Ruby Ridge and the Roots of American Extremism

A review of End of Days: Ruby Ridge, The Apocalypse and the Unmaking of America by Chris Jennings; 384 pages; Little, Brown and Company (February 2026)

On 31 August 1992, a siege at a remote cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, ended with the negotiated surrender of religious fanatic and white separatist Randy Weaver and his three daughters. During the eleven-day stand-off with federal law enforcement agents, Weaver’s wife and son were killed and so was a US marshal. Consequently, the incident rapidly became a notorious example of federal incompetence and overreach. That is not, however, the view of author and journalist Chris Jennings, whose new account of what happened that summer and why attempts to straighten out the record and place the story in its broader political and theological context.

End of Days is a sprawling, epic work that is part true crime and part intellectual history. It is more than an account of the siege itself; it is an attempt to map and understand how that strange event is connected to our present political moment. But in this—and in other matters—Jennings is positively schizophrenic. This is partly due to the authorial persona he adopts (every writer has one), which has a tendency to be smug, self-consciously sophisticated, and as obsessive as the people he ridicules. But when he takes a breath and takes his subject matter seriously, he can be the best kind of writer. Much of the book, in spite of its faults, is an absorbing read.

Jennings assembles the book on two intersecting tracks. Track One traces the history of apocalyptic thought. Track Two examines the lives of Randy Weaver and his wife Vicki, “farm kids from pious deeply-rooted Iowa families” who were raised “within a rich ecology of millenarian traditions.” As they radicalise by reading the Book of Revelation and its literalist exegeses, they retreat from their local communities, sell their belongings, and move into isolation, where they find a new sense of purpose in survivalist compounds and white-separatist conspiracies about Jewish power.

When he is exploring Track One, Jennings tries to be fair. But as he starts to assess the Book of Revelation, you can hear his teeth grinding. The last book of the New Testament, also known as the Apocalypse of St. John, is a record of the religious vision its author supposedly experienced on the isle of Patmos about six decades after the crucifixion. Jennings, it turns out, can’t stand John or his strange book. It is “a testament of violent and bitter resentment,” he writes, and a “gory fever dream” of “bloody seaside frothings” full of “heavy-metal prose” describing the Holy War between an enraged Jesus and the Beast. “None of the tender love of the Gospels can be found here,” Jennings remarks. “It is smiting and gnashing, top to bottom” and a “merciless sorting of humanity into the saved and the damned.”

John Darby, a 19th-century pastor, influenced the way the apocalypse is viewed today by placing the Jews front and centre of the coming war. Paraphrasing Darby, Jennings writes:

If you want to know where things stand on the countdown to the End, simply look to the Jews. Only once they are in position, can Christ return. The prevalence of this notion would greatly influence American foreign policy in the Middle East, in turn shaping domestic politics. As a result of the prophetic conviction that modern Jews need to return to Palestine for the Second Coming to commence, political American and British Evangelicals began lobbying for Jewish resettlement in the Holy Land even before the advent of Jewish-led Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century.

Darby’s other dubious contribution to the evolution of apocalyptic thought was his belief in the Rapture. Although Jennings acknowledges that this idea—that “Christians would be taken out of the world in advance of Armageddon”—has a contested lineage, he argues that it was Darby who popularised the belief “that Jesus will return not once but twice: first to remove the Church, and then again to lead the charge at Armageddon.” This doctrine, Jennings notes, “allowed believers to accept a literal reading of Revelation with the consoling assurance that they will be spared John’s parade of monsters and bloodletting.” Darby preached that the manner and timing of the apocalypse could be divined with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in another, so long as one knew how to interpret them.

American televangelist Jerry Falwell, who lived from 1933 to 2007 and was watched regularly by the Weaver family, politicised this idea:

Falwell helped guide prophetic ideas out of obscurity and into mainstream denominations and suburban living rooms like the Weavers’. In doing so, he linked a style of faith that had once been skeptical of earthly politics with movement conservatism, building up the modern Christian Right and forging an unlikely alliance between those who would stand athwart history yelling “Stop” and those who would leap in front of it, crying “End!”

Tracks One and Two of Jennings’s narrative finally intersect with the appearance of a Korean war veteran turned religious writer named Hal Lindsey. In 1970, Lindsey adapted the sermons he had delivered during the late 1960s into a book titled The Late Great Planet Earth. This volume built upon Darby’s conviction that contemporary events would alert the faithful when Armageddon was at hand. In melodramatic, testosterone-powered prose, Jennings writes, Lindsey linked the End of Days to the “geopolitics and culture wars of the 1970s”—a narrative fraught with “global intrigue and carnage” and Lindsey’s “boyish delight in the details of military hardware.”

Lindsey explains that the Antichrist, who is already out there somewhere, slouching toward his awful purpose, will be greeted as a peacemaker, calling for internationalism and economic cooperation. This man will be deified by the masses before forcing everyone under his sway to accept the Mark of the Beast. As the Tribulation reaches its climax, Lindsey writes, the Antichrist’s reign “will make the regimes of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin look like Girl Scouts weaving a daisy chain.”

Woe betide those who don’t prepare for the coming apocalypse. Jennings sets out Lindsey’s prophecy, according to which a “confederacy of Arab and African states, China and the USSR will invade Israel, where the Antichrist will somehow have inspired the rebuilding of the long-destroyed Temple.” This invasion will trigger a nuclear conflict that draws in the United States, and eventually, a One World Government will emerge, headed by the Beast. Jennings treats this sort of thing with the same disdain he reserves for the Apocalypse of St. John. Despite—or maybe because of—how popular Lindsey’s book was (The Late Great Planet Earth became the bestselling nonfiction work of the 1970s), Jennings dismisses it as “a theological version of McDonald’s ‘Billions and Billions Served’ or ‘50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong.’”

But Randy and Vicki Weaver were enthralled and galvanised by Lindsey’s theories. Armageddon was coming, they concluded, so they had better get ready. In the late 1970s, Vicki began to experience visions, and in 1983, the couple left the fundamentalist church they attended, quit their Bible-study groups, and moved with their four young children to Ruby Ridge. There, they built a cabin that contained a cast iron stove, lots of canned food, and enough military hardware to stop the Satanic hordes of the US government when they arrived to attack the family. Their home had no electricity and Vicki removed all the children’s toys and the television set, along with anything she considered a graven idol. Randy fell in with white separatists. Then they waited for their big day to arrive.

The Weavers first came to the attention of the federal government in 1985, when a neighbour, with whom Randy had fallen out over a land dispute, informed the FBI that the couple were planning a series of political assassinations. In response, the feds opened an investigation into the Weavers’ white-nationalist connections. The following year, Randy Weaver was introduced to a man working as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms at a gathering of the World Aryan Congress. In December 1990, a federal grand jury indicted Weaver on charges of owning and making illegal shotguns. When Weaver missed a court appointment after a mix-up over the dates, officers from the ATF, the FBI, the US Marshals Service, and the Idaho police department all descended on Ruby Ridge.

This must have seemed like a confirmation of the Weavers’ most paranoid delusions:

As the Weavers drew their curtains and prepared for ZOG [the Zionist-occupied Government] to kill them off, trucks began rolling into Homicide Meadow. The FBI, with support from the Marshals Service, the Idaho State Police, the local sheriff, and the ATF dug in, as if for war. Within a few days there were three hundred people in jungle camo hustling around amid olive-drab mess tents and mobile command centers. On both sides of the siege, the militarization of American civilian life that began in the wake of Vietnam—the hardware, the clothes, the tactics, the language—was on full display.

Although Jennings is generally unsympathetic to the Weavers, he acknowledges the federal overreach in the stand-off. For some reason, the FBI called up their elite hostage-rescue team, although there was no evidence that anyone in the Weaver family home was actually being held hostage. “[The FBI] mobilized under the false impression that they were heading into an active gun battle with religious zealots intent on the murder of federal agents.” This bizarre scene was further inflamed when the government troops sent a robot up to the cabin. The idea was to open some kind of dialogue with the Weavers, but the robot had a shotgun attached to it.

Jennings vividly captures the nightmarish atmosphere of those eleven days. He concedes that the federal government was besieging a family that had no interest in offensive action. But on the whole, his account reads like a weird mix of big-government-sympathetic leftism and law-and-order conservatism:

[T]he glacial pace of the efforts to get the fugitive Randall before a judge attests to a government so scrupulously devoted to its own codes that it would spend immense sums and countless man-hours to avoid even the possibility of gun play, while upholding the basic notion that if you are indicted for a crime you need to come to court, regardless of how tightly you clutch your rifle.

The tense situation slipped out of control almost immediately. On 21 August, the day federal agents arrived, a small reconnaissance mission encountered Randy Weaver, his fourteen-year-old son Samuel, his friend Kevin Harris, and the Weaver family dog near the cabin. A firefight ensued, and by the time it was over, the agents had shot and killed Samuel and the dog, and Kevin Harris had shot and killed US marshal William Degan. New and permissive rules of engagement were drafted authorising the use of lethal force, and the following day, an FBI sniper shot and wounded Randy Weaver. As Weaver, Harris, and Weaver’s sixteen-year-old daughter Sara ran back to the cabin, the sniper fired a second shot that wounded Harris and killed Vicki Weaver as she stood in the cabin doorway with her ten-month-old child in her arms.

The siege would last a further seven days, until government negotiators finally persuaded Harris and the surviving members of the Weaver family to surrender. Kevin Harris and Randy Weaver were both indicted on charges of conspiracy, assault, and murder, but both were cleared on all counts (Weaver was convicted on two counts related to his missed court date). “The system,” Jennings concludes, “worked,” which is an odd comment to make about an official fiasco that claimed three lives. Weaver and his family filed a civil suit against the government and received US$3.1 million in an out-of-court settlement.

As a historian, Chris Jennings is concerned with the present-day implications of the Weavers’ story. Since then, he argues, apocalyptic thinking has become a plague on American democracy, and he draws a line from Revelation to QAnon that passes directly through Ruby Ridge. In a large telephone survey conducted in 2021, he writes, “15 percent of Americans told researchers that the media, Wall Street, and the United States government had fallen under the control of a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles.” In the same survey, “a tenth of all Americans, and half of those who believe in the satanic cabal, claimed that the COVID-19 vaccines contain tiny microchips that are intended to serve as the ‘Mark of the Beast’—the identifying brand that will be forced upon humanity just before the end of history according to the Book of Revelation.”

But in the end, Jennings’s biases weigh too heavily on the narrative. His antipathy to the Weavers interferes with his ability to understand and explain them properly. If QAnon and the Proud Boys and neo-Nazi skinheads are really as dangerous as Jennings alleges, we should try to see who or what they are as clearly as possible. Scornful readings of the Revelation of St. John do not contribute anything especially constructive or edifying to that goal.