DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
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 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 Weavers' beliefs, and the impact of Ruby Ridge on the spread of conspiratorial antigovernment 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.
CHRIS JENNINGS: Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here.
DAVIES: 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 Weavers' dog, Striker, detected their presence, started barking. You pick it up there. Tell us what happened.
JENNINGS: So Randy and his friend Kevin Harris - who is 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 on 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 Striker, 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, you know, willing and capable of firing on federal agents.
A marshal 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 .30-06 hunting rifle, aimed into the woods where he believed the shots were coming from. You could see little puffs of smoke. And he let out a single shot, killing a deputy U.S. marshal named William Degan, 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.
DAVIES: Yeah, a 14-year-old kid, right?
JENNINGS: A 14-year-old kid, yeah.
DAVIES: Yeah. So let's talk about Randy Weaver and his wife, Vicki. They lived in Iowa before they went to Idaho. Randy'd 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.
JENNINGS: 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 were from the very center of the country. They came from these pious, sort of 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 & Co. foundry in Waterloo, which was a huge tractor works. And they had, I would say, a quite good 1970s living there in Iowa.
DAVIES: Yeah. They would host Bible meetings at home. They were very active in their views and very active in worship and held beliefs, you know, that the apocalypse was not far away, I guess. What convinced them they should move to a remote hillside in Idaho?
JENNINGS: 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 a belief in the rapture, started thinking about sort of material ways of surviving the coming tribulation. So that meant they were preserving food. 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'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, you know, an agent of Antichrist when the end of days arrived.
DAVIES: All right. We need to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Chris Jennings. His new book is "End Of Days: Ruby Ridge, The Apocalypse, And The Unmaking Of America." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with writer Chris Jennings. He has a new book about the origins of the violent 1992 Ruby Ridge confrontation between federal agents and the family of Randy Weaver. The book is called "End Of Days."
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, you know, some really militant, heavily armed right-wing groups like the Order, which, you know, 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 sympathizer?
JENNINGS: 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, you know, 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, 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 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.
DAVIES: 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?
JENNINGS: 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.
DAVIES: Right. And he thought that if they were up on a hilltop and well-armed, they could survive the end while these tribulations occur?
JENNINGS: 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 a, you know, 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, you know, prophetically gifted, which is not my interpretation of things.
DAVIES: 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 could handle a rifle, right?
JENNINGS: Yeah. You know, like a lot of Americans (laughter), 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 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.
DAVIES: So the criminal charge that led to the violence at Ruby Ridge was actually initiated by government agents. Tell us what happens.
JENNINGS: 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 gunrunner.
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 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, you know, white supremacists.
DAVIES: So Randy Weaver sells two sawed-off 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?
JENNINGS: Correct.
DAVIES: Right. So he committed a crime. What happened then?
JENNINGS: 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 sort of 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've been a pretty minor punishment. Gun-friendly Idaho jury. He probably would've gotten work release or probation or something like that.
DAVIES: Right, so not a heavy-duty crime, but Randy Weaver didn't show up for trial, which itself was another offense. 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, which means that he's technically a federal fugitive, right? And so it's something for the U.S. 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?
JENNINGS: 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 U.S. 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 a warrant's been issued for your arrest, it's almost impossible to - 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? 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 U.S. attorney says, you know, 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, you know, move towards a more - what they would say - more dynamic way of arresting Randy.
DAVIES: And again, 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?
JENNINGS: 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 their 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.
DAVIES: So eventually, the marshals decide to take a more, as you say, dynamic approach to resolving this. They bring in the 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. And then Kevin Harris, this 24-year-old man who lived with the Weavers, fired and killed a deputy U.S. marshal named William Degan. 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?
JENNINGS: Yeah. So, I mean, when people look at the case of Ruby Ridge, they always compare the overwhelming scale of the federal response. And there are these photographs of, you know, what looks like a military encampment - hundreds of agents, helicopters, camo trucks - and this lowly family, and people say, what was the crime? Oh, it was two illegal shotguns. 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 Degan.
DAVIES: Oh, 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.
JENNINGS: The marshals didn't report it. You know, people 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, Degan, who was bleeding out and dying, and they believed that they were still under assault 'cause they continued to hear gunfire 'cause 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.
DAVIES: Let's take a break here, and then we'll talk some more. We're speaking 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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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies. We're speaking with writer Chris Jennings, whose new book explores the origins of the apocalyptic beliefs that led to the violent 1992 Ruby Ridge confrontation between federal agents and the family of Randy Weaver. Jennings also writes about the role of the Ruby Ridge story in fueling conspiratorial antigovernment and white supremacist movements. His new book is "End Of Days: Ruby Ridge, The Apocalypse, And The Unmaking Of America."
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.
JENNINGS: 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 - represent an imminent threat to the agent or someone else. And if you've identified yourself, you know, said, like, U.S. marshals, drop your weapon, that sort of thing. So as far as the FBI planners were concerned, and the subgroup of the FBI known as the HRT, the Hostage Rescue Team, which is sort of the FBI's most elite SWAT tactical unit, they had clearly announced themselves, there'd 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 was later deemed unconstitutional - but as the government saw it, was the Weavers had already evidenced their willingness to fire upon and kill federal agents.
DAVIES: 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 siege phones that the Weavers could use to communicate for negotiations. That was the plan. What actually happened?
JENNINGS: So by this point, a night has elapsed 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? 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 the bullhorn. So the sniper observer teams were already in place, and this is, you know, two-man teams, one with a scope and one with a 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 Samuel's body, one of these snipers sees him and shoots him in the arm, goes in his armpit. And the story that the FBI tells and this particular sniper who took the shot tells is that as Randy was reaching out 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 Sara and Kevin Harris turn to run with him, kind of all falling in line, racing at full speed. Vicki, his wife, carrying their baby, Elisheba, who's 10 months old, steps in the front door of the cabin to open the door so that they can pour in quickly 'cause 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 the 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.
DAVIES: 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.
JENNINGS: 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 and 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.
DAVIES: They would come up to the door and 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 he...
JENNINGS: Exactly.
DAVIES: ...Be so cruel?
JENNINGS: Exactly.
DAVIES: 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 is 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?
JENNINGS: 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 Weaver never even pointed his gun at anyone. Whatever his culpability in creating this situation, he did not murder William Degan, and Kevin Harris had a reasonable claim that he shot at William Degan in defense of his 14-year-old friend. So a jury and the Weavers had a rather brilliant legal defense, and the jury believed it.
DAVIES: Yeah. Gerry Spence, the cowboy lawyer who was quite well-known at the time...
JENNINGS: Yeah.
DAVIES: ...Represented them. The Weavers would sue the federal government and win a $3.1 million settlement.
JENNINGS: Yes, exactly.
DAVIES: Yeah. Let's take a break here, and then we'll talk some more.
We're speaking 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. This is FRESH AIR.
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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with writer Chris Jennings. His new book is about the origins of the apocalyptic beliefs that led to the violent 1992 Ruby Ridge confrontation between federal agents and the family of Randy Weaver. His book is called "End Of Days."
You know, there have been so many horrendous stories in all the years since this, including many mass shootings, 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.
JENNINGS: 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, it's - 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 postmortem 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.
DAVIES: In assessing the legacy of Ruby Ridge, you say that it portended the crack up of American reality itself. What do you mean?
JENNINGS: 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 claim 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.
DAVIES: 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?
JENNINGS: Yeah. This sort of official postmortem went on for a very long time and was extremely thorough. You know, 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.
DAVIES: You know what'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?
JENNINGS: 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 certain type of influencers and preachers, which is just it's exciting stuff. And congregations that talk a lot about prophecy grow at a time when a lot of American churches are 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, QAnon is a great example of sort of prophetic framework being latched onto contemporary political characters.
DAVIES: 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 more theologically informed command have used?
JENNINGS: 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 Malheur 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 statehouse with guns in hand. And 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.
DAVIES: Yeah, and frustrating for your adversary who is counting on you to overreact, right? Yeah.
JENNINGS: Exactly, yeah.
DAVIES: Yeah. Yeah. You know, after you'd finished this book and were 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've been learned from Ruby Ridge that might be relevant?
JENNINGS: Well, yes, I mean, of course, after the death of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, 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 an enormous amount of time and effort and bureaucracy to avoid gunplay. Whereas what happens in Minneapolis, to my mind, looks like, you know, extreme carelessness, if not an effort to actually, you know, create chaos. So I think the question of immunity for federal agents who kill people was 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.
DAVIES: Randy Weaver lived three decades after this. What did he do with his life?
JENNINGS: 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 Bonners 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 by 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, you know, 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 government's, you know, 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, 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, you know, do you regret anything about how it all went down? He was very, very direct and said, no, I would've done everything the same. And if Vicki and Sam were here, they would've done everything the same, too.
DAVIES: Well, Chris Jennings, it's been really interesting. Thank you so much for talking to us.
JENNINGS: Oh, thank you, Dave. It's been great.
DAVIES: 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. This is FRESH AIR.
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