Chris Jennings

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's 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 mountaintop 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.

I would say, yes, they were.

I mean, I think Randy and his son who – 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 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, which 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 people of color.

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 called 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 unbidden.