Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: What led to the Ruby Ridge siege and who were the Weavers?
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 mountaintop.
An attempt by federal marshals to serve an arrest warrant on Weaver resulted in gunfire that left three people and 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, Dave. 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.
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Chapter 3: What events triggered the violent confrontation at Ruby Ridge?
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 was 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 together. 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 men, Samuel and Kevin Harris, stepped out of the woods to see Stryker, the dog, kind of leaping around in front of one of the U.S. marshals. The marshal 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 marshal
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. They were under the belief that the Weavers were willing and capable of firing on federal agents.
Marshall shot the dog who died, and young Samuel, seeing his dog shot, immediately opened fire in the direction of the three Marshalls, hitting nobody,
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Chapter 4: How did the Weavers' beliefs influence their actions during the siege?
But they returned fire and struck and killed Samuel Weaver, at which point Kevin Harris, who's carrying a big .30-06 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. marshal 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 a 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. They're 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, a rather happy family. They had three of their children were born in Iowa before they moved to Idaho. And a 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 & Co. Foundry in Waterloo, which was a huge tractor works. And they had, I would say, 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.
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Chapter 5: What were the government’s actions leading up to the Ruby Ridge siege?
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.
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 to right 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. 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 – 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.
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Chapter 6: What was the outcome of the initial confrontation between the Weavers and federal agents?
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.
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 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.
Right. And he thought that if they're 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, you know, 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, you know, shockingly dangerous.
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.
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Chapter 7: How did the media portray the Ruby Ridge incident?
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.
Yeah, you know, like a lot of Americans, Randy sort of conceived of guns as like this fourth branch of government. You know, 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 own guns themselves and are comfortable around guns.
But there was something about the Weaver's 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. Tell us what happened.
Well, the actual charge was for selling two sawed-off 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 at 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 Aryan 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 That Randy might help lead them to a more overtly dangerous character.
There was a lot of federal interest in the Aryan 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.
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Chapter 8: What were the legal consequences for Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris?
And I would say to the credit of the U.S. Marshals, they 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 it's part of the nature of the American legal system that
Once a warrant's been issued for your arrest, it's almost impossible for a judge to waive it away. In fact, at one point, the marshals did go to the U.S. attorney in Idaho and say, is there any way we can just dismiss these charges? The 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 U.S.
attorney says no judge would go for that just because someone doesn't want to go to court 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 move towards a more – what they would say a more dynamic way of arresting Randi.
And again, there's this fascinating contrast in that 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 more than a decade seemed to be being fulfilled on a daily basis. It was almost shocking the extent to which their longstanding 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 a 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 decide 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 marshal shooting the dog, and then their 14-year-old son, Sam... firing a weapon and then a marshal shooting and killing this 14-year-old son who was armed.
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