S1: Welcome in San Diego. It's Jade Hindman on today's show. Author Chris Jennings joins us to talk about his new book , End of Days Ruby Ridge The Apocalypse and the Unmaking of America , where he explores how the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident moved conspiracy driven politics and white Christian nationalism to the mainstream. This is KPBS Midday Edition. Connecting our communities through conversation. In 1992 , federal agents and a white separatist family faced off in a remote part of Idaho in what became known as the Ruby Ridge Incident. The historic standoff can be seen as a precursor to conspiracy driven politics and the ongoing resurgence of white Christian nationalism. Author Chris Jennings chronicles the 11 day siege and its legacy in his book End of Days , Ruby Ridge , The Apocalypse , and the Unmaking of America. He'll be coming to the San Diego Writers Festival on Saturday , March 28th , and he joins me now. Chris , welcome to the show.
S2: Thank you so much for having me.
S1: Thanks for taking the time. Okay , so it is 1992. Randy Weaver and his family are living in a remote cabin near a small town in Idaho.
S2: He he grew up in a rural part of Iowa , and as did his eventual wife , Vickie. They kind of got married and fell in love in the late 60s. And Randy joined the Army and qualified to be a Green Beret , but never actually was sent over to Vietnam , even though he had enlisted right at the height of the war. He eventually dropped out of the service and he and Vicky together got very into fundamentalist Christianity , particularly a lot of prophetic stuff about the end times , and that sent them away from their rather comfortable suburban life in Iowa to live in this very remote part of Idaho , because they believed the end of the world was imminent , and they wanted to find a way to survive what they saw as a coming period of tribulation. Hmm.
S1: Hmm. Okay. Well , can you set the scene for those of us who might not be familiar with Ruby Ridge ? What happened in that standoff ? Sure.
S2: So Randy was , um , was hanging around the Aryan Nations. Uh , his whole family was. It was a compound near where they lived in , in Idaho. And there was a lot of federal interest in that organization because there'd been a spate of sort of white power inspired terror , some bombing , some murders , some robberies. And Randy got himself ensnared , um , by selling Two illegally modified shotguns to an ATF informant , and the government thought that they could use that charge as a bit of pressure to get Randy to to be an informant , to help them get information about what other future terror incidents might be coming down the line. So how , because of their.
S1: Oh go. Ahead.
S2: Ahead. Sorry. Go ahead.
S1: No , no. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
S2: I was just going to say so because of their beliefs about the the approach of the apocalypse and , and the that the federal government was under the control of a sort of demonic Jewish cabal. They refused to cooperate with the courts. And Randy simply said , I'm not not coming into court. And he stayed in his home , which which sets the stage for this year and a half long effort. The siege is remembered for its most dramatic ten days , but it was actually a year and a half that the family refused to to sort of come down from their mountain.
S1:
S2: So the government decided the only way to get him safely into handcuffs was to to set up this rather elaborate ruse to get him away from his , his wife and kids so that they could get him in cuffs before before anyone started shooting during some sort of routine surveillance. As part of that operation , almost by accident , one of the Weaver's dogs smelled the marshals and who were sneaking around the Weavers Ridge and took off after them. The retreating marshals stopped and shot the dog to conceal their own position , and Randy's young 14 year old son , Samuel , returns , saw his own dog get shot and shot at the marshals , and he didn't hit anyone. But the marshals returned fire , hitting and killing the boy and his friend. The family's friend , Kevin Harris , a young man in his 20s , also shot and also opened fire , shooting and killing a US marshal named William Degan. And so that is really what sets the whole thing in motion. There's the dead child on the on the weaver side. And on the federal side. A US marshal has been killed. And really , the images that everyone remembers about Ruby Ridge , this sort of like extreme asymmetry of this massive army confronting this lowly separatist family had very little to do with the shotguns or Randy's failure to come to court. It was about the killing of that U.S. Marshal. Hmm.
S1: Hmm. So.
S2: And meanwhile , all sorts of federal agencies descend to the base of their mountain. Uh , you know , following the death of this marshal. And the following day , as they're setting up a sort of perimeter around the property , um , and waiting to issue a sort of surrender announcement , the FBI , which made quite a few mistakes. During the course of the siege. The most overtly illegal was revising their usual rules of engagement so that any adult are seen holding a weapon after a surrender announcement had been issued. Uh could be shot on site , which is which was later determined to be completely unconstitutional. And , um , a FBI sniper attempting to shoot , uh , they thought Randy might be taking aim at a helicopter. That was that was taking off. And , uh , FBI sniper shot Randy , but didn't kill him. He and his friend Kevin Harris , both holding guns , then started running back towards the cabin , and the sniper tries to shoot Kevin Harris just as he crosses the threshold of the house and he he succeeds. But what the sniper most likely did not know is that the bullet passed through the head of Victoria. We heard Randy's wife before hitting Kevin Harris. She was sort of scrunched up behind the door where the the sniper probably couldn't see her. And so now the family has lost their son. The the mother of the family is is dead inside the house , in the kitchen and this little cabin that they had built themselves. And Randy has got a bullet wound in his arm. And their friend Kevin Harris has a has a very bad wound in his arm. And the family then believes that they're just all going to be shot and killed. And they basically closed the door in the cabin and won't come out or even really communicate for the next ten days. Hmm.
S1: Hmm. You know , in.
S2: It ends surprisingly. I mean , it takes a lot. And the FBI tries a lot of different ways to coax them out. The family was sort of so terrified and so convinced and had been convinced for for more than a decade that the federal government , um , intended to kill them. I mean , part of what's remarkable about the story is that the weavers had been predicting something like this happening for a long time. Speaking to reporters , they even filed an affidavit. You know , about seven years before any of this happened. Saying someday our our home will be besieged by the FBI and will be forced into killing a federal officer , which is precisely what happened. Um , so that you can either chalk that up to to Victoria Weaver actually being a legitimate prophet , or you can talk about the ways in which certain kinds of prophecy have a way of self-fulfilling. Uh , it eventually ends when a man who actually passed away last week , a Colonel Bo Gritz , who was a big hero and a figure on sort of the far right , um , a guy who Randy trusted. He was one of the most highly decorated Green Berets to to fight in Vietnam. He is brought in as a negotiator , and he eventually coaxes the family out of the house. They go to court. Randy and Kevin Harris are tried for the death of the US marshal , William Degan. They're acquitted after a very long trial , in which Randy was represented by probably the most famous trial lawyer in the country at the time , a guy named Gerry Spence and. And Randy. Randy and Kevin get off. And in fact , they sued the federal government and are paid a sizable settlement. Interesting.
S1: Interesting. Okay , so so in the book , you write that this time period , you know , in 1992 , it was an error , not unlike our own. Why did you want to revisit this incident in the context of our present day political climate ? Yeah.
S2: Well , I , you know , the sort of capsule version of the story that I just gave you is the one that lives on , particularly in the memory of the American right , as the sort of morality play about the out of control federal government. But in fact , the more you zoom into the story and the longer a window of time you study , the more you realize that that , um , the government , despite having blundered in some , some serious ways , cannot really be be held entirely to blame for what happened here and the weaver's deeply conspiratorial worldview. Um , at turn after turn after turn led events towards this , this tragic conclusion. So I think that , uh , as some of the conspiratorial ideas that the weavers held have moved in the intervening three decades more and more into the sort of American mainstream. And I think the whole Ruby Ridge case contains sort of in seed form , a lot of phenomena that we now recognize as part of our national politics.
S1:
S2: I mean , they had both been raised in , you know , sort of fairly pious households. And as a couple , they got deeply into , into church and then Eventually they absorbed a lot of something that was very popular in the 70s and 80s , and it's still quite popular to sort of pop prophecies. So stuff they were getting less from church than from sort of like paperbacks and cassettes in those days. All of that material now lives mostly on the internet about finding correspondences between current events and and ancient biblical prophecy , especially the Book of Revelation and and the weavers , like many , many Americans then and now , were convinced that the events described in revelation were were , you know , which is a book written in the first century. We're playing out in their current era , and that that faith kind of demands a sort of conspiratorial outlook , because you're forced to say , okay , if there's an Antichrist , who is it ? If there's a one world government , where is it ? And it really drove them deeper and deeper into this , this conspiratorial view. And in their case , it took a special turn with something called Christian Identity , which was this highly racist strain of fundamentalism , which read the whole Bible through the lens of race in which , you know , the Jews are the descendants of Lucifer , the actual Israel. God's chosen people are white Anglo-Saxons , and people of color are part of some wholly separate act of creation or sort of subhuman. Wow.
S1: Wow. Well , I want to talk about some of the ways we're seeing apocalyptic beliefs and even that the racism and anti-Semitism you mentioned come up today. You know , reports surfaced that that troops were allegedly told that the reason for bombing Iran was to start a holy war sanctioned by God , to bring forth Armageddon.
S2: And this really is like a very American phenomenon. It doesn't exist as much in other parts of the world that that puts a great deal of emphasis on biblical prophecy and , and , and sort of searching for the end times narrative in contemporary events has long been pressing on American culture and on American foreign policy. You know , every time there's a conflict , especially if it is in the Middle East , which , you know , is very easy to draw correspondences to , to the Bible , you know , Iran is , you know , can be classified as Persia. They're talking about the this war , you know , meaning ancient Persia. This war is sort of lighting the the signal fire is the phrase that has been used lately in the last couple of weeks for a series of events that will lead to to the apocalypse. Um , and , and so this stuff has been around for a long time. And the way it's being talked about now with this current war is just one more example of , of how it has pressed upon American life.
S1:
S2: They had a sort of church ified version of it , a sacrifice version , which is that the way evil works in the world is that the Jews will sort of weaponize people of color to , to undermine whiteness , which is sacred. You know , it's this relationship between God and his chosen people who they regarded as as white Anglo-Saxons. So , uh , outside of religious context , we call that the great replacement theory , or we call that , you know , some people call it white genocide. And and certainly if you look at a lot of the more heated rhetoric , anti-immigration rhetoric that we've been hearing lately , it leans quite directly on this notion that that sort of malign , forces , whether Jewish or not. Sort of elites are are are pressing for increased immigration as an as an actual like weapon against white Christians rather than just a less conspiratorial reading of the situation , which is that people are immigrating to the United States because of , you know , various other material forces in the world.
S1: Um , I also see a lot of Dominion ism sort of creeping into Americas policy here as well. Um , but that's not anything new.
S2: So the story of the weavers is is tragic and fascinating. But I would like people to think about the larger story of , of of how belief in the apocalypse has , has long sort of warped American life.
S1: I've been speaking with Chris Jennings , author of End of Days , Ruby Ridge The Apocalypse and the Unmaking of America. He'll be at the San Diego Writers Festival this Saturday , March 28th. Chris , thank you so much for your time today.
S2: Thank you. Jade , it was a pleasure to be on.
S1: That's our show for today.
S3: I'm your host , Jade Hindman. Thanks for tuning in to Midday Edition. Be sure to have a great day on purpose , everyone.
