He began firing at the marshals, as did Kevin Harris. When the smoke from the exchange of gunfire cleared, both Sammy Weaver and Marshal William Degan lay dead.
So began one of the most infamous armed standoffs in law-enforcement history. It lasted ten days and also claimed the life of Vicki Weaver. She was shot by a sniper the day after Sammy and Degan were killed when she held the door open for her husband and Harris as they tried to escape an FBI barrage. She was holding a baby in her arms. Randy Weaver, his children, and Harris remained holed up in the cabin for another week. Then, on Day Six, Colonel James “Bo” Gritz, a former Green Beret and Vietnam vet, arrived at Ruby Ridge. Upon his arrival at the scene he announced his intention to negotiate an end to the standoff.
Gritz was a bluff, colorful camera hound who had made national headlines in the 1980s by leading a group of other Vietnam veterans back to Vietnam in an attempt to locate American prisoners of war who were rumored to be held secretly in deep jungle prisons by the Vietnamese government. It was basically a media stunt and was underwritten by the populist millionaire H. Ross Perot, among others (they found no missing POWs). It would later inspire the plot of Sylvester Stallone’s wildly popular film Rambo: First Blood Part II. More recently Gritz had become involved in organizing survivalist training sessions for would-be Patriots.
Four days after Gritz’s arrival, Weaver and his daughters surrendered. Both Harris and Weaver were put on trial on a total of ten charges, including murder and the original firearms charges, and both were acquitted on most charges by a jury in Boise a year later (Weaver was convicted on the lingering failure-to-appear charge). Despite the acquittal, their case lit a flame among the conspiracy-minded Patriots, and “Ruby Ridge” became an instant byword for “government overreaction and oppression.” That winter, a cluster of Patriot and Christian Identity movement leaders, including Trochmann, gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, and discussed their forthcoming strategy: encourage like-minded followers to form “citizen militias” that could spring into action to defend ordinary gun owners and other citizens against a dictatorial federal government.
Less than a year later, in February 1993, another armed standoff with a lethal outcome took place near Waco, Texas, at the compound of the Branch Davidian cult run by a charismatic preacher named David Koresh. The incident began with a botched ATF raid—they were looking for illegal weapons—that resulted in four federal officers dead and sixteen wounded and the deaths of six Branch Davidians. For fifty-one days the ATF tried to get the compound leaders to come out, but they refused. On April 19, 1993, FBI agents moved in to arrest the leaders, who instead immolated themselves and their followers—seventy-six people in all. Videos of the horror played endlessly on all the television networks. For the early dwellers in the Patriots’ alternative universe, the incident became compelling evidence that a totalitarian New World Order takeover of America was imminent.
Now Ruby Ridge and Waco were on a lot of people’s lips, not just Patriots’ lips but also those of a number of mainstream conservative figures such as Rush Limbaugh, his many imitators on the airwaves, and eventually the pundits at the conservative cable TV network Fox News, when it launched in 1996. They mainly used the incidents to bash the Bill Clinton administration for its alleged incompetence, even though the Ruby Ridge incident had not occurred on his watch. Indeed, the Patriot movement was tapping into a deep vein of antigovernment sentiment that had been simmering among conservatives for many years, beginning in the years of the Reagan administration and its admonitions that the “government can’t solve problems, it is the problem.”
Antigovernment sentiment had started to reach a boil in the early nineties, thanks to the growing prominence of a phalanx of right-wing radio talk-show hosts who were transforming the nation’s broadcasting landscape. They were led by Rush Limbaugh, who had become the country’s most famous talk-show host.
“The second violent American revolution is just about—I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart—is just about that far away,” he said. “Because these people are sick and tired of a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington driving into town and telling them what they can and can’t do with their land.”
Limbaugh generally eschewed NWO-style conspiracy theories, but he was a virulent hater of Bill Clinton and his administration, and devoted endless hours to promoting the various drummed-up scandals and conspiracy theories about Clinton, including a “Clinton body count” of people connected with the Clintons who had died under murky circumstances and tales of Clinton running drugs while he was governor of Arkansas.
All of this was also readily absorbed into the Patriot universe, as proof of Clinton’s participation in the New World Order plot. Now, the agitation over the Ruby Ridge and Waco standoffs became a major lightning rod. Alex Jones later told reporter Alexander Zaitchik that he began his Austin, Texas, public-access television program devoted to New World Order conspiracies in 1993 as a result of his outrage over the Waco standoff.
By the mid-nineties the Patriot movement quickly became populated with a number of speakers who spread the word. John Trochmann, operating mainly in the Pacific Northwest, was one of them. Using an overhead projector he would blitz his audiences with a fast-moving blizzard of photos and news articles—military vehicles on railroad cars, blurry images of black helicopters, peculiar-looking fences and signage—that, thrown together with little explanation, reinforced the idea that there was a conspiracy to round up Americans and place them in concentration camps.
Similar speakers popped up around the country—in the Midwest, the Southwest, the South—spreading the word in similar fashion, one small gathering at a time. Some of the early Patriot movement leadership have faded into obscurity, while some—along with their political views—have had more enduring success in getting their messages out. In the latter category were Richard Mack, LeRoy Schweitzer, Jack McLamb, and Samuel Sherwood.
Richard Mack has proved to be one of the movement’s more durable figures. The sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, from 1988 to 1996, Mack gained notoriety for refusing to enforce the Brady gun-control law in his county because he is convinced that such laws are a facet of the NWO in action. A longtime member of the John Birch Society, Mack travels the nation giving seminars on how to resist the New World Order by resisting gun-control measures, and recommends forming militias as preparation for effective self-defense. He also proselytizes regarding the “constitutionalist” notion that the county sheriff is the supreme law of the land, superseding federal and state authorities. In 2009 Mack founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which became a major source of “constitutionalist” organizing in the following years and played a major role in the Bundy family’s standoffs with federal authorities in Nevada and Oregon in 2014 and 2016.
LeRoy Schweitzer, a former crop-dusting pilot who grew up near Bozeman, Montana, was an early proponent of “sovereign citizen” ideology that posited that ordinary Americans could declare themselves free of financial and other obligations to the federal government by filing certain documents with the county clerk. On the basis of this premise Schweitzer developed a scheme for getting rich. He held small seminars where he explained the material benefits of his system: how to create phony liens and file them against public or banking officials on spurious “constitutional” grounds, and then open bank accounts based on those liens and purchase expensive items with the checking account. This could work until bank officials figured out that such an account had nothing behind it. Schweitzer used his “system” to purchase a large cabin near Roundup, eastern Montana. That was where he began gathering a collection of likeminded “Freemen.”
Jack McLamb was a former Arizona policeman who had a long association with Bo Gritz and was involved with the Ruby Ridge incident. McLamb toured the country giving talks on why law enforcement officers should join the Patriot movement, activity that brought him national notoriety for his overt attempts to recruit law enforcement officers.
Samuel Sherwood had been president of the United States Militia Association, based in Blackfoot, Idaho. Sherwood, also
