Read the Excerpt: End of Days by Chris Jennings
Prologue: The End
APOCALYPSE HOVERS on the horizon like a never- setting star, irradiating the present with its lurid glow. Some people can hardly look away. For a time, it lit Victoria and Randall Weaver’s entire world.
The Weavers had been bracing for the End since at least 1983, when they left Iowa and brought their three young children to a high, forested ridge in North Idaho, overlooking Ruby Creek, the Kootenai River valley, and the rest of God’s green, fallen creation.
Now, on a pale, late- August morning in 1992, the great cosmic struggle had finally arrived at the base of their mountain. They knew this day would come and had prepared in every way they could imagine. They had prayed and armed themselves. They had run tactical drills and canned gallons of berries, green beans, and sauerkraut. The root cellar was stocked with cornmeal, potatoes, and peanut powder.
How could they have known that Armageddon would begin with the killing of their yellow Labrador?
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Summer closes hard in the Idaho panhandle, but that morning was warm and dry, the air astringent with pine. All three of the Weaver’s dogs were restless, whimpering and pacing in the rocky yard that lay between the cabin, Vicki’s menstrual shed, and the high granite promontory from which the family surveyed the road that switchbacked up from the meadow below. Maybe the dogs had scented a deer. Fresh game would be welcome; the family was down to their last couple jars of preserved venison.
The Weavers owned twenty steep acres near the small logging community of Naples, just south of Bonner’s Ferry, not far from the Canadian border. Their cabin was a neat plywood rectangle with a porch at each end and a corrugated steel roof. Randy and Vicki, both then in their mid- thirties, had built it themselves in the winter of 1984, while eight- year- old Sara babysat little Rachel and Samuel in a rented trailer down the hill. Even though it was built on the cheap by a pair of amateurs, the house was well- framed and snug against the harsh northern winters. A woodstove brought from Iowa kept the upstairs sleeping loft warm. There was a trickling year- round spring a quarter mile downhill, but no plumbing. Their only power came from a generator. On that August morning, two kitchen gardens were in full, late- summer swing.
The place was built according to the bare- bones logic of life in the wilderness with young kids and little money—as well as the conviction that the End was coming soon. Randy explained to neighbors that the cabin would not need to last more than a few years. Excluding a bright patch of zinnias blooming by the front door, some Bible verses posted behind plexiglass on the porch, and a laminated sign with the words “New World Order” slashed out within a red circle, only the location of the cabin suggested a more romantic, less practical cast of mind.
Instead of building downhill beneath the spring, where the land leveled off and a truckload of lumber or groceries might be driven up to the front door, the cabin was perched on a little knoll, at the very crest of the ridge, amid an outcropping of large boulders.7 This dramatic layout had come to Vicki Weaver in a vision when the family was still living in Iowa, before they had even glimpsed Idaho or the Selkirk range of the Rocky Mountains. She told Midwestern friends that God had revealed an image of her and Randy living out West on a mountaintop, surrounded by children with biblical names, safe with their guns and supplies, while the world below sank into tribulation. Before they even started framing the house, Randy pointed up to his land and told a neighbor, “Armageddon is going to end on that hill.” Vicki reckoned they had about three years.
The Weaver matriarch had long felt drawn to the rule-bound, cast-iron faith of the Old Testament. She kept pork out of her kitchen, secluded herself each month while “unclean,” and, for a time, scrubbed their home of graven images. In letters to family and friends, she drifted into the antique syntax and whithersoevers of the King James Version.
She and Randy had both grown up in the flatlands of central Iowa, among gridded county roads, church potlucks, and slow rivers. Like previous generations of American dissenters, they went West looking for empty space and proximity to the divine. Vicki’s visions and a road trip through the Mountain West led them to a place that matched the drama and severity of their faith. In North Idaho, the family became a denomination unto themselves, alone in the wilderness with their awesome God, like a tiny splinter tribe of Israel.
For some, the voice of God rings most clearly in high places. The Weavers’ scrabbly ridgetop was the type of landscape where you could picture Moses receiving the law or Abraham guiding Isaac up an escarpment with kindling and a sharp blade. When she first saw it, Vicki immediately knew that this high, craggy place was where Yahweh, as the family addressed their creator, intended them to ride out the calamitous End of Days.
Reporters and federal agents would later call their home a fortress, a compound, a fortress-like compound, or a log cabin. It was none of those things. Perched up on fir pilings, with views all the way to Canada and Montana, the homestead resembled nothing so much as an oversized fire lookout.
The Weavers were certainly on the watch. They monitored their drive-way for feds, the county sheriff, a growing list of double- crossing neighbors, and other agents of what Vicki called the “One World Beastly Government.” They saw conspiracies everywhere, some petty and local, others world- historical. The groan of a truck downshifting to climb the final, steep stretch up to the cabin invariably sent Randy and the kids running to the immense granite boulder overlooking the road with guns in hand.
Since the late 1970s, Randy and Vicki, like many Christian fundamentalists, had also been keeping watch over world events, scanning headlines for proof that a very old story about the end of the world was finally coming true. The evidence for this prophecy, a still-lambent artifact of the late first century, seemed to be piling up. Demonic control of the government, the rise of the Illuminati, the Masons, the Trilateral Commission, the Zionist- occupied government (ZOG): the agents of evil seemed to be gathering in plain sight, readying for the global order that the Bible rather plainly says will command the nations at the end of time.
A lot of people believe these things. The Weavers took them more seriously than most. At the base of their long, rutted driveway, a sign heralded the coming judgment. In vine-like letters, painted neatly on two strips of plywood, it paraphrased the prophet Isaiah, using a Hebrew name for Jesus: “Every Knee Shall Bow To Yahshua Messiah.”
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As the dogs paced fretfully on that late- August morning, the Weavers breakfasted on eggs and potatoes.13 Vicki carried ten-month-old Elisheba, her fourth child, periodically nursing the baby. Based on her reading of scripture, their Sabbath began Friday at sundown. Since the twenty- first was a Friday, the family planned to spend the following day relaxing. Their routine was familiar and hemmed- in, like a family on lockdown. For almost eighteen months, none of them had left the property or even strayed very far from the cabin. Yet it had, on the whole, been a fairly happy time. At a glance, one might not have guessed the reason for this homebound exile: Randy Weaver was a federal fugitive.
The way his family saw it, Randy had been set up—tricked by an agent of ZOG into selling two illegally modified shotguns. As far back as the early ’80s, Randy and Vicki had said that something like this would happen. In the final days, Randy told a reporter in 1983, “God will remove his restraining hand from Satan.” The authorities will then stir up disorder and root out dissenters, coaxing the population into submission to a One World Government.
Even under this looming threat, the Weavers went about their daily business calmly. After finishing their breakfast, the three older kids—Sara, Samuel, and Rachel—did their morning chores and goofed around with the dogs. They took turns in the outhouse, a two-seater with fur-covered seats.
Vicki, the petite forty-two-year-old matriarch whose faith, zeal, and competence bound the family together, moved around in a long white nightgown, trailing behind baby Elisheba.
Randy, a short, wiry man with dark, deep- set eyes and a handsome, angular face, changed into camo pants and a T- shirt. Taking a break from his morning rounds, he stopped to roll a cigarette from a bright yellow pouch of Top and share it with his friend Kevin Harris. Harris, who was twenty- four, had lived with the family off and on for almost nine years, sometimes staying for months at a time, sometimes just visiting for a few days on his motorcycle. He was a quiet, thoughtful young man who had first run away from home at fourteen. With the Weavers, he had found a sense of family and belonging. When he was up on the ridge, he slept on the porch or in the living room and acted as a helper and sidekick to Randy, working on the house or cutting neat, high-stacked cords of hot-burning tamarack for Vicki’s kitchen stove. He was an unofficial big brother to the Weaver kids, who all adored him. That morning, he was planning to do some work on the log cabin he had started building lower down on the property.
Around 10:45 a.m., Sam’s big yellow Lab, Striker, began barking anxiously over by the pump house. He was a smart, useful animal. The previous winter Sam had rigged up a sled and harness so Striker could haul water across the snow.
After sniffing the air for a while, the dog heard or scented something worth chasing. “Hey Dad, come out here,” Sam shouted. “Striker is really raising Cain.”19 The dog lit off into the woods by the lower garden. As he ran into the trees, his barking grew more intense. Buddy, a small brown border collie who was tied up near his dog- house, started to bark frantically.
As was their routine, Randy, Kevin, and Sam grabbed guns and rushed out to the overlook rock to see who might be coming up the road. Sara, who was sixteen and shared her mother’s intense faith, trailed behind. Ten-year-old Rachel came last, toting a rifle on each shoulder. Under the tutelage of their father, the kids had practiced this drill many times. Peering down from the rock, they saw no sign of visitors. Randy later testified that he hoped Striker was onto a deer or an elk.
Samuel took off after his dog, jogging across the dry meadow and down into the woods. He was fourteen but looked ten, with freckles, a slight overbite, and a freshly shaved head. He weighed less than eighty pounds and his voice had not yet dropped. He carried himself seriously. He was Sam, never Sammy, and liked to impress visitors by reciting scripture or facts memorized out of the encyclopedia. His favorite book was The Last of the Mohicans. He seldom went outside unarmed. Trotting behind Striker, he wore jeans, a flannel shirt, and a sheepskin vest with antler buttons that his mother had made. He carried a light .223- caliber rifle and wore a holstered .357 pistol. Kevin Harris followed close behind him, with a heavy bolt- action hunting rifle and a .22 pistol on his waist. They followed Striker in single file down a narrow, overgrown trail and cut through a field of ferns.
Randy went downhill, too, following the sound of Striker’s barking but taking a different route along an old logging road that curved around the bottom of the property where it would intersect with the trail Sam and Kevin had taken. He carried a shotgun and wore a 9mm pistol on his hip. The girls lingered for a while on the overlook rock before drifting back toward the cabin, where Vicki sat in a chair on the front porch beside stacked boxes of canning jars. She watched Elisheba learning to toddle inside a playpen.
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Among the scrubby pines beside the logging road, like one of Vicki’s nightmarish visions made real, were three men in full camouflage, their faces hidden behind sheer black balaclavas. Each carried a sub-machine gun.
Now, with the dog charging straight for them, the men took off running downhill, keeping parallel to the road but staying in the scattered light of the forest. They rushed from tree to tree, sidestepping, running backwards, spreading out, leapfrogging past each other. None of them wanted to turn their back on the heavily armed family up the hill. As they retreated, Striker’s barking grew louder and more insistent.
The three men, William Degan, Larry Cooper, and Arthur Roderick, were deputy US marshals, all members of the Special Operations Group, or SOG, an elite tactical unit within the US Marshals Service. Along with another three-man team that was elsewhere on the ridge that morning, Degan, Cooper, and Roderick had been hiking around the Weaver tract since before sunrise. They used night vision goggles to check on hidden cameras, swap out batteries, and scout surveillance locations for an upcoming mission: an elaborate and expensive scheme to apprehend Randy Weaver away from his permanently armed children. They were just wrapping up for the day when Striker gave chase.
Following the sound of the dog’s barking, Randy came around a bend in the logging road that served as the bottom of the family’s driveway, carrying his shotgun in one hand. Confronted with the site of their fugitive all alone in the road—the precise situation that the marshals had spent more than year trying to orchestrate—one of the officers stepped out of the trees, hoisted his gun and yelled, “Freeze, Randy!” Weaver spun on his heel, shouted “Fuck you,” and took off uphill. No shots were fired. “I realized immediately,” he would write shortly thereafter, “that we had run smack into a ZOG/New World Order ambush.” As he raced toward the cabin, he shouted for Sam and Kevin to run home. A moment later, Striker came trotting down the overgrown game path with Sam and Kevin following close behind. As they emerged into the grassy spot where the trail intersected the logging road—a spot that would come to be known as the Y—Sam and Kevin saw a tall, thin man step out of the pines and briefly move from side to side in front of the leaping dog.
Seeing the man at a distance, Kevin claimed to have mistaken his sheer balaclava for a beard and taken him for a neighbor. Kevin’s first instinct was to call off Striker so that the man wouldn’t get scared by the dog, who had a tendency to playfully nip at people’s hands.
The man in the mask—Deputy Marshal Arthur Roderick—was worried that the dog would draw the armed men directly to him and the other two retreating marshals. After a bit more dancing back and forth with the dog, he shot Striker. The big yellow dog yelped and fell dead in the road.
Seeing Striker go down, Sam wheeled on Roderick. In his high, boy’s voice, he screamed: “You shot my dog, you sonofabitch!” He fired his rifle into the woods without hitting anyone.
A bit up the ridge, Randy heard Striker’s yowl followed by Sam’s gunshots. He fired his shotgun twice into the air, hoping to both draw attention from Sam and Kevin and summon them home. He tried to reload, but, in his frenzy, jammed the gun. Unholstering his pistol, he fired a long series of shots into the air while jogging uphill toward the cabin. Between shots, he heard Sam shout, “I’m coming, Dad!”
Later, the Weavers would plausibly insist that they came down the hill the way they did—Sam and Kevin taking an upper path, Randy coming along the road below—because it was the best way to bag a deer, with one person to flush the animal and another to block its likely escape route. “Bird- dogging,” Kevin called it.34 But to the marshals, who had watched hours of footage of the Weavers running drills with their weapons, it felt like a tactically sophisticated ambush.
Returning fire, one of the marshals, most likely Larry Cooper, shot Sam. One bullet shattered the wooden stock of his rifle and almost severed his skinny arm. As Sam spun to run uphill towards his family, a second bullet caught him square in the back. The boy fell forward into the loose dirt.
Seeing Sam go down, Kevin Harris hoisted his heavy thirty-aught-six hunting rifle and fired once into the trees, aiming for a spot where he could make out little puffs of smoke and the flash of spent casings. He hit William Degan in the center of the chest and heard him shout, “I’m hit. I’m hit.”
Cooper fired on Kevin, letting off two three- shot bursts. Kevin dropped into the thick brush without being hit. It was only then, he later claimed, that the masked men finally identified themselves as US marshals. Kevin scrambled to his feet and sprinted up the road for the cabin, stopping briefly to grope at Sam’s neck for a pulse. There was none.
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Quiet descended. It had all happened in less than a minute. Cooper hurried over to Bill Degan, who was lying on his side behind a stump, his mouth full of blood. Ripping off layers of tactical gear, Cooper searched for a place to apply pressure. The entry wound on Degan’s chest was small and clean, but his back was a wet mess. Over his radio, Roderick called for help. The other three-man team on the ridge, which included their medic, raced toward the logging road, their shoulders braced for incoming fire.
Up the hill, Randy joined Vicki and the girls on the overlook rock. They listened anxiously to the chaotic, echoing sounds of several different guns—the sharp report of Sam’s light rifle, the low boom of Kevin’s 30.06, the muted clanking bursts of the marshals’ suppressed submachine guns.
Vicki and the girls began desperately shouting for Sam and Kevin to hurry home. Randy set down his jammed shotgun, took Sara’s semi-automatic Ruger from her and emptied the entire magazine into the sky. At last, Kevin came running up the hill, winded and missing his hat. Everyone frantically asked about Sam. “Sam is dead,” was all he could manage. The Weavers exploded into grief and anger, sobbing and firing their guns into the air. “We went berserk,” Randy later said. Vicki wailed “Yahweh! Yahweh!” over and over.
With the stutter of more and more gunshots echoing off the rocky gullies, the five marshals huddling around Degan’s dead body took cover behind nearby boulders, believing that they were under assault from above. They later testified that they were truly being shot at, with the trees and dirt around them popping with incoming fire. In the immediate aftermath of the confrontation, both the Weavers and the marshals used the word ambush to describe what they had experienced.
Up at the cabin, Sara Weaver changed out of her shorts, putting on camo pants and reloading the gun that her father had emptied. Vicki pulled on jeans. It had been about half an hour since the initial shots were fired. She and Randy walked down the road to collect their son’s body, half expecting to be shot themselves. Kevin had told them that he was pretty certain he had hit one of the masked men.
For a few minutes Randy and Vicki sat on the ground beside Sam, kissing their boy and screaming curses into the woods. Eventually, Vicki picked up the shattered rifle and Randy scooped Sam’s light body out of the dirt and carried him up the road. Kevin came down to help Randy up the final stretch. Sara spread a blanket over a mattress in Vicki’s shed and they stripped off Sam’s bloody clothes. They inspected his wounds, cleaned his body and covered him with a sheet. When they were done, they returned to the overlook rock with their guns.
In the afternoon the weather turned gray. A cold, late-summer rain began to fall. The family left the rock, bringing food from the root cellar and gallons of water into the cabin, preparing for the attack that they felt certain was coming soon.
From near the bottom of the ridge, in a flat grassy expanse known locally (for reasons long forgotten) as Homicide Meadow, they could hear the sound of car doors slamming and the idle of big diesels. Drawing the denim curtains that Vicki had sewn herself, they gathered blankets in the middle of the room and hunkered down together, away from the windows. After a while, Vicki took Elisheba in her arms, collected her Bible, and went up to the sleeping loft. In her diary she recorded the death of her son. Sam and Striker were shot, she wrote, by “servants of the New World Order.”
As it became dark, they heard the faint keen of sirens rising up from the highway that traced the valley floor. “Sirens from everywhere,” Randy said, “sirens, sirens, all around below down the valley.”
Introduction: American Apocalypse
“Watching, waiting, and working for the millennium . . . has become, even more than baseball, America’s pastime.”
— Leonard Sweet
IN A LARGE-SCALE telephone survey conducted in 2021, nearly three decades after the bloodshed at Ruby Ridge, 15 percent of Americans told researchers that the media, Wall Street, and the United States government had fallen under the control of a Satan- worshiping cabal of pedophiles. Among self- identified Republicans and white Evangelicals, the portion that believe in this cabal rose to a full quarter. An even larger share anticipated that a violent “storm” would be coming to wash away the corrupt elites. Today, the number of Americans who profess faith in the core QAnon cosmology—more than thirty million as of 2021—is about equal to the number of white evangelical Protestants.
The prevalence of this dark worldview can seem wholly contemporary, a product of the message- board fever swamps in our age of frenzied unreality. Yet a separate query in the same survey from 2021 carbon- dates this intellectual artifact with surprising precision, revealing a much older lineage. A tenth of all Americans, and half of those who believe in the Satanic cabal, claimed that the COVID- 19 vaccines contain tiny microchips that are intended to serve as the “Mark of the Beast”—the identifying brand that will be forced upon humanity just before the end of history according to the Book of Revelation, a phantasmagoric vision recorded in the first century that serves as the final book of the New Testament: “And he causeth all . . .to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the Beast, or the number of his name . . . for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”
For two thousand years, the scenario sketched in Revelation has captured imaginations and focused passions, offering a terrible, thrilling story on which to graft the anxieties and fears of the day. The narrative that modern readers have wrung from Revelation’s bewildering parade of images—a many-horned Beast, a dragon, a blood-drinking harlot—is basically a political story: an account of creeping globalism, scheming elites, violent comeuppance, and a final, cleansing worldwide war.
A specific version of this tale has long circulated through the American body politic. From the Fundamentalist awakening of the early 1900s, to the John Birch Society of the ’60s, to the Christian survivalism of the ’70s and ’80s, to the militia boom of the ‘90s, to the more recent rise of QAnon and its far- reaching successors in the Trump era, endtimes prophecy and the conspiratorial vigilance that it generates have pressed upon American life, and not just at the fringes. In 2010, a Pew survey reported that 41 percent of all Americans expected Christ’s eventual return. Among self- declared Christians, 47 percent claimed that the Second Coming will “probably” or “definitely” happen by the year 2050. When the field was narrowed to white Evangelicals, that proportion climbed to 58 percent.
Regardless of whether or not the United States was ever, as some insist, a “Christian nation,” Protestant Christianity has undoubtedly been the dominant cultural influence on America’s founding and subsequent history. Any substantial change in the vast churn of popular religion will exert pressure on the wider culture and politics of the republic. The rise of apocalyptic faith that took place over the course of the twentieth century is more than some esoteric matter of doctrine. It represents a complete inversion of how a large and highly activated portion of the citizenry thinks about history, the future, and the basic purposes of human endeavor.
If the promise of everlasting life is, in Marx’s famous formulation, “the opium of the people,” then the Apocalypse is their amphetamine, with all the manic clutter that the word implies. Into the relentless, story-generating combine that is the human mind, endtimes prophecy feeds heroes, villains, urgency, plot, and a sense of an ending. It provides a feeling of direction that alleviates the impression—uncomfortable for all, unbearable for some—that things aren’t really going anywhere. The true believer has the passion of a dozen ordinary citizens and regards all opponents, no matter how benign, as agents of evil. Bumper stickers proclaim the bummer tidings: “The Storm is here,” “The only way out is up,” “It’s later than you think.”
While politics and faith inform each other in ways that are impossible to untangle, belief in the endtimes narrative laid down in Revelation practically demands a worldview defined by conspiratorialism and a permanent filibuster against consensus reality. Refracted through the lens of doomsday prophecy, every news item is evidence of a cosmic war raging just behind the scenes—a literal, zero-sum battle between good and evil. It is a belief system that dramatizes and sanctifies the commonplace impression that things are getting worse.
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Apocalyptic faith cannot, on its own, explain the ongoing crackup of American civic life, but it is nevertheless a potent and habitually over-looked ingredient in the blend of forces—material, demographic, cultural, spiritual—that have delivered us to our baffling present. Along with the immense number of American citizens with explicit ideas about the identity of the Antichrist, the role of Israel in the Second Coming, or the significance of the number 666, there are many more with a vague yet deeply internalized apocalyptic sensibility: a belief that conspiracy is the true engine of history; that a cosmic struggle between light and dark is playing out just beneath the surface of things; and that civilization is rushing toward some final cataclysm. For more than a century this very outlook—the same apocalyptic faith that sent the Weavers up their ridge and into a senseless stand-off with the federal government—has coursed through American life like an underground river, occasionally welling to the surface to perplex those of us who cannot hear the thrumming beneath our feet.
The word apocalyptic often serves as a catchall for the overheated, antidemocratic style and conspiratorial fixations of the American right. Ironically, that handy metaphor obscures the extent to which those attitudes and that style have their roots in literal beliefs about the capital-a Apocalypse. While this troubling, unwieldy presence in our national life goes by many names—“the paranoid style,” “the slow civil war,” “the indigenous American berserk”—its roots are not as hazy or inexplicable as we often imagine. Like any other intellectual tradition, it has its own pantheon of thinkers, organizers, and heroes—little-remembered men (almost invariably they are men) like John Nelson Darby, Cyrus Scofield, Hal Lindsey, John Todd, William Potter Gale, Gordon Kahl, and Robert Jay Mathews. It is a lineage that can be traced all the way back to patient zero himself: the first- century Jesus follower known as John, who recorded the vision that became the Book of Revelation on the Aegean island of Patmos.
Before Waco, Oklahoma City, the militias, the Bundys, the Three Percenters, Charlottesville, Q, the Plandemic, the Steal, January 6, or Jeffrey Epstein, there was the place that we call Ruby Ridge. The Weaver tract was actually on Caribou Ridge, but it was within the Ruby Creek drainage and “Ruby Ridge,” the accidental coinage of one reporter, sounded better.6 With its storybook glint of something red and faceted, the name stuck. Like Lexington Green, Valley Forge, Harper’s Ferry, the Alamo, Mountain Meadows, Watts, Kent State, or Waco, the name of the place came to stand for a brief spasm of violence, which in turn came to stand for something about who we are as a people. With Ruby Ridge, as with those other cases, the haze of contingency, accident, and context gradually burned off, leaving only a morality play in its place: the actors performing Innocence and Valor over on one side, those playing Tyranny and Infamy on the other.
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On the afternoon of August 21, 1992, as news of William Degan’s death arrived in Washington, DC, the collective attention and energies of American law enforcement turned, like a vast bureaucratic murmuration, toward the woods of North Idaho. Control of the Weaver case, which had already passed from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to the US Marshals, now moved to the FBI, which called up the Hostage Rescue Team, its most elite and well-armed tactical unit. They mobilized under the false impression that they were heading into an active gun battle with religious zealotsintent on the murder of federal agents.
As the Weavers drew their curtains and prepared for ZOG to kill them off, trucks began rolling into Homicide Meadow. The FBI, with support from the Marshals Service, the Idaho State Police, the local Sheriff, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms dug in, as if for war. Within a few days there were three hundred people in jungle camo hustling around amid olive- drab mess tents and mobile command centers. On both sides of the siege, the militarization of American civilian life that began in the wake of Vietnam—the hardware, the clothes, the tactics, the language—was on full display.
A bit further down the road, a large encampment of protestors materialized, separated from the makeshift federal base by a cordon of yellow tape and a thin rank of policemen clutching rifles. As word of the siege spread, people poured into Naples to take a stand against the New World Order. It was a gathering of the tribes for the anti-government right—fundamentalist preachers, gun rights activists, white separatists, skinheads, old guard neo-Nazis, anti-tax protestors, and conspiracists of every variety. As the siege ground on and the news filtering down from the mountaintop got worse, plenty of less politically activated citizens came, too, all of them baffled and enraged by this outlandish display of federal muscle.
The siege (or “standoff,” depending on the angle of one’s sympathies) became a media circus of the sort that is now commonplace: a slow-motion tragedy broadcast in real time. The year 1992 was early days for cable news. Live on- site transmission was still a novelty. It had been a year and a half since the vicious beating of Rodney King by members of the Los Angeles police had become national news because a curious plumber stepped onto his balcony with a new Sony Handycam. Two years after Ruby Ridge, one hundred million Americans watched live as O. J. Simpson drove his white Bronco slowly down an empty freeway.
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The facts of the Ruby Ridge affair, when maximally compressed, make no sense. An unemployed man, living in the wilderness to separate his family from civilization, commits a petty crime, into which he was possibly entrapped. In response, the full force and fury of the world’s most powerful government—snipers, helicopters, commando teams, rooms full of lawyers, APCs, a shotgun- wielding robot—comes down upon his family, costing three lives, millions of tax dollars, and the good faith of countless citizens. Randy Weaver’s trifling offense and the government’s overwhelming response are perversely asymmetrical. What else can this be but a tyranny rendered brutal and vindictive by unchecked power?
Except that is not how it happened. Right up until the brief span of seconds in which William Degan and Samuel Weaver were both killed, the glacial pace and scale of the effort to get the fugitive Randall Weaver before a judge attests to a government so scrupulously devoted to its own codes that it would spend immense sums and countless man-hours to avoid even the possibility of gunplay, while upholding the basic notion that if you’re indicted for a crime you need to come to court, regardless of how tightly you clutch your rifle. Willfully unenforced laws revert to what they were all along: a bunch of nifty ideas that somebody set to paper. If the statute in question is about enforcement itself (i.e., once charged, you come to court), the reversion from law to mere words is as abrupt as the breaking of a spell—carriages zapped into pumpkins.
The exhaustive official postmortem of Ruby Ridge—a sprawling federal trial, a huge DOJ instigation into what went wrong, weeks of Senate hearings, internal reports by every agency involved, reports about those reports—proceeded from the premise that it does not really matter what the Weavers believed. Official after official intoned some version of “we don’t punish citizens for their beliefs,” before hurrying to the inevitable coda: “no matter how reprehensible.” The government’s analysis rightly focused on its own errors. History, however, is not a criminal trial. What the Weavers read, and believed, and said were at the very heart of what happened at Ruby Ridge, and what continues, at an accelerating clip, to go wrong between American citizens and their government.
Today, the eleven- day siege occupies that ambiguous borderland dividing history from news. For many, Ruby Ridge is a vaguely recalled headline, something from the lost but familiar world of Ross Perot, the LA riots, and A Current Affair. The news footage has the magnetic haze of old videotape, but the haircuts, the guns, and the politics could be ours. In actuality, the late summer of 1992—before the Internet, cell phones, and 9/11; a decade closer to the fall of Saigon than the fall of Kabul—truly is a foreign land. It was 1992 when Francis Fukuyama smiled upon American victory in the Cold War and, like a more thoughtful Vicki Weaver, glimpsed something like an approaching “End of History.” History rolled on in some surprising directions, but it seems to keep looping back, bolstering the grandiosity of Fukuyama’s infamous title in ways he might not precisely have intended.
Coming at the end of the Cold War, as the millennium coasted irritably to its finish, Ruby Ridge (briskly concatenated by Waco and the bombing in Oklahoma City) seemed, at the time, like a tragic valediction. A new age of prosperity and peace—boredom even—was settling upon the United States. With its arcane Fundamentalism and its trappings of Vietnam and Nazism, the mess in North Idaho looked like one last gasp of the blood- and ideology- sodden twentieth century. As it turned out, the forgetful, becalmed End of History was a mere interlude. Three decades on, Ruby Ridge, looks more like the start of something than its finale.
Discover the Book
“Vivid, frightening, and fascinating…This book blew me away and opened my eyes.”—Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker and Elon Musk
