he doesn't sound like a skinhead. He sounds like a anti-government fanatic, not a racist fanatic. 
But the PBS documentary ends by insisting that McVeigh 'came out of' the militant white power movement.  It's far more accurate to say he came out of an anti-government movement.  If McVeigh fits any modern group we see in America today, it's the Sovereign Citizen movement, which is virulently anti-government and has had it's share of ultra-violent radicals in it, despite it's tiny size. 

As the Oklahoma City episode details, how did McVeigh end up getting himself arrested right after the bombing?  He drove a car with no license plate on it. That was not a mistake on his part, he was deliberately doing that.   And when the cop who stopped him for no license plate noticed McVeigh was carrying a concealed handgun? Of course McVeigh had no license for it, & he was arrested.  This is textbook Sovereign Citizen behavior. 
But while there are around 500 white power groups in the US [at least according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, if you trust their #'s and for good reason many do not], Sovereign Citizens are just a tiny handful of lunatics. Like, maybe a couple thousand coast to coast.

So if you want to pretend there is a REAL growing THREAT here in America that our government needs to crack down on, which do you choose?  Both aren't very numerous. Skinheads likely aren't even 50,000 in a country of 320 million. But they way outnumber Sovereign Citizens. So they have that going for them.  So if you are going to endlessly gin up a threat that hovers over the horizon just out of sight, you use skinheads, not Sovereign Citizens.
You only know who this pathetic nobody is because the media made damned sure you did.

You may have noticed skinheads & white power types are seen more in our society today. That's not because there are more of them.  It's because it serves the purposes of the media's anti-Trump narratives to elevate their visibility right now.

Look at David Duke. He never went anywhere. He wasn't kept in a glass case reading "Break If Donald Trump Runs For President".

David Duke has always been David Duke. That is, he's always been a racist asshole. But for many years he was an out of sight racist asshole. Why did the media suddenly start giving him plenty of oxygen again? Because of Trump. 
The very pale blonde reporter standing just behind Duke's shoulder is the intrepid Olivia Nuzzi, wondering just how she got sentenced to Hell. 

Nobody cared about David Duke or what he thought for the last decade and a half or so until the media realized it could tie him to Donald Trump.  All of a sudden we started seeing that grinning prick's face in the news again, something that hadn't happened since the mid-1990's.

The media breathlessly informed us that TRUMP WAS ELEVATING AND LIFTING UP THE WHITE NATIONALISTS TO POWER!

No he wasn't.  It was the MEDIA raising the visibility of a small pathetic subset of Trump supporters to smear the entire Trump base. "Hey look who you Trump supporters have showing up your rallies. You must secretly approve of these white power groups!" 
Trump running for President & subsequently winning the White House led the media to raise the visibility of his WORST supporters. There is a deliberate purpose behind that.  As they raise the visibility of Trump's white power fans, the media ALSO gets to renew it's pimping of it's racist domestic terrorism narrative. It's one of their absolute favorite narratives, so this is two-fer for them.  

So understand what you are seeing as the media does these two things at once.  They are raising the visibility of this tiny subset of Trump fans to smear the entire Trump base as potential domestic terrorists.

No matter what actually happens, the narrative the Left sells never changes.  For 30 years it's been "The white nationalist movement is frozen out, disenfranchised, they can't participate in the system, they'll turn to terrorism!"

Now? Watch this trick: "Trump legitimized these white nationalists but he'll disappoint them & they'll turn to domestic terrorism!"

Of course, Trump didn't 'legitimize' these racist pricks, but that's what the media will tell you.  But note it doesn't matter what actually happens, a guy these racists like wins such as 'America First!' Donald Trump, or Obama is President, violence is coming either way, supposedly.

That's your first clue the narrative is based on politically motivated wishful thinking. It's the worst kind of wishcasting there is and it's time for it die in a fire. 

Now, you can't stop the media from doing this. This is who they are. It will never change.  What you can do is understand how they are trying to manipulate you and fight back.