KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Paranoid, Yes. But Are We Paranoid Enough? Waco Netflix Series Revives an Old Horror:

Waco proposes (as one ATF agent reported at the time) that the first shots were fired by ATF agents killing the Branch Davidians’ dogs — and suggests that the rest of the agents on the scene, who had not been expecting to hear those gunshots, opened fire in panic and kept firing until they ran down their ammunition. But the real issue is not who fired first; the real issue, as Waco emphasizes, is that the federal government under the Clinton administration staged a military operation instead of a law-enforcement operation, that it did so for purely political reasons, and that in doing so it created a situation that was far more combustible than the one it was, in theory, attempting to police.

The Clinton administration was succeeded by the George W. Bush administration, which constructed a theory of unlimited presidential power in a “war on terror” in which the battleground is literally everywhere. The Bush administration was succeeded by the Barack Obama administration, which claimed for itself the power to assassinate American citizens as part of that same unceasing war. Barack Obama was succeeded by Donald Trump, who declared himself to be in possession of authority that is “total.” The pissant mayor of New York City has threatened to permanently shut down churches and synagogues that violate the city’s coronavirus social-distancing mandates. Many Republicans agree with my National Review colleague and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy that “there was no good-faith basis for an investigation of General Flynn,” that the case against him was part of a political operation masquerading as a law-enforcement operation. Many progressives take it as an article of faith that local police routinely murder young black men with no consequence, and Joe Biden recently suggested that the Trump administration intends to execute what amounts to a coup d’état by canceling the election.

There is a strain of unreasoning paranoia in American public life, and it is a serious problem — but it did not come from nowhere.

It came, at least in part, from Waco.

Read the whole thing.

Flashback: Jesse Walker of Reason on The United States of Paranoia.