Echoes of Conspiracy from Ruby Ridge to Today

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Christopher Jennings, welcome to the show.

 

CHISTOPHER JENNINGS: Thank you, Walter. It’s a pleasure to be here.

 

ISAACSON: It’s been 34 years since the tragic events at Ruby Ridge. Remind everybody what that story was and why you wanna revisit it now.

 

JENNINGS: Sure. The story in its most basic form was a tale of a family who had moved to northern Idaho from Iowa to separate themselves from a civilization that they thought was doomed. They thought the end of the world was coming. And the man eventually became ensnared in a minor crime, selling two illegally modified guns. And the situation sort of spiraled from there. They had a very conspiratorial view about the United States government that came out of a fundamentalist background that they had been praying and worshiping in these various fundamentalist churches. 

And so he refused to go to court and in the effort – a very protracted, expensive effort to get him to come down the mountain and, and face the rather minor charge for the guns. He – the situation devolved and there was, his son was killed, and the US Marshal was killed and their dog was killed. And the following day his wife, Victoria Weaver was shot, and Randy was shot. Victoria died. Their friend Kevin Harris, who was living with them, was shot. And a protracted siege began, with none of them in the family wanting to come out of the cabin. And it was a really tragic situation, but I wanted to revisit it because I thought a lot of the elements that are active in our contemporary political life are sort of there in seed form. The conspiracism, deep distrust of the government, issues over whether, when federal agents can use deadly force against citizens, all the things that we’re talking about today. 

 

ISAACSON: Well, Ruby Ridge became a big symbol for the clash between, you know, government and the sort of well, end times prophecy philosophy, right?

 

JENNINGS: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I think the story has usually been told as a matter about free speech and gun rights and freedom of religion and government excess. But really, the way I tell the story, and what I think is the most relevant thing at play is the religion, the theology that has been present in our national life for a long time. But this particular strain of fundamentalism, that breeds this conspiracism and this deep distrust in the government. And, you know, what happened at Ruby Ridge was a lot of that, a lot of those theories were sort of vindicated in the minds of the people who were already held them. These were people who said, the government’s gonna come and kill you. And then in their case, as it happened, the government did come –

 

ISAACSON: Well, wait, remind us what end times prophecy, what that movement is.

 

JENNINGS: Sure. It’s you know, in the book, I narrate how American history – as Protestant theology has evolved in a pretty significant way from, say, the founding until the present. Especially starting at the end of the 19th century and really accelerating through the 20th century, where the prevailing belief among a lot of American evangelicals and fundamentalists flipped from a belief that the sort of kingdom of God was coming to earth, and the world was gradually gonna be perfected through the spread of the gospel and material progress to an apocalyptic faith. The idea that the end of the world is nigh, and that you can read biblical prophecy through current events and sort of map you know, the Book of Revelation onto the daily newspaper and say which, which country represents what biblical nation and that, those beliefs really spread over the course of the 20th century, especially in the sixties, seventies and eighties when the Weavers were getting deeply involved with their faith.

 

ISAACSON: How is end times prophecy at all relevant today?

 

JENNINGS: Some of the sort of like moods and attitudes that it brought into American Christendom and then sort of subsequently into American life in general derive from end times prophecy. This belief in creeping globalism, that that conspiracy is the true engine of history. That there’s a secret battle between light and dark playing out just beneath the surface of events. I mean, if you look at anything from QAnon to some of what’s being written about the Jeffrey Epstein case, all of these things if you’ve read enough prophecy, you can hear echoes of this long history of popular prophecy in the United States.

 

ISAACSON: And why did Northern Idaho become such a haven?

 

JENNINGS: Well, northern Idaho became a haven, not just for fundamentalists, but for anyone looking to sort of escape from, from what they regarded as an America in decline. It was an inexpensive place to live. It was lightly peopled, and it was overwhelmingly white. The Aryan Nations – which plays a key role in this story because it was through their involvement with the Aryan nations that the Weavers ended up in legal hot water – established itself in the Idaho Panhandle, and a lot of other groups that would go on to sort of form the nucleus of the militia movement. And there was a couple of sort of hard right terror organizations in the eighties. Most famously, the group called the Order who committed all kinds of acts of terrorism, bombings, robberies, murders, they were all centered up there. It was an area that – while people tend to think of the Old South as, as the sort of homeland of organized white supremacy in the US by the eighties and – mid seventies to early nineties, it was really the inland Pacific Northwest where the action was happening.

 

ISAACSON: How important is racism to this whole phenomenon? And was it really white supremacists, or was it, that just sort of tangential to the end times prophecy?

 

JENNINGS: Well, in the case of the Weavers, I mean, it, part of how the story was sort of processed and became a bit of a morality play about the excesses of big government, the racial part and the sort of neo-Nazis part got scrubbed out of it a little bit. But the Weavers were true-believing, hardcore white supremacists, and pretty much all the people in their community were – not all the people in the community where they lived, but the community of activists with which they took part. And I think that the theology and the white power stuff were, were inextricable for them. They interpreted the Bible, there was a movement called Christian Identity, which taught a way of interpreting the Bible through the lens of race very explicitly in which the Jews were the agents of antichrist. And they were gonna be the ones to usher in this end times government that would oppress Christians and similarly dark views of people of color.

 

ISAACSON: But what about economics? I mean, to some extent the whole theology involves people, there’s some conspiracy to leave you out. Was there some economic populism involved?

 

JENNINGS: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the Weavers left Iowa in 1983, which was sort of just at the peak of what became known as the farm crisis. Randy’s job was at Deer and Company. He worked on the factory making tractors and combines. And that whole region of the country with Iowa at the epicenter was brutally depressed by – after a rather booming 1970s – by the farm crisis, it just, commodities market dropped. And there was a spate of foreclosures, which brought a lot of conspiracism, even old school stuff, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan flooded into the Midwest where it formerly had not found much purchase. So the Weavers themselves were not direct victims of the farm crisis. Randy kept his job when they went west. It was not because of economic precarity, it was because of their faith, but they were certainly on the ground when an economic crisis brought hard right conspiratorial ideas into their community.

 

ISAACSON: Well, he Randy Weaver seems paranoid and conspiratorial, but when he gets arrested I’m gonna quote your words. It “really did come to resemble a real life version of every paranoiac’s most outlandish nightmares.” Was there some truth to that conspiracy and paranoid feeling?

 

JENNINGS: The Weavers, for more than 10 years before they fell under siege from the, you know, elite FBI hostage rescue team had been saying, someday our home will become under siege by federal agents. And they had literally filed an affidavit five years before any of this even started saying, we’re gonna kill a federal agent and then – in self-defense – and then they’re gonna come and kill us All. They prophesized with shocking precision what actually ended up happening to them. So you can either say it’s because Vicki Weaver herself was a real prophet, or you can say that there is a way in which these deep paranoia can fulfill themselves.

 

ISAACSON: You said that one of the most fateful decisions comes aboard, I think it’s, an FBI jet flying from Washington DC out there. Tell me what that was.

 

JENNINGS: Sure. I mean, the government made a lot of mistakes in just their failure to understand what they were dealing with, with people like the Weavers. But the one that was sort of most unambiguous was this decision to revise their own rules of engagement, which is basically the written document that says, when an FBI agent can shoot at a citizen. And onboard that jet, laboring under the misbelief that they were sending their tactical team into an ongoing firefight with a band of zealous white supremacists intent on killing as many federal agents as possible, when in fact, what they were going to confront was a family cowering inside of their cabin, waiting for themselves to be killed. They revised their rules of engagement to say that any adult with a gun, once a surrender announcement has been issued – and bearing in mind, this is after a US Marshal has already been shot and killed by Kevin Harris, the Weaver’s friend – they said any adult with a gun can and should be shot on site after, after a surrender announcement. And the whole thing unraveled from there in really tragic ways. But subsequently, when the government did a long post-mortem on everything that had gone wrong, that was the most obvious and most obviously unconstitutional act, was that revision of the, the rules of engagement.

 

ISAACSON: One of the factors you point to is the post-Vietnam militarization of American life, in other words, coming out of the Vietnam War, this sense of militias and militarization. Explain that to me. 

 

JENNINGS: Yeah. Well, it was, it was present on both sides of the conflict. It was present in the tactics used by the, the government, and it was very much present in the Weavers and the community, the wider community of sort of white power activists that they were adjacent to. A lot of people were themselves Vietnam veterans, a lot of people on both sides of the conflict. Randy himself never deployed to Vietnam, but he was in the army and qualified to be a green beret, which in the mind of the government made him more scary. There was this notion of this man with all this special training, who could, who could kill them. So the weapons, the tactics, the way people talked about insurgency, the way the government and its citizens were both regarding each other owed a lot to Vietnam. I mean, if you look at photographs of the Ruby Ridge siege, it looks like you’re looking at Khe Sanh. There’s Hueys, there’s all of drab mess tents. There’s hundreds of federal agents in camo with, you know, balaclavas and face paint. There was – the event took on a militaristic quality almost immediately.

 

ISAACSON: How did the change in federal policies that came after Ruby Ridge, how might that affect the investigations happening into the shootings in Minneapolis now?

 

JENNINGS: Yeah, I mean, the analogy between the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the killings that happened at Ruby Ridge are there, there’s something to them, because there was this matter of qualified immunity. There was an effort to prosecute the sniper who had shot and killed Vicki Weaver. And I think the analogy kind of breaks down after that because that was unsuccessful. Qualified immunity was used as the federal defense, and that sniper never saw trial. And in the case of Ruby Ridge, I think the scale of the government’s response, if you actually look at it thoughtfully, is mostly a testament to their effort to avoid any kind of conflict or gunplay. 

What we saw recently in Minneapolis, to my mind, looks more like, you know, direct carelessness, not necessarily – I mean, certainly among the agents on the ground, but the policy itself seems designed to stir up chaos. I think the question of qualified immunity, what legal liability is there for federal agents who shoot citizens needs to be taken very seriously, I think. Because as we saw in Minneapolis there, the sense that there is total immunity for these CBP and ICE officers has led to a lot of public mistrust and obviously a lot of tragedy in the last couple of weeks.

 

ISAACSON: You described that time period as I think the quote is “an era not unlike our own.” Why so?

 

JENNINGS: Well, you know, Ruby Ridge came immediately after the end of the Cold War and before 9/11. It was the sort of moment in which the American right, especially, turned what had been a longstanding sort of, well of conspiratorial energy that had been directed outward, largely at global communism turned inward and became fixated on the notion that the evil was coming from within our own federal government. And so it was a time, sort of without an obvious foreign antagonist for people to attach their anger and their attention on. And it was a time of, of sort of – it was happening more on the fringes then than it is now, but there was sort of populist energy and widespread conspiracism. I think all of those things are very present in our current moment. 

 

ISAACSON: You’ve referred to it as a hard right phenomenon, far right phenomenon, but to what extent was it just a fringe phenomenon that had very little to do with pure ideology and could be hard fringe left too?

 

JENNINGS: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s fair. I think in this case the term hard right, really fits. These were people who held beliefs that are commonly associated with the hard right. They were generally deeply antisemetic and racist. They hated the government. They were generally Christian fundamentalists. So all of those things I think are fair to classify in this case as qualities of what we might call the hard right. But, sure, of course there are conspiracy theories across the political spectrum. In general, I think if you look throughout American history, they tend to have a right-ward valence only because I think conspiracy theories are sort of an allergic reaction to social change. They’re a fundamentally reactionary way of engaging with the world. 

So you know, they’re a response to anything new, you know, social security was met with a torrent of end times related conspiracies. Obamacare, as you may recall, was met with this. It’s usually, it’s like large federal programs become the opposite, the object of these things. Same with large waves of immigration. You know, there are a lot of conspiracies about Catholics when Catholics were immigrating in great waves. Recently, we’ve seen a lot of conspiracies about people coming from other parts of the world. So I would argue that while of course, conspiracy theories exist across the political spectrum, they have historically had a right-ward valence, just for that reason that their response to change.

 

ISAACSON: You write that “three decades on Ruby Ridges seems less like a finale than the start of something.” Tell me what you mean by that.

 

JENNINGS: Well, you know, when Ruby Ridge happened, and an important fact is it was very swiftly followed by the disaster in Waco at the Mount Carmel compound of the Branch Davidians, where the same federal agencies were responsible for the death of a bunch of citizens in very similar circumstances. And those two events really coming as they did at the end of the century, and the end of the millennium looked like features of the 20th century. There were all, you know, there was this fundamentalist ideology, there was all this trappings of neo-Nazism, there was all this aftershocks of Vietnam. Those things all seemed like what we were leaving behind in the 20th century. But now, I think if you read about the Weavers, you get this uncanny feeling that these are people of our current time. And certainly the extent to which some of the fringier ideas of that era have now moved into the mainstream suggests that Ruby Ridge was the dawn of our current age, not the close of the previous one.

 

ISAACSON: Christopher Jennings, thank you so much for joining us.

JENNINGS: Thank you so much, Walter. I appreciate it.