Eighty people died in Waco after an FBI standoff gone wrong. Here’s how it became a rallying cry for the far-right

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Thirty years ago, a lengthy standoff between FBI agents and members of a religious sect ended in fire. The Waco siege, a deadly 51-day confrontation in central Texas between law enforcement and Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic religious movement then led by David Koresh, remains one of the defining US events of the late 20th century.

The siege is the subject of a recent Netflix documentary (Waco: American Apocalypse), released on 22 March. It also made headlines when Donald Trump planned a rally there in March—a move decried by his niece Mary Trump as “a ploy to remind his cult of the infamous Waco siege of 1993, where an anti-government cult battled the FBI.”