Oh, Randy Weaver died in 2022. Too bad I don't believe in Hell, he certainly belongs there.
Randy Weaver, whose deadly 1992 standoff with the U.S. government made Ruby Ridge a rallying cry for antigovernment and white nationalist movements throughout ensuing decades, died at his home in Montana on May 11, according to social media posts made by his daughter, Sara Weaver. He was 74.
www.splcenter.org
Together, the Weavers began to embrace fundamentalist Christian beliefs. From the mid-1970s, Randy and Vicki claimed to have had religious visions, and they voraciously consumed conspiracist literature with antisemitic and apocalyptic overtones. In 1983, they left for Idaho to wait out the tribulation that they believed would soon destroy a corrupt modern America and herald Christ's return.
That fall, they found a patch of land on Ruby Ridge, near Naples, Idaho, and by March 1984, they had built a rough cabin and moved in. The Weavers did not relocate alone. In the early 1980s, Boundary County and other parts of North Idaho saw an influx of radical rightists, religious fundamentalists, survivalists and others who sought to live apart from a secular, liberal America they despised.
Just an hour’s drive from the Weavers’ cabin, in Hayden Lake in neighboring Kootenai County, Richard Girnt Butler presided over the Aryan Nations compound, where residents and visitors from the broader White Power movement looked forward to the creation of a separatist white homeland in the Pacific Northwest.
The couple homeschooled their children and took in another teenager, Kevin Harris. In 1988, Randy Weaver made an abortive run for Boundary County sheriff on an extremist platform rooted in
Posse Comitatus ideas, yet another strain of far-right ideation that has led to loss of life during standoffs with law enforcement. Weaver and his family attended gatherings at the
Aryan Nations compound where Weaver expressed antisemitic beliefs.