The Ruby Ridge siege & conspiracy-laced politics in America

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies.

A 2022 Pew Research Survey found that

39% of American adults and 47% of Christians

believe we're living in the end times

prophesied in the Bible.

One event that likely accelerated the spread of that belief

was the violent 1992 Ruby Ridge confrontation in Idaho

between federal agents and the family of Randy Weaver,

whose apocalyptic beliefs led them to build

and live in a primitive cabin on a remote mountain top.

An attempt by federal marshals to serve an arrest warrant

on Weaver resulted in gunfire that left three people

in a family dog dead and two people injured.

Our guest today, writer Chris Jennings,

has a new book that explores the religious antecedents

of the Weaver's beliefs and the impact of Ruby Ridge

on the spread of conspiratorial anti-government

and white supremacist movements.

The deadly actions of federal agents at Ruby Ridge,

including the fatal shooting of a woman with a baby

in her arms, raise some of the same questions

about the use of lethal force at issue

in current immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota.

Chris Jennings is a former editorial staffer

at the New Yorker and the author of a previous book

about 19th century utopian movements called Paradise Now.

His new book is End of Days, Ruby Ridge,

The Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America.

Well, Chris Jennings, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you, David. It's a pleasure to be here.

I want to begin with the first spasm of violence

in the Ruby Ridge confrontation.

Randy Weaver and his family had been living

without electricity or running water.

In this cabin, they'd built themselves

on this ridge near a small town in Idaho.

And federal marshals had for more than a year

wanted to take Randy into custody

for failing to appear in court on a weapons charge.

But on this particular day,

federal marshals had made their way up the hillside

to check the batteries on some surveillance cameras

they had installed in the woods.

The plan was to do their work and get out quietly.

But the Weaver's dog, Striker,

detected their presence, started barking.

You pick it up there, tell us what happened.

So, Randy and his friend, Kevin Harris,

who's sort of like an unofficial big brother

to the Weaver kids, spent a lot of time

living with them was basically a member of the family.

And Samuel, just 14, all took off following the dogs barking

into the woods.

Randy took a different path down the hill

than his son and friend.

And when the marshals confronted Randy,

they saw him standing in the road,

and they told him to freeze.

And he screamed that he wouldn't,

in more colorful terms, and turned around

and ran up the hill back towards the cabin,

firing his gun into the air

to alert his son and friends to come home.

At that kind of precise moment,

the younger man, Samuel and Kevin Harris,

stepped out of the woods to see Striker,

the dog kind of leaping around in front

of one of the U.S. marshals.

The marshall not seeing the boys,

although all of this is disputed,

but this is my best assessment of what happened

based on everyone's telling of events that moment.

The marshall, who were undeniably trying to get away,

they were fleeing, and they thought,

well, if this dog is going to keep pursuing us,

we're going to be shot by the Weavers.

The Weavers, they were under the belief

that the Weavers were, you know,

willing and capable of firing on federal agents.

A marshall shot the dog, who died,

and young Samuel seeing his dog shot,

immediately opened fire in the direction of the three marshals,

hitting nobody, but they returned fire

and struck and killed Samuel Weaver,

at which point Kevin Harris,

who's carrying a big 38-6 hunting rifle,

aimed into the woods where he believed the shots

were coming from.

You can see little puffs of smoke,

and he let out a single shot,

killing a deputy U.S. marshall named William Deegan,

and then ran over to check the pulse on Samuel,

the boy, finding him dead.

He took off up the hill,

where he informed the rest of the Weavers

that Samuel, their son, was dead.

Yeah, a 14-year-old kid, right?

A 14-year-old kid, yeah.

So let's talk about Randy Weaver and his wife,

Vicki.

They lived in Iowa before they went to Idaho.

Randy served in the Army and was trained in special forces,

I guess, a green beret,

although he was never deployed in combat.

Vicki came from her religious background.

One of her ancestors was a leader in an offshoot

of the Mormon church,

so she grew up surrounded by scripture.

Tell us a bit about the family,

kind of what their life was like, what they believed.

Yeah, I would say at the outset of the story,

when the Weavers, Vicki, and Randy get together

and get married,

they sort of could not be more normal

from the very center of the country.

They came from these pious,

or deeply rooted Iowa families.

She grew up on a farm.

His father was a salesman,

but he grew up working on farms in an agricultural area.

And it wasn't really until they got together

that they got interested in sort of fundamentalist faith,

and particular interest in prophecy.

But they were, I would say, you know,

a rather happy family.

They had three of their children were born in Iowa

before they moved to Idaho,

and the fourth was born in Idaho.

And, you know, she had worked as a secretary at Sears.

His main job as an adult was working

at the John Deere and Co-Foundery in Waterloo,

which was a huge tractor works.

And they had a quite good 1970s living there in Iowa.

They would host Bible meetings at home.

They were very active in their views,

and very active in worship,

and held beliefs that the apocalypse was not far away, I guess.

What convinced them they should move

to a remote hillside in Idaho?

Well, it happened gradually.

Their beliefs became more intense

and they became interested in what at the time

was known as Christian survivalism,

which was a popular belief.

You know, for people who thought that the end was nigh,

many of them believed in what's known as the rapture.

The idea that true Christians will be taken out of the world

in advance of the coming chaos and bloodshed,

but the weavers, like others,

who did not subscribe to belief in the rapture,

started thinking about sort of material ways

of surviving the coming tribulations,

so that meant they were preserving food,

and they were learning to live off the grid.

They were arming themselves quite heavily,

and they were part of a small group.

They were at the center of it,

it usually met in their home,

of like-minded believers in Iowa.

And at some point, I think it was fair to say

that Vicki was sort of the theological leader of the group,

and the prophet, she began having visions

of her and her family living out west on a mountain top

when the end that she was convinced was coming arrived.

They would do their best to stay safe

by being somewhere remote away from the government,

which they thought would be an agent of Antichrist

when the end of days arrived.

So when they arrived at this fairly remote place

in the Panhandle of Idaho,

they found there were a whole lot of people like them there,

survivalists, you write homesteaders back to the landers,

and some of them were some really militant,

heavily armed right wing groups,

like the order, which committed robberies and murders,

and killed police officers.

The weavers also attended the World Congress

of the Aryan Nation, which was not so far

from where they lived.

You know, what's striking is that a lot of these militant hate groups

are motivated by great contempt for people of color and Jews

and others.

Vicki Weaver really just saw herself as a woman

devoted to the word of God,

and that this is what Scripture demanded.

You interviewed some people who knew the weavers, right?

I mean, what was your sense?

I mean, what really motivated her?

I mean, were they really Nazi sympathizers?

I would say yes, they were.

I mean, I think Randy and his son,

who, you know, how much can we blame a young teenager

for his beliefs, but they sported swastikas

and they quoted Nazi ideology.

And I think what's significant about your question

is not that the weavers were an outlier.

It's that those groups in the Pacific Northwest

at that time, and throughout the nation,

who were espousing, you know,

what looked to outsiders and reporters

as sort of just straight neo-Nazism,

were in fact all heavily influenced

by particular readings of Scripture.

The line between the religion

and the sort of hard-right ideology

was extremely blurry at that time.

Even the order from the outside looked like a sort of political movement

was really greatly influenced by prophetic beliefs

and a particular strain of fundamentalism

that was known as the Christian identity,

which was sort of a racist way of reading the Bible

that put a lot of emphasis on the Jews

and also with people of color.

Right, right.

You know, the interesting thing is that for all the contact

that Randy Weaver in particular had

with these hardcore right-wing Christian identified groups

and militias, he never joined any of them, right?

No, he wasn't a joiner and his belief

in the coming apocalypse was sufficiently strong

that unlike a lot of the people he was around,

the people who would go every summer

for these Aryan nations, world congresses, as they call them,

he wasn't trying to start the revolution.

He thought that within a matter of years,

the prophecy would take care of itself

and the world would be thrown into tribulation.

He thought the end was going to come on-on-bidden.

Right, and he thought that if they were up on a hilltop and well armed,

they could survive the end while these tribulations occur.

Yeah, they had a very specific vision going all the way back

to their days in Iowa to the early 80s

that something specific was going to happen to their family.

It was going to take the form of a siege.

They would be under assault

and they would have to defend themselves.

Five years before the actual siege did come to their land,

they even filed an affidavit

with the Boundary County Sheriff's Office

or the local courthouse saying,

we fear that our land will be raided,

we will be forced to kill a federal agent

and in defending ourselves all be killed,

which is shockingly accurate prophecy

of what was to come five years later,

either a testament to the way prophecy can fulfill itself

or to the fact that Vicki was prophetically gifted,

which is not my interpretation of things.

It is striking how the weavers,

even though they didn't join these militant groups,

had a lot of weapons and everybody in the family

learned to use them,

even 10-year-old Rachel couldn't handle a rifle, right?

Yeah, like a lot of Americans,

Randy sort of conceived of guns

as like this fourth branch of government.

They were his ultimate check and balance

on the power of the state

and he clearly just also enjoyed weapons.

He's always had them around,

but one of the things that alarmed a lot of their neighbors,

which in turn helped aggravate things during the siege,

is the little kids always walking around armed,

kind of gave people the creeps.

And again, these people are residents of rural,

far northern Idaho.

They're all people who owned guns themselves

and are comfortable around guns,

but there was something about the weavers constant target practice,

constant brandishing of weapons

that even gave those people pause.

So the criminal charge

that led to the violence at Ruby Ridge

was actually initiated by government agents

to tell us what happened.

Well, the actual charge was for selling

two sawdust shotguns to an ATF informant.

And it's my view,

and this is much contested by all parties,

but after looking closely,

it's my view that really the government

wasn't initially trying to get weaver on the hook

for selling the guns.

They weren't trying the outset to make him an informant.

They were just trying to maintain the cover

of their own informant whose cover

within the world of the area nations

was as a gun runner.

So by buying guns from Randy,

he was able to sort of keep Randy around

and get to know him a little better

with the hope that Randy might help lead them

to a more overtly dangerous character.

There was a lot of federal interest in the area nations

at the time because there had just been

this big spate of violent terrorism

that had originated more or less

from within the wider community of inland northwest,

white supremacists.

So Randy Weaver sells two sawdust shotguns.

They were illegally modified

to this civilian who was working

for the federal government

and was wired up to capture the sale on tape, right?

Correct.

So he committed a crime.

What happened then?

The whole thing probably would have gone away.

Randy was a small fish

and they were actually more interested in his friend

who was making noises about starting

some kind of group to bring the fight to the feds,

which wasn't something that particularly interested Randy.

So two ATF agents approach Randy.

Randy, to them on paper,

looks kind of like a good candidate

for someone who's an informant.

He's friends with a lot of these guys,

but he's not a real true believer.

He clearly doesn't want to be a terrorist,

but Randy refuses to become an informant

and what's more refuses to have

any further dealing with the government.

So criminal charges are brought

before a grand jury in Idaho

for the illegal weapons sale,

which again it's worth saying

if Randy had gone to court,

it probably would have been a pretty minor punishment.

He's gone friendly Idaho jury.

He probably would have gotten work release

or probation or something like that.

Right, so not a heavy duty crime.

But Randy Weaver didn't show up for trial,

which itself was another event.

He was released on bond.

There was a $10,000 bond,

which somehow he understood might end up

meaning that if he didn't show up,

they would take his land away.

That's actually not the case,

but the instructions were a little confusing.

But he doesn't show up for trial.

So which means that he's technically

a federal fugitive, right?

And so it's something for the US marshals to handle.

And so for a year and a half,

he and the family go to the cabin up the hill

and stay there.

Now, you know,

the marshals could have at least tried

going up and knocking on the door.

Why didn't they do that?

Well, they drove up once

and Randy and Vicki were away visiting a friend

and the kids were standing in the road,

armed, the marshals, you know,

they were in their office clothes,

and they were not prepared for any kind of confrontation

and the kids looked rather ominous to them

so they turned around and went away.

And I would say to the credit of the US marshals,

they spent,

ended up being about a year and a half sending

rather gentle pleading notes up the hill

through friends, through intermediaries,

saying, just come down and talk.

You're not going to lose your land.

But, you know, it's part of the nature

of the American legal system

that once the war has been issued for your arrest,

it's almost impossible for a judge

to wave it away.

In fact, at one point,

the marshals did go to the US attorney

and Idaho and say,

is there any way we can just dismiss these charges?

This situation is a mess.

It doesn't make any sense.

This guy is kind of scaring us

and he didn't really commit a major crime.

And the US attorney says, you know,

no judge would go for that

just because someone doesn't want to go to court.

It doesn't mean they get to stay home.

So things just kind of slowly ratchet up

and the weavers are not sort of silent

during this period.

They're sending down increasingly

caustic warnings to stay away

and you'll never capture us

and even our kids will die in this cause.

So eventually the marshals, you know,

move towards a more,

what they would say,

a more dynamic way of arresting Randy.

And again, you just,

there's this fascinating contrast

in that, you know,

the marshals think they're trying to sort of execute

a fairly simple arrest warrant.

But for the weavers,

this is part of a coming battle,

the tribulation,

the biblical prophecy coming true, right?

Yeah, everything they had been saying

for, you know, more than a decade,

seemed to be, you know,

being fulfilled on a daily basis.

It was almost shocking the extent to which

they're long-standing belief

that the feds were going to come and get them

in some sort of effort to snuff out

true believing Christians

was all coming to pass.

So they were really dealing

with two very different realities.

You know, I don't want to relieve the government

of its culpability in what happened.

It was terrible tragedy

and there were catastrophic mistakes

made by the government.

But they were just speaking

two completely different languages

and the weavers made it very,

very difficult to communicate

and peacefully resolve this.

So eventually,

the marshals decided to take a more,

as you say,

dynamic approach to resolving this.

They bring in this special operations group,

this sort of elite tactical unit.

They set motion-activated cameras

in trees around the cabin.

And it was when some of these marshals

went in to kind of service them

that this first confrontation happened

that begins with a dog from the weavers

ends up a marshall shooting the dog

and then their 14-year-old son,

Sam firing a weapon

and then a marshall shooting and killing

this 14-year-old son who was armed.

And then Kevin Harris,

this 24-year-old man who lived with the weavers

fired and killed a deputy US marshall named William D.

And so now this is a completely different situation.

It's a huge national story.

The weavers are alone and isolated

in their cabin tending to their son's body.

But talking to no one,

how is this situation characterized

by the government and the media at this point?

Yeah, so I mean,

when people look at the case of Ruby Ridge,

they always compare the overwhelming scale

of the federal response.

And they're these photographs of, you know,

what looks like a military in Cam

and hundreds of agents, helicopters,

camo trucks,

and this lowly family.

And people say,

what was the crime?

Oh, it was two illegal shot guns.

And that would indeed be an absurd asymmetry.

But basically, the entire federal response

was because of not the guns

or Randy's failure to appear,

but because of the death of William Deegan.

Well, and the other piece of information

that nobody had at that point was

that gunfire by the marshals had killed

a 14-year-old boy, right?

That was not known,

because the weavers weren't talking to anybody.

And the marshals didn't report it.

The marshals didn't report it.

You know,

a little sympathetic to the weavers widely believe

that it was a lie that the government didn't know.

They had shot and killed Samuel Weaver.

I am somewhat convinced that it's plausible

that they really didn't know.

You know, at the moments after Samuel was killed,

the marshals were attending to their comrade,

Deegan, who was bleeding out and dying.

And they believed that they were still under assault

because they continued to hear gunfire

because the weavers were firing their guns into the air.

So I think it's plausible that they didn't know

that Samuel was dead.

And soon after Samuel was shot,

Randy and Vicki came down the hill

and collected his body and brought him up

to a shed on the property

and cleaned him and wrapped him in a shroud.

Let's take a break here,

and then we'll talk some more.

We're thinking with Chris Jennings,

his new book is End of Days,

Ruby Ridge, The Apocalypse,

and The Unmaking of America.

He'll be back to talk more

after this short break.

I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.

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This is now an FBI operation.

And obviously it's a much more high profile

and high powered operation.

And a decision is made by some leaders in the FBI

to change the rules of engagement

for the use of deadly force in this instance.

Tell us about that.

So basically, you know,

the rules of engagement are a document

that every federal agency has that says,

you know, when they can shoot at a citizen.

And the standard FBI rules

as they are for most law enforcement

is you can only shoot at someone

if they're represented an imminent threat

to the agent or someone else.

And if you've identified yourself

that, you know, said like the US marshals

drop your weapon, that sort of thing.

So as far as the FBI planners were concerned

and the subgroup of the FBI noticed

the HRT, the hostage rescue team,

which is sort of the FBI's most elite SWAT tactical unit,

they had clearly announced themselves

that had already been gunfire.

So they were writing the rules

and revising the rules

as if an ongoing active gun battle was happening.

And as if all of the weavers

and the children, by the way,

were excluded from these new rules of engagement,

that any adult who was armed

could be shot, basically,

because as far as the government saw it,

and this is later deemed unconstitutional,

but as the government saw it was the weavers

had already, you know, evidenced their willingness

to fire upon and kill federal agents.

And the assumption again was that the weavers

had already been warned,

that you know, federal agents, you should surrender.

In fact, the only one who had gotten that warning

was Randy Weaver on that one encounter

the next day where one of the marshals said,

you know, drop it, Randy, and he didn't.

So there was an assumption at work there

that wasn't actually true.

The plan here, though,

was negotiators would approach the cabin

in an armored personnel carrier,

and would call for surrender on loudspeakers

drop off a siege phone

so that the weavers could use

to communicate for negotiations.

That was the plan.

What actually happened?

So by this point, a knight has alapsed,

in which the family has, you know, barely slept

and spent grieving their dead boy,

and nothing had happened.

They were starting to get a little confused.

You know, they, Kevin Harris was pretty sure

he had shot and killed one of the marshals,

so why had nobody come up and demanded their surrender?

And the reason is that the government was so terrified

of what they would find up the hill

that they were getting themselves as prepared as possible.

No one was going to just drive up there with a bullhorn.

So the sniper observer teams were already in place,

and this is, you know, two man teams,

one with the scope and one with the gun,

and they were there basically to provide protective cover

to the negotiators who were coming.

Randy goes to check on Sam's body, carrying a gun,

and as he reaches up to turn the latch

to open the cabin to look at Sam's body,

one of these snipers sees him and shoots him in the arm,

goes in his armpit.

And the story of the FBI tells,

and the particular sniper who took the shot tells,

is that as Randy was reaching up for the latch,

they thought that he was raising his gun to fire

on a helicopter, and there was indeed a helicopter

filled with FBI commanders surveying the area.

So they thought Randy was presenting an imminent threat

to that helicopter.

The weavers deny that.

Randy turns to run back to the cabin,

and Sarah and Kevin Harris turned to run with him,

kind of all falling in line,

racing at full speed.

Vicki, his wife, carrying their baby, Elizabeth,

who's ten months old, steps in the front door of the cabin

to open the doors so that they can pour in quickly

because they believe that they're under fire.

And the sniper realizing he hasn't shot,

the man he thinks is Kevin Harris.

He starts leading him, as they say,

with the scope of his rifle,

to shoot him as they pour through the door of the cabin,

and he shoots just at the moment that Kevin Harris

is crossing of a threshold.

And he does indeed hit Kevin Harris,

but what he didn't realize,

and I believe that he didn't realize it,

though others disagree,

is that the bullet before hitting Kevin Harris

passed through the head of Vicki Weaver,

instantly killing her with her baby in her arms.

So that is when the siege truly breaks down,

because now there's two members of the Weaver family

have been killed,

and in both cases, the government,

so far does not know that either of them are dead,

so the weavers are living in a totally different reality

than the people who are attempting to negotiate with them.

Right, so inside the cabin,

the Weaver family stays there for the next 10 days,

with Vicki Weaver's body,

and since she was hit in the head by this high-powered rifle,

one can only imagine what that was like for her children.

And they stay there for 10 days, right?

Expecting that this is an ongoing attack,

and the end is going to come.

Exactly, and making matters worse

was that the FBI negotiator,

not knowing that Vicki was dead,

and all of their sort of psychological research indicated

that Vicki was sort of the strength

in the head of the family directed all of his negotiation at Vicki,

which from the inside of the house sounded like a sort of

maddening psychological torture.

They would come up to the door in the armored personnel carrier

and say, Vicki, come out, Vicki,

and the people inside are looking at the body of Vicki

and thinking, how can you be so cruel?

Exactly.

Eventually, different mediators are brought in ones

that Randy is willing to talk to,

and they are convinced to surrender, to leave, right?

Randy and Kevin, who was quite seriously wounded,

are arrested, and they would eventually

be tried and acquitted of everything,

except Randy's original failure to appear in court.

Why did a jury acquit them?

The short version is that the extenuating circumstances,

the tragedy of the tale, was so strong

that any jury would have been sympathetic

to what this man had already suffered,

and the other fact is that Randy we've never even pointed

as gun at anyone.

Whatever his culpability in creating this situation,

he did not murder William Deegan,

and Kevin Harris had a reasonable claim

that he shot at William Deegan in defense

of his 14-year-old friend.

So a jury, and the weavers had rather brilliant legal defense,

and the jury believed it.

Jerry Spence, the cowboy lawyer,

who was quite well known at the time, represented them.

The weavers would sue the federal government

and win a $3.1 million settlement.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

Let's take a break here, and then we'll talk some more.

We're sticking with Chris Jennings.

His new book is End of Days, Ruby Ridge,

The Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America.

We'll continue after this short break.

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You know, there have been so many horrendous stories

in all the years since this, including many mass shootings.

It's that it's largely forgotten by a lot of people.

Not necessarily by people in the survivalist world

in, you know, the right wing militia world.

The case was first at trial and then in subsequent coverage.

The emphasis of the story was shifted.

It very much became a case about religious freedom

and especially about gun rights,

because, you know, by a bit of a historical accident,

all of the bloodshed and the siege

and the original setup takes place

during the George H. W. Bush administration.

But the post-mortem happens overwhelmingly

during Bill Clinton's first term.

And Clinton came into office

as people will recall with some rather modest gun control ambitions.

So the weaver story was taken up

as this sort of vindication of a longstanding notion

that the feds are out to take your guns.

And that's why Randy Weaver was shot.

All of the sort of theological stuff,

the white power terrorism,

which was the original reason for the federal interest

in that area was forgotten.

And it became a sort of story about big government coming

to kill you because you're a fundamentalist

or because you have guns.

And so it's been my sort of anecdotal experience

that people who identify as conservative

know the story of Ruby Ridge pretty well.

They can tell you, you know, who the weaver family was.

Even if their facts are not quite right,

whereas liberals generally recall very little of the episode.

It became a sort of foundational myth,

especially on the far right,

but I would say more just within the conservative movement.

In assessing the legacy of Ruby Ridge,

you say that it portended the crack-up

of American reality itself.

What do you mean?

Well, I think, you know, especially in the last few years,

a lot of the conspiracy theories that animated the weavers

and the people in their world have moved, you know,

into the mainstream.

The notion that there's a deep state

or a secret government that is actually pulling the strings.

The most overt example is the extreme popularity

of the QAnon conspiracy, which was basically an updated version

of the story that the weavers told.

You had a larger and larger share of American citizens,

including people in genuine roles of authority

who believed or at least claimed to believe in these conspiracies.

And so, you know, when I say crack-up of American reality,

I'm saying that you have citizens living in two different worlds,

perceiving the same events through very different lenses.

And obviously, that has been accelerated by a media landscape

that has gotten more heterogeneous.

And so, yeah, I would say that's what I mean by crack-up.

Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris were acquitted at trial.

But there was also the matter of what sanctions,

if any, should be imposed on government, you know,

FBI officials and operatives in the field

who were responsible for these killings.

What happened there?

Yeah, the sort of official post-mortem

went on for a very long time and was extremely thorough.

The Department of Justice issued huge reports,

the Blockbuster Senate hearings from the Judiciary Committee,

in which literally, you know, every even minor character

from the whole story was deposed and spoke before Congress.

Randy and his daughters went to Washington

and addressed the Judiciary Committee

to use a term that has in the last couple of weeks

come back into the news.

There was a matter of qualified immunity

can a federal agent in performance of his duties

be held legally liable.

And obviously, that's something we've seen in the news lately

with federal officials saying that CPP agents

have full immunity and can't be held liable

for what happens while they're performing their duties.

Most people on the right would say that not enough heads rolled.

There was a few demotions at the FBI.

There was one FBI functionary did serve a little bit of prison time,

but it was not for anything he did during the siege.

It was for destroying sort of an after-action report

that reflected poorly on the FBI.

It was a classic case of the cover-up

was where most of the crime happened.

You know, it's interesting.

In your book, when you describe the growth of these apocalyptic interpretations

of the Bible and the coming tribulations and all of this stuff,

that a lot of the people who promoted it

made money from doing it and had quite a good little operation going on.

That was before the internet.

Now, you have a lot of people who are influencers,

who the wilder sometimes, the more conspiratorial, the crazier,

you know, the more engagement.

Is this sort of the same process?

Yeah, I would say so.

And I don't even think you need to resolve to sort of cynical financial calculus

to explain why these ideas became popular

with a certain type of influencers and preachers,

which is just its exciting stuff.

And congregations that talk a lot about prophecy grow.

At a time when a lot of American churches were shrinking

and this goes back to the 70s and 80s,

you know, people are excited about prophecy about knowing what's coming

and it can be much more engaging than some of the other elements

of traditional Protestant theology.

And it has increasingly plugged into or been coupled

with a certain type of politics.

You know, the QAnon is a great example of sort of prophetic framework

being latched on to contemporary political characters.

When there was the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco,

not long after the Ruby Ridge tragedy,

law enforcement there seemed to have no understanding

of the apocalyptic views of their adversaries.

As they had not with Randy Weaver,

what kind of strategy might a morphologically informed command have used?

Well, I mean, I think precisely what the feds have done

in the intervening three decades, Waco came so closely

after Ruby Ridge and the same mistakes were made.

But since then, it's actually quite hard for zealous anti-government types

to trigger a conflict with the federal government.

They'll just wait you out.

I mean, the occupation in Oregon at the Malior wildlife refuge

with the Bundy family and some of their compatriots, you know,

during COVID lockdowns, there were some demonstrations in Michigan

where not even just standing on your own land,

but people would, you know, storm a state house with guns in hand.

And they, the feds just won't fight back.

And that seems to be frustrating, as it might be,

to some seems to be the right strategy,

which is that you just cannot play the part

that has been assigned to you in this prophetic narrative

of an evil government that's coming to kill you.

Yeah, and frustrating for your adversary

who is counting on you to overreact.

Exactly, yeah.

You know, after you'd finished this book,

and we're thinking about all of these things,

we saw the events in Minnesota where, you know,

two civilians have been shot and killed by ICE agents.

What came to your mind about what might be learned,

might have been learned from Ruby Ridge that might be relevant?

Well, yes.

I mean, of course, after the death of Renee Good and Alex Preddie,

the analogies to the Weaver family came fast.

I think that there is a lot to that analogy,

but the cases are, to my mind, extremely different,

because in some ways, the Ruby Ridge case

involves the government spending in a enormous amount of time

and effort and bureaucracy to avoid gun play,

whereas what happens in Minneapolis, to my mind,

looks like extreme carelessness,

if not an effort to actually create chaos.

So I think the question of immunity

for federal agents who kill people,

is very complex in the case of Ruby Ridge.

In the case of Minneapolis, it seems quite obvious

that blanket immunity for armed agents of the state

is a dangerous precedent,

because it's helped create an extremely volatile

and, in this case, deadly situation.

Randy Weaver lived three decades after this.

What did he do with his life?

You know, he remained very close with his daughters.

In the immediate aftermath, they all moved back

to Iowa, the girls went to live with their grandparents,

but then they pretty promptly drifted back

not to the area around Bonner's Ferry in Naples, Idaho,

which is where they had lived,

but nearby in Montana.

And Randy remained very close with his three surviving daughters,

who all accounts, I didn't speak with any of them.

Nobody wanted to talk with me, which is fair,

and it's a complicated fact that what is American history

for the rest of us is the most traumatic possible event

in their lives.

Randy sort of became a one-man roadshow

for his worldview,

with Vicki gone,

the religiosity really ebbed away,

and by late in his life, he was publicly identifying

as an atheist,

but the sort of politics that had come along

with his faith remained.

So he continued to talk about the federal governments,

abuses, and he spent a lot of time at gun shows,

having his photo taken, signing books.

He went to Waco, Texas,

in the aftermath of the Branch Davidian compound of Mount Carmel.

He didn't shy away from the press and from telling his story,

and to my mind quite amazingly,

when asked, late in his life,

do you regret anything about how it all went down?

He was very, very direct and said,

no, I would have done everything the same,

and if Vicki and Sam were here,

they would have done everything the same too.

Well, Chris Jennings, it's been really interesting.

Thank you so much for talking to us.

Oh, thank you, David.

It's been great.

Chris Jennings' new book is End of Days,

Ruby Ridge, The Apocalypse,

and the Unmaking of America.

Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Dizzy,

Rachel Weaver's memoir

about struggling to overcome a mysterious illness.

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Rachel Weaver worked for the Forest Service in Alaska,

where she scaled towering trees to study birds of prey

and dealt with brown bears in the wild.

But one morning in 2006, Weaver woke up

and felt like she was being spun in a hurricane.

She'd encountered a medical situation she would battle for years.

Weaver's memoir is called Dizzy,

and our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, has this review.

One morning in January 2006,

Rachel Weaver, a 20-something aspiring writer

who was about to start grad school in Colorado,

woke up to a hurricane,

except the hurricane was whirling within her own body.

Here's how Weaver describes that moment.

I opened my eyes to the walls of the bedroom,

folding and sliding and picking up speed.

I pressed my body hard against the mattress

in search of the center, the still place,

any place.

Desperate to get away from whatever was happening,

I pushed the covers off, inch by inch,

keeping my head as still as possible

and slid down to all fours next to the bed.

I was clawing more than crawling.

The carpet rushing beneath my hands like a river

just let loose from a dam.

In the hallway panting,

I slowly got my feet under me,

crouched low, hands spidered against the carpet.

If I could just brush my teeth, maybe have some coffee,

I figured things would write themselves.

Things didn't even start to write themselves for Weaver

until about a decade later when she met a doctor

who instead of trying to make her symptoms fit

a prefab narrative,

sat with her for two hours and asked question after question

like a detective on the path of a hardened criminal.

In her arresting new memoir called Dizzy,

Weaver herself definitely avoids the prefab narrative

that accounts of deliverance from chronic illness

and this usually fall into.

There's even a name for them.

They're called restitution narratives

because the reward in reading such stories

is the return to some degree of normal life.

Think for instance of the monthly diagnosis column

in the New York Times magazine,

whose appeal is based on the promise

that some solution will be found

by the end of its investigation of a mystery disease.

Weaver takes a more challenging approach.

She devotes all but the very last pages of her book

to the extended experience of being marooned as she puts it

in the windy no man's land of what could possibly be wrong with me.

To me, reading Dizzy is akin to the slow down sensation

of reading Robinson Crusoe.

Year after year goes by,

occasionally rescue appears on the horizon

in the form of an ear-nose and throat specialist,

acupuncturist, neurologist, physical therapist,

ophthalmologist, chiropractic integrative healer.

Many of these human vessels of hope end up dismissing Weaver

with an all-purpose diagnosis of just too much stress.

Early on, when Weaver hears that assessment of her dizziness

by a nurse practitioner,

she thinks back to her time in the Alaskan Forest Service,

where her job occasionally brought her into close encounters

with angry brown bears.

Pretty sure it's not just stress Weaver

tells the nurse practitioner.

Indeed, one of the ways Weaver baguials readers

to stick with her through her long years of landlock sea sickness

are her flashbacks to her work in Alaska.

As Weaver points out, her face offs with animals in the wild

often mirror many patient doctor encounters.

Here, for instance, is the end of an appointment

with a young ENT,

who's just callously shrugged off Weaver's baffling case.

Surprisingly, that doctor ends up giving Weaver a break on her bill.

That discount is crucial to Weaver.

She's mired in medical debt since her night job

doesn't provide insurance.

Weaver recalls,

I tried to feel grateful that she had miraculously lowered her rate

to something reasonable.

But that shrug played over and over in my mind.

I wanted to shrug back now that it was my turn,

but I couldn't.

Thank you, I said, dropping my eyes,

taking my place below her in the animal kingdom of the health care system.

Patient, doctor, broke, not broke, weak, powerful.

In dizzy, Weaver astutely captures these moments of playcation and dominance.

She adopted this meek behavior as many of us do

because she was desperate.

She wanted to be thought of as a good patient

in hopes of securing more attention from a doctor,

maybe even a cure.

What Weaver appreciates more deeply throughout her long ordeal

is that the art of healing has to do with listening

and being open to accompanying a patient into off-road terrain.

Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University.

She reviewed Dizzy by Rachel Weaver.

On tomorrow's show, we'll talk with legal scholar Dorothy Roberts

about her new book, The Mixed Marriage Project.

It's based on her father's five decades of interviews

with interracial couples dating back to the 1930s.

As his bi-racial daughter, Roberts re-examines her father's work

through an entirely new lens.

I hope you can join us.

To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews,

follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers

and Marie Baldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth,

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Our digital media producer is Molly C. V. Nesper,

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For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave D.

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